A Wedding Story

by Susan Kay Law

  She stared at him for so long he was afraid he’d really mucked it up and insulted her horribly. He knew he was not the sort of man she was accustomed to, full of pretty phrases and empty compliments. But Christ, did she really think a few hairs out of place muted her appeal?

  “Then, for God’s sake,” she said, low and urgent, “would you just please kiss me and get it over with?”

  Chapter 15

  He shook his head, unable to believe what he’d just heard. “Excuse me?”

  “When we…when first we met, the first time we…” She wrinkled her nose, as if she wasn’t quite sure of what she was about to say. “I was very young, and very lonely, and missing what I’d given up. What I’d never had, if the truth be told. Very susceptible to handsome, dashing young men who wander out of the moonlight.” She smiled with fond nostalgia. “I’ve been dreaming about that for all these years, which is no doubt why I’ve managed to build those few moments into something much larger and grander than they were.”

  “Grander?”

  “But of course.” Her uncertainty gone, she forged ahead as if laying out a business proposition. “It couldn’t have been that good. No kiss could be.”

  “Is that right?” he asked flatly.

  She continued blithely on. “Of course it is! I mean, it’s ridiculous. A few kisses between two young and, well, clearly irrational people. My imagination built the moment into something outrageous over the years because it had so little else to work with.”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said, carefully neutral.

  “And that’s why, after dwelling on such a minor thing for so long, I simply cannot seem to think about anything else now.”

  He knew full well pride was a dangerous sin but, hell, how was a man supposed to take that? He didn’t trust himself to talk, to make one single move, because what she’d said was now lodged front and center in his brain, big as life, twice as tempting.

  “So you see.” She spread her hands, as if the truth had to be perfectly obvious.

  He shook his head.

  “Hmm.” She pressed her lips together, impatient with his delay in comprehending the obvious. “Our trip would be much simpler and easier if…if I didn’t think about this so much. And so the reasonable step is for you to just kiss me and get it over with.”

  “And you think that will help how, exactly?”

  “Well, it certainly couldn’t live up to my memories, could it? Nothing could. It’s obviously only the wondering that’s got me so fascinated. Once we’ve proven that it is, after all, only a kiss, like every other kiss, then we can put it in its proper place and move on.” She beamed at him, securely pleased with her unassailable logic.

  “Oh well, then. If you’re sure it’ll help.” He gave his shoulders a little shake, arching his neck side to side like a boxer preparing to enter the ring.

  “I’m sure it will help enormously.”

  It was a lot more likely it was going to hurt. For about three days, which is how long he figured it would take him to get the blood to flow back to his head.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Just a moment.” She started to smooth her skirt, then paused with her hands in mid-straighten. “Close your eyes.”

  “You like taking the initiative?”

  “No, I—just close your eyes.”

  He complied. A moment later, he opened the lids the barest slit. He could see only a vague image, blurred and grayed, through his lashes. Her hands flew: tucking in her shirt, ruffling up her skirt and arranging it in perfect poufs along her thighs, fluffing out the mess of her hair into something resembling curls. She pinched color into her cheeks and gnawed on her lips, leaving them plump and gleaming.

  “Okay. No, no wait!” She reached up and popped open the two top buttons of her blouse, a move of which he approved most heartily. Then she closed her own eyes, thrust her chin forward, and puckered up. “I’m ready.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I—” She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly, fine lines scrunched at the corners. “Yes,” she said, firmly enough to convince herself as well as him. “I’m ready.”

  He opened his own eyes completely. Kate held herself still, tension vibrating in the set of her shoulders and the rigid purse of her mouth. If he kissed her, he thought, she was just as likely to spring through the roof as kiss him back.

  And so he looked at her instead. Took in the gleam of her skin, as if the mist had settled there, and the color that blushed along her cheekbone.

