A Bride For Saint Nick

by Carole Buck

  And then, miraculously, something inside her began battling back against the fear. At the same time the man whose identity actually made all the difference in the world spoke her name on a note of urgent concern.

  “Leigh?” John questioned, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Sweetheart? What is it?”

  She inhaled on a shuddery breath, the darkness receding, its power over her waning with each passing moment. “Nothing.”

  “You’re trembling,” he countered, encircling her with his arms. Although he gathered her close, the contact was comforting rather than constraining. Leigh knew with absolute certainty that if she tried to pull away, John Gulliver would make no effort to hold her against her will.

  “I’m all right,” she said, breathing in the musk-male scent of his warm, naked flesh. The coarse silk of his chest hair teased against her skin. “Better than…all right.”

  There was a pause. John’s embrace altered during the course of it, turning possessive although still not constraining. Leigh shifted languidly, her body starting to thrum. She heard his breathing pattern ruffle and re-form. Then, astonishingly, he asked, “Is it the scars?”

  She drew back, her heart skipping a beat. “Wh-what?”

  “The scars,” he repeated. His eyes flicked back and forth, gauging her expression. “I know they aren’t easy to look at. If you’d rather turn out the light—”

  “No!” She shook her head, appalled at the idea. “I meant what I said, John. I need to see you tonight. I…want…to see you.”

  “You were afraid before.” It wasn’t a question. He knew.

  “Not of the scars. Not of you.” Leigh lifted her hands and cupped his rough-hewn face between her palms, willing him to believe what she was telling him. “Never of you, John.”

  And then she kissed him. And he kissed her back. First her mouth. Then the line of her throat and the curves of her shoulders. Then he eased her back and down against the mattress, charting the delicate upper swell of her breasts with his ardent, open mouth while his hands slid up to cup the rounded undersides.

  “Leigh,” he murmured, his breath hot against her skin. “Oh, Leigh.”

  She was half out of her mind by the time John finally shed his underwear and sheathed himself in one of the condoms he’d taken out of his wallet. He’d brought her to the brink of ecstasy and held her there with single-minded expertise until every fiber of her body seemed to be clamoring for release.

  “Please,” she moaned. “Oh…please.”

  A nudge of his knee parted her thighs. He moved up, positioning himself, then thrust into her yielding body, joining them with a strong, sure stroke. Leigh gasped, clutching at his upper arms.

  Bracing himself, John withdrew partway, then thrust forward again. She arched up to meet him this time, the lift of her pelvis a perfect counterpoint to the downward movement of his hips. Her lover groaned deep in his chest, then covered her mouth with his, sealing in her soft cry of pleasure.

  It felt right.

  Utterly, absolutely right.

  It also felt overwhelmingly familiar.

  Except at the very end, when rationality gave way to untrammeled sensation. What Leigh experienced as she reached the peak and hurtled off it was beyond anything she’d ever known or imagined.

  She might have feared this tumultuous journey into uncharted territory save for one thing.

  She didn’t make it alone.

  She was partnered by the man she loved.

  John stirred drowsily shortly after seven the following morning. He was coming awake far more gradually than he normally did. An intensely pleasurable kind of lassitude suffused him, seeming to penetrate to the marrow of his bones.

  “Mmm…” he breathed.

  Eyes still closed, he sought the warmly generous woman who’d granted him readmission to the paradise that he’d thought had been lost to him forever. Three times they’d joined together during the night. But instead of leaving him sated, each ecstatic coupling had whetted his appetite for the next. Even now, with his strength at low ebb, his body was beginning to stir in anticipation. Five and a half years was a lot of lost time to make up for.

  “Suz—?” he said in a husky whisper, groping through the tangle of once-crisp sheets.

  Recognition of the mistake he’d just made lasted less than a second before being swept away by the inundating realization that he was by himself in Leigh McKay’s bed. The woman for whom he was reaching wasn’t with him anymore.

