скачать книгу бесплатно
Of course, Ryan had probably only kept quiet because he knew that her feelings would register on the minus side of Gideon’s ledger, not the plus. Gideon did not trust strong feelings. He was emotionally frozen, in fact, which made him exactly the wrong sort of man for Cassie. She needed someone warm and loving, someone who could return all the feelings she longed to pour out. She’d forced herself to face that fact years ago...in her head, at least.
Surely, she thought, scowling at the fogged glass door of the tub enclosure, if she’d had any illusions left, Gideon had shattered them with that sorry excuse for a proposal yesterday. Unlike her brother, Gideon got quiet and serious when he drank. He’d listened gravely to Ryan’s heavy-handed suggestions for a substitute bride, then turned to Cassie and announced—not asked, but announced—“We can fly to Vegas tonight. That way I can still get married on my wedding day.”
Of course she’d said no. Lord, saying no had been easy. Not painless, but easy. Only somehow she’d wound up here, anyway, naked in Las Vegas with Gideon’s ring on her finger. And, she noticed with a wince as she soaped her body, with an unaccustomed tenderness in a very private place.
She was not going to cry. She’d given up crying for Gideon Wilde eight years ago, when she’d humiliated herself as thoroughly as a woman could. Well, she’d almost given it up. She’d had a minor relapse when she’d heard about the Icicle six months ago, but that didn’t really count. She couldn’t hold that night against herself.
Oh, but she could hold last night against herself. Last night, when he’d been drunk, hot and hasty... and this morning, when he hated her. She could blame herself for this morning.
No more, she told herself, shutting off the shower that would never run out of hot water no matter how long she stayed in. She’d made a mistake, a huge mistake, letting her brother convince her to listen to the man she’d been in and out of love with since she was twelve.
Not love, she corrected herself. Lust. She could not possibly love a man who didn’t remember their wedding night. Her problem, she decided, as she dried off with a towel twice the size any she owned, was that her hormones had gotten themselves fixed on Gideon from an early age, almost as soon as she started having hormones. Somehow, in spite of trying, she’d never gotten them straightened out
It was time to grow up. Gideon was always so damned cool and rational. He’d selected his fiancée that way, according to Ryan. Logically. Miss Melissa Southwark was everything Gideon wanted. She had the chilly, blond perfection that Cassie knew, with the painful certainty of experience, Gideon preferred in a woman.
Well, Cassie could be logical, too. She’d get her hormones straightened out, along with the rest of her. From this moment on, Cassie would be a different woman. Calm. Rational. In control.
First she had to undo last night’s mistake. But to undo a marriage...divorce was such an ugly word, and they’d only been married one night. Really, when you thought about it coolly and logically, one night didn’t count.
An annulment, she thought, zipping herself back into the jeans she’d been married in, would be best. Although it might not be easy to convince Gideon of that truth. If there was one area where he wasn’t always rational, it was what, in another age, would have been called his honor. Gideon didn’t lie, and he didn’t go back on his word. Ever.
What she had to do, she realized, as she pulled on yesterday’s wrinkled silk blouse, was persuade him the contract they’d entered into was not binding. How could she...
When inspiration struck, Cassie smiled, delighted with herself. Unfortunately she wasn’t looking in the mirror at that moment. If she had been, she might have recognized the gleam in her eyes, since it strongly resembled her brother’s expiression when he was at his craftiest. Just before he really messed things up.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Gideon said. He stood by the closed drapes in their room, wearing a scowl along with yesterday’s clothes.
Gideon hated to be rumpled and dirty. He hated the sour taste in his mouth, too, the faint stink of liquor clinging to his shirt and the pounding of his head. Cassie had hidden in the shower a long time, yet room service still hadn’t managed to appear with the coffee, aspirin, breakfast and clean clothes Gideon craved. And he hadn’t managed to come up with more than fragments of the night before. One of those fragments included a bed, darkness, Cassie... and a vivid, tactile memory of overwhelming lust. That fragment stood alone, banked on either side by foggy nothing. He couldn’t remember.
His memory, or lack of it, didn’t excuse him. But as far as he could see, his new bride lacked even the feeble excuse of drunkenness for what she had done to him. Cassie had known he was drunk. She’d known what kind of woman he needed—hadn’t he told her and Ryan both, while drinking toasts to the wedding that didn’t happen? Yet she’d married him anyway.
He scowled at her.
Cassie marched to the window where he stood and seized the drapery pull. “I hope breakfast gets here soon, Gideon. Your blood sugar must be low. It’s interfering with your reason. Of course we’ll get the marriage annulled.” She yanked on the cord, flooding the room with hideously bright light that the white sheers did nothing to tame. “There, that’s better. Mornings in the desert are beautiful, aren’t they?”
