THE EIGHT SECOND WEDDING

by Anne McAllister

  He yawned. "I think I would sleep if you drove us right over Hoover Dam." He raised his arms over his head and leaned from side to side. His shirt pulled up and Madeleine could see a narrow expanse of midriff. She jerked her gaze back to his face.

  "Are we close?" she asked with a smile.

  Chan smiled a sleepy smile in return. "Not close enough." He fished the keys out of his front jeans pocket, juggled them in his palm, then tossed them to her. "You want to drive? Be my guest."

  Madeleine looked from Chan to the keys and back again. "You're sure?"

  "Aren't you?" One brow lifted in challenge.

  Her fingers closed over the keys. She smiled. "Of course."

  The keys were warm from being close to his body, and Madeleine was quite ridiculously aware of just exactly where they had been. She didn't ever remember being aware of anything so silly in all her life.

  She clambered down out of the bunk, then realized that she was wearing a sheer cotton gown.

  "Er," she said, suddenly extremely aware of his dark eyes on her, "I'd better get dressed."

  She expected him to make some lewd remark. He swallowed. "Yeah," he said hoarsely. "You'd better get dressed."

  When she came back out of the bathroom, suitably covered in jeans and a T-shirt, only moments later, Chan was sprawled face-up on the lower bunk fast asleep.

  His lips were parted slightly, whistling a little with each breath he took. His lashes, longer than hers by far, lay in perfect half-moons against his lean cheeks. The only other man she'd ever seen asleep was Scott. She remembered thinking how angelic he looked with his blond curls and slightly full lips. There was nothing angelic about Chan Richardson even in sleep.

  But she liked the way he looked.

  It would never do, however, to have him wake up and find her looking at him. He'd wonder what on earth she was doing.

  She wondered herself.

  This truck was different from Dan's. Bigger. Boxier. But an automatic. And it didn't take Madeleine long to figure it out. She took a few seconds to find the lights, then put it in reverse and, sending a prayer winging to whichever saint protected novice drivers, backed out of the stall. She sent another prayer, of thanksgiving this time, for Chan's willingness to trust her, to just hand over the keys and go to sleep. She hadn't expected that much faith. It warmed her.

  The highway, wide and almost empty, spun out like a silver thread across the California desert into northern Arizona. Madeleine drove steadily through the rest of the night noting the changes as desert gave way to stark hills and eventually trees and mountains.

  They passed through few towns. Those they did were fast asleep. And as the morning dawned, everywhere she looked there was space and stillness.

  She'd forgotten such stillness even existed. So consumed was she normally by the city and its demands and its millions of people that she hadn't remembered until now the quiet she had grown up in.

  She reveled in it.

  She rolled down the window and let the morning breeze blow through her hair. Later it would be much too hot for open windows, and they would have to use the air-conditioning, but now, for just a while, she could savor the wind against her cheeks and in her hair.

  She thought about stopping in Williams, but rejected it. Somehow the idea of stretching her legs in a convenience store parking lot or gas station didn't appeal. She didn't want to cope with civilization, didn't want to look at name-brand junk food, didn't want to speak or break the mood.

  So she waited until she was on the open road to pull over to ease the kinks in her back and the stiffening muscles of her legs, but mostly to bask in the quiet, to breathe in the clear, high mountain air.

  She opened the door and got out quietly so she wouldn't wake Chan. Then she came around the truck to stand silently facing the sun.

  It wasn't really dawn anymore, but it was far closer than she'd ever come to it in New York. Manhattan didn't have a horizon, at least not where she lived in the middle of the Upper West Side.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?"

  Madeleine spun round.

  Chan was standing sleepy-eyed in the door of the camper, his shirt unbuttoned, the top of his jeans unsnapped, his feet bare. He stood there silently for a moment, looked from her to the horizon. Then he stepped down onto the ground.

  Beautiful?

  Yes. He was.

  She took a step back, startled at the intensity of her reaction. "You'll hurt your feet," she warned inanely.

