Here Comes the Bride (16 page)

“Maybe—but it still hurts you.”

“Only if I allow it to.” Lifting his champagne glass, he took a hard swallow. He’d barely lowered the glass when Fiona reached up and kissed him lightly on the mouth, a mere brush of her lips, but she tasted like an oasis in the desert.

His eyes closed, and for one wondrous moment he almost believed she could be just that—his oasis. That she could make him believe in forever.

That it was possible.

The reception drew to an end when the wedding couple departed, ducking into a limousine in a shower of rice. They were spending the night in the bridal suite at Caesar’s, then taking off in the morning for a two-week trip in Walter’s old sedan. He’d been polishing it for days.

Nick groaned just thinking of it, and hoped the car didn’t leave Auntie stranded by the side of the road in some desolate location. Just because she was married to Walter didn’t relieve him of responsibility for her welfare.

When the last guest had departed, Nick
and Fiona and Camille heaved a collective sigh.

“Wasn’t that just the most
beautiful
wedding?” Camille exclaimed, plucking a bright pink floribunda and sniffing it delicately.

“As weddings go,” Nick returned. His cousin had a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes, as if she’d been caught up in a fairy tale.

Fiona wore the same look of unreality.

Why did women gush over weddings? What was it about them that brought fatuous smiles to their lips and made them cry over the bride and groom with such happiness?

Nick knew how quickly fairy-tale marriages could end. He was the one who picked up the pieces of these people’s lives later.

“Let’s get this place cleaned up,” he said, looking around at the aftermath of the celebration.

Fiona didn’t want to go back to the hotel. She was too excited to sleep. Besides, she didn’t want tomorrow to come.

Tomorrow Camille was leaving, returning to India. And Fiona had to get back to Boston and her shop. Tomorrow she’d have to say good-bye to Nick.

It was a day she’d put off thinking about.

“Could we drive for a while?” she asked
him as he pulled the Porsche away from Winnie’s house.

“Drive?” He turned to glance at her.

“Yes. I know I won’t be able to sleep a wink, not with all the excitement of the evening still tripping through my brain. Unless, of course, you’re too tired,” she added. Nick had done most of the cleanup around Winnie’s and it had been a long day for everyone. She was being inconsiderate. Still, she hoped he’d say yes.

“I don’t feel sleepy myself. Sure, let’s drive. Anyplace in particular?”

“Nope.” She settled back in the seat, letting the wind blow her hair every which way. It would be hopelessly tangled, but tonight she didn’t care.

Her life was just as hopelessly tangled. And she didn’t care about that either. Or at least she refused to think about it. There’d be plenty of time to reflect on the impossibility of her situation with Nick once she returned to Boston.

If this was their last night together, she didn’t want to ruin it with desperation.

They’d both changed out of their wedding finery earlier. She’d shed the linen suit, slipping back into her shorts and a T-shirt for the cleanup. Nick, too, had changed out of his tux into form-hugging jeans and a black knit polo.

Fiona had hardly been able to keep her
eyes off him all evening. He’d looked devastating in his white tux, elegant, aloof … untouchable. He looked just as untouchable now. She wanted to reach over and kiss him, tell him everything would be okay with Winnie and Walter. She wanted to tell him that life wasn’t always the way he encountered it.

Love, strong and sure and unwavering, did happen to people. And when it did, it should be celebrated, not viewed with doubt and skepticism.

Fiona had been a doubter, too, when she’d come to Las Vegas, so sure her father could not have fallen in love with Winnie so quickly. But love, she found out, didn’t adhere to time-tables.

She’d fallen in love with Nick in just as short a span of time. Crazy, she knew, but it was true—hopelessly true.

They had left the town behind. Nothing but desert stretched ahead of them, its dark, barren beauty marred only by the headlights of an occasional oncoming car. Neither of them had spoken for the past dozen miles, each pensively lost in his own thoughts.

Nick’s face gleamed hard and lean with the moonlight slanting across it as he drove. There was a tension in him Fiona longed to kiss away. She wanted to run her hands over his hard, bare shoulders and down his taut arms until they grew relaxed and he reached
for her. She wanted to press her mouth to his and wipe away the years of pain and hurt Winnie and Gray had tried to erase with their love and nurturing.

