Three Times A Bride

She could have made excuses; said she had a dental appointment in another country or something, but what was the point? Sooner or later, she’d have to deal with him and time wasn’t exactly on her side.

“Some fancy system you’ve got here,” he observed as the electronic device that protected her inventory admitted him through the outer door and then the inner.“When did you become so safety-conscious?”

She blushed a little at the lightly sugared scorn underlying his words.“When it was pointed out to me that my stock makes me a target for theft on a grand scale. Taking precautions seemed the safe and sensible thing to do.”

“Safe and sensible? The Georgia I used to know never concerned herself with being either safe or sensible.”

“She changed in the months after…”

“I died?” He stepped closer, his smile so reminiscent of his old sweet smile that she almost mistook it for the real thing. Almost.“It’s okay, sweet pea,” he assured her dryly.“You can say it.”

An absurd, unreasonable guilt made her hide her left hand behind her back.“It’s not okay,” she blurted out, retreating.“And you can’t call me ‘sweet pea’, not anymore.”

“Why not?” His smile didn’t slip an inch but she realized now what made it different. It did not touch those blue eyes whose gaze dissected her with such acute, unwavering interest.

“Because…” She faltered, the words damming up for all that she wished she could let them spill out and be over with.

“Because you’re wearing another man’s ring?” He nodded calmly at her startled gasp, and unzipped his suede jacket as if this were just another in a long list of social calls he had to make that day.“Yes, I know. You’re engaged to my best friend, Steven.”

“Who—how did you…?”

“Beverley told me. Who else?”

Georgia sagged against the desk at her back.“Of course. I should have known.”

Adam lifted his shoulders disbelievingly.“Did you expect her to keep quiet about it?” he asked, and she realized that, beneath his composed facade, disgust warred with cold anger.“She’s my grandmother, and very loyal to those she loves—unlike some I could name.”

“I bet she couldn’t wait to tell you.”

He continued to pin Georgia in that sharp, unforgiving gaze.“She waited over a year. Nearly fifteen months, to be exact, during which time she mourned my apparent death. How did you spend the time, Georgia, my love? Running want ads in the Lonely Hearts column of the Piper Landing Daily News? How many poor slobs did you reject before you decided to save yourself a lot of bother and settle for good old Steven, who was so conveniently handy once I’d vacated the scene?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said, flushing at the brazen contempt in his tone.“I didn’t date anyone, not even Steven at first. But you and he had been friends for years, and he was the only one who really understood what I went through when you—when I thought you were…dead.”

“You’re wrong. He wasn’t the only one. Beverley would have understood, if you’d cared to give her the chance to share whatever small portion of grief you decided I deserved.”

There were many things Georgia could have said in retaliation, among them that Beverley Walsh hadn’t particularly wanted to share her grandson in life and had been damned if she’d allow anyone to intrude on her sorrow at his death; or that Georgia’s own anguish had been so keen that, for a while, it had taken all her strength to face each unrelenting day; or that many had been the time that she’d wished for nothing but an end to her own miserable, guilt-ridden existence, so empty and pointless had it seemed without Adam. But his greatest misconception—that she’d turned easily to another man—was the one she felt most compelled to address.

“Steven was never more your friend than in the days and weeks after you…disappeared. I think I would have died without him. He gave me back my sanity when I thought I’d lost it forever. He helped me to accept what I couldn’t change and would never understand. And he asked for nothing in return except the solace of sharing memories of you. It’s only over the last four or five months that we’ve…grown closer.”

“And how close is that, Georgia?” Adam leaned against a glass presentation cabinet with careless disregard for its fragility.“Close enough that he makes you forget the times you made love with me? Close enough that you cry out his name instead of mine when the passion takes hold? Close enough—”

“Stop it!” Georgia clapped her hands to her ears, her earlier flush a pale imitation of the real thing as a wave of embarrassment and indignation left her face flaming.“It’s no longer any of your business!”

