Читать книгу Relentless - Leslie Kelly - Страница 7

SUFFOCATING BENEATH ten pounds of buttercream icing in a paper, cardboard and wood-framed tomb, Pamela Bradford noticed immediately when her whiskey sour buzz wore off. Her mind suddenly cleared, her stomach began rolling around and her hands started to shake.

“Get me the heck out of here,” she ordered in a loud whisper, not even knowing if any of her bridesmaids were still nearby. A giggle and a muttered “hush” told her they were. “Sue? Sue, I’ve changed my mind. I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can,” someone replied.

That wasn’t the voice of Sue, her sweet-natured maid of honor, who was timid as a rabbit about everything except her passion for romance novels. No, the voice sounded cynical but amused, gravely and authoritative, as only the voice of a strong, confident, two-hundred pound African American woman could.

“LaVyrle, please, this was a bad idea. Peter’s not going to be very happy about this.”

“Not happy? Girlfriend, puh-lease! That man’s going to bust into a raging ball of male heat when he sees you come outta this cake. And if he doesn’t, well, at least you’ll know tonight, rather than tomorrow after you marry the pansy. Now be quiet, we’re still working on our evacuation plan.”

Pamela sighed, knowing LaVyrle would not take pity on her. Sue, yes. Pamela’s best friend Sue, who’d been a perfect little angel as a child—except, of course, when Pamela was around—would have let her out in a heartbeat. But not with LaVyrle and Wanda in the room. She’d be no match for Pamela’s two friends and coworkers from the teen center in downtown Miami.

Since Pamela had once seen LaVyrle physically tackle and take down a street dealer who’d approached some of their boys leaving basketball practice, she didn’t think she wanted Sue to try standing up to her.

She could burst out of the cake now, she supposed, avoiding the bachelor party altogether. But since her friends had pushed her into a hallway of the Fort Lauderdale hotel, she figured that wasn’t such a great idea. With her luck, she’d run smack dab into the local gossip columnist or a vacationing family with six young kids, complete with Mickey Mouse caps, big eyes and a camera!

“Good grief,” Pamela muttered, knowing she was stuck, in more ways than one.

Folded in half, with her knees tucked under her chin, she couldn’t move an arm to scratch an itch without risking a heaping headful of icing. She glanced up, seeing that the top of the paper cake, just inches above her eyes, was lower than before. The wooden frame wasn’t dealing well with the weight of the gooey icing. “I didn’t think they put real icing on these stupid things,” Pamela said and glared at the frame, hoping like hell it would hold up a few minutes longer.

“They don’t, usually,” LaVyrle said. “The best man, or whoever the dude was who hired my friend Nona to strip tonight, paid extra for the icing. Some guys do that, you know. Then the birthday boy—or the groom—has to lick the stuff off the dancer.”

Pamela swallowed hard.

“Of course, we all know Peter wouldn’t do that,” Sue chimed in. Thank heaven for sweetly optimistic Sue.

“Well, he’d sure better now,” Wanda retorted. “Pamela, I bet Peter’s gonna want to lick off every speck. Unless he don’t like girls…uh…I mean, sweets!”

Pamela’s stomach rolled again. “Please let me out.”

“You just have cold feet. Quit whining!” LaVyrle ordered.

“I have a cold butt is what I have,” Pamela muttered. Her friend’s low chuckle told her she’d heard. Pamela shifted a little and wondered how she’d gotten into this mess.

Though she couldn’t move her head too well, she did cast a quick glance down at herself, and shuddered. Yes, she still wore the ruby-red, glittery pasties and matching thong, plus the spiked high heels LaVyrle called “do-me shoes.”

Okay, so she had a top on over the getup. But the filmy, nearly sheer shirt fell only to her thighs. It was also so thin it offered no protection for her nearly naked backside seated directly on the cold metal shelf of the pushcart.

This was one heck of a way to spend the night before her wedding. She still couldn’t believe she’d agreed to it. What had she been thinking?

Well, actually, she knew what she’d been thinking. She’d been listening to that teeny tiny voice in her brain that had been nagging at her lately, asking why Peter hadn’t tried to move their relationship from emotionally intimate to physically intimate.

Her fiancé hadn’t so much as attempted a single grope in the entire six months of their relationship! He’d kissed her, yes, sweetly gentle kisses that hinted at a restrained passion. But nothing more.

So why are you marrying him? she asked herself in a rare moment of pessimism brought on by whiskey sours and itchy spangled underclothes.

