Here Comes the Bride Read online

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope Winnie’s not offended, but I just needed some time alone.”

  “Alone?” He didn’t like to think of her being alone. Or more honestly, he didn’t like to think that Fiona preferred being alone to being with him. That she didn’t need to see him as much as he needed to see her.

  “I could come over,” he said, then cursed himself for the words. If he got within ten feet of her, saw her looking soft and inviting and warm, he’d want to make love to her. “I mean, what are you going to do about dinner?”

  “I’d planned to order up something from room service.”

  “Oh.” For the second time that night he tasted swift disappointment. He really had to get a grip.

  “Nick …”

  “Yes?” His answer was too quick, telltale quick. He hoped she was going to say that she’d changed her mind, that she wanted to see him.

  He realized he was holding his breath. Like some adolescent schoolboy who’d asked the prettiest girl in class to the prom and was praying she’d smile at him and say she’d go.

  Never before had a woman had this kind of hold on him.

  “I was going to say …”

  She had him on tenterhooks.

  “I was going to say I had a talk with my father today and—”

  “A talk with Walter?”

  “Yes.”

  It was back to business, the business of their wayward relatives. Was that what had occupied the better part of her thoughts today? The wedding? Not him? Not what was happening between them?

  “And how did it go? The talk with your father?”

  “Nick, he says they’re in love, that—”

  Fiona heard Nick’s derisive snort on the other end of the line. He clearly didn’t believe for a moment that they were in love. After spending the day consulting on another divorce case, his cynicism would be running high.

  Maybe he had a right to be cynical. Marriage was a risky proposition these days and Nick was in a position to know that. “My father seems so sure everything will work out.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.”

  Fiona didn’t know how she felt anymore. All she knew was that just the sound of Nick’s voice as it purled over the phone line made her heart thump faster, made her wish he was here so she could see him … touch him.

  Then she remembered her resolve, the reason she’d stayed away from dinner at Winnie’s. She needed to keep her distance from Nick.

  Before she did something foolish like fall in love with him. A man who didn’t believe in love.

  “I’m just a little down after my day,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to inflict that on you. I know you’re worried.”

  “You didn’t inflict anything on me, Nick. I understand how you feel.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  Fiona didn’t want the conversation to end. She wanted to hear his voice, its velvet timbre that did such dangerous things to her senses.

  She fluffed the pillow at her back and leaned against its softness, drinking in the knowledge that Nick was there. Close—yet a safe distance away.

  “I don’t know if it’ll do any good or not, but I’ll have a talk with Auntie,” he said finally.

  “Thanks, Nick.”

  Nick didn’t want to end the conversation, didn’t want to let Fiona go, but there was nothing else to say. He didn’t understand what it was that was happening to him with this woman, but he knew he was playing with fire.

  “I … I’d better go. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know if I had any luck with Auntie.”

  EIGHT

  Nick did not call the next morning. Instead he showed up. Fiona opened the door to her hotel room to find him standing there in the hallway, looking tall, dark, gorgeous …

  And worried.

  Her eyes widened in surprise and her breath caught in her throat, both at the sight of him and at the concerned expression on his face.

  “It’s Auntie,” he said. “She fell off a stepladder while she and Camille were decorating the gazebo. Your father just called me from the hospital.”

  “Oh, Nick.”

  “I don’t know how badly she’s hurt. I just told Walter I’d come get you; we’d be right there.”

  Fiona swept back her hair with one hand. She didn’t have time to run a brush through its thickness or even change clothes from the pink shorts and Las Vegas T-shirt she’d slipped on after her shower. From the look of Nick, he was eager for them to get on their way.

  He was clearly worried about his aunt, and Fiona was worried about her father. If Winnie was seriously hurt, her father would be a wreck.

  Fiona remembered when she was ten years old and had fallen out of a tree and broken her collarbone. Her father hadn’t left her side. Instead he’d paced beside the gurney they’d placed her on in the emergency room, ordering the doctors to do something and generally getting in the way.

