Here Comes the Bride Read online

  Nothing in his past—or his future—he was certain, could ever compare. Fiona was a haunting mixture of reticence and brazenness. One minute she was as old-fashioned as her name, believing in happily-ever-afters and crying at weddings, the next she was asking him to do wicked things to her body.

  “The night, huh?” That was an offer no sane man could refuse, though he knew, for her sake—for his—he should. “I know a nice, private cove.”

  ELEVEN

  “Do … you come here often?” Fiona asked once Nick dropped anchor.

  The cove was more than private. It was a haven. The moon and the stars were their only neighbors. And silence, silence broken only by the waves lapping softly against the hull, and more distantly, the shoreline, perhaps ten feet away. An intimate place, a place for making love.

  Nick came over to her and took her face between his hands. “If you’re asking if I bring my women here, the answer is no. You’re the first.”

  A shiver climbed her spine. His reply pleased her. “I—I’m glad you thought of it.” She’d die before she’d admit that was the very question on the tip of her tongue.

  “Oh, this, lady, was entirely your idea.” He smiled wickedly and caressed her nipple.

  It sent a primitive pull to the core of her. “How gallant of you to remind me.”

  His smile only widened. He was mighty pleased with himself. What man didn’t enjoy a proposition from a woman?

  “I, uh, might have a bottle of wine onboard and I could scare us up some cheese,” he said, still stroking her nipple through her shirt with infinite slowness.

  What it was doing to her didn’t put her in mind of eating … or sipping wine with him. Her appetites at the moment ran to a need more vital. “Forget the wine,” she ordered.

  He let out a purr of pleasure and cupped her bottom, then drew her hard against him. “I do believe the lady knows what she wants.”

  And it was no secret that he wanted the same thing. In fact, he was more than willing. Hot and ready for whatever she had in store for him. She wriggled against his hardness and heard his groan of agony.

  “Any more of that and I’ll pick you up and carry you below deck, woman,” he murmured in a husky threat.

  “No,” she said. “I want you up here where I can see your body naked in the moonlight.” She wanted to remember him that way, all silvery-sheened and male. “I want to feel the night on us, the breeze awakening our every nerve ending.”

  “Your hands are doing one helluva job of that already.”

  Fiona nearly had him out of his clothes, enjoying the feel of his skin beneath her touch. She memorized the texture of it, from rough to smooth to the velvet heat of his maleness.

  He sucked in a breath when she touched him there and called her something that sounded like “witch.” At least she hoped that was what she’d heard.

  The boat rocked in a rhythm beneath them, making it seem like they were dancing. In a way, they were, a dance with music heard only by the two of them, music that would haunt her again and again when Nick was no longer in her life—when she was alone and aching for him.

  Nick had stripped her of her clothes as well, teasing and tormenting her with his mouth, his tongue, in places he’d never found before, sending her spiraling into sweet ecstasy.

  Then, as the night whispered around them and the moonlight touched their nakedness, they joined together, moving together in a fierceness that hadn’t driven them before. Maybe because this was to be the last time. She obliterated that thought with the glory of him inside her and rose with him until she felt herself fragment into a million tiny shards of pleasure.

  They spent the night on deck, wrapped together in a blanket Nick had stowed, sipping the wine he’d found. There’d been only one small wedge of cheese, but they’d shared it, feeding each other tiny bites.

  They didn’t sleep, only held each other and murmured all the wonderful things lovers say—everything, save one: I love you.

  How could she say those words to a man who didn’t believe in love?

  Sitting up, she let the blanket fall and reached for her clothes. She needed space. She needed distance. She needed to clear her head—and her heart—of Nick.

  Nick’s hand shot out, pinning her to the spot. “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded. His hand cupped her breast, his fingers teasing her nipple lazily, seductively.

  She wanted to slide down into the blanket next to him, let him do all the wondrous things to her body that he’d done earlier, but she knew this was the end, the end of all that they had shared. There was no future for her with Nick.

