Читать книгу Vegas Wedding, Weaver Bride - Allison Leigh - Страница 9

Chapter One

Las Vegas, Nevada

Penny Garner stared at the piece of paper Quinn Templeton was holding between his long fingers. Her stomach, which had already been hovering somewhere two floors below her feet, sank even farther.

She clutched the white bedsheet closer against her naked body, trying desperately to pretend that Quinn wasn’t just as naked. He simply wasn’t bothering with a sheet to hide anything. From the top of his rumpled, dark-haired head to the long, vaguely bony toes on his feet, he was entirely, utterly, gloriously bare.

And he didn’t seem the least bit shy about it, either.

Which left Penny two choices.

Focus on him, or focus on the piece of paper he’d found on the nightstand next to the bed.

And the piece of paper—disturbing as it was—seemed safer at the moment. “What is that?”

Quinn flicked the official-looking document onto the bed that stood between them. The tumbled bed that Penny had scrambled out of only minutes earlier, dragging the sheet along with her. “You can read.”

She could read. But that didn’t mean the marriage certificate, lying with lopsided innocence against one of the bed pillows, made any sense.

She unwound one arm from the sheet to reach out for the sheet of paper. “It’s not real.”

She picked it up. Studied her signature on the line that said “Bride.” Penelope Garner was looped across it in familiar, lopsided cursive. The “Groom” line was similarly obscured under Quinn’s slashing signature.

She looked up at him. Then just as quickly away. When she’d been fifteen, she’d had a crazy mad crush on him. So much so, that she’d thrown herself at him. Tried, in her juvenile way, to seduce him. He’d been home on leave from the air force. She’d been living with her latest foster family, the Bennetts, across the street from where his parents lived.

At the time, he’d ruthlessly crushed her immature advances.

Now she wished she still possessed some of the outrageous guts she’d had in her youth. Because it was more than a little mortifying to be knocking on the door of thirty and feeling wholly out of her depth when faced for the first time with a seriously naked, gorgeous man.

A man with whom she’d spent the night.

A man with whom she’d signed a marriage certificate.

She sank onto the edge of the bed. Which at least gave her the advantage of turning her back toward him.

“This has to be a joke. Right?” It was hard enough to believe she’d slept with him. But marry? She set the certificate on the mattress beside her and wound her shaking hands inside the sheet twisted around her. “It looks like my signature. But I don’t remember signing it. Do you?”

“No.”

If she concentrated on the paper hard enough, then maybe she could forget the way she’d wakened.

Wrapped in his arms.

Intimately.

Fortunately, she’d come to her senses and scrambled out of bed, dragging the sheet with her.

Unfortunately, that was about the time he’d noticed the marriage certificate. And his brows had pulled together in the fiercest frown she’d ever seen.

Her fingers worried the edges of the sheet clutched above her breasts. “Then it’s got to be a joke.”

The fancy Las Vegas hotel suite had thick, plush carpet that easily swallowed the sound of Quinn’s footsteps as he rounded the bed to her side. “Who would play a joke like that?”

She averted her eyes before she got too much of an eyeful of his muscular nude body. He’d been injured during his latest deployment. Had spent months in the hospital, she knew. It didn’t seem logical that he could be so tanned all over the way he was. The only pale skin he possessed was—

She made herself look away again.

“I don’t know!” All her frustrated confusion sounded in her voice as she raked back her hair. “Your cousins? Your sister?”

“Maybe Viv?” His deep voice turned mocking. “God knows little old ladies like my recently discovered granny are prone to pulling off pranks like this.”

She made a face at him, only to get distracted yet again by all that...nakedness. She could only imagine how his granny would react if Viv knew her personal assistant had gotten into mischief with her grandson on what was supposed to be Vivian’s get-to-know-each-other-better trip with her grandchildren. “Would you please put on some clothes?”

“I remember a time when you wanted me to take ’em off.” But mercifully, he moved out of her sight again.

“Yeah, well, I was a kid,” she muttered. A wild, willful kid who’d only been trying to find her place in a world that seemed to have no place for her at all. “And if you were any sort of gentleman, you wouldn’t remind me of that.”