  Exhaustion fell away in the space of a single heartbeat. He sat bolt upright, his pulse pounding out an unsteady tattoo, his senses attuned for some indication of another person’s presence. A moment later he kicked off the sheets and got up.

  The clothing he’d discarded so carelessly the night before had been left in a tidy pile on the end of the bed. He yanked on his briefs and pants, then snatched up his flannel shirt, pulling it on as he headed for the door. Despite Leigh’s passionate reassurances of the night before, he still felt a stab of uncertainty about exposing his scars to her in broad daylight.

  The aroma of freshly brewed coffee reached him at the top of the stairs. He went a little weak in the knees.

  His knees damned near buckled a few moments later when he eased open the kitchen door and saw Leigh. She had her back to him and she was clad in the same powder-blue robe she’d had on six mornings ago. The fuzzy cover-up had not lost one whit of its inexplicable allure. Quite the opposite.

  She turned, her flaxen hair rippling around her shoulders, her expression warm and welcoming. “John!”

  He crossed to her in three swift strides, catching her around the waist and drawing her against him. She melted into the embrace, tilting her head up for a kiss he was more than happy to bestow.

  “You taste like heaven,” he said when he finally lifted his mouth from hers.

  “Heaven comes in peppermint?” she teased, stroking his hair-whorled chest with both hands. Her touch was like a benediction. “I thought it was brandy flavored.”

  “That depends—” he dipped his head and brushed his lips against the tip of her nose “—on the time of day.”

  She gave a breathless little laugh, her eyes sparking sapphire blue. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really,” he affirmed.

  They kissed again. Slowly. Sweetly. As though they had all the time in the world.

  “You wore this blue fuzzy thing to drive me crazy, didn’t you?” John accused, nibbling on the lobe of her left ear.

  “No.” The reply was lush with a very feminine kind of amusement. “I wore it to keep warm.”

  “I would have done.that if you’d stayed in bed with me,” he countered, undoing the belt that held the robe closed. The garment parted, revealing an enticing flash of creamy pale skin. He lid a hand inside. Leigh trembled when he cupped her breast. The nipple budded against his palm.

  “There’s a difference between keeping someone warm,” she managed after a moment, “and making them…hot.”

  It was undoubtedly the most overtly sexual thing she’d ever said to him. John’s physical response was flagrant in its immediacy. His psychological one was more complex.

  Suzanne Whitney had never been so bold, he thought, withdrawing his hand as he tried to ignore the pulsing heaviness between his thighs. Then again, Suzanne Whitney had never been afraid of him, either. For all her virginal inhibitions, she had never gazed at him with the fear he’d glimpsed in Leigh McKay’s face for a few awful seconds the night before.

  He still didn’t understand the source of that fear, although he fully intended to ferret it out.

  “John?” Leigh asked, the provocation of just moments before yielding to a poignant uncertainty. She’d crossed her hands in front of her, drawing the top of her robe closed once again. He noticed for the first time the blue-gray smudges of weariness beneath her eyes. The radiance of her complexion had disguised the effects of a nearly sleepless night.

  It dawned on him then how fundamentally different t
heir perspectives on this morning-after encounter must be. It was more than the usual male-female divergence that typified such situations. For him, last night had been an act of reunion. He was aware of the history they shared. He felt the bond and the burden of their mutual past. Whereas she…

  “Is that what I do?” he asked, his voice several notes deeper than it had been the last time he’d spoken. “Make you…hot?”

  Leigh flushed, her lips trembling, her eyes becoming very, very bright. “Oh, J-John,” she said. “You make me…so many things….”

  He swept her into his arms again, claiming her mouth with his own. The kiss went on and on, growing deeper and more demanding with each passing heartbeat. His blood thundered in his ears.

  Know me, Suzanne, he thought fiercely, trying to obliterate the loss of five and a half years by fusing past to present. Recognize me.

