strung taut at the intimacy of being enclosed in the cab of the Audi with Constantine, she reached into her purse and found her small traveling box of tissues. Pulling off a handful, she handed them to Constantine.
His gaze briefly connected with hers. “Grazie.”
She glanced away, her heart suddenly pounding. Hostilities were, temporarily at least, on hold. “You’re welcome.”
She pulled off more tissues and began blotting moisture from her face and arms. There was nothing she could do about her hair or her dress, or the fact that the backs of her legs were sticking to the very expensive leather seats.
She glanced in the rearview mirror. Her small sports car was right behind them, followed by the gleaming dark sedan, which contained the second of Constantine’s bodyguards and his brothers. “I see you still travel with a SWAT team.”
Constantine smoothly negotiated traffic. “They have their uses.”
She flashed him a cool look. There was no way she would thank him yet, not when it was clear that Constantine’s presence had attracted the press. Until he had showed up, neither she nor any member of her family had been harassed. She studied the clean line of his profile, the inky crescents of his lashes and the small scar high on one cheekbone. Unbidden, memories flickered—the dark bronze of his skin glowing in the morning light, the habit he’d had of sprawling across her bed, sheets twined around his hips, all long limbs and sleek muscle.
Hot color flooded her cheeks. Hastily she transferred her gaze to the traffic flowing around them. “Now that we’re alone you can tell me what that media assault was all about.” The very fact that Constantine had interceded on her behalf meant something was very wrong. “Conned? Charges? And what was that about negotiating a deal?”
With her background in commercial law, Sienna was Ambrosi Pearls’ legal counsel. At no point in the past two years had her father so much as mentioned The Atraeus Group, or any financial dealings. After the loan Roberto had tried to negotiate had fallen through, along with her engagement, the subject had literally been taboo.
Constantine braked for a set of lights. “There is a problem, but I’m not prepared to discuss it while I’m driving.”
While they waited in traffic her frustration mounted. “If you won’t discuss it …” her fingers sketched quotation marks in the air, “then at least tell me why, if Ambrosi Pearls is supposed to have done something so wrong, you’re helping me instead of throwing me to the media wolves?”
“In an instant replay of the way I treated you two years ago?”
The silky edge to his voice made her tense. “Yes.”
The lights turned green. Constantine accelerated through the intersection. “Because you’re in shock, and you’ve just lost your father.”
Something about the calmness of his manner sent a prickle of unease down her spine, sharpened all of her senses.
His ruthless business reputation aside, Constantine was known to be a philanthropist with a compassionate streak. He frequently gave massive sums to charities, but that compassion had never been directed toward either her or her family.
“I don’t believe you. There’s something else going on.” During the short conversation during which he had broken their engagement, Sienna had tried to make him understand the complications of her father’s skyrocketing gambling debts and the struggle she had simply to support her mother and keep Ambrosi Pearls afloat. That in the few stressful days she’d had before Constantine had discovered the deal, the logic of her father asking Lorenzo Atraeus for a loan had seemed viable.
She had wasted her breath.
Constantine had been too busy walking out the door to listen to the painful details of her family’s financial struggle.
“As you heard from the reporters, there is very definitely ‘something else going on.’ If you’ll recall, that was the reason our engagement ended.”
“My father proposed a business deal that your father wanted.”
“Reestablishing a pearl facility on Medinos was a proposal based on opportunism and nostalgia, not profit.”
Her anger flared at the opportunism crack. “And the bottom line is so much more important to you than honoring the past or creating something beautiful.”
“Farming pretty baubles in a prime coastal location slated for development as a resort didn’t make business sense then and it makes no sense now. The Atraeus Group has more lucrative business options than restoring Medinos’s pearl industry.”
“Options that don’t require any kind of history or sentiment. Like mining gold and building luxury hotels.”
His gaze briefly captured hers. “I don’t recall that you ever had any problem with the concept of making money. As I remember it, two years ago money came before ‘sentiment.’”
Sienna controlled the rush of guilty heat to her cheeks. “I refuse to apologize for a business deal I didn’t instigate.” Or for being weak enough to have felt an overwhelming relief that, finally, there could be an answer to her family’s crippling financial problems. “My only sin was not having the courage to tell you about the deal.”
She stared out of the passenger-side window as Constantine turned into the parking lot of a shopping mall. It was too late now to admit that she had been afraid the impending disgrace of her father’s gambling and financial problems would harm their engagement.
As it turned out, the very thing she had feared had happened. Constantine believed she had broken his trust, that her primary interest in him had always been monetary. “I apologized for not discussing the deal with you,” she said, hating the husky note in her voice, “but, quite frankly, that was something I would have assumed your father would have done.”
Constantine slotted the Audi into a space. She heard the snick as he released his seat belt. He turned in his seat and rested an arm along the back of hers, making her even more suffocatingly aware of his presence.
“Even knowing that my father’s lack of transparency indicated he was keeping the deal under wraps?”
A dark sedan slid into a space beside the Audi. One of Constantine’s bodyguards, with Lucas in the passenger seat and Zane in the rear. A flash of cream informed her that her sports car, driven by the second bodyguard, had just been parked in an adjacent space.
Feeling hemmed in by overlarge Medinian males, Sienna released her seat belt and reached for her purse. “I didn’t understand that you were so against the idea of reestablishing a pearl industry on Medinos.”
Stupidly, when she hadn’t been frightened that she would lose Constantine and burying her head in the sand, she had been too busy coping with the hectic media pressure their engagement had instigated.
Life in a fish tank hadn’t been fun.
“Just as I couldn’t understand why you failed to discuss the agreement, which just happened to have been drawn up the day following our engagement announcement.”
Her gaze snapped to his. “How many times do I have to say it? I had nothing to do with the loan. Think about it, Constantine. If I was