She wanted to love away all the hopelessness he encountered daily in people’s lives, hopelessness that was beyond him to repair, but that, nonetheless, ate at him and threatened any future happiness.

Tall order, Fiona, she told herself.

What made her think she could succeed where others had failed? She sighed and hugged her arms to herself.

“Cold?” Nick asked, glancing over at her. “I have a sweatshirt in the trunk.”

“No, I’m fine.” The warmth of a sweatshirt couldn’t help her. It couldn’t ward off the chill of a future without Nick.

Their drive had taken them to Lake Mead, where they’d sailed together a few days earlier. Memories of that day came flooding back to her, that day and all the others she’d spent with him since coming here.

She wanted more days with Nick—and more nights. She wanted this night. She wanted him to make love to her again—one last time. And she wanted to pretend it was forever.

“Nick, can we spend the night on the boat?”

Nick turned toward her and studied her
face in the pale moonlight. It was naked with longing, with want. If he lived to be a thousand, he’d never forget the way this lady could proposition him.

Nothing in his past—or his future—he was certain, could ever compare. Fiona was a haunting mixture of reticence and brazenness. One minute she was as old-fashioned as her name, believing in happily-ever-afters and crying at weddings, the next she was asking him to do wicked things to her body.

“The night, huh?” That was an offer no sane man could refuse, though he knew, for her sake—for his—he should. “I know a nice, private cove.”

“Do … you come here often?” Fiona asked once Nick dropped anchor.

The cove was more than private. It was a haven. The moon and the stars were their only neighbors. And silence, silence broken only by the waves lapping softly against the hull, and more distantly, the shoreline, perhaps ten feet away. An intimate place, a place for making love.

Nick came over to her and took her face between his hands. “If you’re asking if I bring my women here, the answer is no. You’re the first.”

A shiver climbed her spine. His reply pleased her. “I—I’m glad you thought of it.” She’d die before she’d admit that was the very question on the tip of her tongue.

“Oh,
this
, lady, was entirely your idea.” He smiled wickedly and caressed her nipple.

It sent a primitive pull to the core of her. “How gallant of you to remind me.”

His smile only widened. He was mighty pleased with himself. What man didn’t enjoy a proposition from a woman?

“I, uh, might have a bottle of wine onboard and I could scare us up some cheese,” he said, still stroking her nipple through her shirt with infinite slowness.

What it was doing to her didn’t put her in mind of eating … or sipping wine with him. Her appetites at the moment ran to a need more vital. “Forget the wine,” she ordered.

He let out a purr of pleasure and cupped her bottom, then drew her hard against him. “I do believe the lady knows what she wants.”

And it was no secret that he wanted the same thing. In fact, he was more than willing. Hot and ready for whatever she had in store for him. She wriggled against his hardness and heard his groan of agony.

“Any more of that and I’ll pick you up and carry you below deck, woman,” he murmured in a husky threat.

“No,” she said. “I want you up here where I can see your body naked in the moonlight.” She wanted to remember him that way, all silvery-sheened and male. “I want to feel the
night on us, the breeze awakening our every nerve ending.”

“Your hands are doing one helluva job of that already.”

Fiona nearly had him out of his clothes, enjoying the feel of his skin beneath her touch. She memorized the texture of it, from rough to smooth to the velvet heat of his maleness.

He sucked in a breath when she touched him there and called her something that sounded like “witch.” At least she hoped that was what she’d heard.

The boat rocked in a rhythm beneath them, making it seem like they were dancing. In a way, they were, a dance with music heard only by the two of them, music that would haunt her again and again when Nick was no longer in her life—when she was alone and aching for him.

Nick had stripped her of her clothes as well, teasing and tormenting her with his mouth, his tongue, in places he’d never found before, sending her spiraling into sweet ecstasy.

Then, as the night whispered around them and the moonlight touched their nakedness, they joined together, moving together in a fierceness that hadn’t driven them before. Maybe because this was to be the last time. She obliterated that thought with the glory of
him inside her and rose with him until she felt herself fragment into a million tiny shards of pleasure.

