The Secret Wedding Dress

by Ally Blake

  Gabe slowly removed his hands and tucked them into the pockets of his old jeans and took a small step back. He lifted his eyes deliberately to hers. Her eyes were all liquid-blue, her lush mouth down-turned. She looked so forlorn, so … unbridely, it was almost laughable. Almost.

  He motioned with his chin to the small kitchen table. ‘Sit.’ She sat. Gabe sat too, though far enough away so as not to touch. ‘So do you want to tell me what this is all about so I can stop looking over my shoulder for the priest?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘More than you know.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, then after a big deep shaky breath went on. ‘So I’d been shopping with Mae to find her wedding dress the morning before we met, and I saw this dress and felt like I’d never breathe again if I didn’t take it home. Not out of some deep and abiding desire to get married. I’ve never been one of those girls who always wanted to get married. On the contrary. So we can clear that up.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, feeling far from clear.

  Then Paige looked down, a swing of fair hair falling over her face, all her usual va va voom seeping out of her as she stared at some unknown spot on the table. ‘Turns out Mae getting married has really thrown me. More than I’d realised until about half an hour ago. I’ve been completely out of sync since she got engaged. We’ve been in one another’s pockets for such a long time. And now she’s … not mine any more.’ She held out her hands as if she’d lost something then settled back into her slump. ‘I’ve been going through the motions ever since. With Mae. At work. Not dating.’ Her eyes slid to his, her long dark lashes all crazy and clumped together. ‘You’re the first guy I’ve seen since it happened.’

  The emphasis on the word ‘seen’ brought a flare of heat to his groin. When he shifted on the chair Paige noticed, and her mouth flickered into the first smile of the day.

  ‘Mae had a theory about why I bought the dress,’ she went on, ‘and it was easier to believe that than to believe the truth. That I was jealous of her. Not the marriage bit, the happiness bit. So I kind of wished for you. And then a minute later you stuck your fingers through the lift door.’

  ‘I’m sorry … You wished for me?’

  Sass put some sinew into her slump as she flicked her fringe off her face, and lifted one saucy shoulder. The flare of heat spread till it roared through his blood with the speed and intent of a bush fire.

  ‘Well, not you in particular,’ she said. ‘A man who … Well, a man. Mae’s theory for why I bought the dress was that I needed to get some.’

  Gabe’s mouth turned dry at the thought … for about half a second. Then saliva pooled beneath his tongue and he had to physically press himself back into the chair so as not to go right ahead and give her what Mae thought she needed.

  Paige slowly eased herself upright, leaned back in her chair, and looked him dead in the eye, and he realised she hadn’t been kidding. If any other man had walked into the lift at that precise moment she would have been sitting at her kitchen table sending some other guy hard with desire with those burning baby blues of hers.

  No way. It wouldn’t have been the same. The way they fitted was chemical. One in a million. Thus worth pursuing to the edges of his limits. Clearly, or he wouldn’t still be sitting there while she wore a wedding dress.

  He leaned forward, keeping her gaze connected to his. ‘And now that you have … got some, how are you doing?’

  Paige tilted an eyebrow, before wafting a hand past her lace-covered curves. ‘How do you think I’m doing?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Gabe rubbed his fingers into his eyes to clear the image that was making it hard for him to see straight. ‘And do you try it on every morning—? ‘

  ‘Good God, no! This was the first time ever. Don’t think I ever had any intention of you finding me like this. This is my worst nightmare. And I can’t fathom why you’re still sitting here and not halfway to anywhere else but here!’

  She had him there. He’d help her get the dress off then vamoose. Go home. Go to work. Put some space between them so that he could think.

  He shoved back the chair so hard it squeaked on the pale floorboards. He motioned to her with a flick of his fingers. ‘Come on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said that thing was stuck.’

  She nodded. ‘The zip. It’s caught on something. I tried tugging, and shimmying it over my head, but it fits like a glove.’

  It did that. ‘Then let’s get you free of it, shall we?’

