Читать книгу Wedding Party Collection: Don't Tell The Bride: What the Bride Didn't Know / Black Widow Bride / His Valentine Bride - Kelly Hunter, Cindy Kirk - Страница 13

FIVE

She barely remembered him. Trig tried to conceal his growing panic beneath another mouthful of food. Lena really did think she was married to him. Because he’d told the hospital staff they were in order to get her the attention she’d needed.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she was saying. ‘I’ve really screwed up, haven’t I? I’m a little light on details but I do remember you. You like the ocean too. And we played together as children. You and me and another boy.’

‘Jared.’ She couldn’t even remember Jared.

‘Yes. Jared. Jared, my...’

Trig waited. Lena frowned.

‘Brother,’ he told her, because he couldn’t stand the confusion in her eyes.

‘Right. I’m pretty sure the concussion’s screwing with my head.’

‘You think?’ Sarcasm didn’t become him, given the circumstances, but it was that or outright panic. She’d barely touched her food. He’d hardly made a dent in his and he shovelled another load down, because he didn’t rule out another trip to the hospital in the not too distant future.

‘You should try and eat something,’ he said gruffly, and she speared a small chunk of baked eggplanty stuff and ate it. Usually if he suggested she eat more, she’d tell him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t tell him what to eat.

Lena’s memory-lapse problem was worse than he thought.

He needed to get her upstairs and resting.

He needed to stop totally freaking out.

‘We’re after platinum rings,’ she said suddenly. ‘With a brushed finish.’

What did he even say to that?

‘And carpet. I wanted one of those too.’

‘A silk one,’ he said, and condemned himself to hell for his sins.

‘Expensive?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And you had a...problem with that?’ she continued tentatively.

‘Not at all. I’m thinking we need two.’ And a brain transfusion. For him.

‘Are we rich?’ She wasn’t even pretending to remember stuff any more.

‘Between us, we have resources.’ He thought that was a relatively fair call. ‘And your father’s a very rich man.’

‘I don’t sponge off him, do I?’

‘No, but you’re used to a certain way of life. You and your siblings all travel wherever you want, whenever you want to. You have several family houses and apartments at your disposal.’

‘But the beach house is ours. I remember the beach house.’

‘That’s Damon’s.’

‘Oh.’ Lena’s face fell and she blinked back sudden tears. ‘Could have sworn it was ours.’

‘We’ve spent a lot of time there lately,’ he offered gruffly. ‘There’s an indoor heated pool there that’s good for rehab. You’ve done a lot of rehab on your leg.’

‘Oh,’ she said again.

Trig set his napkin on the table and pushed away abruptly. ‘C’mon. I’ve had enough and you need to rest.’

She tried to follow swiftly. She caught her hip on the edge of the table and winced.

‘Easy, though. There’s no rush.’

‘Nothing works,’ she whispered.

‘It works. It just works different from the way you expect it to.’

She clutched at his arm and together they headed slowly for the lifts. ‘Do I have a crooked wooden walking stick?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you give it to me for when you weren’t around?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thought so.’

The lift door opened and they stepped in. Lena didn’t release his arm when he thought she would. The old Lena wouldn’t have taken his arm at all. He looked at the picture they made in the mirror, she was looking at the picture they made too, and her eyes were like bruises. He’d wanted this—them—for so long, but not like this. He needed the old Lena back before he pursued this.

‘I must have a really excellent personality,’ she said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Look at you.’

He eyed himself warily. Same oversized buffoon who’d failed to protect Lena. Again.

‘You look like a Hollywood action hero.’ She frowned when he didn’t reply. ‘You’re not, are you?’

‘Pass.’

‘Professional athlete?’

‘No.’

‘Fireman? I hear those boys lift a lot of weights in their spare time?’

‘Where’d you hear that?’

‘So you are a fireman?’

‘No.’

She stood there in silence, but not for long. ‘So what do you do? A wife should probably know.’

‘I work for Australia’s Special Intelligence Service.’

‘You’re a spy? Are you serious?’

‘You work for them too.’

The lift doors opened and before Lena could protest, Trig lifted her into his arms and headed for the room. She’d done enough walking for the day and maybe, just maybe, he needed to hold her for a little while and pretend that she was safe.

‘Do you carry me often?’ she asked as she wound her arms around his neck and relaxed into his arms.

