See You Again

by Kait Nolan

  The khaki pants and button-down shirt he was wearing when he picked her up gave absolutely no additional clues.

  “Is this okay?” she asked, brushing at the skirt to smooth imaginary wrinkles.

  “You look beautiful.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek.

  “But is it appropriate for where we’re going?”

  The corner of Trey’s mouth twitched. “It’s an anything goes sort of place. You’ll be just fine.”

  Sandy picked up her purse. “You’re seriously not going to tell me where we’re going?”

  “Nope.” He laced his fingers with hers and brought her hand to his lips. “I told you, it’s a surprise. C’mon.”

  She hesitated when he opened the door to the back seat.

  “Louis is driving us,” Trey explained.

  And that just elevated this whole date to…something new. They were being chauffeured? Sandy slid into the car and nodded to the stone-faced man in the driver’s seat. “Hi, Louis.”

  “Ms. Crawford.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  His eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror, and she could’ve sworn she saw a spark of humor. “I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”

  Trey slid in beside her. “He’s too well-trained to reveal my secrets. But you’re welcome to keep guessing on the way.”

  Since it felt like a game, she did. She ran through everywhere she could ever remember going with him and quite a few restaurants in Lawley, the county seat about forty miles away. But when they turned down a country road, she knew that wasn’t their final destination. This road led…nowhere.

  Sandy shot Trey the side eye. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing. Yet. But give me ten minutes.” After that cryptic remark, he said nothing else.

  So, she lapsed into silence and watched the woods and fields roll by, while he idly played with her fingers, as if he couldn’t bear not to touch her. She liked it. She liked all of this more than she should.

  “Ah, we’re here.” Trey leaned forward as they broke free of a stand of trees at…a helipad?

  Sandy couldn’t even care if she looked like a rube as she pressed her nose to the glass and stared at the tidy little helicopter parked in front of them. “Since when is there a helipad in Wachoxee County? And how did I not know about it?”

  “Since I had one put in after I started construction on The Babylon. It’s often more convenient to fly than drive. C’mon.”

  Sandy accepted his hand up out of the car. “Where’s the pilot?”

  “Right here.” He tapped his own chest.

  “You can fly a helicopter?” She looked at Louis to see if she was being teased.

  “He’s been flying for fifteen years, ma’am.”

  “Well, as dates go, this one is definitely thinking outside the box,” she muttered.

  “Oh, this isn’t what we’re doing. This just gets us the first leg of the way. We can get to Lawley in about fifteen minutes by air.”

  Trey had a helicopter. That he could fly himself. Sandy was still trying to wrap her brain around that, as he took a bag from Louis and led her toward the chopper. Once they were both strapped in, he handed her a headset.

  “Just lean on back and enjoy yourself.”

  Sandy didn’t talk on the short flight to Lawley. She didn’t want to do anything to distract Trey from what he was doing, and anyway, she was too busy staring at the view below. Her town was so tiny. Talk about a perspective check. Her entire world was microscopic compared to his. She didn’t doubt the importance of her job or her role in the community at large, but he probably employed more people world-wide than the entire population of Wishful.

  They landed at a part of the Lawley airport she’d never seen. Not that there was much to the Lawley airport. It was a hub for commuter flights to Jackson, Atlanta, and Memphis. And apparently, today it was hosting Trey’s private jet. A sleek little plane, with the logo for Peyton Consolidated painted on the tail, waited on the tarmac, stairs unfolded, staff already waiting to usher them inside. Sandy could only stare.

  Trey took her arm. “You okay?”

  “I’m just…a little staggered.” She was more than staggered. She was intimidated. Back in college, he’d never said a word about his family’s wealth. A good thing. She doubted she’d have been able to relax enough around him to get to know who he really was. He’d built on that foundation exponentially in the decades since. Seeing clear evidence of that made it harder to reconcile this man with the boy she’d known.

