Please Say I Do

by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  “And I suppose you think I was flinging serious invitations all over the place.”

  “Don’t even try to deny that when you opened the bathroom door and stepped out with your bare shoulder and a flower in your hair, you weren’t thinking ahead to the end of the evening.”

  “A kiss,” she said. “I was thinking about a kiss. Specifically, whether I should kiss you good-night at the door or wait until we were in the room.”

  “Right, and you weren’t thinking about how soon after that kiss you could rip off my clothes and get me flat on my back on the bed.”

  The elevator arrived back at the ground floor and she didn’t even wait until the doors opened before she jabbed the button for the fourteenth floor. “Is that the best you can do in the fantasy department, Rik? Imagining that I want to rip off your clothes and have my wicked way with you? Frankly, I expected better from a man who’s been, quote, ‘out of the dating scene for the past several years,’ unquote.”

  “I save my better fantasies for the second date.” He braced his arms on the railing and crossed his feet at the ankles. “To be perfectly honest, I find it amazing that you, whose fantasy revolves around where a goodnight kiss should take place, would be so picky about what is a fairly standard fantasy among adults of both sexes.”

  “You, of course, would know all about standard, runof-the-mill fantasies. I prefer to be on the cutting edge.”

  “The cutting edge.” A crooked smile tucked in at the corners of his mouth and made him look enormously desirable. “You’re on the cutting edge of fantasy,” he repeated with an amusement that squared her shoulders, brought up her chin and convinced her she was wrong about the enormously desirable quality of that smile. If she’d been wearing her glasses, he wouldn’t have fooled her for a second.

  “I guess you’re going to have to educate me, Hallie. What kind of sexual fantasy would you consider to be ‘cutting edge?”

  “Something more complicated than yours and infinitely more romantic. But you’ll just have to fill in your own specifics. My fantasies are very personal and very private.”

  He nodded, as if he respected that Not that she thought he actually did. The elevator stopped and they stepped to opposite sides of the cubicle as Kimo stepped on. “Hi,” he said brightly. “Where are you two headed?”

  “Fantasy land,” Rik said.

  “In-your-dreams land,” Hallie shot back.

  Kimo glanced uncertainly from one to the other, then jabbed the elevator button for the very next floor and faced front. His foot tapped the floor until the elevator stopped, and then he was over the sill and into the hallway. If he’d moved any quicker, he’d have had to pry open the doors with his bare hands. “Have a good one,” he called over his shoulder as the doors closed again.

  Hallie thought she’d enjoy a “good one” if she could ever figure out just what it was. She was fairly certain this wasn’t it. Over the door, the floor numbers lit up and dimmed in sequence as the elevator passed by. At number eleven, she dived into the silence with a crisp, “Do you want to go to the room? Because if you do, I’ll be happy to go back downstairs.”

  “I’m beginning to like elevator travel,” he said.

  “Perfect. I’ll go to the room.”

  His gaze locked with hers and her knees began to tremble. Must be anger, she thought She was so angry her knees were shaking. But they held her up until the elevator reached the fourteenth floor again, and this time, Hallie didn’t wait to see if Rik was going to make a move. He could ride the elevator all the way to Christmas, but she wasn’t going to hang around and make a fool of herself any longer. She stepped from the elevator into the hallway and walked briskly toward room 1413, head high, shoulders back, the hem of the sarong clipping her ankles, the hem of Rik’s cardigan drooping low on her hips.

  He probably thought she was an idiot. Hot. Cold. She might as well have the words tattooed on her arms so she could check them for reference and keep track of what she was running at the moment. Stopping in front of the room, she glanced at the numbers on the door and realized, with a sinking spirit, that she didn’t have a key. She sagged against the door frame and wondered how she had gone from a successful afternoon of getting exactly what she wanted from everyone associated with the wedding to this disappointing state of affairs with Rik. How could she be so completely confident in business and so extraordinarily inept when it came to dealing with matters of the heart?

  Not that her heart was actually involved. She’d just thought…wished…hoped…It wouldn’t have worked out anyway. She’d tried this before and failed… miserably. Why had she entertained any thoughts that it might be different with Rik? Might be perfect. Might be better than perfect.

  “I got tired of the same old view,” Rik said as he came up beside her and inserted his key card into the lock.

  He opened the door and waited for her to precede him, but she decided she wasn’t moving. Not until she figured out how she could easily manage the myriad details of an elaborate wedding but couldn’t coordinate the seduction of one reasonably willing man. “Thank you for bringing the key,” she said. “Saves me a trip downstairs.”

  He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and held out the card. “You should keep this from now on. Put it some where…safe.

  “I can think of only one place where it would be really safe, but I couldn’t put it there.” His gaze dropped in an oddly reluctant way to the curve of her breasts, when he lifted his eyes to meet hers, she regarded him skeptically. “It would be sort of pointless to lock the key card for the room in the hotel safe, don’t you think?”

  His sheepish glance darted past her into the room, dropped to the floor, then came to rest on the door frame just above her head. He cleared his throat “Maybe I meant to say keep it handy, instead.”