  She is such a problem, he thought. For now he could no longer fit her into that neat, off-limits package: the doctor’s deceitful wife. But as much as that revelation had released him, it now also chained him. For she was firmly placed back into the category of a “lady.” No more could he contemplate a simple tumble, one that meant nothing the moment after it concluded except an erotic memory, where she could go back to her life and he could hie off to unknown lands without a worry. Now there were rules attached to her, ones that his mother had drilled in well enough that even all his years away from England hadn’t drummed them out of him.

  But she was not a complete innocent. And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t kissed before. She wouldn’t make too much of this, would she?

  And when it came right down to it there was no way in hell he could refuse her this. Not just out of curiosity, although there was a fair helping of that as well, the same curiosity that no doubt spurred her. Would it be as he remembered? Had she learned something over the years?

  But mostly because, on her knees in front of him, waiting for his kiss, she was the most wildly tempting thing he’d seen since he’d walked into that damned gazebo and laid eyes on her the first time.

  Kate got tired of waiting. Her eyes popped open, and she jammed her fists on her hips. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “Maybe I’m not waiting. Maybe I’m just taking my time,” he said slowly. And then he reached out and laid his hand along the side of her neck, his thumb stroking the cords of her throat and easing along the first ridge of her collarbone. “Lord, but your skin is soft.”

  Her pupils dilated, deepening the pure blue to midnight. “Atkinson’s Honey Complexion Cream,” she murmured automatically.

  His lips twitched. Laughter right as this moment, he decided, would be a very bad idea. But who would have guessed she was so sweet? Exceptionally confident in one realm, heartbreakingly unsure in another. Alternately sharp and fiercely protective.

  His thumb made soft little circles in the hollow of her neck. He breathed in the anticipation, the feminine scent that seemed bound to her skin. And waited for her to relax.

  She’d so clearly braced herself. As if expecting a blow rather than a kiss. But sooner or later one had to breathe, muscles had to unkink. Finally her neck softened and her shoulders dropped. The tense line of her mouth eased and her forehead smoothed.

  It lasted only until he bent nearer, bringing his mouth within inches of hers. She stiffened again, relentlessly apprehensive. He should give her one more chance, he thought, to back out. But it was too late for him; she’d given him the opening, and he could no more resist it than he’d ever been able to resist her.

  “Easy,” he murmured. He was close enough to feel the heat emanating from her skin, the moist wash of her breath touching his lips.

  “Oh, please, just get it over with!”

  “Now there’s what a man wants to hear.”

  “But—”

  He took advantage of the slight opening as she formed the words, lowering his mouth to hers at the first syllable. Softly, surely, a bare meeting where their breaths tangled more than their lips. He held his mouth still, though he felt the effort of it through his shoulders, in the tight coil of tension in his belly, and just breathed her in, smell and taste and feel.

  “Oh,” she sighed softly, and went lax. He felt the tension seep out of her, the easing of her muscles where he touched her, the softening of her lips against his.

&nb
sp; And he lost all intent, all plan and control. It blurred into one great, shimmering haze of sensation, the physical experience overwhelming thought.

  Her mouth trembled and opened for him. Her hands found his back and clutched there, crumpling his shirt, digging deeply into muscle.

  Tenderness surrendered to greed. Too many places to touch, to much to explore, too many wonders to appreciate—he couldn’t separate out any one of them, couldn’t focus on her mouth or the feel of her back twisting beneath his hands. There was just one slick blur of her, a heated, shifting fantasy of all the dreams of her he’d ever had, all the visions he’d never allowed to star her face, and now, the woman he held, her vivid presence making all the rest, those memories that had tortured him for so long, suddenly go pale.

  “Oh, God.” She broke away, jerking herself from his grasp, stealing her wonderful mouth from his with such abruptness it left him dazed, grasping at empty air.

  “Oh!” She flapped her hands before her face, as if trying to dry away tears, and pressed her knuckles to her mouth.

  She swayed on her knees, only a few tempting inches away. Her skin was flushed, her mouth tender-looking. Without thought, without intent, he reached for her again.