Gideon winced at the assault on his abused eyeballs. The sunshine lit a fire in Cassie’s hair, a fire that should have clashed with the tomato-red silk of the blouse she wore tucked into her jeans but didn’t. Vivid colors suited Cassie as pastels never would.
Melissa, Gideon thought, his scowl deepening, would never wear a shirt that bright. Melissa preferred soft blues and peaches that didn’t overwhelm her delicate blond coloring. She wouldn’t have opened those drapes without asking, either. He was sure of it. “There’s nothing wrong with my reason. Yours, however—” Patience, he reminded himself, was necessary to maintaining control. “Cassie, you must know an annulment isn’t possible after the marriage has been consummated.”
“So?” She propped her hands on her hips in a familiar, challenging pose.
“Obviously, after last night—”
“I thought you didn’t remember last night.”
The shock of fear over his loss—of memory, of control—was less than it had been. Less, but still powerful. “I don’t,” he said, his voice flat with the effort of detachment. “But when I wake up naked, in bed with a woman who is also naked, I don’t need an instant replay to tell me what happened the night before.”
“Well,” she said, “I hate to tell you this, but you had an awful lot to drink yesterday, Gideon. You’re not used to that. You mustn’t be upset that your, ah, manly functions were impaired.”
“My what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Are you saying that I didn’t—that I passed out?”
“Not exactly. You tried. It isn’t as if you didn’t try. You just couldn’t.” She stepped closer and patted his arm. The gold band on her finger winked at him mockingly in the sunshine. “It’s okay, though. Really.”
He stepped back and glared.
She smiled sweetly at him. “Don’t worry. I’m sure there’s no permanent problem. And an annulment is much tidier than a divorce, don’t you think?”
The knock at the door pleased Gideon. Thinking of coffee and a clean shirt, tabling consideration of Cassie’s bombshell, he strode to the door and opened it without hesitating.
The man on the other side of the door was very like Gideon, and very different. The expressions the two men faced each other with were identically grim, but the newcomer’s scowling mouth was framed by a thick mustache. He was every bit as tall as Gideon, and even heavier through the chest and shoulders. Where Gideon’s hair was the limitless black of midnight, this man’s hair flamed with sunrise.
Just like Cassie’s.
“I want to talk to my sister,” the other man growled. “Now.”
Gideon sighed. Of course Ryan showed up before Gideon’s coffee and clean shirt did, and of course he was breathing fire. On a morning like this, what else could he expect? Gideon stepped back, silently holding the door open for the one man he considered a friend—or had. Until this morning.
Ryan charged into the room. “Cassie,” he said as he reached for her. “Cassie—”
She held an arm out stiffly, as if that slender limb could really hold off her oversize brother, and announced, “I am going to kill you this time.”
Ignoring her arm and her statement equally, he grabbed her shoulders, peering into her face. “Are you all right?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, I’ve been ravished too many times to count. Quit playing—”
The growl rumbling up from Ryan’s chest didn’t sound playful. Gideon went from standby to full alert.
Cassie grabbed her brother’s arm and hung on as he turned to face Gideon. “I am not going to have this, do you hear me? You are not going to pound on Gideon. Yesterday you did everything but offer him some cows and ponies if he’d take me off your hands, and now you come barging in here as if he’d abducted me! What in the world is wrong with you—other than the usual, I mean?”
Ryan didn’t bother to look sheepish. “Yesterday I’d had too much to drink. That doesn’t—”
“Doesn’t excuse you in any way, form or fashion! What I want to know is—” Cassie broke off to stare at Gideon. “Would you mind?” she asked irritably. “I’d like to talk to Ryan privately for a minute.”
He could, he thought, take offense at having his bride of nine hours ask him to go away and let her talk with her brother privately. He could have been amused. He’d often been amused in the past by the way the pair of O’Gradys interacted with each other—alternately quarrelsome and affectionate, full of dire threats and a fierce, unshakable loyalty.
Today he simply felt the chill and the distance. He’d never known how to belong like that. “You know,” he said, surprising himself, “I think I do mind.”
The knock that landed on the still-open door was a welcome interruption. Room service had arrived at last.
Two
Brother and sister argued in vehement whispers while the waiter set out a variety of breakfast dishes. Gideon didn’t go to the bathroom for the shower and clean clothes he badly needed. For some reason he simply did not want to leave the room.