  He grinned at her—boyish and charming—and some of the knots unraveled. “I thought for tonight, I’d go for shock and awe.”

  He was certainly succeeding. “Are you flying this, too?”

  He laughed. “No. I conduct too much business en route to pilot myself. And for the next few hours, I want to focus on you.”

  Hours? Really, where the hell was he taking her?

  Trey led her up the stairs and introduced her to the flight attendant—Imogene Glasner— and the pilot—Jon Beale—before taking her back into the plush cabin. The seats were leather and spacious. There was a bar, where champagne chilled in a bucket of ice. A flat screen TV was mounted on one wall. There was even a sofa in the back.

  The pre-flight check was a blur. Sandy found herself buckled in and accepting a glass of champagne from Imogene, numbly thanking the other woman.

  Trey lost a little of his grin as he took a good look at her. “You’re not afraid to fly, are you?”

  “No.” It was all she could manage.

  He slipped his hand in hers, as Imogene disappeared into the cockpit for takeoff. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  His thumb stroked across the back of her hand. “Sandy. You’ve hardly said two words since we left Wishful.”

  “I…it’s just. This is all so…much. I never even dreamed of something like this. I haven’t traveled all that much. I was a mother, then a single parent, then mayor. There’s just never been a chance.” That had never seemed to matter before. But being in his world made her feel small and inexperienced.

  Trey brought her hand to his lips again as they left the ground. “I know. I wanted to give you some of what you had to miss. There’s no pressure here. No expectation. Just enjoy it.”

  She looked into his eyes and found him a smile. “I’d enjoy it more if I knew where we were going.”

  “Nope. Not gonna happen. I’m sticking to my guns that this is a surprise.”

  Deciding she’d better embrace the concept, Sandy settled back into her seat and sipped the champagne. “Then you, sir, had better keep me entertained.”

  Chapter 6

  Trey was having the best dream. An entire weekend of wining, dining, and dancing with Sandy. No work, no worries—just her. The whole thing took a sharp left into the realm of weird when Elvis showed up and started singing a slightly off-key rendition of “Love Me Tender,” but who was he to complain? The guy made her laugh. She didn’t do that enough. Then the dream bled into an erotic montage that made his body tighten with need. Trey tried to cling to it, to burrow deeper into sleep so he could get to the end, but a pulsing pain in his skull dragged him inexorably back to consciousness.

  The dull thump of agony in his head made him want to whimper. Okay, there was a lot of champagne last night. He hadn’t felt this hung over since…well, he couldn’t remember when. As a rule, he rarely overindulged. He didn’t like being out of control. Careful to remain utterly still, lest his brain decide to conga right out of his skull, Trey cracked one eye open. His bleary vision resolved itself to a dim room. Just enough light seeped in around blackout curtains that he could tell this wasn’t his suite at The Babylon. Where the hell was he? Turning his head just a little, he managed to catch sight of an enormous chandelier above the bed.

  Vegas. He was at his hotel in Vegas.

  A faint groan beside him had Trey going instantly on alert, hangover be damned. He wasn’t alone. With painstaking slowness
, he turned his head and saw the tumbled blonde hair, the slope of bare shoulder with a birthmark shaped like a butterfly. He felt an immediate urge to press a kiss there and had a flash of memory that he’d done just that, as he peeled off Sandy’s dress the night before. Why couldn’t he remember the rest of the night? Nights? What day was it?

  He reached out to stroke a hand down Sandy’s arm. She rolled into him, nuzzling against his throat and making him excruciatingly aware of the fact that they were both very, very naked. She smelled of him—of sweat and sex and that curious, soft scent of sleep. Well, now he really wished he knew how they’d gotten here.

  Something gleamed faintly in the space between them. Tipping his head down, Trey noted a gold band on the hand she pressed against his chest. Frowning, he peered closer. Had she been wearing that when they left Wishful? No, he’d have noticed. Still puzzling over that, he pulled her closer—and saw the matching band on his own left hand.