‘As often as I can.’

And then Lena pressed her face to the hollow of his neck and took a deep breath and her arms tightened around him.

‘I remember this,’ she murmured. ‘I remember the way you smell.’

Trig didn’t need to die and go to hell. Hell had come to him.

She pressed a tentative kiss to his neck and his arms tightened around her. ‘Why do I call you Trig?’

‘Because I tutored you in trigonometry back in high school.’

‘So, I needed help. Meaning I’m not exactly a scholar.’

‘Depends on the company. You topped your state in mathematics, which for most seventeen-year-old girls is an excellent result. You just happen to have a couple of geeky geniuses in the family. It skews your expectations.’

‘I sound insecure.’

She was insecure. More so since East Timor. She just couldn’t get it through her head that her family cherished her for who she was. That her common sense and iron will often carried them.

They’d reached the door and Trig set her down reluctantly and opened it. His bag stood just inside the door, he’d had the hotel staff shift it from last night’s room back to this one. The doctor had said to monitor Lena through the night. He’d figured he could do that better from her room than from his. At that point he’d still been under the impression that Lena knew she wasn’t his wife.

She looked at the two beds and slanted him a sideways glance. ‘Not exactly the honeymoon suite. Or the Ritz.’

‘Yeah, about that...’ Was now the right time to tell her that they weren’t married or would that news only confuse and alarm her more? Did he let her sleep on it and hope to hell she woke up with her memory back?

Who the hell knew?

‘Sometimes your leg bothers you and you need the extra space to stretch out. And tonight, for example, what with your head and your leg and the fact that you really don’t remember me...it’s probably a relief to you that we have twin beds tonight, right?’

She didn’t say ‘right,’ she said ‘oh,’ and for a moment looked utterly lost.

‘So, your gear’s all here,’ he continued doggedly and gestured towards the cupboard and her suitcase. ‘I, ah, can run you a bath while I have a quick shower. The bath takes a while to fill.’

‘No bath,’ she said. ‘I’ll shower after you and then jump into bed. This bed.’ She pointed to the one nearest the window. Trig nodded and slung his bag on the other one and rifled through it for clean underwear and a T-shirt and sweats. He needed a shower and a lot more distance from Lena than was currently available, but sometimes a man had to take what he could get.

He reached for the shutter divider between bathroom and bedroom.

‘Can you not?’ Lena asked hurriedly.

‘What?’

‘I mean, you can shut them, of course you can. But if you wanted to leave them open you could do that too. It’s just...I feel better when I can see you.’

How could he possibly close them after that?

He left them open. He walked around the other side of that half wall and into the bathroom and shucked his clothes quickly, no showing off allowed. He didn’t want Lena looking and wondering. He most emphatically didn’t want her coming and touching.

Much.

He stepped into the shower before he’d even turned on the taps. He washed away the stench of fear and let icy resolve replace it. He could offer Lena comfort and reassurance tonight. He’d spent plenty of nights in the chair beside her hospital bed—tonight would be a lot like that, what with Lena wounded and aching and him half worried out of his brain. They’d done this before. Nothing to sweat about.

Except for the bit where she thought he was her husband.

Nothing to sweat about at all.

* * *

Lena opened her suitcase while her husband took the longest shower in the history of mankind. She really wanted to see him when he emerged, slick with water and minus a towel. She figured that particular image ought to be engraved on her brain, concussion or not, but unfortunately she had no memory of it.

She found her toiletries bag amongst her clothes and opened it up and found all sorts of yummy things. Lovely brand-name make-up. A travel-sized bottle of rose-scented perfume, and she popped the cap and lifted it to her nose with the thought that a familiar scent might jog a few memories back into place, and it did, for she had a brief flash of a laughing dark-haired woman wearing a totally awesome headband full of feathers.

‘Do I know a Ruby?’ she asked as she stoppered the perfume and returned it to the toiletries bag.

‘Damon’s wife,’ came the rumble from the shower cubicle. ‘Ruby’s cool.’

‘Does she buy me perfume?’

‘She takes you frock shopping, for which I’m eternally grateful. She may have bought you perfume—I can’t say for sure.’

‘Why are you grateful?’ Lena couldn’t seem to find any frocks at all amongst the clothes she’d brought. These clothes ran more to casual trousers and tops that wouldn’t need ironing.