  Paige stood, and turned her back to him.

  Swallowing down the bile rising in his throat at the connotations of ridding a beautiful woman of a wedding dress, Gabe forced his eyes to move to the dress to find a paper clip had been bent through the eye of the zip.

  His tension melted a little. At least now he could be certain she’d had a go at taking the thing off. As for the rest? Everyone had weaknesses, and if hers was for a combination of lace and pearly-looking things, then it beat smoking. Just.

  ‘Do you need me to move at all?’ she asked, lifting her hair away from her neck, the scent of her shampoo wafting past his nose for the first time in days. The interplay of muscle across her back made his fingers feel fat and useless as blood left his extremities to pour into his groin.

  He reached for the zip, the backs of his fingers brushing across her warm skin. Her muscles twitched at even his slightest touch. A few strands of hair fell to slide against the back of his hand and, God help him, delicate shocks prickled down his arms landing with a rock-hard thud in his pants.

  ‘You want this thing off or not?’ he asked, his voice gruff.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then stop wriggling.’

  She stilled. And there were a few long moments in which the only sound was the shuffle of satin on her skin as the hopeless zipper refused to budge.

  ‘I had an outfit,’ she said. ‘For tonight.’

  ‘Another one?’

  Her laughter was husky, telling him he wasn’t the only one affected by the fact that he was, to all intents and purposes, trying to get her naked. The sound vibrated through him, morphing into a whump whump whump that pulsed through his veins.

  ‘Quite something, this outfit of mine. Red, sleek, no zip in sight.’

  He swallowed down the lust rising from the bottoms of his feet all the way to the back of his throat. The phenomenal pull of desire he felt for her, despite the wedding attire, gave him one last pause.

  Did he want her too much? To the detriment of his own sense? His own self-interest? He listened to his gut, and listened hard. But even his deeply scarred conscience couldn’t go there. She was habit-forming, but the hold she had over him was unintentional. And all the more dangerous because of it? Not so long as they both knew the score. He’d just have to make sure she never forgot it. Him either.

  ‘Careful,’ she cried out suddenly when the sound of over-stretched fabric rent the silence. Then like the collapse of a dam, the zip gave way. The dress tipped over her shoulders and she scooped it to her chest, but not before he’d caught a glimpse of a strapless black lace bra and a hint of matching G-string.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ she said, turning and staring down at the dress so that her breasts pressed together. ‘I’d been working on that damn thing for half an hour! It clearly hates me. Well, I hate it right on back. It’s so going straight to Good Will after this.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, his voice rough as sand, ‘I have the touch.’

  She glanced up at him, her chest pinking as she realised the direction of his gaze. And he was more than half hard. When their eyes met, her bottom lip was tucked between her teeth, and her naked toes curled over one another under the pool of material at her feet.

  And Gabe knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

  A half-second after he moved for her, she let the dress go and was in his arms. Clinging to him as he devoured her with his mouth. Tasting her neck, his tongue tracing the line of her jaw, teeth nipping at her ear. When he slid his hands
to cup her backside it was to find the dress was thankfully gone, leaving him with her hot bare skin and a strip of lace.

  When he lay her back on the table, atop his jacket and scarf, she was pink all over. A pulse beating fast in her neck. Her lips moist from his kiss. Her eyes so hot he could barely make out a thin circle of blue. She grabbed him by the belt-line, tugging him between her legs, wrapping her thighs about him as she whipped his button fly open with one rough yank.

  With a growl he buried his face in her breasts. Drinking in the scent of her till his lungs were full. When he palmed her breast she arched off the table.

  Lust filled him so thick and rich his vision was a pinprick. His focus concentrated on a bead of perspiration running down her torso. The jump of her muscles as his hands encircled her waist. Her gasp as he pressed a kiss to her navel. The grip of her hands in his hair as he sank his teeth into her hipbone. The way she trembled as he ran a thumb along the strip of soft black lace.

