Secondhand Bride (The Almost Wives Club Book 2)

by Nancy Warren

  She raised her head and realized she could smell a hint of cigar smoke. She glanced around and there he was. At his ease in a lounger, shirt open at the neck and legs crossed casually at the ankle. “Don’t let me stop you,” he said. “It’s a nice night for swim.”

  Well, he had caught her now. There was no point pretending she hadn’t come here to swim, when he saw her do it almost every day. “It is a nice night. I came by to dip my feet in the water and cool them down.” She suited her action to her words and dipped one throbbing foot into the deliciously cool water. “I hate wearing heels.”

  “What happened to the fancy jewels?”

  She was puzzled. “My what?”

  He made a swinging motion under his chin. “Your royalty-toppling pearls.”

  “Oh, those.” She dipped her other foot in the water and swished it around a little. “I had to give them back.”

  Even in the dim moonlight she could see the amusement cross his face. “Let’s see, your jewels had to be returned, you’ve left the party with no shoes on. Does that dress disappear at midnight?”

  “No, I’m hanging on to the dress.”

  “Only because I was a gentleman and let you know I was watching. You were this close to dropping your laundry and diving into that pool.”

  He rose and stepped slowly toward her. She felt her heart rate speed up. She wanted to turn tail and run but she didn’t. She stood her ground and watched him approach. “I–” What was the point in denying it? They both knew she’d planned to ditch her dress and dive in.

  He was close now. So close she could see the wrinkles in his dress shirt from where he’d been sitting down. “Only thing is, I don’t see a bathing suit.”

  His words were like warm fingers stroking her skin. Crazy to feel such a reaction but she couldn’t seem to prevent her body from acting as though she were still the love struck fool she’d been at fifteen.

  “I…I must have forgotten it.” Oh, brilliant. Exactly the witty, sexy comeback he was used to from the movies.

  He didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t a master of sparkling dialogue. He seemed perfectly happy to stand way inside her personal space and fill it up with his presence. She could smell the slightest hint of cigar smoke, like a raspy note in a singer’s voice, she could feel the warmth of his body, see the darkness of his lashes and the burning intensity of his gaze.

  “Good,” he said, his voice all low and sexy. This was like something out of a fantasy. One of her own fantasies, in fact, from when she was a kid.

  But she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was all grown up.

  She felt as though he leaned toward her but he was so close there wasn’t far to lean. She felt as though she leaned toward him, one of those slow motion leans that he probably wrote in his scripts.

  A chorus of female laughter, quickly snuffed, reminded her that there was a party winding down, a party to celebrate her engagement. And the man standing so close to her they were practically sharing a bra, the man who made her lips tingle with longing to kiss him, was not the guy she’d agreed to marry.

  She pulled away, breaking the spell. “I have to go,” she gasped, and then she fled.

  ***

  Ben watched Ashley disappear into the night, half frustrated and half relieved. What the hell was he thinking? Messing with an engaged woman? Even if it was clear to him that neither bride nor groom were in love with the other, who was he to push his way between them.

  He shook his head at his own stupidity. Turned to head back into his pool house where a much-needed cold shower would take the place of the midnight swim he’d come so tantalizingly close to enjoying. He nearly tripped over an object in his path, bent to retrieve it and chuckled softly. “I don’t believe it,” he said, as he held Ashley’s dropped shoe in his hand. “I do not believe it.”

  He headed back into the pool house and set the shoe on his bedside table. He slept well. In the morning, he carried the shoe out to his work area, put coffee on and waited for the usual splashing outside that indicated his resident mermaid had come for her morning dip. However, no splashing occurred.

  She didn’t come every single day, but she showed up often enough that not to see her was remarkable. He worked for a bit, but the high-heeled silver sandal sitting in the middle of his glass table was distracting. Every time he saw it he was reminded of that very ill-advised moment last night, standing around the swimming pool, when he’d very nearly made a move on a woman who was not only engaged but living on the same property. And to think that Ashley was the one who had pulled away.

  He had a few smart cracks planned to say when she showed up for her swim, foolish comments that would hopefully put the relationship back to the easy familiarity they’d enjoyed before last night. But he never got a chance to use his lines. Work wasn’t going very well anyway so finally around eleven he picked up the shoe and decided to deliver it to its rightful owner. He walked down the winding path that would lead him to her cottage. A full team of gardeners and cleaners was busy at work up near the big house removing all traces of yesterday’s entertainment. He imagined there were a few sore heads this morning, one of which no doubt belonged to the groom-to-be.

  When he reached the cottage he nearly bumped into Ashley coming out the door. She looked much more like the Ashley he knew this morning, wearing a tight jean skirt, sleeveless white shirt and sandals. She carried a big straw bag over one shoulder. When she caught sight of him a slight blush rose on her cheeks. She wasn’t a girl who blushed easily, and had he not been looking at her so intently he never would have noticed.

