The Bride's Protector

by Gayle Wilson

  “I know,” she said softly. “I know you will.”

  She pulled her gaze from his, finding her reflection again in the glass. Was that woman someone who had made a bargain with the devil for her bruised and battered soul? Or was she really, as they all told her, the luckiest woman alive?

  That was a question she had wrestled with since Amir had proposed the first time, three days after they met. Laughing, she had turned him down, of course, but her refusal hadn’t made a dent in his supreme self-confidence. He’d acted exactly as if she had agreed, lavishing her with expensive gifts that she had honestly tried to refuse. She had even sent them back, but Amir had had them delivered to her again, accompanied by his secretary this time, a very charming Englishman, who had also made most of the arrangements for this wedding.

  “Really, my dear, ” Malcolm Truett had assured her, “it is much easier to let him have his way. He will in the end, you know. Simply because he always has. And, after all, he is very much in love with you.”

  Tyler had held on to those words like a talisman during the bouts of doubt and uncertainty about this marriage, to which she had finally agreed. She needed desperately to believe it was true, and she didn’t really know why she found that so hard.

  Maybe it had something to do with the fine lines and creases the morning sun was so clearly illuminating in her face. Or the knowledge that there were so many other, far more beautiful women in this city. Woman who were educated. Smarter. Wittier. More at ease in social occasions. And far younger.

  Why in the world would Amir al-Ahmad, who could have almost any woman in the world, have chosen a fading model as the object of his affections? Despite her very prolonged “fifteen minutes of fame,” Tyler found it hard to believe she would qualify any longer as a trophy wife. At least not for someone like Amir, whose father was reputed to be one of the richest men in the world.

  Why, then, would Amir have chosen her? Other than for the reason he claimed—that he was in love with her and wanted to take care of her. That was the only conclusion she had come up with, despite endless hours she had spent worrying over that question in the short weeks since she’d accepted his proposal.

  “And now, my darling,” Amir said, “I am going back to my suite to dress. Then I’m going downstairs to await my father’s arrival. I hope you understand the honor he pays us in attending today. I want to show him how grateful we are for his kindness.”

  “Of course,” Tyler said. She was beginning to feel like a marionette. Amir pulled the strings, and she agreed with whatever he said. But thinking that was ungrateful, of course. And petty. She hoped she was neither.

  He was naturally delighted his father was coming to the ceremony. There had been some doubt about that even as late as yesterday, but Amir was his father’s oldest as well as his favorite son. Tyler understood that Sheikh Rashad al-Ahmad had made a tremendous concession in leaving his country. For security reasons that was something he seldom did. But he had come to New York to be present at this wedding, despite the fact that today would be only a civil ceremony.

  Although Tyler hadn’t really understood the reasons for this formality, Amir insisted it was important to protect her legal rights before they traveled to his country for the religious ceremony. Besides, he said, it would give her friends a chance to attend the wedding, and it would give him a chance to show her off to the assembled international media, something that wouldn’t be allowed at the other ceremony.

  He would take care of everything, he had promised. Every detail. She wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Once again, she had found herself steamrollered into agreeing.

  “It’s much simpler to let him have his way. He will in the end, you know.” Malcolm Truett had been right. The truth of that was something she had discovered more and more frequently as the weeks wound down to the wedding day.

  “I’ll send someone to escort you downstairs to the ballroom when it’s time for the ceremony. From today, you’ll have to be far more conscious of security. The price of the politics in our part of the world, I’m afraid. And the money,” he added, his tone humorously self-deprecating. “I hope you understand.”

  She nodded, not even bothering to voice her agreement this time. How had she gotten herself into all this? she wondered.

  Her eyes flicked back to the image in the glass. She didn’t look much different from the confident woman who had appeared on all those magazine covers through the years. Not spineless. Or as if she had been run over by a steamroller. Or defeated.

  The word appeared in her brain, and, interested in where the concept had come from, she examined it. Defeated enough by what Paul had done that she’d decided to roll over and play dead? Or defeated enough that she would let Amir’s suave determination sweep her along with whatever he wanted her to do?

  In the mirror, she watched him stride across the room behind her. The door was opened by one of the ever-present, eternally silent bodyguards, who followed him through it and into the hall, white robes billowing behind. She knew that that kind of security, and the restrictions it imposed, would now become part of her own life.

  Never again to be able to decide the course of her day according to mood or whim... To get into a car and take off for a weekend. To go shopping on the spur of the moment Call a girlfriend to meet for lunch. Never again to be completely alone. Completely unguarded...

  “I think,” she said, turning around to escape the image in the glass as much as those frightening mental pictures, “if you all don’t mind, I think I’d like a few minutes alone. Just a little solitude. To settle my nerves, I guess.”

  “Alone?” Susan Brooker questioned. “Are you sure that—”

  “I’m sure,” Tyler assured her. “I just need a minute to unwind. Time to get my act together before we do this.”

  “Are you all right?” Cammie asked softly, her voice touched with real concern.

  “I’m fine,” Tyler promised, reaching out to put her hand reassuringly on her maid of honor’s forearm. “I just need...a little peace and quiet.”

