by Mollie Molay
“You again?” she commented.
“Yeah. I thought I’d buy my wife a few gifts to make up for having to wait until morning to leave on our honeymoon.”
“No problem,” the clerk answered. “We have to help each other out at times like this.” She smiled sympathetically and waved to Arden who was waiting outside the shop. “It’s no way to start a honeymoon, is it? I’m sure glad my own started out better than this.”
“It’s going to be a night to remember, all right.” Luke agreed. If she only knew the whole of it! The briefcase chained to his wrist, the suspicious glances and questions had been enough to try any man. Especially when he wasn’t guilty of any wrongdoing— yet. Of course, there was Arden to make up for some of it. Even if she was only a temporary diversion.
“Yeah. Think of all the great stories you can tell your children someday,” the clerk responded cheerfully. “They’ll never believe it!”
Children? Luke shuddered. He was in this caper only as long as it would take to get Arden to Cancún and say goodbye before he took off for parts unknown. He kept that detail to himself.
“Wait a minute.” He found himself reaching to a display shelf to take down a fake miniature Christmas tree. It was adorned with red and white garlands that reminded him of the Christmas trees of his own childhood. “I’ll take this, too, if it’s for sale.”
“It is now,” the clerk assured him. “The sooner I sell out, the sooner I can go home to my own husband. We’ve only been married for a few months, and I sure didn’t want to work tonight. Christmas Eve is no night to spend by yourself, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” Luke replied. He could write a book on the many empty Christmas Eves he’d spent alone. Somehow, this one promised to be a little happier.
He glanced over his shoulder at Arden who was watching him curiously. She had made this holiday memorable, at that.
He inventoried his purchases.
The small tree was for the true spirit of Christmas.
The music box was for the child in Arden.
There was one thing still lacking.
Perfume for the woman within her!
White Diamonds or Passion in their fashionable packaging looked appropriate for a bride. He glanced back again to where Arden waited. Passion? Not for the Arden he knew. Maybe she could be capable of passion with the right man, but it wasn’t going to be him. Not that a part of him he was trying to ignore didn’t wish he could be the one to share a night of passion with her.
Under the circumstances, maybe he shouldn’t open the subject by giving Arden perfume with such a sensuous name tag.
Luke thoughtfully surveyed the boxes of perfume displayed in the counter in front of him. Even if she’d probably wonder why a new groom didn’t know his bride well enough to make a suitable choice, he had to ask the clerk which scent was appropriate for a new bride.
“Oh, White Diamonds, by all means,” the clerk replied when he asked the question. She reached for a sample of the perfume and sprayed it on the back of his hand. “Diamonds are forever,” she went on, “long after the first passion of marriage passes.” She held up her own diamond wedding ring for him to see.
Forever? echoed in Luke’s thoughts as he sniffed the perfume. Its fragrance was just strong enough to sharpen his senses and to suggest nights of desire. But forever was a long time, longer than he intended. Certainly more than the few hours still ahead of him before the flight to Cancún and a quick goodbye to his “bride.”
On the other hand, White Diamonds had a nice ring to it. Especially since he hadn’t given his temporary “bride” a wedding ring remotely resembling anything of value.
“I’ll take it,” he said, indicating a small bottle of the perfume. “How much do I owe you?”
She named a sum. Considering the smile he thought would come over Arden’s face when she saw the pres- ‘ ents he was buying for her, they would have been cheap at twice the price.
“The store will take care of the sales tax as its wedding present to you and your wife. Just don’t tell the boss,” the clerk laughed. “If you wait a minute, I’ll wrap everything for you and put them in a nice little holiday shopping bag.”
Luke dug into his wallet for the money. It was almost ATM time.
Chapter Seven
“Something’s wrong,” Arden said under her breath when he came back to her.
Luke froze. What could have happened during the few minutes he was in the gift shop? “What kind of trouble?”
“Them,” she whispered. He followed her gaze. Sure enough, two security guards were standing a short distance away trying to be inconspicuous. What had they thought he was going to do, rob the shop with hundreds of people around?
“Forget them,” he assured her. “You don’t have anything to worry about and neither do L”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Here, these are for you.”
He handed her the small, decorated shopping bag with a flourish. “Merry Christmas,” he said. When her eyes lit up, he gave in to the spirit of the holiday and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
This time the smile that came across Arden’s face was real. And so was the way a single dimple danced across her cheek at his brief kiss. She was so easy to please that it warmed Luke’s cynical heart.
“Feeling better?” he asked, fighting the desire to gather her in his arms for a Christmas kiss they would both remember. She might be smiling, but something was still missing in her smile.
“Yes, thank you,” she replied. “Now, it’s beginning to feel like Christmas!”
“Good,” he answered thankfully. “So now do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”
“I’ve already told you,” Arden said, fingering the brightly wrapped packages and avoiding his eyes.
“No, that was just an excuse not to tell me,” he chided. “Come on now. New wives shouldn’t keep secrets from their grooms,” Luke added playfully. “It’s a heck of a way to start married life, especially on the first night of the honeymoon.”
