The Pregnant Bride

“Of course.”

“What was it about this Mark person that made you decide to marry him?”

She lifted her shoulders, mystified that he couldn’t figure that out for himself. “I loved him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t understand what you mean. Love doesn’t have to have a reason.”

“Sure it does, Jenna. We might like a lot of people, but as a rule, we love very few. What made him special?”

She thought about that for a minute, then said, “At first, he was interesting and fun and exciting…and…”

And a little bit insecure. Too much under his father’s controlling thumb. Too much in thrall to the family name and reputation.

“Go on.”

“He seemed to need me.” I made him feel important in his own right. With me, he was somebody other than the son who always did his father’s bidding. “We became friends.”

“And lovers?”

“Eventually, yes.” Silly to feel uncomfortable with the admission. She was twenty-seven, after all; well past the age of consent. “We were compatible. Comfortable with each other. His family accepted us as a couple. So, when he proposed…”

I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.

“…I accepted. I was ready for marriage and I thought we’d be happy together.” Irritated to find herself trying to justify a decision which, at the time, had seemed absolutely right, she flung out her hands. “What does it matter? He obviously didn’t agree, and now I have to accept that, too.”

“How did he break the news that the marriage was off?”

“He had his best man deliver a letter to the church.”

“He had his best man deliver a letter?” Edmund made no effort to mask his disgust. “Jeez, I take back my apology. The guy’s pure pond scum!”

“He’s not nearly as bad as I’ve made him sound. If anything, he’s a rather unhappy man. I thought I could change that. Apparently, I was wrong.”

“A guy who sends someone else to do his dirty work isn’t fit to be called a man, Jenna! And what I find hard to understand is why you feel compelled to go on defending him.”

“Because if I don’t,” she cried, at her wits’ end with his probing questions, “I look like an even bigger fool for having agreed to marry him in the first place. And my pride’s taken enough of a beating for one week.”

Edmund drew in a long breath and gestured for the waiter. “Mark’s the fool, sweet pea,” he said, “but if you can’t see that without my having to beat you over the head with the idea, we might as well drop the subject.”

They feasted on steamed crab dipped in melted butter and washed down with white wine, but although the meal was every bit as delicious as he’d promised, Edmund became increasingly withdrawn and never did make good on his promise to share some of his own history. Nor did he suggest lingering once they’d finished eating. Indeed, his taciturnity during the drive back to The Inn made her wonder if he regretted having invited her to dinner to begin with.

The path from the parking area to The Inn wove among plantings of shrubbery interspersed with the pale faces of daffodils. Concealed floodlights showcased the mighty cedars looming in the background. Strategically placed benches just big enough for two lurked in the shadows. Piano music drifted through the darkness, the notes falling soft and clear in the night.

Everything about the place spelled couples, romance, honeymoons, happy-ever-after. Added to Edmund’s aloof silence, it was more than she could bear.

Just a few yards farther on, the path forked, with one way leading directly to The Inn’s front door and the other descending to the beach. As they approached it, Edmund stopped. “I’m too restless to turn in, so I’m going for a walk,” he said, looking pointedly at her high heels. “I’d ask you to join me but you’d break an ankle in those shoes, so I’ll say good night instead. You should sleep well after the day you’ve had.”

Numbly, she watched him turn away, and willed herself to do the same. To walk into The Inn and not look back. To accept that her interlude with him had come to its inevitable end.

His silhouette became indistinct, swallowed up by the night. The sound of his footsteps crunching over the gravel grew fainter.

Do him and yourself a favor and disappear inside before you say something you’ll live to regret, Jenna! He can’t fix what’s broken in your life and you have no business expecting him to try. He’s already done enough.

She swallowed, and braced herself to face the night alone. Her self-confidence had already eroded into near oblivion. Why expose it to further abuse? But no amount of common sense could ease the raging loneliness in her heart, or prevent her from calling out just before he disappeared from sight, “Edmund, wait! Don’t go without me, please!”

