Not the Girl You Marry

by ANDIE J. CHRISTOPHER

  Noah Long was the total package, unlike Jack. Jack was still feeling his way through life, still trying to make a career he loved happen.

  “Noah.” He stopped in front of Hannah’s ex on the sidewalk. “Could I have a word?”

  The guy pasted on a slick smile that didn’t reach his eyes and straightened his pure silk tie. “Do I know you?”

  “No, but I’m reporting a story on your boss.”

  Noah’s slick smile disappeared. “Then you know that you can call my assistant during regular business hours to set up an interview.”

  “This isn’t the kind of thing I think you want to talk about in the office.” Jack needed to stand his ground now.

  “Seriously, where do I know you from?” Noah narrowed his gaze. Jack toyed with telling him that he was the guy who was reaping the rewards of his stupidity when it came to Hannah but thought better of it. It would be best if Jack remained a faceless reporter to this guy. From Hannah’s oblique references to the guy, it seemed like he had his head up his ass enough that he wouldn’t even remember Jack’s name. Hell, he hadn’t even asked his name.

  At the same time Jack said, “I’m Jack Nolan,” Noah said, “You’re Hannah’s new boyfriend.”

  Jack wasn’t about to deny it. Even though he wouldn’t feel like Hannah’s boyfriend until she knew the whole truth about how they’d started and why he’d acted so strangely, he liked hearing it, and he wanted it to be true. “Yeah.”

  Noah scoffed, and Jack’s fist clenched reflexively. “Good luck with that.” That this guy didn’t see that Hannah was pure gold pissed him off for sure.

  “That’s not why I’m here to talk to you.” Jack needed to get this back on track. “I’ve gotten some documents that seem to insinuate that the senator’s involvement with the building contracts and permits for the new federal building downtown aren’t completely on the up-and-up.”

  “Listen—”

  Jack wasn’t about to let this guy put a spin on the situation before he’d even asked the question. “I can either get your comment now or when your boss is forced to resign.” Jack shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. “You seem like a pretty smart guy, and you probably care enough about your future in politics to want to distance yourself.”

  His gambit didn’t work. Noah’s spine seemed to stiffen, and he said, “I can see why you can get past Hannah’s lack of class.”

  “We’re not talking about Hannah right now.” Jack didn’t want to have to punch the guy in the middle of the street. “We’re talking about how you’re working for a guy trying to fleece the people he’s supposed to represent and what’s going to happen when that all goes public.”

  “You and she are just alike.” This asshole really wasn’t going to let this go? Maybe he was still obsessed with her. Jack knew that he would be if he couldn’t convince her to date him for real after telling her the truth. “Everything is good or bad, pure or evil with her. And she has less tact than most toddlers.”

  Basically all of Jack’s favorite things about her. “Hannah’s honesty might be off-putting to someone who wouldn’t know the truth if it hit him in the nuts. But her honestly and loyalty are two of my favorite things about her.”

  Jack should be telling Hannah this, but it felt good to say it to someone. And making this douchebag feel the pain of losing Hannah all over again was just a bonus.

  He hoped he wasn’t imagining the pain crossing Noah’s face. “Are you going to comment on the allegations, or what?”

  “No comment.”

  What a douche. Hannah was better off without him. It remained to be seen whether she was better off without Jack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  HANNAH DIDN’T KNOW HOW Sasha didn’t kill at least three brides a year. They were planning the social event of the century for the next evening. Caterers, florists, and a big band all had to be confirmed and/or supervised, and Madison got a wild hair up her ass to go wedding dress shopping. And then she got an appointment at the most exclusive bridal salon in Chicago and insisted that Hannah and Sasha come with her to “run interference” with her mother.

  Wasn’t that what friends were for? Over the past couple of weeks, Hannah had gotten the impression that Madison didn’t have that many friends. And that hurt Hannah’s heart. She didn’t know what she would do if she didn’t have Sasha and their other college girlfriends in her life. Thinking about how lonely Madison must be to force her wedding planners into hanging out with her was the only thing that got her onto a pink couch, surrounded by fluffy white dresses, when she ought to have been reaming out a rental place for trying to short them on forks.

  Hannah would never admit it to anyone, but she loved wedding dresses—the satin, the tulle, the glitz. She used to dream about wearing one and meeting a man who really loved her at the end of the aisle of the basilica at Notre Dame.

  Over the past couple of weeks, spending so much time with Jack while surrounded by the wedding industrial complex, she’d allowed herself to start dreaming of a wedding again. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened, when the daydreams had come back, when the guy at the end of the aisle in her daydreams had turned into Jack Nolan.

  But, even though this had all started out as fake, simply a way to prove that she wasn’t a sad, bitter spinster-in-waiting, her feelings for Jack had certainly become real.

  The wide-eyed bridal gown consultant hustled across the sales floor and back again, into the back room and back out, until her knees were buckling from the weight of all the dresses in her arms.

  “I want to wear blush,” Madison said.

  Mrs. Chapin sniffed. “Over your father’s dead body.”

  “Maybe an off-white,” Sasha suggested.

