Lori Wilde - There Goes The Bride (15 page)

That sounded dangerously close to a compliment. Except Nick was dead wrong. Delaney wasn’t tough inside at all. She was a total marshmallow through and through.

He took a deep breath. “Mom died just four days after we got back home.”

Delaney’s throat clotted with emotion. “Nick—I—”

“So you see why I don’t like anyone messing with Lalule,” he rushed in to say. She could tell he was struggling to sound casual.

She wanted to touch him, to comfort him for that long-ago pain, but she had no business, no right. Still, she couldn’t just leave him with his shoulders tensed, his jaw clenched, his mind hung up in the past. She skimmed his forearm with her fingertips—briefly, lightly, just enough to let him know she cared.

“I understand the hurt. The confusion a young child goes through when they lose someone close to them. You blame yourself. You think that if you’d been a better kid, the person you loved wouldn’t have died. That if you had done just one thing differently, you could have saved them.”

He looked startled. “You too?”

“My older sister,” she said. “When I was eight.”

Nick made a noise, half empathy, half sorrow. His eyes glistened. “Life’s a bitch sometimes,” he said to be macho, but he reached across the seat and tenderly took her hand.

Every muscle cell in her heart ached. She looked over at him. This shared intimacy forced a deeper understanding, a bonding between them.

“Losing Skylar changed me forever, you know.” She swallowed. “While losing your mother made you braver, losing my sister made me more afraid.”

“You seem brave to me.”

“I’m not.” She ducked her head. “Not at all. You have no idea how scared I am ninety percent of the time.”

“What are you so scared of?”

“Of everything, but mostly of being scared.” She laughed at herself. “Of not really living.”

“If that’s true, where did you find the courage to dress up in that bustier and raincoat and attempt to kidnap your fiancé?”

“I needed to feel something. Needed some magic in my life, I guess. But you saw how well that turned out.”

“I thought it turned out very well. It made me damn jealous of your fiancé.”

Delaney couldn’t handle the swell of emotions flooding through her. She couldn’t keep looking at him. Instead, she directed her attention out the window and told herself to breathe.

They were traveling down Seawall Boulevard. Sunlight streamed through a break in the soft covering of clouds, sparkling off the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The water shimmered, rolling in toward the seawall.

For a split second, Delaney felt the way she’d felt the night she found the wedding veil. Caught up in a special sort of magic that could change everything. And then the feeling vanished, disappearing as quickly as it surfaced.

She saw a carnival-style amusement park situated at the end of the beach. The rides looked old and shaky, the garishly painted skins peeling and rusting in the salt air. Delaney was at once both charmed and repelled by the rinky-dink amusement park.

When she was a kid, she’d always wanted to go to a carnival or an amusement park. Ride those scary rides. Eat sticky candy apples and funnel cakes dusted with powdered sugar. Breathe in the air rich with the smell of frying grease. Get taken in by the sideshow barkers. Play games of chance and win a giant teddy bear.

Her mother had hated carnivals and amusement parks with a passion verging on phobia. “Carnies are common street thugs,” she’d tell Delaney. “You’ll get germs from the rides. They’ll cheat you and steal your money. Stay away from carnivals and fairs and small-time amusement parks.”

So she had.

But her mother had made carnivals such a taboo, that whenever Delaney saw one, she experienced the lure of the forbidden deep in the center of her stomach. Calling to her. Urging her to defy her mother. To sin by climbing on the Ferris wheel and floating high above the crowd and then slowly coming down to earth. She had imagined it a thousand times.

She latched on to the amusement park with her gaze, using it to pry her awareness off Nick. Realizing that in spite of having grown up a very rich girl, she had missed out on a lot of the simple things. What she would have given for a Lalule of her own.

Then Delaney saw something totally unbelievable.

Her smartly dressed, perfectly coiffed mother.

No way.

But she could have sworn it was Honey Montgomery Cartwright standing on the seawall beside the entrance to the amusement park, talking to an elderly woman in a babushka and wading boots, wearing a black eye patch over her left eye.

The pickup truck sailed by.

Delaney blinked. No, it couldn’t be. She must have imagined it. She couldn’t conceive of a single reason that would compel her mother to visit a run-down amusement park on Galveston Island.

“Wait, wait,” she exclaimed.

“What is it?”

“Back up, back up,” she yelled at Nick, frantically making counterclockwise motions with her hand.

“Huh?”

“Put it in reverse, go back, go back.”

“I can’t back up in traffic.”

“Make a U-ey. Hurry, hurry.”

“Okay, okay, keep your shirt on.” His grin turned wicked. “Unless, of course, you want to take it off.”

Any other time she would never have said what she said next, but she was so stunned at seeing her snooty mother slumming at an amusement park that she was not her normal self.

“Shut up and drive, Vinetti,” she snarled.

“Yes, ma’am.” He obeyed and made a U-turn at the next traffic light.

She was amazed at his acquiescence. Hmm, maybe that was the way you handled a guy like Vinetti. If she’d growled “shut up” at Evan, it would have hurt his feelings so badly he would have pouted for an hour. Nick, on the other hand, seemed to respect her for it. Then again, Evan had never given her any reason to snarl “shut up” at him.

“Drive slower.”

“Cars are on my ass, Rosy.”

“Tough.”

“When’d you get so bossy?”

When indeed? She wasn’t acting like herself, but right now that felt like a good thing. Delaney undid her seat belt and scooted over to Nick’s side of the truck and craned her neck to peer out his window. She was sitting so close she could hear him breathing.

They crept along Seawall Boulevard, cars piling up behind them, drivers honking their horns in irritation.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“I thought I saw someone I know.”

