One Night Stand Bride

by Kat Cantrell

  “You, um...what?” Hendrix swallowed. It didn’t work. Throat still burned. He gulped enough whiskey to choke a horse, coughed and then had to wipe his watering eyes.

  Paul Carpenter approved of Hendrix’s marriage to Roz. As if Hendrix was someone he might have picked out for his daughter. It was as shocking as it was unbelievable.

  For the first time in his life, he’d been automatically accepted by a male of note, one he wasn’t related to, whom he admired, one whose approval he would have never sought, save this specific situation. And he’d never expected to get it.

  “It’s high time that Roz take responsibility for the questionable decisions she makes, especially the one that led to so much trouble for you and your mother’s campaign. I appreciate that you’ve been a willing party to the fix.” Paul accompanied that word with two fingered air quotes.

  The elation that had accompanied the man’s initial statement fizzled. Fast.

  A willing party? As if Roz had somehow seduced him into indulging a one night stand and then orchestrated the photograph? As if Hendrix had been an innocent victim of her stupidity?

  Agape and unable to actually close his mouth around the sour taste coating his tongue, Hendrix let Paul’s meaning filter through his brain for a good long while. At least until he felt like he could respond without punching Paul in the mouth.

  “It takes two to tango. Sir.” Hendrix lifted his chin. “Roz and I are partners. I’m making all my own decisions and rest assured, one of them is to treat her like the amazing, wonderful woman that she is.”

  He stopped short of telling Paul that he should take a lesson.

  Figured the one time he’d had a few moments of approval from a man who could have been a father figure would end in the realization that Roz hadn’t had a relationship with her surviving parent the way Hendrix had. Hendrix’s mother loved him and while his exploits exasperated her, she never judged. Not the way this sanctimonious jerk had just judged Roz.

  Roz was Paul’s daughter and he should be on her side. If anything, Hendrix had been expecting a talking-to about corrupting the Carpenter daughter with his evil ways, which would have been well-deserved and easy to pretend didn’t affect him. Instead, he felt like he needed to take a shower and then tuck Roz away where this man couldn’t touch her.

  “Well, be that as it may, I for one am quite happy with the development. Marriage will be good for Roz and with any luck, she’ll stop the naked romps in hot tubs.”

  “Sir, I mean this with all due respect, but I sincerely hope not.”

  Hendrix whirled and left Paul standing by the fireplace with a bemused look on his face. Having an in with Carpenter Furniture wasn’t going to pave the way to belonging in the upper echelon of North Carolina businessmen then. But what would make Hendrix finally feel like he was legitimate?

  He found Roz talking to Lora in his study and took only half a second to gauge Roz’s mood. Better. She didn’t seem fragile any longer. Good. He grabbed his fiancée’s hand, threw an apologetic glance at her friend and dragged Roz from the room.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded once they hit the hall.

  “You and I are going to go do something together. And we’ll be dressed.”

  Then he’d have a memory of her that had nothing to do with sex. They both needed that.

  “Darling, we are doing something together. Dressed.” And Roz’s sarcasm wasn’t even as thick as it should be. “We’re at our engagement party, remember?”

  “Of course I do,” he grumbled. A lie. He’d forgotten that he couldn’t just leave and take Roz on an honest-to-God date.

  Soon. It was an oversight that he’d beat himself up for later. He and Roz would—and should—go on lots of dates with each other while they weren’t having sex. Spend time together. Get to know each other. Then he could stop thinking about her naked forty-seven times a minute.

  But one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about was the fact that he’d never have realized she was upset earlier if he’d been permitted to turn it into a sexual encounter. What else had he already missed because his interactions with his fiancée started and ended with how best to get into her panties? That question put a hollow feeling in his chest that stayed with him the rest of the night.

  * * *

  Roz took a long shower when she got home from the engagement party, hoping it would wash the evening from her brain. But nothing could dislodge the surprising things she’d learned about Hendrix in the course of a few hours. The man never did what she expected. But she’d already known that.

