Girl Least Likely to Marry

by Amy Andrews

  ‘And the best part is,’ Tuck said, rolling up onto his elbow, looking down at her, ‘I literally get to make you see stars every night.’

  Cassie shut her eyes as his scent wafted over her and breathed him deep into her lungs. The primal urge to feel him inside her bloomed deep and low.

  ‘But I think it’s only fair that you get to see them first.’ She pushed on his chest. When he fell back against the bed she rolled on top of him.

  Tuck smiled up at her as she straddled him, naked but for her underwear, just like that night in the desert. ‘Okay…’ he said, his palms sliding up her torso, finding her breasts. ‘If you insist.’

  But his hands soon fell away as her intent became clear, and when she kissed her way down his body and right into his boxer briefs he felt as if he’d snatched a little piece of heaven from off the ceiling.

  The next morning the bubble they’d been living in, tucked away in Ithica, away from the rest of the world, well and truly burst. It was a phone call from Marnie that alerted Cassie to the looming disaster.

  ‘How you doin’, hon? Are you okay?’ Marnie asked.

  Cassie stopped looking at the data on her computer screen and frowned. There was something in Marnie’s Southern twang that put her on high alert. ‘Er…yes…sure… Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Oh. You haven’t seen it, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Seen what?’

  ‘The tabloid article?’

  Cassie went back to her work. ‘About the paternity stuff? That’s old news.’

  ‘No, not that. Same tabloid but…it’s about you and Tuck. There’s some not very flattering pics, and the headline…it’s pretty awful.’

  It was sweet of Marnie to alert her, but Cassie just didn’t care about celebrity gossip or the weird obsession people had with it. ‘I’m sure I’ll survive,’ she said dryly.

  ‘Okay…just don’t… Ignore it, okay? Anyone who knows you knows how beautiful you are—inside and out.’

  Cassie frowned at the odd parting remark, but was quickly absorbed in her work again.

  Gina phoned next, followed by Reese. She assured both of them that she was fine and had better things to do with her time than worry about tabloid gossip. And she put it out of her mind.

  Until she arrived home at seven and Tuck was pacing in front of the large windows, yelling into his phone.

  ‘I don’t just want an apology. I want a price put on that pap’s head. I want him dead or alive. I want the whole freaking paper shut down. I want to tie them up in the world’s most expensive legal case until they’re haemorrhaging money. They think they can mess with me after the Jenny thing? They just made me their worst freaking enemy!’

  Cassie jumped as Tuck hurled his phone at the glass. It bounced off and crashed to the ground. He raked a hand through his hair, ignoring the felled piece of expensive technology.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  Tuck turned and saw her standing there. He took half a dozen long strides and swept her into his arms. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell from the fierceness of his hug that he was still angry.

  Tuck pulled back and looked into Cassie’s blue-grey eyes. They’d become such a part of his life he couldn’t begin to imagine a time when she wouldn’t be here, all calm and thoughtful. And that made him even crazier—their time together was definitely finite!

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Is this about the tabloid article?’ she asked.

  Tuck gaped. When his PA had first alerted him that morning he hadn’t thought that Cassie would want her day interrupted—plus he hadn’t wanted to tell her over the phone. So he’d left informing her in preference to jumping on as many heads as he possibly could before she got home.

  ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had phone calls from Reese, Gina and Marnie about it.’

  Damn! He hadn’t thought about them. ‘It’s okay. By the time I’m through with them they’ll think the Jenny debacle was a freaking Sunday school picnic.’

  Cassie stepped out of his arms. This seemed a lot of fuss about some dumb tabloid article. ‘For goodness’ sake, what does it say?’

  ‘Oh. They didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No, I was busy doing important things, like my PhD research at the very place where Carl Sagan himself studied. Now, what the hell does it say that has everyone in such a tizz? Have you got a copy?’

  Tuck looked behind him at the pile of newspapers he’d bought from practically every newsstand in Ithica. ‘One or two,’ he said.

  Cassie blinked at the stacks that littered the formal dining table and the nearby floor. She marched over, picked one off the top and opened it. The glaring headline on page three jumped out at her—‘Tuck’s Ugly Duck’.

  There were several pictures. One was of them at Barringer Crater, where she looked all hot and bedraggled, and three more had been taken the next morning. One was a shot of the wind billowing under her T-shirt, so she looked like the Michelin man, another was of her face all screwed up when that rock had jabbed into her, and the last was their passionate kiss just after that, with Tuck all bare-chested.

  They were a little fuzzy, but it was definitely them.

  The article speculated as to who she was and how unlike Tuck’s usual glamorous consorts she was. It seemed to be drawing a parallel between the fading of his star and his luck in the lady stakes. Cassie rolled her eyes and threw the paper down in disgust.

  ‘It was that bastard in the RV,’ Tuck said, resuming his pacing. ‘He has to have been paparazzi too—not just some visitor wanting to cash in on an unexpected opportunity. You’d need a serious camera to get those images of us.’

