As the woman approached, Zane told her, “We’ll need shoes and some sort of hair accessory to match.” He turned to Mirabella. “Unless you’d rather wear a veil instead?”
“No, a hair accessory will be fine,” she assured him. She was fine with anything he picked out for her. And then her eyes widened as she saw the price tag affixed to the dress he had selected for her. “Is that for the dress, or the whole store?” she asked, amazed anyone could charge that much for a dress without holding a gun in their hand.
He laughed. “It’s a Vera Wang,” he pointed out. “It’s for the dress.”
“Would the young lady like to try it on?” the saleswoman wanted to know. They both looked at Mirabella for an answer.
“It’s my size, it’ll fit,” she said. She’d make it fit, she added silently. “Besides, it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride in the wedding dress before the wedding.”
The words had just come tumbling out. The moment they did, she felt like a complete idiot. Those superstitions were for people who were actually getting married, not going through the motions of a charade, the way they were.
“The young lady is absolutely right,” the saleswoman agreed with a smile.
Mirabella had a feeling that, given what Zane was spending at the store, the saleswoman would have agreed if he’d speculated the old adage about the moon being made of green cheese was actually true.
* * *
“I’ll pay you back for these,” Mirabella told him as they walked out of the boutique. “It might take me a year or two,” she added honestly, thinking of what all the items had come to, “but I’ll pay you back.”
“I already told you, Belle, consider it a wedding present. And don’t start arguing with me on our wedding day,” he cautioned as she opened her mouth to do just that. “That is definitely considered bad luck.”
“I never heard of that one,” Mirabella said as she went around to the passenger side.
Loading the bags from the boutique into the truck, he closed the lid and walked back to the driver’s side of the vehicle. “That’s because I just made it up.”
Mirabella laughed softly in response. He found himself liking the sound of her laugh more and more.
“Next stop, County Clerk’s Office,” he announced as he pulled away from the curb. “I could rent a room at the hotel,” he offered. “That way you could change into your wedding dress there instead of in the chapel.”
“No, that’s all right, you’ve already gone to a great deal of expense. The chapel’s got to have somewhere I can change.”
“What if it doesn’t?” he challenged.
“It’s got to have a restroom,” she reasoned. “I can change there. I don’t need much.”
“Apparently not,” he agreed.
* * *
Since he had everything prepared ahead of time, picking up the license turned out to be a matter of producing their photo IDs and signing the license in the proper spaces, then paying the posted fee. From start to finish, the entire process took a little longer than ordering a meal to-go in a fast-food restaurant.
Vegas was known for speed in these matters.
The last part of their Vegas adventure entailed finding a chapel.
There were, she quickly discovered, a myriad to choose from. There appeared to be something for everyone’s taste, be it color—blue was popular, but there were others in red, lime, rainbow, etcetera—or theme—Elvis still held sway, but there were chapels featuring Western scenarios and others that appealed to people who had always loved traveling circuses.
Zane drove by all of them, making her think that perhaps he was the one having second thoughts now.
Gathering her courage, she said, “Look, it’s okay if you changed your mind—”
He spared her a quick glance. Traffic was beginning to pick up. “Why would you think I changed my mind?” he asked, passing a chapel called ’til Death Do Us Part—If Not Sooner.
“You’ve driven by a number of chapels already—a lot of chapels, actually—and you haven’t stopped, so I just thought maybe you’d changed your mind about all this—and that’s okay,” she quickly qualified. “I understand—”
“No, you don’t,” he contradicted. “I drove by all the other chapels because I was driving to this one.”
When she looked, she realized they had arrived at a rather small chapel that appeared to be modeled after a quaint little country church.
“How do you like this one?” Zane asked her, slowing the car so she could get a better look.
“It’s lovely,” she told him, surprised and touched he’d gone to the trouble of finding a chapel that actually looked the part. From what she had heard from others, one chapel was just as good as another for their purposes.
“Yes, I thought you might like this,” he said, driving to the rear of the small chapel. Behind it was a tiny cottage, just to the side of the limited parking lot. “The cottage belongs to the chapel. The minister, Reverend Applegate, and his wife live in it,” he told her. “I’m sure if we asked Mrs. Applegate, she’d have no objections to you changing into your wedding dress there.”
Just as he pulled his car into a parking spot, the reverend’s wife, a motherly looking woman in her sixties, came out of the cottage.
Shading her eyes from the sun, she squinted a little as she looked in his direction. “Mr. Colton?” Mrs. Applegate asked.
“She knows you?” Mirabella turned from the woman to look at him quizzically.
“I called ahead.” He could feel Mirabella’s eyes on him, questions multiplying in her mind. “I try not to leave too many things to chance.”
That made sense—and she liked that explanation a lot better than what she was thinking. “Oh, I figured maybe you’d been married here before.”
He laughed out loud at the idea. With all he’d had to deal with over the years, he’d never even given any serious thought to marriage, much less gone through with one.
“No, this is my first marriage,” he replied.