  She dragged on her usual cocky attitude to cover any momentary embarrassment as her gaze dropped to the shoe he was holding out to her the way the waiters last night held up trays of champagne. “I wondered where I dropped that,” she said, reaching for the shoe.

  “Not so fast.” He pulled the shoe back before she could touch it. “How do I know it’s yours?”

  She tilted her head and gave him a quizzical, exasperated look. “You brought that shoe to my house because you saw me wearing it last night. Whose shoe do you think it is?”

  He could sense the quiver of amusement and knew that she was trying hard to hold onto her snarky expression. “I should probably make you try on this shoe and then, if it fits, we’ll know it’s yours.”

  She seemed to consider the idea. “But then you’ll have to kneel at my feet, and you’ll get your pretty white pants all dirty.”

  He gazed at the shoe and then back at her. “That would be a problem. What do we do?”

  “I don’t know, but we better do it fast.” She glanced her watch, a big round timepiece that looked huge on her wrist. It was kind of quirky of her to use an actual watch instead of her cell phone to tell time. “I can’t miss my bus or I’ll be late for work.”

  “Bus? There must be half a dozen cars in that massive garage over there.”

  “At least have a dozen. But, first, none of them are mine, and second, I don’t know how to drive.” She sounded a little defensive.

  “You don’t know how to drive?”

  “No.” She reached for the shoe, “and I really have to go.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

  “It doesn’t matter. My time is my own.”

  She glanced at him with sympathy. “The script’s not going well at all, is it?”

  He pretended to think about it. “I don’t know. This morning when I woke up I wrote two lines of dialogue. But after I got my second cup of coffee, I deleted one of them.” He shook his head. “No. It’s not going well. Maybe a drive will clear my head.”

  “I work at La Scala, which is a coffee shop with pretensions.”

  “I don’t know where that is, but I’ll come with. In fact, maybe I’ll bring my laptop and work there.” He really liked this idea. He used to write in coffee shops all the time back before he could afford a proper writing studio in his house. Maybe that was what he ne
eded to kick start the script. Maybe he needed noise and people around and chatter and the steam-engine wheeze of an industrial espresso machine. Plus, he was curious about why someone of twenty-five didn’t know how to drive.

  She withdrew big, dark sunglasses from her bag and prepared to put them on. She glanced at him. “You’re not going to be all pervy and weird and keep staring at me while I’m working are you?”

  He winced. “I was hoping my charming returning of the shoe would kind of let me off having to apologize.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise and he saw that faint, faint trace of pink appear once more. “You were going to apologize?”

  “No, I wasn’t. But now I think I should. I probably drank more than I meant to last night, but I shouldn’t have been hitting on you.” He was about to add words like it won’t happen again, but he stopped himself. He tried never to make promises he couldn’t keep. “I’m sorry.” He glanced down at her and held out his hand. “Friends?”

  The expression in her eyes was hard to read. Most of all he thought he saw confusion. But she nodded and held out her hand. “Friends.”

  They shook hands solemnly and he felt the warmth of her hand in his plus the strength in her shake. He may tease her about her likeness to Cinderella, but there was nothing helpless about this gun toting, athletic woman. She was strong. He wondered if she knew that.

  After she tossed the shoe back in the cottage, she shut the door once more and they headed together up the path. Even though there was a huge garage for the main house, the pool house had its own parking spot. He didn’t go in a lot for the big fancy toys Hollywood was so famous for. Besides, his success was modest by Hollywood standards, though he’d already made more money than he ever dreamed he would from the stories he made out of his head. One overpriced ego-boosting toy he had indulged in, however, was his car. It was a Ferrari California and he loved that baby. He loved the low-slung body, handling around corners on the coast road, the sun on his face and the wind through his hair when he took the top down.

  “Hop in,” he said when they reached the car. “I’ll run in and grab my laptop.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Serious as unemployment.” Which was what he’d face if he didn’t get this project completed.

  Since he figured his ride was going to be speedier than the bus, he took the time to make sure he packed his notebook and his favorite pens as well as his laptop. He ran back out and got in the car. The engine started with a purr of power and he backed out and headed toward the road.

  He pushed the remote to open the gates and they motored out onto the private drive.

  “Top down?”

  She grinned at him. “Oh, yeah.”

  The sun shone down and the sea sparkled. He glanced over to find a huge smile of pure bliss on Ashley’s face. In that moment, even through two pairs of dark glasses, their gazes connected and he thought without the double polarized lenses between them their eyeballs might have scorched.

  He silently cursed, and dragged his attention back to the road.

  Chapter Ten

  LA SCALA WAS , AS SHE’D WARNED HIM, a lot fancier in name than in reality. He liked that. She walked in ahead of him and he followed more slowly. She raised a hand in greeting to the three baristas currently behind the counter and then disappeared through a side door.

  He glanced around the coffee shop. It was like a million other coffee shops and yet had its own personality. There were posters on the wall for various Italian operas, and some decorator had drawn fake pillars and opera scenes on the walls, but other than that, the tables and chairs were pretty standard coffee-shop fare. There were half a dozen faux-leather club chairs, all of them filled. The tables were sparsely populated with people reading newspapers, doing God knows what on iPads , studying, chitchatting, or, like him, working alone on laptops.

