Читать книгу Midnight Fantasy - Ann Major - Страница 8

Tonight should have been the happiest night of Claire Woods’s life. Instead, tears of disillusionment stung her eyes. North had let her drive off. So, now here she was, forty miles from home, her blond hair whipping her face like a mop, and two unsavory goons honking on her tail.

She hit the accelerator. Nothing was turning out the way she’d planned. She had so wanted her wedding to be a fairy tale, but as the big day approached Claire Woods, who everybody thought spoiled and pampered, was feeling bereft and hollow.

If only Melody, her quirky, irrepressible, unpredictable sister, hadn’t come home to spoil everything!

It was just like Melody to helicopter off that freighter bound for China and fly home—tonight! Just like her to stage that provocative dance for North’s benefit and steal Claire’s show and maybe her man.

Claire had wanted to shout, “I’m the bride! North loves me now! Not you!” But, of course, she’d only stood there with a frozen smile while Melody hummed and did her cute routine.

And North…

“It’s not North’s fault!”

He hadn’t known Melody would pull one of her stunts. Who but Melody would fly in from China just to crash their party? From the second Melody had waltzed into the yacht club ballroom in those tight pants and shimmery blouse, looking like she owned the place, everybody had been electrified. Nobody could stop talking about that buffoon, Merle somebody, a fly-by-night P.I. their daddy had sent to find her six months ago. Melody had laughingly explained how she’d lured Merle on board her China-bound freighter and then tricked him into walking the plank, so to speak.

“Why did you come home?” North had demanded of Melody. “Why now?”

“I…I couldn’t miss your wedding.”

“You sure missed the last one.” North’s low voice was rapier-sharp.

If North truly loved Claire, he would be chasing Claire right now instead of the two hoods flashing their highbeams and honking behind her.

Instead, her fiancé and her sister were still at the party, probably making eyes at each other this very minute, while she was driving around alone.

No…. No….

A vision of Melody humming softly, Melody, in those skintight black jeans and a white silk shirt, eyes aglow, her honey-gold hair streaming down her slim back took shape in Claire’s too-vivid imagination. Her sister’s dance had been so enthusiastic, so spontaneous, and so original that everybody had stopped dancing and started clapping the moment she kicked off her shoes and threw them to North. Everyone except North who’d gripped those sparkly high heels in a strangle-hold. Not that he hadn’t watched her dance, his expression darkening when the other men had started clapping.

How much of her childhood had Claire spent curled up with a book or in her room alone with her dreams while bubbly Melody was out in the yard putting on a show that had all the neighborhood children, especially the boys, spellbound?

Applause and love and sheer sexiness came so easily to the uninhibited Melody.

All her life Claire had wanted to be first with somebody.

“Don’t think about Melody,” Claire whispered to herself. “Don’t think about the pain in North’s eyes when he’d watched her dance.”

“But I can’t stop.”

Claire had never outgrown the childish habit of talking to herself, especially when she was in her car alone or primping in front of her mirror.

“Chase me then!” she’d laughingly challenged North a little while after Melody’s dance.

The memory made her blush, made her eyes burn. What a brazen fool she was. When would she ever learn North was too cool and mature to play what he called her childish games?

Or was that really it? Did he love her, really love her as once he had loved…

He had told her once, “I can never love you as I loved Melody. But I believe what we’ll have will be better and stronger than what I felt for her.”

Claire was sick of driving around. More than a little scared, too, and not just of losing North. The jerks behind her were persistent. Her parents’ warnings played like tapes in the back of her mind.

A woman alone on the road is prey, Claire. This in a shrill tone from her bossy mother, Dee Dee.

When a man sees a woman alone, he takes it as an invitation. This from Sam, her all-knowing doctor father.

Maybe the old folks were smarter than she’d thought. Her legs had been jelly ever since these two goons had almost sideswiped her, forcing her onto the shoulder a while ago.

The humid wind that battered her face and tangled her butter-colored hair stank with the pungent fragrance of a plankton-laced bay. When their car speeded up, attempting to pass her again, Claire shakily pushed a sticky strand of hair out of her eyes.

Her front wheels skidded. Her heart skittered.

“I’m not scared!”

When the car in her rearview mirror rushed forward and she could no longer see it, she yanked her steering wheel to the left and cut them off. Honking, they eased off the accelerator and veered back into the right lane behind her. So did she. They slowed, and she relaxed enough to rehash the humiliating little scene at the country club with North and Melody, which was the reason she was in this mess.

North never wanted to discuss wedding details, maybe because his first wedding had ended in such disaster.

“We’ll all be happier when you grow up!” North had thundered distractedly a few minutes after Melody’s dance had ended. Claire had been trying to discuss some of the difficulties with wedding costs. “So, scale back. Compromise!”

North could hold onto his cowboy cool a whole lot longer than most guys, so his uncustomary show of temper should have warned her.