  Chan looked down, then shook his head. "Naw." He padded toward her across the gravel, then squinted again at the sun as he stood next to her.

  She saw him take a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He turned to her and smiled. "This is what makes it all worthwhile."

  Madeleine looked at him, surprised.

  He gave a sheepish shrug. "Well, winning's nice, too, of course. And all the cheering and hootin' and hollerin'. Makes you feel like you accomplished something. Makes you want to go on. But you spend more time blown' and goin' than you do ridin' bulls. A hell of a lot more. You sit for hours and hours, drive for hours and hours. Through heat and dust and traffic jams. But—" he paused and took another deep breath "—you also get times like this."

  Madeleine looked at him, blinked at the smile on his face, then smiled back. She couldn't help it.

  "Pretty philosophical, Richardson," she said after a moment.

  He grinned. "Yeah, isn't it?"

  "All that profundity in a man who goes looking for kicks in the head kind of boggles the mind."

  "Hey, you thought it was poetry, remember?"

  She laughed. "So I did."

  Their gazes caught, locked. She swallowed. So did he. He looked at her lips. She looked at his.

  And then she said, "Sometimes you surprise me."

  He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, then closed it again. He looked at her for a long moment, then he nodded.

  "Ditto," he said. Then he tucked his hands into his pockets and turned and walked away, heading toward a small stand of trees.

  Madeleine watched him go and thought how much he seemed to fit into the landscape, his ruggedness blending well with the forest and the meadows and the rough San Francisco peaks in the distance. But like them, the hardness of his features was gentled by the low-angled sun, which at a distance seemed to dust with gold the stubble on his chin and cheeks.

  He turned and looked at her, then headed back toward her. He was smiling as he came, and she found herself once more looking at his mouth. He had a strong mouth, firm and wide and uncompromisingly male.

  She wondered how he kissed.

  Her whole body jerked. Then she blinked, hauling herself out of her reverie, annoyed at the direction of her thoughts. She beat a hasty retreat back to the camper.

  "Something wrong, Decker?" Chan called after her.

  "Not a thing," she said quickly. "I'm just ready to go!"

  Chan stood where he was for a moment, then gave a small shrug, then followed. "I'll drive."

  Madeleine tossed him the keys.

  He slid into the driver's seat and started the engine. She went to work.

  It might be only five in the morning, but she had no intention of trying to go back to sleep.

  She didn't even climb back into the bunk; she knew what she would do if she did.

  She would lie there and think about Chan Richardson's mouth.

  * * *

  Chan spent the day thinking about Madeleine Decker's mouth.

  Mile upon mile of Arizona and New Mexico desert slipped past unnoticed. With one conscious part of him he kept alert, his eyes on the white line and the traffic. In his mind's eye he saw Madeleine Decker's mouth.

  He touched it, tasted it, savored her lips with his own.

  Second by second, move by move, he saw, he tasted, he felt their kiss unfold. He saw himself take her in his arms and hold her, saw himself smooth her hair back, stroke her cheeks, then tilt her face and touch his lips to her.
/>   He did it all in his mind.

  Preparing himself. Just like when he was getting ready to ride a bull.

  He laughed.

  Behind him Madeleine stopped typing. "What's funny?"

  He shook his head. "Nothing." Madeleine Decker might be improving, but he couldn't see her appreciating that. "How's the dissertation going?"

  She groaned. "Drivel. Pure drivel." She had been working all day. She'd even made him stop once so she could call her adviser. She wanted to get his opinion on something. She got it, but it didn't seem to be making her happy.

  She came back to the camper more out of sorts than when she'd left. And since then there'd been an awful lot of fuming and muttering coming from the table where she sat.

  She sighed and stood up. "I'm having a problem in chapter four. Venable doesn't think it works."

  "Want me to read it?"

  There was a pause. He glanced over his shoulder to see her standing in the aisle staring at him.

  "I can read, Decker," he said a little irritably.

  "I'm sure you can, Richardson. I'm just surprised you offered."

  He shrugged, turning back to his driving. "Think of it as a compatibility test."