  “No!” She shrank away. “Damn. Damn you.”

  “What?” All right, perhaps he’d been too lost, too taken with her, at last, in his arms, to take the care he should have. There were a thousand tricks, a hundred secrets he’d learned in mysterious corners of the world, and he’d been too absorbed in her to use any of them. “Here,” he said. “I’ll fix it. Come—”

  “Damn you,” she said again, the sweet, passionate haze in her eyes sharpening to open accusation.

  He winced. “I—”

  “I cherished that kiss in the gazebo for years,” she went on. “Boxed it away in glass, perfect and fragile. I dreamed of it, longed for it. For all the things I’d never had, never would have, I’d had that. If I had nothing else, I’d had a kiss for the ages.

  “And now you—” She jabbed a finger into his chest, the force of her rage pushing him back. “You had to go and ruin it.”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” he said, thinking frantically. What would she like best? He could—

  “You stole that from me. To find out that my perfect memory was merely a girl’s kiss after all, that it was merely nice compared to what a kiss could be—oh, what am I supposed to do now? If I longed for that for a dozen years, I can barely guess how long this is going to haunt me.”

  “I—” He shut up and let the words swirl around in his brain a bit until he was sure he was making sense of them. She…she wasn’t disappointed. She worried that he’d marked her for life? Damn, but that went to his head, a peculiar mix of pride and worry. For she’d marked him every bit as strongly, and wasn’t that a mess?

  He had to say something that would make it okay. Preferably something that would make this nice and simple and clean for him, while ensuring she’d never forget one solitary instant. “Kate—” Hell. Words. What good were words? He gave in and reached for her.

  “Oh, no.” She scrambled to her feet and backed away, hair and skirts swirling around her like a vengeful siren. “I can’t think straight when you’re touching me.”

  “Trust me, darling, that’s a good thing.” He grinned and followed her up, smiling when she took a step back. Her skirt was damp at the knees and her mouth was still puffy from his kiss, and did she really think she could get away from him that easily? “A very good thing.”

  “No.” She flung a hand out to put space between them and touched the other to her temple. “There’s a reason we can’t do this. I know there is. I can’t come up with it right now, but I’m sure there is.”

  A very faint suspicion, the barest suggestion that she might be right, niggled at the back of his brain. He wouldn’t listen to it. It was paying attention to just those sorts of qualms that robbed men of fun all the time.

  “You can’t come up with a reason because there isn’t one,” he said, and moved forward until the palm of her hand came up flat against his chest. Even that contact seared him, sent his heart into a wild rhythm as if it were trying to beat its way out of his chest to her.

  Her eyes fell to where she touched him, her small hand pale and shaking and so erotic just laying there against his chest that if she touched him anywhere else it would surely destroy him. And in that moment he didn’t give a damn. Her eyes went soft and unfocused, and her fingers swept in a gentle arc while he held his breath and felt every single increment of movement.

  And then her gaze cleared. She snatched her hand back. “No,” she said, with a ring of finality that sounded a death knell to his plans.

  “Yes,” he said, one last-ditch attempt even as he knew it was hopeless.

  “No. If there’s no reason not to, there won’t be any reason tonight, or tomorrow.”

  But there’d be reasons. Doctor Goodale, big and real between them. The fact that Jim fit into her life no more neatly than she would fit into his, which was not at all. That they’d a competition to win, one that required more attention and thought than either one was expending on it at the moment.

  But damn. Damn!

  She rubbed her palms together, then smoothed them down the front of the ruin of her dress as if she didn’t know what to do with them. “I’m not the sort who leaps without looking,” she said. “I like to decide.”

  “Maybe that explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

  Her eyes darkened. “That’s not fair.”

  He had the dim notion that someday—in a week or two—he’d know that it wasn’t. But at the moment, caught in the vicious, painful grip of frustrated passion, he didn’t much care about fair.