“And that’s worth snarling traffic over?”

“In this case, yes.”

“What? Do you think that you saw your fiancé with another woman?”

“No.”

“Then what on earth could you have seen that would make you holler like a banshee with her hair caught in a chamois wringer?” Nick asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

“I hate to disagree with you on that, but your sighting is the reason these cars are kissing my bumper. You owe me an explanation.”

“I saw my mother, okay? Happy now?”

“With a man other than your father?”

“What’s with you and the cheating-loved-ones scenarios? Oh, oh.” She tapped his shoulder. “Slow down even more, we’re almost there.”

They inched past the amusement park entrance.

Teeth clenched, Delaney scanned the area. She looked first left toward the Gulf, then right toward the collection of ragtag carnival rides.

Nothing.

No one.

Her mother had vanished.

Chapter 8

S
haking with fear and revulsion, Honey climbed into her sleek white Cadillac and sped out of Galveston as fast as she dared, desperate to reach home and take a long, hot, cleansing shower to wash away her sins. Her heart was in her throat, her stomach was a tight knot, and her hands smelled of the twenty thousand dollars she’d just counted out. She felt very dirty.

Blackmail was an ugly business.

Then again, so was the thing she had done.

All these years, she thought she’d gotten away with it. Thought she had fooled everyone. Thought no one would ever discover her terrible secret.

In retrospect, she’d been both foolish and arrogant.

Now she was trapped. Forced to pay to keep her shame quiet and never knowing how long the blackmailing would continue.

And she had to keep it quiet. For her daughter’s sake. No one must ever discover the truth.

At least until after the wedding. When Delaney was married to Evan and safely out of harm’s way.

Nick didn’t know why he’d told Delaney about his mother. He rarely talked about Dominique anymore. He wasn’t the kind of guy who liked stirring up the past, and he certainly didn’t like examining his feelings and talking about them.

Unfortunately, once the memories of those old feelings had been aroused—feelings of loss and anger and sadness—he could not easily stuff them back down into his subconscious. Even after he’d gone home for the day, he kept replaying his afternoon with Delaney over and over in his head. To relieve the pressure, Nick was back at the gym, pushing himself, exercising his body in an attempt to free his mind.

It wasn’t working.

Almost always, when things got too emotionally tough, exercise provided him with the release he needed. During the whole Amber/Gary Feldstein fiasco, he shed nine pounds, ended up running a five-minute mile, and bench-pressed two-sixty. Thanks to Gold’s Gym, he’d been able to put the scandal out of his mind and get through the humiliation.

But this was the second time exercise had failed him where Delaney Cartwright was concerned.

He lost count during bicep curls because he kept thinking about Delaney’s soft voice and the way her deeply green, intelligent, expressive eyes encouraged him to spill his secrets. He forgot how many laps he’d done in the pool and had to go around again to make sure he wasn’t shortchanging his routine because he’d vividly imagined kissing that slightly crooked little mouth of hers. He forgot to put the timer on the treadmill and ended up staying on fifteen minutes longer than he intended because he kept wondering how her silky hair would feel slipping through his fingers.

What was it about Delaney that loosened his lips? Why did he feel this need to explain himself to her?

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. She seemed to hold some kind of magic key to the trunk where he kept his vulnerabilities locked up tight. She knew just how and when to slip that key into the lock and turn it. Nick barely knew the woman, and he had already told her things he’d never told Amber. Not even after being engaged for eighteen months.

He’d never even told his ex-wife the story behind Lalule.

When she’d run off with Feldstein, Amber had cited Nick’s inability to communicate as the reason she’d left. Ha! If she could see him now. With Delaney, he was communicating like Geraldo Rivera in the Middle East, spilling everything he knew. How laughably ironic.

Then it suddenly occurred to him why he would share his deeper feelings with Delaney and not with Amber. For one, Delaney was an empathetic listener, but he suspected that was secondary. He could talk to her because with Delaney, he had nothing to lose. She was engaged to someone else. He didn’t see her as a threat to his self-image. With her, he wouldn’t forfeit any macho points for revealing his tender side.

Once he realized that, he felt better.

Okay, he didn’t have anything to worry about. If tears had misted his eyes a little when he’d talked about his mother, no harm, no foul.

Except whenever he thought about Delaney, something tightened in the dead center of his chest, and that disturbed him. A helluva lot. The woman was engaged to another man. He couldn’t,
wouldn’t
, have these feelings for her.

Clearly, he had to find a way to chase her off. Not only because he didn’t want her succeeding at selling Nana’s house, but for his own mental health as well. He had to be subtle about it. Nana loved her. Hell, the whole family was smitten with her. If he didn’t handle this right, he’d come off looking like the bad guy.

Quitting the job had to be Delaney’s idea. But how to accomplish that goal? What he needed was an underhanded plan.

A smile broke across his lips as the perfect plot popped into his head. He’d turn on the charm and pretend he was trying to win her away from her fiancé. That ought to do the trick. Pleased with his solution, Nick breezed through the rest of his workout.

Yep, Delaney Cartwright’s days as his Nana’s house stager were numbered.

“You’ve got to be mistaken. Our mom? At an amusement park? Talking to a one-eyed carny woman?” Skylar scoffed when Delaney dreamed of her again.

“Yes.”

Tonight, Skylar was dressed in scarlet cowgirl boots and a fawn-colored suede jacket with fringe on the sleeves. “I can’t imagine in what universe that scenario is even remotely possible.”

“I’m telling you, it was her.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

Delaney blew out a breath. “Yes . . . no.”