by Amelia Wilde
look like this in my presence, all clean cut and dressed to the nines. I never thought he’d be the one to come after me. “Do you want to be standing out here?”
It’s a perfectly nice parking lot—the Bliss Resort is by far the fanciest of the venues we looked at—but the second he asks the question I feel them running down the back of my neck—goosebumps. I didn’t just follow Clayton out of the reception hall. I chased. There’s no way eighty guests are going to sit, waiting, for longer than a few minutes. Ash was the first. He won’t be the last.
And then…what? What am I going to say? I found him out here practically swallowing some strange redhead’s tongue? No, I don’t know who she is? Strangely, yes, I do want to have a wedding because I’ve never looked so good in my life?
“No.”
Ask and ye shall receive.
“Let’s go. Anyplace in mind?” Ash offers me his arm, and I loop my hand through his elbow. At my touch I feel his muscles tense, flexing, and for a hot second my balance flees. This isn’t the imminent stomach flu. This is a full-on swoon.
For the first time all day, I don’t feel alone in a crowd of people. Walking down the aisle alone—that was one thing. Walking back into the Bliss Resort after a failed wedding? That’s on another level.
Touching Ash is on another level, come to think of it.
I swallow hard and push away the prickle of anxiety that grows like a seed at the base of my gut. Run—I should run. But I don’t want to run. That’s the most fucked-up part of all.
And besides—I do know a place. I know the perfect place. It’s the one place nobody will think to look.
The first time I saw Ash Montgomery, he was shirtless.
Technically, we were all shirtless. My mom sat on the deck of the pontoon boat, underneath its shade, and I sprawled on a beach chair perched on the end of the dock. The screen door at the back of the cottage slammed shut, the hinges squeaking. I didn’t look up from my book until I felt the shadow.
It came down over me, blocking the sun, and I blinked up through my sunglasses at the figures towering above me.
My brother, Gunnar, who had just completed his first stint in the Army and was home on break.
And his friend, Stunningly Handsome.
That was all I could think when I first saw his face—his fine, chiseled face, eyes darker than sin and cheekbones sharper than knives. Don’t get me started on his abs. His abs transported me to another plane of existence, then slammed me back to the surface of the earth.
“Hey, Soph,” Gunnar said, stepping around me to climb onto the pontoon boat. “This is my friend, Ash Montgomery.” The radio next to me was playing Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.
The name came to me in bursts of static. Ash stood in the center of the dock, waiting for his turn to get onto the boat, the sun in his hair like a fiery halo. He kept his eyes on my face, never moving them an inch, and my skin caught fire.
I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to notice me.
And for seven agonizing days, he made sure not to notice me.
Oh, he was perfectly polite. We talked to each other as we danced around each other's personal bubbles in the kitchen. One night, he even sat next to me by the fire when Gunnar went in for another round of beer. The orange-red firelight glinted off his hair and reflected in his eyes, his entire body a mirror for the flames, and that was one of the few times he asked me a truly personal question.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
It had come off the heels of a discussion about Gunnar’s girlfriend, so it wasn’t completely out of the blue.
I told him the truth, even though my student-teacher heart wanted to lie. I wanted to lie so badly. I could feel the future branching out before me—say this, and we go one way, say that, and we go another—and for an instant I was caught between the two branches.
But I’m not a liar. I’ve always been atrocious at it. I can fake it until I make it with the best of them, but outright lies? No.
So I told him the truth. And I regretted it instantly.
I regretted it for three long years.
“You have a room?” Ash says in the elevator on the way to the top floor of the resort’s hotel building.
“I have a suite.”
The air in the elevator thickens, and is it me, or does Ash step a little closer?
The elevator comes to a stop and he ushers me out. There are four doors on this level, and four doors only. I came up here earlier to take a breather from the hair and makeup whirlwind, so I know where I’m going—the second door on the left.
I slip the key out of the hidden pocket in my dress. That pocket was a dream come true when I placed the order almost a year ago, and now it’s a true lifesaver. No fumbling around for a purse. No need to let go of Ash’s arm.
The lock clicks, and I push open the door. My heart skips like off-beat raindrops in a thunderstorm and skids to a crashing halt when Ash hesitates at the threshold. I whirl back around to look at him, framed in the door in that black tux.
“If you want to be alone…”
The last thing I want is to be alone. And I don’t care if my entire body feels like it might spontaneously combust in the presence of this man, who is looking at me now like I could have been his bride. I need something more. I need something else. I need a door closed between me and the rest of the world.
Between us and the rest of the world.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
The air thins, stretches, and the cool tingle of adrenaline sparkles through my veins. If Ash steps through the door, there’s no telling what will happen. This day has already unhinged itself from the planned reality. There are no rules.
“I don’t know what to do.” I forge ahead because the silence makes me dizzy. It keeps giving me flashbacks from that moment under the canopy before that fateful yeah fell out of Clayton’s mouth. “Everybody’s waiting for me down there.” A truth, and another truth, and I can’t stop all of the truth spilling from my own lips. “And I don’t want to be alone right now. I want to be with you.”