‘Ruby’s totally committed to bringing sexy back. I heartily approve.’

Lena rifled through her clothes again and lifted out the plainest pair of white cotton panties that she’d ever seen. What kind of woman took these on her honeymoon? ‘Maybe you should have married her.’

‘Nah. She can’t surf. Or hang-glide. Or put a bullet in a moving car wheel from half a kilometre away.’

‘And I can?’

This time he hesitated before answering. ‘You used to be able to. Little bit different now.’

She couldn’t remember any of that, but the notion that she’d once done all that didn’t particularly alarm her, so maybe it was true. ‘So how did I get all the scars? And the bad leg?’

The water cut off abruptly. Moments later the top half of Trig appeared, framed in the cutaway wall. Water ran off him in rivulets and muscle played over bone as he reached for a towel and set it to his face and then scrubbed his hair with it. She couldn’t see anything below mid waist, but even so...

All that sun-bronzed, spectacularly muscled glory and it was hers.

How in hell had she managed that?

‘You don’t remember what happened to your leg?’ he said when his face re-emerged from beneath the towel and the towel drifted lower. Never had a woman been more resentful of a wall.

‘No.’

‘You got shot. On a mission. Nineteen months ago. You’ve made a spectacular recovery, given the prognosis.’

‘What was the prognosis?’

‘A wheelchair.’

Oh. Well, then... ‘Good for me.’

‘Good for us all.’

His clothes went on and she mourned the loss of skin. She wondered if he wore PJs to bed and hoped he did not.

‘Shower’s free,’ he said on his way out and if that wasn’t a hint for her to wash away the smell of the street and the hospital, nothing was.

‘I’m getting there.’ She was. ‘But I can’t find my honeymoon nightie. Do you have it?’

Trig opened his mouth as if to speak and then shut it again with a snap. He shook his head. No.

She looked beneath the pillows. ‘Did we rip it?’

Still no sound from Trig.

‘Could be the cleaner mistook it for ribbon,’ he said at last.

‘Ribbon?’

‘There wasn’t much of it. But there were bows. Lots of bows. Made out of ribbon.’

‘Oh.’ Lena tried to reconcile ribbon nightwear with the rest of her clothing. ‘I really should be able to remember that.’

She passed her husband on the way to the shower and when she stepped beneath the spray she could have sworn she heard him whimper. So she’d screwed up their honeymoon by falling prey to a gang of pickpockets. She couldn’t have been much of an operative—they were probably glad to be rid of her.

She contemplated washing her hair and decided it could wait. Her hair took for ever to dry, the bump on her head was starting to ache and she wanted nothing more than to fall into bed in the arms of her husband and burrow into his warmth until she fell asleep. Tomorrow would be a better day. Tomorrow she’d have her memory back and they might even be able to continue on to wherever it was they were going.

It could have been worse. She might not have been married to a wonderful man who knew exactly how to take quiet control of hospital staff and taxi drivers and her.

She could have been alone.

* * *

Trig had set his laptop up at the table by the time Lena emerged from the shower, scrubbed pink and wrapped in a fluffy white towel. She rifled through her suitcase, but couldn’t seem to find whatever she was looking for.

‘What was I thinking?’ she grumbled, and disappeared back into the bathroom with a little grey T-shirt and a pair of yellow-and-white-striped boy-leg panties in hand.

Trig sent up silent thanks for small mercies given that she hadn’t dropped towel in front of him, and went back to surfing the net for local news, more specifically what had been happening in the port city of Bodrum on Turkey’s southwest coast. It killed the time. It could prove useful. And it gave him something to do while Lena prepared for bed.

Because Lena preparing for bed involved her sitting on the bed and applying scented lotion to every millimetre of visible skin. It involved the brushing of hair—and working gently around the bump on her head and it involved the gentle lift and fall of her breasts and slender arms as she wove her hair into a long loose plait that he immediately wanted to undo, much like the imaginary ribbon nightgown that he also wanted to undo.

Eventually, Lena slid between the sheets, but she didn’t lie down and the torture continued. She had pillows to divvy out and covers to turn down and Trig had no idea what was in the email he’d just read.

‘Will you be much longer?’ she asked, and he looked up to find her looking at him, her glorious grey-blue eyes full of silent entreaty.

