Marriage by Mistake

was it, the last time.
    "Call security," Kelly heard someone order behind her. She felt alarm, an amazed shiver at her own gall, but her rage, and a kind of fear, overwhelmed everything. If she stopped now, she'd never be able to look herself in the mirror again.
    He'd promised her love, then sneaked out. She could not wait to deal with that.
    Kelly wrapped her hands around the knob of the next door down the hall, telling herself she was going to keep on trying if it took all day, if it took all night—
    Kelly flung the door open and stopped dead. A dozen business-suited professionals seated around a convex table stared at her in shock.
    But the business-suited professionals filling the room were not what stopped Kelly's heart. What did that was the one man standing at the head of the table, a pointer in his hand and a fancy Italian designer suit stretched across his broad shoulders.
    "Dean," Kelly breathed.
    Or was it? He looked so odd in that suit, as if he were born to it. His jaw was unexpectedly clean-shaven and the dark curls Kelly had loved to tousle were ruthlessly tamed.
    Most peculiar of all, he stared at her in the same manner as the rest of the people in the room. As if he'd never seen her before in his life.
    Kelly felt a hard bump in the progress of her quest. He was supposed to shrink back in guilt. He was supposed to crumple in shame and panic. And for heaven's sake, he was supposed to look like Dean . Faded blue jeans, crooked grin, come-get-me eyes.
    This man looked like he'd been carved from a slab of Massachusetts granite. His lips were a straight slash of severity and his glacier-blue gaze was steady. Indeed, not a single part of him moved as he stood there, pointer upraised. Strong and cool, he looked like—a king.
    He looked like he could be the actual, real-life head of Singleton Industries.
    Kelly felt a shiver run down her spine. Her rage slipped. Was this Dean?
    But a commotion behind her—security?—propelled her back into action. "Okay," she said, and straightened. "Okay, so you didn't feel anything, the way I did. That's no crime. But—" She drew in a steadying breath against a sudden upwelling of pain. Two days before she'd hoped for so much, been so happy. "But why'd you have to go and make promises?" she whispered.
    That's when she caught it, finally, his reaction. He flinched. Five hours flying and maxing out her credit card—for a flinch.
    The next instant strong arms seized her from behind. Security. It was almost laughable. He was the dirty rotten crumb, but she was about to be thrown from the premises.
    "Let her go."
    The words emerged from Dean. Yes, he heard himself say them, but he felt like he was watching the whole drama from the end of a very long hall. Or as if he were in the type of nightmare where one needed to escape dire disaster, but could not move one's arms or legs.
    It had happened. The fallout he'd been dreading, the consequences of his 'lost weekend.'
    But staring at the woman who'd interrupted his annual meeting of vice-presidents, Dean could not believe the fallout was this bad. In skin-tight blue jeans and a jacket that strained at her breasts, all under a kittenish face framed by a great quantity of blond, upswirled hair, she looked like she'd stepped out of some adolescent boy's wet dream.
    Or out of one of his father's. Yes, the woman standing at the door of the conference room looked exactly like one of Dean's father's ridiculous, inappropriate women; a showgirl, an actress, or a lingerie model.
    As if that weren't bad enough, Dean had no idea who she was.
    Jeff and Frank, the two security guards, stopped to look at Dean, their gazes questioning his odd command.
    The woman looked at him, too, her full lips parted.
    She might have been his father's type, but she was not his. Desperately, Dean assured himself of this fact. He was a sober man, a responsible one. A throwback to good, old-fashioned New England stock. This woman's presence before him, her knowledge of his name, her—her outrageous assertion he'd made her promises simply could not be.
    But a deep abyss opened inside him. He'd also thought it impossible he could have been sitting in the leather chair of his study at home one minute, and wandering a seedy neighborhood he didn't recognize the next—a neighborhood clear across the country, no less.
    But it had happened.
    He had to believe now that anything was possible.
    "Let her go," Dean repeated quietly.
    The guards released her. As Dean