But not your last, Mirabella couldn’t help thinking. She knew she should be grateful he was going through all this trouble for her and her unborn child, but there was a part of her—granted, a selfish part, she admitted ruefully—that wished all of this was for real and for keeps, instead of just for show and only temporary.
“You’re early,” Mrs. Applegate told Zane. “The reverend’s in the chapel, getting prepared for the ceremony.” Then, turning to Mirabella, she said, “Let’s get you ready, my dear. Your bouquet arrived a little while ago. Your young man has excellent taste,” she confided, then added, “And you are going to make a beautiful bride.”
Taking the shopping bags from her, Mrs. Applegate led Mirabella to the cottage.
“We’ll be back soon,” the older woman promised Zane just before she walked into the house.
* * *
She couldn’t take her eyes off herself.
She hadn’t thought she could look this beautiful, this breathtakingly stunning.
It’s the dress, not you, she chided herself. Now let’s go, before Zane comes to his senses and changes his mind.
“There,” Mrs. Applegate declared, stepping back and admiring her part in getting Mirabella ready. She paused for a second, giving the pearl hair clip a final minor adjustment. “You look like a vision, my dear.” Picking up the bouquet she had on the side table, Mrs. Applegate thrust it into Mirabella’s hands. “Now, let’s get you married.”
“Let’s,” Mirabella whispered. It was meant to come out like a positive statement, but at the last moment, her voice had faltered.
* * *
Strains of the wedding march began to fill the little chapel the moment she stepped over the threshold.
Zane, standing at the altar, turned expectantly in her direction. He wasn’t prepared to see her looking like this and for a moment or two, he couldn’t do anything but simply stare at her as if he was some pubescent teenager.
Mirabella looked eve
n more beautiful than he’d anticipated.
Mirabella didn’t remember walking down the short aisle, didn’t remember clutching the bouquet so hard, she all but severed the flower stems. One moment, she was crossing the chapel threshold, the next she was standing beside Zane with no clear recollection of how she got there.
It was a little similar to the way she felt about how she had gotten to this place in her life, standing in a tiny chapel in Las Vegas, three months pregnant and marrying a man who hadn’t gotten her that way.
Mrs. Applegate discretely stepped forward to take the bouquet from her so her hand was free to be joined to Zane’s.
Reverend Applegate looked like the photograph her grandmother had of her own father on her wedding day, Mirabella thought, instantly warming to the man, just as she had to his wife. They both had a kindly appearance and were not at all what she would have expected to find in a city that performed wholesale weddings. It was as if the Applegates had been born to be the people they now were, a minister and his wife.
Reverend Applegate began to speak.
This might, in reality, be just a sham marriage, but Mirabella still listened intently as the minister said the words that, in the eyes of the world, would bind her to Zane.
At least for now.
There was no one else in the chapel except for the four of them. Even so, Reverend Applegate said, “If anyone has any objections why this man and this woman should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your piece.”
Mirabella realized she was holding her breath, half expecting someone to pop up out of nowhere and speak up.
But no one did.
The rest of the ceremony proceeded without any interruption or incident. And then, before she could fully absorb it, Reverend Applegate pronounced them “husband and wife.”
Her heart raced even harder.
“You may now kiss the bride,” Reverend Applegate told Zane.
She expected Zane to kiss her on the cheek. At the very most, she expected him to give her a peck on the lips. She didn’t expect him to take her into his arms and actually press his lips to hers.
And she definitely didn’t expect him to completely rock her world.
Chapter 14
It wasn’t as if she’d never been kissed before. She had. She had even half fancied herself in love once before. That had been back in college when everyone she knew had seemed to be pairing off and she desperately wanted to be part of what was going on rather than just left sitting on the sidelines.
But despite her best efforts to emulate her friends, she came to realize it was more like she was trying to talk herself into being in love rather than actually feeling any of the exhilarating side effects that came from experiencing love. The first and foremost of these side effects would have been to be on the receiving end of a kiss that threatened to eclipse the sun, the moon and all the stars.
She truthfully had never even come close to feeling something like that.
Until just now.
Suddenly, all the things she’d once believed were really only fabrications of some romance storyteller’s overactive imagination—the racing heart, the swirling room, the darkening surroundings, all of that—she realized were most assuredly absolutely true.
And she knew this because her heart was racing, the room she was in was whirling around her like a sped up merry-go-round, and now everything was beginning to shrink down to less than a pinpoint before it all suddenly went to black.
Leaving nothing behind except for the man who was kissing her and the kiss itself, the kiss that was causing this huge detonation to go off inside her.
Was this really happening?
One moment, she was going through what she’d convinced herself to view as a necessary charade, the next moment every molecule that went into the making up her body had astoundingly come to life.
And was eagerly wanting more.
People sucked into the eye of a hurricane undoubtedly experienced a more stable environment than she was experiencing right at this second. Her breath, as well as her orientation, was almost completely gone. All she could do to keep from being blown away was to hold on to Zane for dear life.