He snorted softly and sat on the side of the bed right next to her. “I’m not a gentleman.”

She peeked at the blue jeans now hugging his thighs and breathed a little easier. At least as easily as she could, considering his bare shoulder was brushing warmly against hers. “You’re in the air force. Isn’t being a gentleman a requirement?”

He didn’t answer that, but plucked the crumpling piece of paper from between them and held it between his hands. “At least you’re not jail bait anymore,” he muttered. “What’s the last thing you remember from last night?”

She felt her cheeks getting hot.

They were sitting on the edge of a hotel room bed. It was painfully obvious what had happened last night. Her imaginative mind had no trouble whatsoever filling in the blanks.

And wasn’t it ironic as all get-out that she’d finally shed her virginal state, but couldn’t actually remember a single detail of it?

Even as a teenager, he’d inspired insanity in her. As an adult, clearly nothing had changed.

Flushing even hotter, she pushed off the bed, dragging the unwieldy sheet with her. “I remember the nightclub.” His grandmother had been adamant that Penny join them. “I remember your grandmother kept ordering bottles of champagne.” Penny had been a little concerned. In addition to being the woman’s personal assistant, she was supposed to be watching out for Vivian’s health.

But Vivian had also been surrounded by five of her fully adult grandchildren. If they’d been cheering on their fully capable grandmother, how on earth could Penny have intervened?

“Viv does seem to like her champagne.” He pushed off the bed, too, grimacing a little as he straightened. He pressed his hand to his side, covering the long surgical scar there as he paced around the bed again, coming to a stop in front of the enormous sliding glass door that opened to a narrow balcony with a spectacular view of the city below. His hand went from his side to the window as he looked out.

The August sun was shining brightly outside the glass, and the sunlight threw his body into perfect relief. From the spread of his wide shoulders to the narrowness of his hips where the blue jeans clung a little too precariously, the only flaws he possessed were that long zipper-like scar and a scattering of small pale blotches on his side.

“Last thing I remember was dancing with you.” His thumb tapped the window. “We’d been at the bar. Champagne’s not usually my thing. I ordered a pitcher of margaritas for the table.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than her.

She felt perspiration spring out on her forehead. “It can’t be a real marriage certificate.”

“Yeah, well, unless we prove it one way or another—” He broke off when there was a knock on the door.

His eyes were as dark a brown as his hair and they looked toward her, questioningly. Combined with the whiskers blurring his jaw and the faint lines arrowing out from his eyes, it was a powerful combination.

“How should I know?” she whispered. “This is your suite.”

She’d been the one to make all the hotel arrangements for Vivian’s little Las Vegas jaunt. Quinn, his sister, Delia, his triplet cousins and Vivian were all on the same floor. Penny’s room was twenty floors below. Down in the less outrageously expensive section. Vivian had thought that particular touch was uproariously funny.

But then Vivian Archer Templeton had more money than Midas. She could afford expensive vacations like this for half her family anytime she wanted.

The knocking got louder, this time accompanied by feminine laughter. “Come on, Master Sergeant Templeton,” came the muffled voice through the door. “Get your lazy bones moving. You’re going to be late for lunch.”

Lunch.

Penny groaned. Vivian was expecting everyone in her suite for the lunch that Penny had arranged the day before. It was to be their last full day in Las Vegas before heading back home to Wyoming.

“They’re gonna get a kick out of this.” Quinn started for the door, but Penny grabbed his arm, feeling sheer panic flow through her veins.

“You can’t tell them!”

He lifted a dark eyebrow. “How do you know they don’t already know?” He held up the certificate. “Maybe they were our wedding guests.”

She felt the blood drain out of her face. He was right. If neither one of them could remember the events of the previous night, how could she assume anything? “Don’t bring it up if they don’t,” she whispered fiercely. “Promise me!”

His eyes searched hers.

The knocking on the door got louder.

“Your leave is going to end. You’ll go back to your life,” she reminded him. “I’ll still be in Weaver. I don’t want the notoriety, okay? Gossip is the town’s best industry.”

His beautifully molded lips compressed. He looked like he wanted to argue.

“Please, Quinn. I’m begging here.”

