Three Grooms and a Wedding

by JoAnn Ross

  And as he slid into her with a silky wet ease, he considered, not for the first time since moving into the house, that Alexandra Romanov Reardon was his every wish come true.

  4

  FEELING AS IF he were about to explode, Gage was jerked out of a restless sleep. His aching body was rock hard. And frustrated.

  “Damn.” Groaning, he climbed out of bed and made his way painfully into the kitchen where he poured a glass of ice water. As he chugged it down, then followed it with another, he willed it to cool his lingering physical hunger.

  This was getting ridiculous. If he wasn’t suffering hot dreams about Blythe, he was having them about Alexandra.

  “The problem, pal,” he decided as he put the empty glass into the dishwasher, “is it’s been too long since you got laid.”

  Since the day he’d first met Blythe Fielding, he hadn’t wanted any other woman. Reminding himself that he’d always been known for his patience, Gage told himself that Blythe was worth waiting for.

  He was still telling himself that as he crossed the living room on the way back to bed. As so often happened since moving into the apartment that also served as his office, his gaze was unwillingly drawn to the oversize pewter mirror.

  “Aw, hell.” He dragged both hands down his face and told himself the vision was only a leftover fantasy from his earlier dream.

  But it wasn’t. When he looked into the silver-backed glass again, he knew, deep in his gut, that the ethereal ebony-haired woman clad in the pale, flowing gown was, at least on some level, all too real.

  Unsurprised, since everything else in his life had gone haywire lately, he returned the sober gaze with the same no-nonsense stare that had always worked well for him on the street.

  “Well?” he challenged grumpily. “Which is it going to be? Are you here to grant my greatest wish? Or am I going to experience my worst fear?”

  He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer. He hadn’t expected her to.

  “You know, I really don’t need this,” he complained. “Not now. See, in the first place, I’m a little busy these days. Not that I’m complaining about having too much work, understand, because I’m not.

  “But along with the rest of my cases, this Alexandra Romanov investigation is turning out to be a real bitch. I mean, nothing about it is turning out to be predictable. Or easy.”

  Including Blythe, he tacked on mentally, wondering idly if the lovely phantom with the sad eyes could read minds. “In the second place, I’ve already got two fantasy women driving me up a wall. I’m not certain I can handle another.

  “So, no insult intended, sweetheart, but why don’t you just fade away to wherever the hell it is you phantoms go, and try some other time?”

  Again, there was no answer. But, as Gage watched, her lips turned into a slow smile. Then, as requested, she faded away.

  “You realize of course,” Gage told himself gruffly, “that you’re losing it.”

  Glancing over at the clock, he saw there was only another two hours left before he had to leave for the airport. Needing to work off his lingering sexual frustration before being in forced proximity to the woman who was driving him around the bend, he pulled on running shorts, a ragged LAPD T-shirt and a pair of Nike Air Jordan shoes.

  He left the apartment and ran a five-mile circuit throughout the neighborhood. Then, for good measure, he ran another three miles.

  When he returned home, the pink Mediterranean apartment was bathed in the golden glow of a morning sunrise. His heart was pounding against his ribs, his blood was flowing, he was drenched in sweat and his clothes clung wetly to his body.

  Unfortunately, the enforced exercise had failed to drive Blythe—or the equally luscious Alexandra—from his mind.

  He wanted her. Just as she wanted him. And although he wasn’t certain he could handle the consequences, he knew that the time would soon come to move their relationship to the next step.

  It was only logical, especially now that she was no longer committed to Sturgess, that they would make love on this trip. Striving for the logic that had always served him well, Gage knew the odds were that during their time in Greece, the passion that had burned between Blythe and him from the beginning would flare itself out. It was, he told himself, the logical conclusion.

  The only problem was, there was nothing remotely logical about his feelings for this woman.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE GLARE of early morning sunshine streaming in through the window that woke her. Feeling as if her head were filled with rocks, Blythe moaned and pulled the pillow over her head.

  “Rise and shine,” Gage said cheerily.

