rel="nofollow" href="#u2ffcc786-1dea-53eb-9ca2-469ba06d0dd6">One
“There’s been a terrible mistake.”
Yasmin Carter froze—poised in her wedding finery at the end of the royal blue carpet leading to the altar. She stared at the man who had just turned to face her. Ilya Horvath, heir apparent to the Horvath empire, CEO of her biggest business rival.
Her groom. The one she was meeting for the first time today.
Her eyes skimmed the small gathering of guests flanking the aisle. Their expressions registered varying degrees of dismay and shock at her words. She forced her gaze back toward Ilya. He did not look surprised...or amused. In fact, he looked annoyed.
Well, that was fine with her. She was pretty annoyed, too, right now, and she’d tell the Match Made in Marriage people at the first opportunity. When her office manager, Riya, had brought the matchmaking business to her attention, it had appeared to be a solution to her current business woes. Cost aside, she had stood to gain more if she went through the type of arranged marriage at first sight offered by Match Made in Marriage than if she remained single. She’d endured the psychometric testing and the interviews with the end goal in mind—securing an exclusive deal to handle Hardacre Incorporated’s corporate and family travel for the next five years. The company was a well-known motivational and business coaching enterprise that worked all over the country. That agreement was the golden treasure that would pull her small charter airline out of the red and back into the black—so she’d signed the detailed contract that stipulated she must stay married to her stranger-husband for at least three months without a second thought. But contract or no contract, this wedding simply could not happen.
She should never have entered into this ridiculous scheme to save her business, but her inside source had warned her that the owner’s wife would never allow her husband to do business on a regular basis with a beautiful, young, unmarried woman. Wallace Hardacre had a wandering eye but was known to leave married women alone.
It had seemed so simple. To seal the deal, she needed to be married. She knew she had everyone else’s quotes beaten on price. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t want to marry Mr. Right someday. She absolutely did. It was just that with running the company and all the hours that took, she didn’t have time to form quality relationships with men.
Her gaze caught and meshed with Ilya’s for just a moment and a shiver ran through her. Not of apprehension, exactly—something more primitive than that. But it was enough for her to be certain that this whole thing had been a mistake from the start.
Ilya Horvath might look as though he’d stepped from the pages of GQ but there was no way she could consider marrying him.
Physically, of course, he was perfect. Tall, with broad shoulders filling out his suit to perfection and a light beard wreathing his jaw, he was—in a word—gorgeous. Attraction rippled through Yasmin’s body, making the corset beneath her strapless bodice suddenly feel a hundred times tighter than when Riya had hooked her into it this morning. Yasmin clamped down on the sensation and forced herself to take a breath, reminding herself that mentally, emotionally, socially and fiscally he was all wrong for her. No, she couldn’t do this to her late granddad’s memory—not to the man who’d taken her in and raised her when her parents had dumped her on him so they could continue to pursue their adventures rather than face up to adulthood and responsibility. She couldn’t marry the man whose own grandfather, her granddad’s best friend, had stolen and married the woman her grandfather loved. Attraction was all very well and good, but not when two families had been feuding for as long as theirs had.
“There’s definitely been a mistake,” she repeated, more firmly this time.
She bent and gathered the fullness of her layered organza gown, completed a swift one-eighty and exited the ballroom as fast as her feet, clad in intricately beaded slippers, would carry her. There was total silence for a few seconds, then the room broke out in a clatter of noise that followed her down the wide corridor.
Yasmin didn’t know which way to go as she headed into the resort’s foyer. To the elevators and back to the luxurious honeymoon suite where she’d gotten ready this morning or straight out the front door and hope there was a cab waiting there? It was a long way from here in Port Ludlow, Washington, to her home in California. The fare would be—
“Yasmin!” a woman called from behind her. “Please, wait. We need to talk.”
Yasmin turned to face the petite, elegant older woman now approaching her. Alice Horvath—the woman responsible for the bitter rivalry between the Carters and the Horvaths these past sixty-plus years.
“There’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind,” Yasmin said firmly.
“Just give me a moment of your time.” Alice put a gentle hand on Yasmin’s arm. “Please? It’s important.”
“Look, I—”
“Perhaps up in your suite would be best, more private.” Alice began to steer Yasmin toward the elevators.
The adrenaline that had surged through Yasmin’s body at the sight of her intended groom began to abate, leaving a dragging lethargy in its wake.
“Fine, but you, of all people, should know you’re wasting your time if you’re going to try and persuade me to marry your grandson.”
The older woman gave her a sweet smile in response but said nothing as they rode the elevator up to the honeymoon suite. Yasmin was surprised when Alice produced a key card that opened the door.
“Forgive me the intrusion,” Alice said, closing the door behind them. “I was merely holding the key for Ilya until after the ceremony.”
Yasmin didn’t know what to say or where to look, so she opted to plunk herself down on one of the sofas in the sitting room. Alice gracefully seated herself opposite.
“You have a right to know what’s going on.”
Damn right she did. Yasmin tightly squeezed the bound stems of her bouquet of pale pink roses and gypsophila to stop the trembling that had begun in her fingers and now threatened to travel up her arms and take over her entire body.
“Let me be frank with you, my dear. When you applied to Match Made in Marriage I immediately knew you and my grandson were compatible. I didn’t need the specialist tests to assure me that you and Ilya would very much be a perfect match.”
“I beg your pardon? You work with Match Made in Marriage? Are you telling me that you make the matches?” Yasmin replied in stunned surprise.
“It’s not widely known, of course, and we do take the tests and interviews into consideration, but more as a confirmation that I’m on the right track with my couples. Trust me when I say I’ve always had a knack for these things. Once I retired from the family firm it was purely common sense to turn my little talent into a business. When my grandson told me he was ready to marry and settle down, it was only natural he would turn to me, but I didn’t expect to find the perfect match for him so promptly. I have to say, getting your application was quite the surprise.”
* * *
Alice Horvath looked at the beautiful but clearly confused and angry young woman sitting opposite her and wished things could have been different between their families. That the painful rift between best friends hadn’t formed when Jim Carter and Eduard Horvath both fell in love with her and, eventually, fallen out forever when she chose Eduard for her husband. But this was her chance to make things right—to heal the wounds of so long ago and to put this stupid feud to bed once and for all.
If only she could persuade Yasmin to go ahead with the wedding.
She drew in a breath and chose her words carefully. If there was anything this young woman seemed to have a grasp of, it was business. Oh, yes, Alice knew that Carter Air was struggling. She also knew that Yasmin, despite having come up with the hefty commitment fee, could not afford to break the terms of the marriage contract she’d signed or attempt to sue Match Made in Marriage to get out of it.