Zoe And The Best Man

Was this what she’d been afraid of? she asked herself desperately, trying to keep her expression neutral. Had something deep within her somehow known that seeing Flynn again—just seeing him!—would threaten to overturn the stable existence she’d worked so assiduously to establish for herself?

Zoe felt her one-time rescuer’s hazel gaze travel down her body and back up. The assessment was intimate, as proprietary as the stroke of a palm against naked skin. For one mind-blowing moment she thought her legs might buckle beneath her. While she was scarcely an innocent, she’d never experienced such a powerful tug of sexual attraction.

And then Flynn’s emerald- and amber-flecked eyes met her blue ones.

There was a sizzling pause.

“You’re…late,” Zoe finally managed to say. While she seemed to have regained a modicum of control over her lower extremities, her ability to breathe had been severely compromised.

“Who—” he began in a husky-hoarse voice that sandpapered her tattered nerves. “Finally!”

Zoe’s lungs emptied abruptly in a sickening rush of air.

“Terry?” Flynn questioned, shifting his attention to a point behind her. He blinked several times, like a man not quite certain whether he should believe what he thought he was seeing.

“Well, it’s not the queen of England,” Peachy’s self-styled wedding organizer retorted, gliding forward. He winked at Zoe as he moved by her. She just stood, too shaken to respond. Too shaken to do much of anything. “So what’s your excuse, soldier? Did some nasty old civil insurrection mess up your travel plans?”

The question provoked a dry laugh. “Try a small monsoon.”

“Mother Nature can be such a bitch,” Terry quipped, then wrinkled his nose in disgust as he came within sniffing distance of the latecomer. “Ugh! Flynn! Making a dramatic, last-minute entrance is one thing. But that stench! I mean, what have you been doing? Swimming in sheep dip? Wrestling with rotting yak carcasses?”

“Don’t ask,” Flynn advised trenchantly. He slanted an odd glance at Zoe. She thought for a moment that he was on the verge of addressing her. Instead, he returned his gaze to Terry and said, “When I told Luc I’d get here, I warned him there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming first class. He said he’d arrange—”

“There’s hot water, cold beer and a clean tuxedo waiting for you,” Terry interrupted. “To say nothing of a whole church full of people and an organist who’s going to be reduced to playing the love theme from The Terminator if you don’t get yourself in gear right this second.”

Zoe stepped aside as the two men headed into the church. Her heart was thudding, her head throbbing. She was trying to make sense of Flynn’s response to her. Granted, it had been a long time since their previous encounter. And granted, she’d changed a great deal since then. Still. The man had acted as though…as though…

“Thanks for your help, sweetie,” Terry called over his brocade-covered shoulder.

“No problem,” she answered numbly, grappling with a turn of events that unraveled every scenario she’d spun about having a second meeting with the man who’d saved her life.

The possibility had never occurred to her.

Never. Ever. Not once.

But there it was, and she had no choice but to face the reality of it.

Gabriel James McNally Flynn didn’t remember her.

The instant he’d caught sight of the coolly elegant blonde standing in front of the church where his best friend was going to get married, Flynn had known with visceral certainty that he knew her. But it wasn’t until the last few moments of the wedding ceremony—right after the presiding minister had informed the groom that it was time to kiss the bride, to be specific—that he finally figured out who the hell she was.

Zoe.

Zoe Alexandra Armitage.

Goldilocks.

The realization hit him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the skull. Flynn hid his reaction to it, but just barely. His normally ironclad self-discipline had been undermined by weeks of physical hardship and emotional stress. He passed a swift prayer of thanks that he’d had the good sense to forgo the well-chilled bottle of beer Luc had offered him when he’d finished toweling off after his first indoor shower in nearly a month. Coupled with a dangerous lack of sleep, the ingestion of alcohol on an almost empty stomach probably would have destroyed his ability to disguise the shock that was resonating to the core of his soul.

Who would have thought it? he asked himself, trying to focus on the blissfully oblivious couple whose first marital embrace was provoking an affectionate outpouring of laughter and applause from the gathered congregation. Who in the name of heaven would have imagined that the flat-chested, pixie-haired girl who’d demonstrated she had more guts than a lot of professional warriors would blossom into a champagne and sherbet beauty who looked as though the toughest task on her daily agenda was deciding what to wear?