  It wasn’t until the woman, he was trying so desperately to reach shoved him away and grabbed for a bread knife that he realized he’d made his supplication aloud.

  Chapter 11

  Leigh clutched the knife she’d snatched from the counter in a two-handed grip, aiming the point of the serrated blade at the man to whom she’d given herself so freely. So trustingly. She’d envisioned herself constructing a secure and loving future with him. But in the space of five short words, he’d transformed himself into a threat to everything she held dear.

  He was standing perhaps a yard away, hands raised, palms facing forward. Although his stance clearly was meant to assure her that he intended no harm, she wasn’t deceived. She could see the coiled-spring readiness in his posture. It was evident in the set of his strong back and broad shoulders. Clearer still, in the way he was balanced on the balls of his bare feet.

  He was like a predator, poised for a strike. If she faltered for even an instant, he would be on her.

  She would fight him if that happened, she vowed. She would battle him to the bitter end. The last time she’d been cornered by someone bigger and stronger, she’d given in. Given up. But never again.

  Never, ever again.

  “What did you call me?” she asked in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own.

  “Suzanne,” the man who’d taken her to bliss and beyond answered evenly. His dark gaze shifted from her face to the knife blade and back to her face. He seemed to be trying to gauge whether she would have the nerve to stab or slash another human being. He apparently came to the conclusion that she would because he stayed where he was. “I called you Suzanne.”

  “No.” She shook her head, denying everything and nothing at the same time.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the name I originally knew you by.”

  “Knew—” her breath seemed to solidify somewhere between her lungs and her lips “—me b-by?”

  “Yes.”

  “You c-couldn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t know you!” It was a cry of desperation. A last-ditch rejection of the implications of the inexplicable flashes of familiarity she’d been experiencing ever since they’d met.

  “Yes, you do.” The response was quiet but unequivocal, as though he was aware of what she’d been feeling. As though he’d been inside her brain and under her skin, sharing the sense of deja vu. “And yes, you did.”

  Again she shook her head, her unbrushed hair shifting over the nape of her neck. A sudden stir of air against her naked breasts warned her that her robe had gaped open again. She wanted to pull it closed and cover herself but she was afraid to loosen her hold on the knife. Her palms were slick with perspiration. What if she dropped her weapon?

  “Wh-who—?” she stammered, tightening her hold on the polished wooden handle.

  “I’m John Gulliver, Leigh. I’ve been John Gulliver all my life. But seven years ago, I went undercover for the Justice Department. For eighteen months, I used the name Nicholas Marchand.”

  There were no words to describe what the woman who had been born Suzanne Whitney felt during the next few seconds. Indeed, she was never sure she felt anything at all. It was not that there was nothing for her to feel. Rather, there was so much that her capacity to respond to it completely shut down.

  “N-n-no,” she finally managed to choke out.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t be.”

  Saint Nick was dead. They’d told her he was. The morning after the night that had taught her the meaning of degradation, grim-faced men flashing official badges had come to her door and told her. Nicholas Marchand was dead.

  He had to be, she thought numbly. Because in a horrible way, Nick’s violent demise had been the cornerstone of her new life. Losing her first lover had freed her to move on, to become Leigh McKay. While she’d never articulated it, she’d always felt a great deal of guilt about this turn of events. It seemed as though part of the price of her second chance had been paid in another person’s blood.

  “I am,” John countered. “I was.”

  He lowered his hands at this point and took a step toward her. Leigh retreated involuntarily, a frightened gasp breaking from her throat when she realized that she’d backed up against the edge of a counter. She was trapped. She straightened her arms, thrusting forward with the knife, slicing through air. John froze in his tracks, what little color there was left in his scarred face draining away.

  “No!” she cried rawly, her fingers spasming. She wondered dizzily if she was losing her mind. Maybe none of this was real. Maybe she was hallucinating. Hearing things. Insanity seemed to make more sense than the idea that the man to whom she’d surrendered her virginity had returned from the grave in the guise of a disfigured stranger who’d found a way to heal her wounded psyche and win her woman’s heart. “No.”

