her father’s desk, his hands planted wide either side of him, pulling his shirt taut across a muscled chest that looked far better than any man’s had a right to. The open V of his shirt revealed olive skin that was impossibly smooth, almost glossy, and a hint of dark chest hair. She forced her eyes higher, aware that she’d been staring. Her mother was right. Diablo Barrentes was one good-looking man. Why did someone so detestable have to be blessed with such good looks and such a killer body? There was clearly no justice in this world.
He smiled then, as if amused by what her face betrayed of her thoughts. ‘You are as prickly as your name suggests, my wild rose.’
‘I am not your wild rose! Don’t you understand? I don’t want to marry you. And there’s no way on earth you can make me.’
She turned her attention back to her father as another cog suddenly slipped into place. Suddenly her mother’s ‘he must have some redeeming features’ discussion made sense, though not the sudden secrecy. ‘What’s this really about? Why did you make us come into the library? Mother knows about this arrangement, doesn’t she?’
Her father looked grey. ‘She knows something of the proposal, it’s true.’
Briar’s gut churned. ‘Something of the proposal’? What more could there possibly be? What she was hearing already set her stomach roiling. And the very concept that her future had been mapped out by her own parents—the two people she’d always assumed loved her and wanted the best for her—was too much.
‘So you’ve discussed this then, between yourselves like some kind of domestic transaction. I can just imagine how the conversation went: “Shall we renovate the beach house? Maybe trade up to the new Mercedes? Oh, and while we’re at it, maybe we can marry Briar off to Diablo Barrentes.”’
She swivelled her head and firmly fixed Diablo in her sights. ‘You’ve worked out between yourselves that you’re going to marry me off to the person this family detests more than anyone in the world. How could you do that?’
Diablo didn’t flinch at her words, his eyes merely glinting menacingly. Her father, however, was getting more agitated.
‘Briar, calm down, we have no choice!’
‘There’s always a choice! Like I have a choice. Because there’s no way I’m marrying Diablo Barrentes. I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth.’ She swung around in Diablo’s direction and looked square into his dark fathomless eyes. ‘I’d rather die!’
This time the merest tic in his cheek was the only indication that her words had met their mark. ‘It’s drama you studied at university, then,’ he delivered in a tone that told her how unimpressed he was with the proceedings. ‘I was obviously under a misapprehension.’
‘I studied fine arts,’ she hissed. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You surprise me, given you have such a flair for the dramatic.’
‘And you have such a flair for the insane! How could you possibly imagine I would marry you? What were you thinking? That you could marry your way into Sydney society? It won’t work. People aren’t going to forget how you rode roughshod over everyone in your path to get to where you are today.’
He surveyed her through half-hooded eyes that failed to hide those dark simmering depths. ‘You resent me for building my own fortune, instead of having it bestowed on me through some accident of birth like you and your kind?’
‘I resent you because you’ve built your fortune by pulling others down, my father included.’
‘Is that so? And yet now I’m offering your father a chance to get re-established. He can see the sense in the offer. And yet still you resent me.’
‘I will always resent you.’
She turned in frustration to her father. ‘Please, tell me this is all a joke. You can’t really expect me to marry this arrogant Spanish import. This is twenty-first century Sydney, after all. We don’t do arranged marriages!’
Her father shook his head sadly. ‘Briar…’ His voice choked off as he sank down into an armchair, dropping his head into his hands. ‘Oh God, I’ve been such a fool.’
She rushed to him and knelt at his side, latching both hands on to his forearm, willing him some of her strength and hope. ‘Dad, listen to me. We don’t need Diablo’s money. I’ve got it all worked out. We can survive just like we planned—with my job and by auctioning the good furniture periodically. We don’t need to go crawling to people like him. We don’t need his money.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ her father murmured, shaking his head from side to side.
‘It is that easy,’ she assured him. ‘We don’t have to make this deal. I haven’t had a chance to tell you yet—because we can survive without it. So what that we won’t have servants?—We can cope. We’ve been coping. And I’ll have a job soon.’
‘We’re not coping! Look at the state of the house—it’s killing your mother that she can’t keep up with everything.’
‘Who cares if the floors don’t get cleaned every day? Things will get better, you’ll see.’
Her father grabbed her by the shoulders, his desperate fingers clawing into her flesh so hard it hurt. With his hurt, she knew. ‘No, it’s not that easy,’ he reiterated. ‘You have to listen. We have no money left. No credit. Nothing.’
‘We do,’ she argued, wanting to stop his pain. ‘Or we will, and enough to keep us going and to get us through these times. We don’t need anyone else’s money, let alone his. Let me go and get the schedule I’ve been working on. I’ll prove it to you. I’ve worked it all out.’
‘Briar,’ was all he said as he dropped his grip to her hands, holding on to them for all he was worth, not letting her rise. ‘Thank you. You’re such a good child. I’m so proud of you.’
She looked into her father’s eyes and saw his approval beaming out at her. She relished the moment as he pulled her close, wrapping her securely in his arms, and for a moment they were the only two people in the room. Nobody else counted. Nobody else mattered. Her father thought he had been carrying the entire burden of their debt on his shoulders. Now he knew that Briar had also been searching for solutions. And everything would look different when he’d seen her calculations. She’d soon show him they didn’t need to resort to people like Diablo for the funds to ensure their future.
‘So when are you going to tell her?’ jarred a voice from outside her perfect understanding. And she stilled within the circle of her father’s arms as dread turned her blood to ice.
‘Tell me what?’ she asked huskily, drawing back to search her father’s face. What the hell else could there be?
He looked down at her with his empty eyes and it was impossible not to feel his despair drape around her, damp and pungent. ‘There’s nothing left.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, willing life into his eyes, searching for the merest flicker of hope. ‘“Nothing left”?’
‘It’s all gone. All of it.’
‘But we’ve still got the house and the furniture!
