by Merry Farmer
Arch gaped at it with her. Along with the kitchen and bathroom, there was a desk with a large computer monitor on it to one side, and a bed with what was either a large nightstand or a small bureau beside it. Windows that might have been repurposed portholes from a ship were evenly spaced around the circumference. Some of them had curtains.
“I need to see the blueprints for this place,” Arch said, knowing full well he had said that the way most men would say they needed to see a catalog for the latest sports cars. “I’d love to know who designed this and how.”
“Right after we finish the important stuff,” Tabby said with a renewed sense of purpose. That determined note in her voice shook him out of his reverie. She headed for the desk, pulling open the top drawer. “We’ve got to find that marriage license.”
A wave of disappointment hit Arch, taking him by surprise. “Right.” He jumped into action, crossing the room to search the drawers on the other side of the desk. “First things first. Find the license and…” And then what?
It was as if Tabby had heard his unspoken question. She paused in her search through the drawer and looked up at him. “They tricked us,” she said, though there was no passion behind her words.
“They did,” Arch agreed. But was that really so bad?
“We can’t let them get away with it,” Tabby went on.
Arch paused. He paused some more. “No,” he answered at last, sounding anything but certain.
“They think they know our minds better than we do,” Tabby continued, her face pinching to a confused frown. “Like we’re not mature enough to make our own decisions about who we want to be with.”
Arch didn’t say anything. As fun as their rivalry had been in the past few weeks, he wasn’t dumb enough to think that it had been anything close to mature. In fact, while the rest of his life and his career had moved on, when it came to Tabby, it was like he was stuck in that struggling high school boy mentality. In spite of the fact that he was more than ready to move on.
“Arch?” Tabby blinked up at him. “What do you want to do?”
“I…” He wanted to end the whole thing, admit defeat, and pull Tabby into his arms. He wanted to kiss her and never let her go. But he also wanted to keep his pride intact, and at the moment, he didn’t see how those two things went together.
Tabby let out a long breath. “Let’s keep looking.”
She continued her search, although Arch had the feeling it was half-hearted. The license wasn’t in the desk anyhow. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or frustrated by that. After the desk, Tabby moved on to searching the bureau beside the bed, while Arch went through the small bookshelf by the desk. It wasn’t until they made their way around the room to the kitchen that the obvious hit them between the eyes. The license was stuck to the tiny refrigerator with a smiley face magnet.
“Has that been there the whole time?” Arch asked as Tabby taking it off the fridge.
“Maybe,” she muttered.
“Hmm.” Arch shifted to rest his backside against the kitchen counter, standing side-by-side with Tabby as they stared at the document. “Funny how the things you’ve been looking high and low for are right there in plain sight half the time.”
A heavy silence fell between the two of them. They both just stood there, leaning against the counter, staring at the marriage certificate. It was as official as documents came. The longer Arch stared at it, the more foolish he felt for not realizing it was the real deal when he’d signed it. There was no dodging the feeling that maybe he’d signed it because he’d wanted to be married to Tabby after all. The first kiss they had shared after Brother Anthony declared them man and wife had probably impaired his judgement. Either that or year’s-worth of missing Tabby had finally caught up to him.
“Why did you run against me for class president?” she asked suddenly. She plucked the license out of his hand, put it back on the counter, and turned to stare at him, arms crossed. “Why couldn’t you just let me run? We didn’t have to break up, but you were such a jerk about that stupid little election. We could have…we didn’t have to…”
“I was upset,” Arch said. Mumbled, more like. He had the good sense to know he’d been wrong back then, but it didn’t stop him from feeling those awkward, juvenile emotions now, or at least some sort of reflection of them. “I’m not saying I was right,” he went on, “but back then, all I could think was that I was going to lose you if you became president.”
She frowned. “Why? We could have still dated.”
Arch rubbed a hand over his face and blew out a breath. “I was seventeen. I felt alone and angry and…okay, scared, at home. You were the only good thing I had in my life. Your parents had just gone through their divorce, and even though everyone was gossiping about the circumstances, you seemed fine. You were still happy and stable.”
“That’s because my parents worked hard to make sure Sammy and I knew none of it was our fault, or anyone’s fault, for that matter.”
“And that was so refreshing to me. It was exactly what I needed. And I thought I was about to lose it, to lose you.”
“So you did something to drive me away even further?” Tabby crossed her arms, but her frown lightened, as if she were trying to understand instead of just recycling old anger.
Arch shrugged. “Teenage boy logic. Go figure. I guess I thought that if I controlled the way you left me, it wouldn’t feel like it did being left behind by Sly and Doc and Elvie. Or my parents, for that matter.”
“Oh.” Tabby lowered her head, brow knit in thought. “I didn’t know anything about your parents back then.”
“They kept their problems well hidden.”
She continued to think for a few more seconds, then blinked up at him. “So why did you start pulling all of those stupid pranks if it was your parents and your siblings and not me you were upset about?”
“Like I said,” Arch sighed. “I thought I would lose you if you became class president, that you’d have no time for me. I guess by feeding that stupid rivalry, I knew that you’d always be thinking about me, always interacting with me. Not that I thought that through consciously,” he rushed to add.
