Mistress Of The Groom

by Susan Napier

  So she had shamelessly borrowed money from Peggy that she might never be able to repay and got Carl to drop her off at the hotel where the fund-raiser was being held. She had booked a room and called Dr Frey, wickedly invoking Ryan’s influence to get herself an urgent appointment during which he had reduced the taping on her broken hand and delighted her with the news that her burn no longer needed a permanent dressing. Then she had spent two hours in the beauty parlour, getting the full works, and an hour at the hairdresser. She had even bought a new pair of high heels, but the lucky black dress was her charm.

  She was once again dressed to kill—or be killed...

  ‘Did you cash in my cheque? Or perhaps you’ve acquired yourself another rich protector?’ Ryan’s cutting drawl drew the attention of all those in the vicinity who hadn’t yet recognised that here was a potentially explosive encounter.

  ‘Maybe I still have friends in high places,’ she countered lightly, not wanting to get Carl into any trouble.

  ‘As long as you’re not counting on me being one of them,’ he said, lifting his champagne glass towards his mouth.

  She didn’t flinch at his studied indifference. ‘No,’ she said huskily. ‘I’m counting on you being my husband.’

  A fine tremor shook his hand and a small amount of champagne splashed out of his glass onto his white silk lapel. He brushed at it without taking his eyes off Jane’s exotically made-up face.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ His tone was neutral, giving her no hint of what was going on inside his head.

  ‘I’m here to ask you to marry me,’ she said steadily.

  Ryan’s dark eyebrows lifted.

  ‘I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I don’t think I quite heard what you said,’ he drawled, looking pointedly at the semi-circle of fascinated faces which surrounded them.

  Oh, God! Jane’s chin tilted higher and her voice rose firm and clear above the surrounding hum. ‘I said, Will you marry me, Ryan?’

  Conversation stilled, more heads turned, and Ryan took a leisurely swallow of his champagne and considered his options.

  ‘Why—are you pregnant?’ he demanded, and a sizzle of scandalised excitement swept through their immediate audience.

  Mortified colour swept into Jane’s cheeks. In none of the possible scenarios she had rehearsed in her head had he asked that! ‘No, of course not,’ she gritted.

  His eyes swept slyly over her waistline and he leaned forward, his voice dipping to a murmur for her ears alone. ‘You might be, since I didn’t use anything last night...’

  Her temper fizzled with the knowledge that he was toying with her. She was showing him that she trusted him not to complete his revenge and he was playing games. ‘Well, I wouldn’t know yet, would I?’ she bit out fiercely.

  He straightened, playing to their audience again. ‘So, tell me then, Jane—why should I many you?’

  ‘Because I love you,’ she declared, tossing it out like a challenge. She would offer him her gift, and if he wanted to throw it back into her face then it would be his loss. But she believed he wouldn’t. She believed that he loved her; she had to!

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He cupped his hand around his ear, his blue eyes glittering with mockery. ‘What was that you said?’

  ‘I said, I love you!’ She threw out her hands in a gesture of helpless surrender and shouted it to the restaurant ceiling. ‘I love you! I love you!’ She looked at him furiously. ‘Are you happy now?’

  ‘No, but I’m getting there,’ he taunted, taking another sip of champagne, patently enjoying himself.

  Red misted her vision. She had had enough. She snatched the glass from his hand and threw it onto the floor, ignoring the thrilled gasps of horror that erupted around them

  ‘A simple “yes” or “no” will suffice, Ryan, and then we can both get on with our lives!’ she flared. ‘Now, are you going to marry me or not?’

  ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘No!’

  He shrugged, looking bored. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better say yes, then, since I happen to love you to distraction.’

  It took a moment to distinguish his words from his tone and expression. Her knees buckled. Ryan began to laugh.

  Love and fury fountained up inside her. ‘You—!’

  She took a furious swing at him and he sidestepped, scooping her off her feet and lifting her high in his arms, whirling her around for a passionate kiss. Then, still laughing, he carried her across the restaurant with an ease that suggested to the parting crowd that her voluptuous body was as light as thistledown. Cameras dazzled, and Jane linked her arms around Ryan’s neck, resigned to her fresh notoriety.

  ‘I have a room here at the hotel,’ she whispered in his ear as they approached the glass door which led into the hotel foyer. Her eyes flirted with his startled expression. ‘Plan B was to lure you up there and seduce you if you proved difficult,’ she admitted with a sultry smile.

  He grinned, his face lighting with incredible warmth, and for the first time Jane saw a resemblance to his mother. ‘And I was, wasn’t I? So Plan B it is!’

  He nodded at the man who held open the door for them. ‘Thanks, Carl, remind me to give you a bonus...’

  Jane received a sly silver-grey wink as they swept past and realised, ‘You knew I was going to turn up here tonight...!’

  ‘How do you think Carl got hold of a ticket?’ he said wryly. ‘They’re as rare as hen’s teeth at this late stage.’

  She had wondered why his adviser had been so cooperative and informative when his job was to be the soul of discretion! Her thick brows lowered. ‘So this was all just a set-up, a test...?’

  He shook his head as he carried her across the foyer, much to the entertainment of the staff, and into a waiting lift. He set her down and looped his arms around her waist as the doors closed and she pressed the button for her floor.

  ‘Let’s just say it was a window of opportunity I left hopefully ajar. I was angry when I left Piha, not thinking quite straight—but I knew it wasn’t finished between us, no matter what I said. I’d been trying not to rush my wooing—’ His mouth curved as he heard her choked disbelief. ‘Yes, I know it mightn’t have seemed that way. But I thought I was being very patient, considering how badly I wanted you.