Not he!

Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t thought about the sky-eyed Zoe Armitage now and again during the past decade and a half. Because he had. Memories of her courage had surfaced in his consciousness more times than he cared to count. Likewise, regrets that he’d never told her how brave she’d been or explained why he’d behaved so brutally.

About three years after their jungle ordeal, an impulse he still didn’t fully understand had prompted him to make a few discreet inquiries about Zoe’s situation. He’d learned that she was attending the University of Virginia. Her scholastic record was brilliant. Socially, she seemed remarkably settled for a young woman whose relentlessly nomadic parents—Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick, two of the world’s foremost anthropologists—’had never married, much less provided their only child with a permanent home.

Flynn had gathered this reassuring information at a distance, never seriously considering the possibility of making personal contact with Zoe. He supposed he might have acted differently if he’d felt the girl was in trouble. But since all indications had been that she was doing just fine—

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the minister suddenly intoned, derailing his train of thought. “Please welcome our newlyweds. For the first time, I give you Mr. and Mrs. Lucien Devereaux!”

There was another wave of applause as the wedding guests rose to their feet. While most of them were lit up with sunbeam smiles, more than a few were blinking back happy tears.

Flynn experienced a sharp pang of emotion as he watched Luc link hands with the ethereal, green-eyed redhead he’d vowed to love, come what may, for the rest of his life. He’d never seen his friend look so happy. So whole. So…at peace with himself.

His mind flashed back nearly twelve weeks to the night he’d confronted a drunken, despairing Lucien Devereaux across a small wooden table in a dingy French Quarter bar.

“Wallowing in self-pitying gloom” had been his sardonic diagnosis of his former comrade-in-arms’ condition. He’d intended the words to flick on the psychological raw and it had been plain to see that they had. In much the way he’d once prodded Luc into making his first parachute jump, he’d goaded his friend out of the emotional mire and gotten him talking about why he believed his relationship with Peachy was doomed.

Flynn had received an incredible earful, starting with an inebriated explanation of how the shock of an emergency landing during a flight back from a wedding in Atlanta—to wit, the realization that if the plane she was on had crashed, she might very well have died without ever having “done it"—had prompted Peachy to ask her landlord of two years to deflower her.

Luc had become increasingly lucid as he’d recounted how he’d initially resisted this lunatic proposal, then changed his mind and decided to pretend to accept the one-time-only offer in order to protect his temporarily traumatized tenant from her own impulses. He’d been nearly sober when he’d bitterly declared that it was his unruly impulses about which he should have been concerned.

“That first morning, I was thinking commitment,” Luc had confessed rawly. “Commitment, as in marriage. Commitment, as in making a home and having a family.” He’d given a humorless laugh. “You know my history. Can you honestly see me—me!—playing the loving husband and adoring daddy?”

“Playing?” Flynn had echoed. “No. Being? Yeah. Sure. No problem.”

His friend’s expression had gone stark with disbelief at that point. His response to this had been predicated on a conviction that had been growing within him for a number of years.

“You haven’t figured it out, have you?” he’d said.

“Figured out, what?”

“That if you really were the alienated son of a bitch you seem to think you are, you would have bedded your little virgin without a second thought and moved on. That you would’ve spent every dime of the money you’ve earned from your books on yourself instead of using a big chunk of it to bankroll the dreams of people like that high school buddy of yours who always wanted his own restaurant. And that you’d be holed up in solitary splendor in some Manhattan bachelor pad instead of landlording over an eccentric old apartment building that’s stocked with folks you’ve made into the family you never had.”

“I—”

“Think about it.” He’d shifted into his “Shut up, Soldier, and listen” mode without hesitation. While self-control had been something he’d had to work hard to develop, the knack of commanding other people had always come easily to him. “You’ve got a surrogate mother in Laila Martigny. A surrogate father in Francis Smythe. A pair of doting great-aunts in May and Winnie Barnes. So what if the dynamics are a little kinky? You care about the people back at Prytania Street. Deep down in that place you seem to think is so incapable of making a connection, you care about them. And they sure as hell care about you.”

