The Bridesmaid and the Bachelor

by Kris Fletcher

  “Okay.” He sat across from her on the chair and tried to ignore the way their knees almost bumped. “The engagement party was last fall. Columbus Day weekend. They had it in Vermont, at that place they like to go skiing.”

  “Do they ever do anything where they live?”

  He wished she wouldn’t rest her pen against her lips that way. It gave him too many ideas.

  “Welcome to the sweet life, Kyr. Anyway, everyone was there, and there was a pool party. But they wanted some kind of game to go with it. So they got a ton of rubber ducks. All different colors and sizes. They were going to have races and a contest to see who could decorate their duck best, all those things.”

  “Except . . . ?”

  “Except . . . well . . . I may or may not have taken all the ducks and glued them together to make one giant one.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I never said I did, really.” He cracked a smile. “Though I might have been more inclined to take credit if the damned thing had floated.”

  Her head tipped back and her hair shimmered. She broke into laughter, full and long, and damn, every note rippled over places in him that hadn’t been rippled in way too long.

  Nope. Not doing anything about that. He’d been down that road with Kyrie once before, and he’d been left alone and feeling stupid. Not happening again. Better to stay focused on the wedding, the dilemma, anything but her.

  “So do you think that might be it?” he asked.

  “You know . . . I don’t think so. It seemed like whatever it was, it involved a lot more nudging and winking. Though maybe they’re just anticipating another prank.”

  “If so, they’re screwed. I promised Adam I’d behave.”

  “Well, that’s not fair. I was getting all excited.”

  So was he. Damn it.

  “Sorry.”

  “No chance anyone else will take up the torch?”

  He ran through the guest list in his head. “Nobody from Siobhan’s family. That would require pulling the sticks out of their collective asses, and it’s hard to do that with dinosaur arms.” He curled his arms by his chest and held his hands in approximate T-Rex position. She broke out laughing again.

  He should have known better.

  “Tell me about some of your other pranks.” She pulled a pillow close and braced herself against it, leaning slightly sideways. He immediately slid down a little in his chair, hooking his arm over the back. All the better to restrain himself.

  “What makes you think there were more?”

  “Genius like that doesn’t show up out of the blue.”

  “Genius, huh? Flattery will get you anywhere.”

  He regretted the words as soon as they were out. Memories crowded into the room, teasing him back to life, making it hard to breathe.

  “Ben—”

  “Pranks. Right.” Not Kyrie. Not thinking about Kyrie. Or noticing the way the mattress barely dipped beneath her. Or wondering how much more it would dip if he were to join her. “Let me think. There were the classics at field camps—fake scorpions in shoes, pretending to see a snake. One time when we were deep in the jungle in Guyana I convinced everyone—it was me, my advisor, and a bunch of freshman undergrads—well, I convinced them that we had violated some ancient taboos and we had to leave right away.”

  “You are evil.”

  “Me? Hey, I was nothing compared to my advisor. She knew exactly what I was up to. Played right along. She had everyone convinced that if we didn’t get everything packed up and everyone out of there in fifteen minutes or less, we’d be jaguar bait.” He grinned at the memory. “The best part was when we finally told them the truth and one guy accused us of taking a bribe from his mother. Because apparently all his life, she’d told him that if he didn’t get his head out of the clouds when they went places, he was going to say the wrong thing at the wrong time and cause an international incident.”

  This time her laugh was accompanied by hoots of delight. There may or may not have been a gasp for air in there as well. And though it was seriously unwise to pull that delight from her, knowing what it did to him, he couldn’t quite make himself stop.

  Every minute of their week had been like that. Every giggle, every teasing comment, every saucy glance had left him wanting more.

  “Didn’t you ever prank anyone?” Maybe if he wasn’t the one doing the talking, this would be easier.

  “Of course I did. I have four sisters, remember?” Her grin pulled him forward in his chair. He forced himself back.

  “The good part is, Jenna is the really outgoing one, and Annie is the funny one. So they always got blamed for things like that, while I sat back and watched it all unfold.”

  “Giggling all the way?”

  “Amen.”

  “So give me a for instance.”

  “Well . . .”

  The pen went back into her mouth. Not good.

  “Once I sent in a fake update to Bree’s alumni magazine. She was finishing her master’s, ready to graduate, and I sent in a notice that she had accepted a job somewhere in Idaho, and that she was looking forward to starting her new position as soon as she was off bed rest. Because she was pregnant.” A small laugh slipped out. “With twins.”

  “That was inspired.”

  She dipped her head. “Thank you. Coming from a master such as yourself, that’s high praise indeed.”

  “When did she find out?”

  “When she started getting messages on Facebook asking when she was due.”

  “She never figured out it was you?”

  “Nope.”

  He shook his head. “And you call me the master? I’m not worthy.”

  She waved away his compliment, her cheeks pinking up and making a total hash of his plans to keep his distance.

