Free What a Bride Wants by Kelly Hunter Page B

the work from home. Although that has its drawbacks too.”
    “ Sawyer, you mystify me. You’re comfortably situated with a home and well-paid work that you seem to be able to take or leave at whim. Forgive me for being wildly impolite, but are you rich?”
    “ It’s all relative, don’t you think?”
    “ Yeah, no.”
    “ I come from an extremely wealthy background but I started again from scratch. I’m not even in the same league as the rest of my family, but I’m certainly not destitute by any means.”
    “ So you are rich.”
    “ Yes.”
    “ So why on earth are you working at Grey’s and living in a bunkhouse?”
    “ Nobody gets that, do they?”
    Ella shook her head.
    “I like working at the saloon. Coming into a new place and figuring out what makes everyone tick and how they fit together. I like finding out what’s important to people and what’s not. It helps me do my other job – the one where I look at revenues and deals and then start ripping up management plans. Spread a business out on paper and it’s all too easy to forget that we’re playing with people’s lives.”
    Now it was Ella ’s turn to look at the fire.
    “ What do you do when people fall for you, Sawyer? Either as a bartender or in your corporate magician incarnation? You’re rich. You’re smart. You’re absolutely gorgeous and of marriageable age. Why aren’t you hooked up?”
    There. Right there was the opening he needed. And he knew damn well that Ella had given it to him deliberately. “Confession time, huh?”
    “ Your call.”
    It was time. Past time. “There was a girl. My girl.”
    Ella sipped at her wine and listened.
    “Zoey was twenty-one, I was twenty-four and we were living together. I’d asked her to marry me.”
    “ And she said no and broke your heart?”
    “ She said yes and made me very happy.”
    “ Hnh,” said Ella. “So much for that theory.”
    “ Problem was, my brother wanted her too, and at the engagement party he stood up and told everyone that she was carrying his child and that she needed to marry him and not me. It was a complete lie. I knew it. Zoey knew it. My mother suspected it. But.”
    “ But?”
    “ You don’t know my brother. He had a lot of power, even back then. A lot of people positioned inside his web. He was very convincing.”
    “ I hate him already.”
    Sawyer smiled wryly. “Zoey and I went ahead with our engagement, regardless. Richard didn’t get what he wanted that night, but the damage it did to Zoey’s reputation was irreversible. The gossip mongers attacked her.”
    “ Tell me she stuck it out.”
    “ Would you have?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ For a month, she did. Zoey’s no weakling. But it was a month during which my brother pursued her relentlessly; never mind that she wanted nothing to do with him; never mind that Zoey lived with me. He’d corner her on her way to work and on the way home, and when I started taking her to work and picking her up he’d get to her at work. He was at every social function we went to and he was obnoxious. And then…” Sawyer cleared his throat. “Then he tried to rape her. To make the statement he’d made at our engagement party true.”
    “ Oh.”
    There was a world of sick horror in Ella ’s quiet exclamation. And Sawyer let it sit there.
    “ Anyway, that was the end of it for Zoey. She’d had enough. She was living in fear. I wanted her to press charges, but she broke the engagement and took off back to her family in Spain instead. In the end she did it with my blessing. Zoey’s fine now. She’s safe. She’s married and very much in love with her husband, who adores her.”
    “ Didn’t your brother follow her?”
    “ No. As soon as Zoey broke our engagement Richard lost interest in her. But he hadn’t quite finished with me. We were working in the family business, him in management, me in marketing – mainly because we were better off working apart. I’d had some success marketing one particular product