She didn’t have to search for an answer; she knew why. Peter might not have seduced her physically, but he had bowled her over emotionally. She’d never met another man with whom she was so perfectly in sync. They shared the same tastes in everything—from sports teams and ice cream to rock groups and political affiliations. They’d never had a single argument, never exchanged a cross word. Given Pamela’s battles with her parents, she found Peter to be a soothing presence in her world.

It went even deeper than that. Peter was also the first man she’d dated who completely and without reservation supported and applauded her career decisions. He encouraged her to keep fighting for the underprivileged teens she felt so passionately about. He consoled her when she cried in frustration at her parents’ continuing refusal to accept the choices she’d made in her life—choices that didn’t include their country clubs, golf dates or yachting trips.

In their minds, she was merely going through a stage, or intentionally being difficult as she had been when she was a child. Okay, so she’d been a tough little cookie as a kid. She’d performed operations on her stuffed animals on the kitchen table, and used green and brown markers to draw camouflage outfits on all her Barbie dolls. She’d dreamed of making the basketball team rather than being a cheerleader. Not out of a desire to be difficult, but because she’d been born with a need to be true to herself—which meant being different from those who loved her!

Peter had supported that. He’d appealed to her brain, seducing her completely with his unwavering support.

But as for her body…. Had there been touches? Heated caresses? Seductive whispers or downright horny grins? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Pamela wasn’t a sexual connoisseur—far, far from it!—but she had enough experience to know that people who were supposed to be in love enough to marry one another usually had some physical desire going on, too. Yet Peter had never made one serious effort to make love to her, even though she’d hinted that she wanted him to.

She’d heard about his reputation as a ladies’ man. She’d been around her father’s offices enough to know that Peter had had more than his share of female companionship—though, of course, that was all in the past. That fact made his disinterest in pursuing a physical relationship with her even more disturbing.

She’d gone so far as to plan the most romantic, enticing honeymoon she could think of! Egged on by one of those seductive ads in the back of a bridal magazine, she’d paid a small fortune to book them a room at a new honeymoon resort at Lake Tahoe. Peter thought they were going to a friend’s lakefront cabin, and Pamela wasn’t too sure how he might react to her surprise when they arrived at the luxury resort that promised to “wash away the outside world…and every inhibition.” What if he hated it? What if he wanted to leave?

She shouldn’t be having these fears about the man she was going to marry. They bothered her. More than bothered, they concerned, even angered her. So much so that, tonight, at her own bachelorette party, she’d allowed too much alcohol to loosen her tongue and had spilled her secret to her bridesmaids.

Sue’s eyes had widened. Wanda had given her a look of outright skepticism. And LaVyrle had shrieked, “He’s gay! I’m tellin’ you, girl, you’re about to marry a man who hangs out in steam rooms and goes to Bette Midler concerts!”

“He’s not gay,” Pamela muttered inside the cake. She knew Peter was straight, particularly given his love ’em and leave ’em history, yet she was unable to come up with a more logical explanation for her fiancé’s physical disinterest in her.

One thing was sure. She could not be married to a man who had no interest in sex. Love was wonderful and she felt sure…pretty doggone sure, anyway…that she loved Peter. What wasn’t to love? What woman wouldn’t want to be married to a handsome, successful man who anticipated her every need, agreed with her every thought?

“Maybe a woman who needed some passion in her life,” she muttered. Pamela simply could not imagine a marriage without desire. Not after seeing the passionate love her parents had for each other, still, after thirty years of marriage.

“My parents,” she said with a grimace. If they could see their little princess/pumpkin/pookie-face Pamela now, they’d both be clutching their hearts, leaning against their matching red Beamers in horror.

“Okay, honey, we’ve got us a plan,” LaVyrle said from somewhere above and to the right of Pamela’s cakey coffin. “Sue’s going to go in and tell Peter she has to talk to him about a last-minute wedding problem. While they’re talking, Wanda and I are gonna bust in and say there’s a bomb and everybody has to get outside. Only Sue’ll hold Peter back.”

“That’s the stupidest idea I have ever heard,” Pamela yelled. “Don’t you think Peter’s going to wonder why Sue wants him to stay and risk blowing up if there’s a bomb?”

“She’ll tell him you’re the bomb, sweet cheeks! Besides, you got any better ideas?”

Pamela blew at a wisp of brown hair that had slipped from the loose mass of curls at her nape to fall over one eye. “Why not just tell the groomsmen there’s a wet T-shirt contest in the bar?” Beneath her breath, she added, “Peter probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.”

“Yeah, Peter probably wouldn’t be interested in that, anyway,” LaVyrle said with a snorty chuckle.

Pamela muttered an obscenity.