  Uh-oh.

  “Sandy.” His voice came out like gravel.

  “Mmm?” Her eyes blinked open. “Trey?” After a long moment, her bleary expression cleared and her eyes popped wide, her body going stiff. “Trey.” She promptly winced, squeezing her eyes shut again as she dragged the covers up to her chest. “My head. What happened?”

  Trey had a moment of regret that he couldn’t remember what she was hiding beneath that sheet.

  “I think, possibly, we drank half the champagne in the state of Nevada.”

  She squinted at him, as if maybe she was hoping he wasn’t real. “And we…um.” The wave of her hand seemed to encompass all the nakedness and what had inevitably come before.

  “Seems we did. Probably repeatedly, although I’m pretty fuzzy on that point.” And that was a damned shame. After waiting thirty years to make love to this woman, he resented the hell out of not being able to remember it.

  The flush began at her hairline and swept down her throat and the chest that was pressed so tantalizingly to his. “I’m pretty fuzzy on all of it.”

  At least he wasn’t the only one.

  “You don’t happen to remember getting these, do you?” He held up his hand where she could see the ring.

  Sandy frowned, lifting her own hand and staring at it like it was an alien appendage. “What?”

  “I think…we got married last night.”

  She started to shake her head, then seemed to think better of it. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would we do that?”

  Trey struggled to sift through his patchy memory. “I seem to recall something about thirty years apart being quite enough and announcing I never wanted to let you go.” He really hoped the drunken rendition of Sergio Mendes’ “Never Gonna Let You Go” was just a dream.

  “We can’t be married.”

  “Well, we are in Vegas, and we’re wearing wedding bands we didn’t have when we got here, so I’m thinking maybe we can.”

  Sandy sat up, still clutching the sheet to her chest. “We can’t be married,” she repeated, panic underscoring her words. “I did not come to Las Vegas for the first time and get married by Elvis. I’m not that irresponsible.”

  “Was Elvis real? I thought he was just part of my dream.”

  “Oh God!” She rolled out of bed, dragging the sheet with her as she began to pace. “How did this happen?”

  As it seemed highly unlikely he was going to talk her back into bed for a reprisal of the wedding night that was currently a blank, Trey reached for the pants puddled in the floor. He slipped them on and strode past her to the bar in the other part of the suite, pouring them both glasses of water. Stepping into her path, he stopped her frenetic pacing and pressed one into her hand. “Drink.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Her face was wan and a little puffy from lack of sleep, and her hair was an absolute wreck. And she was, improbably, his. At last. It felt like every cell in his body began to grin at once—at least, all the ones not currently protesting his status as one of the living.

  “Why are you smiling?” she demanded.

  “Because this is one of my college fantasies fulfilled.”

  “Getting drunk and married in Vegas?” Incredulity dripped from every word.

  Trey set his glass aside and took her face between his palms. “No. Marrying you.”

  Rather than melting as he’d hoped, she gave him a hard stare. “Did you bring me out here for this?”

  He absorbed the insult of that. She was justifiably upset, hung over, and seemed to be just as unclear on the particulars as he was. But how could she even think for a moment that he’d deliberately liquor her up and marry her? “No. I didn’t plan on this. I can assure you, if this were on purpose, we’d both have been sober enough to remember all of it. And I’d have employed considerably more thought to the event than pulling you into the nearest quickie wedding chapel.” If Elvis had officiated, Trey assumed that’s what had happened.

  Sandy pulled away and began pacing again, her movements jerky enough to slosh water from the glass. She was too busy babbling to notice. “—an impossible situation. We can’t be married. You’re involved in a ton of city projects. I’m the mayor. That’s a serious conflict of interest that needs to be disclosed. But we can’t disclose it. That would take the focus off Cam and Norah, and their wedding is in a week! It has to go off without a hitch. And it would be crazy to stay married. We’ve barely seen each other in thirty years.”

