“She told me that she still loved me.” Her voice quavered a little. “But I knew she was disappointed.”
“In you?” That didn’t exactly sound very warm and loving to him.
“No, in the situation,” Mirabella replied. “And then she asked me if the baby’s father wasn’t willing to marry me.”
The pieces finally all came together. “And you said he was.”
Which was why she was calling, he thought. Not because she’d changed her mind and wanted to marry him, but because she wanted to please her grandmother. It put somewhat of a different spin on everything.
She nodded before she realized he had no way of seeing her. “I told her that I’d turned you down because I didn’t want you feeling obligated to marry me, just because of the baby.” Mirabella sighed again, hating the deception she was forced to be part of, yet at the same time grateful to Zane for helping her—provided he was still willing to help her. “That was when she said I had an obligation to the baby to provide it with a two-parent home and not to allow my own stubbornness to get in the way of that.”
“So, she knows you can be stubborn,” she heard Zane say with a laugh. For a second, she allowed the sound to wrap itself around her, comforting her. And then she heard him ask in a more serious voice, “Does she know it’s not mine?”
“I didn’t mention you by name,” she told him. “She just thinks the father of my baby was the one who asked me to marry him.”
“And that’s why you’re calling,” he concluded.
“That’s why I’m calling.” There was silence on the other end. Every second it continued, she became progressively more uneasy and much less sure she should have called at all. Finally, unable to take it, she blurted out, “Look, this was a bad idea. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“What’ll you tell your grandmother?” he asked, keeping her from hanging up.
“I’ll think of something,” she muttered. Right now, she couldn’t think about that. “It’s not your problem, sir.”
“You’re going to have to stop that, you know,” Zane said.
She didn’t understand. “Stop what?”
“Well, if we’re going to be married, you can’t keep calling me sir.”
Was he saying he was willing to go through with it, after all? “Mr. Colton—”
“Or that,” Zane pointed out. “This isn’t the early 1900s when married couples referred to one another by their titles and surnames. That’s one old-fashioned habit that has happily fallen by the wayside.”
This was happening too fast for her. Thoughts were whizzing in and out of her head, jumbling in the process. “Wait, are you telling me that you still intend to marry me?”
“I thought we cleared that part up already,” Zane said. “You were the one who just called to say yes, weren’t you?”
“I was, I mean, I am.” She was doing it again, tripping over her own tongue. Mirabella took a breath, trying to sound coherent. “It’s just when you didn’t say the offer was still open—”
None of this was coming out right, Mirabella thought, frustrated with herself. She closed her eyes, doing her best to get a grip on herself, not to mention on the situation.
After a moment, she tried again.
“When?”
“Give me a second,” Zane replied.
There was some background noise as he checked what she presumed was an electronic calendar.
A minute later, he was back. “I’ve got meetings scheduled Monday and Tuesday.” The information, he knew, was rhetorical since Mirabella was more familiar with his daily schedule than he was. “How about Wednesday?” he posed.
“Wednesday?” she echoed, suddenly feeling as if she had been propelled into some sort of a parallel universe or at the very least a dream world. Was he asking her to consider Wednesday as a day for their wedding?
To even think that felt so strange, she thought.
“For the wedding,” he deliberately stressed in case she missed the point of this discussion. “Unless you can’t get away,” he qualified.
“I can get away,” she answered, the words all but bursting out of her mouth before he could change his mind. And then reality hit her with an overwhelming force. “You want to get married that soon?” she asked in disbelief. Her head was beginning to spin from the very idea of all this actually coming together and becoming a reality.
“Why not?” He wanted to know. “There’s no reason to wait if we’ve both agreed to set this marriage in motion, right?”
This sounded much too whirlwind for her tastes. Zane was forgetting things. “Aren’t there arrangements that have to be made?” she questioned.
“You mean like for a big wedding?” he asked. “Is that what you want?”
What she wanted, Mirabella reasoned sadly, was for Zane to really want to marry her, not to save the day, but to do so because he loved her.
Take what you can get and stop whining, a little voice in her head ordered. You’re damn lucky he’s actually offering to do this.
“No,” Mirabella said out loud, doing what she could to block out the inner voice driving her crazy. “Like for licenses and blood tests and things like that. We need time for that.”
“You’d be right—if we were getting married here,” Zane agreed. “But we can take the corporate jet and fly to Las Vegas.” The plane was at his disposal, as it was for his father and several other executive officers within the company. “The whole thing can take under four hours, start to finish.”
Her lips twisted in an ironic smile as she thought over his description. That didn’t sound like much of a wedding day to her.
“That puts a whole new meaning to the term dream wedding. Blink and you sleep right through it,” Mirabella quipped.
Everyone wanted someone at their wedding, he realized. Someone they cared about to witness the ceremony. “We could fly a few people out—your grandmother,” he suggested. “Make it seem more festive.”
“No, your way is better,” she told him stoically. It was bad enough she was going to be lying to her grandmother—and continue lying until she and Zane finally got divorced and went their separate ways. She didn’t want to have the woman participating in the charade, as well. “No muss, no fuss, no meetings missed.”