  “You ever do this prank?” He leaned forward to tug her notebook from her hands. But he was so intent on grabbing without touching that he misjudged the angle and put pressure on the wrong part of his femur.

  He thought he stifled his gasp fast enough that she wouldn’t catch it. Wrong again.

  “Ben?”

  The worry in her voice made him want to sit up faster, reassure her that he was fine. He had to force himself to move slowly and deliberately as he shifted into a better position.

  “I’m okay. Really. Every once in a while I move wrong and my leg reminds me that I was—am—not as invincible as I thought.”

  Her gaze flickered down the length of his leg. Not lingering, thank God, but brisk and assessing.

  “From the skydiving accident?”

  “Yep.”

  “What happened?”

  “My toggle malfunctioned. That’s the part you pull on to steer the chute while you land,” he explained in response to her quizzical expression. “I came in at a bad angle. Slammed into a tree.”

  In truth, it had been more complicated than that—his femur broken in three places, his arm in one, and a concussion to add to the excitement—but she was already covering her mouth with her hand and watching him with too-wide eyes.

  “It’s okay,” he said again. “It sucked, but I had good docs and great pain meds. And it could have been a lot worse.”

  “You never told me if it’s going to keep you from going to Antarctica.”

  “The leg? Probably not. Timing is the issue now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My research team is done there. Even if I were to try to sign on with a different crew , there’s only so many people they can take. Fewer than just a few years ago, thanks to budget cuts.”

  “So you may never be able to go.”

  “Let’s say I’m not holding my breath.”

  She studied him, again without anything more dangerous than curiosity. “For someone who was so excited about going there, you don’t seem
very upset.”

  “It’s been almost two years. I got a post-doc position at Penn State. I teach just enough to keep it interesting, and I have plenty of research opportunities. Things are good.”

  Her ached brows told him how much she believed that line.

  “There are other places out there,” he said. “Other adventures.”

  “But not that one.” She leveled the pen in his direction. “Not the one you’d been working toward forever.”

  He couldn’t believe she remembered all this. He really couldn’t believe they had spent enough time talking for her to get this much information out of him. His memories of their week involved a lot less conversation and a whole lot more action.

  His first instinct was to brush aside her concern, make a joke about deciding he preferred the tropics to the cold any day. But if she had remembered this much about the things he’d shared, then she deserved the truth.

  At least, that was what he told himself.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said slowly. “I had a lot of time to think while I was lying in my hospital bed. I told myself I could get bent out of shape, or I could figure out why Antarctica had appealed, and see if I could find another way to get whatever it was I’d been looking for there.”

  “That’s an impressively wise reaction.”

  Not wisdom, he knew. More like a lingering bit of his dad’s legacy, a whispered reminder of Dad telling him that in any situation, there were only two things he could control: his own actions and his own attitudes.

  “Yeah, well, don’t give me too much credit. There was still a lot of bitching and moaning mixed in there.”

  “Fine. You are scum. So what did you decide?”

  He struggled to find the words he had never shared with anyone else. “I figured out that what I really wanted from Antarctica was all the newness. That it would be the most unique learning experience I could ever have.”

  “How did you narrow it down to that?”

  “I thought about other research projects and asked myself what I enjoyed most about them. It always came back to the same thing: I liked going different places because they made me learn more. Not just facts, but how things looked and smelled and tasted, how it felt to be part of that world. Learning that made me feel—I don’t know. Strong. Powerful. Like I could face anything.” He shrugged. “I decided I could get that same experience by doing other things and going other places. Maybe not as much or as intensely as in Antarctica, but it was still possible.”

  “That was a heck of a lot of self-awareness out of one experience,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, it was a heck of a long hospital stay.”

  He didn’t want to talk about the hospital or about himself anymore. She was too interested. She remembered too much.

  And that made him want things he would be smart to avoid wanting.

  “Here.” He extended her notebook back in her direction. “I should get going.”

  Her fingers closed over the cover, but she didn’t pull the book from his grasp. “I thought you were going to show me another prank.”

  He should leave. Now.

  He pushed himself out of the chair, this time without incident. Her head tipped back as she watched him move, her eyes big and her lips slightly parted, and he couldn’t keep from thinking that there was something to be said for rediscovering places he had explored in the past, too.

  He took a step. Not in the direction of the door, but across the little bit of carpet between them.

  He sat beside her on the bed.

  She didn’t move away. She did, however, shift so her hands were tucked beneath her thighs. Thighs which he had no business admiring, even if there was a whole lot of them visible below the edge of her teeny skirt.

  But the tethered hands . . . he could only think of one reason why she would want to be pinning them. Because she wanted to touch him as badly as he wanted to touch her.

  Bad idea. He knew it. She obviously knew it, too. But it seemed the message was being slowed by a rising tide of temptation.

  Show her the prank and get out.