Ash stands up straight, a soldier called to attention, and I can imagine him standing just this way at boot camp graduation. He looks pained with duty. “Your brother…”
“My brother’s not here.”
I’ve pushed them down in my memory—all those tiny moments at the cottage. How he looked in the morning light, groggy in boxers and a t-shirt that accentuated exactly how perfect his biceps were. The way he smelled after a day on the lake, tanned and covered in sunscreen and heat. And the day they left, how he finally let himself look at me in my swimsuit and the flimsiest cover-up they had on sale at Victoria’s Secret that summer.
I had not planned to meet Ash Montgomery in that coverup, and I hadn’t. I’d met him in even less. Just the suit. Just his suit.
My mouth waters at the memory of those red swim trunks cutting across the hard lines of his body. And my brain, my foolish brain, superimposes it over the image of him now, in black tie, at my wedding.
My wedding in limbo.
My wedding about to be canceled.
I clear my throat. “My brother’s not here,” I repeat, like saying it twice makes it truer than before. He’s not there to barge in and steal Ash’s coffee from the coffee maker. He’s not lingering at the edge of every conversation to make sure his buddy isn’t getting too close to his sister.
The ache that he’s not at my wedding twines itself right around a rush of relief that he’s not.
Ash looks at me, and it’s the same look he gave me that morning, right before he climbed into their rental car and disappeared off the face of the planet for a year.
Then he steps inside.
Ash
Sophie is no-nonsense, shutting the door behind us and flipping the deadbolt.
I’m nothing but nonsense. The bite of adrenaline races straight through my heart, pumping madly through every one of my veins. My heart doesn’t know if I’m on th
e battlefield in Afghanistan or in a honeymoon suite with my buddy’s sister. It’s a fight either way, because she looks…touchable. Delectable. Devourable.
How the hell could that guy have walked away from her?
How could I have walked away from her?
The reasoning back then was solid. You don’t hit on your buddy’s sister while you’re on vacation with his family and then head back overseas like nothing happened. You make damn sure nothing happens, even if you want it to. Even if you want it so fucking badly your cock aches for weeks afterward. Even if she looks at you like she wants it, too.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, that pretending. I had to pretend not to see the blush on her cheeks and the curve of her ass and the jut of her hip out there in that bikini.
Just like I have to pretend not to see how radiant she is in that gown. Sophie wears a crown of flowers, looking regal as hell and nothing like the most recent picture I’ve seen of her, which features her on one knee in the middle of a bunch of kindergarteners, a paint smear on her face and pride in her eyes.
I’m here to be a sounding board—nothing more. A steady presence, since Gunnar couldn’t make it. Sophie’s parents couldn’t, either, but that’s not a story for anybody’s wedding day.
She paces over to the windows that overlook Ruby Bay and stands silhouetted in front of the deep blue water. “Okay. So, things didn’t work out with Clayton.”
This is such an understatement that I have to stifle a laugh. No, things did not work out with Clayton. No, I want to say, because he’s a complete jackass. But instead I come farther into the suite.
It’s a nice suite. Rooms branch off to either side, bright spaces flooded with eggshell paint and deep navy carpet that looks plush enough to lay on naked.
I stop looking at the carpet.
“And I don’t know what to do, because…” Sophie takes one elegant step forward, then another, exactly as graceful as she was when she was walking down the aisle. Only this time, it’s only for me. A delicate pink blush spreads across her cheeks. “Because I’m…I’m so disappointed, and I’m so relieved.”
Her green eyes lock on mine, and a diamond shard of light flies off the lake and embeds itself in my chest, igniting. She’s waiting for a response—I can see it in the flutter of her pulse at her neck. “Disappointed and relieved,” I echo, making it as much of a question as I dare.
“I’m disappointed for this.” She motions down the length of her body at her dress and my skin tightens with the urge to touch the fabric for myself and feel every slope and curve. “I look like I’ve always wanted.” Sophie grins, the smile wrinkling her nose, and another little piece of my heart slips out from behind the cage where I’ve kept it since that vacation and falls to the floor at her feet. “How stupid is that? I don’t want to go back there and tell everyone the wedding is off, because I feel like…” She pauses, like the word is on the tip of her tongue. “Like a princess.”
“You look like a queen.” My voice sounds gruff, even to me, and I see the flash in her eyes before her lashes flutter to her cheeks. “More than a queen. Otherworldly.”
“Like a ghost?” she whispers.
“Like a goddess.”
The only thing keeping us apart is the sofa in front of me, which is doing god’s work in hiding the erection currently trying to force its way through the front of my pants. I lower my hands to the plush back and tighten my grip.
Sophie brushes her fingertips over the delicate line of her collarbone with a flower crown–colored brush. “I’m glad you’re here to see it. When Gunnar said he wasn’t going to be able to make it, I didn’t know if you’d come.”
“Where else would I be?”
Her eyes fly back to mine. “Anywhere else, other than here, watching me get dumped at my own wedding.”
“I’m not watching you get dumped anymore.”
“No.” Her voice is soft, almost tentative. “We’re alone in my honeymoon suite.”