“Belle—” he began to apologize, feeling that despite her cheerful flippancy, beneath it all, her feelings had somehow been hurt.
Didn’t Mirabella realize he was attempting to shield her as best he could? That he’d only suggested this marriage to protect her, not himself? He’d been living on the cusp of a scandal all of his life, right from the moment his mother had first laid eyes on Eldridge Colton. A few more rumors, innuendos and hints of scandal made no difference to him. It was her he was worried about.
“Really, I’m fine with this,” Mirabella assured him. “I appreciate you being so kind and doing this for me,” she added with feeling.
“You don’t want your grandmother there?” That somehow didn’t sound right to him, not since she professed to care so much about the woman.
“No,” Mirabella answered firmly, even though it secretly hurt her heart to keep her grandmother from attending the ceremony. “She’d want it to be more...wedding-like,” Mirabella explained after a beat. “This might be a little too assembly-line for her taste. This way, I can embellish on it when I tell her about how you just whisked me off. I can make it more appealing for her. The main thing my grandmother wants is for this baby to have its father’s last name and this Vegas wedding will accomplish that for her.”
“All right, then,” Zane agreed. “It’s settled. Wednesday morning we’ll fly out to Vegas and make it official.”
She surprised him again by saying, “You really don’t have to do this, Zane.”
“Changing your mind again?” he asked, wondering what was wrong this time.
“No, I’m not. It’s just that—”
He heard her hesitating and he put his own meaning to it. “Don’t worry, Bel
le, I don’t expect anything to change between us. You’ll have to move in for appearances’ sake, but that’s as far as the cohabitating will go,” he assured her. “You’ll have your own room.” When she still didn’t say anything, he said, “Think of it like a dorm, except there’ll only be two inhabitants in the whole building.”
She had to stop looking for ulterior motives and hidden agendas and just graciously accept his help. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Don’t worry about it. But I’ll still expect you to come in tomorrow,” he added, teasing her.
“I never thought differently.”
The thing of it was, he thought as he replaced the landline receiver into the cradle several minutes later, he knew she didn’t have to come in tomorrow—which placed her in a class all by herself.
He’d had his share of women who, even after only a short time into the relationship, expected things of him. A great many things. They took things for granted as their due. Mirabella did none of that. Even though she was supposedly going to be his wife in the eyes of the world, she didn’t assume that gave her any extra privileges, any more rights than she already had.
He could do worse than to build a life with a woman like that.
And it certainly didn’t hurt that he was attracted to her.
Although, he reconsidered, that might make things rather difficult in the immediate near future. They were going to be married and yet any benefits which came from a union like that were going to have to be held at arm’s length. He’d given her his word it was going to be a celibate union and he wasn’t the type to force himself on a woman.
He had a feeling he could easily charm Mirabella. Charm her so he could get her to want to be in his bed, but that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. It certainly wouldn’t be the honorable way to go. There would be no satisfaction in knowing he had to in essence seduce Mirabella in order to see just how much of the chemistry he felt between them actually existed, and how much of it was just in his head.
There was a definite lure to forbidden fruit and right now, she was that.
This, he couldn’t help thinking as he went upstairs to his bedroom suite, was getting very complicated.
It wouldn’t be if she weren’t attractive and intriguing, and if he wasn’t drawn to her, as well, Zane thought.
Would you have been so willing to step up and help her out this way if Belle had a face that could stop a clock? Zane asked himself.
In all honesty, he didn’t have an answer to that question. He supposed he was just lucky no one would be asking it.
And that Mirabella looked the way she did. No one was going to question he was marrying her because they were a love match.
If they only knew, he couldn’t help thinking.
Chapter 13
By the time Zane arrived at her ground floor apartment to pick her up for the airport on Wednesday morning, Mirabella felt as if her butterflies were giving birth to butterflies—and all of them were vying for space with her baby who had taken up residence there three months before them.
She left behind a bedroom in chaos. Every article of clothing she owned was no longer in the closet, but on her bed, a casualty of her search for something becoming to wear to the wedding with no guests.
“You’re doing the right thing, you’re doing the right thing,” she kept telling herself over and over again, chanting the sentence as if it was some sort of magical mantra that would, perforce, become true through sheer repetition.
Butterflies now on full alert, she closed the door behind her and was halfway down the walk before she suddenly doubled back. She’d forgotten to lock her apartment door.
“Sorry,” she apologized, hurrying to Zane’s dark sedan and getting into the passenger seat. “I didn’t want to leave the apartment unlocked.”
“No reason to apologize. It’s not as if the plane’s going to leave without us, seeing as how we’re the only passengers. Did you remember to bring a valid ID?”
He’d reminded her of that yesterday, just before they left the office for the evening. He had a friend pull strings at the Clark County Clerk’s Office in Nevada, assuring him the marriage license would be waiting for them when they arrived. All that was needed was proof of ID on both their parts.