  “You aren’t nervous, are you?” Cammie teased, sounding relieved. “Every woman in New York is wishing she was in your shoes, and you’re shaking like a leaf.”

  Cammie had put her own fingers over hers, which Tyler realized were trembling as they rested on her friend’s arm. Cammie tightened her hand reassuringly over those cold fingers.

  “That man’s crazy about you,” she said. “It’s obvious in everything he says and does. And his daddy owns a country. A whole country. I don’t know what more you could ask for.”

  Cammie was almost ten years younger than she, although according to Tyler’s biography the difference in their ages was not as great. Paul had kept adjusting her age downward through the years, just as he’d told all those silly stories about her background. But still, Cammie had been a model long enough to know how this business worked and to understand the insecurities inherent in it. The not-unjustified insecurities.

  Marrying Amir had seemed an answer to everything. He had appeared like a godsend at the darkest moment of Tyler’s life. He had been a miracle she hadn’t even had strength enough to pray for. So she didn’t know why, suddenly, she was overwhelmed with doubts about what she was doing.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Cammie said more softly, squeezing her fingers again. “I promise it will be.”

  Tyler smiled, grasping at those reassuring, kind words just as she had held on to Malcolm Truett’s through these last stressful weeks. “I know,” she said. “This is just the jitters. Every bride has them. I don’t know why I should be an exception.”

  “Maybe because you, of all people, have no reason for them. You’ve got the world by the tail. All you have to do is hang on. This is a really good thing,” Cammie said, her voice full of sincerity. “He is.”

  Their eyes met. Unlike Amir’s, Cammie’s were clear and open and filled with understanding. She knew exactly what Tyler had faced in the last three months—the double
blow of Paul’s death and the revelations that had followed it. She would understand why those had been enough to destroy Tyler’s confidence. In her judgment about people. And in her future.

  “A good thing?” Tyler asked, smiling. “You promise me that, oh wise Martha-clone?”

  “I promise,” Cammie said solemnly, her voice made strong with confidence, as if she could convince Tyler by her own conviction. Her tone lightened when she continued. “Now I’m going to run all these yakking women out and let you get ready to charm the assembled masses and your new daddy-in-law,” Cammie said, broadening the last words with her natural Southern accent.

  That was something that she, like Tyler, had worked for years to erase, but sometimes when they were together, they fell back into the comforting rhythm, to words drawn out to too many elongated syllables, and dropped g’s.

  “You gotta charm the pants off that old man, honey,” Cammie ordered. “He might even give you your own oil field. That’s real job security.”

  Tyler laughed, feeling better than she had all morning. Cammie was right. Amir was a good thing. Especially the way her life had been going. He loved her. And she...

  She hesitated, thinking for the first time about what those words really meant, before she forced herself to finish the thought. And she loved him.

  Of course she did, she decided, wondering why her mind had faltered over the phrase. She must. She would never have agreed to marry him otherwise. Not for the money. Not even for the security he seemed so eager to provide. That wasn’t the way she had been brought up. That wasn’t what marriage was all about.

  She watched in gratitude as Cammie efficiently ushered everyone out of the room. After the door had closed behind them, Tyler turned back, facing her image in the full-length glass again. Despite the famous bone structure, the gleaming blue-black hair and the wide violet eyes, reassuringly the same, the woman reflected there seemed almost a stranger.

  Prewedding jitters? she thought. Was that really what this was all about? Or was it something much deeper? Scarlett O’Hara holding up that turnip and shouting into the night, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again”?

  Tyler’s mouth inched upward, amused by the probably too accurate comparison. Some uptown psychiatrist would have had a field day with her life, she thought. She’d never given any of them a chance, of course. That, too, wasn’t the way she had been raised. Instead, she had poured all the emotions from her painful past into her determination to succeed. To leave everything else behind her. Back in Covington, Mississippi.

  Up until a couple of months ago she’d really believed she had done that. But then, for more than twenty years, she had also believed in Paul Tarrant. She had trusted that he would always be there to look after her interests. He had become the caring father she had never had, the guiding hand in her long success and her most trusted friend.

  Suddenly, so quickly it seemed impossible to comprehend, he was dead, the victim of a massive coronary, and she had been alone. And devastated. Just when she needed him the most, Paul was gone, and she had been left to face a career that was going nowhere. Was nowhere, she amended honestly. The woman reflected in this glass was no longer in demand. Wrong look, wrong decade, wrong something. And suddenly it had all been over.

  Paul’s death, coming almost at the same time she had had that realization, had been a terrible blow, but the one that followed had been infinitely worse. She had never begrudged Paul his agent’s commission, taken out of every check she received. After all, he had kept her working through the vagaries of one of the most fickle professions in the world.

  She had thought from the beginning that her time in this business would be short. Only as long as her particular “look” was in demand. That’s all any model could expect—except for the very privileged few who somehow hung on through trends and fads. With Paul’s direction, for almost twenty years Tyler Stewart had been one of those few.

