He pulled her up on top of him, so that her body straddled his, pressing her against him, against the one place he needed her touch more than any other. And when she let out a husky groan, he drank it in, loving the sound of Bridget’s desire.
But he couldn’t stand how slowly she was moving. Bracing his hands on her hips, he held her steady, and rolled her over. Like magic, he was on top. He grinned, bending down to drop kisses on her lips and her cheeks and her chin. She writhed beneath him. He couldn’t ever remember making love to a woman as slippery and reckless as this.
He was struck by a sudden thought, a thought he did not want to deal with right now, when he was swept up and beaten up by pure lust, when he was having a great deal of difficulty remembering anything but Bridget.
But this was so unlike her. Calm, controlled, sedate Bridgie. Yet here she was, making incoherent little moans, throwing self-control to the four winds, getting on with some real steam.
It was so unlike Bridget that he had to stop, had to wonder if it was okay to do this. Hell. The last thing he needed was a conscience when every system in his body was on red alert and raring to go.
Maybe it was okay. Maybe she was caught up in a wedding night fever that she couldn’t break. Possible.
Or maybe she’d been possessed by some evil, seductive impostor. Or maybe she was so wasted, she didn’t know what she was doing.
But even as he hesitated, she was ravenous, pushing his clothes away, raining kisses, running her tongue over his chest and his ribs, inflaming him, engorging him, more than he thought possible.
And when she slid down one hand, cupping him through his trousers, fingering him ever so delicately, he knew he was going to explode.
“Bridget,” he said through gritted teeth, “just how drunk are you?”
“I don’t know,” she breathed. “Does it matter?”
“There are rules about things like this, about taking advantage of someone who...isn’t herself.”
But she wasn’t paying attention to his words. She stroked him then, with a surer, rougher touch, and he arched off the bed. He caught her wrist and gripped it tightly, inches away.
“Bridget, I can’t do this. Not with you.”
She froze.
Had sanity returned? If only it would. If only he could look into her eyes and see a thinking, rational being, one who would say “yes” right now and mean it.
Because, if by God that happened, he would be on top of her, inside her, in a New York minute.
“Bridget?” he asked slowly.
But her eyes were still cloudy, still confused. “You said you couldn’t do this. Not with me.”
“Not if tomorrow, when you remember, it will be my fault. I can’t do that, Bridgie. It’s not right. I...” He caught himself, just before the words I love you too much for that left his lips.
Of course he loved Bridgie. He had always loved Bridgie.
But not this way.
This was the real way, the whole way, the I-want-to-sleep-with-you-every-night, I-want-to-take-vows-with-you way. Tripp Ashby was notorious for never, ever getting close to feeling like this about anyone.
But he felt it. Shocked, astonished, he realized. He definitely felt it. For Bridget Emerick.
And he didn’t want to make love with her unless she was in her right mind and fully participating. Scruples. At this late date. How inconvenient.
“Of course you don’t want to do it with me. I heard what they said. Your Studs,” she said angrily. Hot spots of color stained her cheeks. She reached out and slapped him hard, and he could hear a ringing in his ears. “Sure you had to get married. Too bad it couldn’t be somebody more fun.”
He shook his head, trying to regain his hearing. What had just happened here? One minute she was snuggling all over him, and the next she’d slapped his face. “I don’t know what you’re saying. You heard what who said?”
She detached herself from him with an elaborate show of pride, looking down her nose at him. Calmly, very slowly, she announced, “I seem to find myself rather inebriated at the moment and I apologize for any...” She hiccuped loudly. “Any inconvenience this may have caused you. But I think I’m going to be sick.”
And then she leapt from the bed and ran out in the hall in her camisole and her garter belt.
He was up and after her in seconds, but by the time he got upstairs, she’d barricaded herself in the bathroom. She refused to open the door.
“It’s better this way,” he said quietly, his hand flat on the door. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
Silence was all that greeted him.