“I guess it’ll do. You just sit tight—don’t you go anywhere now.” The other woman snickered again. “We’ll go find out where the bar is and then come up to the suite to get the other men out. Back in ten or fifteen minutes to getcha.”

“Please, LaVyrle,” Pamela pleaded, “make sure you get every other man out of there. This is humiliating enough—the possibility that anyone other than Peter could be there to see me come out of this cake is too horrible to think about.”

Particularly since most of the men at the party were Peter’s coworkers—which meant they also worked for Pamela’s father! The image of all of her father’s navy-blue-suit-and-tie-wearing middle managers seeing her in the pasties and thong was beyond bearable.

“Back soon, Pammy,” she heard Sue whisper. “It’ll be okay.” She listened as the three women walked away, their giggles lingering after them. That left Pamela alone in the small alcove near the hotel suite where the bachelor party was taking place. They’d moved her here after helping her get into the giant cake, which had been prepared for LaVyrle’s stripper friend, Nona.

What an oddly bad coincidence that LaVyrle had happened to know the woman who was performing at Peter’s bachelor party tonight. What a worse one that Pamela had chosen tonight to overdo it with the spiked punch. She’d been tipsy enough to spill her guts about her concerns regarding her potential sex life with her future husband. Her three friends hadn’t let up once LaVyrle had gotten the idea for Pamela to switch places with the stripper.

And now look where she found herself. Mostly naked. Inside a paper cake covered in icing so sweet the smell was making her nauseous. Curled so tight her legs were probably going to fall asleep and give out before she could pop out of the cake like a deranged, spangled jack-in-the-box. Unable to stop shaking as she waited to see either a wonderful look of lust or a horrible grimace of disdain on the face of her groom.

Why, oh, why had she agreed to do this?

As she had explained the time she’d broken her arm trying to see if she could fly by leaping off the roof of her parents’ garage, Pamela muttered, “I guess it just seemed like a good idea at the time.”

KEN MCBAIN sat in a back corner of the opulent hotel suite, alone, nursing a beer and asking himself for the tenth time why on earth he’d ever bothered coming to this bachelor party. He didn’t know the groomsmen. He barely knew any of the men attending the party, their conservative, clean-shaven faces wearing similar goofy expressions that said, “Let’s do something real dangerous like watch a dirty movie on the Playboy Channel.” And to top it all off, he didn’t even like the groom!

All in all, it was proving to be a wasted Friday night. Though he’d only been at the suite for about an hour, Ken was more than ready to leave.

“Pete, you remember these ladies, I’m sure,” a man Ken recognized from the personnel department of Bradford Investments said as he entered the room. Behind him were two women—two very blond, very stacked, very professional-looking women, their profession being the world’s oldest, that is.

The partying junior executives exchanged nervous glances and more nervous grins. Their eyes widened as Ken’s rolled in amused disgust.

“Now this party’s gonna roll,” the groom said, lifting a beer—imported, of course—to his lips and chugging it. Well, he tried to chug it. He drained about half of the green bottle before pulling it from his lips and sucking in a deep breath.

The entrance of the party girls was Ken’s cue to cut the hell out. He’d never had to pay for sex in his life and had absolutely no interest in being around guys who did.

He stood, preparing to do just that. Two of the other men—ones Ken had dealt well with in the few weeks he’d been working on the Bradford project—did the same thing. His respect for them went up a notch. As the groom grabbed the hip of one of the passing blondes, Ken’s respect for him—already pretty damn low—dropped to toilet bowl range.

He couldn’t believe Pamela Bradford—the Pamela Bradford whose smiling face had captivated him from the moment he’d seen her photo on her father’s desk at their first meeting—was going to marry this womanizing loser.

Peter Weiss must have one amazing acting ability to go along with the GQ looks and oozy charm. Because, as far as Ken could tell from his single encounter with Ms. Bradford, she could have just about any man she wanted with the crook of a finger. Ken grudgingly conceded he had to include himself in that estimation.

And she’d chosen Peter. So either she was stupid and gullible, which he doubted, or Peter had snowed her about what he was really like. That seemed almost inconceivable, too. Ken had only been working in the Bradford office building two weeks, and he already knew Peter had had affairs with three secretaries and had been caught nailing one of the bookkeepers in a stall in the men’s bathroom last year. Could she really not know?

Of course, it was possible Peter had been on the straight and narrow since meeting his fiancée. What man would want anyone else with Pamela Bradford in his life?

“Horse’s ass,” he muttered under his breath as Peter began untying the prostitute’s halter top with his teeth. “She could do so much better than you.”