  What she hadn’t known was how easily he’d figure out how to bend her to his will. She’d naively assumed that as long as they weren’t naked, she’d be good. Wrong. Somehow, he’d gotten her to agree to a date.

  A date with Hendrix Harris. That was almost more unbelievable than the fact that she was marrying him. Yeah, their “date” was a public spectacle that he’d dreamed up as a way to push their agenda. Couldn’t get society used to the idea that they were a respectable couple if they hid at home. She got that.

  But for the love of God... What were they going to talk about? She didn’t date. She had a lot of sex with men who knew their way around a woman’s body but conversation by candlelight in an intimate booth at a swanky restaurant wasn’t in her repertoire—by design. One she could handle; the other she could not. Intimacy born of conversation and dating led to feelings she had no intention of developing, so she avoided all of the above like the plague.

  One surefire way to ensure a man never called you again? Sleep with him. Worked every time. Unless his name was Hendrix Harris, apparently. That guy she couldn’t figure out how to shake, mentally or physically.

  At least the concept of going on a date with her fiancé had pushed the unpleasantness of the encounter with her father to the background. Actually, Hendrix had almost single-handedly done that with his comfort-slash-seduction scene in the kitchen, which she’d appreciated more than she’d ever let on.

  The less the man guessed how much he affected her, the better.

  The next morning, she rifled through her closet for something appropriate for a date with the man who’d blown through half the female population of Raleigh. All eyes would be on her and not for the normal reasons.

  Nothing. How was it possible not to have a thing to wear in an entire eight-hundred-square-foot closet? She’d have to go shopping after she got some work done.

  Donning a severe suit that she secretly called her Grown-up Outfit, she twisted her hair into a sleek up-do that made her feel professional and drove to Clown-Around to push some paperwork across her desk.

  Her phone rang and she almost didn’t answer the call from an unfamiliar number. It was too early and she hadn’t had nearly enough coffee to endure more rejection from yet another hospital.

  But she was the only one here. There was no one else to do the dirty work. She answered.

  “Rosalind?” the female voice said. “This is Helene Harris. How are you?”

  Roz nearly dropped the phone but bobbled it just enough to keep it near her face. “Ms. Harris. I’m fine. Thank you. It was lovely to meet you last night.”

  “Likewise. I hope you don’t mind that I asked Hendrix for your number. I’d like to take you to lunch, if you’re free.”

  “I’m free.” That had probably come out a little too eagerly. Thank you, Jesus, she’d worn an outfit that even a future mother-in-law would approve of. “And thank you. That would be lovely.”

  They made plans to meet at a restaurant on Glenwood Avenue, dashing Roz’s notion to go shopping for a date dress, but she couldn’t think about that because holy crap—she was having lunch with her future mother-in-law, who was also running for governor and who had presumably agreed to be a clown. Plus there was a whole mess of other things running through her head and now she was ne
rvous.

  By lunchtime, Roz truly thought she might throw up. That would put the cap on her day nicely, wouldn’t it? A photo of her yakking all over a gubernatorial candidate would pair well with the one of her in flagrante delicto with the woman’s son.

  Ms. Harris had beaten her to the restaurant and was waiting for Roz near the maître d’ stand, looking polished, dignified and every inch a woman who could run a state with one hand tied behind her back. In other words, not someone Roz normally hung around with.

  “Am I late?” she asked Ms. Harris by way of greeting. Because that was a great thing to point out if so.

  Ms. Harris laughed. “Not at all. I got here early so I didn’t have to make you wait.”

  “Oh. Well, that was nice. Thank you.” A little floored, Roz followed the older woman to a table near the window that the maître d’ pointed them to.

  The murmur of voices went into free fall as the two ladies passed. Heads swiveled. Eyes cut toward them. But unlike what had happened to Roz the last time she’d braved polite society, the diner’s faces didn’t then screw up in distaste as they recognized her. Instead, the world kept turning and people went back to eating as if nothing had happened.

  Miraculous.