“And you’re—” I fumble it, looking for a way to steer this back onto safer ground. I called her a goddess. If that’s not giving myself away, I don’t know what is. “You said you were relieved.” Another thought occurs to me that turns my blood to metal spikes. “He wasn’t…unkind to you, was he?” Unkind—I don’t know what I’m saying. I’d like to do some things to the innocent otherworldly goddess in front of me that could definitely be classified as unkind. But the thought of another man taking advantage of her in any way feels like swallowing a primal scream.
She screws up her lips, looking down. “Unkind? Not unless you count cheating on me. And before that, boring me to death.”
“Boring you?”
“Do you honestly think that Clayton Herzog knew what he was doing in bed?” My pulse clangs against my ears in matching cymbal beats. “He never once gave me what I really wanted.” Sophie crosses her arms over her chest. “That’s probably too honest for you.”
“You can’t be too honest with me.”
“Can’t I?” Her voice is so loaded I’m surprised her words don’t loose an invisible arrow. “Because I can see you right now. There’s nothing hiding your face.”
Or my hands. I let go of the back of the sofa and slip my hands into my pockets, every muscle aware of her eyes on me. “And what does my face tell you?”
Sophie bites her lip.
Damn it, she bites it, drawing it between her teeth. “That you didn’t come up here to act like my brother.”
There is so much I want to do with her that I’d never classify as brotherly. “No.”
“So why did you come up here?”
“You’ve had a shock. You didn’t want to be alone.” It’s simple. She asked, I answered. As if I could do anything else. “It’s what Gunnar would want.”
Sophie raises one eyebrow in a skeptical arch. “He’d want the two of us alone in an empty honeymoon suite? I don’t think so.” She turns her head to the side, and I’m treated to a view of the flawless curves of her face set against the blue of the lake outside the window behind her.
My heart splits in two, one part throwing itself carelessly against my rib cage and the other side plummeting straight between my legs. My heart needs blood to survive, and all of it is centered in one aching organ.
“Is there something you need, Soph? Because I’m here to give you what you need.”
She looks me straight in the eye and pulls herself up to her full height. Sophie’s eyes gleam. Freedom—I’m seeing freedom in her eyes, and if that’s not enough to make a person stand up and sing the national anthem, I don’t know what is.
“Are we being honest with each other?” Her tone is light, like a flag fluttering on the wind.
“I don’t think we have any other choice.”
“And you want to know what I need. From you. Right now.”
I’m on the edge of a cliff, looking over. The truth is that her goddess-word is law. I’ve wanted the chance to do anything for her for three long years and two tours in Afghanistan, and I’m not going to let it pass me by.
Cool it. I have to cool it. What Sophie probably wants is a shoulder to cry on, a stiff drink, and someone to stand next to when she announces that the wedding is off. Then Mallory will step in, and the rest of her extended family, and I’ll be on the outside looking in.
This is my moment. The knowledge of it sucks the breath right out of my lungs, but I force more air in.
No point in waiting.
“I want to know.” I’ve never been so definitive. Not even on the battlefield.
She takes a deep breath in, the air hitching in her chest, but she doesn’t look away from my eyes. No. Sophie Langdon—this Sophie Langdon—might look sexy yet demure in her wedding dress, but she’s not the shy college sophomore out on the dock. Not today. “What I want, Ash…what I want from you…” Time slows, stills, stops, but my heart keeps beating. “I want a wedding night.”
Sophie
Ash leans over the back of the sofa ag
ain, digging his hands into the upholstery. His eyes are thunderclouds, complete with lightning bolts, and I swear the temperature of the room sizzles with that gaze.
“A wedding night.”
The words on his lips light up every one of my nerves. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head since I saw Clayton make his escape.
I want my own escape.
It’s here—I see that now—in the form of Ash Montgomery.
“I chose this dress because I thought, if I got all the details right, I would finally get what I’ve been looking for?”
“What’s that?”
“Passion.” The word tears from my throat, coming loose from something deep at the center of my core. I would never have admitted this to anyone else. It nagged at me every day with Clayton, but somehow I made this dress—this day—into some kind of crucible. If we got to the other side, maybe it would turn him into the man I wanted.
And let’s be honest. Ash is the one I wanted.
I wanted a man with a hard body and eyes that could be softer than the sunrise on the lake or harder than an arrowhead. I wanted a man who could look my father in the eye when they shook hands. I wanted a man who didn’t flinch away from sitting quietly with my mother, reading books.
My parents aren’t here anymore, but that man still is.
He’s standing dead center in my honeymoon suite.
“I thought…” My voice trembles in the hush of the room. “I thought that if I married Clayton, it might change him into something I wanted.”
A half-smile, almost a smirk with a side of sadness, flashes across Ash’s face and disappears. “I don’t know if weddings can work that kind of magic.”
“After today, I’m guessing not.” A wild hope rises in my chest like a bird taking flight. “But I still want what I paid for. I want what I paid for, only better.”
“And you paid for a wedding night.”
“That was the point.” I shake my head. “No. The point was the marriage, but I’d hoped the marriage would be a long string of wedding nights. Something different from what we had before.” I make the face before I can stop myself. “Something less…soul-numbing.”
