Stand-in Groom

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He slipped into a clean pair of jeans and a plain red T-shirt, and then quickly set the table.

  He’d turned on the oven the moment he came through the door, and it was preheated enough now to put in the still-warm containers of food he’d brought home from the restaurant.

  He’d made a lamb stew early in the afternoon, and it had simmered all day, along with his buzzing anticipation, constantly reminding him of the night to come. Now the meat was so tender it seemed to melt from the pressure of a fork.

  The sauce was up to his usual near-perfection standards, delicate and light, with a flavor that added to the richness of the lamb rather than covering it up. This was going to be a five-star meal. He couldn’t wait to see Chelsea’s face as she tasted it. He couldn’t wait to watch her eyes as she realized the man she’d married was well on his way to becoming a master chef. He knew she hadn’t asked him about his work because she’d been embarrassed for him—working in a restaurant. She probably thought he was a glorified waiter or a sous chef at best.

  The water he’d put into a pot when he’d first come in finally reached a rolling boil, and he quickly rinsed a cupful of basmati rice and tossed it in with a dash of salt and a pat of butter. He stirred once, then put the lid on and turned down the heat. The rice’s fragrant aroma soon filled the house.

  He’d brought fresh lettuce and vegetables already cut for a salad from the restaurant, and he tossed them together in a cut-glass bowl and placed it on the table along with a small bottle of his own apple-cider vinaigrette dressing.

  As he lit the candle in the center of the table, the doorbell chimed. Hoping he hadn’t missed picking up any of the stray laundry that magically seemed to appear around the house, he went to open the door.

  He took a deep breath before he pulled it open, but still, the sight of Chelsea standing on the steps outside nearly knocked him over.

  His wife. Her blond hair was loose around her shoulders, and underneath her jacket she was dressed as he was, in jeans and a T-shirt, a gold wedding band around her left ring finger, and a matching blaze of desire in her eyes.

  “Honey, I’m home,” she said, in a decent enough imitation of Ricky Ricardo.

  He laughed, but then stopped, afraid he sounded as giddy as he felt. He opened the door wider to let her in. “Did you have any trouble parking?” he asked, trying to sound casual, knowing that grabbing her and pulling her inside, tossing her over one shoulder in a fireman’s hold and carrying her up to his bedroom to tear off her clothes and bury himself inside of her would not be good form.

  “No,” she told him. “I took a cab.”

  Neither would pinning her to the wall with a soul-shattering kiss as his fingers found the zipper of her jeans and …

  She was carrying a leather gym bag over one shoulder, and he took it from her as he closed the door behind her. His fingers brushed the warmth of her shoulder as an intimate whiff of her sweet perfume invaded his senses. He had to close his eyes briefly in an attempt to steady himself.

  He watched her glance around the small entry-way, taking in his somewhat eccentric collection of mismatched watercolors on the walls, and the soft—and recently vacuumed—beige carpeting underneath her feet. She looked at the stairs going up to the bedrooms, at the old-fashioned coatrack and umbrella stand in the corner, and the rather battered antique that served as a table for the telephone.

  She stood back, slightly ill at ease, waiting for him to lead the way. This was going to be her home for the next year, but right now she was a guest here. “Something smells great.”

  “Yeah. I thought we could have a late dinner. Did you eat?”

  For a moment she looked a little odd. “No,” she said. “But I’m not very hungry—I haven’t had much of an appetite lately, and …”

  He set her bag down by the stairs and walked backward into the great room, unable to turn away from her for even a moment.

  Chelsea looked astonished, then confused as she took in the huge single room that served as living area, dining room, and kitchen combined.

  “This is beautiful,” she murmured, looking at the vaulted ceiling, the sliders that led out to the deck that had a million-dollar view of the harbor, and the sparsely furnished yet comfortable-looking living area. She turned to look at him, narrowing her eyes accusingly. “You have money.”

  “Not really,” he said, moving into the kitchen and checking the rice. “Not the way your family has money.”