“I guess not.” His deceptively lazy gaze missed nothing as it swept over the studio’s costly display of jewelry before finally coming to rest on her. He stared insolently at her full-skirted silk and cashmere suit, the cameo brooch at her throat, the baroque pearl studs in her ears. And last of all, he looked long and hard at the two carat diamond solitaire engagement ring on her finger.“I guess life goes on, no matter what. Things change, people change. For a thirty-year-old woman, you’ve achieved impressive success, Georgia. Grief has worked wonders on you.”

She rounded on him, stung.“How dare you cheapen how I felt and turn it into something contemptible and shallow?”

He shrugged, his shoulders lifting easily under the supple doeskin jacket.“Those are your words, sweet pea, not mine,” he pointed out softly.

“But you’re thinking them,” she cried, “and you have no right. You don’t know the half of what I went through after you disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, “any more than you know what actually happened to me. One of the reasons I’m here now is that I think we’re both entitled to some enlightenment. But let’s strike a deal: I won’t ask your forgiveness for my sins of omission, if you won’t ask mine for yours of commission.”

“I don’t need your forgiveness because I haven’t done a damned thing wrong,” she shot back, an anger she’d almost forgotten sparking in response to his. Wasn’t this how it had always been between them? Raging passion, or raging fury? Sudden disagreements that erupted into flaming rows, followed by reconciliations whose intensity left them both drained and exhausted?

She sank into the chair behind her desk, the fight seeping out of her.“You know, we never would have made a go of marriage,” she said wearily.“We’re too much alike, both strong-willed—”

“I’m strong-willed,” Adam contradicted. “You’re just willful. Your trouble is, you were indulged as a child and grew up believing you had a right to whatever your little heart desired. It probably made perfect sense that, when you realized you’d made a mistake in dismissing one potential marriage candidate, you should simply turn around and snag the first available man to take his place.”

“Is that your explanation of why you were so quick to accept the decision to end our engagement?” she countered.“To avoid being chained to such a spoiled brat for the rest of your life?”

“Hardly!” He pushed himself away from the glass cabinet and she thought, as he crossed over to sit in a chair facing hers, that he limped a little.“If I’d wanted out of our engagement, I’d have said so up-front. Your family might have programmed you to believe it was your social duty to stop tongues wagging all over town by marrying the man you were sleeping with, but they never carried that much clout with me.”

Privately, Georgia felt her family ran a poor second to his grandmother when it came to trying to manipulate other people’s lives but she wasn’t about to get sidetracked by the issue now. She was, however, forced to accept the truth of the rest of his statement. Whatever else his faults, Adam Cabot had never been a coward.

“Why don’t you stop trying to outdo yourself in insults and tell me what happened to you?” she said.“Where did you disappear to for so long, and why have you shown up now, when it’s too late for either of us to go back and change things?”

“To answer your last question first, because—silly me!—I thought you might be pleased to discover I’m alive. And because I thought you deserved to hear the news from me before it became common knowledge all over town. As for the rest, official reports to the contrary, I didn’t go down with my aircraft. I managed to eject and bail out, got swept miles off course by a howling blizzard, and ended up breaking a number of bones and doing various other bodily damage when I landed in the frozen wastes of the sub-Arctic. That I didn’t get eaten alive by polar bears or die from exposure is entirely due to the kindly intercession of a band of nomadic Inuit hunters who, for reasons that escape me, find traipsing over the Polar Ice Cap a stimulating winter pastime.”

He made it sound so uttery reasonable and ordinary that she knew he was leaving out a good deal more than he was telling.“That might have kept you away for a few weeks, Adam, but it hardly explains your being gone fifteen months.”

He shrugged.“Some things take time,” he said ambiguously.“And considering the way we parted, you can’t blame me for not being in too much of a hurry to get back to you.”

Any sympathy she might have felt for him evaporated at that.“You’re the one who put our future together in jeopardy and allowed your ego to lure you out of retirement for one last chance at flying glory.”

“And you’re the one who threw my ring in my face and told me to take a hike. ‘Fly off the edge of the earth, for all I care,’ you said. Well, I did the next second-best thing, sweet pea.”