  Obviously, they’d seen a great deal of each other last night. He wished he could remember more of it. Maybe when the rest of the champagne wore off.

  She was still rolling. “But we can’t get a divorce either. Nevada requires a six-week residency for a quickie divorce, and neither of us has time for that.”

  “How do you even know that?”

  “Adele did it. And we can’t do it in Wishful. That’s a formal, public legal proceeding, with a judge that has to sign off on it. Everyone knows me. Which, again would take the focus off Cam and Norah. And dear God, people will think I’m flighty and impulsive. Nobody wants those qualities in a mayor.”

  He crossed to where she was digging in her purse, gently taking her by the shoulders. “Sandy, we’ll figure this out.”

  “Figure it out? Figure it out? Trey, we got married!”

  From where he was standing, that wasn’t a bad thing. He was working on not being offended that she wasn’t as happy about it as he was. He hadn’t planned to rush her into anything, but he’d have been lying if he said marriage wasn’t his end-game with her. He loved this woman. He always had.

  Sandy was obviously not in the right frame of mind to talk about it right now. She was staring at the screen of her phone, her cheeks going pale.

  “What?”

  “It’s Sunday,” she whispered. “We’ve been gone for two days.”

  “Are you under some kind of curfew?”

  With a glare, she snapped on the nearest light, blinding him and sending a fresh bolt of agony into his brain. “It is Sunday. I have missed church and Sunday dinner with my entire family. I have fifteen missed calls. We’ll be lucky if my brothers haven’t called the police to report me missing. And even if they didn’t call out a search party, I still have to find some kind of explanation for where I’ve been. An explanation I will no doubt have to deliver, in person, to a small army waiting on my doorstep when I get home.”

  Okay, so that didn’t exactly sound appealing. If they were very, very lucky, maybe they’d both be over their hangovers by then. And maybe they’d remember some more of the past thirty-six hours.

  “We’ll deal with it,” he promised. “First things first, we need to get back to Wishful. We’ll clean up, get some food and painkillers, a fresh change of clothes, and we’ll face them down together.”

  “We can’t tell them.” She looked aghast at the very idea.

  “No. We can’t,” he agreed. Because a drunk, quickie wedding on The Strip was hardly the route to endearing himself to the Campbell clan. Sandy deserved better.
A real wedding. Proper rings. To be cherished, as Waylan had never cherished her. “We’ll figure it out on the flight home. I’ll go call my pilot. Make a call or send a text to your family to let them know you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  Trey began searching for his cell phone, a task made infinitely easier when it began to ring. He unearthed it from a potted palm in the corner and answered. “Peyton.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a problem with the London project.”

  Just the sound of that had his headache cranking up to eleven. He listened, pacing, as Louis outlined the issue. Loss of oversight. Delays. Projected additional costs. Exactly what Edward had warned him of. It was a prospective clusterfuck, one he needed to wade in himself to sort out.

  “I realize you wanted your schedule cleared, but this is time-sensitive. Shall I make travel arrangements?”

  “I’m sure as hell not leaving for London tonight. It’ll keep until tomorrow.” He wasn’t leaving town with things such a mess with his new wife. Hell, he hadn’t even gotten her back to town.

  Louis was quiet for a beat too long. “Yes, sir. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Trey hung up and turned to find Sandy standing in the doorway to the bedroom, arms folded over her middle. She’d put her dress back on.

  “London?”

  “It will get handled.” He was far more worried about her. Lines of strain fanned out from her eyes and pain pinched her mouth. No doubt her head was pounding as much as his was. Because he couldn’t resist, he wrapped his arms around her, pressing a gentle kiss to her brow. “Everything will work out. Without having to search out the nearest means of filing for divorce.” He’d make her see that this could be a good thing. A great thing, if only she’d give it a chance.

  She sucked in a breath and stepped back, putting more than physical distance between them. “Trey, our lives are incompatible. I’m tied to Wishful. You’re due in London tomorrow. A marriage with us could never work.”