  Madeleine considered that. "Fair enough."

  * * *

  Other people had read parts of her dissertation. Malcolm had read it. So had Douglas. Alfie's cousin Sarah, who was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia had read and critiqued the part on Kant.

  Madeleine had awaited all their comments with equanimity and confidence. She didn't know why she was so nervous about Chan. She didn't even know why she was letting him read it. What did he know about philosophy?

  She flicked a glance over her shoulder. He didn't look up. She chewed on her thumbnail for another five miles, then looked again. This time the truck swerved.

  "Watch it, Decker. You're too new at this to be driving, looking over your shoulder."

  "Just read, Richardson."

  He read.

  Finally when they stopped to eat at a rest stop somewhere in west Texas, he handed it back to her.

  "So what's his problem?" he wanted to know.

  "His problem?"

  Chan shrugged. "What doesn't he like? I think it sounds fine. Impressed the hell out of me."

  Madeleine smiled faintly. "He says I've given it the wrong emphasis."

  Chan scratched his head. "The wrong emphasis?" His mouth lifted at the corner. "What's that mean?"

  Madeleine grimaced. "I think it means that I'm not seeing this topic the way he sees it."

  Chan frowned. "Whose dissertation is it, yours or his?"

  "Well, mine, but—"

  "Then you pick the emphasis."

  "That's not precisely the way it works," Madeleine said.

  "It ought to be."

  * * *

  She was still smiling about that when they got to Fort Smith. Everyone else who had read her dissertation had told her what she should do. Everyone had had advice, suggestions, comments, criticism.

  Chan said it was hers, she should do what she wanted. Then he'd shrugged in the face of her open-mouthed stare. "Well, hell," he'd said. And she thought she'd even seen a faint reddish hue along his cheekbones. "It seems simple enough to me."

  Madeleine didn't know if it was really any simpler or simply refreshing. But it made her smile every time she thought about it.

  And when Chan was heading off to ride the bull in Fort Smith, it made her reach out and grab him as he tried to slip past her in the camper. It made her smile right into his stunned blue eyes. It made her whisper, "Good luck."

  It made her kiss his cheek.

  * * *

  It took Chan thirty hours to drive to Fort Smith to ride a black Brahma bull with the unlikely name of Mr. BoPeep. It took Mr. BoPeep 3.2 seconds to dump Chan on his butt in the dust.

  He shouldn't have been surprised.

  He broke the cardinal rule of bull riding: he let himself get distracted.

  But who the hell wouldn't have been distracted, thinking about the touch of Madeleine Decker's mouth on his cheek?

  What in the hell had possessed her to kiss him? Christ, he could still feel it now as he stumbled back to the camper. He could feel that soft touch more than he could feel the throb of his elbow where he'd hit it on the fence or the smarting where his rear end had hit the dirt.

  He touched his cheek, amazed, dazed.

  Then he looked up and saw her waiting, her eyes wide and worried.

  "No poetry this time," he said, his mouth twisting as she came up to him.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Of course." He brushed past her, climbing into the camper. "Let's get moving."

  "We're going? We just got here."

  Which was true enough, but he didn't see the point. "Why not? Something you got to stay around for?"

  "No. You mean—" she looked at him, aghast "—that's it? Don't you get another chance? Don't you get to ride a bull?"

  "Yeah. Tomorrow. In Strong City." He sat down and pulled off his boots.

  "No, tonight. You fell off tonight."

  He stuffed his riding boots back into his rigging bag and rubbed his elbow. "No joke."

  Madeleine frowned, touching his arm. "You're sure you're all right?"

  "I'm all right!"

  "Okay, okay. But then, don't they let you—"

  He stood up. "No, Decker, they damned well don't let you."

  "But—"

  He held up a finger. "One bull. One ride. Those are the rules."

  "You mean we drove all the way to Fort Smith, Arkansas, for you to fall off a bull?"

  He shrugged, undoing his shirt and trying to ease out of it without brushing his elbow. "Win a few, lose a few."

