by Jane Graves
Kari looked around, delighted by the interior of the house. To her right was what looked like a parlor. To the left was what had probably once been a living room or library, but it had been rearranged and reworked to create an area for the front desk. Straight ahead was a gorgeous oak staircase with a stained glass window towering over the midfloor landing. It took a moment or two for Kari to realize the stained glass was a representation of Noah’s ark. How cool was that?
Over the front desk was a sign that read: “Animal House. A Bed & Breakfast for Cats and Dogs. Feel Free to Bring Your People.”
Just then a man stepped through a doorway to stand behind the desk. He had a short swirl of gray hair and wore a pair of bifocals around his neck. At one time he’d probably been at least six two, but age had taken its toll and hunched him down to about six feet. He wore a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved plaid shirt that barely harnessed the belly that lopped over his buckstitched belt. He took one look at Kari and froze. Then slowly he turned his gaze to Marc.
“I always assumed I’d be invited to the wedding.”
“Nobody got married, Gus,” Marc said.
“Not even me,” Kari said.
“She needs a room for the night,” Marc said.
“Or maybe several nights,” Kari added.
“She had a car accident near the vineyard in the middle of the storm,” Marc said.
“Wearing a wedding dress?”
“Long story.”
“Not really,” Kari said. “I ran away from my own wedding. I got lost on a deserted highway. I swerved to miss a deer and landed in a ditch. I walked to Marc’s house. He brought me here so I’d have a place to stay.”
“She’s right,” Gus said. “That’s not long at all.”
Marc checked his watch. “Gus? A room?”
Just then a small black-and-white cat leaped onto the counter and sauntered across it, arching her back and rubbing the length of her body along Gus’s arm. He petted her absentmindedly.
“She’s pretty,” Kari said, stepping forward to pet her, too.
“Name’s Fanny,” Gus said. “Short for Fantasia. One of my grandkids named her after the Disney movie, but Marc still thinks it sounds like a stripper name.”
“Gus?” Marc said. “Are you in the hotel business or not?”
Gus smiled a little, then pulled his keyboard across the desk and started poking at it. As he took Kari’s information, Marc retrieved her luggage from his truck.
“How many days did you say you’re staying?” he asked Kari.
“I don’t know.”
He eyed the four huge suitcases. “Sure you’re not moving in?”
“You never know,” she said with a smile. “I like this place.”
Kari reached into her purse for her credit card, but Gus waved her away. “My machine’s down,” he told her. “Drop by the desk tomorrow morning. If it’s working again, I’ll run your card.”
“What about incidentals?” she asked.
“We got no incidentals around here. This is a bed-and-breakfast. You get a bed and breakfast.”
“Movies?”
“We got a bunch of DVDs in the dining room. Take your pick. Just bring them back after you watch them. We have wine and cheese and cookies and such at three o’clock every afternoon, if you’re interested. Those are freebies. So you’ll know, Jasper and Fanny aren’t the only two critters in the place. If any of them end up in your room, be sure to shoo ’em out before you go to sleep. And watch Fanny. She’ll slip into your room and creep under the bed when you’re not looking, and then you’ll find her on your pillow an hour later.”
Kari thought about Boo, who curled up next to her every night. That had bugged the hell out of Greg, which was just one more thing that should have been a red flag.
Gus handed Kari the key to the room. “The only rooms I have open right now are on the third floor.”
“I’m guessing there’s no elevator.”
“Sorry, no.”
She looked down at her dress, then behind her at the muddy train. It had been all she could do to drag it along as she trudged down the highway after the accident. The dress wasn’t even close to dry yet. With the weight of the water it had absorbed, she doubted she could even make it up the stairs.
Marc sighed. “Wait a minute.”
He clearly saw the problem, because he took off his raincoat and kicked off his muddy boots. Moving around behind her, he gathered the train of her dress in his arms.
“Up the stairs,” he told her.
As she walked up to the midfloor landing, Gus called out to Marc, “Estelle’s in Waymark with Chloe and the new baby, so the bed hasn’t been made up yet. I’ll bring linens in a minute.”
By the time Kari made it to the third floor, she was about to drop. She opened the door to room 302. Once inside, Marc let the train fall to the floor.
“Stay on the hardwood floor to take it off,” Marc said. “It’s easier to clean. I’m going down for your luggage.”
Kari took off the poncho and gave it to Marc. He left the room, making two trips to bring her luggage upstairs. She gave him a smile. “Thanks for your help.”
“I’ll call Rick first thing in the morning and tell him where your car is. Drop by his place tomorrow and he’ll let you know what it’s going to cost to get it fixed. Gus will give you directions.”
Without another word, he turned around and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Kari just stood there dumbly, blinking with disbelief. She didn’t know what she’d expected him to do next, but after all they’d been through tonight, she thought at least he would say something to wrap up the occasion, like “Nice to meet you,” or maybe “Have a nice life.”
But he’d said nothing.