  “Leigh. God. Please.” John’s expression was anguished. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  A bubble of hysterical laughter worked its way up from the center of her chest. Not going to hurt her? she echoed mentally. Sweet God in heaven, what did he—whoever he was-think he’d already done?

  “Nick’s dead!” She spat out the words like a curse.

  “Nick never existed.”

  “Never—?”

  “It was me, sweetheart. Playing a part.”

  “You don’t look anything like him!” she disputed wildly, flinching from the endearment.

  “Plastic surgery. The car crash that supposedly killed Nicholas Marchand damned near killed me. It destroyed my face.”

  She couldn’t contend with the horror this last statement conjured up. She shoved it away. “You don’t know—”

  “I know everything. Think back, Leigh. Remember. The first time you—Suzanne Whitney—saw Nicholas Marchand was in an elevator in the office building where she worked. Neither of them said a word. But Saint Nick sent her roses within the hour. Pale pink, barely opened roses. He sent Suzanne a handwritten note, too. It said the roses made him think of her.”

  Leigh started to tremble. Anyone could have found out about the bouquet, she reasoned desperately. The florist. The delivery boy. Her office colleagues. But the note. Oh, God. She’d never told anyone about the note!

  Nick could have, though. He could have boasted about it. Or perhaps the oh-so-intimate line he’d used had been part of some standard seduction routine. She didn’t know. She just didn’t know!

  “Nick was waiting for you—for Suzanne—that evening when she left work. He asked her to have dinner with him. Ordered her, really. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She simply said thank you and got into his car.”

  “Someone…someone could have seen…could have heard…”

  “At the restaurant, he talked her into trying caviar as an appetizer. Suzanne didn’t like it, but she was too polite to tell him. He ordered lobster for her entree. That, she did like. Very much. But not as much as she liked the hot chocolate souffle he persuaded her to have for dessert after she told him she was too full to take another bite.”

 
Leigh recalled the flavor of the sinfully rich treat as though she’d eaten it six minutes—rather than nearly six years—ago. Her mouth flooded with saliva. She swallowed convulsively.

  “It was a…public p-place…”

  The man she’d taken into her bed and into her body the night before paid no attention to her feeble effort to explain away his knowledge of what had happened between Suzanne Whitney and Nicholas Marchand. He simply continued with his accurate-in-every-detail recitation.

  “Nick took Suzanne dancing afterward. Bright lights. Loud music. Lots of people. His turf, not hers. Sometime around one in the morning he drove her home to her apartment. He didn’t need to ask the address. He’d had someone pull her personnel file. He escorted her to her door and he kissed her. He knew she’d never been with a man. He could taste it. He could also taste that Suzanne would be willing to make love with him if he pushed her. And that’s why he left.”

  Leigh made an inarticulate sound of protest. Although she tried frantically to keep her hands steady, the knife blade jerked and flashed.

  Her throat started to close up. Her chest felt as though it had been lashed with straps of hammered steel. The straps began to tighten. She had to labor to fill her lungs.

  “I stayed away as long as I could after that first night.” The admission was strained. The expression that accompanied it, stark. “I should have stayed away, period. Getting involved with an innocent like Suzanne Whitney broke every rule in the book. I realized it was wrong. I realized—God help me, I realized it might be dangerous. But I couldn’t help myself.”

  John advanced on her as he spoke, catching her wrists and forcing the knife down between them. Despite her earlier vow to fight to the end, Leigh didn’t struggle. His devastatingly sudden shift into the first person had under-cut her resistance in ways she couldn’t begin to explain. By the time he’d finished his confession, there were only a few scant inches between them. She could feel the warmth of his body; smell the musky male scent of his skin; see the wild jump of his pulse at the base of his scarred, sinew-corded throat.