“I’ve got my driver’s license in my purse,” she told him.
“Good.” He glanced over to make sure Mirabella had buckled up before he started the vehicle again. “You’re wearing that?” he asked as he drove out of the complex.
Mirabella looked down at the two-piece suit she’d finally decided on. Light blue, it was the most expensive outfit she owned and she rarely wore it, trying to keep it new looking.
“Yes. Why? What’s wrong with it?” she asked, her confidence, what little there was of it this morning, swiftly ebbing away.
“Nothing,” he said, “if you’re going to a meeting. But this is supposed to be your wedding. I would have thought you’d be wearing something a little more—” he wasn’t good at descriptions, he just knew what he liked when he saw it “—well, festively elegant.”
Zane was undoubtedly accustomed to the women who moved around in high society circles, she thought, trying to ignore the sting to her pride. He probably had no idea what it was like to have to budget money from month to month, to save up for something rather than just purchase it because he had a whim.
“Sorry,” she replied. “This is the best I’ve got.”
“It’s okay, we can remedy that,” Zane told her. “And stop apologizing so much. You can’t just keep assuming you’re always in the wrong. You’re entitled to your own opinions, your own tastes—and your own mistakes,” he added, glancing back at her suit.
He obviously viewed what she had on as one of those “mistakes” she was entitled to. “What do you mean, ‘we can remedy that’?” she wanted to know, doing her best not to take offense. Exactly what did he have in mind for a so-called remedy?
He was catching all the green lights for once. The private airfield wasn’t far now.
“Once we land in Vegas,” he told her, “I’ll take you shopping.” He’d made arrangements for a car to be waiting for him. “There’re some exclusive boutiques along Via Bellagio—and a few of them actually have some rather nice clothes,” he teased with an amused smile. “A high price tag does not always ensure a decent-looking outfit,” he pointed out.
There was no way she could go on the shopping trip he was talking about. “I didn’t bring my credit cards,” Mirabella confessed as they got out of his sedan and walked to the corporate jet.
“Don’t worry about it.” Zane could see she was about to protest, most likely stressing she was worried about it. Her grandmother was right, he couldn’t help thinking. In her own mild, unassuming way, this was one very stubborn woman. “Consider it my wedding present to you.”
Holding on to the handrail, Mirabella made her way up the steps to the jet.
A flight attendant stood in the open cabin door, a welcoming smile on her lips.
“But this isn’t a real wedding,” Mirabella reminded him.
Zane pretended to review the key ingredients that were going into this undertaking. “Wedding license, chapel, licensed minister officiating, it’s real, all right,” he assured her, walking into the plane directly behind her.
He pointed out available seats in the body of the jet plane. Other than the captain and the attendant, they were the only two people on the flight.
“I think the term you’re looking for is marriage of convenience,” Zane prompted. “Marriages of convenience,” he went on, “are still real in the eyes of the law. They’re just struck up for different reasons. Given some of the reasons people have for getting married—money, connections, using deception for their own selfish reasons—this marriage doesn’t rank that poorly.”
Selecting a seat, Zane sat down, then gestured to the seat next to him. “Sit,” he urged. “Relax. Everything’s going to be fine.”
She wished she co
uld believe that, but even with Zane’s easygoing assurances, her pulse refused to settle down and stop racing.
* * *
True to his word, before they ever entered the chapel where they were to exchange their vows—or rather, repeat the words fed to them by some inattentive minister who chose speed over quality and made his money by the ceremony, not by the hour, which was how Mirabella envisioned the whole wedding—Zane took her shopping.
She had only seen places like the shops he took her to and the clothes displayed there on the pages of magazines she’d occasionally thumbed through at the checkout counter. She didn’t even bother buying those magazines because she knew the clothes they featured belonged in a world she would never inhabit. What was the point of wistfully looking, then?
And yet, here she was, looking at those clothes as Zane selectively went through the racks, reviewing what was being offered.
The clothes whizzed by so quickly on their hangers, she hardly had a chance to look at them.
But then, she had a feeling her opinion really didn’t matter here. After all, she’d picked out something to wear to the wedding he had already indicated didn’t come anywhere close to making the grade.
Her opinion was just to wait and see, she thought, not to render any opinions no matter what he had said to the contrary previously.
“How about this one?” Zane asked after spending several minutes engaged in swift perusal, going through the dresses in the shop like a dealer going through a deck of cards.
Turning to face her, Zane held a white lace dress up against her. The hem was an inch shy of brushing along her knees. Fitted to the waist, with three-quarter-length sleeves and an A-line skirt, the material felt as if it had been spun out of a cloud.
“It’s stunning,” Mirabella whispered. She’d never owned anything so beautiful in her life.
“No, a dress’s job is to make the wearer look stunning,” he corrected. And then, as if appraising the wedding dress’s effect, he nodded. “It passes the test. We’ll take it,” he announced to the saleswoman who was doing her best not to hover too closely.
The Pregnant Colton Bride Page 12