Saying Yes To The Dress!

“I’ll attest to that,” he said. “I have the bruises on my ribs to prove it.” And then his tone grew more serious. “And you never gave up in the water yesterday, either.”

“That was because of you. Believe me, I am the little bookworm I told you I was earlier. I do not have the spirit of a gladiator.”

Though she did have some kind of unexpected spirit of boldness that had made her, very uncharacteristically, rip off her clothes and go into the water.

“How many guys were there?”

“Hmm, it was years ago, but I think maybe four. No, five.”

“What were they doing?”

“They kind of had her backed up against a wall. She was quite frightened. I think that stupid Bram was trying to kiss her. He’s always been a jerk. He’s my second cousin.”

“And you just waded right in there, with five high school guys being jerks? That seems brave.”

She could not allow herself to bask in his admiration, particularly since it was undeserved.

“I didn’t exactly wade right in there. I used the Moose Run magic words.”

“Which were?”

“Bram Butler, you stop it right now or I’ll tell your mother.”

He burst out laughing, and then so did she. She noticed that it had gotten quite dark. The wind had died. Already stars were rising in the sky.

“Allie and I hung out a bit after that,” she said. “She was really interesting. At that time, she wanted to be a clothing designer. We used to hole up in my room and draw dresses.”

“What kind of dresses?”

“Oh, you know. Prom. Evening. That kind of thing. Allie and her mom moved away shortly after that. She said we would keep in touch—that she would send me her new address and phone number—but she never did.”

“You and Allie drew wedding dresses, didn’t you?”

“What would make you say that?” Becky could feel a blush rising, but why should she have to apologize for her younger self?

“I’m trying to figure out if she has some kind of wedding fantasy that my brother just happened into.”

“Lots of young women have romantic fantasies. And then someone comes along to disillusion them.”

“Like your Jerry,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

“So little to tell,” she said wryly. “We lived down the street from one another, we started the first grade together. When we were seventeen he asked me to go to the Fourth of July celebrations with him. He held my hand. We kissed. And there you have it, my whole future mapped out for me. We were just together after that. I wanted exactly what I grew up with, until my dad left. Up until then my family had been one of those solid, dull families that makes the world feel so, so safe.

“An illusion,” she said sadly. “It all ended up being such an illusion, but I felt determined to prove it could be real. Jerry went away to college and I started my own business, and it just unraveled, bit by bit. It’s quite humiliating to have a major breakup in a small town.”

“I bet.”

“When I think about it, the humiliation actually might have been a lot harder to handle than the fact that I was not going to share my life with Jerry. It was like a second blow. I had just barely gotten over being on the receiving end of the pitying looks over my dad’s scandal.”

“Are you okay with your dad’s relationship now?”

“I wish I was. But they still live in Moose Run, and I have an adorable little sister who I am pathetically jealous of. They seem so happy. My mom is still a mess. Aside from working in the hardware store, she’d never even had a job.”

“And you rushed in to become the family breadwinner,” he said.

“It’s not a bad thing, is it?”

“An admirable thing. And kind of sad.”

His hand found hers and he gave it a squeeze. He didn’t let go again.

“Were you thinking of Jerry when you were drawing those dresses?” he finally asked softly.

“No,” she said slowly, “I don’t think I was.”

She suddenly remembered one dress in particular that Allie had drawn. This is your wedding dress, she had proclaimed, giving it to Becky.

It had been a confection, sweetheart neckline, fitted bodice, layers and layers and layers of filmy fabric flowing out in that full skirt with an impossible train. The dress had been the epitome of her every romantic notion. Becky had been able to picture herself in that dress, swirling in front of a mirror, giggling. But she had never, not even once, pictured herself in that dress walking down an aisle toward Jerry.

When Jerry had broken it to her that her “business was changing her”—in other words, he could not handle her success—and he wanted his ring back, she had never taken that drawing from where it was tucked in the back of one of her dresser drawers.