  Roz slid into her chair and opened her menu in case she needed something to hide behind. Ms. Harris didn’t do the same. She folded her hands on the table and focused on Roz with a sunny smile that reminded her of Hendrix all at once.

  “I’m so jealous that you can wear your hair up,” Ms. Harris said out of the blue and flicked a hand at her shoulder-length ash-blond hair. “I can’t. I look like a Muppet. But you’re gorgeous either way.”

  “Um...thank you,” Roz spit out because she had to say something, though it felt like she was repeating herself. “Ms. Harris, if I may be blunt, I need some context for this lunch. Are we here so you can tell me to lie low for the foreseeable future? Because I’m—”

  “Helene, please.” She held up a hand, palm out in protest, shooting Roz a pained smile. “Ms. Harris is running for governor and I hear that enough all day long. I like to leave her at the office.”

  “Helene, then.” Roz blinked. And now she was all off-kilter. Or rather more so than she’d been since the woman had called earlier that morning. Come to think of it, she’d been upside down and inside out since the moment she’d caught Hendrix’s eye at the Calypso Room. Why would lunch with his mother be any different? “I’m sorry. Call me Roz. Rosalind is an old-fashioned name that would be better suited for an eighty-year-old woman who never wears pants and gums her food.”

  Fortunately, Helene laughed instead of sniffing and finding something fascinating about the tablecloth the way most polished women did when confronted with Roz’s offbeat sense of humor. She hadn’t grown up going to cotillions and sweet-sixteen balls the way other girls in her class had, and her lack of decorum showed up at the worst times. Her father had been too busy ignoring the fact that he had a daughter to notice that she preferred sneaking out and meeting twenty-year-old boys with motorcycles to dances and finishing school.

  “I think it’s a beautiful name. But I get that we can’t always see our own names objectively. If I had a dime for every person who called me Helen.” She made a tsk noise and waved away the waiter who was hovering near her elbow. “And then try to give your own kid an unusual name that no one on the planet can mispronounce and all you get is grief.”

  In spite of herself, Roz couldn’t help but ask. “Hendrix doesn’t like his name? Why not?”

  Helene shrugged and shook her head, her discreet diamond earrings catching the low light hanging over the table. “He says Hendrix was a hack who would have faded by the time he reached thirty if he hadn’t overdosed. Blasphemy. The man was a legend. You’d think your fiancé would appreciate being named after a guitar hero, but no.”

  “He...he thinks Jimi Hendrix is a hack?” Roz clutched her chest, mock-heart-attack style, mostly to play along because she knew who the guitarist was of course, but she had no opinion about his status as a legend. Neither had she been born yesterday. You didn’t argue musical taste with the woman who would most likely be sitting in the governor’s chair after the election. “I might have to rethink this whole wedding idea.”

  The other woman grinned wide enough to stick a salad plate in her mouth sideways. “I knew I liked you.” Helene evaluated Roz for a moment and then signaled the waiter. “As much as I’d prefer to spend the rest of the afternoon hanging out, duty calls. We should eat.”

  Since it sounded like a mandate, Roz nodded, trying to relax as Helene ordered a salad and water. This wasn’t the Spanish Inquisition that she’d expected, not yet anyway. Maybe that was coming after lunch. She ordered a salad despite loathing them because it was easy to eat and obviously an approved dish since Helene had gotten the same.

  And that was the root cause of her nervousness—she wanted Helene to like her but had no clue how to go about that when she had no practice cozying up to a motherly type. Furthermore, the woman had just said she liked her. What more did Roz need in the way of validation, a parade?

  She sipped her water and yearned for a glass of wine, which would be highly inappropriate. Wouldn’t it?

  “Thank you,” Helene murmured to her after the waiter disappeared. “For agreeing to this wedding plan that we came up with. It speaks a lot of your character that you’d be willing to do something so unconventional to help me.”

  “I...” Have no idea how to respond to that. Roz sat back in her chair and resisted the urge to rub at her temples, which would only clue in everybody that she’d fallen completely out of the rhythm of the conversation. “I—You’re welcome?”