He watched as Ryan helped himself to a cup of coffee and Cassie picked up one of the croissants and tore the end off, neither of them bothering to sit down. He could hear snippets of their argument as he signed the tab and tipped the waiter, enough to know that, as angry as Cassie was with him, she was still trying to persuade Ryan he shouldn’t blame Gideon for yesterday’s events.
Gideon couldn’t remember anyone ever defending him. His response was swift and physical. The sting of desire was sharp enough to burn, strong enough to disorient him.
He wanted Cassie. Badly. He was still angry over all he’d lost by marrying the wrong woman, angry with her as well as himself. He still felt betrayed in a private corner of his soul no one had ever managed to disturb before. But he wanted her with bewildering intensity.
He watched her argue with her brother. Cassie put her whole body behind everything she said, everything she did. Like a candle flame, he thought—always in motion. She wasn’t beautiful the way Melissa was. She was short and slight and...fascinating. The sleeves of her silk blouse were rolled up, and the pale flesh of her arms gesturing fluidly enticed him as if she’d bared her breasts. He felt ridiculous. And aroused.
Maybe he didn’t consciously remember what had happened between them last night, but his body remembered. If, as she’d said, he hadn’t been able to finish what he started, then he might want her all the more today because of what he hadn’t done last night.
If he could have her even once, he thought, the hunger wouldn’t be so keen, so consuming. He could regain control.
He watched as Cassie grabbed the butter knife. She paused in her vehement discussion long enough to spread a precise amount of pale, creamy butter on the end of the croissant. She was such an odd little creature. In some ways she subsisted on impulse and emotion as purely as fire lives off the oxygen it bums, yet in others she was as neat and orderly as the facets of a crystal—a small, tidy agent of chaos.
He had never pretended to understand her. He watched her now, but he was remembering a skinny girl with messy braids and eldritch eyes.
Gideon had gone home with his new roommate for a rare weekend off. Not that he’d planned to. At eighteen, Gideon hadn’t thought he had time for friendships, not with his heavy course load and the part-time job his aunt considered an essential part of his college experience. Being the sort of woman she was, Aunt Eleanor had made the job necessary in fact as well as theory. She’d paid for his tuition and books. Everything else was up to him. If Gideon didn’t work, he didn’t eat.
But Ryan O’Grady, for all that he seemed like a cheerful Irish grizzly, was almost as ambitious, every bit as stubborn, and twice as poor as Gideon was. Eventually Gideon had given in and accepted Ryan’s invitation home. By the time the two of them had walked up the short path to the run-down mobile home in a south Dallas trailer park, though, Gideon was regretting having agreed to the weekend.
Not that the poverty bothered him. He’d lived in places a good deal worse before his aunt took him in, places where no one bothered to trim the grass or set out pots of grocery store mums to brighten a tiny front porch like someone had done here. No, he hadn’t wanted to be there because he didn’t know how to act around a regular family.
“Ryan!” a lilting voice had called out from somewhere above their heads. “I’m so glad you’re here! I have to warn you, though.” The voice had dropped confidentially. “Mom has been cooking all morning.”
Gideon had looked up, right into a mermaid’s eyes. A very dirty, landlocked little mermaid, with an elf’s pointed face, skinned knees, and braids half undone, sat on the roof of that rundown mobile home, her bare feet dangling, and watched them solemnly.
“Is that bad?” he’d been startled into asking.
She’d nodded. “You have to eat it, you see.” She looked him up and down, and her eyes brightened. “You look like you could eat a lot.”
“He does,” Ryan had said, laughing and lifting his arms. “Eats like a horse. Mom will love him. Come down from there, brat, you’re confusing our guest.”
Quick as that, she’d drawn her legs up, held her own skinny arms out, and leaned out into thin air, falling right into her brother’s arms. Gideon had never forgotten the look on her face as she fell. Trust. Utter, joyous trust.
No, Gideon didn’t understand Cassie. Not the little girl he remembered, or the young woman who stood across the room from him now in a gold and white Las Vegas suite, scattering crumbs on the thick carpet while she argued with her brother. But he did understand responsibility.
“Ryan,” he said, deciding it was time they settled things. “You didn’t come to my room to argue with Cassie.”
The other man looked over at him. “No,” he agreed slowly. “I came here to see if you needed your bones broken.”
Cassie made an impatient noise that the two men ignored. “You thought I would hurt her?” Gideon asked.
“You were drunk.” Ryan said bluntly. “So was I, or I wouldn’t have let her go with you when you were in that shape.”
Gideon nodded, accepting that. “Well?”
Ryan faced him. “She says you didn’t hurt her. So the next question is, what do you plan on doing now?”