“I’ve talked too much,” she said. “It must have been the wine.”

“I don’t think you talked too much.”

“I usually don’t confide in people so readily.” She suddenly felt embarrassed. “Your name should be a clue.”

“To?”

“You drew my secrets right out of me.”

“Ah.”

“We have to go now,” she said.

“Yes, we do,” he said.

“Before something happens,” she said softly.

“Especially before that,” he agreed just as softly.

Her hand was still in his. Their shoulders were touching. The breeze was lifting the leathery fronds of the palm trees and they were whispering songs without words. The sky was now almost completely black, and finding their way back was not going to be easy.

“Really,” Becky said. “We need to go.”

“Really,” he agreed. “We do.

Neither of them moved.

CHAPTER TEN

DREW ORDERED HIMSELF to get up and leave this beach. But it was one of those completely irresistible moments: the stars winking on in the sky, their shoulders touching, the taste of strawberries and cream on his lips, the gentle lap of the waves against the shore, her small hand resting within the sanctuary of his larger one.

He turned slightly to look at her. She was turning to look at him.

It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to drop his head over hers, to taste her lips again.

Her arms came up and twined around his neck. Her lips were soft and pliant and welcoming.

He could taste everything she was in that kiss. She was bookish. And she was bold. She was simple, and she was complex. She was, above all else, a forever kind of girl.

It was that knowledge that made him untangle her hands from around his neck, to force his lips away from the soft promise of hers.

You heal now.

He swore under his breath, scrambled to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Are you?”

Well, not really. “Look, Becky, we have known each other for a shockingly short period of time. Obviously circumstances have made us feel things about each other a little too quickly.”

She looked unconvinced.

“I mean, in Moose Run, you probably have a date or two before you kiss like that.”

“What about in LA?”

He thought about how fast things could go in Los Angeles and how superficial that was, and how he was probably never going to be satisfied with it again. Less than forty-eight hours, and Becky English, bookworm, was changing everything in his world.

What was his world going to look like in two weeks if this kept up?

The answer was obvious. This could not keep up.

“Look, Becky, I obviously like you. And find you extremely attractive.”

Did she look pleased? He did not want her to look pleased!

“There is obviously some kind of chemistry going on between us.”

She looked even more pleased.

“But both of us have jobs to do. We have very little time to do those jobs in. We can’t afford a, um, complication like this.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

“It’s not professional, Becky,” he said gruffly. “Kissing on the job is not professional.”

She looked as if he had slapped her. And then she just looked crushed.

“Oh,” she stammered. “Of course, you’re right.”

He felt a terrible kind of self-loathing that she was taking it on, as if it were her fault.

She pulled herself together and jumped up, doing what he suspected she always did. Trying to fix the whole world. Her clothes were still wet. Her pink blouse looked as though red roses were blooming on it where it was clinging to that delectable set of underwear that he should never have seen, and was probably never going to be able to get out of his mind.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into me. It must still be the aftereffects of this afternoon. And the wine. I want you to know I don’t usually rip my clothes off around men. In fact, that’s extremely uncharacteristic. And I’m usually not such a blabbermouth. Not at all.”

Her voice was wobbling terribly.

“No, it’s not you,” he rushed to tell her. “It’s not. It’s me, I—”

“I’ve given you the impression I’m—what did you call it earlier—wanton!”

“I told you at the time I was overstating it. I told you that was the wrong word.”

She held up her hand, stopping him. “No, I take responsibility. You don’t know how sorry I am.”

And then she rushed by him, found the path through the darkened jungle and disappeared.

Perfect, he thought. He’d gotten rid of her before things got dangerously out of control. But it didn’t feel perfect. He felt like a bigger jerk than the chicken they had eaten for supper.

She had fled up that path—away from him—with extreme haste, probably hoping to keep the truth from him. That she was crying.

But that’s what I am, Drew told himself. He was a jerk. Just ask his brother, who not only wasn’t arriving on the island, but who also was not taking his phone calls.

