Married to His Business (Millionaire of the Month #5)(36)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

How could he have missed Kendall’s beauty all those years? he wondered. How could he have missed Kendall? How could he have not seen what should have been obvious from the first? That she was a rare, exquisite jewel amid the meaningless rubbish of his work. How could he have thought his work was the most important thing in the world, when every day she was with him was a sign of how there was so much more?

"Matthias?" she said softly.

He lifted a hand to thread his fingers through her hair, then hesitated, in case she didn’t want him to. But she leaned her head forward, toward his fingers, toward him,

and he closed what was left of the distance gratefully, loving the way the soft, warm tresses felt cascading over his fingertips. "Hmm?" he replied absently.

"The engagement?" she prodded gently. "You were going to tell me why it happened."

Right. He had been planning to tell her about his now-defunct engagement. Which was weird, because there was another engagement he wanted to talk about so much more. Of course, that engagement hadn’t happened—yet. So maybe it would be best to divest himself completely of the old one. Then he could move ahead to the new.

"It was actually Lauren’s father’s idea," he began. "He and I were talking about merging our companies over dinner one night, and when the food came, the conversation turned to more personal subject matter, because it’s hard to talk business when you’re eating." He adopted his best professor voice as he added, importantly, "Because as everyone knows, it’s an unwritten rule of business etiquette that you should never talk about important things with your mouth full. So talk about unimportant things with your mouth full instead."

Kendall chuckled at that. "Yeah, personal matters are so much less important than professional ones."

He nodded. "You learned well at my knee, grasshopper. Unfortunately, a lot of what I taught you was wrong."

She smiled at that. "As long as you understand that now."

"Oh, I understand a lot now that I was clueless about before."

She lifted her hand and cupped his cheek affectionately. A very good sign. "We can talk about that, too," she said. "In fact, I look forward to it. But first, you’re talking to Conover."

"Right. He mentioned that his daughter had just returned from Paris having canceled her wedding for the third time. Not the same wedding, mind you," he hastened to add, "but the third wedding with a third fiancé."

"Lauren Conover was engaged three times before she agreed to marry you?"

Matthias nodded. "Which was why she let her father cajole her into the whole thing. She’d gotten to the point where she didn’t trust her own judgment. And Conover took advantage of that to convince her an arranged marriage would be best."

"And how did he convince you of that?" Kendall asked. "Somehow, I’ve never pictured you as the sort to mistrust your own judgment."

"Too true," he said. Except that, like so many other things, he’d been wrong about that, too. His judgment, at least when it came to matters of the heart, stank. Or, at least, it used to. "But Conover is a very persuasive man, and he made some excellent points about why it would be beneficial to merge our families as well as our businesses. And since I’d never planned to marry, marrying Lauren Conover made sense."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Kendall said. "I don’t follow that logic at all."

"Of course not," he said. "You don’t have the convoluted logic gene that men have."

"Ah."

"The convoluted logic goes like this," he told her, smiling. "Try to keep up. I’d never planned to marry, because I never planned to fall in love." Something else he’d been wrong about, he thought. Man. Where had he ever gotten the idea that he was savvy? "So marrying for love made no sense to me. Marrying for business, however…"

Now Kendall nodded. "Right. Got it. It’s all coming clear now. Anything done for the sake of one’s business makes perfect sense."

"It used to," he said. "Back before I realized what was really important. I guess I just never really thought marriage was such a big deal. And when I did think about it, it seemed like the things that screwed up a marriage always resulted from the emotional investment people made in it. I concluded that by not investing emotionally, my marriage to Lauren would be successful. As long as she and I looked at it pragmatically, everything would be fine."

"And what did Lauren think?"

"At that point, she agreed with me. Like I said, she’d been engaged three times because she thought she’d been in love, and all three times, she ended up abandoned. She hadn’t wanted the arrangement to be based on love any more than I had. Until she came to her senses one day and realized how unrealistic she and I both were being about it."

"And until she met up with your brother, Luke."

Matthias waited for the stab of…something…that should have come with the comment. A stab of jealousy maybe, even if he hadn’t been in love with Lauren when Luke set out to seduce her. Or a stab of anger that his brother, even though the two of them had barely been speaking at the time, would misrepresent himself as Matthias and deliberately seduce his brother’s bride. Or even a stab of resentment that Luke had won some misguided competition between the two men over a woman.

But all Matthias felt was relief. Profound, unmitigated relief that Lauren, at least, had been smart enough to know they’d be making a huge mistake if they married. Then he met Kendall’s gaze again, and he felt something else, too.

Something he’d never felt before, but he recognized nonetheless. Something his brother had ultimately found with Matthias’s ex-fiancee, something that had made him propose to Lauren instead. Something that made Matthias realize there was a lot more to life than work.

"Love," he said aloud. "Lauren didn’t just meet up with my brother, Luke. She fell in love with my brother, Luke."

Kendall said nothing in response to that, only gazed at Matthias in silence. She had to know, though, he thought. Not only had he told her, but her hands were placed right over his heart, and the way his heart was racing now, as he looked back at her, feeling what he felt, knowing what he knew, she had to feel it. She had to.

Finally, softly, she asked, "And how do you feel about that? That your brother, Luke, is going to marry a woman you once planned to marry yourself?"

"I’m happy," he told her. "Lauren’s a nice woman. I’m glad she finally found someone who allows her to realize that about herself."