CHAPTER THREE

HE THOUGHT he’d done it—removed himself, permanently, from a situation grown too complex, too fast—but the naked pain in her voice caught up with him just before he moved out of earshot and much though he’d have liked to, he couldn’t walk away from it.

Burying a sigh, he waited as she stumbled over the coarse gravel toward him. A gentleman would probably have rushed forward to steady her before she broke her neck in her flimsy little shoes, but he’d never aspired to be anything other than what he was: a working guy who’d made a pile of money by learning from experience never to make the same mistake twice.

A fat lot of good that rule of thumb was doing him now, though. Knowing he’d always been a sucker for a bird with a broken wing should have been reason enough for him to steer clear of her in the first place. That he’d persisted in ignoring the warning bells clanging loud and clear in his mind and had chosen instead to protract the association, was nothing short of foolhardy.

“What?” Frustration, as much with himself as her, had him barking the question at her.

If only she’d taken umbrage or flight at his brusque tone! But she was too wounded, too crushed in spirit. “I can’t…face going up to that empty room,” she said wretchedly, flinging herself at him.

Good idea or nor, his arms closed around her. She was so slight, so fragile, that to shove her away was unthinkable. But to let her remain pressed close against him like that…! Jeez, it was all the encouragement needed for certain parts due south of his brain to rise to action.

“Listen, Jenna,” he said, sounding as if he’d just choked on ground glass, “this isn’t such a good idea. I know you’re going through a bad time right now, but it’d be better if you were to turn to the people who care about you.”

“No,” she said, clinging to him and lifting her face to his so that, even though he’d thought it was black as Hades under the trees, enough light filtered through from the gardens for him to see the tears glimmering in her huge dark eyes, and feel himself drowning in them. “I don’t need them. I need you!”

“How can you need someone you don’t even know?”

“For precisely that reason! When you look at me, you don’t see a pathetic bride without a groom, or a daughter who’s made a laughing stock of her family. You see me— an ordinary woman, just like any other.”

Ordinary, my hind foot! She was a lovely, sensitive, tenderhearted creature who felt other people’s pain as deeply as her own. A woman in desperate need of the kind of loving which would restore her faith in herself—the kind of loving his brain told him she’d do better to seek elsewhere, but which his less cerebral components clamored to accommodate. Another good reason to put an end to things before they grew even more seriously out of hand!

“I can’t give you what you’re looking for, sweet pea,” he said hoarsely. “I come with too much excess baggage of my own.”

Briefly, she sagged against him as if all the fight and courage had been blasted out of her. Then, with a flash of the courage which had drawn him to her from the first, she pushed herself away from him. “Of course you can’t,” she whispered, her voice tinted with shame and her body—every slender, desirable inch of it—poised for escape. “Whatever possessed me to suggest that you could?”

For the second time in as many minutes, he had the chance to cut and run out of her life as easily as he’d blundered into it. So what the devil prompted him to haul her back into his arms, and stroke the soft, dark hair away from her face? What sort of masochist was he to search out her mouth and kiss her as if she was the last woman on earth and there was no tomorrow?

The insatiable kind, that’s what, and she’d have done them both a favor if she’d smacked him across the head for his nerve. Maybe that would have spared them both a lot of grief. Instead, her mouth softened beneath his and she sank against him in total surrender.

To his credit, he tried to put a halt to the situation. But when he went to break the kiss, her little whimper of distress scored a direct hit to…

What? His heart? Impossible! He was thirty-five, for Pete’s sake, not fifteen, and knew better than to buy that kind of codswallop on the strength of a twenty-four-hour acquaintance with a pretty woman. His conscience? Hell, it was nothing more than a dying whisper desperately trying to make itself heard over the caterwauling of rampant lust! Good deed for the day? Fat chance! He’d been telling her the truth when he said he was no Boy Scout.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he muttered, dragging his lips away from hers before he made things even more dangerously volatile by bringing his tongue into play. “It was a very bad idea.”

She didn’t argue, at least not in so many words. She just brought her soft, smooth little hand up to his cheek and touched him as wonderingly as if she’d just discovered her own personal guardian angel.

