A Bride For Saint Nick

by Carole Buck

  Leigh was vulnerable, too, of course. One look at her face in the examining room had told him that. But unlike Suzanne, she appeared to be intensely aware of how dangerous the world could be. What’s more, she’d taken steps to protect herself. Many of those steps were small—the careful way she now chose her words, for example. A few of them, however—like her acquisition of a handgun—represented a huge change in attitude.

  John Gulliver had never gone anywhere unarmed during the eighteen months he’d played the role of Nicholas Marchand. A lot of women had been turned on by this. More than a few had been perversely fascinated by his alter ego’s carefully orchestrated reputation for violence, as well.

  Suzanne, on the other hand, had been appalled to discover that he carried a weapon. And while she’d never flat-out said so, he’d come to believe that her decision to surrender her virginity had been fueled by a conviction that Saint Nick was not what he was said to be.

  The stirring of John’s body became a stiffening.

  Memory beckoned.

  The flavor of Suzanne’s sweet, kiss-rouged lips as they’d opened to the coaxing courtship of his teeth and tongue…

  The feel and fragrance of her passion-heated skin as he’d charted her nearly naked flesh with long, lavish strokes…

  Yes, he thought, succumbing to the lure of erotic recollection. Oh, yes.

  Suzanne had shivered like a leaf in a windstorm when he’d dipped his head to suckle at the taut nipples of her small but beautifully shaped breasts. He’d nipped delicately at the jewelhard peaks, then licked the outlines of the lushly pink areolae from which they rose. Her hands had come up at some point during those tactile ministrations, her slender fingers spasming in the dark hair that curled over the nape of his neck. A wild little sound—part plea, part protest—had broken from her throat.

  “Don’t be afraid, sweetheart,” the man known as Saint Nick had whispered, levering himself up a few inches and staring down into his about-to-be-lover’s emotion-clouded eyes.

  “I’m not.” Suzanne had shifted her body in a seemingly irrepressible movement. “Not…with you.”

  She’d tried to hurry him then, her caresses awkward but ardent. Although his libido had vehemently argued otherwise, he’d responded by slowing the pace. He’d done so for the same reason he’d stopped her earlier in the evening when she’d started to refill her wineglass for the third time. He’d wanted her wholly aware—and utterly sure—of what she was doing.

  Well, no. Not wholly aware. Not utterly sure. Because that would have required his revealing the truth about who he really was. And that had been something he hadn’t been able to do.

  “Easy, love,” he’d said huskily, gripping Suzanne’s hips and holding her still. He’d shoved the goad of conscience aside, telling himself that his lies were this woman’s greatest form of protection. All impulses toward honesty had to be deferred until his assignment was over and her safety could be assured. “We have all night.”

  She’d said his name in a hushed, half-suffocated voice, her gaze imploring. “Please,” she’d entreated, the color in her cheeks fluctuating wildly.

  “Not yet.” He’d brushed his mouth over hers. Her tongue had stolen out for a heady moment to meet and mate with his. “There’s no rush. I want to make sure you’re…ready.”

  She’d been beyond readiness—all wet heat and wanton innocence—by the time he’d finally taken what she was offering: Fiercely aroused, he’d still been afraid of hurting her.

  He’d eased into her slowly. Very slowly. So slowly that he’d shuddered with the stress of trying to control urges that were nearly uncontrollable. Constraint had caused his heart to hammer violently. He’d felt the force of each pounding beat from the tips of his toes to the top of his skull.

  Despite his desperately careful precautions, there’d been an instant of pain. The sudden stiffening of Suzanne’s previously pliant body and an involuntary whimper had made that brutally obvious. Appalled by what he’d done, ashamed by the duplicity that had brought him to this consummation, he’d started to withdraw. His no-longer virginal bed partner had clutched at his shoulders, her nails digging sharply into his tautly muscled flesh.

  “N-no,” she’d disputed on a shattered cry. “Oh…Nicholas. No.”

