To Catch a Groom

by Rebecca Winters

  Of course not.

  Greer turned to her sisters. “I don’t think I can go on without some sleep.”

  “I can’t, either,” Piper murmured. “You can bet these are the only four beds available in Monaco.”

  “I don’t see we have a choice, guys,” Olivia declared.

  “Agreed.” Greer pulled out her wallet and handed the receptionist the credit card. At the rate they were spending money, there would be no profit to bank at the end of the year.

  So far they were out their designer luggage, their wardrobes, their bikes and $15,000 they would have to give back to Mr. Carlson. If it hadn’t been for the generosity of Simon and the boys, they would have been forced to buy breakfast, too.

  The woman handed them three sets of clean sheets, blankets and pillows. “You’re in dorms four, five and six upstairs.”

  They wouldn’t even be in the same room. “Thank you.”

  At the top of the stairs they paid a visit to the rest room before moving on to the dorms. To their relief, each one was empty. Naturally no backpackers would be hanging around here. Not while the most exciting event in the world’s most romantic spot was happening right outside the building.

  All the bottom bunks had already been claimed by other guests. Olivia looked around her dorm. “If our luck holds, no one will show up until tonight. By then we’ll have had our sleep and can head for the train station.”

  “Let’s set our watch alarms for 7:00 p.m. That’ll give us a good few hours to recuperate.”

  They hugged Olivia goodnight, then went to their separate dorms. Somehow Greer found the strength to climb up the ladder and fix her bed before collapsing on top of it. Yet five minutes later she was still awake.

  Max’s last words to the guests in the drawing room kept running through her mind. Welcome to the family.

  His mockery, meant as the final affront before he put her on the plane home from Nice had been particularly hurtful.

  Greer knew why… She was in love for the first and only time in her life.

  Hot tears gushed from her eyes. She buried her face in the pillow. It was a good thing her sisters weren’t in the room. They’d never seen her cry over a man before. And they never would!

  When next she became cognizant of her alarm going off, she was so out of it she rolled off the mattress to get up like she usually did, then screamed to feel herself falling.

  “Oh!” she cried out again when a pair of strong masculine arms caught her before she went splat on the floor.

  “Easy, signorina.”

  “Max!”

  She blinked several times while she tried to figure out if she was awake or dreaming. Right now the black eyes staring into hers at such close range were alive with flame.

  “How did you find me? What are you doing here?” She was so in love with him and so cross with him at the same time she couldn’t see straight. “Where are all the other people?”

  “What other people? Don’t I even merit a ‘grazie’ for saving your life?” he whispered against her lips, nibbling them as if they were delicious morsels he couldn’t resist.

  She groaned because he was kindling the ache that had never gone away since he’d first kissed her. Rivulets of desire coursed through her body which yearned toward his. She was trembling with needs he’d brought to life, needs that would never go away.

  “Put me down first and we’ll talk about it,” she begged in a breathless voice. This close to him she couldn’t think.

  His mouth roamed over her face, her nose, her eyes, her hair. “I can’t do that, bellissima. I’ve learned that the only way to get anywhere with you is to keep you in my arms. I want you, Greer. I want you with a hunger you couldn’t possibly comprehend.”

  His mouth was doing the most incredible things to her. In his arms she was learning the meaning of rapture. When they got tangled up with each other on the narrow lower bunk, she couldn’t tell where one kiss ended and the next one began.

  Ecstasy. That’s what it was like being kissed by Maximilliano di Varano. Ecstasy.

  Her fingers twined in his raven-black hair and she found herself covering his face and throat with her mouth, savoring everything male about him while she worshipped the differences between them.

  “You were right to call me a shark,” he whispered huskily as he caressed her throat with his lips. “I’d like to take bites out of you in order to make you a part of me.

  “But if I did that, then you would be consumed, and I would go mad with hunger because there wasn’t any more of you, anywhere. Let me take you back to the Piccione where we can be alone and I can love all of you,” he begged with primitive longing.

  Back to the Piccione? For only one night?

  In that moment her heart dried up like winter’s last prune.

  Deliberately misunderstanding him, she leaned over him, pressing his cheeks with her palms. Pain like she’d never known before intensified the purple glow of her eyes.

  “You’ve made me so happy, I’m frightened. Do you think you could talk Fabio into letting us take the Piccione on a long, long honeymoon? I want to go to Elba, Monte Cristo and a hundred other islands with you. I want to experience everything with you.

  “You’ve set me on fire, and now I’m the one bursting from the love I want to shower on you. I want to be all things to you. I want to live with you night and day.

  “I want to have your babies,” she cried against the male mouth that had transformed her. “Beautiful, brilliant, wonderful babies just like their father.

  “You won’t be doomed to swim forever alone, searching for me but never finding me. Once we’re married, you can make love to me whenever you want. Whenever I want. Whenever we both want, for the rest of our lives if we want. How does that sound to you, my darling?

  “You are my darling you know,” she kissed the corner of his mouth, the lashes of his eyes, the lobes of his ears. “Don’t you know a hundred lifetimes from now I will love you even more than I love you right now?