“But I can’t. It’s our wedding day. If your family would just—”

“You know what your problem is?” North had waved one of Melody’s shoes at her. “You’re spoiled, Claire.”

“Me? Spoiled? You’re the big multimillionaire rancher.”

Men. At first she hadn’t been able to believe that North, whose wealth was legendary, had joined forces with the wedding consultant, caterers, her parents, and his family to attack her. Why couldn’t he understand how unsure she felt with Melody home and everybody else pulling her to pieces?

“Darling, Mother keeps saying she just wants our wedding day to be fairy-tale perfect,” she’d whispered, “something special we’ll remember forever. We’re doing this for you…to make up for…” Claire stopped, staring at the sparkly shoes he still held because she couldn’t say, my sister jilting you at the altar.

“I wish you two would worry a little more about what comes after that day—our marriage.”

“Oh, that—That’s the happily-ever-after part.”

“Damn it.” North had shrugged wearily. “I’m beginning to wonder about that.”

Finally, she’d said what was really on her mind. “Is this about Melody?”

“Hell, no.” But he’d reddened, and the sparkly shoes had glinted. “Life’s not lived like the glossy pictures of those bridal and home magazines you and your mother pore over all the time. I wish to hell we’d eloped.”

Suddenly she’d realized everyone, especially Melody, had begun watching them when North had raised his voice in annoyance. Claire had felt frightened and guilty when North’s gaze had drifted back to her blushing sister.

“I’m sorry,” Claire had said. “So sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” When he’d scowled at her and then at the shoes and hadn’t apologized, she hadn’t known what to do. Suddenly she’d realized she shouldn’t have upset him with wedding details right after Melody’s dance. “Dance with me, darling,” she’d pleaded, realizing he hadn’t said one word about how beautiful she was in her white sheath.

Again his black gaze had drifted to Melody. “I’m really not in the mood to put on a show!”

“But we’re supposed to be madly in love.”

“Claire, your sister’s show is a hard act to follow. And now you’ve got me all worked up, too. I can’t just…You’re always pressuring me, chasing me—”

“’Cause you never chase me.”

His black eyes left Melody and flicked over Claire with a strange look of pity that startled them both. When he pressed his handsome lips together and continued to regard her thoughtfully, she was terrified.

“How will it look to everybody if we just stand around, not dancing, not talking?” Claire pleaded. “And holding my sister’s shoes?”

“Frankly, I don’t much give a damn.”

“You’d better be careful,” Melody had quipped, gliding up to them. “That sounds a lot like Rhett Butler’s exit line.”

A look had passed between Melody and North. Then North’s face had hardened and he slammed the shoes into her open palms. “And you’re just the girl to appreciate a good exit line.”

Melody had gone as pale as death.

Claire had felt a burst of sympathy for North.

Would he ever get over her sister?

Of course, he would. He was. She had just been immature to push him.

Would he ever be over her sister?

People were turning to stare. Not knowing what to do, Claire had flown out of the club and gone to her car.

North would follow. He would leave the stuffy party where all anybody ever did was try to impress each other. He would chase her. He had to.

Nobody had been more upset than Dee Dee when Claire’s wacky, unconventional sister had broken North’s heart. Just as nobody had been more elated when he’d found consolation first in Claire’s friendship, and then in her love.

Claire banged her hands on her steering wheel and listened to the band. Even out here the throbbing music was loud, almost loud enough to drown out the loneliness in her young aching heart, almost.

“Go back inside.”

“No, any minute North will march out those polished mahogany doors with the shiny brass handles and prove his love for me—to everyone.”

But the doors didn’t open, and the brass handles began to swim in a sea of hot tears. North stayed at the club.

And even though Claire had known deep down that she was, at least, partly in the wrong—she hadn’t had the guts to go back inside, face Melody and meekly apologize to North.

Her mother, Dee Dee, who’d all but engineered this marriage after Melody had jilted North, was, once again, planning the wedding of the year. Only Dee Dee was determined that Claire’s wedding would be so magnificent everybody would forget and forgive what Melody had done. But the financial burden of marrying great wealth for the second time was a strain on their upper-middle-class budget, a fact her father never let Dee Dee forget, which was why Claire had asked North to help.

“Have a wedding your family can afford,” he’d said. “After what Melody pulled, all that matters is a sacred ceremony.”

Mother said the wedding had to be perfect…perfect. Just the event to reestablish Dee Dee Woods as a Texas hostess to be reckoned with after having been made the laughing-stock of the town last year by Melody. The effort and pressure to impress the right people had her mother in bed with what she called “heat” headaches.

Bridal nerves. Maybe that’s what had Claire so uptight and jittery lately…even before Melody’s return.

The moon lit a path from the horizon to the shoreline. Not that she noticed when the jerks behind her honked loudly.