  He turned away and strode over to the rim of the cave, staring out at the roiling gray sea. It seethed between him and the shore, waiting to slap at him with cold and power.

  “Jim.” She’d come up behind him—nearer than she would have if she had the slightest inkling of how thin his control had shredded—and spoke softly.

  “I wouldn’t,” he warned her, his voice dangerously low.

  “Jim—”

  “Not now.” The icy churn of the water seemed the lesser evil. “Time to go swimming.” He began to strip off his shirt.

  “You’re not going in there.”

  “Here.” He tossed his shirt in her direction and began to pick his way down the slope toward the water.

  “Hello!” Their heads swiveled in tandem toward the sound. Charlie Hobson wavered on the narrow ledge that led to the cave’s entrance. He ventured a wave, bobbled, then flattened himself against the side.

  “What the hell?” Jim clambered back up to her side.

  “Well.” Charlie pointed his thumb back up the slope. “Let’s meet topside, shall we?”

  Jim grabbed his shirt and shrugged into it. The trip back up seemed much easier than down. It felt like only a few moments had passed before they rounded the top to find Hobson waiting for them, red-faced and sweating in the cool morning mist.

  “Well, well. You do show up in the most interesting places, don’t you?” Jim said.

  “Part of my job.” He spoke to Jim, but he looked at Kate. “Rough night?”

  Two words, and Kate was suddenly, unbearably conscious of how she must appear. A glance at her skirt showed it to be hardly worthy of a rag basket. Her hand crept up to her hair and found it a snarl the size of a bird’s nest near the back. She must look…old. Ordinary.

  Jim edged between her and the reporter, blocking the man’s gaze. For a second she was grateful. And then she thought, no. No.

  She stepped out from his protective shadow. “Actually, it was surprisingly…comfortable.” Beside her, she felt Jim’s amazement and didn’t dare glance his way. “No, it’s his insistence on a morning swim that’s disturbing me.”

  “Is that what you were arguing about?” Hobson asked.

  “Arguing?”

  “When I first saw the two of you, you look
ed a bit…intense.” Was that the reporter’s stock in trade, Kate wondered? A leading comment, a level gaze, then the pregnant waiting silence that encouraged one to blurt something, anything, to fill it?

  “Facing a choice between swimming in that and starving to death on this rock tends to make me a bit serious,” she said smoothly.

  He smiled blandly. “I suppose it would.”

  “Convenient of you to show up,” Jim put in. “Very timely. Seems to be a habit of yours.”

  “I try.”

  “How’d you know we were here?”

  “Been following the competitors. Everybody has to show up here, sooner or later.”

  “Everybody?” Kate asked, all innocence. “Who’s been here so far?”

  “Oh, no.” Charlie waggled a chiding finger. “I’m not telling you how far along anybody else is.”

  “I was just curious.”

  “I’m sure you were. Anyway, I saw you two come over yesterday. When you didn’t come back—”

  “Yesterday? You saw us then and just left us here all night?”

  “Hey, now, how was I supposed to know?” He spread his hands. “Thought maybe you two wanted to be alone. Deserted island and all that.”

  “That wasn’t the plan, no. Our boat left without us.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry. This morning, I figured I’d row on over and see what was up. Just in case.”

  “How lucky for us,” Jim said without inflection. “Much as I’ve enjoyed the chat, I’d as soon get going.”

  “Wouldn’t do to get too far behind, would it?” said Hobson, his smugness almost perfectly disguised. He knew very well where everyone else was, Kate thought, and thoroughly enjoyed knowing something they didn’t.

  “Let’s go.”

  Hobson had tied his boat behind a boulder out of sight of most of the island. No wonder they hadn’t seen him coming. Jim’s hand hovered at Kate’s elbow as she clambered over the rough rocks, perfectly correct on the surface, but his thumb stroked inside her elbow with easy sensuality that had her stumbling along the way.

  “Bet you’re glad to see that boat,” Hobson said.