He’d watched Luc absorb the words and slowly begin to. accept their meaning. Finally the younger man had asked, “What about Terry Bellehurst?”

Flynn had allowed himself a grin. “He’s a twofer. A big brother and a big sister.”

“And…Peachy?”

“I think you’ve known the answer to that since the day she walked into your life.”

He’d carted Luc back to Prytania Street shortly before dawn and dumped him on the couch in the living room of his apartment. Before he’d departed, he’d pledged to his friend that if— no, when—things worked out, he would stand up as the best man during the “I do’s.” Had he known then how complicated keeping his word was going to turn out to be—

“I’m glad you were able to make it, Mr. Flynn,” a dulcetly feminine voice said, suddenly bringing him back to the present.

The assertion came from his right. Wondering uneasily how long he’d been meandering down memory lane, Flynn turned to face its source—a classically pretty woman who’d been one of Peachy’s three bridal attendants. Dressed in blush pink silk, she had chestnut-colored hair and crystalline gray eyes. She was somewhere in her early thirties and she was very obviously expecting a child.

Some long-suppressed lesson in etiquette prompted him to offer the woman his arm. She accepted it with a charming smile and they started down the aisle behind the newlyweds. The other two bridesmaids—the May Winnies, vivacious in raspberry lace and pearls—brought up the rear.

“It’s just Flynn,” he corrected after a second or two. “And I apologize for holding up the proceedings, Mrs…”

“Powell,” she supplied, giving him a look he couldn’t interpret. He had the peculiar feeling that something about him had surprised her. That he wasn’t what she’d expected. Although why this woman would have expectations about him, he had no idea. “Eden Powell. I’m Peachy’s sister. And considering that Luc mentioned you probably had to risk life and limb to get here, I’m willing to cut you a little slack vis-a-vis your late arrival.”

The name Eden rang a bell somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind. Had he not been half-dead on his feet, he probably would have pursued the matter. He didn’t like loose ends.

“Ah,” was all he said, glancing to his left.

It was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Because he shifted his attention at precisely the same moment he reached the row of pews in which Zoe was seated.

She was on the aisle. Close enough so that for one crazy instant he imagined he could smell the scent of her smooth, feminine flesh and fair, silken hair. Certainly close enough so that he could have touched her if he’d chosen to do so.

Again Flynn was buffeted by the changes he saw, and sensed, in her. The difference between Zoe’s appearance now and the way she’d looked nearly sixteen years ago was extraordinary enough. But the rest of it…

Her eyes met his. Her gentian blue gaze was cool. Selfcontained. Politely curious.

Nothing more.

After a moment she cocked her well-shaped chin upward a fraction of an inch. The long, lovely line of her throat arched, ever so slightly. Some fragment of his exhaustion-hazed brain registered that she was wearing a delicate silver chain and locket. He wondered with a surge of savagery whether the dainty piece of jewelry was a token from a lover.

Her brows lifted. Her expression clearly communicated the message that she was not the kind of female who was likely to be flattered by a stranger’s stare.

Flynn’s muscles clenched.

A stranger?

“Mr. Flynn, are you all right?” he heard the woman who’d identified herself as Eden Powell ask through the sudden pounding of his pulse. He was dimly conscious of the anxious pressure of her fingertips against his forearm.

“Never better,” he lied through his teeth, struggling to come to terms with what seemed to be the only possible explanation for Zoe’s distant manner.

Damn her!

She didn’t remember him.

Two

“So that’s the infamous Flynn, hmm?” Annie Powell said several hours later, her long-lashed brown eyes sparkling as she watched the celebratory swirl on the dance floor. Among those coupled for a waltz were the bride and the best man. “You never mentioned he was such a hunk.”

Zoe nearly spewed out the sip of champagne she’d just imbibed. “H-hunk?” She stared at her former college roommate, shutting her mind to the memory of the wildfire lure of sexual attraction she’d felt outside the church. Her body was less amenable to discipline. She felt a quicksilver sluice of heat rinse through her veins. The tips of her breasts started to harden. “Hunk?”

