The Tycoon's Temporary Bride: Book Four (3 page)

“What’s your name?”

“Tashi. Tashi—” She hesitated, then decided
to go for it. “Tashi Holland.”

She waited for some indication of
recognition. A “My goodness, I’ve been looking for you for months,”
or something along those lines. When none came, Tashi continued on
her way.

Tashi
.

“Tashi Holland.” Adam whispered her name as
he watched her walk through the parking lot, her long jean dress
flapping loosely around her ankles. When she exited the lot, Adam
realized that she didn’t own a car. The thought that she couldn’t
afford a car upset him. How many other basic necessities of
life—things people like him took for granted—did she live
without?

He was tempted to follow her, even though
he’d told her he hadn’t been following her. That was then. This was
now—now that he knew she was afraid of something or someone, the
urge to run after her and hold her again mounted by the second.
Twice in one day, within the hour, he’d held her against him,
pressed her cheek close to his heart—his heart that was now beating
madly out of control.

Adam pressed his palm into his chest where
her cheek had lain. His shirt was damp from her tears. His skin
tingled from her heat. He fisted his hand as if he could capture
her sadness and make it his own.

“What frightens you, Tashi? Who scares you?
An obsessive boyfriend? An abusive husband?” he asked out loud as
he watched her cross the street and walk west on Beacon Avenue,
pass Mountainview Café, toward Union Street.

Soon she would be out of sight, but
positively not out of mind, he thought as he recalled her eyes—wide
sapphire pools of mystery and magic, bright open windows to her
timid soul. His pulse quickened as he remembered the rich golden
glow and enthusing aroma of ginger scenting her soft auburn curls,
and the sensuous bouquet of jasmine and vanilla emanating from her
smooth silky skin.

Exotic. Sweet. Enticing.
Lei era la spezia
e il sapore al suo stufato—
yes, the spice and the flavor to his
stew, indeed. The kind of woman a man wished he could bump into
again and again—all pun intended.

Adam’s excitement waned when she made a right
turn onto Union Street—the low-income part of town, littered with
rundown multi-family houses where people existed from paycheck to
paycheck. His heart squeezed mercilessly. A woman like Tashi didn’t
belong in that kind of neighborhood. She belonged in a palace
surrounded by servants eager to grant her simplest request.

As her diminishing figure disappeared from
his view, Adam walked into the supermarket. His concern for the
girl sprouted wings and his protective instincts toward any damsel
in distress bulldozed through the barrier he’d erected several
years ago. It ripped through him like a fist smashing through the
surge of a waterfall.

Tashi was in trouble
. Not the kind
that went away with a threatening phone call or a letter from an
attorney. She was in deep. The girl was a bundle of nerves, and
seemingly as defenseless as an alley cat trapped with its back
against the wall.

Much like Claire, sans the entourage of
negative vibes.

As he pulled the box of disposable diapers
from the shelf and headed to the checkout, Adam tried to put all
thoughts of Tashi Holland out of his mind. He told himself that she
was not his concern. He berated himself for asking her name and if
she lived in the vicinity. Why couldn’t he have left well enough
alone?

It wasn’t that he was opposed to helping
damsels in distress. It was just that damsels in distress were his
weakness.

He’d discovered his Achilles’ heel at age
twenty-one when he’d rescued Claire, a damsel in distress from an
abusive relationship. A practicing yogi and meditation guru since
the age of twelve, he should have known that a woman with that kind
of baggage and high levels of toxins circling her orbit would tip
his Libra scales way out of equilibrium.

Perhaps the challenge of teaching her to
trust again, to show her that not all men were cruel, and most
emphatically the fact that she was the first woman he’d made love
with had clouded his mind, made him think he was in love with her,
and pushed him to propose. It could also have been his father’s
frequent referral to the fact that since Adam was his only heir, it
was his duty to carry on the Andreas bloodline.

