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“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
Dante stopped laughing and studied her with amusement. “You cannot be serious. Tell me that you’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“You wantmeandyouto get married again?”
“Yes,” she answered in a voice suggesting she didn’t understand what the big deal was.
Dante ambled behind his desk and tapped his fingers on the top of the leather chair. “Okay, I’ll play along. You said you want a temporary marriage. For how long?”
“No more than one year. Long enough to make the world believe we were serious and gave the relationship a good try. Our lives won’t change much, except that we live together.”
“You have a very mercenary point of view.”
“Being mercenary has nothing to do with it. I don’t want Albert Strong to steal what’s rightfully mine,” she said with a hard note in her voice.
“And you want to prove to Daddy Dearest that you can handle the work, despite being a mere woman.”
Her cheeks turned a pinkish hue because his words hit a nerve.
“My relationship with my father is none of your concern,” she said in a low voice. “What do you think of my proposal?”
“I already told you what I think.”
“That was your first impression because you don’t know what you get out of the deal.”
“WhatdoI get?”
“Access.”
He couldn’t help himself. His gaze skimmed her shapely hips and the fullness of her breasts, and he idly wondered if she’d come dressed like that to tempt him.
His dick lifted in his pants at the memory of the fiery love they used to make. Annabelle was as insatiable as he was, though at first she pretended to be shy and demure. They had been very young when they married, only twenty and twenty-one, both with very few sexual partners. Unfortunately, with the typical naïveté of a young married couple, they tried to solve every problem between the sheets because it had been the one area where they communicated best—right up until she left him.
“Notthatkind of access,” Annabelle said, her voice filled with the Arctic bite of the North Pole. “I meant you’ll have access to Houston’s inner circle and one man in particular. Nolson Hilderbrandt. A little birdie told me that he’s quietly looking for a buyer for the Hilderbrandt Plaza, and if I remember correctly, you once mentioned you’d kill to get your hands on that building.”
¿Qué?Dante’s heart took off at a gallop, but he maintained a calm exterior.
No way Nolson would sell that building voluntarily. It had been in his family for decades.
The Hilderbrandt family owned the iconic Hilderbrandt Plaza, which dominated the Houston skyline and was the tallest building in the state. There had been whispers of solvency issues in the family business, and allegedly they had paid debts late in recent months. If Nolson was going to sell the Plaza, that could only mean one thing. They needed the money.
Word had not gotten to Dante yet that Nolson, the forty-something-year-old current head of the family business after his father passed several years ago, was planning to sell—but that was no surprise. Unlike his father, Nolson didn’t spend much time in the spotlight, preferring to stay at his mansion with his much younger wife when he wasn’t running the family empire. Also, there was the murky, complex class system dominating the upper echelons of Houston society.
Nolson came from old money, having inherited generational wealth which kept his family in social prominence. Dante was new money and had amassed his fortune within the past decade. The line of demarcation between the two worlds had never mattered to him before, but in this instance, the boundary kept him behind the curve, on the outside of the most important deal of his life.
Dante wanted the building so badly he could almost taste the glass and steel. Such a prominent property would be handled in a private sale between friends or business acquaintances. More than likely, the buyer would be someone in Nolson’s immediate social network or referred by a person in their group.
Dante didn’t adhere to the same social traditions and thus wasn’t part of the circle the Hilderbrandts belonged to. He was a member of the country club, but he didn’t get invited to the private dinners at the estates of the old money elites. He attended charity balls and philanthropic galas, but there were other, smaller events where his name never made the list. Clifton and Annabelle Buchanan, on the other hand, would be on the list. Like Nolson, Clifton’s wealth was generational in nature.
A devilish grin touched Annabelle’s lips. “If you still want the property, I can get you an audience with Nolson.”
If Dante got an audience with him, he was convinced he could make the man an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he’d finally accomplish the one goal that had eluded him for years. Hilderbrandt Plaza would be the crown jewel in his portfolio of properties and raise his profile even higher.
Keeping his gaze neutral, he took in the knowing expression on Annabelle’s face. She was like a shark and could smell blood the same as the marine predator.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