Ken wondered why he thought so much about a woman he’d never formally met. But he did. He thought about her quite a lot, particularly when sitting in meetings in her father’s office, glancing at her photo and catching glimpses of a hint of wicked humor in her wide eyes.

Pamela Bradford had sparked something in him. He’d like to call himself a gentleman and say it was his chivalrous side, rearing up in protest of the colossal mistake she was about to make. But he had to concede it was more than that. His libido definitely had something to do with it, too.

He had a serious case of the hots for his client’s daughter…and they’d never exchanged as much as a nod of hello. In the two weeks he’d been in Miami, working on a major software project for her father, he’d seen Pamela Bradford’s picture on a daily basis, heard her name on her father’s proud yet frustrated lips dozens of times, and seen her in the flesh once. Just once. But what an impression she’d made.

She’d just emerged from her father’s office where, he’d learned later, she and Jared Bradford had argued again over Pamela’s job. Jared had often moaned to Ken that his daughter, who’d been offered every advantage two doting, wealthy parents could provide, had never willingly accepted a thing from them.

Her father was afraid for her, plain and simple. She worked with inner-city kids at a teen center in Miami. The distance from her family’s pricey estate in Fort Lauderdale went way beyond the mileage on I-95. It was like a different world. Pamela had chosen that world—which was completely foreign to her father.

That day, Ken had leaned against the doorjamb of his temporary office, which had been provided by the company for the duration of the three-month-long project. Arms crossed, he’d unabashedly listened to the raised voices from the next room. He’d watched as Pamela literally burst out of the heavy, oak-paneled door to her father’s private sanctum, giving it a solid kick with the heel of her sneaker for good measure, before she stalked away toward the elevators.

She’d been magnificent, from the curves in her tall, lean body, to the flash of fire in her huge brown eyes. A sheen of light from the overhead fixtures cast highlights of red and gold on her chestnut-colored hair. Ken had simply stood silently, watching. She hadn’t even seen him, but he’d paid close attention to her. Her chin was as proud and firm as her father’s, and her shoulders were stiff under her simple green shirt. She also had a gorgeous, wide mouth made for smiling. And kissing. And…more.

It wasn’t just the Pamela he saw with his own eyes that so attracted Ken. It was also the Pamela he saw through her father’s eyes—through his stories, his commiserations and his fond remembrances—a woman who was stubborn, yet full of heart. That Pamela sounded like someone he’d very much like to get to know.

Unfortunately, she was about to become the wife of an oversexed moron.

“Go, go, go, go,” the men around him chanted, drawing Ken’s attention back to the party. Peter was chugging again, cheered on by the crowd. After the groom drained the bottle, he threw his arms up in the air like a college jock and howled.

And Pamela was marrying him?

Ken walked through the living area, dodging puddles of spilled beer, looking for his suit jacket. He’d taken it off when he arrived, and knew he’d left it on the back of a chair near the door. It wasn’t there now. Several more guests had come in and someone had obviously done some jacket rearranging.

Frustrated, Ken looked around and saw the door to the suite open yet again. Another of the groomsmen, who’d left earlier to find cigarettes, yelled from the hallway, “Look what I found waiting around the corner.”

The man turned away, pulling at something, his already alcohol-reddened face beading with sweat. Interested in spite of himself, Ken watched as the man pulled a cart into the room.

The cart, it appeared, had other ideas. It was pulling back. From where he stood, Ken was able to see one high-heeled red shoe sticking out from beneath what appeared to be a large white-iced paper cake. The shoe tried to stop the cart by digging into the floor. The spiked heel, however, slid through the plush weave of the ivory carpeting like a knife through soft butter.

Whoever the lady was, she didn’t seem quite ready for her performance. Ken could even hear her hissing at the man to put her back where he’d found her. No one else seemed to notice.

“The entertainment has arrived,” the man said as he finally managed to pull the large cart and cake into the room.

The two blondes exchanged amused looks. “You’re gonna like Nona, sweetheart,” one of them said to the groom, who responded by pulling her onto his lap.

Ken, still closest to the cake, heard the person inside say, “I need to get out of here. There’s been a mistake!”

The man who’d pushed the cart in—Ken thought he was Dan from Billing—leaned close to the P in the word “Peter” written in red icing. “Don’t be shy, sweetie!”

She wouldn’t come out.

“Maybe she needs music,” someone said doubtfully. Considering the stereo was blasting loud enough to shake the walls, Ken wondered what that guy was smoking!

Dan from Billing tried again. “Hello in there,” he said. This time he poked two fingers into the side of the top tier of the paper cake, probably about level with where the dancer’s face was. Ken hoped she hadn’t lost an eye.