  “Yet I can’t imagine it being any stronger than it is at this very instant. There’s no man who comes close to you, Max. I love you. I love you to the depth of my soul.” Her voice throbbed.

  “I honestly didn’t know love could make me feel like this. I didn’t realize,” she whispered, her breathing shallow. “Kiss me again so I’ll know this is real.”

  She sought his mouth once more with soaring passion. “I can’t wait to be your wife. I realize we haven’t known each other very long, but it doesn’t matter. Not when you’ve found your soul mate.”

  Staring into the black depths of his eyes she said, “We are soul mates. I knew it when you asked me to guess your name, knowing such a task would have been impossible. It was the most thrilling moment for me because I knew you wanted the experience to go on and on and never be over.

  “I wanted it to go on and on, too. More than anything in my life I wanted to swim in the moonlight with you. But my feelings were too intense that night, too raw. I felt like one of those white-hot stars out in space ready to implode. Oh Max, I—”

  “Greer—” he spoke her name in a gravelly voice, shifting her aside so he could get to his feet.

  His breathing sounded ragged. The broad chest beneath the cream knit shirt he was wearing rose and fell visibly, like he’d just run a marathon. She’d terrified him.

  That was the prophecy she’d made to her sisters months ago. It had come true. She knew he would run once he thought marriage was on the cards. But it hurt with a pain from which she would never, ever recover.

  She slid off the bottom bunk. “What’s wrong, darling?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. His face was a study in agony. She had no idea he could look that way.

  “I forgot I was dealing with a woman who has obviously never been to bed with a man before.”

  Really. Her inexperience stuck out that badly? She’d thought her wild response to him was probably more uninhibited and reckless than any initia
ted woman he’d ever made love to before.

  “No,” she answered in a bright tone. “I haven’t. I’ve never had the slightest inclination until I saw you get out of that pool and come walking toward me as if you wanted to devour me. Since then I haven’t been able to think about anything else but marrying you and making love with you for the rest of our lives.”

  After a long, palpable silence, “Greer—” he said her name again. The ultimate playboy of the Riviera seemed to be choking on monosyllables. It had to be a first for him, so why wasn’t she jumping up and down with glee?

  He raked a hand through his hair. “I’m afraid taking you out to the Piccione isn’t going to work after all.”

  He’d finally been able to spit out the words, but they emerged sounding like a tormented whisper. How weird!

  With the entire female population throwing themselves at him from every direction, why was it causing him such upheaval? Why such suffering to deny himself the pleasure of a one-night stand with a virginal American from the wrong side of the tracks?

  “What do you mean?” she cried out in spurious alarm.

  When he didn’t say anything else, she decided it was time to help him out.

  “Why don’t you just admit you would love to make love to me, but not if it means getting hitched first!”

  “Greer—”

  She laughed. If her sisters had been present, they would have called it her cruel laugh.

  “Take it easy, Max. It’s not the end of the world. You’re off the hook. You always have been.”

  His dark head reared back, exposing his hard jaw. “Explain that remark.”

  Putting her hands in her back pockets, she smiled up at him. “I’ll be happy to. At the jail when I was telling you about the Husband Fund, I’m afraid so many other matters were discussed at the same time, I left out the most important part.”

  “Which part?” he demanded in a chilly tone.

  Greer cocked her head to the side. “This’ll take a few minutes. Would you like to sit down first?”

  Like a magnificent colossus, he remained standing there.

  “Fine. Have it your way.” She flashed him another sunny smile. “My sisters and I never worried about getting married, but our parents did.”

  His scowl was quite frightening. “We’ve been over this ground before.”

  “True, but there’s more. Unfortunately you have to be patient because I’m a woman, and you know how women are. They have to lay everything out and build up to it, analyze it, discuss it, and dissect it to death before they get to the point.

  “It’s just one of the great differences between the sexes men have so much problem with. Especially a man like you.”

  His mouth thinned. It delighted her, even if the withered prune which had been her heart was dissolving fast.

  “As I was saying, our parents were concerned enough about the situation that during Mr. Carlson’s reading of a letter our father had written to us, Daddy asked us to watch a movie about these ladies who try to find millionaires to marry.”

  “I’ve seen it,” he interjected in a low voice.

  “Of course you have. Anyway, the whole idea was to put ideas in our head to find a rich man and settle down.

  “The film was a complete turnoff.”

  She paused. “You’re pacing. Why don’t you sit down? I told you this would take a while.”

  If looks could kill. “Go on.”

  “The loss of both our parents who needed constant nursing care over a couple of years was harder on us than we thought. After Daddy died, we moved across the street to a basement apartment so the house could be sold to pay the bills. I guess we didn’t see that we needed a break until our landlady suggested to Piper we could use a vacation.

  “But you know how it is when you’re a workaholic, because that’s what we are. We loved college, love our work and find it much more stimulating than anything else we do.

  “So…until Mrs. Weyland brought up the idea of a vacation, we really hadn’t entertained the thought. But with $15,000 suddenly in hand, it sounded kind of fun to go somewhere exciting. If only the money didn’t have to be used to find a husband which none of us wanted.