  “Suzanne—”

  He’d felt her hands move down his back, pausing a scant inch or so above the crescent-shaped birthmark near the base of his spine. The pressure of her smooth palms had been a wordless but eloquent expression of her need. She’d raised her hips, taking him deeper inside herself. His bones had begun to liquefy.

  “Please,” she’d begged, arching again. “Please. D-don’t…stop.”

  He hadn’t. Whether he would have been capable of doing so, had she asked it of him, John Gulliver genuinely hadn’t known. But somewhere in the back of his desire-hazed brain he’d been deeply grateful that she hadn’t. He’d waited a long time to make love with Suzanne Whitney. The clamor for completionhad been almost overwhelming.

  He’d slid forward gently, increasing the extent of his possession by a small but critical increment. He’d been rewarded with a breathless gasp that held no hint of hurt. He’d moved again, still exercising great care. Reluctant tissue had relaxed, gloving his flagrantly hard flesh with a compellingly sensuous warmth. A luscious wave of sensation had rolled through him, sweeping him closer to ecstatic release.

  “Yes,” Suzanne had whispered heatedly, her fingers tightening. She’d kissed the side of his throat, licking at his sweatdampened skin with feline delicacy. “Oh…yes.”

  “Suzanne,” he’d groaned, sinking a little deeper into her slick, feminine tightness. Nothing in his life had ever felt so right. So good. So meant to be. “Sweet…Suzanne.”

  “N-Nick—”

  The sudden shrill of a telephone shattered John’s reverie. He returned to the present with a start. His lungs were laboring as though he’d just completed a marathon. His body pulsed with carnal vitality, primed for a sexual explosion.

  He glanced around, momentarily disoriented. Then he remembered where he was. And why.

  The telephone rang again.

  Getting to his feet, he walked an unsteady path over to the rucked-up four-poster bed in which he’d spent a very restless night. The phone sat on a small wooden table positioned next to it, along with a lamp and clock radio.

  He picked up the receiver with his left hand, forking the none-too-steady fingers of his scarred right one through his hair. “Yes,” he snapped into the mouthpiece. “What is it?”

  There was an audible gulp from the other end of the line. Then, very tentatively, “Mr…. Gulliver?”

  John experienced another flash of disorientation. A part of his psyche was still tangled in the potent web of memories spun from the life-altering period he’d spent as Nicholas Marchand and he wasn’t sure how to tear it loose. Turning slightly, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung above a chest of drawers set against the wall across from the foot of the bed. The image he saw did nothing to clarify his sense of identity.

  God, he thought with a hint of desperation. How was he going to persuade Suz—Leigh, dammit!—about the truth of who he was if he could barely keep track of it himself?

  “Gulliver,” he finally repeated, hanging on to the name like a mental lifeline. He cleared his throat. “Yes. That’s right. This is John Gulliver.”

  “Oh, good. This is Edith from housekeeping, Mr. Gulliver. I know you have your Do Not Disturb sign up, so I apologize for calling. But it’s getting late in the day and I wanted to see whether you’d like your room cleaned.”

  John eyes flicked toward the bedside clock. The numbers on its digital readout gave him a shock. Late in the day, indeed. It was nearly 7:00 p.m.

  “Uh—no, Edith,” he responded after a few seconds. “But thank you for checking.”

  “You need fresh towels? Soap? A change of linen? Anything at all?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, if you�
��re sure.” A sigh came through the line. “My cousin made me promise I’d take special care of you.”

  John sank down on the edge of the unmade bed, the insistent throbbing in his body moderating a few degrees. “Your…cousin?”

  “Thalia Jenkins. From the preschool. She’s my second cousin, actually. On my mother’s side.”

  “I see.” He should have anticipated something like this, he thought with a grimace. Small-town rule of thumb: Everybody was related to everybody else by blood or business and they all knew each other’s secrets.

  “She told me what you did the day before yesterday. Went on and on about it.”

  It occurred to John that Thalia Jenkins could use a few lessons in discretion. While her garrulousness had proven useful to him—providing him with cover, should Leigh decide to pursue the touchy issue of how he’d discovered her home address—he had an innate aversion to people with loose lips. Careless talk could kill.