  She’d known that from the beginning. But why, when faced with the reality of it now, did it hurt so damned much?

  She wriggled her T-shirt over her head and shimmied it down to cover her nakedness. Nick’s hand fell to the bareness of her leg, his fingers trailing a seductive path up her thigh.

  His touch was nearly her undoing. She struggled for strength. “It’s almost morning,” she said, and drew away, slipping hastily into her shorts.

  “Yes, it’s almost morning,” Nick repeated.

  She heard a catch to his voice, and then she knew that he, too, realized the full implication of that fact. Their time together was over.

  “I’m leaving today,” she added quietly.

  She didn’t look at him, but she could feel him recoil at her statement.

  Say something, Nick, she cried inside. Tell me to stay. Tell me you love me. But even as her brain screamed the words she knew she wouldn’t hear them, not from Nick.

  She got up and paced across the deck. Golden fingers of light speared the waning night sky. If it were possible, she’d hold back the sunrise. Morning would never come.

  Nick shucked off the confining blanket and yanked on his jeans. Fiona looked so tiny, so fragile, so beautiful, standing there, gazing out across the lake. He wanted to go to her, beg her to stay, but he knew he had nothing to offer her.

  He’d come so close to falling in love with her, so close to believing it really did exist. He’d listened to Auntie and Walter exchange their vows and tried desperately to believe.

  He’d squeezed his eyes shut and tried to imagine himself and Fiona saying those words, promising forever to each other, but it was no good. Something was lacking in him. Faith had died in him a long time ago.

  He wished he could go to her, pull her into his arms, and tell her she belonged to him, tell her he loved her, but the words would sound foreign, hollow.

  He crossed the deck to her and coiled a silken strand of her tangled hair around his finger. He didn’t dare touch any other part of her. “When does your plane leave?” he asked.

  He felt her body grow taut. It had been a simple question, and not so simple. With it, he’d condemned their relationship to its end.

  He wanted to yank back the words. If only he and Fiona had had more time, but he knew that would not have solved anything between them, only made it that much harder to part.

  “It’s a one-thirty flight,” she managed to say. There was a quaver in her voice and he wished he could kiss it away from her throat.

  He was hurting her, he knew, but if he asked her to stay, he’d only hurt her more. He couldn’t be what she needed. “I’ll see what there is in the galley for breakfast.”

  “No.” She put a staying hand on his arm, then quickly withdrew it as if she’d been burned. “Nick, I’d like to go back to the hotel. I … I need to pack.”

  Nick studied her for a long moment. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Everything else between them went unsaid.

  “What’s the matter with you two? You both look like you just lost your best friend,” Camille remarked, her gaze sliding over Nick first, then Fiona, her perception rapier-sharp.

  They’d stopped by Winnie’s on the way in from Lake Mead so Fiona could say good-bye to Camille, but she hadn’t considered how close to the surface their emotions shimmered.

 
“Something like that,” Nick said. He shared a glance with Fiona, then frowned and sauntered away, off to the kitchen, no doubt to find something for breakfast. Neither he nor Fiona had eaten—and Fiona wasn’t sure she ever would again.

  She smiled wanly at Camille, not knowing what to say. A tight knot of emotion threatened to close off her throat. “We had, uh …”

  “A lovers’ quarrel?” Camille supplied.

  Fiona shook her head. “No, not a quarrel.” She could use a friendly shoulder to cry on right now—and Camille had become both friend and sister these past few days—but Fiona didn’t dare let her feelings show right now. She didn’t dare do so until she was back home and alone with her pain.

  She raised her chin high and forced a courageous smile. “Nick and I, well, we decided things can’t work out for us.”

  “Fiona!”

  Fiona went on in spite of Camille’s protest. “It’s time for me to go home. I’ve abandoned my shop for far too long, as it is.” Elaine had told her her customers were being very understanding, when she had called, but she needed to be there. She needed the shop’s familiar warmth and security. “I—I’m leaving this afternoon, Camille.”