  “I’ll just grab my purse,” she told Nick. She snatched it off the bed, checked to see if she had her room key, and followed Nick out the door.

  After an endlessly slow elevator ride they reached the lobby. Nick was three paces ahead of her across its expanse. He looked like he’d been dressed for the office, though he’d shed his suit jacket and tie somewhere along the way and turned back the sleeves of his soft blue shirt. His hair was tousled, either from the desert breeze or from raking his hands through it. She didn’t know which.

  “Is the hospital far?” she asked when they’d reached the hotel entrance.

  Nick shook his head and held the door for her. “Not more than ten blocks.”

  Nick had left the Porsche in a no-parking zone when he’d raced inside to get Fiona. He tipped the doorman ten bucks for not having the car towed. When he turned back, Fiona was sliding into the passenger seat. Her pink shorts rode up a delectable few inches on her tanned legs, a view he wished he had more time to enjoy. Swallowing a groan, he rounded the car and slipped in behind the wheel.

  “I told Auntie to wait until Walter and I could string those damned wedding garlands for her,” he said, pulling out into traffic. “But she wouldn’t listen.”

  If Winnie was stringing wedding flowers in the gazebo this morning, she hadn’t listened to Nick’s little talk last night, Fiona surmised.

  She didn’t even need to ask how the conversation had gone. She knew it chapter and verse. She was certain it was the same she’d gotten from her father. The couple knew their own minds. And a few well-pointed objections from Fiona and Nick weren’t about to change it.

  Within minutes Nick pulled into the crowded visitors’ parking lot, then grasped her hand as they hurried toward the ER entrance. Inside, they spotted Camille. She sat on the edge of a waiting-room chair, nervously thumbing the glossy pages of a magazine that she didn’t look like she was reading. She jumped up as they entered.

  “Is she okay?” Nick asked. “Did she break anything?”

  “They’re waiting for the X-ray reports now. It’s her ankle. This is all my fault,” Camille said. “I shouldn’t have let her climb on that stepladder to hang those silly flowers.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Camille,” Fiona told her. “Is my father with her?”

  “Yes. They would only allow one person in there. Have a seat. Walter’s been giving me progress reports.”

  Nick paced the length of the waiting room. Fiona joined Camille on a chair and listened as Camille explained how the unfortunate accident had occurred and how the headstrong Winnie never listened to reason.

  The pair—her father and Winnie—were well matched on that score at least, Fiona thought. Headstrong and stubborn to a fault.

  A short while later Walter stepped into the waiting area. He looked a little pale and his sandy-gray hair was mussed, no doubt from nervous fingers, but he was smiling.

  Nick approached and grasped his arm. “Is Auntie okay? What did the doctor say? Is he a good one?” He didn’t want Winnie treated by some snot-nosed i
ntern no older than Doogie Howser.

  “Her ankle isn’t broken,” Walter reported. “It’s just a bad sprain. At the moment Winnie’s giving the doctor what-for about the thick wrap he’s putting on to immobilize it.”

  Nick studied his face to be certain that this was the whole truth, that Walter wasn’t holding anything back. Auntie wasn’t married yet. Nick was still responsible for her welfare.

  Just then the ER doors slid open and Winnie hobbled through, leaning inexpertly on a pair of crutches. Her right foot was encased in the cumbersome-looking wrap.

  Nick hurried to her side at the same moment Walter did. She listed to the left, accepting Walter’s strengthening arm—not Nick’s.

  Nick took a step back, relinquishing his hold. He’d always been there for her—and now she didn’t want his help, just Walter’s.

  “Good gracious,” Winnie muttered. “You didn’t all have to come down here.”

  “We were worried about you, Mother,” Camille said.

  “Worried? It’s nothing but a silly sprain. I tried to tell that nervous Nellie of a doctor just that, but he trussed me up like a partridge and told me I had to use these cursed crutches. I’m telling you I’ll really break something trying to get used to them.”