“Fine.” He sounded none too pleased about it.

Relief still flooded through her. One thing she knew about Quinn Templeton was that he always kept his word.

She dashed around the bed, snatching up the items of her clothing that were visible, and raced toward the bathroom, only to nearly fall on her face as the sheet caught around her feet.

Quinn’s hand shot out, grabbing her arm and righting her.

“Quinn!” The knocking on the door hadn’t ceased.

“Dammit, Greer, I heard you the first time,” he said loudly. “Keep your pants on!” He pushed the crumpled marriage certificate into Penny’s hand and nudged her gently toward the bathroom. “Be more careful,” he murmured.

She ducked her chin, grabbed the sheet higher around her calves so she wouldn’t trip again and hurried into the luxuriously appointed bathroom, closing the door quietly after her.

The sight of her reflection in the wall-size mirror made her shudder. Guilt. Horror. Shock. All of that was in her face. Added to her rat’s nest hair and the whole bedsheet thing, she looked exactly as she’d expect a woman to look after waking up in a strange man’s bed.

Only he wasn’t really a stranger, was he, if she’d known him since she’d been a teenager? Or was that negated by the fact that—aside from his brief visits home to Wyoming—he’d been gone for more than the last decade?

She dumped the certificate, her dress and the one high-heeled sandal she’d found beside the bed on the marble counter and pressed her ear against the closed door.

All she could hear were muffled voices.

She raked her tangled hair away from her face. It was only then that she noticed the narrow band on her left finger. It was gold. Set with sparkling diamonds that circled all the way around. And it was beautiful.

She slid it off so fast it flew out of her fingers and rolled out of sight.

Her conscience nipped at her and she crawled around until she found it. Feeling decidedly nauseated, she set it on top of Quinn’s leather shaving kit, then went to sit on the side of the enormous round bathtub. Pins prickled behind her eyes and she pinched them closed. It was one thing to know she’d slept with him. But how could she have married him?

Once upon a time, she was supposed to have been a bride. A real one. Only instead of marrying Andy, she’d—

“Hey—”

She looked up to see Quinn had opened the door. He’d added a T-shirt over his jeans. The light gray cotton looked stretched almost to breaking point over his shoulders.

“You all right?”

She swiped her cheeks. “You ever hear of that thing called privacy?”

“That’s what locks are for.” His dark, dark eyes roved over her. “There’s no reason to cry. At least my cousin Greer didn’t mention anything unusual. This isn’t the end of the world.”

“Waking up married?” She waved her hand, only to feel her sheet slipping, and yanked it once again up to her neck. “Sure. Nothing to be worried about at all.”

He scrubbed his hand down his bristly jaw. The thick, wavy hair on his head was as dark as ever, but the whiskers there definitely held a touch of gray.

She wished she could say they detracted from his appeal.

But at least that long-fingered hand of his wasn’t sporting a wedding ring.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said.

“I don’t know how you can sound so calm.” She hitched up the long ends of the sheet and stood. “This is a disaster.” She slipped past him to return to the bedroom area. As oversize and opulent as the bathroom was, it was still too small with him in it.

His voice turned flat. “Stop being melodramatic.”

She spotted her other shoe peeking out from beneath the gold silk bedspread that was hanging off the mattress, and grabbed it. She couldn’t remember how the evening had ended the night before, but she distinctly remembered how it had started off—with her fully clothed and wearing her usual complement of panties and bra underneath.

“Maybe it’s not a disaster in comparison to your usual life.” She knew he was part of some special operations thing in the air force. To Penny, that was just code for some really dangerous thing in the air force. “But it is to mine. I have no desire to be anyone’s wife. Certainly not like this.” Not to another man already married to the military. She’d been through that before. Thanks to the army in which Andy had served and a close encounter with an IED on his way home for their wedding, she’d never even had the opportunity to be a widow. Much less a wife.

She went down onto her hands and knees to look under the bed. But the ivory carpet there was smoothly vacuumed and untarnished by discarded undies. She sat back on her knees.

“What are you looking for?”

“The rest of my clothes, obviously.” She hitched up the sheet again and stood. “I need to get back to my room. Clean up. Make sure everything’s set for the flight home tomorrow.”