“You know I didn’t really mean that!” Georgia’s voice faltered for a moment as other memories of that last time together came surging back, but she’d be damned if she’d let them overwhelm her. She’d done all the crying she was going to do over this particular tragedy.“In case you’ve forgotten, Adam, we both said harsh things to each other. I called you selfish and chauvinistic and a lot of other things I’m ashamed to recall.”

“And I accused you of being cold and ambitious, which was equally unkind and untrue. It was your independence, the fact that you were as much a rebel as I was, that first attracted me to you.”

His voice was grave and sincere enough to soften granite. If she let him, he’d throw her life into turmoil a second time and hurt innocent bystanders in the process. Under cover of the desk, she dug her finger nails into the palms of her hands and plowed through the rest of what she had to say.“I’m not a rebel anymore, Adam. Ten days after you left, a uniformed stranger showed up at my door and told me that pieces of your precious fighter jet had been found scattered over miles but that there was no sign and absolutely no chance that you had survived. In the space of five minutes my world collapsed and nothing has been the same since, especially not me.”

“I agree. The Georgia I used to know would never have made such a remarkable recovery from grief that she’d be ready to marry someone else so soon.”

“Recovery?” Her voice cracked with emotion and she felt the tears pricking behind her eyes despite her most stringent effort to keep them in check.“I fell apart almost literally! I didn’t sleep for weeks, didn’t want to eat or go out of the apartment. I wished I had died with you, Adam, because I’d lost everything that truly mattered to me.”

More, in fact, than you can begin to guess!

She squeezed her eyes shut, even though doing so meant the tears escaped and drizzled down her face.“I felt guilty. And angry. And alone.”

“You don’t know the first thing about being alone. You had your family.”

“Who were no help at all. My mother could scarcely contain her relief at being spared having you for a sonin-law.” Georgia swiped at the tears with the back of her hand, angry and appalled at the ease with which the misery was finding chinks in her armor.

Adam leaned over, plucked a tissue from the box on the corner of her desk, and passed it to her.“But your father must have cared. He was never mean-spirited like that.”

“He was sympathetic but…”

“Too henpecked to dare take a stand.” Adam nodded.“Yeah, I’d forgotten how thoroughly your mother and sister keep poor old Arthur in line.”

“Precisely.” She drew in a deep breath and managed to get herself under control again.“And that’s when I found out what a real friend Steven was.”

“Well, good old Steven,” Adam jeered softly.

“He saved my life,” Georgia shot back, declining to mention that it was thanks to Steven that she hadn’t hemorrhaged to death when she’d miscarried Adam’s baby in the kitchen of her apartment.“If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I would have gone on. I felt responsible for what had happened to you.”

“Rubbish!” Adam scoffed.“The prototype’s malfunction had nothing at all to do with you.”

“But I didn’t know that. I nursed the idea that you’d been too preoccupied over our disagreement to pay proper attention to what you were doing. The guilt festered, made more complicated by the reaction of everyone I met. Pity is a corrosive thing when it’s flung in your face every time you turn around. Steven saved my sanity.”

“So what are you telling me?” Adam wanted to know.“That you’re marrying him out of gratitude? That it’s no great love affair?”

They were the same questions that had kept her awake most of last night.“It’s not quite that simple,” she wailed.

“It is to me,” Adam said bluntly.“When a man finds himself staring death in the face, things become very simple. It’s a case of fight or go under. So do you love Steven, or don’t you?”

“Of course I love him!”

“Well, that’s one of the things I came back to find out. Now that I know, I guess you and I have nothing more to say to each other.” He rose and zipped up his jacket.“Have a happy life, Georgia,” he said, and turned away.

Eyes suddenly swimming again, she watched as he covered the distance to the front doors. Sometimes, it seemed that was what she remembered most vividly of all their times together: her watching as he walked away from her. And every time, it broke her heart all over again.

Let him go! the voice of sanity begged. Do it just one more time and you’ll never have to do it again.

Yes, she thought.

And promptly accused, in a woebegone little voice, “That’s what you did after we broke up, too. Just turned and walked away without even kissing me goodbye.”