  “Go away,” she muttered from beneath the goose down pillow.

  “I could. But then you’d undoubtedly break your record of never missing a plane.”

  The idea of spending hours on an overseas flight made her moan. “Why didn’t you stop me last night?”

  Understanding she was referring to her over-indulgence, Gage decided against mentioning that he had, with effort, stopped them both from something far more dangerous than too much champagne.

  “You’d already made inroads on the bottle by the time I arrived,” he reminded her mildly. “I suggested you might want to go easy, but you seemed to have a different goal in mind.”

  “I was trying to drown Alan,” she said as the memory of finding her fiancé with another woman came back to her.

  “I kind of figured that out for myself. If you’d asked, I could have told you that it doesn’t work.”

  She pushed the pillow aside and opened her scratchy lids. Having achieved that much, she tried sitting up and cringed as the boulders in her head began tumbling around.

  “Tried to drown a lot of women with booze, have you?” She licked her arid lips with a tongue that felt like sandpaper.

  “Only one.” He leaned down and pushed her tumbled hair away from her face with one hand and held a glass out to her with the other. “It left me with a hangover about like the one you’re suffering now. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I still haven’t managed to get you out of my mind.”

  The admission, which she knew was not some practiced line to coax her into his bed, was too much for Blythe to handle this morning. The slow burn that she always felt when this man was anywhere in the vicinity had become so mixed up with a confusion of fantasies and dreams that she was losing track of what was real and what was imagined.

  “Gage—”

  “Don’t worry.” His smile was warm and nonthreatening. As was his hand as he stroked her hair. “I’m not about to push, Blythe. Not until you’re ready.” And from her pasty complexion and red-rimmed eyes, Gage knew it was going to be awhile. “Here. Drink this. It’ll help.”

  She looked at the rust-colored liquid with suspicion. “What is it?”

  “An old family recipe for hangovers.”

  “It looks like toxic waste.”

  “Kinda tastes like it, too,” he said agreeably. “But it works.” His coaxing smile was enough to almost ease her headache. “Trust me.”

  She did, Blythe realized. With more than a hangover cure. Taking the glass from his outstretched hand, she took a tentative sip. “Ugh.” The taste was enough to make anyone give up drinking forever. “What’s in this, anyway?”

  “You don’t want to know.” He grinned. “Come on, Boss Lady. Down the hatch. I’ve got coffee brewing for afterward.”

  Squeezing her eyes shut, she clutched the glass in both hands and swallowed the unsavory mixture down in rapid gulps. “I think I’m going to die,” she complained, flopping back against the pillows and closing her eyes. “Then again I’m afraid I might not.”

  Unable to resist the lure of her too pale face, he sat down on the bed and ran the back of his hand up her cheek. “He wasn’t worth it.”

  “I know.” She flung a hand over her eyes. “It was stupid. But I was so damn mad.”

  “Mad?” Having seen the headache in h
er eyes, he began rubbing his fingers in slow, soothing circles against her temples.

  Blythe could hear the question in his voice, even through the racket from the maniacs who were pounding away with jackhammers inside her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not now.”

  “Fine.” He bent down and pressed a light kiss against her furrowed brow. “As you’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, you’re the boss.”

  Before she could discern his intentions, Gage scooped her from the bed and carried her into the adjoining bathroom. He considered stripping off her silk nightshirt, then decided he could only be expected to resist so much temptation. Still holding her in his arms, he reached into the shower and turned on the water.

  “Dammit, Gage!” Blythe shouted as he stuck her beneath the stream of water. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Making sure we catch our plane.” Knowing it would get her blood stirring even more, he gave her a quick pat on the rear, trying not to notice how the wet emerald green silk clung to her firm buttocks. “You’ll thank me for this when we’ve tracked down Natasha.”

  “If I don’t kill you first,” Blythe muttered in response.

  She didn’t speak more than two words to him during the entire flight to New York. But since she’d spent those hours reclining in her first-class seat with her eyes closed, Gage figured her lack of conversation was due as much to the lingering aftereffects of too much champagne as to her irritation at his admittedly chauvinistic behavior that morning.

