The Groom's Stand-In (Special Edition)

by Gina Wilkins

  “He’s probably been here recently—maybe even last weekend. Probably fishes nearby.”

  “If he comes often, then he probably doesn’t live very far away. We must be getting closer to civilization.”

  “I think you’re right.” Satisfied that he’d treated every visible cut, he looked up from her feet. “Any other injuries you need me to treat?”

  Her smile was suddenly wicked. Before he could predict what she was going to do, she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Just one,” she murmured against his lips. And then kissed him.

  Oh, hell. He was only human. Dragging her against him, he slanted his mouth to a better angle and took her up on what she was offering.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chloe’s lips had been ice-cold when Donovan had pulled her from that stream. Now they were warm enough to sear a brand on his soul…if he wasn’t careful. But maybe it was too late for caution.

  She murmured her pleasure with his response and snuggled closer, so that it was too damned obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra beneath the shirt. Or anything else, most likely. His hands wandered almost without volition, stroking her smooth thighs, her softly curved hips and slender waist. Her breasts were on the small side, but firm and high—just the right size to fill his hands when he smoothed them slowly upward.

  Pressing herself into his touch, Chloe locked her hands in his damp hair, and kissed him as though she had been starved more for him than for food.

  Being wanted so badly was intoxicating. Made him feel special. Almost like a man who deserved a woman like Chloe.

  He started to pull back. She tightened her grip and parted her lips for him. There was no way he could resist the temptation to deepen the kiss. Just for a moment, he promised himself.

  One taste and he was lost.

  The too-loose borrowed jeans grew significantly tighter as his tongue plunged repeatedly into her mouth to mate with hers. Her hands were suddenly all over him, stroking, exploring, testing his strength. She seemed to take as much pleasure from touching him as he did her—and that, too, was a heady sensation.

  He tried to remind himself that she was endowing him with qualities he didn’t possess. That she was turning him into some sort of hero because they had grown so dependent on each other during their ordeal. Yet when she kissed him like this, he found it all too easy to believe she wanted him for exactly who he was. Flaws, baggage and all.

  That sort of self-deception was dangerous. Addictive. He’d never even been tempted to indulge in it before.

  Everything was different with Chloe. She tempted him in ways he’d never been tempted before.

  She almost tempted him to forget she was the woman his best friend planned to marry.

  The thought of Bryan gave him the willpower to rip his mouth from Chloe’s. “We can’t do this.”

  She blinked and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue—a gesture that almost shattered his sanity again. “Are you in pain?” she asked, her voice bedroom-husky.

  “Oh, yeah,” he groaned, pushing himself away from her. How had they ended up sprawled in this position, with her on her back and him draped over her? He didn’t even remember moving.

  Rising to her elbows, she studied him anxiously. “Is it your leg? Have you twisted it?”

  “My leg is fine.” It hurt like hell, of course, now that his attention had been called to it, but he welcomed the pain. It gave him something to concentrate on besides the throbbing ache in his groin.

  She reached out to brush her fingertips through the lock of hair that habitually tumbled onto his forehead, being careful to avoid the swollen bump at his temple. “You’re being macho again, aren’t you? I know your leg is hurting.”

  He pulled away from her gentle touch, sliding to the other end of the couch. He wasn’t quite ready to stand. “I’ll take some more painkillers. Why don’t you go lie down for a while? I want to look around for a way to get us out of here.”

  “And after we get out?” she asked, keeping her gaze locked on his face.

  After that, he thought, they would go their separate ways. She would get over this danger-induced crush she seemed to have developed for him, and she would probably marry Bryan. And he would have to figure out how to spend the rest of his life avoiding his best friend’s wife. The woman who was everything he could have wanted—had things been different. Had he been different.

  “Get some rest, Chloe,” he said again, refusing to meet her eyes. “By tomorrow you’ll be home.”

  “Home,” she murmured. “Where is home for you, Donovan? I don’t even know.”

  “I don’t have a home.” He had an apartment, of course, but he thought of it as a place to sleep, a place to store his stuff. Not home. “I haven’t wanted one.”

  “Everyone wants a home.”

  “Not everyone.” He finally stood, balancing his weight carefully on his left leg. “Go to bed. We’re both tired and keyed up. Things will look different tomorrow.”

  “Not that different. Not to me. You don’t give me much credit, do you?”

  He heard the irritation in her voice as she also rose. He knew she didn’t like his repeated assurances that her feelings for him were being unduly influenced by what they had been through together—but eventually she would realize that he was right.

  He was afraid she was going to argue more. But it seemed even Chloe’s impressive courage had limits. “I’ll lie down for a while in the small bedroom,” she said, turning toward the door. “Let me know if you find anything interesting.”

  “I will.”

  He watched her leave. There was wounded pride in the angle of her shoulders when she stepped into the hallway. Maybe she was already getting over her crush, he mused. Maybe she was beginning to remember now why she hadn’t much liked him before they’d been forced to spend so much time together.