  “So here’s what you do.” He flipped to a fresh pages, drew a circle. “You tell the person you want to show them this puzzle you learned.”

  “Okay.” She leaned over, scoping out the drawing. Her shoulder brushed his chest. Her breasts hovered tantalizingly close to his hands.

  He was frickin’ doomed.

  “What do you do next?”

  There was a breathy quality to her voice that told him she was no more fooled by his feigned indifference than he was. Nor did it seem she was resisting it.

  “Then you, uh, you take the pen . . .” He lifted it to his mouth the way she had, tapping first his lips, then hers. Her eyes widened.

  She didn’t move.

  “And then what?”

  “Then you say the magic words.”

  A smile flitted across that mouth that he couldn’t forget. “Magic words?”

  “Uh-huh.” Crap, where were the magic words when he needed them? “Bibbity . . . bobbety . . .”

  “Boo,” she whispered right before leaning up and in, kissing him and clinging to him and doing a damned fine job of pressing as much of herself as possible against him.

  And damned if he could resist her.

  This. This one. The message seemed to travel from one neural path to the next, faster than he could comprehend, far too swift for him to stop. Not that he wanted to. Because this was Kyrie, damn it, Kyrie was back in his arms and kissing his neck and sliding her hands beneath his shirt and wriggling to get herself on top of him.

  Kyrie, who had left a mark on him like no other women.

  Kyrie, who pushed him back on the bed and was—oh, Jesus—straddling him, fitting herself to him as if they’d never been apart.

  Kyrie, who he couldn’t stop touching and kissing and wanting.

  “I told myself I wouldn’t do this,” she whispered against his chest.

  “Me, too.”

  “What is it about you, Ben?” She nuzzled his shirt out of the way, kissed the chicken pox scar above his belly button. “Why can’t I think about anything but you?”

  He wished he knew. Wished he had the breath to tell her that he was just as lost, but she was moving higher, her lips never leaving his skin as they slid up his chest, her breasts making a perfect triangle of contact. When she couldn’t push his shirt any higher she switched directions, kissing a slow arc from one collarbone to the next.

  Not that he was listening to his common sense any better than she was. His hands couldn’t decide if they wanted to tug her closer or explore the curves that were branded into his memory, so he did a little of both—one hand roaming down her ribs while the other crept over her butt and pulled her flush against him. Each wriggle of her hips against his, each slip and slide and nip and shudder, made it ever more impossible to remember why he wasn’t supposed to be doing this.

  “Ben.” She whispered his name, turning into a question, a demand, a prayer. “You weren’t supposed to be here.”

  “Neither were you.”

  She kissed him again. “Well, if neither of us were supposed to be here,”—kiss—“but both of us are here anyway”—nip—“then what do you think we should do about it?”

  He was on the verge of suggesting some damned fine ideas that involved the bed, no clothes, and a whole lot of afternoon, but his words were stopped by a booming whoosh outside the window.

  “What the—”

  He yanked her against him, rolled her away from the noise, sat up to see what was happening—and realized she was laughing.

  “The fountains,” she said.

  “The—you’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. They always start like that, with the big cannon boom.”

  “I know, but it’s usually not that lo
ud.”

  “My window is open a bit.”

  Good God. And he called himself a scientist.

  The music floated in, faint but identifiable. She pushed up on her elbow, head cocked, humming.

  “Time to . . . say good-bye.” She sang softly, eyes closed, head tipped back, her voice pulling him in like a siren’s song. He was caught between wanting to float in the river of her voice and needing to feel her again—

  And listening to the damned words. Time to say good-bye.

  Oh yeah. That was why he couldn’t start up with her again. That was why he needed to keep his head. Because he didn’t want to start something that he was pretty sure she would finish—and not in a way that was any good for his heart.

  “Kyr.” He started to tap her nose, figured that any touch would be an invitation to disaster, and stood as fast as his leg would allow, his shirt drifting back into place.

  Message delivered.

  “This was a mistake.” There was no question in her words. Just a sadness that left him aching to grip her arms and press his lips to her forehead and then—

  “Yeah. A mistake.”

  “It would have been a hell of an awesome one.”

  “Can’t argue with you there.”

  She nodded and crossed her arms. “I’m sorry.”

  “I might be wrong, but I think I’m the one who started this.”

  “No. Not today. I’m sorry for leaving you the way I did.”

  “Oh.” He smoothed his shirt. It was easier than watching her. “Yeah, I guess I’m sorry about that, too.”

  “It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.”

  He made himself laugh. “You’re not going to get an argument from me.” But as the words landed, he knew that they told only half the story. “And even though my body wants to forget it, Kyr—my brain won’t let me.”

  She nodded, her lip caught between her teeth. “I understand.”

  It would be so easy to shove the past aside, to say the hell with it, let’s have ourselves a weekend to remember. But they had tried that. And while she seemed to have been able to do it, he couldn’t. Not with her.