  But she had never forgotten that five-room house in Covington, featured in none of the colorful biographies Paul had fabricated. That dilapidated little house where a girl named Tommie Sue Prator had once lived. And Tyler knew there was still a lot of Tommie Sue left in her. Most of it in the form of scar tissue.

  Her mother had scrimped and saved to provide them the most basic necessities after her daddy had run off. Sometimes it had been a struggle just to get enough to eat. Tommie Sue had always done without things other kids took for granted, even in a place like Covington, where nobody had much. Those memories you never forgot. Deprivations your soul never recovered from.

  As a result, Tyler Stewart had never taken anything for granted, especially not success. Every job she got, she had asked Paul to invest most of the money she made. That growing nest egg would provide security when this dream ended.

  She thought he had done it. Thought he knew people who would know the right things to do with that money. The safe things. He had assured her over and over that it was in good hands. That he was taking care of her. Taking care of her future.

  Maybe he’d tried. It had taken her a month or so after his death before she could come to that more charitable assessment. At first the realization that there was nothing left of all that money had left her numb. Then angry. And finally just bitter.

  It seemed the only thing Paul Tarrant had been good at was peddling the unique bone structure and incredible violet eyes that had transformed Tommie Sue Prator into the woman in the glass. A woman called Tyler Stewart.

  She hadn’t worried when the contracts had gotten fewer and fewer. She had known that was inevitable as the years took their toll, and as other girls, younger, with a fresher look, moved up to claim their rightful places at the top of the heap.

  Tyler had had a great ride on that merry-go-round. She had grabbed the brass ring, and she had been more than ready to retire. Ready to do something with her life that had meaning. More meaning than smiling into a camera.

  Smile, Tyler. The familiar words echoed inside her head. All those smiles. Provided willingly even when she didn’t feel like smiling. Just smiling anyway to protect that future.

  Just as they expected her to do today. Just as Amir would probably instruct her to do if he thought about it. After all, that was what she had done for years. Surely she could do it a little longer, and then, if she did...

  Again her brain hesitated over the painful thought. But this was the reality that had brought her to this day. If she did exactly what Amir wanted her to do, then she’d be safe again.

  Her future with him wouldn’t be snatched away from her as the one she had worked so hard to provide for herself had been. The prenuptial contracts they had signed would assure that, no matter what happened, she would always be taken care of.

  All she had to do was to say “I do.” Simple enough. Just a couple of whispered words, and the pain of Paul’s betrayal would be over and her fears about the years ahead would be ended. Erased. Then maybe the memory of her mother’s short, sad life would finally stop haunting her.

  Tyler closed her eyes, feeling the burn of tears behind her lids. Why was this so hard? Everyone she knew thought this marriage was wonderful. That Amir adored her. That she was the luckiest woman in the world. And all she could think was...there’s something wrong. Wrong about all of this. About today. It wouldn’t feel this way if I were doing the right thing. That was it, of course. No matter what anyone else said, she shouldn’t feel like something was wrong, if what she was doing was right.

  She took another deep breath, watching the veil float around her shoulders. It was one thing, however, to acknowledge that wrongness here. To confess her doubts. Alone. In her room. Away from Amir’s self-confidence, which had belittled every doubt and disclaimer she made, making her feel...

  Like Tommie Sue. The realization was startling, and then she knew it shouldn’t have been. That was exactly how Amir treated her. Just as Paul had. “Just smile at them, sweetheart, ” Paul would say with a laugh, “but don’t open your mouth.”<
br />
  For years she had done just that. Hiding who she was beneath the way she looked. Hiding everything, because she had felt that if they ever found out, it would all be over. The dream. The security.

  Paul had always made her feel that way—inadequate. Not very bright. In need of his guidance. Maybe she had once been all those things, but she’d thought she had outgrown those feelings. She had made herself over in her own image. Ironically, it was the same image Paul had created for her.

  She wouldn’t go back, she decided fiercely. Not back to being Tommie Sue. Not to feeling as if she had no right to an opinion. No right to say no. To make a decision. She couldn’t marry Amir if that’s what he expected.

  And it’s just a little late to have arrived at this conclusion, she realized in panic. About four weeks too late.

  Maybe if she told him how she felt... Surely they could talk about this. Surely it wasn’t too late for that. There was still time.

  Tyler turned away from the mirror and hurried across the vast, empty suite. She didn’t know what she could say to Amir that might make a difference, but she knew, no matter what happened today, for her own self-preservation she had to make an effort to say something.

  THE MAN CALLED HAWK stared at his reflection in the wide, well-lit bathroom mirror, its edges still hazed with the fog from his shower. He had been in the process of wiping off the middle section of the glass with one of the huge towels the hotel provided, when he’d caught a glimpse of his face.

  For some reason the infinitely familiar landscape of his rugged features stopped him, making him pause in his preparations for shaving the two-day growth of beard. He leaned forward, studying the harsh contours of his own face, as if the man in the mirror were a stranger.

  He leaned closer, his hands resting flat on the expensive marble of the countertop, one on either side of the shell-shaped sink. The hotels Hawk normally frequented were not equipped like this. He was unaccustomed to, and a little uncomfortable with, the luxury that surrounded him.