  “I did what needed doing,” he said flatly, wanting to discourage the woman’s interest. “Anyone else would have done the same.”

  “That’s not what Thalia says,” Edith countered. “And I’ll just bet it’s not what that little McKay boy’s mother says, either.”

  “Don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter that he lied about who he is and why he’s here! He’s the only man I’ve ever—”

  “He’s back.”

  Leigh started guiltily, her gaze slewing from the overwrought action on the screen of the small television she kept in her office to the thin, frowning face of her assistant.

  “D-Dee,” she stammered, reaching for the set’s volume control and turning it down. She couldn’t quite bring herself to switch off the program entirely. It was a hospital-based soap opera she’d begun watching years ago, with her mother. Melodramatic though it might be—among the current story lines were a custody fight over a pair of switched-at-birth babies and the angst of an amnesiac bride-to-be—she was hooked. She’d even scheduled her bookshop’s weekly story hour not to conflict with it. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “That guy’s back.”

  “What…guy?”

  The redhead fiddled with the cuff of the baggy beige blouse she was wearing. The color was extremely unbecoming, emphasizing the sallow undertones of her milk-pale skin. Leigh knew that the unflattering attire had been deliberately chosen. While it pained her to see her assistant reject her natural prettiness, she understood the demons that drove her to do so too well to criticize.

  “I didn’t mention it because you had enough on your mind with Andy. This guy came into the shop Monday, while you were in Brattleboro. Tall. Dark. Definitely not your ordinary tourist-type. I would have remembered him even without the scars—”

  “John Gulliver?” Leigh interrupted, her heart skipping a beat. She stood, smoothing the front of the raspberry-pink sweater she wore.

  “You know him?”

  The question triggered a strange tremor in Leigh’s nervous system. Did she “know” John Gulliver?

  No. She didn’t.

  Not really.

  And yet…

  She remembered again the visceral sense of affinity she’d experienced when their gazes had connected in the clinic’s examining room. She remembered, too, the rush of physical response he’d evoked when he’d stroked the back of her hand with his fingertips during his visit to her home on Tuesday.

  She’d never been a believer in reincarnation or the transmigration of souls. But if she had—

  “Leigh?” Dee prompted.

  She blinked, swatting away a stray lock of hair and telling herself to stop being foolish. “John Gulliver is the man who drove Andy to the clinic after he had his accident, Dee.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes, him. Why do you find that so difficult to believe?”

  Dee hesitated, shifting her weight. “I don’t know, exactly,” she finally admitted, her voice constricted. The line of her jaw fretted. “Something about him…bothers me.”

  Leigh stiffened. Something about John Gulliver bothered her, too. Intensely. She didn’t want to think it was the same thing that was bothering her assistant. Disciplining her voice into neutrality, she commented, “He certainly makes a very strong impression.”

  “You want to know the truth?” the redhead demanded with a hint of defiance. “If I were still on the street, I’d make him for a cop.”

  “A cop?”

  “Yeah.” A jerky nod underscored the affirmation. “Absolutely.”

  Leigh didn’t know what to say. She was aware of her assistant’s checkered history, of course. Dee had been painfully frank on her employment application. Given what the other woman had gone through, she supposed she should give some credence to her assessment. But it just didn’t…jibe.

  She had more than a passing familiarity with law-enforcement types, herself. It wasn’t the kind of familiarity she’d gone looking for. Quite the contrary. But circumstances beyond her control had given her a crash course in cops. How they walked. How they talked. How they viewed the world. And if she had to “make” John Gulliver for anything other than what he claimed to be, it certainly wouldn’t be a police officer!

  She wouldn’t have made Nicholas Marchand for a criminal, either, she suddenly reflected. Even after he’d confirmed with his own lips that the stories she’d heard whispered about him were more or less accurate, a part of her had still refused to believe—

  Leigh inhaled sharply, clenching her fingers until their nails jabbed into the tender flesh of her palms. Nick was dead, she told herself. What they’d shared was gone. Thinking about him, about what he had and hadn’t been, was dangerous. Not just to her, but to her son. She had to stop it.