“It’s not really my honeymoon,” she corrected in a small, tight voice.
He hadn’t really thought for a minute she’d been thinking of her aborted honeymoon. So what had he said to set her off again?
Good Lord, he thought with a growing awareness of how she might have taken his remark. She didn’t believe he was going to press her for an actual honeymoon, did she?
“Look, I know we’re only pretending to be newlyweds,” Luke assured her. He led her to a more secluded corner. “Why don’t you open your gifts now? Or, if you like, you can wait until morning.
He found an empty bench. “Now it doesn’t take a mind reader to know something is on your mind. I’m sure it’ll make both of us happier if you let me in on the secret.”
Arden met his probing gaze. How could she tell him he was only part of the problem that troubled her? And that her own awakened senses were the rest?
“I really don’t know if I can explain it to you,” she answered.
“Try me.”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” she said, twisting the ribbon on the gift bag. “Not when I can hardly understand it myself.”
Luke carefully studied the uneasiness in her eyes as he wondered what on earth could be still bothering her.
Her reputation?
Hardly likely, considering the way she’d stood up to her aunt Jane and her father’s thundering accusations.
Her father?
No, she’d sounded pretty resolute when she’d told him she intended to be her own woman. Of course she cared about her father, but how much did the man care for his daughter to put her through the wringer like he did? Did he realize how deeply he had hurt her?
Was it the thought of Christmas morning and the gifts that would have been waiting for her under the tree at home until she returned from her honeymoon with John Travers?
No, he didn’t think so. Not after he’d seen the passing look of delight on her face and in her
eyes when he’d handed her her gifts. And certainly not in the way she’d described her fiancé. But her expression still remained troubled.
“Still having second thoughts about running out on your wedding?”
“No.” Arden shook her head. “Definitely not!”
By now, he’d mentioned everything he could think of that could be bothering her. Except for one.
That left him as her problem.
A quick mental, review of their recent conversation gave him a possible, though astounding, answer. Was it something about him that bothered her?
“Arden, look at me,” he commanded. “Are you afraid of me? Of being alone with me?”
Honest to the core, Arden met his eyes and found herself telling him the truth. Or at least part of it. “Truthfully, maybe I was for a few minutes back there, but I’m not anymore.”
“Thank goodness for that,” he remarked ruefully. “I’d hate to think I was the type who scared people.”
“Maybe it’s just that I don’t really know you very well,” she answered as she glanced at the briefcase he clutched in his left hand. The handcuff was hidden by his sleeve, but it was there.
“You have nothing to worry about, I swear,” Luke replied as he followed her gaze. His good humor began to fade. Hadn’t he shown her he was no threat, to her or to anyone else? He may be damned by the briefcase, but he’d expected her to trust him by now.
“So, there is something bothering you,” he said as he eyed her thoughtfully. A crazy idea shot out of the blue like a thunderbolt and hit him right between the eyes. An impossible idea but just bizarre enough to be true. At the thought, an unexpected wave of desire washed over him.
“Is it this?” he asked as he put a forefinger under her chin and tipped her face to his for a kiss.
Her lips opened in a soundless answer. Without a second thought, Luke gave in to temptation.
He brushed her ruby red lips with his own. In seconds he knew one kiss wasn’t going to be enough.
“Or this?”
This time he let his kiss grow bolder. His tongue probed the sides of her lips, wandered until her lips opened to give him entry.
With a groan, he took her face between his two hands and kissed her deeply. The kiss was a mixture of his frustration and desire. Frustration because he couldn’t afford to have the kiss mean anything, and a desire he couldn’t ignore. The sensuous fragrance of the White Diamonds perfume the shop clerk had sprayed on the back of his hand heightened his desire for her.
Her tentative response was all he needed to kiss her again.
Arden forced herself to face the truth. It wasn’t Luke she was afraid of, it was his attraction for her that worried her. And her response to the myriad new emotions coursing over her when he kissed her. She’d dreamed of such an embrace in her fanciful daydreams, but now it was coming true in a way she’d never expected.
She stepped closer into his embrace, thirsty for the friction of his lips on hers, the strangely erotic taste of gingersnaps and warm beer on his breath, the scent of perfume on his hands. She’d never felt like this before, never been kissed like this before. And, in truth, had never expected to be. Certainly not by John, a dear but unimaginative man.
She closed her eyes, the better to let herself be plunged into the sea of sensation that swept her from head to toe and lingered in her middle.
She would never be able to think of Luke in an impersonal way again.
When the kiss was over, Luke gently stroked the sides of her brow with his thumbs and lightly kissed the path his fingers had taken. He folded her into his arms until his heart could stop racing and his pragmatic mind took over. “What are you doing to me?” he asked, even as he held her closer to him.
He hadn’t intended his embrace to be so sure, so strong. He hadn’t even meant his kisses to be more than teasing questions. And all because he’d been frustrated and angry at the thought Arden was afraid of him. But her lips had looked so soft, so warm, so inviting, he couldn’t help himself. Now, looking down into her glowing eyes, he realized he may have gone farther than he’d intended.