“What a wedding night,” he muttered.
Dueling bathrooms. The bride was locked in one upstairs, while the groom marched downstairs to find one of his own. Six or seven cold showers sounded like a good idea.
* * *
BRIDGET HAD a wretched headache. She also had the most horrific case of total embarrassment she’d ever had in her life.
So if she had to wake up with a mouth full of sand and a head like a gong, why couldn’t she at least have total amnesia about how she’d gotten that way?
But, no, she remembered every detail. She remembered the whole, bloody awful picture. She remembered crawling all over him like a lovesick fool, and him rejecting her.
I can’t do this. Not with you.
Oh, sure. He was more than willing to make love to every cheerleader and pompon girl on the planet. To every bimbo with a bank account. But not to Egghead Emerick.
She remembered throwing herself into her own bed, still wearing that idiotic garter belt and stockings. But how was she supposed to know Tripp was going to see them? They were a present from Kitty Belle, who’d assured her that all the brides were wearing them these days. And Bridget hadn’t had the heart to refuse such sinfully pretty things.
Now they were residing in the wastebasket. She’d thought about flushing them, but she didn’t want to clog the drains.
Padding around in a much more sensible pair of flannel pajamas, she splashed cool water on her face and regarded herself blearily in the mirror. Her face was so pale, she might as well have been a vampire.
“At least vampires get to sleep all day,” she mumbled. She hadn’t ventured out of her room this morning, and she wasn’t sure she was going to. “Chicken,” she chided herself.
But what was the point?
If she went downstairs to the kitchen or the living room, she might run into Tripp. She might even pass by Tripp’s bedroom, hereafter known in her mind as the Chamber of Horrors. And why would she want to chance that?
With the Studs and, most importantly, Kitty Belle, safely out of the cabin, winging their way far away from Lake Tahoe, there was no need to pretend anymore. Now she and Tripp could be pleasant strangers, inhabiting opposite ends of the cabin until it was time to go home.
Time to go home to her job and her fiancé. Her real fiancé. Jay Philpott. The good, honest, noble man she had betrayed in almost every sense of the word. And the fact that she hadn’t actually, physically, betrayed him sure wasn’t from lack of trying.
Bridget sat down on her bed and burst into tears.
But the hair on the back of her neck began to tingle. Lifting her head, she stilled. Was she supersensitive this morning, or was that really Tripp back there somewhere?
Quickly she jumped up and spun around, clutching a pillow to her midriff. “Tripp,” she blurted. If she looked bleary and hung over, he certainly didn’t. The swine.
Oh, he had a few shadows under his dreamy blue eyes. But that hardly interfered with his looks at all. The pig.
If at first her hair had tingled, now it was her whole body. She was standing there throbbing and trembling, unable to put last night out of her mind, unable to think of anything but Tripp’s hands on her body, and her hands on his...
“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a voice that was more than a little shrill. “Or is it too much to ask to let me suffer in peace?”
“I’m sorry you’re suffering.”
“Then go away.” She marched over there and tried to slam the door on him, but he caught it with his hand.
“Bridgie, we need to talk,” he said tersely.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
She had the absurd impulse to smash him with the pillow. Like that would’ve stopped him from invading her room and standing there, like a Greek statue, cool and immovable.
“I hate to bother you,” Tripp said quietly. “I know you’re not feeling well.”
That was the understatement of the year. “I have a headache,” she said, backing up awkwardly, still dangling the pillow from fingers that were just itching to smack him one right across the face.
“I can imagine.” He gave her a tight, cynical smile. “You drank quite a bit last night.”
“I am aware of that,” she shot back. “Yet another disaster to lay at your door.”
Tripp’s brows drew together darkly. “My door?”
She ignored the danger signs. “Yes, your door. It’s all your fault!”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t the one crawling all over you in a damn garter belt,” he accused.
She felt all the color drain from her face. “I seem to recall you doing some crawling of your own, buddy boy.”