  Cassie thought about it for a moment. ‘It was the guy with the big gold jewellery,’ she said.

  Tuck stopped pacing. ‘What? Why didn’t you tell me there was a pap around?’

  She shrugged. ‘I didn’t realise he was at the time.’

  ‘Well, what makes you think it was him now?’

  ‘He kind of hung around a bit. He asked me if you were my boyfriend. He commented that I wasn’t your usual type. He looked kind of puzzled as to why we were together. He had a little boy with him…Zack…you signed an autograph for him.’

  Tuck nodded. He remembered. The man hadn’t been familiar—and Tuck had got to know most of the paps over the years.

  ‘Good,’ he said, stalking over and picking his phone up off the floor. He hit the last call button.

  Cassie listened to the one-sided conversation as Tuck relayed the details to his lawyer and they discussed ways to access Barringer Crater’s records of who had come through that day. Tuck paced again as he spoke, and even though his anger seemed less palpable she could sense frustration surging off him in waves, much the same way she’d always been sensitive to his pheromones.

  Tuck hung up the phone and turned to face Cassie. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,’ he said, trying to gauge how Cassie was feeling about the article. ‘I won’t let them get away with this.’

  Cassie shrugged. ‘Get away with what? Who cares what they think?’

  Tuck blinked. Any other woman he knew would be outraged at that headline. ‘But they’ve insulted you,’ he said.

  Cassie snorted. ‘You think I’m insulted? You think how beautiful you are counts when you’re up for a Nobel Prize? Those things don’t go to the prettiest candidate, Tuck. You think science cares about what you look like? You think they
select people to go to Antarctica based on their attractiveness? I really don’t think you realise how very, very little this matters to me.’

  ‘They don’t have the right to say such horribly hurtful things in a national newspaper about you,’ Tuck said, his anger once again exploding to the surface at Cassie’s calm acceptance. ‘About any woman.’ Didn’t she realise how beautiful she was?

  Cassie shook her head, amazed at how angry he seemed to be. But then she supposed it was a bit of a slap in the face for Tuck, who was used to accolades, to being known for his beautiful women.

  ‘Oh…I see,’ she said. ‘This isn’t about me. This is about an affront to your masculinity. That some two-bit rag has the audacity to call one of your women ugly. Are you afraid you’re not going to make the A-list any more with an ugly, brainiac girlfriend?’ She shook her head. ‘Just what the hell are you doing with me, Tuck?’

  Tuck couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. Rage, white and hot, built in his gut and leeched into his bloodstream. How could she think he was so damn shallow?

  ‘I don’t care about that crap,’ he snapped, shoving his hands on his hips. ‘But I do care when a national newspaper calls any woman ugly. Who has the right to be the arbiter of that? The right to say it? And you? You are smart and sexy and warm and intelligent and beautiful and natural in a way beyond anything any of those twits with their freaking airbrushes and computer programs would know anything about, and I’m not going to sit still and let them call one of the most brilliant minds on the planet, and the woman I love, ugly.’

  Tuck was breathing hard when he finished. In fact it took him a few seconds before he even realised what he’d said.

  ‘What did you say?’ Cassie said.

  He’d said he loved her. His first instinct was to take it back. Pretend that it had been said in the heat of the moment and not meant. But, whilst it had totally been said in the heat of the moment, he did mean it. He loved her. He just hadn’t realised it ’til that moment.

  He’d almost spat his coffee all over the paper this morning when he’d first read the article, and his anger had been building with the ominous power and thrust of a dangerous weather front all day. He hadn’t been able to articulate where the immediate irrational anger had come from when he’d first dialled his lawyer, but it had been frighteningly, utterly palpable.

  And now he knew why.

  He’d never felt like this about a woman. Not even April. He’d wanted to love her like this, had committed to that, but the plain truth was that he’d only ever just liked her, and she’d been there to cling to when everything was spiralling down the plughole. But it hadn’t been enough, and he’d been wrong to give her hope that he could love her as she’d deserved.

  As he loved Cassie.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. And then he said it again for good measure, weighing it up. ‘I love you.’

  He’d spent a lot of his life thinking those three words would mean his life was over, but it didn’t feel like that—it felt as if it was just beginning. It wasn’t scary and awful—it was just right.

  Cassie blinked. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Even if I believed that such an emotion existed, and wasn’t some commercial construct to sell movies and Valentines, we’ve known each other for just over a month—it’s preposterous.’

  Tuck shook his head. ‘It’s not.’

  Cassie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Len might never have performed oral sex on her and blown her head right off her shoulders every single night, but he would never have complicated their arrangement by falling prey to such schoolboy fancy. This was what happened when she got involved with someone who let his heart—or other parts of his body—rule his head.

  Now she understood why her mother had been so determined to school her in the importance of her career and not to let distractions derail her from what was truly important.