With a sinking feeling, he drew away. He shouldn’t have kissed her so passionately, or touched her to begin with. Not when her response to his embrace was so telling. And not when he couldn’t afford to have her believe his kisses and the embrace meant anything serious.
“I suppose that shouldn’t have happened,” he said ruefully. “But actually, I have to be honest with you and admit that I’m not sorry it did.”
“I’m not sorry, either,” she answered, rubbing her fingers across her bruised lips. “I guess we both got carried away by the Christmas spirit in the air.”
It was true. She wasn’t sorry. Not a bit. His had been her first real passionate kisses, and now that she’d tasted of their pleasure, she was looking forward to more. If it wasn’t meant to be with Luke as her lover, then as soon as she found the right man to share those kisses with.
Except that it was too late. She’d already lost her heart in the depths of Luke’s sable eyes.
Luke cleared his throat. “Come on, let’s go back and see if we can find someplace to spend the rest of the night.”
It didn’t take long for Luke to realize there was no such place.
“Maybe we ought to try to get back home tonight instead of waiting for the flight to leave,” a male voice on the other side of Luke suggested. He turned around, but the comment hadn’t been directed to him. The man had spoken to his very pregnant wife.
“But this is our honeymoon!” the bride in the man’s arms declared. “I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time!”
“I know, sweetheart, but in your condition maybe it’s not such a good idea to hang around here any longer. All this excitement might be bad for the baby.”
“Don’t be silly, Larry. The baby isn’t due for two weeks. We’re only going to be away for five days.”
Luke snapped to attention. His mental alarm bells went off. Her baby was due in two weeks?
He cautiously eyed the bride. It was the first time he’d ever seen an expectant mother wearing a maternity wedding dress. Her husband was right. Sitting on a cold floor waiting for their flight to leave couldn’t have been a good idea for the mother, or the unborn child. Just as taking off for a foreign country at thirty thousand feet in the air was another fool idea. He was willing to bet the charter airline personnel hadn’t been aware of just how pregnant this particular bride was.
He exchanged sympathetic glances with the harried groom.
All things considered, he thought, with another apprehensive glance at the pregnant bride, he would rather be sitting somewhere else.
“What’s going on over there?” Arden whispered in his ear.
“Nothing, I hope,” he answered with a quick glance at Arden’s flat middle. Thank goodness she wasn’t pregnant. From what he knew about her, if ever a woman had walked the straight and narrow path until now, Arden had to be one of them. But if she kept draping herself over a man like she was doing to him, she was going to be in for a big surprise one of these days. Hadn’t she ever heard about the birds and the bees?
“Ouch! That hurt!”
From the surprise in the pregnant bride’s tone of voice, and the way she grabbed her middle, Luke had the sinking feeling the moment of reckoning was near, if it hadn’t already arrived.
In a flash of déjà vu, his past experience surfaced.
It had been in a small city in the Central American country of Guatemala. Working for the federal government, he’d been hot on the trail of a suspected drug smuggler. The guy, who obviously knew where he was going, had disappeared into the jungle. Tired, worn and new to the area, Luke had rented a Jeep and set out to track him.
What he had found was a broken-down cart alongside an overgrown road with an elderly woman, two small children and their pregnant mother. Realizing he wasn’t going to find his man, Luke had used the Spanish he knew to offer to give them a lift to the nearest town an
d, hopefully, a hospital. With the mother protesting the baby wasn’t due yet, and the kids hollering their heads off, they hadn’t gotten very far.
With the help of the weathered old woman, the baby had been born in the back of the Jeep.
But this wasn’t a Central American jungle, and there wasn’t anyone to give him instructions.
One experience like that was enough for him to swear off marriage and fatherhood and never to put a woman through the trauma of childbirth. He’d also learned babies usually had their own agenda.
The way his luck had been going lately, the kid was bound to arrive tonight.
“Jenny?” The prospective father questioned apprehensively as he started to rub his wife’s hands. “Are you all right?”
Based on what he remembered seeing on TV, Luke knew the guy should have been rubbing his bride’s back, if he was going to rub her anywhere. Better still, he should have been calling 911. Or at least Airport Security. But from the way things were beginning to look, it was probably already too late.
Resigned to the inevitable, Luke bestirred himself.
“How long have you been having pains, Mrs….”
“Alcott, and the pains have been strong for the last three hours,” the woman gasped and winced again. “Why, are you a doctor?”
“No,” Luke replied. He uttered a silent prayer. “But unless I miss my guess, I’m about as good a one as you’re likely to get under the circumstances until your husband can find a real one. With the airport crowded this way, any medics around probably have their hands full.”
“I’m her husband. Do we have time to take my wife to a hospital?” her groom asked, casting a worried look at his laboring wife. “She looks awful.”
“Awful! Why, Larry Alcott, what a terrible thing to say! It’s your baby I’m having!” his wife shouted in between groans.
“I didn’t mean it the way it sounds, sweetheart. It’s just that things are happening sooner than I thought they would. And I never thought they would happen in a place like this or we wouldn’t have come here!”
