Anna DePalo - His Black Sheep Bride / The Billionaire Baby Bombshell - His Black Sheep Bride / The Billionaire Baby Bombshell

Her mother resided in Houston now with husband number three, the owner of a trio of car dealerships, having finally achieved a measure of stability.

Tamara sighed. Partly because of the physical distance, she and her mother weren’t very close, but a fringe benefit was that her mother didn’t interfere much in her life.

Of course, she could hardly claim the same benefit with respect to her father, who owned an apartment in New York City.

But unlike her mother, she’d thumbed her nose at her father’s money. Because the strings attached had been more than she’d been able to accept. As she’d grown older, her father had made his opinions known, and her artsy tendencies, her penchant for the bohemian and her taste for the unconventional had not gone over well.

Her father’s attempts to meddle had, of course, reached their zenith in his crazy plan to marry her off to Sawyer.

Really, that scheme was beyond ridiculous.

Sure, her parents’ marriage had been an ill-advised union between an American and a British aristocrat—a still-naive girl from Houston on the one hand, and the young and ambitious heir to a viscountcy on the other. But her starry-eyed mother, who’d imagined herself in love, had been thrilled by the prospect of residing in a British manor house.

In contrast, Tamara prided herself on being a worldly-wise New Yorker. And much as she hated to admit it, she had her father’s skeptical nature. She’d inherited her mother’s coloring and features, but that’s where similarities ended.

She liked her life just fine. She was bohemian with an edge.

A marriage between her and Sawyer Langsford was laughable. They barely spoke the same language, though she had been known to read his paper, The New York Intelligencer, and occasionally watch the Mercury News channel.

To Sawyer’s credit, Tamara acknowledged, his media outlets didn’t stoop to petty sensationalism. And she had to admit he’d built an international media empire from the two British radio stations and the regional newspaper he’d inherited from his father. At thirty-eight, he’d stuffed a lifetime’s worth of career accomplishments into a mere fifteen years or so.

At twenty-eight, she was a decade behind Sawyer in experience and worlds away in outlook. Yes, she wanted her design business to float instead of sinking into the great abyss, and yes, she dreamed of becoming successful. But she didn’t aspire to the same lofty heights of empire building that her father and Sawyer did.

She’d effectively been abandoned twice by her father—once, in a transatlantic divorce, and then again by Viscount Kincaid’s devotion to his media company. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—risk acquiring a husband who was from the same mold.

It would be beyond foolhardy, notwithstanding the kiss the other night.

Still, the kiss had repeatedly sneaked into her thoughts over the past few days. Sawyer had made her toes curl. And embarrassingly, she’d clearly responded to him.

But she knew why Sawyer had kissed her. He’d been trying to convince her to agree to a marriage of convenience.

If Sawyer thought she was a pushover for his seduction techniques, however, he had another thing coming. So she’d had a brief and primitive response to his air of raw power and sexuality. She was still well past the age of gullibility—of being swayed by a momentary attraction into a relationship with someone who was so very wrong for her.

In contrast, she and Tom were alike. They enjoyed prowling SoHo at night, appreciated the city, and were both artistic. They were friends, first and foremost.

They weren’t two people from very different backgrounds united by lust. In other words, to her relief, they were definitely not her parents.

As if on cue, her cell phone rang, and it was Tom.

“You’ll never guess what’s fallen in my lap,” Tom said.

“Okay, I give up. What?” she replied.

“I’m flying out to L.A. to meet with a big music producer. He heard one of our demos and is interested in signing the band.”

“Tom, that’s wonderful!” Tamara exclaimed. “I didn’t even know you were in touch with a producer out in L.A.”

Tom laughed. “I wasn’t. The guy got his hands on the demo from a friend of a friend.”

“See, networking works.”

Tom gave an exaggerated sigh. “Here’s the thing, babe. I’ll be gone. Physically, existentially and in every other way.”

She picked up on his meaning.

“What?” she said with mock offense. “You’ll no longer be available to be my standby date?”

It was easy for her to adopt a lighthearted tone, she realized. Tom had never been more than a casual, occasional date for her—a reliable escort when she had to attend one social function or another. He was nothing more, despite their Tom- and-Tam epithet, and that was the reason she could be happy for him without rancor.

“Afraid not,” Tom responded now. “Will you ever forgive me?”

“If I don’t, you could always write a song about it,” she teased.

Tom laughed. “You’re a pal, Tam.”

Tom’s words summed up their relationship, Tamara acknowledged. It had always been easy and casual. Such a contrast, she thought darkly, from her fraught interactions with—

No, she wouldn’t go there.

“It was a lucky break running into your friend the Earl of Melton.”

Tamara started guiltily. “He’s not my friend.”

“Well, friend or acquaintance—”

“And what do you mean it was a lucky break?” she asked, even as she was touched by a feeling of foreboding.

“Well, this music producer has a friend who socializes with the earl. Seems the earl had heard my music—”

She’d just bet Sawyer was a fan of Zero Sum.

“—and had talked it up to a friend of his, who passed along the recommendation to his music industry connection.”

Tamara felt a wave of heat wash up her face. He didn’t … He wouldn’t …

And yet, it was all too convenient.

When she found Sawyer, she was going to let him have it, and then some.

For Tom’s sake, however, she forced herself to sound cheerful. There was no reason to rain on Tom’s parade by imparting her suspicions about how his lucky break was more than mere luck.

Besides, from Tom’s perspective, it didn’t matter how his intro to a top music producer had come about. The bottom line was that he was getting his chance to hit it big.

“I owe this all to you, Tam,” Tom said gratefully. “I don’t need to tell you how tough things have been in the music industry lately, so getting someone to take a chance on Zero Sum is a big deal.”

If only Tom knew exactly what he owed to her, Tamara thought.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,” Tamara said. “Blow them away.”

“Thanks, babe. You’re the best.”

When she ended her call with Tom, she set down the phone and stared at it unseeingly, her brows knitting as she contemplated Sawyer’s skullduggery.

She’d barely begun to get herself worked up over Sawyer’s fiendishness, however, when the intercom sounded.

After she pressed the intercom button by the front door, she jumped as she heard Sawyer’s voice.

She took a deep breath. Apparently her confrontation with Sawyer would occur sooner than she’d expected.

“Come on up,” she said with a semblance of serenity, and buzzed him in.

Trust Tamara to name her company something ridiculous and suggestive like Pink Teddy Designs, Sawyer thought as he rode the elevator up to the third floor.

The name had been emblazoned next to the buzzer for Tamara’s apartment in a cast-iron warehouse building that had long ago been converted into lofts. Located along one of SoHo’s narrow side streets, the sidewalk in front of Tamara’s building had nevertheless been almost as crowded with pedestrians and street vendors peddling everything from paintings to T-shirts as SoHo’s main commercial strips, Broadway and Prince and Spring Streets.