  He chose the closest empty table he could find which put him basically dead center in the middle of the coffee shop. It would be the least quiet spot in the place, but then, if he’d wanted quiet, he could have stayed in the pool house.

  Having chosen his table, he unpacked his bag, set his notebook and one of his favorite pens out, and then set up his laptop. He removed his jacket and hung it over the chair back and then approached the counter. By this time, Ashley was out front, a dark green apron with the words La Scala written in script across the chest. “What can I get you?” she asked.

  “I will have a Grande café latte, please.”

  She flashed him a quick smile. “I love it when my first customer of the day has an easy order.” She grabbed a big white pottery mug and began doing whatever it was that baristas did. He moved to the other side of the machine, watching her swift efficiency with a machine so complicated it looked as though it could launch a space mission. When she handed him his drink he noticed the latte art in the foam. “Is that a lightning bolt?”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “Huh, I usually get a heart.”

  She rolled her gaze, “so obvious.”

  When he tried to pay, she waved him away. “One of my only perks is that I can give out free coffees to my friends.”

  “Thanks,” he said. When she turned to serve the next customer he discreetly stuffed a ten-dollar bill into the tip jar.

  He took his lightning bolt coffee back to his table and settled down. He opened his computer and pulled up the file for his current script. He sipped his coffee while he went over the last scene. It didn’t spring to life. The problem was the woman. “It’s always a woman,” he muttered to himself, not even realizing he’d spoken aloud until an old man at the table beside him glanced up from his crossword. “You said it.”

  While he pretended to work, he sipped his coffee and glanced around, even though he’d promised not to stare at Ashley while she was working. He couldn’t keep his gaze from going towards her from time to time. He knew there were thousands of young women like her in the city working at coffee shops. They were budding actresses, budding writers, students, or people who didn’t know what else they wanted to do with their lives. Maybe this wasn’t her dream job, but she was good. She moved with graceful efficiency, and when the lunch rush started, and there were four of them back there it was like a choreographed dance the way they stepped and dipped and do-si-do’d to avoid each other.

  He didn’t fully understand why she worked at a coffee shop when there were a thousand opportunities for a young, clearly creative person like her. He also didn’t understand why she had no driver’s license. In fact, there was a lot about Ashley Carnarvon that he didn’t understand, and, curiously, he found he very much wanted to know all about her. An idea began to form.

  He turned back to his screenplay and deleted the entire scene that he had spent the past few days writing, rewriting, and re-re-writing. It wasn’t the writing that was the problem. It was the damn woman.

  He thought about Ashley and her mother and why women make certain choices, and he started again. He’d been picturing Vanessa Moore in the role of the wife, an older version of Vanessa, but her all the same. No wonder the writing was crap. He imagined Ashley, instead. An older Ashley, but a woman who could easily have married the wrong guy. What would happen if she fell in love with someone else when she was already committed to the wrong man?

  He felt an urgency, deep in his gut, that told him he was on the right track. He wrote the scenes straight through, while the fire of inspiration burned. And when he got to the end of the scene he didn’t even bother to reread what he’d written.

  He knew what he had to do. He had to go back to the very beginning. He wasn’t even in the coffee shop anymore. La Scala became a dirty brick alleyway. He could smell stale urine and rank garbage. If he looked into corners he’d find needles. A lone cop entered the alley, humming with tension, ready for a confrontation. A shadowy figure melted out of the shadows of Ben’s imagination and his fingers flew.

  He jumped when a voice said, “Hey!” From the loudness and general irritation i
n the tone, he suspected she’d said it a time or two already. He glanced up to find Ashley staring down at him the way a mother might study a child she suspects has a fever.

  “I brought you something to eat. But the way you’re going, I figured I better tell you or you wouldn’t notice.”

  He blinked, blinked again and then rubbed his eyes. He’d get eyestrain if he wasn’t careful. On the table in front of his laptop was a sandwich, another latte and a glass of water. He looked up at her, only now realizing he was hungry and parched with thirst. “Thank you.”

  She shook her head, her quirky smile playing over her lips. “You’re not the only crazy writer we get in here you know. If you get low blood sugar and pass out it disturbs the other customers.”

  “What kind of sandwich is this?” He said pulling the plate towards him.

  “Do you care?”

  He realized, as she must already have done, that he was starving. “No, not really.”

  “Didn’t think so. I gave you today’s special.”

  “When do you get a break? Can you join me?”

  “I’m not taking a break today. I need to get to class, and if I skip a break that gives me fifteen extra minutes.”

  A frown pulled his brows together. “That sounds barbaric. And probably against labor laws. What time do you finish?”

  “I get off at three. Why?”

  He matched her pissy tone. “Because, if I know what time you get off, I can decide if I want to stay here until then and I could give you a ride to school.”