  “But this place must’ve cost—”

  “It was bequeathed to my mother by one of her patients.”

  “I thought you told me she had a clinic near the Projects. How could one of her patients …?”

  “His name was David Hauser,” he told her. “He was about a million years old. He lived next door—we had no idea he owned prime real estate all over town—and my mother always made a point to stop in and see him after she came home, no matter how tired she was.”

  Johnny took a pair of wineglasses down from the cabinet as Chelsea perched atop one of the bar stools on the other side of the counter that separated the kitchen area from the rest of the room. She was watching him, her eyes following him as he moved around the kitchen.

  “She always made me cook a little extra at dinner,” he continued, “and take a plate over to Mr. H, even on the days we were stretched a little thin for cash. Sometimes, if I knew she was going to be really late, I’d take my plate over, too, and eat with him. He was very cool. He was born in 1875, so he could tell the most incredible stories about Boston, before the advent of the automobile. He’d lived through the turn of the century and both world wars. He was amazing. My mother was convinced he was going to live forever—and he damn near outlived her.”

  He took a deep breath. “After my mother was gone, I thought about selling, but I’d lived here with her the last year before she died, and I liked it here too much, you know? There’s a little bit of Davey and my mom still here. Their spirits linger—and I don’t mean in a bad way,” he added hastily.

  “I know what you mean,” she murmured, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, still watching him with those impossibly blue eyes.

  “I never had a place like this before,” he told her, losing himself in the ocean of her eyes. “I always lived in crappy little basement apartments or fifth-floor walk-ups with a courtyard view of the neighbor’s bathroom window. So I decided to stay and see what it was like to have a real home. That’s when I put in this kitchen and did the rest of the renovations—I tore down the walls and opened this area up.”

  “Your mother and Davey would’ve approved,” she told him. “It’s gorgeous.”

  She was gorgeous, with the overhead light from the kitchen glinting off her golden hair as she turned to look out at the dimly lit dining area, the living space beyond that, and the harbor lights twinkling on the other side of the sliding glass doors. Even dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt, she looked glamorous.

  “How about a glass of wine with dinner?” His voice sounded raspy, and he cleared his throat.

  She turned to look at him. “Dinner?”

  “Yeah. The rice is just about ready. What do you say we eat?”

  She looked uneasy. “John, I realized when I walked in here that there’s something kind of important about myself that I haven’t told you. I mean, I didn’t think to tell you, and it hasn’t come up when we’ve talked, which is odd, because it usually does, but …”

  Chelsea took a deep breath. “I’m a vegetarian.”

  As she watched, her words sunk in. Johnny first laughed at the absurdity, then gazed at her with questioning disbelief, then looked incredibly disappointed. Finally he tried to hide his disappointment with a smile.

  “Well, damn,” he said. “If I’d known, I’d have made something with chicken or fish.”

  She shook her head at his common mistake. “I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat chicken or fish. I follow the face rule.”

  “The what?”

  “The face rul
e: If it used to have a face, I don’t eat it. I also don’t eat any milk or dairy, although I will eat eggs if they’re cooked into a bread or a cake—John, I’m so sorry. You went to all this trouble to make this nice dinner. …”

  He definitely didn’t look happy. “So what do you eat?”

  “Lots of things. Beans, salad, pasta, tofu, vegetables—lots of vegetables … Just not meat of any kind.”

  “I’m not a vegetarian,” he told her. “Obviously. Is it going to bother you to have meat around the house?”

  “Not if you keep it in the kitchen.”

  He forced a smile as he crossed the kitchen and turned off both the oven and the burner under the pot of rice on the stove and made his own attempt at humor. “At least I found out before our appearance on The Newlywed Game. We would have lost big points, me not knowing this one.”

  “There’s still so much we don’t know about each other,” Chelsea mused. “Yet here we are, about to live together as if we’re really married for a whole year.”