Tabby continued to frown, face pinching more and more, until she gave it up with a long breath. “Looking back on it now, after what you just told me, it does sort of make sense,” she admitted.
“Not that I’m proud of it,” Arch said.
She huffed a laugh. “I’m not particularly proud of the way I reacted all those years ago either.”
Arch shifted, leaning more heavily against the counter and crossing his arms. “So why did you react the way you did? Why’d you keep trying to one-up me?”
A sheepish smile spread across her face. “Because it was fun.”
Arch laughed. “Yeah, in a sick and twisted way, it was a heck of a lot of fun.”
Her expression heated, turning to a sort of challenge that was way beyond what high school Arch could have imagined. More than ever, he wanted to take her in his arms and forget the whole thing.
Until her sizzly-eyed look froze as she said, “Your parents. Are you okay with all that now? I mean, I know they passed away years ago.”
He didn’t want to go back there. He wanted to grab hold of whatever excitement was brewing between them and take that as far as it could go. Instead, he met it all halfway. He rested his hands on Tabby’s arms, then took a huge risk and pulled her into a loose hug.
“I am as okay with it as I’m ever going to be,” he said. “I’ve had years of therapy to deal with it, and Sly, Doc, Elvie, and I have all sat down and talked about things over the years too. I’ve made peace with the fact that we don’t always get dealt the best cards in life or get handed the best family. But anyone can move on from misfortune and become a better person because of it.”
Tabby smiled up at him, inching closer, slipping her arms around his back. “That’s a pretty darn admirable way to look at things,” she said. “I wonder if it extends to putting aside other
things in the past and trying to be a better person in other ways.”
Arch raised a brow. “Are you scolding me for pranking you last week.”
“No!” She tensed in alarm. “I was talking about myself.”
“You?” Arch turned the relief he felt at her statement into a lazy smile, and drew her a little closer. “But you’re perfect.”
“Ha! I’m far from it.” She lowered her eyes. “If I were perfect, or at least trying to put the past behind me, I wouldn’t have been so all-fired determined to find and destroy that marriage license.”
The air between them crackled. Slowly, they both glanced to the license, now sitting innocently on the countertop. The question of what to do with it hung in the air between them, but neither seemed to want to be the first to say something.
Instead, Arch said, “What do you think would have happened if neither of us had run for class president?”
“We wouldn’t have played all those pranks on each other, for one,” Tabby answered, meeting his eyes again. A grin pulled at the corner of her mouth. “We wouldn’t have had as much fun.”
“We wouldn’t have broken up,” Arch said, barely above a whisper.
“No,” she agreed, something deep and yearning in her gaze. “We wouldn’t have.”
The words hovered behind Arch’s lips for a long, long time before he forced himself to say, “I would have proposed to you at the end of our senior year.”
He watched the blush spread across her cheeks, the joy and the regret fill her eyes. At last, she took a breath and said, “You wouldn’t have gone away to college then. And neither would I.”
He hadn’t thought of that before. “I…I guess you’re right. I would have wanted to get a job nearby so that I could support you.”
“And I would have wanted to have kids right away.”
They fell silent, staring into space. Arch didn’t want to think what his life would have been like if he’d never left Culpepper, if his hobbies had stayed just that, hobbies, instead of leading to a career that had been both fulfilling and lucrative. He was pretty sure the same sort of thoughts were going through Tabby’s head as well. She was a fantastic doctor, someone who was truly needed in Culpepper.
“You know,” he started slowly. “I think we made the right decisions back then.” And that fact baffled him.
“I know,” Tabby said, equally as stunned by the admission. “I’m happy with my life now.”
“Me too.”
“Well,” she corrected herself, “almost happy.”
“Why?” He frowned. “What’s wrong?”
Her grin turned mischievous. “There’s still one thing hanging over my head, unresolved.”
Arch’s heart beat faster. “What’s that?”
Her smile grew. “A little matter of whether my sister and some friends of mine are right about me or whether I should fight back against a little stunt they pulled.”
Zips of excitement pulsed through Arch’s gut, reaching as far as his fingers and toes. “Funny, I find myself in a similar situation.”
“Do you really?” Her voice took on a tempting, honeyed tone. She leaned closer to him, shifting so that her arms rested on his shoulders, circling around to the back of his neck.
“Yeah,” he answered. “In fact, I’m beginning to think that it’s time to give up my fighting days and just accept what comes at me.”
“Not put up a fight?” She blinked, the real question staring both of them in the face.
“We could do it, you know,” he said. “We could just accept defeat and spend the rest of our lives together, licking our wounds and admitting that they all got the best of us.”
To his surprise, Tabby winced. “I just really, really hate the idea that they win.”
He chuckled deep in his throat. “I know. It gnaws at you, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” she admitted with a laugh.
Arch laughed too. Next thing he knew, he’d bent forward and touched his forehead to hers. Heat radiated from her. It was irresistible. She was irresistible. He tugged her closer and kissed her.