  “Now, Winnie dearest, it’s for your own good,” Walter soothed. “Let’s get you home, then Nick and I will finish stringing those flowers for the wedding.”

  “The wedding?” Winnie’s brows all but descended to the bridge of her nose and her eyes narrowed. She looked askance at her trussed-up leg. “There isn’t going to be any wedding. Not tonight. I’m not about to march down the aisle to my intended looking like this,” she said, then hobbled her way toward the exit, Walter in tow.

  Fiona and Camille spent the afternoon calling all the wedding guests, explaining that the ceremony was off until some future date and accepting regrets about Winnie’s infirmity. These they passed on to the patient, who lounged nearby on a blue-green chaise in the family room, alternately fuming over her ruined wedding and enjoying her future husband’s loving ministrations.

  Walter catered to her every whim, plumping her pillow, bringing her fresh-made lemonade, and settling tiny kisses on her brightly painted toes, which peeped out from the thick elastic wrap.

  Finally the last guest had been contacted. So had the minister, the caterer, and sundry others who were to have performed services connected to the night’s festivities.

  Fiona breathed a sigh of relief, excused herself from the group, and headed for the kitchen for a tall glass of lemonade like the one Winnie was enjoying. Nick glanced up from the crossword puzzle he’d been frowning over at the breakfast bar.

  “What’s a six-letter word for interloper?” he asked. “W-a-l-t-e-r doesn’t fit.”

  Fiona finished pouring her drink, then set the pitcher down with a thunk. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Nick scowled. “Your father’s been hovering over Auntie all afternoon, pampering her silly.”

  “And you feel unneeded,” she added for him. She knew how much he loved his aunt, saw how worried he’d been about her. Since his uncle Gray died, he’d been the one to look after her, care for her—now Fiona’s father was doing that. And Nick didn’t like it. Nick didn’t trust him, any man, to make her happy.

  “They haven’t even noticed the rest of us are around.”

  “I think that’s called love,” Fiona said, realizing the pair were indeed very much in love.

  He gave a disapproving snort. He didn’t believe in love, any more than he believed in marriage. But she was having second thoughts about her father’s relationship with Winnie.

  Fiona had always thought love needed to be developed, nurtured, allowed to bloom. She didn’t believe love could spring to life so quickly between two people, but it obviously had for her father and Winnie.

  She’d seen it shining brightly in his eyes as he catered to Winnie’s every need. She saw it in Winnie’s eyes as she allowed his solicitous pampering.

  “So, did you get all the calls made? Is the wedding officially off again?”

  “The wedding’s officially off.”

  For how long, Fiona didn’t know. She didn’t know whether to stay here in town until it was on again or go home to Boston.

  Each day she stayed she knew she was at risk, at risk of falling in love with Nick. Falling in love as quickly as her father had with Winnie.

  She sighed and leaned back against the bright tiled countertop. Maybe it was something in the water here. Maybe it was the hot desert wind, firing up passions. She didn’t know. All she knew was that she was deep in danger.

  “Since we’re not needed here, wanna blow this joint?” Nick asked. He shoved aside the unfinished crossword puzzle and came over to nuzzle her neck.

  “Leave?”

  “Yes, leave.”

  His breath whispered down the neckline of her T-shirt, sending dangerous little shivers skittering over her body. She tried to ignore it … him … and took a sip of lemonade. Between its delicious coolness and Nick’s nuzzling nips to her delicate skin, she was transported. Heat curled low inside her.

  She longed to slide into his embrace and spend the rest of the day and all of the night there, being loved and wooed by him. But did she dare? Nick was a man who could shred her heart.

  “Kiss me, Fiona.” His voice was a soft command, an order from some baser part of him. It reached out to some baser part of herself, one she couldn’t ignore. Like someone drugged into willingness, she sought the urgency of his lips.

  “Mmmm, you taste like lemonade,” he murmured. He drew his tongue with infinite slowness over her top lip, then her lower, rasping every nerve ending into life. He nipped; he kissed; he stroked; he caressed. Until Fiona was quivering.