“Jenna,” he croaked, afraid that the distant thunder echoing in his blood boded no good for either of them, “you’re pushing your luck.”

She slid both arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest. “My luck,” she said dreamily, “hit rock bottom yesterday. But thanks to you, it’s starting to improve.”

If his survival instincts weren’t all tangled up in hunger for something he had no right wanting, he’d march her back to The Inn, pack her off to bed by herself, in her own room, then hightail it out of her life before he compounded his already manifest sins.

If he possessed one ounce of decency, he wouldn’t be tracing a path from her chin to her throat and fantasizing about how she’d look without any clothes on.

If he had a grain of self-respect, he’d back away from her instead of letting her know he was primed for seduction in the most obvious way a man could convey such a message to a woman.

And if the damned Inn weren’t so fixated on honeymooners, it wouldn’t have made it so easy for a couple to be alone at every turn. There wouldn’t be shadowed spotlights pearling the night, or a lullaby of surf whispering ashore, or the scent of cedar and fir and hemlock sweetening the air.

“Maybe,” he said, wrestling with vanishing control, “we should figure out what’s happening here before we let things go any further.”

“Oh, Edmund,” she murmured, her hands wreaking havoc over his rib cage, “I’m so tired of trying to look for answers that aren’t there. Sometimes, things happen without reason or warning. Just this once, can’t we live for the moment and never mind about tomorrow?”

“So what are you suggesting?” He forced the question past a throat gone dry as sandpaper.

“That we follow our feelings, whether or not they make sense.”

And just in case he hadn’t picked up on what she meant, she tilted her hips against him and lifted her mouth to his again.

He made one last stab at rational argument. “Your feelings are all tied up with another man, Jenna, and I’m not interested in being his stand-in.”

“Nor am I,” she said, her lips so close that the words brushed his mouth.

Her skin was smooth and warm to his touch. She smelled of flowers, she tasted of innocence, she trembled with need. Her breathing was almost as ragged as his own. He could feel her pulse racing.

“Please make love to me,” she whimpered, taking his hand and closing it over her breast. “Please, Edmund, make me feel whole again!”

“Not here,” he said thickly, urging her back toward The Inn. Whatever else he might be, he wasn’t such a lowlife that he’d risk their being discovered by other guests. If they were going to make love—and he knew that, barring some cataclysmic natural disaster, nothing would stop them now—it would be in private. Not in her room but in his. Removed from anything that might remind her of the man whose place he was taking.

The lobby lay deserted, the elevator doors stood open. Pulling her after him into the empty car, he pressed the third-floor button. The doors had barely glided closed before he was searching for her mouth again, the fever to discover her more intimately roaring at fever pitch now that it had been given free rein.

She melted against him, opened her lips to him, clenched her fingers in his hair as his tongue probed the depths of her mouth. So moist, so sweet. So like that other part of her which taunted him with urgent little pelvic thrusts.

She was driving him crazy! How else to justify the insane urge to hit the Stop button and take her, right there on the elevator floor? How otherwise to contain the aching fullness testing his control beyond anything a mere man should have to withstand?

The doors whispered open with a melodious ding! “Talk about saved by the bell,” he panted, fairly racing her down the hall.

Moonlight left the corners of his room dark, and swathed the bed in drifts of purple shadow. Her skin took on the luster of pale silk, her hair the sheen of dark satin. He framed her face in his hands and bent his mouth again to hers, hoping to imbue his seduction with at least a little finesse.

But the feel of her, the touch of her, defeated him at the outset. Driven by unwise hunger, he tugged at her clothing, flinging aside one item after another until, at last, he could feast his gaze on her breasts, cup their slender fullness in his hands and take their dusk-tinted peaks in his mouth.

She sagged, as if he were drawing the last ounce of strength from her. Uttered his name on a long, despairing breath. A tremor raced through her.

The same frenzied urgency that possessed him was tearing at her, too, stripping her more naked than he ever could, and reducing her dignity to ashes. They were clawing at each other, their hands delineating every curve, every angle. He heard the soft hiss of ripping fabric. His shirt? Her panties? Egyptian cotton, fine French lace?