“Oh, definitely,” Annie affirmed, fluffing her pertly bobbed hair. After a moment she transferred her gaze back to Zoe’s face. “Now I understand why you played it so cool when some of the hottest guys on the U. Va. campus were flinging themselves at your feet. What girl would settle for undergraduate frankfurters when she knew there was filet mignon in the world?”

Zoe struggled for control. She realized she was being teased. Teasing was one of Annie’s favorite activities. And most of the time she genuinely enjoyed her friend’s clever quips and perceptive little jokes. But on this particular occasion…

She wouldn’t have to stay much longer, she assured herself. During the traditional cutting of the wedding cake a short time ago, she’d noticed Peachy and Luc exchanging looks that indicated they were both eager for some privacy. A romantic getaway was definitely in the offing. As soon as the new Mr. and Mrs. Devereaux left the reception, she would be able to make a discreet exit from the scene.

And once she did that, she would never have to see Gabriel James McNally Flynn again. Out of Sight, Out of Mind was going to be her motto from this evening onward. She fully intended to forget her one-time rescuer as thoroughly as he seemed to have forgotten her.

She should have purged him from her thoughts a long time ago!

“I wasn’t playing at anything back at U. Va.,” she began, carefully placing her champagne glass on the small, linencovered table at which she and Annie were seated. “I was there to get a good education, not waste my time going to keg parties and football games with a bunch of frat rats. As for Flynn being prime filet mignon…well, you’re entitled to your opinion, of course. But all I see when I look at him is—is—” she searched furiously for a suitably scathing analogy “-gristle!”

Annie remained silent for several long seconds, appearing to subject this last assertion to a considerable amount of mental mastication. Zoe watched her dark eyes stray speculatively toward the dancers but refused to follow the visual cue. She knew Flynn was partnering Peachy and she felt no needno desire!—to watch him do it. She wondered nastily whether the former Special Forces officer realized that there was a world of difference between a waltz and a forced march. Bad luck for him if he didn’t. Although she didn’t know the new Mrs. Devereaux as well as she knew her older sister, Eden, she had a strong hunch that the former Pamela Gayle Keene wouldn’t take kindly to being ordered around like an incompetent recruit.

Her friend exhaled on a hissing breath then looked back at her with an oddly knowing expression. “He’s that tough, huh?”

“I told you what he did!” Zoe retorted, stung. In point of fact, Annie and Eden were the only two people in whom she’d ever confided the humiliating details of her five-day odyssey through the jungle. She’d given everyone else—the government officials who’d questioned her, even her mother and father—a carefully edited version of what had happened.

She never figured out exactly why she’d done this. She supposed it might have been because she’d harbored a fear that adults wouldn’t see anything wrong with Flynn’s behavior toward her. So he’d bruised her sensibilities, she’d imagined them saying to her. Didn’t she understand that he’d been acting in response to exigent circumstances? Couldn’t she see that what really, truly mattered was that he’d saved her life?

Her parents had actually declared that they thought their daughter’s rescuer deserved a medal. Whether formal action had ever been taken on this suggestion, Zoe didn’t know and had convinced herself she didn’t care. But given that inherited wealth and professional achievement had endowed Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick with a fair amount of pull in some pretty high places, she was inclined to guess that Flynn had at the very least received a glowing commendation for his personnel file at the Pentagon.

She’d wondered more than a few times what kind of accounting of his actions—and hers—Flynn had provided when he’d been debriefed by U.S. Army authorities, as he surely must have been. She’d also wondered whether he’d complained to his military buddies about “baby-sitting duty” as much as he’d complained to her.

“You told me he’d saved your life, Zoe,” Annie pointed out.

“I told you a lot of other things, too.”

“Well, yes. You did. It’s just that…uh…”

“Just what?”

Zoe watched as Annie began twiddling with the small bellshaped locket that dangled at the base of her throat. Except for the initial engraved on its softly gleaming surface, the exquisite silver ornament was identical to the ones hanging around her neck and that of the blushing bride.

“Annie?” she prodded.

Her friend stopped twiddling. “Okay,” she said, leaning forward. “First and foremost, I don’t doubt for a second that those five days you spent tromping around the jungle were every bit as awful as you told me and Eden.”