  She found herself watching the loose-fitting cut of his jeans and the more snug fit of his T-shirt, the red cotton hugging his muscular chest and shoulders. His hair was still damp from his shower, combed back from his face and curling around his neck. He looked unbearably delicious.

  “We are really married,” he said quietly.

  She looked up and into the midnight brown of his eyes, and the entire world seemed to tilt around her. He was right. They were really married, with rings and a marriage license and everything. And in just a few minutes—if she could make her rubbery legs work well enough to climb down off this stool—they were going to go upstairs together and consummate that marriage.

  He turned and took a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, and poured some into one of the glasses. He paused and looked up at her, bottle poised, ready to fill the second. She couldn’t begin to interpret the look in his eyes. “Do you drink wine?”

  “Not usually. No. It’s not … I … No, I don’t.”

  He nodded, setting the bottle down beside the empty glass as he took a generous sip from the other, swirling the wine around his mouth before he swallowed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  He looked at her. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. It never even occurred to me to ask if you were a vegetarian.” He forced another smile. “I guess we could send out for pizza—” He swore sharply. “Except you don’t eat cheese, right?”

  Chelsea slid off her stool and moved toward the end of the counter. “I’m not hungry right now. I’d rather see the rest of your condo anyway. What’s upstairs?”

  Johnny looked at her, standing there, leaning slightly against the edge of his kitchen counter. She knew damn well what was upstairs. The bedrooms. His bedroom. His bed.

  Heaven. Heaven was upstairs.

  She smiled at him, a smile that was bewitchingly sexy, and he instantly released his disappointment. Just like that, it was filed away, to be worked through at a later time. She was a vegetarian, and he was well on his way to becoming a master chef, specializing in dishes made with veal and lamb. By choice, his own wife would never taste his most magnificent creations. Of course, she would only be his wife for one year. But he refused to think about any of that now.

  She held out her hand to him. “Will you show me the rest of your condo?”

  She wanted to go upstairs.

  He may have totally blown the chance for a romantic dinner through his ignorance, but there was no way he could possibly blow this. He’d wanted her for far too long.

  Still, he couldn’t seem to do more than whisper, “I’d love to.” Her fingers were cool as he took her hand and led her back down the hallway. As they passed he grabbed her gym bag with his free hand and carried it with them up the stairs.

  He tried to stop at the first door off the upstairs hallway. “This is my home office.”

  But Chelsea only glanced in. “Which one’s your bedroom?”

  “The door on the left.”

  She slipped free from his grasp, and pausing only to glance back at him with another of those incredible smiles, she disappeared into the darkness of his room.

  He followed her in, setting her bag down near the door.

  The curtains were open, revealing more sliders like the ones downstairs and a similar view of the harbor. The moonlight streaming in gave the room a ghostly glow, and Johnny didn’t switch on the overhead light.

  He watched her make her way around the big room. His closet door was open, and as she passed she fingered one of the shirts hanging there. She trailed her hand along the polished wood of his dresser, along the huge bookshelf that lurked against one wall, along the metal frame of the NordicTrack system he had set up with other exercise gear in the corner of the room, working her way around to his bed.

  She turned to face him then, across the wide expanse of his bedspread. “I was thinking that right about now would be a really good time for you to kiss me.”

  He took his time walking around the bed, each step filled with the pleasure of his anticipation. She met him halfway, impatient with his pace, and kissed him, instead.

  Her lips were so soft, her entire body melting into his. Johnny laughed aloud and heard her join in.

  “This is going to be really good, isn’t it?” she whispered, looking searchingly into his eyes.

  He could feel her heart pounding, feel his beating an answering tattoo. “Oh, yeah.” He kissed her again, harder this time. This was going to be beyond good.

  He felt her hands sliding up underneath the edge of his T-shirt, her palms gliding along his bare back, and he knew, despite his intentions to make love to Chelsea slowly, he couldn’t wait a second longer.