  ‘With Mum running interference for you I was getting hellishly frustrated, and last night was so good between us I simply blurted it out like an idiot. I forgot that because of your father you might look on marriage to a dominating male as something to be afraid of, and that I was presenting you with a totally new idea that you would need time to get used to...’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that...’ She debated waiting until they had reached her room, but with the lift to themselves there was no reason to put it off. ‘It was because it wasn’t new that I reacted so horribly...because it was something I’d refused to let myself even dream about for so long...since Ava...

  ‘I know you loved her—’ Ryan tried to interrupt and she put her burn-scarred hand quickly over his mouth, revelling in her new freedom to touch. ‘Please, let me finish—you have to know this. I’m breaking a trust, but I want you to know that your trust is more important to me...’

  He took her hand from his mouth and kissed it, and she found the courage to continue. ‘Ava came to me the day before your wedding in a terrible state, telling me that she and Conrad had fallen in love and that she couldn’t marry you after all...but she was afraid of what you and her family might do if she tried to call it off at the last minute. She was practically hysterical. She begged me for help—’

  ‘So you said yes,’ he guessed gently, cupping her hot cheek, his thumb stroking her mouth. ‘Loyal Jane... What a price you paid for that friendship. When you give your trust you give it totally, completely and for ever, don’t you?’ He sounded deeply satisfied.

  ‘You don’t seem very surprised,’ she murmured, her terrible revelation having evoked none of the rage she had expected.

  ‘In hindsight, I’m not... There
was no excitement between Ava and I...not the kind of instant spark there was between us.’ He narrowed his eyes as they swept over her body, and she instantly felt singing of her blood in her veins. ‘I think I was in love with the idea of Ava rather than the actual woman herself... My feelings for her were one-dimensional, whereas with you...’

  His voice dropped abruptly. ‘With you I get the whole gamut of emotions. I was more offended by the sight of you laughing with Carl than I ever was by the thought of Ava sleeping with someone else.’ He shook his head at her. ‘The more I got to know you, the more I began to question my interpretation of events... I wondered whether my being jilted had anything to do with the fact that Ava married so quickly afterwards. Was she pregnant?’

  ‘No, but she told me she was to persuade me to help her.’

  ‘What?’ This time his reaction was satisfactorily outraged. The lift doors opened and Jane found herself hustled along to her room, where Ryan kicked the door closed and demanded, ‘She did what?’

  ‘She was desperate.’ Jane excused her friend with a generosity all the more complete for her own recent resort to desperate measures. ‘She told me afterwards that she was terrified I might refuse to help, so she lied about being pregnant to make me more sympathetic...and of course it did...’

  ‘So she used emotional blackmail to get you to take the blame for her actions—’

  ‘No, don’t you see? That’s what’s so awful!’ If she had been able to Jane would have wrung her hands; as it was she just had to wave them in anguish. ‘That wasn’t her idea at all—that was me! I was the one who came up with the idea of making a horrible scene at the wedding that would make it easy for Ava to cry off. Because I was secretly glad when she came to me begging to call off the wedding. I wanted to stop it—not just for her, but for me, for selfish reasons, because I didn’t want her to marry you...I wanted you to marry me.’

  She spun away, unable to look at him in case she was forced to witness the dawning disgust in his eyes. ‘So you see, you were right all along when you accused me of being sick with envy. But it wasn’t because I was jealous of Ava having someone to love her; it was because that someone was you.’

  Her blue eyes were wild with shame and grief at the memory as she paced up and down. ‘I was in love with you and Ava wasn’t—and I hated it that you couldn’t see that, that you still seemed to want her, and I hated it that you made me feel like an unfaithful friend and that I couldn’t stop myself being attracted to you. I felt so guilty that it somehow seemed that I ought to take the blame for her not marrying you, because I had somehow wished it to happen, and that having you despise me would be fitting punishment which would also destroy the terrible temptation to try to make you love me. Oh, it all sounds totally ludicrous now, but back then it made an ugly kind of sense!’

  ‘Not ludicrous at all...just very human,’ said Ryan, catching her as she restlessly roamed by, tugging her over to sit with him on the bed. ‘We rouse such strong feelings in each other that it’s natural to be afraid of being overwhelmed by them, and, of all the passions, fear weakens judgement most.

  ‘You weren’t alone in feeling confused back then, sweetheart. Even standing there at the altar, in total shock, I felt a shiver of relief that someone was stopping me from taking the drastic step of marrying a woman whom I respected more than I desired. I tried to smother the feeling in rage and denial, but that moment of self-betrayal haunted me, especially since it was somehow tied up with the fact that you were the one who had perpetrated the terrible lies about me.

  ‘But the strange thing was that I felt more betrayed by your lies than by Ava’s defection. When you said that you and I were lovers, it was as though you had translated my deepest; most private thought into a deed. And even when I met you again, after I came back from Australia, that was part of the pleasure of punishing you—making you pay for the sin of my desiring, until I discovered there was even more pleasure in loving you...’

  ‘We’re quite a pair,’ said Jane huskily, wrapping her arms around him. ‘A matched pair. You know, I even welcomed your revenge in a horribly twisted way because it meant that at least I knew I wasn’t forgotten, I was alive in your thoughts...’

  ‘Oh, you were in my thoughts, all right,’ he said, kissing her rumpled brow. ‘All the time... And the thought being father to the deed, I couldn’t leave you alone—can’t leave you alone...’ he corrected himself, his hands wandering over the luscious curves of the black dress. ‘So you’d better be prepared for a lifetime of this kind of attention...’

  Jane laughed as he tipped her back on the bed and began to kiss her breathless. She couldn’t imagine a more glorious fate!

  ISBN : 978-1-4592-6941-5

  MISTRESS OF THE GROOM

  First North American Publication 1997.

  Copyright © 1997 by Susan Napier.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspire by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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