The truth was, Drew Jordan sucked at relationships. It was good Becky had run off like that, for her own protection, and his. It would have been better if he could have thought of a way to make her believe it was his fault instead of hers, though.

Sitting there, alone, in the sand, nearly choking on his own self-loathing, Drew thought of his mother. He could picture her: the smile, the way she had made him feel, that way she had of cocking her head and listening so intently when he was telling her something. He realized the scent he had detected earlier had reminded him of her perfume.

The truth was, he was shocked to be thinking of her. Since that day he had become both parents to his younger brother, he had tried not to think of his mom and dad. It was just too painful. Losing them—everything, really, his whole world—was what life had given him that was too much to bear.

But the tears in Becky’s eyes that she had been holding back so valiantly, and the scent in the air, made him think of his mother. Only in his mind, his mother wasn’t cocking her head, listening intently to him with that soft look of wonder that only a mother can have for her offspring.

No, it felt as if his mother was somehow near him, but that her hands were on her hips and she was looking at him with total exasperation.

His mother, he knew, would never have approved of the fact he had made that decent, wholesome young woman from Moose Run, Michigan, cry. She would be really angry with him if he excused his behavior by saying, But it was for her own good. His mother, if she was here, would remind him of all the hurt that Becky had already suffered at the hands of men.

She would show him Becky, trying to keep her head up as her father pushed a stroller down the main street of Moose Run, as news got out that the wedding planner’s own wedding was a bust.

Sitting there in the sand with the stars coming out over him, Drew felt he was facing some hard truths about himself. Would his mother even approve of the man he had become? Work-obsessed, so emotionally unavailable he had driven his brother right out of his life and into the first pair of soft arms that offered comfort. His mother wouldn’t like it one bit that not only was he failing to protect his brother from certain disaster, his brother would not even talk to him.

“So,” he asked out loud, “what would you have me do?”

Be a better man.

It wasn’t her voice. It was just the gentle breeze stirring the palm fronds. It was just the waves lapping onshore. It was just the call of the night birds.

But is that what her voice had become? Everything? Was his mother’s grace and goodness now in everything? Including him?

Drew scrambled out of the sand. He picked up the picnic basket and the blanket and began to run.

“Becky! Becky!”

When he caught up with her, he was breathless. She was walking fast, her head down.

“Becky,” he said, and then softly, “Please.”

She spun around. She stuck her chin up in the air. But she could not hide the fact that he was right. She had been crying.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said. “I’m the one in the wrong here, not you.”

“Thank you,” she said icily. “That is very chivalrous of you. However the facts speak for themselves.”

Chivalrous. Who used that in a sentence? And why did it make him feel as if he wanted to set down the picnic basket, gather her in his arms and hold her hard?

“Facts?”

“Yes, facts,” she said in that clipped tone of voice. “They speak for themselves.”

“They do?”

She nodded earnestly. “It seems to me I’ve just dragged you along with my wanton behavior, kissing you, tearing off my clothes. You were correct. It is not professional. And it won’t be happening again.”

He knew that it not happening again was a good thing, so why did he feel such a sense of loss?

“Becky, I handled that badly.”

“There’s a good way to handle ‘keep your lips off me’?”

He had made her feel rejected. He had done to her what every other man in her life had done to her: given her the message that somehow she didn’t measure up, she wasn’t good enough.

He rushed to try to repair the damage.

“It’s not that I don’t want your lips on me,” he said. “I do. I mean I don’t. I mean we can’t. I mean I won’t.”

She cocked her head, and looked askance at him.

“Do I sound like an idiot?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, unforgivingly.

“What I’m trying to say, Becky, is I’m not used to women like you.”

“What kind of women are you used to?”

“Guess,” he said in a low voice.

She did not appear to want to guess.

He raked his hand through his hair, trying desperately to think of a way to make her get it that would somehow erase those tearstains from her cheeks.