  Hannah should say something, but her eye kept snagging on a cream-colored dress that seemed to have walked right out of her dreams. It was simple, but she could almost feel it floating around her feet as she walked toward Jack. Danced with him at their wedding.

  She shook her head, trying to clear it out. Even if she and Jack were really going to be together after the engagement party, after she came clean about using him to get ahead at work and confronted him about his strange behavior, it was way too soon to be thinking about marriage.

  When Madison spoke to her, she realized she’d lost the thread of the conversation. Madison was holding the dress that Hannah saw herself wearing in the wedding she was not going to have to Jack. “You don’t like this one?”

  Hannah flushed. “I do.” She tried to cover. “I think it would look stunning on you.”

  Madison gave her a knowing smile. “No, I think it would be perfect on you.”

  “You should try it on.” Oh sure, now Mrs. Chapin was down for some frivolity?

  “Yeah, it would look fabulous with your skin tone.” Et tu, Sasha? When Hannah gave her a pointed look, she shrugged and said, “What? It’s true.”

  “We’re not here for me. We’re here for Madison.” She was going to be firm on this. “And we should really be checking on the florists—”

  “I insist you try on the dress, Hannah. It’s my appointment, and I can do what I want.”

  Hannah looked around to find all the women in the room seemingly firm in their conviction to have her try on the stupid dress.

  Her hands shook as the consultant helped her put on the dress. As though fate had decided to laugh at her, it fit perfectly. She was almost too nervous to look in the mirror, afraid she’d completely fall in love with the idea of being with Jack for real.

  But she looked up when the consultant gasped. And then she gasped. The dress was absolutely perfect, better than she’d dreamed. And that was a huge problem.

  The things she dreamt about were never better in reality. The life she’d planned out in her head with Noah hadn’t even come close to happening. And she’d been so careful to try to keep Jack out of her
heart. A few yards of chiffon and some expert beading that made her tits look fantastic shouldn’t make her feel anything.

  But seeing herself in the dress made everything real. She touched the fabric at her waist, ran her fingers over the seams. She couldn’t discern a specific pattern, but the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It all worked together.

  She and Jack might not have gotten the most auspicious start, and she couldn’t quite see her way through how coming clean with him was going to go. He could very well never want to see her again if she told him she’d used him. And—outside of his very talented mouth—he hadn’t been anywhere close to perfect since their first actual date. But the way she felt with him was the way she wanted to feel—she felt like she belonged with him. She could be herself with him, which was something she’d never experienced with anyone else.

  “Hannah?” Sasha had come looking for her. She must have been staring at herself in the mirror for a long-ass time.

  “Be right out.” She had to get out of the dress before Sasha came in, but the bridal consultant must have been helping Madison, the real customer. So her best friend walked in on her and slapped her hands over her mouth.

  “Hannah, it’s—”

  “I know.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Help me get this thing off.”

  * * *

  —

  JACK WOKE UP WITH Hannah straddling his hips with her long, sexy legs. He’d been dreaming of her, so it took him a moment to realize that the dream had ended and her smooth thighs were rubbing up against his jeans.

  After running down more leads on his corruption story earlier that day, he’d been at loose ends. He’d taken the L up to the Loop and wandered around Millennium Park, even doing a stupid-tourist thing of staring at his own face in the Bean. About halfway through, he’d realized what an idiot he’d been and come back to his apartment to write.

  He hadn’t meant to fall asleep as he waited for Hannah, but he hadn’t been sleeping much since his conversation with Irv. Luckily, he’d had a brief reprieve from the how-to game when a celebutante had gotten in a coke-fueled car crash and all of the site’s articles had to be about that for three days.

  God bless the celebrity news cycle.

  So, even though talking to Patrick and running down leads on the story about the senator hadn’t quite yielded a solution yet, he’d called Hannah and asked her to come over after she’d gotten done with some work stuff she had to do for the Chapin engagement party the next night. He hadn’t seen her in almost a week, not since he’d woken up in her bed, wrapped in her smell, and decided he’d do whatever he had to do to keep her. Not since Irv had threatened to destroy his professional reputation if he didn’t destroy his burgeoning relationship with Hannah.

  They’d texted and talked on the phone, and he’d half-heartedly tried to be an ass. But neither of them, it seemed, could stand not to talk for even a day. And that wasn’t the same as tasting her skin and feasting on her gorgeous mouth. Nothing technology could come up with compared to having her weight pushing him into the couch.

  Hannah smiled down at him, and he forgot all about his career. This was dangerous because he was supposed to be telling her the truth. But that would require his putting the brakes on what was happening now, and he just wasn’t prepared to do that when she put her hands on his face and pressed her mouth to his.

  Not when he was trapped between waking and sleeping with a dream of a woman rubbing herself against his cock and moaning into his mouth as he got harder.

  When she finally gave up his mouth, he said, “That’s some wake-up call.”

  “Is it okay that the doorman let me in?” She nuzzled his jaw, sounding as soft and sleepy as he felt. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight to him.

  “I wake up with a hot woman in my lap, I’m too smart to complain about that.”

  She pulled back again, a look in her eye. “Question is, what are you going to do with me?”

  “You have tonight off?”

  She nodded. “You?”