“What about my grandmother’s lunch?”

“That’s for all of you. I’m the hired help, remember?” She shoved her long hair away from her face again as she walked back into the bathroom, carrying her second shoe.

She shut the door.

Pushed the door lock for good measure.

She dropped the sheet and pulled her stretchy dress over her head, dragging the dark purple fabric down over her bare hips and thighs. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious that she was entirely commando under the dress.

She raked her fingers through her hair, trying to restore a little order to the dishwater-blond mess, and splashed water over her face, using one of the plush towels stacked on a glass shelf before she pushed her bare feet into her high-heeled sandals and opened the door again.

Quinn was leaning against the wall opposite the door, his arms folded over his wide chest. “Feel better?”

She could feel herself flushing, but she gave a brisk nod anyway as she walked out of the bathroom. Without high heels, she was taller than average. With them, she stood close to six feet, putting her generally eye-to-eye with most men.

But not Quinn. He was still several inches taller than she was.

Which was a completely irrelevant point, she reminded herself as she scanned the room, hoping to spot her purse, because she truly did not want to have to go down to the lobby and get a new room key. Not looking the way she did.

Her relief when she finally found it half-hidden among the ivory leather couch cushions was almost comical. Her room key was tucked safely inside one of the pockets, exactly where she’d put it before joining Vivian and her family for dinner the evening before.

She felt her eyes drifting toward the bed and yanked them front and center.

Quinn hadn’t left his position against the wall. Which meant she had to walk past him once again to get to the door of the suite.

“You can’t run far, Penny.”

“I’m not running. You, however, are supposed to be sitting down to lunch with your grandmother.” She opened the door.

But he reached out and closed his hand around her wrist before she could leave. “Viv can wait. It’s not every day I wake up to a wife.”

Heat rushed up her throat into her face. “I’m not your wife.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Really? I know they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but we’re talking marriage here. And we’ve got a certificate that strongly suggests you’re most definitely my wife.”

She didn’t know if it was deliberate or not, but his thumb was pressed right against the racing pulse in her wrist. “Then we’ll get another certificate that undoes it! Annulments must be almost as popular in this state as weddings.”

“Annulment means there’s been no marriage—or anything associated with the marriage—at all.”

“That’s right.” She pulled on her wrist, but his fingers held fast. They weren’t hurting. But they weren’t giving so much as a centimeter.

Instead, he reeled her in closer. He tucked one finger beneath her chin, and her mouth went dry.

He turned her face until she was looking back into the hotel suite.

Right at the bed.

“You sure an annulment is going to be all that easy?” His voice was low. Intimate. “We have a consummated marriage here, sweetheart.”

A flush ran through her veins, and her skin seemed to tingle.

“We don’t know that for sure,” she reminded, wishing that she sounded a lot less hoarse and a lot more certain.

His callused thumb moved slowly over her inner wrist. “You don’t remember the way we woke up?”

She wanted to block out his words as badly as she wanted to block out the truth. Because she did remember exactly the way she’d awakened.

Engulfed in his warmth. His hand on her breast. His hair-roughened thigh between hers.

He hadn’t been inside her. But he could have been. Everywhere she’d been soft and wanting, he’d been hard and insistent.

And for a moment, a wonderful, blissful moment, she’d imagined Andy weren’t dead. That he was there with her. They were together, finally, just the way they’d planned to be.

And then she’d realized the dream wasn’t a dream at all. But a nightmarish reality.

Because it wasn’t Andy’s arms surrounding her, causing her to feel so deliciously safe and cherished. It wasn’t Andy’s soft blue gaze and sweet smile she saw when she opened her eyes.

It was Quinn.

Quinn, with the seductive grin, and the devil-dark eyes that had always made her want to do anything and everything with him. Sanity had thankfully kicked in then, and she’d jumped out of bed like the hounds of Hades were nipping at her feet.

“I don’t care what that marriage certificate says. And I don’t care what went on in that—” she swallowed hard “—that bed. I am not your wife. You are not my husband. We are not married.”

Then she finally twisted her wrist free and rushed through the doorway to escape.