CHAPTER TWO

HE STOPPED and turned back to face her. He looked at her long and thoughtfuly then, as he retraced his steps, said with ominous intent, “Did I really? Well, that’s one mistake I certainly don’t have to repeat.”

Georgia’s heart flapped around behind her ribs like a chicken trying to save its neck from the hatchet but Adam didn’t care. He just kept moving until he loomed no more than twelve inches from where she stood rooted to the plush blue carpet under her feet.

Trapped by the desk behind her and the reckless words she’d flung at him, she did the only thing she could without losing what was left of her pride. She tilted her head to one side and with regal condescension, offered him her cheek.

“Oh, no,” he murmured, capturing her face in cool fingers and turning it back toward him and bending his head to hers.“Not like that at all. Like this.”

As soon as he touched her, she fell apart. A soft roaring filled her mind, dimming her hearing and clouding her vision. Her legs buckled, sending her reeling into him for support. She grabbed at him blindly, intending only to anchor herself upright, and instead found herself smoothing her hands over his face in tactile renewal of its beauty.

His mouth lowered. She felt the warm drift of his breath against her lips. And then, in excruciating slow motion, he kissed her.

It wasn’t aggressive, as kisses between a man and a woman often were. There was no audacity, no thrusting invasion of privacy. He simply settled his lips on hers and let them rest there. Yet, for all that, it was a lover’s kiss, delicately, temptingly erotic. A hothouse flower on the brink of bursting into fragrant bloom—or more accurately, an echo so painfully sweet of a splendor she’d once known that she couldn’t bear to let it end.

She pressed herself to him, winding her arms around his neck and softening her mouth in acquiescence. A murmur escaped her—a plea for just a little more, just a little longer—soft enough that only he could hear it, yet able to deafen completely all those parts of her brain that were trying so hard to scream out a warning.

The hopeless, helpless longings she’d stored away, having found a crack through which to escape, took full advantage but she was too enthralled to notice. All she cared about was that Adam responded to her overtures by sliding his arms tightly around her and directing the seductive finesse he’d always employed so well to a different turn, one no longer defined by propriety.

His mouth grew bold, investigative, cajoling. As if she weren’t willing enough to surrender to its assault! He tested her lips, tasted them and, when they opened to him, accepted the implicit surrender they offered.

At least, she thought he did. Was so convinced, in fact, that it took a while for her to comprehend that he was declining after all. Not that he was so ungallant as to shove her away and remind her that she was supposed to be engaged to another man. He merely ended things. Slowly, regretfully even, but quite firmly, leaving her no choice but to abide by his refusal.

“Will that suffice?” he asked.

She wrapped her arms around her waist as the cool aftermath of his rejection infiltrated every pore of her skin to lay an icy wreath around her heart. Drawing in a great shuddering breath, she managed to nod.“Yes,” she said.

He prepared to leave again and had one foot out the door before he tossed a final word over his shoulder.“Liar,” he said.

Adam strode across the sidewalk and out into the rainslick road, narrowly missing being hit by a van that turned the corner too quickly. He barely noticed. It wasn’t his time to die; he’d already proved that with the business up north a year ago. And he had weightier things on his mind right now, like the lingering feel of Georgia in his arms, and the fact that some parts of him hadn’t been the least bit impaired by crash-landing in the frozen tundra of the Arctic.

“Hah,” he muttered with fake insouciance to the bronze statue of Eugene Piper that presided over the little public garden in the middle of the square, “that’ll teach her!”

But it had taught him, too—a lesson he’d briefly been disposed to forget: she was about to marry another man. While he’d been recovering from multiple fractures of the thigh, a dislocated shoulder and four broken ribs, not to mention a coma brought on by trauma to the brain and major bruising of just about every internal organ he owned, she’d been casting her net at Steven Drake.

The woman to whom he’d given his heart and his ring, and for whom he’d been willing to give up a career that he’d truly loved, had taken his apparent death in stride and gone ahead with her life without missing a beat. So what did he think he was doing, getting himself all fired up over a kiss when he ought to be congratulating himself on his lucky escape?