Their bumper slammed into hers. A sickening chill of fear shivered up her spine.

She had driven forty miles on this fool’s errand to regain her pride. Halfway to Rockport where her parents had a condo on the bay, the punks had forced her onto the shoulder.

They honked flirtily again. Somehow she had to get back to North and apologize, really apologize. But first she had to shake these juvenile delinquents before she left Rockport.

When the hoods flashed their high beams, she stomped down on the accelerator of her sports car.

It was now or never.

As the cars raced, she began to practice her apology.

“Oh, North, I’m sorry. You were right and I was wrong. You’re my best friend.” She would close her long lashes, let them drift open slowly. “Of course, I love you just as I know you love me. Seeing Melody…Those shoes…That dance…I just wanted you to chase me…To excite me…To thrill me…To act like a caveman for once.”

The way Loverboy does.

“You can’t say that to North Black!” an irreverent masculine voice in her head drawled.

“I know that, silly.” She couldn’t ever let North…or anyone else know about her embarrassing, secret, fantasy life with…with Loverboy.

The trouble had started innocently, the way most bad things do. A lonely little girl, Claire hadn’t ever been able to make friends as easily as Melody. And if she had made a friend, Melody had quickly charmed her or him.

Claire had worn lace dresses when Melody and the other girls wore jeans. Claire had read books, while Melody and her friends had made mud pies and climbed trees. Finally, Claire had invented an imaginary friend, Hal, who was just as lonely and shy as she was. Everybody had thought it was so cute the way she included him in every conversation, set a special place for him, even bought presents for him. Somehow over the years, Hal had grown up and gotten way too sexy for her to handle. She was a virgin…but only technically. In her imagination, Hal and she got up to wanton mischief in all sorts of dark and inappropriate locations, on kitchen tables and the hood of her car. Hal was tall with black hair…like North.

And yet not like North at all.

North didn’t have all that much time for her. He kept much of himself hidden from her. He was steady and predictable when it came to his work, too tied to the responsibilities of his ranching empire and his duties to his legendary family.

Hal was wild and dangerous and free, insidiously attentive, and as faceless as an outlaw’s shadow.

North could give her the kind of safe, secure life her upper-middle-class mother could brag about.

Mostly her imaginary lover was a pirate on a ship who carried her off to sea. Sometimes he was a bandit or a highwayman who carried her to his hideout and robbed her of more than her gold.

Strip, my lady. Slowly. And every time she took something off, he would toss a gold coin at her feet.

Mostly she dreamed about him at night, but lately she’d been having the most lurid daydreams. The over-sexed phantom was becoming terribly distracting. One reason she was so anxious to get married was to send Loverboy packing. Once North made love to her, she would have a husband to dream about. What sane woman would chase a dream, when she had a man like North in her bed? Everybody, simply everybody told her North was the sexiest, hottest, richest cowboy prince in all of Texas.

North could have chosen any woman. He had chosen her.

“That’s not the way it was, Sugar-Baby,” purred Loverboy.

She hated to be called that. “Shut up, Hal!”

“I was there! And Melody was first!”

“Go away and leave me alone!”

“Never. I am not abandoning you till I find a more suitable companion for you.”

“Stay out of my love life!”

Suddenly a strange thing happened. The black sky turned pink, and she saw a lone black figure on a motorcycle off to her left silhouetted in a white cone of light. Pinkish-blue light pulsated around him. He was wearing a helmet, but the heat of his gaze was a visceral, physical connection. Even in that blurred, peripheral glimpse, she sensed that such a man in the flesh might prove wilder and more chaotically thrilling than any secret interior existence with Loverboy.

She knew better than to look at the biker, but some dark and dangerous force compelled her.

Curiosity kills more than cats.

The forbidden—especially in the tame, pampered life of a woman like Claire, who lived her life by rules the way some people paint by numbers—was the most powerful temptation. Besides, Melody’s dance and North’s dark mood had opened a crack in her heart and self-esteem.

She was on the brink of marriage to the most desirable of men. Never had she felt less sexually attractive, nor more afraid or vulnerable. What was the biker doing alone in a dark cemetery?

Jauntily, she turned toward him. For the space of a heartbeat her long-lashed eyes fixed on the black helmet that hid his face with an avidity that should have shamed her. Then with a will all its own, her glossily tipped fingernail tooted her horn.

He nodded. Her lips parted coquettishly. But when the biker skidded out onto the road after her, her heart jumped into her throat.

The thunder of his big bike racing to catch up to her was a fuse that lit a primal heat in every nerve in her body.

The biker left asphalt, caught up with her pursuers, spewing gravel on them before braking and then falling in behind them.

She knew he was bad.

Bad to the bone.

Why did she suddenly feel she was on a collision course with destiny? She turned her three-carat engagement ring backwards.

North was in Corpus, but the chase was on.