  “Good idea.’’ She dropped it into the pocket of his sweater and patted it flat against her side. “You can probably get an extra card at the desk. I’m sure Earlette will give you one. I think she likes you.”

  “She should. I’m a very good tipper.”

  “Then your worries are over. You can come and go as you please.”

  “From now on, I’ll content myself with the go section of. come and go. You need your privacy and I need…”

  She waited, then prompted, “You need…?”

  “My gear, clothes, shaving stuff.” He shrugged. “You know.”

  Hallie sighed. He didn’t need her. “Don’t you need a place to sleep?”

  “The couches in the lobby look comfortable enough. One of them will do.”

  “But that isn’t fair, Rik. You had to sleep in a chair last night You should have a real bed tonight”

  “What makes you think I slept in a chair last night?”

  “Because I slept in the bed.”

  “It’s a double. A queen-size, in fact. You cuddled right up against me several times, but I had plenty of room.”

  She tried to get a good look at his eyes, tried to see if he was teasing her. But he was a little too close and her vision a little too untrustworthy. “I don’t believe you.”

  He frowned and shook his head. “I suppose we could get back in bed and I could demonstrate.”

  “I suppose you could stop trying to make me think something happened last night when I know it didn’t”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Absolutely certain.” She might not be clear on everything that had happened last night, but she knew she would have remembered snuggling naked against Rik, tequila or no tequila. “You’re wasting your time teasing me about it”.

  “Then I guess there’s no reason to tell you what really happened.”

  “None whatsoever. Unless you want to hear me call you a liar.”

  “That would not be polite, Hallie.”

  Something in his voice sent a swirl of rich, warm anticipation through her. Maybe all wasn’t lost, after all. “Rik?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go back and start this ev
ening over again?”

  He paused to consider. “How far back would we have to go?”

  She took a deep breath. “How about the moment you kissed me good-night in the hallway and I said, “Thank you, I had a wonderful evening’?”

  “That would be one of those cutting-edge fantasy moments, I take it.” She nodded and he pretended to consider the implications. “Well, even if this is your fantasy, I’m afraid I have to disagree on exactly what happened. I’m certain you didn’t kiss me good-night until we were inside the room and the door was shut.”

  This was going to be all right, she thought as a thrill of excitement looped the loop around her heart. “The door was definitely open.”

  “No, you closed it. I remember because that’s the moment I knew…” His voice trailed off and Hallie leaned toward him, wanting to grab the rest of that statement before it got away.

  “You knew…?” she prompted.

  “The moment I knew I was going to make love to you.”

  Her knees started knocking in earnest and she was half-afraid windows all over the hotel were rattling in response. “That wouldn’t be one of those standard, runof-the-mill fantasy moments, would it?”

  He shook his head. “Strictly cutting edge.”

  His smile was enough to set her shivering all over again. He wanted to have sex with her. They were going to have sex together. She was going to have a heart attack. Before anything even happened.

  “I think I need to lie down,” she whispered hoarsely.

  He reached for both of her hands at once. “Come with me. I know just the place.”

  RIK KICKED THE DOOR closed and pulled Hallie into his arms in one synchronized movement. Not bad, he thought, for a man who was seriously out of practice in the art of being seduced by a determined woman. And as amazing as it was to him, Hallie seemed quite determined to seduce him. This wasn’t the way he’d imagined the evening would end and it definitely wasn’t the way he’d imagined the evening would begin. But here he was holding her, and here she was in his arms. And here they were together in their own hotel room. Complete with queen-size bed.

  He didn’t think anything Hallie might do after tonight could surprise him. Her proposition, however hesitantly uttered, had knocked the breath right out of him. And right now, she was doing it again…pressing her body against his, holding herself in a sensual juxtaposition, edging closer. And closer. When she cupped the back of his head in her hands and pulled his face down to hers, he wondered just how many days he’d have to spend with her before he stopped being surprised and fascinated and completely confused. A lot of days, he realized as she rubbed her thigh against his arousal. Fantasy, he thought, thy name is Hallie.

  Just as he was getting into the swing of this particular fantasy, though, she brought the palms of her hands up and began bulldozing the material of his shirt back and forth across his chest. “Take your shirt off,” she commanded.

  “You first,” he countered, a trifle concerned at her sudden hurry.

  “I’m not wearing a shirt.”

  “Start with the sweater.”

  Her lips made a rapid sweep over his and then she was kissing him again while pushing and pulling and jerking at the sweater sleeves, and he wondered why she was in such a hurry. Not that he was adverse to getting naked and into bed with some degree of speed, but he did rather like to spend a little time working up to a frenzy. There was something to be said for slow, torturous kisses that sucked the energy out of a room and filled it with sheer anticipation.

  The tip of her tongue limned his lips and he decided there was something to be said for frantic with passion, too. Hallie groaned as she struggled with the sweater, which was now off her shoulders but pulled inside out, the sleeves looped over and tangled around her hands. The more she wrestled with the sweater, the more anxious and agitated she seemed to get, and the more curious he became.