Never mind. Doesn’t matter. You have to get out of this dress.
She reached her hands behind her back. Felt for a button. When she came up short, she stretched her arms a little more. Felt around again. Still nothing.
And then it struck her.
It had taken Hilda and Jill ten minutes to fasten this dress up the back, one minuscule button at a time. Kari realized she might be able to unhook some of the lower ones, but she didn’t have a prayer with the ones in the middle of her back.
A tremor of panic seized her. She might as well have been in a straitjacket. She dropped her hands to her sides and considered her options. As it turned out, she had only one.
Hoisting as much of the muddy train as she could, she hurried to the door and yanked it open.
“Wait!”
A few seconds later, Marc came back up the stairs and peered at her from the landing. “What?”
“I have a little problem.”
His brows drew together with irritation. “What problem?”
“Uh…this dress…”
“What about it?”
“The buttons are in the back. There are about a thousand of them, and they’re really tiny.”
“So?”
“So…I can’t get out of it by myself.”
Marc blinked. “What do you mean, you can’t get out of it by yourself?”
“I need you to take it off me.”
Chapter 3
Marc was stunned. Take it off her? As in undress her?
“I can’t do that.”
“You have to,” Kari said.
“No. I don’t believe I do.”
“I told you I can’t breathe. If I don’t get out of this dress, I’ll probably faint dead away. Is that what you want?”
Her hand went to her stomach again, her already-pale complexion turning white. He couldn’t exactly hand this one off to Gus. But with Estelle gone, what was he supposed to do? Beat on doors until he found a woman who wouldn’t mind unbuttoning a wedding dress?
He came to her door, dropping his voice. “You don’t even know me, and you want me to unbutton your dress? Hadn’t you better rethink that?”
“I don’t know. Do I need to rethi
nk it?”
He narrowed his eyes. “How do you know I’m not a dangerous man?”
“Are you a dangerous man?”
“Of course not!”
“Then there’s no problem, is there?”
“You don’t take the word of a dangerous man when he tells you he’s not dangerous!”
“But if you’re not dangerous, I can take your word for it, right?”
Marc’s number two pet peeve. Convoluted logic that led to the right conclusion. God, he hated that.
“Actually,” Kari said, “it was dumber for me to get into your truck with you. God only knows where you might have taken me. At least here if I scream, somebody will hear me, right?”
Right, Marc thought, even though he didn’t want to say so, particularly since she smiled when she said it. He wasn’t finding a whole lot funny about any of this.
“And if you had nefarious intent,” Kari added, “would you have taken the trouble to bring me here?”
Marc screwed up his face. “‘Nefarious intent’?”
“Sorry. I was a lit major. I like big words.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, stepping back inside the room. He moved around behind her, nudging her dress out of the way with his foot so he could come up closer to her. She was right. There were approximately four thousand tiny buttons closed with fabric loops. He tried the first button, but his fingers were just too damned big. It was as if she was asking him to thread a needle with a rope.
“Uh…how’s it going back there?” she asked.
“I’m working on it.”
He pulled one of the little loops, and after a while he managed to shove the button through it.
“There,” he said.
“There what?”
“I got one of them.”
“One?”
“Do you know how tiny these buttons are?”
“You’re going to have to work faster than that.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
A minute later, he’d undone the second one. Had it been too long since he’d undressed a woman? Was that the problem? Use it or lose it? Or did he just need a magnifying glass for these damned buttons?
Which brought him to another not-so-nice conclusion. Maybe his eyesight was going, too.
“Please hurry,” she said, a tremor of panic in her voice. “I think it’s shrinking as it dries.”
“Look, you’ve already said you can’t do this yourself. So right now I’m all you’ve got.”
“I know. But that doesn’t make breathing any easier.”
He fumbled with button number three, poking and pulling. “Can you suck in a little bit?”
“If I could suck in,” she said pointedly, “I could breathe. And if I could breathe, this wouldn’t be a problem. How many more?”
“Do you want me to count buttons or unbutton them?”
She sighed. “Keep going.”
“These buttons are just too small,” he said. “Hell, the dress is, too. Why are you wearing a dress that’s too small?”
“You have to order a wedding dress months in advance. How am I supposed to know exactly what size I’ll be when it finally comes in?”
“Isn’t that what tailors are for?”
“You can let something out only so much.”
He fumbled with button number four a little longer. It was hopeless. “Do you plan on wearing this dress again?”
She looked down at herself with a sigh. “No. It’s ruined.”
Marc reached into his pocket, pulled out a pocketknife, and flipped it open. He tucked the tip of the knife beneath one of the fabric button loops, gave it a flick, and the button came loose. He freed another one. And another.
“How are you doing that?” she asked.
“Pocketknife.”
She spun around. “You’re cutting the button loops?”
“Do you want out of this dress or not?”
“This dress cost five thousand dollars!”
Marc drew back. “For one dress?”
“It’s Vera Wang.”
“Very what?”