  “That’s when Olivia reminded us we were the Duchesses of Kingston, so why not pretend we were the millionaires and see how many men we could get to propose?

  “Piper picked up from there and said why not wear the Duchesse pendants to bring the really hard-core playboys out of the woodwork?

  “Both their ideas were brilliant. At that point I merely suggested that we vacation on the Riviera if we wanted to hit the jackpot. When any of those phony playboys actually did propose, they would disappear back into the woodwork as soon as we told them we were the poor Duchesses from Kingston, New York, with no titles, no money, no lands.

  “Then we could go home as free as the air to breathe having had a fabulous time visiting the home of our ancestor and maybe picking up new markets for our calendar business.”

  By now Max’s eyes resembled shards of black ice. He shifted his weight, making her aware of his intimidating height. “So if I had proposed—”

  “If you had proposed fair and square, I would have told you the truth about myself knowing you would bail.”

  “Which was exactly what you wanted to happen.”

  Ah hah. His Italian ego had been dented again.

  “I thought I’d already made that clear. But to reiterate, yes! That’s exactly what we wanted to happen. Don’t you see? We would have obeyed Daddy’s stipulation to try and find a husband.

  “Could we help it if in the end our eager suitors took back their proposals when they realized there was no gold at the end of the rainbow?”

  She flashed him her diabolical smile. “I certainly didn’t have to worry about you though, did I. Maximilliano di Varano baled ahead of time because you don’t need to force a woman to have her, and you’re not stupid. Otherwise you wouldn’t be chief counsel for the House of Parma-Bourbon even if you are the son of a duc.”

  “Grazie, signorina,” came his brittle reply. She could envision him making that slight little aristocratic bow.

  “You’re welcome.” Her brows lifted. “You want to know something really ironic? We even planned our scheme so that on the last night of our trip when we unmasked ourselves, we would arrange to do it at a youth hostel just to prove our point.

  “I had no idea it would be this one, though. Our original plan was to end up on the Spanish Riviera where we would lure our opportunistic playboys to a hostel, the last place they would think where we were staying.

  “Unfortunately nothing went the way we expected and I was denied the fun of telling one of those losers, ‘Sorry. No money. No tiara. What? You mean you’re taking back your proposal? Well don’t go away mad. Just go away.’”

  His expression had darkened as if there’d been a total eclipse of the sun. “What if one of those…losers hadn’t bailed?”

  She laughed. “The kind of men we planned to target were safe bets. But wearing the pendants threw a monkey wrench in the works. Are you familiar with that expression?

  “I can see that you are,” she said when there was no answer. “The point is, we never did have a chance to meet a real playboy. All we’ve met up with so far is the good old boy network. Its members don’t count.”

  “So there’s an age?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How old’s Don?”

  Don. Again?

  “He’s the right age, but he’s not a playboy. He’s a fine man who wants to marry me and have a family. Six little boys who will all grow up to be football players.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Not a thing if you love football, which I don’t mind. Sometimes it can be pretty exciting. But I’d prefer not to be looked at as a breeder.”

  “Breeder?”

  “So—there is one vagary about American English you haven’t run into yet. You have no idea how pleased I am to hear that.
Piper complains that Nic claims to know everything about everything.”

  “You were saying?” he reminded her in a gruff tone.

  “I was saying that I would prefer to be looked upon as a woman first. Complete. Total, in and of myself! I mean, what if I couldn’t have children? Would that suddenly make me less desirable in his eyes? And even if I could turn out a football team for Don, what if they were girls instead of boys? Heaven forbid! Who would watch the football games with him in his old age?”

  One of Max’s black brows dipped. “A minute ago you told me you wanted to give me wonderful, brilliant babies like their father.”

  “That was different. You were kissing me and telling me you wanted me with a hunger beyond comprehension. You had no expectations except to enjoy me like a piece of chocolate. I liked that. You weren’t looking at me as the mother of creation.”

  His eyes narrowed on her face. “But you admit you’d like to be a mother one day.”

  “Well, yes. One day. Of course by the time I’m ready to get married, I’ll probably end up with someone who’s been divorced and has children of his own.”

  “I thought you wanted to marry me.”

  “I do,” she said honestly, “but I also have brains in my head, and eyes that can see you’re not for sale at any price. Otherwise you would have married a woman of your own station and breeding years ago.”

  “You’re right. There’s a reason why I didn’t.”

  “I’m sure it was good one,” Greer asserted. “Tragedy is no respecter of persons.”

  “Tragedy?”

  “Yes. You’re the one who said some wounds weren’t visible. I got the impression you were trying to tell me something. You truly are Signore Mysterioso.

  “However there are things about you I do know. For one thing you’re not a man who plays around with other women while your wife is home trying desperately hard to pretend it doesn’t bother her.

  “For another, you don’t take advantage of foolish virgins. On the contrary, you rush about saving them from a fate worse than death while they’re trying to make an escape on their bicycles.

  “Furthermore, I don’t think you’re the type to carry on with married women behind their husbands’ backs. You don’t need to when every eligible maiden in Parma would sell her soul to be the woman in your life.