  He was right. By the time they’d landed at Kennedy, and taken the shuttle to the international terminal, Blythe was beginning, almost, to feel like a human being again.

  “I’m starving,” she announced after they’d checked the flight information screen and learned their plane would be delayed an hour.

  “I’m not surprised. You haven’t eaten a thing all day.” She’d passed up the seemingly continual meal service, but he had managed to talk her into eating the bread stick that had come with his smoked salmon pasta.

  “I was afraid to put anything on top of that unappetizing glop you made me drink this morning.”

  “You’re still alive,” he pointed out. “And your color’s coming back.” He leaned down and took off the sunglasses she’d been wearing since they left the hotel six hours earlier. “And your eyes don’t look like road maps anymore.”

  “As filthy tasting as it was, I can’t deny that I’m feeling better,” she admitted. “Good enough, in fact, for a burger and fries.”

  “In this place?” He glanced around the terminal with obvious disdain.

  “We don’t exactly have time to run into Manhattan for an early supper at 21.”

  “Got a point there.”

  One of the things Gage especially liked about Blythe was the way, even though she’d been born into wealth, she lacked any tendency toward caste snobbery. He’d also never been fond of women who accepted a date to dinner, then picked at the entrée, perhaps eating one or two birdlike bites. Sometimes he had the feeling every female on the planet was on a diet. Every female but Blythe.

  “You were hungry,” he commented, after having watched her make a cheeseburger, an order of greasy fries, a Coke and a rock-hard brownie disappear.

  “Starved,” she repeated. Amazingly, the food seemed to have done the trick. She was, for the first time today, feeling almost human. “But then again, I’ve always had this horrendous appetite. I keep telling myself that I should watch my weight, but then I get a craving, and I cave in.”

  “I like a woman who caves in to cravings.” There was a bright spot of catsup on the corner of her mouth. Dipping a corner of the paper napkin into his water glass, Gage wiped it away. “As for watching your weight, why don’t we just add that to my job description?”

  His eyes took a long, slow look at her perched on the stool at the counter. “Although it probably isn’t fair, me charging you for the job. When looking at your body is one of my all-time favorite things to do.”

  It was happening again! The hustle and bustle of the crowded terminal faded into the background; the voices, speaking in myriad native tongues, the flight announcements, the no-parking warning, all became a distant buzz. She and Gage could have been the only two people in the terminal. In the world. On the planet.

  “We’d better get to our gate.” Was that really her voice? Blythe wondered with amazement. So calm, so matter-of-fact?

  “I suppose so.” Reaching out, he touched her hair, lightly, only his fingers to the sable tips. “You really are so incredibly lovely.”

  His mesmerizing silvery blue eyes were painfully seductive. The unthreatening contact was almost more than she could handle. The emotions Gage always seemed to bring out in her were neither safe nor comfortable. But, she feared, inevitable.

  “Even with a hangover?” she asked with deliberate casualness that didn’t fool Gage for a moment. She drew back, freeing herself from his light touch.

  “Even then. Always.”

  Although an airport snack bar was not conducive to private conversations, Blythe couldn’t let such an outrageous declaration go unchallenged.

  “You disappoint me, Gage.” When his only response was to lift a brow, she elaborated. “I’d hoped you were different. That you were not just another man who couldn’t see beyond the Hollywood image.”

  He laughed at that—a rough, humorless sound—because when they’d first met, he’d found himself actually disliking the Blythe Fielding of the Hollywood image.

  It was when he’d realized that she was much more than just another beautiful face, that she possessed an incredible amount of depth beneath that voluptuous body designed for sin and sexual fantasies, that he’d known he was in deep, deep trouble.

  She stiffened. “I didn’t realize I’d said anything that funny.”

  Hell. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Gage’s expression sobered. “You didn’t.” His tone was soft, his gaze calm and deep and tender. “Not really.”