“I really appreciate your faith.”

The sugared sarcasm provoked a grimace of exasperation. “Come on, Zoe. I realize it was a terrible experience. And I’ll grant you that Flynn might have made it worse—”

“Might have?”

“All right. All right,” Annie backpedaled. “What I’m trying to say is that now that I’ve finally met you know who after so many years of hearing about him…well, to be perfectly honest, hon, Gabriel Flynn is not what I expected.”

“And just what, pray tell, was that?”

“It’s hard to put into words. Sort of a…mmm…sort of a cross between Rambo and a male chauvinist troglodyte.”

The observation was vintage Annie, Zoe thought wryly. “But now that you’ve seen him you’ve decided he’s a fine piece of beef?”

“He’s certainly no Congressman Talcott Emerson III.”

This jibe was vintage Annie, too.

“Please.” Zoe held up her right hand, palm forward, like a traffic cop. She should have known her friend would get around to this, she chided herself. She really should have. While Annie had never been particularly complimentary about her choice of men, she’d become increasingly vocal on the subject since marrying Matt Powell in late April. “Do not—I repeat, do not—start up with that, Hannah Elaine.”

Zoe had had a relationship with Congressman Talcott Emerson III referred to by many as T. E. Three—several years ago. She’d thought he was everything she wanted in a man. He was so solid. So stable. Yet when it had come to the crunch, when this seemingly perfect-for-her man had brought out an engagement ring set with a flawless two-carat diamond that had belonged to his grandmother and proposed marriage, she’d found herself shaking her head and shrinking away.

For reasons she still couldn’t explain, the idea of spending the rest of her life with Talcott had suddenly filled her with an irrational sense of nothingness. Her brain had told her that she was being offered the normalcy she craved as an antidote to her harum-scarum upbringing. Yet something else had ominously warned that this normalcy would be, for her at least, a very numbed-out form of existence. And so, to her vast astonishment, she’d wound up thanking Talcott for his proposal, then politely turning him down.

He’d seemed surprised by the rejection but not terribly upset. He hadn’t even suggested that she might like to take a bit more time to think it over.

His political handlers had been less sanguine in their reaction. Apparently convinced that she was prime congressional spouse material—“A potential First Lady!” one of them had enthused—they’d come to her without Talcott’s knowledge and pleaded with her to change her mind.

She hadn’t.

Her employer, Arietta Ogden, had assured her that she’d done the right thing in saying no to Talcott. So, too, had Annie. After a certain amount of soul-searching, and some intensive questioning of her sanity, Zoe had decided that she agreed.

“I wasn’t denigrating your ex-almost fiance,” Annie protested. “My opinion of him has been going up ever since he punched out Trent Barnes, who, incidentally, Peachy tells me just happens to be the MayWinnies’ great-nephew, during that ambush-interview attempt on the local TV news last December. Just a few mornings ago I said something very nice about him. There was a photograph of him and the soon-to-be Mrs. Congressman Talcott Emerson III—you know, the multimarried Melissa ‘Call me Honeychile’ Reeves—on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. I pointed it out to Matt, and I told him that even though nobody’s ever going to mistake T. E. Three for a wild and crazy guy, he’s definitely looking a lot less stodgy than he did back when you were going out with him.”

Zoe groaned.

“Speaking of stodgy—”

“Don’t.”

“I was just wondering about your latest beau,” Annie said, all brown-eyed innocence. “The Harvard-educated lawyer you met at the White House. You know. The one with the reversible name.”

Zoe reclaimed her champagne flute and took a healthy gulp. “Carter Howard.”

“Oh, right. Carter Howard.” Annie edged forward in her seat, her expression conspiratorial. “How would you rate him against Flynn?”

Zoe drained the remainder of her sparkling wine and signaled a passing waiter for a refill. “I wouldn’t.”

There was an unpleasant silence. It came to an end when Annie heaved a remorseful-sounding sigh and said, “I’m sorry, Zoe. Really. Forget I asked. I don’t know what got into me. I’d blame PMS, but it’s not that time of the month.”