it?”
Emma sucked in a big breath through her nose. One of her best groomers and dearest friends, Deirdre Laventhol, was real big on yoga. In yoga, you always breathed through your nose.
It was supposed to be calming.
Emma slowly let the breath back out the same way she’d sucked it in. It didn’t help much. She still felt angry and confused and a little bit afraid of the man who was so determined to blame her for something she had not done. Her heart was beating too fast. Just racing away in there. And her hands felt clammy. She had to resist the urge to rub them on her skirt.
Oh, Blythe, she thought miserably, why did you do this? I told you I plain don’t like him. And he never liked me. I told you that.
But Blythe hadn’t listened. She was like that sometimes, once she got an idea in her head.
Emma would say, “I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me, either. He always gives me that narrow-eyed suspicious look, like he’s waiting for me to grab the silver and run—or to cheat you out of every last penny you own.”
And Blythe would say, “You’re wrong, Em. You don’t understand him. Naturally he’s hostile with you. He doesn’t want to admit the attraction. But you’re the woman for him. And he’s just right for you.” And then Emma would groan and order her friend to forget that idea. Blythe would always drop the subject about then, which left Emma assuming that her friend had gotten the message.
To assume, Aunt Cass used to say, makes an ass out of u and me, too…
Emma made herself look at him again. It wasn’t that he was so hard to look at. He was a big, muscular man in a high-dollar suit with a burning look in eyes that sometimes looked blue—and sometimes looked black as the darkest part of the night.
Not handsome. No. His features were too blunt, too…basic for that. Not handsome, but masculine. Emma had always thought that the air kind of vibrated with male energy whenever Jonas Bravo was around—even when he wasn’t ready to chew nails like he was now.
Women were supposed to be drawn to him “like moths to a dangerous flame.” Yep, she’d actually read that about him somewhere. Blythe had told her that his “playboy phase” had come to an end around the time he turned thirty. But during it, he’d dated the most beautiful and charming women in the world. Famous actresses. The stunning youngest daughter of one the nation’s oldest and wealthiest families. Not to mention a long string of starlets and showgirls from both the good old U.S. of A. and abroad.
Blythe had often mentioned oh so casually to Emma that in the past few years, Jonas had hardly dated at all. Blythe had said she considered that a good sign. She thought he was ready for the real thing, for the love of his life.
In fact, looking back now, it seemed to Emma that Blythe was constantly bringing up Jonas whenever she and her friend spent time together. It seemed, looking back, that she should have been warned that Blythe might do something crazy like this—something bizarre and extreme, something just next door to desperate, to try to get her and Jonas hooked up.
But then, Aunt Cass’d had a saying for that, too—the one about hindsight always being twenty-twenty.
“Don’t give me that wide-eyed innocent look,” the Bravo Billionaire growled. “Admit it. You set this up.”
Emma folded her clammy hands in front of her, yanked her shoulders up tall and looked him dead in the eye. Think bold, she told herself silently. Think one hundred percent completely unconcerned about the mean things this awful man is saying to you.
“Didn’t you?” he taunted.
She answered truthfully—as if the truth was going to do her a bit of good with this wild man. “I most certainly did not. I didn’t know a thing about it until I walked in here today.”
One side of his mouth curled lazily into a sneer. “Fine. Then get out of the way.”
Now, what did that mean? She was not in his way. If he wanted to leave, he could get right up and go. “Pardon me?”
“Get out of the way. Refuse to marry me and decline to assume custody of my sister. If you won’t marry me and you won’t take Mandy, either, there’s no problem. She’ll go to me.”
The wild man had a point. Nothing said she had to go along with Blythe’s crazy scheme. Mr. McAllister had said the same thing a few minutes ago, hadn’t he?
If Ms. Hewitt is unwilling, then these changes become meaningless….
Emma could just…do what Jonas Bravo wanted her to do. Get out of the way. Mandy would go to him and—well, wasn’t that the right thing, anyway?
Emma opened her mouth to tell him she’d do what he wanted: step aside. Make no claim on Mandy.
But the words got caught in her throat.
A little over five years ago, right after her aunt Cass died, Emma had first come to L.A. She’d brought nothing but a few cheap clothes, a battered Ford four-door, a degree from a two-year business college in Odessa and a burning will to succeed, to make a mark upon the world. She’d taken a job at a famous deli/restaurant on Fairfax—just until she could figure out what kind of business she intended to make her mark in.
She’d met Blythe Bravo the second morning on the job, when Blythe had dropped in good and early for a black coffee and a plain bagel to go. It was immediate, the feeling of connection between them. It didn’t matter that, on the surface, they had nothing in common. Emma had looked in Blythe’s eyes and known that things were going to be all right, that she didn’t have to be secretly terrified anymore. She had lost her dear aunt Cass and she was starting all over. But she had found a rare friend. That gave her confidence, made her certain that she really was going to make it in L.A.
“When can you take a break?” Blythe had asked the third time she walked into the deli and found Emma behind the register. “We’ll do lunch.”
After that, they met two or three times a week—for lunch, to take in a movie, sometimes just for coffee and serious girl talk. Within a month, Emma was telling Blythe her idea of creating a special kind of “pet retreat.” And Blythe was offering to be her backer….
Emma owed Blythe so much. She did want a chance to repay her—not only for giving Emma her start, but also for holding out her hand in true and binding friendship.
Some people—like the man who was trying to push her around right now—would say that Emma came from nothing. Her daddy and her mama had both been dead by the time she was five. She’d been raised by a good-hearted, sun worshipping, platitude-loving aunt in a double-wide in a dinky, dusty west Texas town called Alta Lobo.
So yes. Some folks might say she was a nobody from nowhere.
But in Alta Lobo, in her aunt Cass’s double-wide, Emma had learned a number of important lessons. One of them was that if you can possibly give a friend what she wants, you do it.
Emma longed to do just that, to grant her dear friend’s dying wish.
But, oh, Blythe, she thought miserably. Oh, Blythe, why this? Anything but this, to get myself hitched up to this awful man.
Emma was not sure she could bring herself to do it—even for the very best friend