He could be misreading her.

But he didn’t think so.

‘Why?’ he croaked, and cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Is the light bothering you? I still have some work to get through, but I can turn off the room lights, no problem.’ Maybe he wouldn’t covet what he couldn’t see. Worth a try. ‘It’s a backlit screen. I can keep working.’

‘I know you said we sometimes sleep in different beds but could you come to this bed tonight when you’re done?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sure.’ And vowed to wait until she was asleep before going anywhere near that bed and the temptation within it.

She lay back against the pillows, with her head to one side, carefully avoiding the bump on the back of her head. She let out a little sigh that did nothing whatsoever for his calm. ‘Good?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Heaven.’

‘Close your eyes.’

‘Why?’

‘I have it on good authority that you’ll sleep better if you do.’

‘How about a trade? I’ll close them if you come and hold me.’

What was a husband to do?

So he lay down atop the covers, on his side, and pushed her hair away from her face with fingers too big and clumsy for the job, but she smiled at him, so he stroked the pad of his thumb against her cheek bone, rough against silky soft and smooth, and she made a little hum of pleasure and tilted her face towards his touch.

‘Pretty sure I need a good-night kiss,’ she mumbled, her eyes at half-mast already. ‘You should probably get onto that before I fall asleep.’

She was wounded. He could do this. He pressed an almost-there kiss to the very corner of her mouth. The whole thing took maybe a couple of seconds.

‘That’s not a kiss.’

‘Yeah, it is.’

‘It’s not a honeymoon kiss.’

‘The honeymoon’s on hiatus.’

‘Seems a shame.’

‘You need to get better first. Get your memory back.’ And then, technically, they needed to get married.

‘I can’t remember your kisses.’ She reached up and traced the curve of his lips with her fingertips. ‘I want to.’

He’d never kissed her full on the mouth before. He’d always aimed for brotherly, and nailed it. Cheek kisses were good—they encouraged restraint. He and Lena had never practised anything but restraint when it came to kissing.

‘Just one,’ she murmured, her eyes grave on his.

‘Lena—’

‘It’s not every day a woman gets to repeat her first kiss.’

‘You can’t remember any kisses?’

‘Nope. First kiss. Going once... Going twice...’

Oh, hell.

He didn’t wait to be asked a third time. He did try and do their first kiss justice—starting slow, keeping his hunger in check. No tongue, just the press of his lips against hers and those lips of hers were warmer and more willing than he’d ever imagined, and soft...so soft...

No tongue whatsoever until she flicked at the seam of his lips and tempted them open, and curled her tongue around his. And then he slanted his lips and deepened the kiss just a little. He tried to quieten her slick, darting tongue with the long slow slide of his as he learned her taste and committed it to memory. He tried to ignore just how well that smart mouth of hers matched his, but it fitted—it fitted so perfect and true that he lost himself for a moment, just surrendered all thought and took what he’d always wanted.

* * *

Lena couldn’t believe she’d forgotten this man’s kisses. Because they were everything she’d ever imagined kisses would be, from that first slow sweet slide to the all-consuming hunger that raced through her now. They’d done this before. How else could it be so perfect?

She’d known he was a big man—her memory might be faulty but there was nothing wrong with her eyes. What she hadn’t understood was how much she gloried in his size and all that ruthlessly controlled strength looming over her. So much of him to explore and she wrenched her lips away from that too knowing mouth and set lips and teeth to his jaw instead.

A shudder swept through him and he groaned, more responsive than she could have ever dared wish for. She turned her lips to the strong cords of his neck and he cursed, even as he urged her closer.

‘Now I remember why I married you,’ she whispered against his skin and he trembled some more.

‘Lena—’

‘Mmm?’

‘Lena, please.’ Anyone would think she was torturing him. ‘You have to stop. I have to stop. Please.’

Oh, he begged so pretty. A hot lick of power rushed over her, and she wondered what else he might beg for. What she might demand of him if she but had the courage to ask.

He kissed her again, hard and fast and ruthless, and then he was off the bed with a speed that surprised her, looking everywhere but back at her as he found his phone and slid those giant feet into his shoes. ‘You need to rest and recover,’ he muttered and headed for the door. ‘And I need to make a couple of calls.’