“Not that I expected her to spend the rest of her life alone, draped in widow’s weeds and burning a candle under my photo, you understand,” he grumbled to Eugene.“But couldn’t she have waited a decent interval? And chosen to look a bit further afield than my best friend?”

Eugene stared sightlessly ahead, rain dripping off his face mournfully. Some best friend, Adam, old buddy!

“I don’t blame him,” Adam said defensively.“He’s a nice guy who didn’t see what was headed his way until it was too late to duck. And at least he didn’t sweep me under the carpet the way she did. He showed some sort of conscience about the whole affair.”

In fact, from what Beverley had said, Steven had done a lot more than that. During the weeks immediately following the jet’s disastrous test flight, he’d been a frequent visitor at her house. He’d taken time out from consoling the bereaved fiancée to offer comfort to an opinionated, autocratic old lady who didn’t have another soul in the world who really gave a damn about her once her grandson had apparently shuffled off.

“He actually asked my permission to court that foolish child,” Beverley had told Adam, stemming her pleasure in his survival long enough to allude to Georgia with the customary disdain she reserved for all the Chamberlaines.“Under the circumstances I gave him my blessing and wished him luck. Heaven knows he’s going to need it, marrying into that straitlaced lot.”

She’d been referring, of course, to the long-standing feud between the Walshes and the Chamberlaines, two of Piper Landing’s founding families. It went back two generations, to the time when his maternal grandfather, Simon, had dumped Georgia’s paternal grandmother, Celeste, to marry Beverley. Well, the tables had been turned now, with a vengeance!

“In the long run it’s probably just as well that things fell apart between Georgia and me,” Adam confided to Eugene.“Hell, there’s enough grief in the world without a man finding himself caught in the crossfire between warring in-laws, wouldn’t you say?”

Although Eugene continued to stare commiseratingly into space, a young woman pushing a baby carriage through the little park heard Adam muttering to himself, flung him a startled glance, and gave him a wide berth.

Just then, the Courthouse clock struck the quarter hour, reminding him that he was taking Beverley to lunch at one.“Well, enough of this rubbish,” he decided, turning up the collar of his jacket and heading for his grandmother’s 1979 Rolls-Royce which he’d prudently parked on the far side of the square, just in case Georgia had spotted it and decided not to answer the door to her chichi little establishment.“All I need is to have it rumored abroad that I’ve come back from the dead with half my marbles missing and was spotted wandering around town talking to myself!”

The minute they were seated at their usual window table at the Riverside Club, Natalie Chamberlaine went into a recital of the prenuptial affairs being hosted during the coming week in Georgia’s honor. What she forgot to mention, Samantha, Georgia’s younger sister, supplied.

Georgia bent her mouth into what she hoped passed for a smile and tried to look interested. Apparently, she didn’t try hard enough.

“You know, Georgia,” her mother commented, visibly annoyed, “people are going to quite a lot of trouble for you. It seems to me that the least you could do is show a little enthusiasm and appreciation in return. It is the second time they’ve done this, after all.”

“Yes.” Samantha nodded smugly, secure in the knowledge that, unlike her older sister, she’d managed to get married on the first try without making a botch of things.“Smarten up, Georgia. It’s not as if we’re just recycling leftovers from the first time.”

Except for Adam! Georgia thought, and fought to stifle a burst of hysterical laughter.

“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong, dear?” Her mother peered at her narrowly.“You really don’t seem yourself today.”

Georgia toyed with her spinach salad. All morning long she’d debated on when and how to tell her family the news that was doing a great job of turning her nicely ordered world upside-down. But she’d held back because she knew there’d be an uproar from both her mother and sister when they heard. On the other hand, Adam wasn’t exactly sneaking around in secret, so how long could she afford to wait before letting them in on the fact that he’d turned up again?

Perhaps now was as good a time as any, after all. If nothing else, it would keep the outcry of protests down to a dull roar because nothing less than seeing her daughters held up at gunpoint would allow Natalie Chamberlaine to indulge in public hysteria. It wasn’t considered seemly behaviour for members of the upper echelon of Piper Landing society.