“I’m scared I’ll hurt you,” he said, his voice gravelly in his own ears. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to move this fast. Let’s back up a step or two. Let’s just be friends. First.”

He had no idea where that first had come from. It implied there would be something following the friendship. But really, that was impossible. And he just had to get through what remained of two weeks without hurting her any more than he already had. He could play at being the better man for eleven damn days. He was almost sure of it.

“Do you ever answer a question?” she asked. “What kind of women are you used to?”

“Ones who are as shallow as me,” he said.

“You aren’t shallow!”

“You don’t know that about me.”

“I do,” she said firmly.

He sucked in his breath and tried again. Why was she insisting on seeing him as a better man when he did not deserve that? “Ones who don’t expect happily-ever-after.”

“Oh.”

“You see, Becky, my parents died when I was seventeen.” Shut up, he ordered himself. Stop it. “It broke something in me. The sense of loss was just as Tandu said this afternoon. It was too great to bear. When I’ve had relationships, and it’s true, I have, they have been deliberately superficial.”

Becky went very still. Her eyes looked wide and beautiful in the starlight that filtered through the thick leaves of the jungle. She took a step toward him. And she reached up and laid the palm of her hand on his cheek.

Her touch was extraordinary. He had to shut his eyes against his reaction to the tenderness in it. In some ways it was more intimate than the kisses they had shared.

“Because you cannot handle one more loss,” she guessed softly.

Drew opened his eyes and stared at Becky. It felt as if she could see his soul and was not the least frightened by what she saw there.

This was going sideways! He was not going to answer that. He could not. If he answered that, he would want to lay his head on her shoulder and feel her hand in his hair. He would want to suck up her tenderness like a dry sponge sucking up moisture. If he answered that he would become weak, instead of what he needed to be most.

He needed to be strong. Since he’d been seventeen years old, he had needed to be strong. And it wasn’t until just this minute he was seeing that as a burden he wanted to lay down.

“I agree,” she said softly, dropping her hand away from his cheek. “We just need to be friends.”

His relief was abject. She got it. He was too damaged to be any good for a girl like her.

Only then she went and spoiled his relief by standing on her tiptoes and kissing him on the cheek where her hand had lay with such tender healing. She whispered something in his ear.

And he was pretty sure it was the word first.

And then she turned and scampered across the moonlit lawn to the castle door and disappeared inside it.

And he had to struggle not to touch his cheek, where the tenderness of her kiss lingered like a promise.

You heal now.

But he couldn’t. He knew that. He could do his best to honor the man his mother had raised him to be, to not cause Becky any more harm, but he knew that his own salvation was beyond what he could hope for.

Because really in the end, for a man like him, wasn’t hope the most dangerous thing of all?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BECKY LISTENED TO the sound of hammers, the steady ratta-tat-tat riding the breeze through the open window of her office. When had that sound become like music to her?

She told herself, sternly, she could not give in to the temptation, but it was useless. It was as if a cord circled her waist and tugged her toward the window.

This morning, Drew’s crew had arrived, but not his brother. They had arrived ready to work, and in hours the wedding pavilion was taking shape on the emerald green expanse of the front lawn. They’d dug holes and poured the cement they had mixed by hand out of bags. Then they had set the posts—which had arrived by helicopter—into those holes.

She had heard helicopters delivering supplies all morning. It sounded like a MASH unit around here.

Now she peeped out the window. In all that activity, her eyes sought him. Her heart went to her throat. Drew, facing the ocean, was straddling a beam. He had to be fifteen feet off the ground, his legs hanging into nothingness. He had a baseball cap on backward and his shirt off.

His skin was sun-kissed and perfect, his back broad and powerful. He was a picture of male strength and confidence.

She could barely breathe he was so amazing to look at. It was also wonderful to be able to look at him without his being aware of it! She could study the sleek lines of his naked back at her leisure.