  He tugged at her shirt, pulling it free from the waistband of her jeans, filling his hands with the soft weight of her breasts as she fell back with him onto the bed.

  Her legs were around him, and she kissed him fiercely. She tugged at his T-shirt, and he helped her pull it over his head, then did the same with her shirt. His fingers fumbled with the front clasp of her bra, and she quickly unfastened it for him.

  He pulled back then, wanting to look at her, wanting to see her desire for him in the tautness of her nipples and the swell of her perfect breasts, in the way she lay there on his bed, half-naked and waiting for him, in the heat in her eyes.

  “Touch me,” she whispered, and he did. With his hands, with his mouth. He buried his face in her incredible softness.

  He could feel her unfastening her jeans, and he helped her pull them off. Her legs were long and smooth and gracefully shaped and he laughed again because he couldn’t believe he was actually running his hands along them.

  Chelsea smiled at Johnny’s laughter as he slid her panties down her legs.

  She pulled him down on top of her, and before he kissed her, he gazed into her eyes and gave her a heart-stoppingly gorgeous smile. “I’m overcome by the need to spout a cliché,” he told her.

  “Such as?” Chelsea’s heart kicked into overdrive. Was he going to tell her that he was falling in love with her?

  He gave her a kiss that rocked her as he ran one hand up her leg, all the way up her thigh and even farther. He touched her, gently at first, slowly, softly, and all coherent thought vanished from her mind. She found herself reaching for the button of his jeans, wanting to feel his skin against hers.

  “Such as, you’re so incredibly beautiful, just looking at you makes me dizzy,” he murmured, trailing kisses from her mouth down to her breasts.

  He didn’t mention whether or not he loved her and Chelsea didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. And then she didn’t feel anything but desire as he shifted his weight to allow her better access to the zipper of his jeans, as still he touched her, stroked her, harder now, deeper.

  It was her turn to laugh aloud as she wrestled the zipper down and discovered he was wearing no underwear—just the way she’d described that night on the phone. And, as she’d also
described, his arousal gave her powerful proof of his desire. He was totally, incredibly male.

  She looked up into his eyes and he caught his breath as she touched him.

  As she gazed at him something seemed to explode, and the passion they had kept buried between them for so long fireballed. He kissed her almost savagely, possessively, and she kissed him back just as ferociously. She’d never felt anything so intense ever before, and it terrified her, bringing tears to her eyes, but she couldn’t have stopped had her life depended on it.

  His hands were everywhere, touching, stroking, driving her wild with need. He paused only to cover himself and protect them both, and then he was on top of her, between her legs, and she was lifting herself up, seeking him, wanting him, needing to feel him, all of him, inside her, possessing her.

  Owning her, body as well as heart and soul. No, no. She couldn’t think that way. She wouldn’t think that way. …

  “Look at me,” he whispered. “Chelsea, open your eyes.”

  She did, looking up into his beautiful, familiar, lovely eyes. He watched her face as he filled her, his satisfaction evident in the hot, fierce smile he gave her. “Now you’re really my wife,” he said.

  For a year. Only for a year. She pressed her hips up, pushing him deeply inside of her, in an attempt to show him that she was still in control. But she was the one who cried out.

  And when he began to move, setting a rhythm that made her heart pound, she knew that when it came to Johnny, she hadn’t truly been in control since the morning she asked him to marry her. Ever since that moment she’d been careening down a hill toward a cliff, in danger of falling crazily in love with this man, destined to crash, her life as she knew it shattered into a million irreparable tiny pieces.

  But as she went over the edge, as her heart as well as her body was engulfed in waves of sheer, tempestuous, exquisite pleasure, she found a pure, uninhibited freedom in her lack of control. The fall would probably kill her, but dear God, all she was feeling was well worth it.

  She felt Johnny’s release, heard him cry out her name again and again, his voice like velvet, both smooth and rough against her sensitized skin, as he drove himself deeply inside of her one final, delicious time.