Dan nearly lost a finger. “Ouch!” he yelped as he yanked his hand free. “I think she bit me!”

Biting? Strippers? Prostitutes? Okay, Ken had seen enough. It was time to leave before they started bringing in the livestock.

But he still hadn’t found his jacket. Since his car keys and phone were in the pocket, he didn’t think he was going to be able to just ditch it. Walking into the kitchen area of the suite, he glanced around and began digging through a pile of coats someone had dumped on the counter.

He kept an eye on the party. Dan and another guest pulled the reluctant cart farther into the room, so it was practically right in front of the groom. Though the men tried to coax the dancer out, Peter didn’t seem too concerned about his entertainer’s reluctance. “We’ve got all night,” he said with a chuckle. The blonde on his lap curled tighter against him.

“Better make it worthwhile, Pete, since it’s your last night of freedom,” one of the men said. Ken, who’d just about given up finding his coat, grabbed a canned soda from a cooler and rolled up his shirt sleeves. The room was getting hot and he imagined whoever the woman in the cake was, she was going to be wilted and steamy if she hid in there much longer.

“I don’t think I’m going to miss my freedom much once I get my hands on my new wife. Holding her off has been killing me!”

That got Ken’s attention like nothing else this evening had. It almost sounded like Peter was saying he and his bride hadn’t anticipated their wedding night, which would be a shock given the groom’s notorious sexual escapades.

The blonde giggled. “You mean you haven’t…”

“No. Princess has to be a virgin on her wedding night or Daddy won’t be happy, and that’s all that counts. After waiting this long, she better make tomorrow night worthwhile.”

Though Pamela wasn’t here, couldn’t know what was being said, Ken felt a sharp pang of embarrassment for her. This jerk was spouting off locker-room talk about the woman he was going to marry! Not only that, he was talking to a roomful of men who got their paychecks every week from that woman’s father.

“Whaddya mean keeping Daddy happy?” one of the less intoxicated guys asked.

Peter’s beer consumption must have been pretty high, because he answered the question, not noticing or not caring how much of an insensitive ass his answer made him appear. “She comes with the keys to the kingdom. As long as I keep her pregnant, at home and away from those dregs from the inner city she’s so devoted to, I write my own ticket with dear old Dad-in-law. He and I have something of a ‘gentleman’s agreement.’”

Ken felt sick on Pamela’s behalf. Because it sounded, from what Peter was saying, like Pamela’s own father had conspired with her fiancé to get her to give up her career and be the good little socialite wife. As much as he liked Jared Bradford, Ken had to concede that as far as Pamela went, the man probably wouldn’t be above such meddling.

“You can’t imagine the hell I’ve gone through—my wife’s gonna be a wild one in bed, I can tell. Practically every time I’ve dropped her off lately she’s given me this pouty look with those lips of hers, and I’ve had to go cruising for some female company before I could go home!”

Ken shook his head in disgust. Of course Peter hadn’t curbed his appetites in the months since his engagement. He was an oversexed cheating moron.

As far as Ken was concerned, once you put a ring on a woman’s finger, you’ve promised her you’ll be faithful. It was like shaking a man’s hand over a business deal. You don’t welch, you don’t whine. You give your word to a colleague that you’ll accept his offer? You stick to it. You’re engaged to a woman but can’t have sex till the wedding night? You start enjoying cold showers and get damned friendly with your hand. You don’t cheat.

Shaking his head, he gave one more quick glance around the room, again looking for his coat. Then he noticed something funny. The cake was shaking. It had started to tilt a bit, and now, from here behind the cart, Ken could see the back jerking as if the person inside was pounding on it. Slowly. Rhythmically.

“If I’d known old man Bradford was that hot for someone to take the girl off his hands, I’da tried a lot harder to get her to go out with me,” someone said.

“As if you didn’t already try enough—to the point that you made a complete idiot of yourself every time she walked by your cubicle,” another man replied. “Not that I blame you. She’s not hard on the eyes—she’s got legs that’d make a man weep.”

“Not to mention her sweet…”

Ken didn’t hear the last word because, suddenly, the cake erupted. Two fists punched through the paper and icing on the flat top, putting holes through the C in “Congratulations” and the R in “Peter.” The arms scissored, effectively slicing the paper down the middle, and a woman’s head and torso burst through the opening.

“Oh, crap,” someone muttered. Ken understood why as soon as he saw that thick mass of chestnut-brown hair, held in a loose clasp at the nape of her neck.

Pamela Bradford, who had obviously heard every word uttered since she’d been pushed into the room, emerged from the remains of the cake like a vengeful goddess.