“Well, what do you think I am, a saint? I’m not Jay. Old Jay would hide his eyes and walk away because he’s such a stand-up guy. I did walk away, though, didn’t I? Nothing happened, and it’s completely because I walked away.” And then he growled something under his breath, something that she couldn’t quite catch, about never walking straight again.
“Don’t talk about Jay,” she tried. This time she did swat him with the pillow, although it was pretty ineffectual. “I already feel so guilty I can’t see straight, and you bring up Jay, my poor fiancé that I’ve just treated like dirt, and he doesn’t even know it. Well, thank you, Tripp Ashby, for yet another reminder of what a horrible, unworthy fiancée I am!”
“Look, Bridgie,” he said kindly, detaching the pillow from her hand and setting it back on the bed. “You’re not unworthy. So you got a little drunk and made a mistake.”
“A mistake? More like a screwup of titanic proportions,” she muttered.
“Everybody makes mistakes.”
“Not Jay,” she bit out. “And not me before I started getting involved with you.”
“Yeah, well, get ready, because here’s another one to blame on me.” He ran a savage hand through his hair. “We have a problem.”
Gritting her teeth, she asked, “What is it?”
“My mother.”
Nothing new there. “What, did she miss her flight back to Chicago?” She glanced down at her watch. “She ought to be there by now.”
“She didn’t go.”
That got her attention. “You’re not serious! She didn’t go? Why not?”
“She says she wasn’t feeling well this morning.” Tripp’s handsome face was drawn and grim. “She says she doesn’t think it’s wise to travel right now, that her condition is deteriorating more quickly.”
“Oh, no,” Bridget gasped. “But she seemed fine yesterday, except for that episode right at the end of the ceremony.”
“I know, but...” He broke off. “I’ve talked to her doctor a couple of times, but all he says is that every case is different, and that we can’t predict what to expect. She could seem fine, or she could be progressively weaker and dizzier. She’s definitely weak right now. And, Bridget, the thing is, she wants to stay here.”
“Here, as in Tahoe?” She began to get a bad feeling about this. “Or, here, as in this general vicinity?”
“Here, as in this cabin.”
“Oh, no.” Thunderstruck, she thumped back down on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, yes. She needs to rest, she says, and she promises she won’t bother us. She’ll just sleep and sit in the sun. But she doesn’t want to spend...” He took a deep breath and kept going. “She doesn’t want to spend what may be her last days in a hotel. And I don’t blame her.”
“No, of course not.”
“And it’s really not that big a deal to move her into one of the upstairs bedrooms. They’re all empty, all but this one, of course, and you’ll have to vacate...” Tripp gave her a measuring glance, gauging her reaction. “She thinks you and I are sharing my room downstairs, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed dully.
“And I’d like to make her as comfortable as possible.” He held out his hands in a gesture of supplication. “It’s getting to be ridiculous, all the compromises I’m asking you to make. It’s not fair, and I’m sorry.”
Bridget gazed down at her bare feet. “There’s no need to be sorry. I agreed. Each step of the way, I agreed. I kept thinking...”
She’d kept thinking it was a lark, an adventure, before she settled into acting like a responsible human being for the rest of her life. She hadn’t quite realized how painful this would be.
“So what are you saying?” she asked. “Am I supposed to move in with you, into the Chamber of—into your room?”
“Come on. It won’t be that bad.” He gave her a sardonic grin. “We’ve already been through the worst, don’t you think? And we’ll keep you away from the booze. I promise not to touch you, and to return you to your fiancé in one piece.”
“Don’t worry. I can control myself.” She stood up, trying to be as cool and impersonal as she could. This was hard enough, when her brain kept feeding her the same scandalous phrases over and over. He took off my clothes. He saw me practically nude. I touched him...everywhere.