That, and kiss back.
* * *
It was one hell of a surprise. Zane hadn’t expected to have his world shaken up like this. The best way he could think to describe it was likening it to crossing a solid piece of terrain and suddenly discovering there was no ground beneath his feet at all.
It wasn’t even like trying to walk across quicksand because in that case there was at least something there that made him think he could attempt to cross it. But the ground he believed was there had just vanished entirely and he now found himself experiencing the sensation of free-falling through space.
It was exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
The sweetness that surprised him was indescribable.
Her lips tasted of some sort of sweet flavor he couldn’t begin to place. All he knew was he liked it—and he wanted more.
His arms tightened around her as he tried, to the best of his ability, to make sense of it all, to make sense of the intense reaction he was having to this woman.
But he failed, just as he suspected he might.
It didn’t make sense.
What it did do was make him uneasy because feeling the way he suddenly did, he realized keeping Mirabella at arm’s length was going to be very, very difficult. After all, he had told her—all but given his word—nothing would change between them privately. Even though they were now legally married, he’d promised not to take advantage of that—or of her.
Attracted to her though he was when he’d said it, Zane had thought keeping his distance would be easy enough to do, he would just exercise his self-control. But what he hadn’t bargained for was being this drawn to her.
This was, he couldn’t help thinking, going to be one hell of a challenge.
A very distant noise vaguely caught his attention. When it came again, louder this time, it managed to undulate into his consciousness. That was when Zane realized Reverend Applegate was clearing his throat in an attempt to get their attention and terminate the kiss he had instructed them to initiate before the day grew old.
“Now then,” Reverend Applegate told them with a chuckle, “go out and start your new lives—and try to wait until you at least get back to your hotel room,” he added with a knowing wink.
Zane paused to shake the minister’s hand, pressing an additional hundred dollar bill into it. “Thanks for fitting us in so quickly, Reverend, instead of making us wait,” he told the older man.
The smile on the minister’s lips was genuine. “My pleasure, Mr. Colton. Nice to see a calm, clear-headed couple exchanging vows for a change instead of two people propping one another up because they’re both utterly inebriated and suddenly decided, in the middle of that dense alcoholic haze, it was a good idea to get married.” Reverend Applegate beamed at them. “Have a good life together,” he said, meaning every word.
“Wait,” Mrs. Applegate cautioned to keep them from leaving the chapel just then. “Now look this way and smile!”
Before Mirabella had a chance to process the woman’s words, the minister’s wife had snapped the camera she was holding in her hands three times in succession. “One of these should turn out,” she assured them. “If you give me your email address, I can send them to you.” Mrs. Applegate’s words were addressed to her.
Still feeling somewhat dazed, Mirabella gave her the information she’d requested.
“Perfect,” Mrs. Applegate declared, jotting it down. “You’ll have them within the hour. Come, I’ll walk you out,” she offered, then added on an explanatory note, “There’s another couple waiting for the reverend.”
“Of course,” Zane said amicably, ushering Mirabella out behind Mrs. Applegate.
Leading the way out of the chapel, the minister’s wife brought them to the front door. “Be good to one another,” she advi
sed. “And never go to bed angry. It’s worked for the reverend and me for the last forty years,” she confided with a wink. “Remember, words of love are so much better to say—and hear—than words of anger.”
“Thank you for everything,” Mirabella said to the older woman.
The latter waved the words of thanks away. “I didn’t do anything. It was the reverend who did all the work.”
Hugging them each one at a time, Mrs. Applegate then turned her attention to the couple waiting in the wings.
“Guess I’d better change out of this and into my clothes again,” Mirabella said, looking down at her wedding dress. She ran her hands lovingly over the bridal dress’s skirt. “I left them in the cottage,” she told Zane needlessly.
“Do you want me to wait in the car?” he asked her, sensing Mirabella needed a little time to herself to process everything.
Her first inclination was to answer yes, she wanted him in the car because she needed distance between them in order to regroup. But then she remembered the minister’s wife had to help her with the dress’s zipper. Getting the zipper down would most likely present the same problem as pulling it up had.
“I think I’m going to need you to get me started.” The second the words were out, Mirabella realized how it had to have sounded to him and color instantly materialized—a bright, bright pink—and climbed up to her cheeks. She tried to go into damage control mode. “I mean the zipper, it’s—”
“I understand what you mean,” he said, doing his best not to look amused over how flustered she was. Once again it occurred to him there was something incredibly vulnerable about her and he found himself having the same reaction he’d had before—he wanted to protect her.
Entering the cottage behind her, he asked, “Where did you leave your clothes?”
“This way.” She led the way down the small hallway and then entered a room off to the right. Her suit was on the bed where Mrs. Applegate had laid it out for her. “I just need you to move the zipper down to the middle of my back.”
She didn’t trust him, he thought. Otherwise, her directions wouldn’t be so specific. She’d just tell him to pull down the zipper.
The Pregnant Colton Bride Page 13