It didn’t matter. Nothing was more immediate than that they cleave to one another, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat. Nothing, that was, except the primeval tide which had stalked him from the moment he’d kissed her and which, patience at last outrun, refused to hold back a moment longer.

Groaning in defeat, he tumbled her to the floor and buried himself inside her mere milliseconds before the first shattering waves depleted him.

She lay beneath him, her mouth trembling, her eyes wide pools of disappointment.

He bent his forehead to hers and whispered, “Sweetheart, I’m sorry!”

She touched a finger to his face, traced the outline of his upper lip. “It’s all right.”

“No,” he said, rolling free and drawing her to her feet. “It’s all wrong.”

He took her hand and led her to the bathroom. Turned on the shower and when the water ran hot, pulled her under the spray with him. He soaped her long, lovely spine, her arms, her legs, until the tension seeped out of her, and her eyes took on a dreamy, unfocused gaze.

Lips slightly apart, she reached for the soap. Her hands roamed over him, lathering the length of his torso in slow, erotic strokes.

Quickly, before she brought him to the brink of destruction a second time, he imprisoned her hands in his and growled, “Uh-uh, Jenna! Cut it out!”

“We aren’t going to make love again?” she asked him dazedly.

A firm believer in the efficacy of cold showers, he adjusted the water until it ran at little more than blood temperature. “You know full well that we are,” he said, rinsing them both off. “But this time, we’ll take it slowly.”

And they did. Slow and easy, with a fire burning in the hearth, and brandy to sip between caresses, and the bed soft beneath them. With leisurely delight and the sort of murmured words a man and a woman exchange when they find untold pleasure in each other.

He explored her from head to foot. Tasted the wild honey of her response as her body yielded to his seduction. Held her tight as she splintered with passion. And when she begged for mercy and whimpered that she could not…could not reach orgasm again, he drove himself deep inside her and taught her that, with him, she could.

When at last she fell asleep, some time after midnight, he did not think it likely that she dreamed of the absent Mark.

Light, too bright, too persistent, speared her eyelids and had her squinting into the pillows. Her limbs lay heavy with delicious lassitude. Her mouth felt slightly swollen, her skin a little chafed. She ached pleasurably in hidden places, the way she’d always thought a woman might when she’d been thoroughly loved.

Had she…?

With Edmund…?

Or was she still caught in the web of an unusually vivid dream?

Tentatively, her hand stole out to verify reality, checking the other half of the bed. Finding the dent in the other pillow where another head had lain. She stretched her leg under the covers, explored with her toe the barely perceptible warmth of other feet recently removed from the mattress.

As if floodgates had suddenly burst open, memory rushed in.

Cautiously, she opened one eye and took quick inventory of the room. Like hers, it overlooked the Pacific. The cold ashes of last night’s fire lay in the hearth. The empty brandy snifters still stood on the bedside table. But of the man who’d brought her to the edge of delirium with his mouth and left her sobbing for release; who’d filled her with his vitality and ridden with her to heights of pleasure she’d never before experienced, not once but over and over again throughout the night—of him there was no sign.

Clutching the duvet to her, she sat up. A thick terry-cloth robe lay across the foot of the bed. Someone had folded her clothes and left them over the arm of a chair, with her shoes neatly placed on the floor below them. The bathroom door stood ajar with no light showing from the interior. Clearly, he wasn’t in there.

With a tiny click which seemed deafening in the silent room, the digital clock beside the bed rolled to eight-thirty. How could she have slept so late? How could she have slept at all?

By exhausting herself, physically and emotionally until she was as limp as a rag! By curling up next to Edmund’s hard, warm frame, sated in body and soul, and refusing to think about what yesterday had brought or what tomorrow might hold because, right at that moment, with nothing but a silver dollar moon to witness the event, the here and now had been enough.

Of course, what they’d shared wasn’t love. It couldn’t be. Because she loved Mark.

Didn’t she?