  Holding onto the thinnest thread of control, he pressed her thighs apart and kissed her. She flung an arm over her eyes and let her thighs fall apart all the way. He tugged the slip of lace aside and took her in his mouth, tasting, bringing her to the edge before pressing soft kisses to her inner thigh. When she begged him to never stop, he never did, and when she came it was with such abandon he almost came right along with her.

  Fumbling for his wallet, he took for ever before he found a condom. Sheathed, he hovered over her, waiting until her eyes found his, glints of fire, before he sank into her. Pressing into her velvet heat, deeper and deeper. The walls of her body gripping him like nothing else he’d ever known. One hand around the top of the round table, the other on his hip, she sucked in short sharp breaths. When pleasure gripped him from the inside out his eyes squeezed shut and he heard himself yell her name as he came.

  As the world slowly came back into focus Gabe’s head cleared. And it was as if the hard and fast sex had knocked something loose.

  He looked into her eyes, to find them dark, liquid, sated, making him hard for her all over again. Knowing it, she grinned, and stretched her arms over her head, letting them dangle over the edge of the table.

  Willing himself to keep it together another moment, he asked about the one part of the morning that hadn’t made some sort of crazy sense. ‘All this time you thought I thought you owned a wedding dress, and you therefore believed that I believed you were possibly about to be married.’

  She looked up at him from under her lashes. ‘Possibly.’

  He braced an arm against the kitchen table. ‘And that was okay with you?’

  ‘Not normally. But remember I was a girl with not a lot of experience in happily ever afters who’d just bought a wedding dress. I needed to do something equally desperate to counteract the first act.’

  Gabe blinked at her. A glint had made it through the sexual haze in her blue bedroom eyes. She was making jokes? ‘Hell, Paige. Consider what you’ve put me through so far this morning and give me the slightest break, okay?’

  She lifted a knee to brace herself, her inner thigh accidentally sliding along the outside of his leg. Or maybe not so accidentally. He was fast learning the woman had hidden facets.

  ‘Gabe, I’ve dated guys who aren’t jerks and they’ve still jerked me around. So I figured dipping my toes back into the dating pool with a jerk there’d be no nasty surprises.’

  ‘Did you call me a jerk?’ Gabe pushed himself to standing, found his jeans and yanked them up, buttoned them, and ran a hand up the back of his neck. His head was starting to thud.

  ‘No. No!’ she said, bracing herself on her elbows, the long, lean, rumpled, semi-naked length of her draped over the table. ‘Honestly, there’s nothing about you that screams jerk. Or whispers it even. But, come on. You were all big and dark and stubbled and dishevelled from your flight. Could you blame me for not jumping straight to “Mr Nice Guy”?’

  His default position, to get annoyed and stay that way, flickered to life. But the thing was she was right. She’d seen him at his irritable worst and thought him unapproachable. He had seen a leggy blonde and thought SEX! They’d both been spot on.

  But, just in case, he looked back at her, right into her eyes, looking for something else. The opposite of what he’d always been most afraid of. A sign of hope. Of expectation. A sign that she was deeper into this thing than he was.

  ‘Yikes! Is that the time?’ she said before he had the chance and Paige wriggled off the table and made a mad dash for what must have been her bedroom. The shower turned on. Two minutes later she was out. Dressed in tight black pants, black T-shirt, black man-eater boots, a swirly grey jacket that made her eyes look like the clearest summer sky.

  With a hairpin between her teeth as she tamed her long hair up into a quick neat bun, she said, ‘I have to run. So so late. Big big meeting. Last chance to convince Callie to let me shoot the summer catalogue in Brazil.’

  He grabbed her hand as she fled past. She spun to look at him, her brows raised in question. How to put this delicately? ‘I was never one of those boys who played “getting married” dress-ups when I was a kid either. Just so you know.’

  She cocked her head, a grin sliding onto her mouth. ‘Good to know. And considering your namesake, and your extensive knowledge of Doris Day movies, I’d have thought a penchant for playing bride and groom might have been one step too far.’