  Even given the circumstances and the truly barnraising kisses they were exchanging, he didn’t think she’d had the opportunity to form a desperate passion and deep craving for his body. It was a good body, he thought. But in all honesty, he knew it wasn’t this inspiring. Something was going on here that he figured he’d better investigate before she got him trapped into the sweater with her. “Hallie.” He pressed a soft, let’sthink-this-over kiss to her lips, grabbed the double helix knot of his sweater and began to untangle it. “Hallie?”

  She stopped trying to kiss his cheek, lips, chin, neck and shoulder all at once and looked up, her eyes shining with excitement and nervousness and panic.

  Panic? He double-checked the expression in her eyes’ and frowned. “Do you have a late date?” he asked. “Because I have all night, and, while it’s very pleasant to be the seducee, I have a few moves of my own I think you might enjoy.”

  Her shoulders drooped and she sighed. “I knew this wasn’t going to work.”

  “Now, wait a minute.” He began to feel an edge of panic himself. “I’m not complaining. I just thought maybe you had a hidden agenda I ought to know about.”

  She shook her head miserably. “I just wanted to get it over with.”

  All right. So it wasn’t his body she craved with a ravenous hunger. He could deal with that. But getting it over with as speedily as possible wasn’t exactly his idea of mutually consensual, much less emotionally satisfying, sex. He moved his hands to her shoulders and pushed her to the full extension of his arms. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and he wanted to be sure she was looking at him with as clear a vision as possible. “You’ve taken some pretty tight swings at my ego tonight, Hallie, but that one connected. I don’t know what is going on inside that pretty head of yours, or who the hell you’ve been sleeping with before now, but for the record, I don’t have sex just to ‘get it over with.’ I’m not that shallow. And I can’t believe you are, either.”

  She blinked, several times in succession. She swallowed, once. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “I’m…not good at this, Rik. I should have just told you right up front that this was an experiment.”

  Great. Now he was an experiment. “Hallie, you’re killing me here. Please stop trying to put a good face on this. I’m a reasonably strong person. I can take rejection.”

  “No, you can’t. I mean, this isn’t about you at all.” She stopped, and he could see her struggle to compose her thoughts. “I’ve been very unfair to you tonight, I know. So why don’t we forget what just happened and watch movies or something.” A tiny spark of hope flickered in the misery of her eyes. “We could order a pizza. Or popcorn.”

  Rik pursed his lips before slowly releasing his grip on her shoulder and putting his fingers back to work on the knot of sweater sleeves. “No popcorn,” he said. “No pizza. And no TV. A half hour ago, I could have had a nice evening just having dinner with you down stairs in the dining room. Fifteen minutes ago, I might have been able to forget that you said you wanted to have sex with me.” He paused, glanced at her pensive, troubled expression, then went on. “Okay, so I wouldn’t have forgotten that you said it, but I could have had a nice time just thinking about it. But now we’re stuck. We can’t go back to a moment in the past and start over and we can’t jump ahead to some imagined moment in the future and pretend this one never happened.”

  “I’ve ruined it. I knew I would, and I did.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She shook her head in abject misery. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing” he repeated just as miserably. If she’d slapped him, he could have walked out, good and mad, and slammed the door for his trouble. If she’d simply said she’d changed her mind, he could have told her it was all right and maybe taken her to dinner to show he was a sensitive, mature kind of guy. If she’d only stopped talking five minutes ago—right after that ‘let’s-get-it-over-with” remark—he could have written off the evening he’d planned with her and spent a few mediocre hours commiserating with Jack, instead. But no, she had to sound so forlorn over ruining
his evening that now he had no choice but to do something to convince her she’d done nothing of the kind. Hallie Bernhardt, he thought. Another way of saying high maintenance.

  “Look, Hallie, you changed your mind. That’s allowed. It’s all right. Believe me, you haven’t wrecked my life.”

  She frowned at him. “I didn’t change my mind,” she said. “You changed yours.”

  Amazing. “I don’t think so.”

  Her frown turned pensive. “You didn’t?”

  “No. I objected to making love at the fast-forward setting, and I objected to being cast as the rat in your experiment, but I…On second thought, I did change my mind. Just now.” He turned toward the door, turned back, warming to his newfound indignities. “This sounds like one of those made-for-television movies where the woman’s biological clock is ticking and she tricks a man into sleeping with her so she can have a baby with minimal male involvement”

  She stepped right up to him and glared, which would have had more of an effect if he hadn’t known he was nothing but a blur from this angle. “I’ll have you know my clock isn’t even close to ticking. And what’s more, I keep a condom in my billfold for just this kind of situation. I was not only not trying to trick you, I was actually trying to protect you from disappointment.”

  Rik rubbed a pensive thumb across his jaw. “All right, Hallie. I surrender. Tell me what you want and I’ll do my utmost to oblige.” Then he was getting the hell out of this room. No matter what she said.

  “I wanted a good-night kiss. Just a pleasant goodnight kiss.”

  He nodded. “Do we need to go back out to the hallway for that?”

  “No. That won’t be necessary. We can do it here in the room.”

  “Okay. Just checking. Didn’t want to cause a ruckus by kissing you in the wrong location.”

  She stepped back and looked at him…and every instinct urged him to start backing toward the door. “So…?” she questioned.

  He managed to move one foot behind the other. “So,” he repeated.