Of course she did! But he’d deserted her and left her at the mercy of self-doubt and a hurt so deeply wounding that she’d wanted to crawl into a hole and never again come out. Instead, she’d turned to Edmund and, miraculously, passion had flared between them with scorching intensity. Because of him, she’d begun the long process of restoring her confidence in herself as a woman.

Recognizing that was a blessing she’d never expected to find. She knew now that, in time, she would recover. The rest of her life would not be blighted because Mark Armstrong had reneged on his promise to marry her. A whole different world from the one he’d offered waited to be discovered. And one day, when she was ready, she would find a better and a truer love. In the meantime, there was Edmund, and today, and perhaps even tonight.

Sliding her legs to the floor, she reached for the robe and was securing the belt around her waist when a knock came at the door.

“Well,” she said, a rush of anticipation warming her cheeks as she ran to open it, “there’s no need to be so polite! It’s your room, after all!”

A uniformed busboy stood outside, holding a tray. “Your breakfast, ma’am,” he announced pleasantly. “May I come in?”

Breakfast for one, she noticed with mild dismay, waving him across the threshold.

Placing the tray on a table by the window, he drew up a chair and removed the fluted paper cover from a tall glass of orange juice. “Another lovely morning, ma’am. A number of our guests are already enjoying the beach.”

Of course! And Edmund was probably one of them.

“May I pour your coffee?”

“I’ll wait a while, thanks.”

“In that case, I’ll leave you to enjoy your meal. No,” he insisted, backing toward the door when she reached for her purse to tip him, “that’s already been taken care of, ma’am. Have a very nice day.”

She thought it entirely possible that she would—an amazing concept, all things considered. The rich aroma of coffee underscored by the delicate scent of the single bud rose which completed her breakfast tray, added to the stunning view from the window and the stream of sunlight slanting over the polished wood floor surely made for a great start to the morning.

Buoyed with sudden optimism, she picked up the glass of juice and silently toasted the bright morning. Life really did go on, one day at a time. Trite, perhaps, but true. The secret was to look forward, instead of back.

She did not find Edmund on the beach, nor in the lounge where guests were taking morning coffee when she returned to The Inn two hours later. The Navigator was not in the parking lot. The message light was not blinking on the phone in her room.

“Mr. Delaney checked out early this morning,” the clerk told her when, with a growing sense of unease, she inquired at the front desk.

“Checked out?” But he’d told her he was staying for a week. He’d slept with her the night before. He’d ordered breakfast for her. She’d thought…she’d thought…

What? That a new love could be so easily born to replace the one she’d lost? In fairy tales, perhaps—or the mind of a self-delusional fool!

Still, she looked for a reason that at least hinted of a happy ending. “And you’re sure he left no message?”

“He was in a hurry,” the clerk said kindly. “I was already on duty when the call came through. Normally, we don’t intrude on our guests when they’ve specifically requested us not to do so, but his wife insisted he be contacted right away—some sort of emergency, I understand. Fortunately, he happened to come into the lobby just then—he’d been down at the pool for an early swim, I believe—and I was able to convey the message right away.”

Wife? She’d spent the night in the arms of another woman’s husband? No wonder he’d phoned the front desk the minute he’d closed his door behind them, and asked not to be disturbed! Risking a call from his wife while he was in bed with another woman would have seriously hampered his performance!

Jenna thought she was going to be sick, right there on the floor in full view of whoever happened to be passing by.

The clerk seemed to think so, too. “Are you feeling unwell, ma’am? Shall I send for a doctor…?”

“No,” she said, somehow managing to articulate a response even though her insides were shaking. “Thank you for your concern but I’m perfectly fine.”

Dazed with shock, she reeled toward the front door and the cool fresh air outside.

I come with too much excess baggage, he’d said, the night before, but she’d never for a moment supposed he was talking about a wife. He’d seemed too straightforward for such arcane half-truths.

And she…she had only herself to blame for the guilt and regret now hemming her in on all sides. It was one thing to accept the end of a relationship, and quite another to imagine that flinging herself headlong into the start of another was any solution. New hopes weren’t built on the ashes of broken dreams. A person had to heal before she was ready to begin again with someone new.