  Blythe had the strangest feeling that Gage had known her all her life, was intimate with all her flaws, and loved her anyway.

  No. Not love. Want. There was, Blythe reminded herself sternly, an enormous difference.

  “I’ll admit to having wanted you almost from the moment I saw you,” he said, unknowingly confirming her thoughts. “I also want you more with every minute—every day—that passes. But I also care for you, Blythe. More than I’d planned. A helluva lot more than I should.”

  Her right hand was in her lap. He covered it with his. “You. Not Xanadu Studios’ larger-than-life movie star, but the intelligent, warmhearted, and yes, incredibly sexy woman beneath all the glitter and hype.”

  He said it so simply it could only be the truth. Exaggeration wasn’t Gage’s style, Blythe knew. He was straightforward and honest to a fault. She could only guess how much it cost him to be so unflinchingly open with her now.

  She turned her hand and linked their fingers together. She didn’t say a word. None were needed.

  * * *

  HOURS LATER, after they’d finally landed in Athens, Gage telephoned his Greek counterpart, who’d been keeping track of Natasha’s whereabouts.

  “She’s left Seriphos,” he told Blythe, who was waiting with their luggage in an airport lounge.

  “Terrific.” She dragged her hand through her hair. “If you tell me she’s on her way back to America, I’m going to throw myself off the top of the nearest temple.”

  Despite having napped briefly during the overseas flight, she was tired, and it showed. There were shadows beneath her dark eyes and the color she’d regained after eating that hamburger in New York had faded away again. But she could still not be anything but stunning. Her exquisite bone structure assured that she would still be beautiful when she was Natasha Kuryan’s age.

  “We’re in luck.” Tempted to kiss her frown into a smile, he took her hand and kissed each finger, one at a time. “The yacht she’s visiting on was docked in Mykonos.”

&nbs
p; “Was?”

  “They’re on their way to Aegina.” He brushed his lips over her knuckles. “They’re expected in a few hours.” He touched his mouth to the inside of her wrist. Her pulse was fast, but steady. “While we can be there in thirty minutes.”

  Blythe was exhausted and frustrated, and the way he was tangling her already-raw nerves wasn’t helping. “So what are we supposed to do while we wait?” she asked petulantly.

  “Find a place to stay. Have a bite to eat. A nap, perhaps.” He bent his head and gave her a sweet, brief kiss. “After that, I have several suggestions.” His slow, seductive smile could have charmed the mythical Greek sorceress Circe out of her magic spells.

  “I’ll just bet you do.” She might be aroused, but she was also too intelligent to allow Gage to keep looking at her that way, touching her that way, dear Lord, kissing her that way in such a public place. She rose from the hard plastic chair. “Let’s go. Right now a real bed sounds like nirvana.”

  Gage picked up the suitcases, putting one under each arm. “My thought exactly,” he drawled.

  In the fifth century, B.C., the ancient port of Piraeus had been home to the galleys of Themistocles’ great Athenian fleet. Today, sleek white yachts and cruises were moored in the sheltered bays. Foregoing the lumbering car ferries, Blythe and Gage boarded one of the yellow-and-blue hydrofoils.

  As it literally bounded over the rough water, Blythe decided that the name, Flying Dolphin, definitely fit. And although she’d never been prone to seasickness, she was definitely grateful that Gage’s horrid concoction had calmed her queasy stomach.

  Named for one of Zeus’s conquests, the island of Aegina was bathed in a benevolent gold sunlight.

  Whitewashed houses covered the nearby hillsides in a haphazard series of terraces, their tile roofs blanched by sun and years to a pale, pinkish glow. The doors and window frames were painted in scintillating scarlets, sapphire blues and brilliant emerald greens. “It’s absolutely charming,” she breathed as they disembarked.

  “You sound as if you’ve never been here before.” Gage led her past the colorful vegetable market boats moored at the dock to one of the horse-drawn carriages waiting dockside. A taxi would have been more practical, but what he was feeling had nothing to do with practicality. “I thought you told me you’d been to Greece.”