  "But—" But apparently she couldn't think of an argument. At least not one that would do any good. She took ahold of his shirt and helped ease it off for him, wincing when she saw his elbow. "You're going to have a terrible bruise."

  "I'll live," he said shortly.

  "I'm sure you will." Her tone was just as sharp. "To ride again another day." She sounded almost mocking. It set his teeth on edge.

  "It's your fault," he said, his voice gruff.

  "Mine?"

  "You kissed me!"

  Her jaw dropped. She stared at him, disbelieving. Then her cheeks turned bright red. "Well, may the saints strike me dead for my sin," she said sarcastically. "I had no idea my kisses could wreak such havoc, Richardson. Please forgive me."

  At the moment that was beyond him. "Shut up, Decker," he said and shut himself in the shower.

  * * *

  They didn't talk all the way to Strong City, Kansas. The silence was rigid and complete, neither even meeting the other's gaze until they got there just in time for Chan to ride the next afternoon.

  Only when he was heading out the camper door with his rigging bag, still silent, did Madeleine finally muster her determination and speak up.

  "I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "I shouldn't have kissed you. I should never have overstepped the bounds. It was a mistake. Put it down to propinquity."

  "What?"

  "The nearness of you," she said.

  "I know what the word means, Decker."

  "Good." She wiped her palms down the sides of her jeans. "Then you know it was nothing special about you. I'm sorry that you were distracted."

  He just looked at her, dazed. "Yeah," he said. And then he walked out.

  Madeleine watched him go. She didn't go watch him ride. She sat staring at her computer screen, telling herself to stop thinking about damnable Channing Richardson and concentrate instead on free will, which was what really mattered.

  Her mind, it seemed, had a will of its own. And it freely chose to think about Chan no matter what she said.

  So what else is new? Madeleine thought grumpily, and her mind dragged her along to spend another hour replaying the infamous kiss.

  She was stunned when he'd yelled at her about it.

  Was it real
ly so awful? She didn't suppose a normal woman would feel this way. A normal woman probably never had doubts. But then she hadn't been normal since Scott. Or maybe even before, she thought wearily. Probably she shouldn't be let around men at all. She didn't seem to know what to do with them. She would just have to try to be aloof.

  She stared at the screen again. Resolute. Determined. Then the door opened and Chan came in. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek and a grin on his face and all that propinquity came rushing back.

  "An 80." He grinned. "Good enough to win."

  "Because I didn't kiss you, I suppose," Madeleine said.

  He grinned. "I've been thinking about that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Propinquity. I've got an idea." He was stripping off his boots and his shirt even as he spoke. Madeleine thought she was spending an awful lot of time watching him get undressed.

  She looked at him warily. "What idea?"

  "You should do it again. A lot."

  "What?"

  "Get it out of your system."

  "But I thought you hated it."

  He stared at her as if she'd lost her mind.

  "You fell off the bull," she reminded him.

  He shrugged. "Yeah. Because it surprised the hell out of me. I was thinking about the kiss not the bull. Hell—" he rubbed a hand against the back of his neck "—I liked it, Decker. A lot."

  "You did?" She tested the notion, then swallowed the smile that touched her lips. She felt funny all of a sudden, silly, breathless. She looked around to see if the sun had just come out.

  "So," he went on, "I was thinking it wouldn't be quite so distracting if you did it more often." He grinned.

  Madeleine narrowed her eyes and looked at him. "Richardson," she warned.

  His grin widened. "Hey, why not? Desensitize me, too."

  "I've heard some lines in my time, Richardson—"

  "You have?" He gave her such a look of wide-eyed innocence that she laughed.

  "You're a shark, Richardson. A predator."

  "Not me. I'm just a normal, red-blooded American boy."

  There wasn't anything boyish about him except, perhaps, his grin. "Sure," Madeleine said.

  He laughed. "Come on, Decker. I've ridden my bull for the day. It's safe. I promise I won't fall on my, er, rear end."

  "If I thought it would knock you on your, er, rear end," Madeleine said, "I might do it."