He was acting like sharing a room under those circumstances would be as easy as putting on brave faces to the world. In fact, he was more distant now that he’d ever been since the first days of their friendship. Apparently he didn’t think it would be weird at all to share a room. But Bridget was terrified.
“Is Kitty Belle here now?” she asked.
“Yes, downstairs.” His eyebrows were drawn together, and his eyes were a dark, moody blue. “I told her you were getting the rest of your things out of this room.”
“Good cover. You’re very good at thinking up lies on the fly, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, it’s a real talent,” he returned, in just as snippy a tone as she had used.
So she threw her things haphazardly into a couple of suitcases, not bothering to be neat. They weren’t going far. At the last minute, she remembered to retrieve the stockings and the garter belt from the wastebasket in the bathroom, just in case Kitty Belle chose this room. Wouldn’t want her finding suspicious articles of clothing lying around in the wrong room.
And then she fled her sanctuary, luggage in hand.
Tripp was waiting outside, waiting to carry her bags downstairs. But as she shut the door behind her, they heard voices from down below in the living room.
Loud, agitated, excited voices. She and Tripp dropped the suitcases and ran to look over the railing.
“Where is she?” an aggravated voice demanded. “I want to see her, now!”
“She is on her honeymoon, sir,” Kitty Belle retorted. “And don’t take that tone with me.”
Bridget was rooted there, stock-still, staring down at the newcomers. She couldn’t possibly be seeing what she was seeing. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
Tripp jumped down the stairs two at a time. “Come on, Mother. I’ll take you upstairs where you can lie down. We can sort this all out later.”
“But who is that man? Why does he want to see Bridget? And who is the other one?”
Tripp practically dragged his mother up the stairs, past Bridget, and into the last room, where Ki always stayed when he was at the cabin.
“Here,” he commanded. “You rest, do you hear me?”
And then he slammed the door shut after her, and grabbed Bridget by the hand. Without brooking any objections, he towed her downstairs, down to where their new gues
ts were anxiously awaiting them. Or at least anxiously awaiting an explanation.
“Bridget,” the man said testily, “are you or are you not married? That woman just told me that you are on your honeymoon. With him!” he exclaimed, poking a finger at Tripp. “Is this true, Bridget Marie?”
She smiled weakly. “Hi, Dad.”
It seemed the real father of the bride, the real widowed plumber from Minnesota, had just shown up.
“Look, you’ll have to keep your voices down, so my mother doesn’t hear,” Tripp whispered hastily. “We haven’t got time to explain, but you’re just going to have to trust us. There is nothing wrong going on here.” He looked more than a little guilty, chafing under Frank Emerick’s stony glare. “Absolutely nothing,” he repeated.
From behind her father, Jay Philpott made his presence known. Calm and collected as always, he pointedly ignored Tripp, gazing right at his fiancée. “Bridget, I think I deserve an explanation. I know you’re not married, darling, so what exactly is going on here?”
“She can’t be married,” her father interjected. “She would’ve told me if she were getting married. I know my girl better than that.”
Bridget had no idea what to say. Who did she lie to first?
“Bridget?” her father demanded. “Say something.”
“Bridget?” Jay prompted.
There was a long pause, while she tried to think about the stars dancing in her periphery. Her worst nightmare was that either her dad or Jay would find out. And now they both had. What was she supposed to do? She felt like running for the hills.
“Dad, Jay,” she said finally, in the calmest voice she could manage. “It’s really wonderful to see you. Do you mind stepping outside for a second? We’ll walk around back and you can see the mountains. It’s really quite lovely here.”
“We are more concerned about you than about the mountains,” Jay said quietly. He continued to watch Bridget carefully, but when she took his arm, he did allow himself to be led outside.
She took them around the back, and then waited for the floodgates to open. She could feel Tripp at her back, offering himself up as a tower of strength, but she refused to lean on him. She’d gotten herself into this mess, and she planned to navigate her way out without his help or his interference.
Once Upon a Honeymoon (Harlequin American Romance) Page 16