  Camille studied her for a long moment, as if she couldn’t quite accept the reality of what was happening. “Mother and Walter will be disappointed,” she said. “They were ecstatic when you and Nick—”

  “They were just ecstatic period,” Fiona pointed out. “They’re in love and they want the whole world to be.” And not everyone could be; she knew that.

  Camille sighed. “I had my hopes, too, that things would work out for you and my bachelor cousin. I’d hoped there would be another wedding for me to come home for very soon.”

  “Well, you were wrong.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Whether Nick knows it or not, he needs you. He needs to know that love, the kind of love he can have with you, exists. He’s buried himself in those horrid divorce cases for so long, it’s warped him to everything beautiful in the world. You’re what Nick needs, Fiona. You’re perfect for him.”

  “No, not perfect, Camille. Someone perfect would know how to heal him. I—I don’t know how to do that.”

  Camille reached out and wrapped her arms around Fiona in a sisterly embrace. “I’m going back to India because it’s what I want, what’s right for me. Are you sure you’re doing what’s right for you, Fiona?”

  Fiona couldn’t answer. She swallowed a lump in her throat the size of a mountain.

  Tossing the last item into her suitcase, Fiona glanced around the room to see if she’d left anything behind. Only her heart, she thought sadly.

  She wouldn’t cry—she’d promised herself that.

  She’d held back the tears with Camille. She’d held back the tears with Nick. He’d wanted to drive her to the airport, but she’d refused his offer. She wasn’t sure she could hold up to any more good-byes.

  Camille was leaving today too. She’d be taking the night flight to New York, then on to India. Fiona wished they’d had more time to spend together, more time to cement the new sisterly relationship between them.

  She wished she could have learned more about the work Camille was doing abroad and about the passion and excitement she felt for that work. Camille seemed to know what she wanted—and Fiona envied her that strength of purpose. She was sure one day Camille would find someone to love, someone to share her nomadic life with.

  Perhaps, in time, Nick would find someone, too, someone who could make him believe in a whole and complete love. It hurt to think of him in another woman’s arms. She squeezed her eyes shut to hold back the tears.

  When she felt composed again, she picked up her bag, slung her purse strap over one shoulder, and started for the lobby—and a waiting cab.

  “Taxi, lady?”

  Nick stood beside the Porsche, smiling that smile she would always remember. For one wild moment her heart soared with the hope that he’d come to carry her off with him, but her head knew he’d merely changed his mind about letting her go to the airport alone.

  Didn’t he realize he was only making things harder for them both? “I’m not sure I can afford your price,” she answered in truth.

  She wasn’t sure she could afford the cost in emotion.

  He studied her solemnly for a quiet moment, then he snatched up her luggage and made room for it in the trunk of the car.

  “Nick, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to take me to the airport. I’m a big girl now.”

  “I know.”

  She’d wanted him to know she’d be okay about this, she’d be okay about everything. Or perhaps she’d wanted to convince herself. Whatever, he didn’t owe her anything.

  She’d gone into this brief relationship with her eyes wide open. And she had them open now. She retained no illusions about Nick—or about how difficult the weeks ahead would be without him.

  They drove in silence for a few awkward miles. Fiona played with her purse strap and pretended a consuming interest in road signs.

  Finally Nick turned to her. “Maybe you should stay a few days,” he said. “I mean, what if Walter and Auntie don’t hit it off? What if they don’t last out the honeymoon?”

  A worry line creased his forehead. Fiona knew this man, knew the feel of his skin, the taste of his mouth, the glory of his hands on her, and she died a thousand times inside at the keen realization that she’d never experience him again.

  “Nick, Winnie and Walter will make it through their honeymoon and, I daresay, twenty years of wedded bliss. You don’t have to worry about them.” If only he wanted her to stay for other reasons, if only he believed they, too, could be that happy together.