  Smiling, Helene patted Roz’s hand, which was currently clenched in a fist on the tablecloth. “Another thing. You’re making me nervous, dear. I can’t decide if you’re about to bolt or dissolve into tears. I asked you to lunch because I want to get to know you. You’re the only daughter I’ve ever had. For as long as I’ve got you, let’s make this a thing, shall we?”

  Unexpected tears pricked at Roz’s eyelids, dang it. The Harris family shared that gene apparently—Hendrix had that uncanny ability to pull stuff out of her depths, too.

  “I don’t have a mother,” she blurted out. “So this is all new to me.”

  Helene nodded. “I understand that. I didn’t have a good relationship with my mother. Sometimes growing up, I wondered if it would have been easier if she’d disowned me instead of spending every waking second being disappointed in me.”

  Roz nodded, mortified as she dashed tears away with the white napkin from her lap. This was not the conversation she’d intended to have with her new mother-in-law. She didn’t believe for a second that shouting, I still wonder that about my father! would be the best way to foster the relationship Helene seemed to be asking for.

  But Helene’s story so closely mirrored the way Roz felt about her father that it was uncanny. How familiar was she allowed to be on her first one-on-one with Helene? This was uncharted—and so not what she’d expected. If anything, she’d earned an indictment for playing a role in the problems that Helene had just thanked her for helping to solve. There’d been two naked people in that hot tub, after all.

  “I’m sorry about the photograph,” she said earnestly and only because Helene hadn’t called her on the carpet about it. That was why Roz and her father were always at such odds. He always adopted that stern tone when laying out Roz’s sins that immediately put her back up.

  Accepting the apology with a nod, Helene waited for the server to put their salads on the table and leaned forward. “Trust me when I tell you that we all have questionable exploits in our pasts. You just got lucky enough for yours to be immortalized forever, which frankly wouldn’t have happened if you’d been with anyone other than Hendrix.”

  That was entirely false. Bad luck of the male variety
followed her around like a stray dog, waiting to turn its canines on her the moment she tried to feed it. Roz swallowed and ate a tiny bit of salad in order not to seem ungrateful. “I have a tendency to get a little, um, enthusiastic with my exploits unfortunately.”

  “Which is no one’s business but yours. The unfortunate part is that my son forgot that political enemies have long reaches and few scruples. You can only tell the kid so much. He does his own thing.” She shrugged good-naturedly, far more so than should have been the case. It was a testament to Helene’s grace, which was something Roz had no experience with.

  “You’re very generous,” Roz said with a small frown that she couldn’t quite erase. “Most parents aren’t so forgiving.”

  At least that had never been Roz’s experience. Parents were harsh, not understanding.

  “I’m not most parents. Hendrix is my life and I love him more than I could possibly tell you. He saved me.” Helene paused to eat some of her own salad but Roz didn’t dare interrupt. “I have a bit of a wild past myself, you know.”

  Was this the part where Roz was supposed to nod and say, Why yes, I have heard all the gossip about your rebellious teenage years? Especially when Roz’s own rebellious teenage years had been nothing but practice for her even more defiant twenties, when she’d really tested the limits of her father’s patience.

  “Getting pregnant at seventeen was a huge wake-up call,” Helene recounted in the pause. “Without that baby, I might have continued in a self-destructive cycle that wouldn’t have ended well. And now look at me. I created a successful business that Hendrix runs like the maestro of the boardroom that he was born to be and I’m running for governor. Governor. Some days, I don’t know what I did to earn these blessings.”

  Roz’s own eyes misted in commiseration as Helene dabbed at hers with her napkin. “I honestly wasn’t sure what to think when you asked me to lunch. But making each other cry wasn’t even on the top ten.”

  Helene’s smile widened. One thing Roz noticed, no matter what, the woman’s smile never slipped. It was a trait she’d like to learn because not for one moment did Roz believe that Helene’s life was all smooth sailing. No, instead, Helene had some innate quality that allowed her to be happy regardless of the subject or circumstance. Voters must really be drawn to that happiness the same way Roz was.