  “Wes doesn’t like him either.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Wes,” Dee repeated, flushing from the prim neckline of her blouse to her furrowed brow. “He doesn’t like your Mr. Gullible either.”

  “Gulliver.” The correction was automatic. So was what came next. “And he’s certainly not mine.”

  “Well, Wes thinks-”

  “How does Wes know him well enough to have an opinion, anyway?”

  “He, uh, met him. Sort of. He dropped by the bookshop Monday, too.”

  Leigh studied her assistant for several seconds. “When did you and Wes Warren start comparing notes on people?”

  “We don’t!” The color in Dee’s face intensified, clashing violently with her coppery-red hair. “Wes and I aren’t—He doesn’t even—I mean, we’re not—God! I just knew…you know?”

  “You just knew that Wes had taken one look at a total stranger and decided he didn’t like him?”

  “Yeah.” The other woman made an awkward gesture. “Sort of. Oh, look, Leigh. I got this feeling from him, all right? From Wes. He didn’t say anything. He hardly ever says anything to me. But…still. I could tell how he felt.”

  “I see.” Leigh let a moment or two tick by. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the end-of-show credits beginning to roll on her soap. “Where is he?”

  “Wes?”

  “John.”

  “Oh. I guess he’s still out front.”

  “Do you have any idea what he wants?” Leigh reached over and switched off the TV. Her hand wasn’t entirely steady. Neither was her pulse.

  Dee grimaced. “He said he’s here for story hour.”

  The wisdom of returning to Leigh’s bookstore was something John Gulliver refused to debate with himself. He’d had to come. It was that simple.

  Or that complicated, depending on one’s point of view.

  Still, he couldn’t help wondering whether he mightn’t have picked a more propitious moment to drop by. Preferably one when Deirdre Bleeker was off duty and the place wasn’t crawling with kids.

  Well, no. Not crawling. None of the dozen-or-so youngsters gathered in the cozy shop was crawling. Running, jumping, whirling around, kick boxing and playing patty-cake, yes. But crawling…no. Not that he could see.

>   John glanced toward the back of the store. The redheaded salesclerk had disappeared in that direction a few moments after he’d arrived, presumably to fetch her boss. He wondered what was taking so long.

  What if Leigh didn’t want to see him? he asked himself. While they’d parted on friendly terms at the end of Tuesday’s visit, he’d sensed a great deal of tension lurking beneath the surface of his former lover’s cordiality.

  Maybe he’d been wrong to hold back the truth about who he was and what he’d been to Suzanne Whitney, he thought. Perhaps waiting was going to make an incredibly difficult situation even worse.

  Then again…maybe he should abandon the idea of spilling the beans altogether. The past was the past. Suzanne had obviously moved beyond it. She had a new name. A new life. Perhaps he, too, should—

  “John! John!”

  John bobbled the hardcover book he had hadn’t even realized he’d picked up, narrowly avoiding dropping it. He turned, his heart thudding.

  “Hey, there, buddy,” he greeted the bundled-up little boy who’d just skidded to a stop about a foot away from him. He hunkered down to kid’s-eye level, controlling the urge to reach out and hug the youngster. He settled for a guy-to-guy wink. “How are you doing?”

  “Pretty okay.” Andy pulled off his mittens and stuffed them into the pockets of his bright blue snow jacket. His eyes were clear, his dimpled cheeks pink and glowing. The only visual reminder of his recent ordeal was a rectangular gauze bandage affixed to the side of his head. “‘Cept my owwie keeps itchin’ and itchin’ and itchin’. Only I’m not s’posed to scratch it cuz the germ things might get in it and then I’d be in big trouble.”

  John nodded sympathetically, inwardly savoring a surge of paternal pride at this last sentence. Impartial judge or not, Leigh had been right. Their son was exceptional. How many other four-going-on-five-year-olds knew enough to articulate a concern about germs?

  “You have to watch out for those germ things,” he agreed.

  “No kidding.” After a few seconds of fumbling for the proper tab, Andy unzipped his bulky jacket and started to squirm out of it. “My friend Bryan—”