Or perhaps it was that longing in his heart
to share his life with someone special, to create his own home with
a wife and children that was filled with joy, happiness, laughter,
and respect—much like the one he’d grown up in. Whatever it was
that had pushed him to ask, Claire had accepted his proposal, and
had seemed excited about marrying him in the months they’d spent
planning the elaborate wedding of the decade.

Then she’d broken his heart.

Eventually, his heart had healed and had
forgotten the ache of rejection. A true believer in love and Happy
Ever After, he’d opened up to another damsel in distress. He never
got as far as the altar with Denise, and he couldn’t say that his
heart had been broken the second time around—just a little hurt and
somewhat disappointed at failing again.

That kind of consecutive rejection could
wreak havoc on a man’s confidence, not to mention his ego—even if
that man practiced yoga and meditation on a daily basis. While yoga
and meditation were efficient in helping him regain and maintain
balance in his inner universe, they, however, were ineffective when
it came to matters of the heart and soul.

The heart and soul, he’d discovered, were
restless teammates—forever on perpetual journeys to find their one
true love—the ultimate mate to complete them. Twice burned, Adam
had learned that the best way to deal with his heart and soul was
not to engage them, to keep them away from things that affected
them most.

For him, that
thing
was a woman in
distress, since the moment he thought he had to rescue a woman was
the moment he began falling for her.

After his emotional disasters with Claire and
Denise, he’d made a conscious effort to only pursue independent
women who didn’t need to be rescued, women who wanted a career more
than they wanted love and a family, those who bowed out as
graciously as they bowed into their affairs with him. To be fair,
he was always mindful to let them know right up front that there
was no permanency in a relationship with him. Consequently, he was
known as Temporary Adam to some, and the Temporary Tycoon to
others.

Adam had been initially surprised that there
were actual women out there who didn’t see marriage and children as
the prime reason for their existence, that it wasn’t a goal they
needed to attain to feel complete and valued by the opposite sex,
or by society. What many women
really
wanted had changed in
recent decades. Some of them just wanted to have fun.

Adam appreciated their contemporary
philosophies, and while the opposite was true for him,
temporary
was working out just fine. The heart couldn’t
always get what it wanted, and since he’d conditioned his not to
fall in love, it seemed to have ceased its endless quest.

The safest way to keep
temporary
permanent was to stay away from damsels in distress. That meant no
opening of Pandora’s box—well, in this case, Tashi’s box—for a
quick and curious peek inside.

By the time he walked back to Mountainview
Café and handed the box of diapers to Felicia, Adam had succeeded
in putting all thoughts of Tashi Holland out of his mind.

At least that’s what he thought.

Once inside her apartment, Tashi turned the
dead bolts and dropped her bags on the floor. She leaned against
the door and took deep breaths of the stifling hot air into her
lungs. She felt as if she’d been holding her breath ever since
she’d collided with that incredible man in the café.

“Adam.” She finally allowed herself to say
the name that had been bouncing around in her head during her
fifteen-minute walk home—the longest and most difficult she’d ever
taken. Ever since she took the first step away from him, her legs
had been wobbly and stiff—a contrasting combination she didn’t know
was possible. It was a miracle she hadn’t collapsed on the
sidewalk.

“Adam,” she said again as if repeating it
would somehow ease the constriction in her lungs, the quaking in
her belly. As the sound of his name bounced off the walls of her
apartment, the image of his gentle blue eyes, the lingering feel of
his arms wrapped around her, the warmth from his hard strong body
made Tashi flush all over. Even now in the delicious aftermath of
their brief physical encounter, she felt as if her skin was on
fire.

But that fire quickly waned as Tashi
remembered the little girl in the stroller.
He was married.
He had a child, maybe more than one. Ms. Felicia was his
mother-in-law. Maybe that’s where she’d seen him before—at the
café. She shook her head. No. If she’d seen this man in person
before, she would have remembered. He was not the kind of man a
woman forgot meeting.