  Declarations like this could stop a person in their tracks!

  But not her. She had her PhD to finish, then she was heading home to Australia, and next year she was going to Antarctica—come hell or high water. And she was not going to let some jock talk her out of it because he imagined himself in love with her.

  Love was for dreamers—not thinkers. And she was most definitely a thinker.

  It just wasn’t logical that he loved her, for crying out loud!

  ‘Well, I don’t love you,’ she said.

  Tuck flinched at her matter-of-fact delivery. ‘You’re telling me you don’t feel anything for me?’

  Cassie shrugged. ‘I feel sexual arousal. I feel a Pavlovian response to your pheromones. I feel a constant state of primal awareness.’

  ‘Well, that’s a start,’ he said.

  ‘I’m here because of my libido, Tuck. That’s why you invited me, remember? It was never about anything other than burning off some lust.’ Even as she said the words she knew they weren’t one hundred percent true. ‘We always had an end date.’

  Tuck took a step towards her. He’d thought they’d grown closer over the last weeks, that Cassie had started to see their relationship as something more than a scratching post for her libido. Especially since their time at Barringer—since she’d told him about what had happened to her as a teenager.

  ‘What if I don’t want that any more? What if I want more?’

  ‘More?’

  ‘A relationship. Marriage. A family.’

  It was Cassie’s turn to gape. Since when had Mr-Love-Them-and-Leave-Them got so serious? Hadn’t he said her complete lack of interest in weddings and babies was right up his alley?

  ‘In a couple of months I’m going home to Australia, to continue my aurora research, and next year I’m going to Antarctica for six months. I’m not going to have any regrets in my life, Tuck. Not like my mother. I don’t believe in love and marriage. And children aren’t on my agenda. You know that.’

  Tuck could feel it all slipping away. ‘A career and a family don’t have to be mutually exclusive.’

  ‘You can’t even have children, Tuck.’ She saw him flinch at her blunt statement and felt conflicted by how bad it felt. Damn it—it was the truth. ‘I didn’t think you wanted them.’

  Tuck hadn’t. Not really. Not even when he’d been going through the fertility process with April. But she had, and it had seemed like something to bond them together even though his infertility had exacerbated his already battered sense of self.

  ‘I do now,’ he said, realising the truth of it. ‘I want to have children with you.’

  Cassie shook her head. ‘I’ll be gone for six months, Tuck. And it won’t be the only time my career will have me travelling. You’d be okay with that, would you?’

  Tuck blanched at the thought. He missed her like crazy during her twelve-hour days at the university. Six months would seem like an eternity.

  Cassie nodded at his hesitation. ‘Clearly this is not working. I’ll move back to the dorm.’

  She headed for the bedroom. She should be calm. It was, after all, a logical decision to move on now things were not as she’d originally agreed. But her heart was thumping and there was an ache in the pit of her stomach as if she was ravenously hungry but there was nothing she wanted to eat.

  Tuck took some deep breaths before he followed her in. His heart thundered and his head spun at how everything had unravelled so quickly. Cassie was throwing her clothes into her case when he joined her.

  ‘Don’t do
this,’ he said from the doorway.

  Cassie shook her head. ‘It’s logical,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘I moved in because it was logical and now—given the way that we both feel—it’s logical for me to move out.’

  Tuck didn’t know what he’d expected. Women he’d split with before had never been this calm. There’d been tears. Anger. Threats. It should have made a nice change, but it only made it virtually impossible to reach her. She’d reverted to her comfort zone of logic and sense and that was as far removed from gut and emotion as was possible.

  He was angry and frustrated, but it seemed futile in the midst of her calm, detached packing. How could he get through to a robot? It was ironic that when he’d finally fallen in love with a woman it was with one who was incapable of returning it.

  His Great-Aunt Ada would have said it was poetic justice.

  ‘Don’t,’ he snapped, moving into the room. ‘Stay. I’ll move. I’ll go back to New York. Stay until you’re done here. It’s paid up for three months.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Cassie said, automatically concentrating very hard on the job at hand instead of the growing gnaw in her gut. ‘This is your place.’

  Tuck reached over and slammed the drawer shut. ‘I said don’t,’ he barked. ‘You want logic? A dorm is no place for a grown woman. It makes sense for you stay here. Put some of those IQ points of yours to good use and figure it out.’

  Cassie couldn’t look at him as he loomed over her. His pheromones wafted off him in strong waves and despite the situation her nostrils flared. If he didn’t go soon she was going to act in a very confusing and contradictory manner.

  For both of them.

  ‘Okay. Thank you,’ she said.

  Tuck nodded. He went to the bedside table and picked up his wallet and keys. ‘I’ll send for my stuff tomorrow.’

  Cassie didn’t acknowledge him. She didn’t turn to watch him leave. She just stood by the drawers and listened to the door slam, the car start up, the garage door open, the car drive away.