“You have work to do,” she told herself. Drew, as if he sensed someone watching, turned and glanced over his shoulder, directly at her window. She drew back into the shadows, embarrassed, and pleased, too. Was he looking to glimpse her? Did it fill him with this same sense of delight? Anticipation? Longing?

Reluctantly, she turned her back to the scene, but only long enough to try to drag her desk over to the window. She could multitask. The desk was very heavy. She grunted with exertion.

“Miss Becky?” Tandu was standing in the doorway with a tray. “Why you miss lunch?”

“Oh, I—” For some reason she had felt shy about lunch, knowing that Drew and his crew would be eating in the dining room. Despite their agreement last night to be friends, her heart raced out of control when she thought of his rescue of her, and eating dinner with him on the picnic blanket last night, and swimming with him. But mostly, she thought of how their lips had met. Twice.

How was she going to choke down a sandwich around him? How was she going to behave appropriately with his crew looking on? Anybody with a heartbeat would take one look at her—them—and know that something primal was sizzling in the air between them.

This was what she had missed by being with Jerry for so long. She had missed all the years when she should have been learning the delicate nuances of how to conduct a relationship with a member of the opposite sex.

Not that it was going to be a relationship. A friendship. She thought of Drew’s lips. She wondered how a friendship was going to be possible.

There must be a happy medium between wanton and so shy she couldn’t even eat lunch with him!

“What you doing?” Tandu asked, looking at the desk she had managed to move about three feet across the room.

“The breeze!” she said, too emphatically. “I thought I might get a better breeze if I moved the desk.”

Tandu set down the lunch tray. With his help it was easier to wrestle the big piece of furniture into its new location.

He looked out the window. “Nice view,” he said with wicked amusement. “Eat lunch, enjoy the view. Then you are needed at helicopter pad. Cargo arriving. Many, many boxes.”

“I have a checklist. I’ll be down shortly. And Tandu, could you think of a few places for wedding photographs? I mean, the beaches are lovely, but if I could preview a few places for the photographer, that would be wonderful.”

“Know exactly the place,” he said delightedly. “Waterfall.”

“Yes!” she said.

“I’ll draw you a map.”

“Thank you. A waterfall!”

“Now eat. Enjoy the view.”

She did eat, and she did enjoy the view. It was actually much easier to get to work when she could just glance up and watch Drew, rather than making a special trip away from her desk and to the window.

Later that afternoon, she headed down to the helicopter loading dock with her checklist and began sorting through the boxes and muttering to herself.

“Candles? Check. Centerpieces? Check.”

“Hi there.” She swung around.

Drew was watching her, a little smile playing across his handsome features.

“Hello.” Oh, God, did she have to sound so formal and geeky?

“Do you always catch your tongue between your teeth like that when you are lost in thought?”

She hadn’t been aware she was doing it, and pulled her tongue back into her mouth. He laughed. She blushed.

“The pavilion is looking great,” she said, trying to think of something—anything—to say. She was as tongue-tied as if she were a teenager meeting her secret crush unexpectedly at the supermarket!

“Yeah, my guys are pretty amazing, aren’t they?”

She had not really spared a glance to any of the other guys. “Amazing,” she agreed.

“I just thought I’d check and see if the fabric for draping the pavilion has arrived. I need to come up with a method for hanging it.”

“I’ll look.”

But he was already sorting through boxes, tossing them with easy strength. “This might be it. It’s from a fabric store. There’s quite a few boxes here.” He took a box cutter out of his shirt pocket and slit open one of the boxes. “Come see.”

She sidled over to him. She could feel the heat radiating off him as they stood side by side.

“Yes, that’s it.”

He hefted up one of the boxes onto his shoulder. “I’ll send one of the guys over for the rest.”

She stood there. That was going to be the whole encounter. Very professional, she congratulated herself.

“You want to come weigh in on how to put it up?” he called over his shoulder.

And she threw professionalism to the wind and scampered after him like a puppy who had been given a second chance at affection.