They spent the night on deck, wrapped together in a blanket Nick had stowed, sipping the wine he’d found. There’d been only one small wedge of cheese, but they’d shared it, feeding each other tiny bites.

They didn’t sleep, only held each other and murmured all the wonderful things lovers say—everything, save one:
I love you
.

How could she say those words to a man who didn’t believe in love?

Sitting up, she let the blanket fall and reached for her clothes. She needed space. She needed distance. She needed to clear her head—and her heart—of Nick.

Nick’s hand shot out, pinning her to the spot. “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded. His hand cupped her breast, his fingers teasing her nipple lazily, seductively.

She wanted to slide down into the blanket next to him, let him do all the wondrous things to her body that he’d done earlier, but she knew this was the end, the end of all that they had shared. There was no future for her with Nick.

She’d known that from the beginning. But why, when faced with the reality of it now, did it hurt so damned much?

She wriggled her T-shirt over her head
and shimmied it down to cover her nakedness. Nick’s hand fell to the bareness of her leg, his fingers trailing a seductive path up her thigh.

His touch was nearly her undoing. She struggled for strength. “It’s almost morning,” she said, and drew away, slipping hastily into her shorts.

“Yes, it’s almost morning,” Nick repeated.

She heard a catch to his voice, and then she knew that he, too, realized the full implication of that fact. Their time together was over.

“I’m leaving today,” she added quietly.

She didn’t look at him, but she could feel him recoil at her statement.

Say something, Nick
, she cried inside.
Tell me to stay. Tell me you love me
. But even as her brain screamed the words she knew she wouldn’t hear them, not from Nick.

She got up and paced across the deck. Golden fingers of light speared the waning night sky. If it were possible, she’d hold back the sunrise. Morning would never come.

Nick shucked off the confining blanket and yanked on his jeans. Fiona looked so tiny, so fragile, so beautiful, standing there, gazing out across the lake. He wanted to go to her, beg her to stay, but he knew he had nothing to offer her.

He’d come so close to falling in love with her, so close to believing it really did exist.
He’d listened to Auntie and Walter exchange their vows and tried desperately to believe.

He’d squeezed his eyes shut and tried to imagine himself and Fiona saying those words, promising forever to each other, but it was no good. Something was lacking in him. Faith had died in him a long time ago.

He wished he could go to her, pull her into his arms, and tell her she belonged to him,
tell her he loved her
, but the words would sound foreign, hollow.

He crossed the deck to her and coiled a silken strand of her tangled hair around his finger. He didn’t dare touch any other part of her. “When does your plane leave?” he asked.

He felt her body grow taut. It had been a simple question, and not so simple. With it, he’d condemned their relationship to its end.

He wanted to yank back the words. If only he and Fiona had had more time, but he knew that would not have solved anything between them, only made it that much harder to part.

“It’s a one-thirty flight,” she managed to say. There was a quaver in her voice and he wished he could kiss it away from her throat.

He was hurting her, he knew, but if he asked her to stay, he’d only hurt her more. He couldn’t be what she needed. “I’ll see what there is in the galley for breakfast.”

“No.” She put a staying hand on his arm, then quickly withdrew it as if she’d been
burned. “Nick, I’d like to go back to the hotel. I … I need to pack.”

Nick studied her for a long moment. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Everything else between them went unsaid.

“What’s the matter with you two? You both look like you just lost your best friend,” Camille remarked, her gaze sliding over Nick first, then Fiona, her perception rapier-sharp.

They’d stopped by Winnie’s on the way in from Lake Mead so Fiona could say good-bye to Camille, but she hadn’t considered how close to the surface their emotions shimmered.

“Something like that,” Nick said. He shared a glance with Fiona, then frowned and sauntered away, off to the kitchen, no doubt to find something for breakfast. Neither he nor Fiona had eaten—and Fiona wasn’t sure she ever would again.

She smiled wanly at Camille, not knowing what to say. A tight knot of emotion threatened to close off her throat. “We had, uh …”