  He really should be working. Or telling her everything, but he still didn’t know if that was the right thing to do. The only thing he did know was that he needed more time to figure it out and he wouldn’t figure it out unless she was right there with him.

  It wasn’t him who decided that tonight they would just be a real couple and that he’d figure the rest out tomorrow. It was the way she sighed when he grabbed a handful of her fine ass and moved her body up his so that he could take control and kiss her properly.

  Her sigh was just magic and fire like that.

  * * *

  —

  ALL HER RULES WERE out the window now that she was officially Jack’s girlfriend. Jack’s girlfriend could not be expected to hesitate or have doubts about slipping into his apartment and waking him up by grinding on him—not when she hadn’t seen him in almost a week.

  Luckily, he’d seemed amenable to the idea. His hands roamed over her back, slowly. They had all night together, and he took advantage. His kisses were soft, but not weak. They were leisurely, which just made her want more of him. He was hard beneath her belly, so she knew he was tamping down his urgency to be inside of her, but that did nothing to make her less impatient.

  When he moved his mouth behind her ear, tipping her head to one side, she said, “I don’t need all this.”

  “Huh?” He still sounded sleepy and so damn cute that she wanted to eat him up.

  “Foreplay.” She moved her hips, making him groan. “The foreplay is the fact that I haven’t seen you all week.”

  He cupped her jaw and made her look him in the eye. He had the nerve to look amused. “What if I need to taste you all over, Duchess?”

  She smiled back at him, sure there was one good way to provoke him. “I just wish you would get to the good parts.”

  “I never should have gone down on you.” His chest moved as he laughed. “Now you just see me as a mouth with legs.”

  Running a finger over his lips, she said, “I like the abs, too.” He laughed again, and she moved her hand to his chest. “But this is the best part.”

  He sobered, and they stared into each other’s eyes for a beat. Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. It really was too soon to know if she felt all of the things that she wanted to say that she felt. But then he made it all okay when he smiled again. “Then I think I need to remind you about my mouth.”

  Then he grabbed her thighs, settled her on his face, and did just that.

  After he’d made her come, fed her, and made her come again, they’d watched movies until they fell asleep on his couch. She was clean from the soap in his shower, wearing his T-shirt and sweats, and completely wrapped up in him. His steady heartbeat under her hand grounded her and felt like home.

  Nothing had ever felt like this before. If this wasn’t love, then maybe Annalise was right, and she didn’t know what love was after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  NOAH HAD ONCE CHOSEN to chide her in front of a room full of people because she’d described her Halloween costume as a “flapper” rather than a figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Just more evidence that she hated her own blackness, according to him. She was sure that if someone asked him about his costume tonight, at Madison Chapin’s engagement party, he would say he was dressed as Langston Hughes.

  He caught her eye and lifted his glass of champagne, as if she cared that he thought she’d done a good job planning the party. She knew she’d done a fantastic job planning this party. She’d turned the ballroom at the Drake Hotel into a time machine destined for the 1920s. Everything was dripping with expensive, fragrant flowers. And champagne and signature gin and whisky cocktails flowed like water. The center of the room had been cleared off as a dance floor, and an honest-to-God big band played on the stage.

  Madison and her fiancé were already hammered, doing t
he Charleston among their friends. Senator Chapin and his wife were glad-handing guests, who were no doubt doing double duty tonight as donors. Noah stood slightly behind the power couple, ready to jump in and produce the forgotten name of an acquaintance at a moment’s notice.

  Hannah stood near the entrance, waiting for Jack. He wasn’t late yet, but she’d been very clear that he needed to show up on time and in the tux she’d made him pick up. He’d tried to protest and say that he had his own tuxedo, but she needed him to look like he belonged.

  Somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten to be sweet and biddable with Jack. But he’d rolled with it thus far. Whereas any other guy would have bristled at her telling him what to wear and how to fix his hair—slicked back like a silent-film star—she’d been able to hear Jack’s smile over the phone. And not a smile like he was amused by her and was deciding to indulge her. It seemed he truly liked that she was extremely picky and always thought of everything.

  The fact that he really saw her and liked what he saw was a balm to her frayed nerves. She’d been so busy planning this massive event—people really had no idea what kind of hours a party of this size involved—and Jack had been so busy with an article that he couldn’t tell her about—that they’d only had last night. She’d barely hesitated before sneaking into his condo, and she was glad she had. They’d had a nice, normal night, and she felt like they were a real couple.

  It had to be the fact that she was so tired that let her mind wander back to the things he had texted her after canceling their late dinner on Thursday. Her face heated, and she grabbed a gin cocktail off a passing waiter’s tray. She’d have only one since she was on duty, but she had to cool down in the increasingly crowded room. And gin would quiet the riotous thoughts in her head, which was increasingly crowded with thoughts of her intrepid journalist.

  He showed up right then, stood next to her, and slid his warm palm across the exposed skin on her neck. She started and then lifted her gaze to meet his. He looked absolutely devastating, as though he belonged in a tuxedo all the time. With her free hand, she smoothed back a strand of hair that had escaped his exactly-to-her-specifications hairdo. He grabbed her hand and kissed the center of her palm.