  That thought occupied her mind until Nick had parked and they were inside the terminal. “You don’t have to go to the gate with me,” she said once she’d checked her luggage and gotten her boarding pass.

  “I know.” Taking her arm, he led her toward the escalator.

  They talked about phoning each other—concerning their relatives’ well-being, of course; they talked about the weather back in Boston, and didn’t she want a few snacks to take on the flight with her? But they didn’t talk about what was going on inside each of them at that moment. That would have been too painful.

  Finally Fiona’s flight was called.

  “Well, I guess this is it,” she said. She shouldered her purse and put out her hand. “Good-bye, Nick.”

  But a handshake was far from good enough for Nick. He hauled her into his arms and kissed her hair, her cheek, then found her mouth, closing over it with the unmistakable taste of regret.

  She soaked up the male heat of him one last time. Her heart hammered until she thought it would splinter. An ache coupled with the pain of loss ripped through her, tearing at her insides. She loved this man, but love was not enough.

  Blind with unshed tears, she tore herself away from him and escaped through the door and onto the jetway without a backward glance.

  Nick frowned down at the contract he’d been reviewing for a client, then shoved the pages aside. He hadn’t concentrated on a word of it since the party of the first part. In fact, he hadn’t concentrated on much of anything in the past week and a half. Not since Fiona had gone back to Boston.

  He’d turned down three major divorce cases because he was certain, in his present condition, he wouldn’t be able to do them justice. Was that really it? he wondered. Concern for his illustrious—and winning—track record?

  Or was it that he no longer had the stomach for watching couples who’d once professed undying love tear each other apart in the courtroom.

  Maybe what he needed was a rest from work. How long had it been since he’d taken a vacation? He couldn’t remember the last time.

  The more he thought about it, the more the idea appealed to him. He leaned back in his desk chair and studied a wooden beam in the ceiling. Maybe he’d take a gambling junket to Nassau—or Atlantic City. A change of pace from Vegas.

  He crossed one
long leg over the other on the corner of his desk and wondered just how far Atlantic City was from Boston.

  “Forget it, Killian,” he muttered aloud. “What you had with the lady is over. She won’t want to see you again.”

  “Talking to yourself now?”

  Nick jerked to an upright position as Jasmine strode unannounced, and definitely uninvited, into his office. She dropped a stack of papers beside the rest of his unfinished work on the desk. “I wasn’t talking to myself. I was … thinking out loud.”

  Jas merely raised an eyebrow at that. “Same difference.”

  He offered her a scowl, then snapped up the contract he’d been reading earlier and pretended busy interest.

  “Is that thing written in Sanskrit or something?” She folded her arms in front of her and pursed her lips like a schoolteacher. “You were on that same page when I went to lunch—over an hour ago.”

  Nick pushed back from his desk, plotting which way of firing her he’d enjoy best. “Is there some point you want to make or did you just come in here to harass me?”

  She sat down opposite him, crossed one trim leg over the other, and smiled, quite pleased with herself. “What point could I possibly have to make? Just because you’ve been working at a pace a retarded snail could top ever since Fiona Ames blew this town …”

  Maybe he could still get Jas her old job back, he thought crossly. “The pace I work at has nothing to do with Fiona.” Just saying her name hurt like hell. Thinking about her nearly killed him. And the dreams he had—“Isn’t there something you have to do at that desk of yours?”

  “Not since the boss went into a major funk over the only woman who’s mattered to him since I can’t remember when,” she retorted in that know-it-all, superior tone he’d rather not endure.

  “Who made you an authority on the females in my life, may I ask?” Jas was hitting too close to a nerve. Hell, she was doing a tap dance on it with spiked shoes, but he’d be damned if he’d admit it to her.

  “I’m just being a good little secretary.” She stood up, riffled through the stack of papers she’d brought him, then shoved a neatly printed brochure in front of him. “Something you might want to attend,” she said, tapping it mysteriously with the tip of one red nail.