  Damn, he thought. Some girl he’d found himself. Or had she conjured him after all? Either way … Damn.

  ‘See you tonight?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  She planted a kiss on his lips. Domestic, he thought, not sure how it made him feel, before she pressed up on her heels, slid a hand into the back of his hair and the kiss deepened until blood was roaring through his head once again.

  Who knew how long it was before she unpeeled herself from his front, blew a stray strand of hair from her forehead, and grinned?

  ‘Welcome home. Lock up on your way out.’ And she was gone.

  When the sound of the slamming front door stopped echoing through the apartment, Gabe looked around, realising belatedly it was the first time he’d been inside. Pale furnishings. Lots of books, mostly coffee table and recipe. No prints on the walls, only photos; blown up, framed well. Photos of her travels, laughing raucously with Mae, with a cool-looking blonde who must have been her mother.

  The rest wasn’t overly garnished as he had imagined it might be, considering her job and her admitted penchant for scatter cushions. It was soft, elegant, warm. A haven not a showroom. It was her. Which gave him the impression that inviting someone into her home was akin to inviting someone into her life.

  A strange feeling came over him then. Tightness. Darkness. Anticlimax.

  She’d never invited him in. Not once. He’d had to practically bang her door down like some testosterone-laden caveman to get inside.

  He’d thought himself in charge of the tempo of this thing. But from day one she’d come to him, and left him, on her terms. He’d let her because it was easy. He’d let her because it was hot.

  He grabbed his stuff before letting himself out, locking the door behind him. As the lift took its sweet time in collecting him he stared unseeingly at his scowling face in the silver doors of the lift.

  He told himself that after the rest of the morning’s debacles it shouldn’t have even registered on his list of things to give a flying hoot about. That since they were having a casual fling it shouldn’t damn well matter at all where they were doing the flinging and where they weren’t. But if the ball of lead that had taken up residence in his gut was anything to go by, apparently it damn well did.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GABE sat at his big gleaming desk in his vast and spartan office at BonaVenture later that day, ignoring yet more paperwork. His desk was annoying him too much to concentrate. The colour of the walls was making him twitch. Not that he wanted to shop online for interior decorations ever again. When he’d done so for the party he’
d actually felt his balls shrink a size.

  Instead he sat there and fumed and wondered, if Paige’s apartment was such a clear reflection of her, then what did this office and his apartment say about him that his oldest friend thought he’d find them comfortable?

  He sank his face into his hands and rubbed his temples with his thumbs. Since when had he ever wanted to be comfortable? For as long as he could remember, he’d sought brilliance in his life. He’d wanted to make an impression. Every way, every day. Nothing like having your parents die young to show a kid that every moment counted.

  And somehow that had twisted into a footloose existence where the only thing that had his lasting imprint on it was a bed.

  It was a hard truth to admit. Harder still to know what, if anything, he planned to do about it. Because no matter how far his life was from his original plans, it worked. Look at the success that had come of it. Did he even have the right to want to change things now?

  When Nate came into his office followed by his assistant and a tray of coffee and doughnuts, like any cornered animal, Gabe lashed out. ‘Tell me we’re nearly done,’ he growled.

  ‘But that would be a lie,’ Nate said. The assistant smartly left.

  ‘I’ve read everything you’ve put in front of me. Listened to a dozen different experts. I’m not sure what else can be brought to the table. Hell, I’ll take a meeting with a bearded lady and her psychic monkey if that’ll convince you I’m up to speed.’

  The sober leather chair on the other side of Gabe’s desk squeaked as Nate lowered himself into it. ‘I hoped your time away would eventually wear down the chip on your shoulder. Seems it’s burnished it to a shine.’

  Gabe glanced across at Nate, a fighting muscle jumping under his left eye, to find Nate looking tired. More than tired, he looked older. As if the years, the business, had taken their toll on him too. Gabe wrestled his inner bear back into his cave, because he knew he was partly to blame.