Gideon was silent. What was he going to do? Until Cassie had come out of the shower and announced her desire for an annulment, his course had seemed clear. He’d made promises. Never mind that he’d been drunk at the time. If anything, that made it even more important that he take responsibility for his actions—financial responsibility, at least. Money was the basis for this marriage, after all, however Cassie might try to deny it now.
Then Cassie had said she wanted an annulment. He couldn’t let that happen. Gideon didn’t know why it was so important, but he simply could not let her erase their marriage as if it had never happened.
After all, dammit, he wanted her. He ached, and the intensity of that ache unsettled him. He realized that one time with her would be not be enough. And didn’t Cassie owe him something, too? “I promised her my support,” he said slowly, forcing himself to think beyond the throbbing in his loins and the confusion in his mind. A piece of yesterday’s jigsaw puzzle floated to the surface. “That was our deal, that I’d support her if she would marry me,” he said, remembering. “She wants to paint.”
“She needs to paint,” Ryan corrected. “Not just because of the gallery owner who’s interested in the direction she’s taken with her work lately. That’s important to her career, sure, but painting means more to Cassie than a career.”
Cassie frowned and muttered something to her brother. Gideon didn’t listen.
He understood what Ryan meant when he said Cassie needed to paint. Painting meant more to her than anything, including the husband she’d acquired in order to pursue her painting. He just hadn’t thought Cassie could use people that way. He hadn’t thought she could use him that way.
Yes, he decided, she did owe him. Chances were, though, her brother wouldn’t care for the type of repayment Gideon had in mind. Gideon didn’t want to lose Ryan’s friendship. He had to set this up carefully. “What I decide has to be up to Cassie to some extent. I’m willing to settle funds on her.”
“Marriage involves a hell of a lot more than a checkbook. If you’re not—”
“He said it was up to me,” Cassie interrupted.
She might as well have not spoken. “What I want to know,” Ryan said to Gideon, “is whether you intend to dump my little sister or not. I had my reasons for encouraging this marriage—”
Cassie squawked and grabbed her brother’s arm.
“—but that’s because I trusted you to take care of her. I’m riot talking about money here, Gideon.”
Ryan knew better, Gideon thought with a hot flick of resentment. At least Ryan ought to know how little Gideon had to offer a woman, other than money. The man had no business insisting on that damned ambiguous “more.” But he was insisting. And he was Gideon’s best friend, maybe his only real friend. Gideon made up his mind suddenly.
Ryan wouldn’t like it at all if he knew just what Gideon intended to give Cassie, other than financial support. Gideon didn’t plan on enlightening him. “You’re right. We should give this marriage a try, at least for a time.”
“For a time?” Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “Just what does that mean?”
“Yeah,” Cassie said, an identical expression on her narrower, more feminine face. “What does that mean?”
“Six months.”
Cassie threw up her hands. “You’re crazy.”
“A year,” Ryan said. “Anything less than a year would strike me as insincere.”
“All right.” Gideon nodded. They wouldn’t have to live together the entire time, after all. “At the end of the year, if we’re not both convinced the marriage is working out, I can still settle some funds on her.”
“Have either of you noticed that I’m fight here in the room with you?” Cassie demanded. “Do you two really think I’m going to let you settle my future as if I were a property Gideon didn’t want to buy, but is considering leasing? Come on, Ryan, you’re supposed to be so hot at real estate. Can’t you bargain Gideon up to a two-year lease? And shouldn’t we talk about who’s responsible for necessary maintenance and repairs? Like dental work. And health insurance. Usually the owner carries structural insurance—I guess that would translate as major medical—-white the leaser is responsible for—”
“Come here,” Ryan said, and grabbed Cassie’s arm. He pulled her, protesting, over by the window, where the two of them carried on another discussion, this time mostly in whispers. But Gideon had excellent hearing. He caught a few stray words, enough to realize that Ryan knew something about Cassie that she wanted kept secret.
Gideon’s disillusionment deepened. What could that mean, except that Cassie did, indeed, want his money, and didn’t want him to know? Gideon didn’t blame Ryan. He’d known, even yesterday when he was drunk, that Ryan was doing his damnedest to manipulate the two of them into this marriage. But Ryan only wanted what was best for his sister. That was how it should be. Brothers, especially older brothers, should look out for their younger sisters...or brothers.
Gideon felt an old, old ache.
Cassie kept darting wary glances at Gideon. Finally she nodded.
“Good,” Ryan said, looking relieved. “It’s settled, then.” He glanced around, noticed the table full of breakfast dishes, and his face lit up. “I haven’t eaten yet.” He reached for one of the chairs next to the table.
Cassie pushed his hand off the chair. “Nothing is settled, and you’re not staying.”