The instant their lips touched, he knew the game was over. She was so soft and willing, her mouth so eager. The kiss they shared wasn’t one of rivals pretending to like each other, it was of lifelong lovers who had spent far too long pretending they hated each other. But as Arch had always heard, there was a fine line between love and hate. The more he kissed Tabby and the more eagerly she responded, the more he was convinced that there was no line at all, just as there was no hate at all.
“You know what we could do,” he murmured between kisses, somehow managing to shrug out of his coat at last.
“What?” Tabby’s mouth widened to a mischievous smile, even as he continued to kiss it. She too started to wriggle out of her coat, and then to help him with his coat.
“We could go back and tell them we destroyed the license.”
“Tell them?”
His coat dropped to the floor, hers right behind it. When his arms went around her now, he was able to draw her much closer to his quickly overheating body.
“Yeah.” He reached for the hem of her shirt underneath her sweater next, tugging it out from the waist of her jeans. His fingertips brushed along the soft, warm flesh of her middle, and she shivered. “Instead of destroying the license—”
“We could file it,” she finished, giggling low in her throat.
“If you say so.”
“I definitely say so.” She lifted to her toes so that she could slant her mouth over his in a deep, satisfying kiss. Satisfying in one respect, but leaving him wanting so much more in another. “We could have so much fun pretending that we called the whole thing off.”
“When, in fact, we’ve done anything but.” He was quickly losing the ability to think as his palms tested her curves under her shirt and sweater.
“We’ll do other things instead,” she agreed, breathless. “Things we should have done a long time ago.”
“Some of them we did do a long time ago,” he reminded her in a tempting whisper.
“But not all of them. We’ve got so much unfinished business.”
“We’ll have to do something about that, then.” He kissed her long and hard, putting his whole heart into it.
Tabby hummed in the back of her throat, then managed to say, “They never have to know.”
“Agreed,” Arch growled. “We could go back and tell them it’s all over, when in fact—”
“It’s only just begun.” She finished his sentence, unbuttoning his jeans.
He sucked in a breath and had to marshal all of his powers of concentration to finish the thought he was having. “Oh, I think we began a long time ago.”
She leaned back enough to look into his eyes. “Then let’s finish this now.”
Chapter 10
Shivers of excitement wriggled down Tabby’s spine as Arch kissed her. For so long, she’d been holding out against him, pretending that he wasn’t the only man she’d ever really wanted. Now here they were, in a secluded, high-tech water tower, of all places, and all she wanted to do was let go. Especially when Arch deftly reached up her back and unhooked her bra.
She caught her breath and slipped her hands inside the waistband of his jeans until they rode precariously low on his hips. His hands drifted around to cup her breasts, thumbs teasing her nipples, and she sighed loudly. His lips and tongue played with hers in a way that was making her lose her mind. It felt so very right, but was it?
She moved her hands to lay her palms on his chest, pushing him back just a little. Her breath came in gulps.
“What is it?” he asked, sliding a hand out of her shirt to brush a strand of hair back from her face.
“One thing,” she said, meeting his dazzling eyes. They held so much heat that she forgot what she was going to say.
“Which one thing?” he chuckled.
A grin spread across her face. “I have to know. Just between you and me.” She paused, biting her l
ip, feeling more than a little silly for asking after everything they’d been through in the past few days. “Are we married?”
Arch’s grin was teasing and triumphant. “I dunno. The license is there on the counter, not filed away in some county clerk’s office.”
“But it’s signed,” she said.
He wiggled his eyebrows. “It is. And there was that little wedding ceremony we had.”
“Does it count if we thought we were faking?”
“Does it count if Brother Anthony thought it was the real thing?”
Tabby started to giggle. More than just questions zipped between the two of them. Sparks of passion made the air around them crackle. “He did say that God had joined us together.”
“Maybe we’d better do something, just to be sure.” Arch slipped his arms around her waist.
“Like what?”
He leaned in enough to touch his forehead to hers. “Tabitha Montgomery Ross, do you take me, Archibald James O’Donnell, to be your husband, to love and to cherish, no matter what anyone else says, and to keep me on my toes until death do us part?”
Tabby grinned from ear to ear, a pervasive warmth filling her. “I do. And do you, Archibald James O’Donnell, take me, Tabitha Montgomery Ross, to adore, honor, and obey, especially when we’re up to no good, and to build a fabulous, exciting life with, until death do us part, and probably not even then?”
“I do,” Arch chuckled. He spread his hands across her back so that he could kiss her fully, and Tabby melted into him, kissing him back.
Several moments later, she whispered, “I guess that settles it, then.”
“Not quite,” Arch hummed in return, kissing his way from her lips to her neck as his hands reached for the front of her jeans. “There’s still a little matter of consummating this marriage.”
“How fortunate that there’s a bed in here,” Tabby answered, heart pounding against her ribs.
“Lucky us,” Arch said.
That was the last thing either of them said. The energy between them switched from heavy flirtation to outright passion. Tabby tugged Arch’s shirt up, and he took it the rest of the way, peeling it off over his head to reveal his broad, muscled torso. Tabby’s insides went squishy, but that was nothing to how she felt as he took off her shirt and bra. She’d always been nervous about undressing in front of other people, but with Arch, she couldn’t wait to get naked and have him look at her. All of her.