“No. Vera—oh, never mind.” She sighed. “Keep going.”
He continued like that all the way down. As the sides of the dress parted, her body slowly relaxed. His gaze trailed down the indentation of her spine, which curved gently all the way to her waist, with skin that looked so soft and fragile he was sure one touch would leave a bruise. As she took a deep breath, her body shifted and the dress fell open a little more, revealing the top of her baby-pink panties. Marc’s heart beat faster. Something about that little scrap of fabric peeking out just about did him in. He’d been too long without a woman. That was the problem. When just the sight of a pair of panties made him hot, he had some serious catching up to do.
Three more buttons, and the task was done. As he clicked his knife shut and returned it to his pocket, she turned around slowly, her hands clasping the bodice of the dress against her breasts to hold it up. As she stared up at him, for the first time he looked past the raccoon rings and the wet lashes and focused on her eyes. They were green. No, more than just green. He’d always prided himself on being a concrete thinker with no room in his ordered mind for metaphorical crap, but suddenly he had a mental picture of the shimmery color of dewdrops glittering on grape leaves in early autumn.
Where the hell had that come from?
He tried to look away, but away turned into down. From one of her shoulders to the other was an expanse of creamy skin sprinkled with raindrops that shimmered in the dim lamplight, complete with delicate collarbones overlaid with a dainty pearl necklace. He couldn’t stop staring at her. He couldn’t even blink. He swore he was staring so hard his eyeballs were turning to dust.
As his gaze moved lower still, he zeroed in on the most beautiful thing he’d seen in ages—her breasts swelling above the lacy bodice of the dress she held against her. He didn’t get it. Brides were supposed to at least pretend they were sweet and virginal, only to wear dresses that made men picture them naked. And that was exactly what he was doing right then. He knew he should be ashamed of himself for that. Rescue a damsel in distress, then fantasize about ravishing her? What kind of man did that?
One who hadn’t seen a naked woman in so long he barely remembered what one looked like.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Look at your shirt. It must have gotten muddy when you helped me up the stairs. I’m sorry.”
She touched her fingertips to his chest, tracing the muddy blotches. Marc had been so preoccupied by having a near-naked woman standing in front of him that he hadn’t even thought about his muddy shirt. And now all he could think about was her soft, soft hand on his muddy shirt. Then she flattened her palm against him, and when he felt the warmth of it, his nerves went haywire. Her hand against his chest was actually making him hard, so hard he was sure not an ounce of blood was getting to his brain. She flexed her fingers against his chest, and fireworks exploded inside his head.
Then it dawned on him. Good God. Was she actually coming on to him?
He wasn’t sure. But if she was, it was wrong. So wrong. She was a marginally crazy woman who’d left her fiancé at the altar not five hours before, standing in front of him wearing a muddy dress with her hair in a wet blob on the side of her head. So why did none of that seem to matter to him? Why could he think of nothing else but tossing her down on that bed and having his way with her?
Suddenly he heard footsteps in the hall. He jerked around just in time to see Gus push the door open—the one Marc realized now that he’d left ajar.
Gus stopped short, looking back and forth between them. Kari was standing with her back to the door. That dress was unbuttoned below her waist. And those damned pink panties…
He had definitely gotten an eyeful.
“I was just bringing you sheets and whatnot,” he told Kari, holding them up. “Tell you what. Why don’t I just leave them right here on the dresser?” As he set them down, he had the nerve t
o smile. “You kids have a good time now.”
With that, he stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
“Well, crap,” Marc muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Kari asked.
“I have to go.”
“Uh…okay,” she said, and he swore she sounded disappointed. Wishful thinking?
It didn’t matter. He had to get out of there. It didn’t bother him for somebody to know he was with a woman. But it did bother him for somebody to think he was ravishing a helpless woman he didn’t even know an hour after she was in an accident. He would have liked to have said he didn’t care about any of that, but in a town the size of Rainbow Valley, gossip took on a life of its own.
He headed for the door, calling back over his shoulder, “Like I said before, I’ll talk to Rick in the morning to tell him where to pick up your car. Gus will tell you how to get to his place.”
“Okay.”
He started out of the room only to turn back. “And the next time you think about doing something like leaving your wedding and driving two hundred miles, check the weather report.”
“I will.”
“And for God’s sake, take the dress off first.”
She nodded. He left the room, then stuck his head back inside again, pointing his finger at her. “And don’t you ever—ever—let a man you don’t know undress you again.”
“Even a nondangerous one?”
“You know what I mean. You lucked out tonight. Never forget that.”
Marc left her standing in the middle of the room, still clutching that dress to her breasts, and trotted down the stairs. He went straight to the bench near the front door to put his boots back on. Gus had settled into an overstuffed chair nearby, wearing a smirk that said he thought the whole thing was just a little too funny.
“That wasn’t what you think,” Marc said, grabbing one of his boots.
“Hey, no business of mine,” Gus said.