  Picturing the condition of her feet, he grimaced, almost feeling the pain she must have endured. She hadn’t deserved any of what she had been through the past few days. He was convinced that Bryan would do everything he could to make certain she would never have to suffer fear or pain again. Chloe deserved to live in luxury.

  Donovan still believed Bryan would charm her into marrying him. Bryan had recognized immediately what a special woman she was—perhaps even more quickly than Donovan had. A fitting match for an extraordinary man like Bryan Falcon.

  As for himself—well, he was merely ordinary. From his dysfunctional childhood to his occasionally disreputable adulthood, he’d been nobody until Bryan had given him a job—and, more than that, a future.

  A future that included her only as his best friend’s wife.

  He closed his eyes and gave himself a moment to deal with that pain. And then he shoved his feelings aside and turned away from the hallway into which she had disappeared. He had to figure out a way to get them out of here. The sooner, the better.

  Chloe was tired, but not sleepy. Lying on top of the quilt that served as a spread on the twin bed in the smaller of the trailer’s two bedrooms, she stared at the ceiling and wondered what the next day would bring—as she had been doing for the past half hour or so since she had left Donovan in the living room.

  By this time tomorrow, if not before, she could well be back in her own apartment, reunited with her sister, back to her “normal” life. Perhaps trying desperately to pretend that she was still the same person she had been before three greedy and unscrupulous men had ordered her into a van just four days earlier.

  She had a bad feeling about the way Donovan had just shut her out after kissing her until she hadn’t been able to think of anything but him. About how badly she wanted him. And how hard she had fallen for him.

  She knew he still didn’t trust their feelings, still felt torn by his loyalty to Bryan, but she was afraid if they didn’t talk while they had the chance, they never would. She would break things off with Bryan, and then Donovan would disappear from her life forever.

  She couldn’t
allow that to happen without even making an effort to stop it. If there was one thing she had learned from this ordeal, it was that sometimes she had to forge ahead despite fear, despite risk, despite the possibility of pain.

  She was trying to decide how to confront him about his feelings for her when she heard the outside door to the trailer open and close rather forcefully. Donovan?

  She rolled off the bed and hurried toward the main room again.

  Donovan was standing just inside the front door to the trailer. His hair was wind-tossed, he was still wearing the ill-fitting flannel shirt and jeans, and he’d found a pair of slip-on canvas shoes that looked a good two sizes too big for him. Anyone else might have looked a bit silly in that garb, she mused, taking a moment to study him. Donovan looked devastatingly sexy—but then, she’d thought the same when he’d been unshaven and dirty and dressed in his ripped black clothes.

  His eyebrows lifted when he saw her standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  “I wasn’t asleep. What were you doing outside?”

  “Just looking around.”

  “You shouldn’t be walking around on that leg. Are you trying to do as much damage to it as possible?”

  “I’m trying to get you back to your family,” he retorted. “And I found our way out.”

  Her heart jumped into her throat. “You did? What? How?”

  “An ATV. One of the big two-passenger four-wheelers hunters use. It’s stored in a small shed out back.”

  “A locked shed, I presume?”

  “It was.”

  She shook her head. “Did you find a key to the ATV?”

  “No. But we won’t need one. As soon as you’re ready, we’ll get on the road.”

  “You’re going to hot-wire it?”

  He nodded, apparently having no concern about his ability to do just that.

  “We, um, won’t be in danger of being arrested for breaking and entering or theft as soon as we reach a town?”

  “We aren’t stealing anything. We’re borrowing—and the owner will be reimbursed for his trouble.”

  She looked around the trailer, suddenly, unaccountably nervous about leaving it. “What should I do to get ready?”

  “Let’s try to find you some pants and socks, maybe a pair of shoes. They’ll all be too big, of course, but it’ll be better than trying to ride on the back of an ATV wearing nothing more than a shirt.”

  She nodded and turned back toward the bedrooms.

  They found her a pair of black sweatpants with a drawstring waist and some thick white tube socks that covered her all the way to her knees. Shoes were more of a problem. They finally uncovered a pair of rubberized lace-up boots that were ridiculously large, but she was able to keep them on by lacing them tightly around her ankles.

  “I look ridiculous,” she said ruefully, glancing down at her outfit.

  As if by impulse, Donovan reached out to smooth a strand of hair away from her face. “You look fine.”

  Something in his voice made her reach out to him. “Donovan—”

  He turned away. “We’d better get going. It’s almost 4:00 p.m. now, and we don’t know how far we are from a town.”

  “I know we have to concentrate on getting rescued now,” she said evenly, though his rebuff had stung. “But when we get back, we need to talk.”

  “When we get back, we’re both going to be very busy,” he replied. “First thing we do is make sure the guys who grabbed us are identified and brought to justice. After that, I’ve got a week’s worth of work to catch up on. I’m going to be tied up for quite a while—as I’m sure you will be.”

  “And what about us?”

  He shrugged, refusing to meet her eyes. “I doubt that we’ll see each other much. Except for your connection to Bryan, you and I don’t exactly move in the same circles. If you break things off with him, as you say you’re thinking about doing, there will be no reason for us to see each other at all.”