  He reached for her glass that she’d barely touched and set it down on the counter behind her. “I want both your hands free to roam over me,” he said with that naughty smile she knew not to trust.

  Widening his stance, he straddled her frame, pinning her against the countertop, against him, like a prisoner without a will. The heat of his arousal pressed into her and she sucked in a breath, barely able to control her own need.

  Nick was all-encompassing whenever he was around—and even when he wasn’t. He filled her thoughts, he filled her dreams. She wanted to touch him, every inch of him. No, not touch, but stroke, explore, caress, drink in his maleness with her fingertips.

  She could feel the hard plane of muscle beneath his shirt as she ran the palms of her hands over his chest. His own traveled down her back, making her spinal column as limp as a noodle. All the while his mouth teased and tortured and plundered hers, sapping her of strength.

  She hoped no one came into the kitchen, hoped this feeling could go on forever, this feeling of being owned by Nick. The feeling that she possessed him as well. For she knew she did, if only for this moment.

  She moved her hands over the wide expanse of his shoulders, where his sinewy muscles bunched and relaxed beneath her touch. She brushed her fingers up the strong column of his neck, feeling his pulse throb there, sure and powerful, in sync with her own thudding heartbeat. Her fingertips learned the shape of his jaw, the curve of his ear. She wanted, needed, to know the feel of him.

  “You’re setting me on fire, woman,” Nick groaned as he reveled in her tentative explorations. He wanted to peel off his clothes, let her touch him everywhere. He wanted to strip her naked and return the pleasure tenfold.

  “That’s not the half of what you do to me, Nick Killian.” Her soft voice was a seductive whisper next to his ear, as if the words came from some secret place deep inside her.

  “Have dinner with me tonight, Fiona. Just us. Away from the family.” His request was a plea, one he hoped she wouldn’t refuse.

  “I … I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Nick.”

  “I make a mean omelette. Now, how can you refuse a free meal from such a charming guy?”

  He tilted her chin up. A s
mall worried frown had insinuated itself between her pretty eyebrows. She was afraid. Of him? Of what was happening between them?

  Oh, Lord, so was he. Terrified. He couldn’t remember a woman who’d had this kind of hold on him. And he didn’t want it to end. Not yet.

  Her green-eyed gaze swept his face, as if searching for reassurance that her heart … and her virtue … would be safe with him.

  He prayed his eyes didn’t reflect a hint of the lust he felt in his soul at that moment and swore to himself this would be an innocent little dinner between them. Above all else he wanted her company.

  When her answer came, it was soft and whispery. “Okay, Nick.”

  His heart soared.

  Before she had a chance to change her mind, he swept her through the family room, uttered hasty good-byes to the rest of the family, and spirited her away to his car.

  The man was gorgeous and he cooked, too. A woman would be lucky to land him.

  Fiona sat on a bar stool in Nick’s state-of-the-art kitchen, holding a goblet of rosé wine, and pondered what sort of woman might fit into his life. Someone tall, chic, and sophisticated came to mind.

  Try as she might, the title wife didn’t seem to work. A live-in would be more to his liking. A woman who came with no strings and who wanted none herself.

  He propped open the door of the fridge with one lean hip as he sorted through ingredients for their omelettes. “Monterey Jack, green peppers, fresh mushrooms,” he enumerated, placing each item on the red-tiled countertop beside him.

  “I vote for all of the above,” she answered.

  Fiona enjoyed his deft movements, the way his off-white slacks fit his sexy, male tush, the way the fine linen of his shirt hugged his muscled torso. She knew what those muscles felt like beneath the fabric of that shirt. She’d memorized them with her fingertips a short while before—and she liked what she’d found. Nick Killian was solid male. She’d felt his vibrancy and his heat.

  And it excited her.

  “So, do you cook often?” she asked, deciding to keep her mind on dinner instead of what came with the meal—Nick.

  He turned and smiled at her. “Define what you mean by often.”