He was kind, and gentle, and considerate.
Okay, yes, and sexy and appealing too. He’d offered to replace her
groceries even though it was her own paranoia that had caused her
to drop her bags. And he’d invited her back to the café for
dessert—to help calm her nerves he’d said. Why hadn’t she accepted?
Because he was married, and if she were his wife, she wouldn’t
appreciate him sharing anything with another woman, no matter how
innocent it looked. That was how illicit affairs
began—innocently.

He could be divorced. Separated.
Widowed
, her lonely heart debated. Could be, she thought,
squinting her eyes, trying to remember if she’d seen a ring on his
finger.

Tashi slid her backpack off her shoulders and
made her way into the living room, where she placed it carefully on
the glass-top coffee table.

In an effort to bring down her body heat, she
flipped the switch to the air conditioning unit in one of the two
living room windows. As the room vibrated from the ruckus of the
cooling unit, Tashi plopped down on her posh leather sofa, picked
up her laptop from the coffee table, and opened up her browser.
There were a lot of men with Adam for a first name living in
Granite Falls, but Tashi knew without a doubt that the first name
on the first page belonged to the man she’d collided with
today.

Adamo Alessandro Andreas
.
Triple
A’
s f
or first, second, and last names.
He seemed like a
man who would be first, at the top of his game, at the top of
everything, including a list of website pages. He was
A
all
the way.
Adam
, the first man God created. Tashi’s heart
pounded furiously at the realization that she’d been nicknamed
“Little Eve” after her mother, Evelyn, because she looked so much
like her.

Expelling a ragged breath, she clicked on the
Wikipedia link. Several images of Adam popped onto the screen and
his intense blue eyes seemed to pierce through her like they’d done
in person earlier. With curiosity burning a hole in her belly,
Tashi leaned back into the sofa and began to devour as much
information as she could about Adam Andreas.

He was thirty-two years old, the only child
of Alessandro and Arabella Andreas, and sole heir to Andreas
International—an exclusive chain of restaurants and hotels situated
all over the globe. Tashi remembered walking past both Hotel
Andreas and Ristorante Andreas last summer when she’d decided to
extend her walking parameters as far as Lake Crystal at the eastern
border of town. It was a long walk from her apartment, but well
worth the effort. She’d photographed some interesting sights on the
way, and once there, she’d people-watched from the boardwalk, and
enjoyed both a delicious seafood lunch and a dinner at two of the
local restaurants.

Having nothing and no one to go home to,
she’d stayed all day, and had even dipped her feet in the cool
crystal water while the town residents and visitors frolicked
around her, and mini yachts docked and undocked all day long,
picking up and dropping off rich-looking men, women and children in
a noisy melee of fun and excitement.

It was nightfall by the time she’d finished
her dinner, and although the crime rate in Granite Falls was less
than a quarter percent compared to the rest of the state and the
country, she’d decided to take a taxi back to her apartment.

Tashi clasped a hand to her mouth. That’s
where she’d seen Adam Andreas before. She’d picked up a copy of
Granite Falls People News
magazine from the back seat of the
cab, and had been absentmindedly leafing through it during the
latter part of her ride. She’d turned a page and just as her eyes
landed on a photo of four men all dressed in business attire, her
taxi ride had ended.

Tashi clicked on the
Granite Falls People
News
link and began to read the first article. The four men
she’d glimpsed in the magazine that night were featured together.
They were all very close friends, and they were all billionaires.
Dr. Erik LaCrosse was a world-renowned OB/GYN who often visited
third-world countries to attend to war-torn and natural disaster
victims and refugees. Bryce Fontaine was owner and CEO of Fontaine
Enterprises—an international conglomeration that comprised of a
vast variety of businesses. He was the man she’d seen at the
outlets with the woman and twins today. His face was also featured
in the Fountain Towers TV ads. That’s why he’d seemed familiar to
her. The glass skyscraper of his Fontaine Enterprises headquarters
towered over the town. Many buildings bore the Fontaine name.
Wow
. And Massimo Andretti, Adam’s cousin, was heir to
Andretti Industries—the largest textile manufacturer in the world.
They were all powerful men, and they were all married, with
children, except Adam.