  She bit her lip. He couldn’t make his message much clearer. He had every intention of taking her back to civilization and then walking away from her.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said quietly.

  His cheek muscles flexed. “You’ll get over it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He took a step toward the doorway. “I’ll go start the ATV, and bring it around to the front.”

  “Donovan.” It took more courage for her to speak then than it had to plunge into that forest on the first night, or to face any of the obstacles they had shared since. “What do you feel about me?”

  He stopped with his back to her, his shoulders tense. “What I feel at this moment isn’t really relevant. It’s what’s waiting for us in our real lives that matters. You have your shop, your sister, your parents—you can have Bryan, if you want him. I have my work. You want to get married, have kids, paint your picket fences. I don’t even want a houseplant. Too much responsibility. The thing would die of neglect.”

  Was it that he didn’t want responsibility—or was he afraid of it? He’d survived a father who had walked out on him, a mother who had died of a neglected infection, relatives who apparently hadn’t wanted him or cared enough about him, a stint in the military, a bodyguarding assignment that had ended badly. The only stability he’d known in his life had apparently come from his friendship with Bryan.

  Understanding his fears didn’t help her figure out how to get through them.

  Maybe she was reading too much into a few kisses. But she didn’t think so. She believed Donovan cared for her. He’d shown her so in too many ways to discount. Now if only she could get him to admit it—first to himself, and then to her.

  He didn’t give her a chance to argue any further. “I’ll bring the ATV around to the front. Meet me there when you’re ready to go.”

  He walked out of the room without looking back.

  Pushing away a weary urge to cry, Chloe ran a hand through her hair and tried, in vain, to be more excited about the prospect of rescue.

  “Chloe!”

  Looking around in response to her name, Chloe didn’t even have a chance to speak before she was engulfed in a hug that nearly cut off her air supply. Instead of protesting, she returned the embrace, as happy as Grace was to be reunited with her twin. The IV line in her right arm got in the way, but they ignored it as they rejoiced in being back together.

  Wearing a thin hospital gown to replace the clothes she’d borrowed from the trailer, she was lying in a narrow bed in a northwest Arkansas hospital. She could hardly remember how she’d gotten here. After a teeth-jarring, bone-jolting hour on the back of the noisy ATV, she had been dazed, feverish and exhausted when Donovan had driven them into a small town. The town’s tiny police station was one of the first buildings they had spotted. Donovan had driven her straight to the front door.

  The next couple of hours had been a blur of activity. Explanations, telephone calls, people hovering over her, bringing her blankets and warm drinks, and finally a long ambulance ride to this hospital, where she and Donovan had been separated immediately. She’d wanted to cling to him, but she’d managed to resist, knowing that he needed medical attention as badly as she did.

  It bothered her that he had hardly looked at her as they’d wheeled him away.

  She hadn’t been in this room long before Grace and Bryan had rushed in. Sitting on the bed beside her, Grace finally pushed back far enough to study her. “Oh, my God, you look awful. Are you all right?”

  “The doctor treated some wounds on my feet and prescribed some strong antibiotics to ward off infection. I was mildly dehydrated, so they hooked up the IV. I’m tired, of course, but I’ll be fine.”

  “You scared me half to death,” Grace scolded, lines of strain still visible around her eyes and mouth. “I didn’t know if you were alive or hurt or…well, you know.”

  “I know. I’m sorry for what you went through.” Chloe could only imagine how she would have felt if the situation had been reverse
d.

  Having held back until after the sisters’ reunion, Bryan approached then, his blue eyes dark with concern. “I’m so sorry about this, Chloe. If I’d had any idea something like this would happen—”

  Managing to give him a weary smile, she shook her head against the thin hospital pillow. “It wasn’t your fault. Donovan was certain some man named Childers was behind the kidnapping.”

  “Donovan was right—as he usually is. Childers hired the men who grabbed you.” Though he kept his expression pleasant enough, there was a hardness in Bryan’s voice that she hadn’t heard before.

  “And the other three? The men he hired?”

  “We have two of them. The other’s still at large—but we’ll get him.” His eyes were as hard as his voice now, glittering like polished blue metal.

  This was the Bryan Falcon she’d heard about but had never personally encountered, she realized. The ruthless businessman who was as cool as ice in the toughest business crisis, utterly merciless when he was double-crossed. He wore his power like an invisible cloak—not a soldier, but a general who surrounded himself with a small, carefully selected and highly skilled ring of followers.

  And yet it was his second-in-command who occupied Chloe’s thoughts. Who had captured her heart.

  “How is Donovan?” Bryan asked, looking toward the open doorway of her room. “I haven’t seen him yet.”

  She roused herself to answer briskly. “He’s having his right leg X-rayed. I’m pretty sure he broke a bone in a fall a couple of days ago. He’s been walking on it ever since, so I’m worried that he’s done some damage to it.”

  “What have you been through since Monday evening?” Grace murmured, brushing a strand of hair from Chloe’s cheek.

  Chloe sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  Bryan pulled up a chair on her other side and took her hand, which had been lying limply next to her. “Is there anything I can do for you now? Anything you want?”