Prelude to a Wedding (The Wedding Series Book 1)

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  Nearly four hours later Bette found herself trying to figure out exactly where she’d lost control with Paul Monroe. Somewhere, she figured, between the time he played on her sense of responsibility by mentioning the need to discuss business and the time he cast out the lure of deep-dish pizza. She dismissed as overly pessimistic the voice that insisted on whispering that control had walked out the minute Paul had walked in the day before.

  The dinner had been wonderful. And so, she had to admit, had the company.

  He’d regaled her with tales of the oddities he’d seen in his business and of the escapades he’d pulled in his life. He’d also drawn stories from her of her childhood and her travails in setting up her business, but she didn’t enjoy that half as much as when he talked—and made her laugh.

  As the cab carried them south from the restaurant toward the center of the city, she studied him. A man whose business was children’s toys. A man who refused to live by schedules or plans. A man who seemed wary of committing to something as simple as choosing a temporary assistant. Logic said, a man wary of committing to anything. Or anyone?

  She frowned, disturbed for reasons she couldn’t explain.

  “Wait a minute. Stop here,” Paul ordered the cabbie as they neared the northern limit of Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile.

  Bundling Bette out of the taxi, he paid the fare and started her off across the wind-whipped boulevard.

  “What are you doing? Where are we going?”

  “The beach.”

  “What?”

  “Oak Street Beach. I haven’t been there all summer.” He took her hand and wrapped it securely in the warmth of his, then led her across the lanes of traffic. They’d reached the sidewalk bordering the beach before she thought to protest further. “Don’t you think it’s a little late in the season to be going to the beach?”

  “Don’t want to rush into anything,” he said with a grin, still pulling her along.

  “Hey. Wait a minute. I’m getting sand in my shoes.” Hauling back on his hand, she managed to stop him.

  “Take ’em off.”

  She glared. “I also have hosiery on, and besides, it’s October.”

  “It’s also probably seventy degrees, and the sand’s been soaking up sun all day.”

  He had a point; she ignored it. “I’m not taking my shoes off and walking in the sand in my hose. And before you say it,” she rushed on, “I’m not taking off my hose on a public beach, either.”

  He looked at her a long moment, and she had the impression that a measuring and accounting was taking place. She stood very still for the outcome.

  “You want to go back?” It was an offer more than a question.

  Now she felt as if she were the one doing the measuring and accounting, only she didn’t know of what or by what standards. Had he experienced this uncertainty a moment ago? She considered the toes of her shoes, already awash in a wave of sand. The black leather pumps needed polishing anyhow, and their wedge heels were nearly flat. She glanced at the tall, lighted buildings standing sentinel behind them, then out to the glistening roll of the lake and finally back to Paul. He watched her without judgment, not goading, not pressuring. Just waiting.

  “Could we walk a little slower?”

  His eyes lit first, then he smiled. “Yeah, I think we could manage that.”

  She smiled back, feeling oddly happy, as they started more sedately for the edge of the water.

  “Thanks, Bette.” The quick words sounded almost ill at ease, as if he expected her to jump on them. “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss walking on Oak Street Beach. I’ve done it every summer since I was fourteen.”

  “Summer, huh?” She made as if to pull her suit jacket closer around her, though the lake breeze felt good against her heated skin. “I suppose you do everything at the last minute?”

  “Everything.” He drew her close, then let loose her hand to loop an arm around her shoulders in a chill-chasing gesture.

  Disconcerted by the immediate response she felt, she dredged up extra disapproval to lace with her teasing. “I suspect you’re one of the people they show on the TV news, lining up to beat the midnight postmark for your tax return.”

  “I’ve met some very interesting people in that line.”

  She couldn’t repress a grin at his blatant self-satisfaction, but it faltered as he turned his head and contemplated her. His face was too close, his eyes too observant, his mouth too...tempting. “Bet you’d never be in that line, would you?” His eyes dropped to her lips, and she felt as if her heart and lungs were operating at double time. He blinked. “And I suppose you have your Christmas shopping done by Labor Day?”

  “Of course.” She’d never been prouder of producing two steady words.

  He gave a histrionic shudder, and she laughed. Everything had returned to normal. Almost.

  “Some years,” she confided, “I get really crazy and wait until Halloween. But I’m always done, totally done, by my parents’ anniversary the first week of December. That way I can enjoy the holiday. And you, I suppose, are probably out there on Christmas Eve madly buying.”

  “Of course. The insane rush is half the fun of Christmas, as long as you go about it with the right attitude. You can’t be buying to meet some quota, you have to be looking for the exactly right gift.”

  They’d reached the water and turned to follow the narrow path of sand that had been hard-packed by restless waves and gentle tides.

  “Why can’t you look for the exactly right gift before December 24th?”

  He leaned toward her intently. “But that’s just it. What if you get what you think’s the right gift on December 14th and then find the perfect present on the 24th? Do you return the gift you bought on the 14th or do you pass up the perfect present?”

  She shrugged, and his arm rose and fell with the gesture. It made them seem connected somehow, that her movement affected his. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On if you have the receipt. On how hard it is to get back to the store where you got the 14th’s present or if that present might be something someone else would like or maybe even something you need yourself.”

  He groaned. “All those ‘ifs.’ I save myself all that. I take no chances. By the 24th, it is the perfect present, like it or not.”

  They’d stopped in unspoken accord. They stared out across the water. Bette was aware of how the concentrated glow of lights from downtown illuminated the right side of Paul’s face, and lights strung along the city’s Gold Coast were nearly as strong on her left side. Between existed a shadowed world that seemed to leave the city and its everyday life far behind. This world between had only the light of the moon to reveal it, a strange light that could make the ordinary extraordinary and mask the dangerous.

  She smiled slyly at him. “Of course you realize, don’t you, that by the time you go shopping on the 24th, you’re just looking at my leftovers. I’ve already snatched up all the perfect presents out there.”

  His wounded expression drew a triumphant chuckle from her that he joined with easy, warm laughter.

  It was crazy. The whole thing. Walking on a beach in her work clothes in the middle of October—even if the weather seemed a flashback to August—with a man she’d known exactly thirty hours, and whose drawbacks easily reached double digits. And enjoying it. A lot.

  Crazy.

  The laughter and the warmth lingered. Paul turned to her, and slight pressure from his arm shifted her shoulders so she faced him. The grin still lifted his lips and fizzed in his eyes. She watched that, so fascinated by the amusement that always seemed near the surface with him that she was hardly aware when he lowered his head and brought his mouth to hers.

  Her last thought, a flash, really, was how like Paul Monroe it was to kiss her with a grin still molding his lips. She felt the teasing joy in the gliding pressure of his skin against hers.

  How different this was from the night before. Then he’d d
rawn out the moment before their mouths met like an extended question; now he swept into the first kiss, and a second, without hesitation. Then he’d whispered a caress; now he stated it boldly. She felt a sensation of warmth that came from one arm still around her shoulder, and the other across her lower back, drawing her to him and out of the lake’s cooling night breeze. A sensation of heat that came from the insistent sweep of his tongue against her lips, edging her nearer to some elemental furnace.

  “Bette.” She heard the faint request in his voice, even as he muffled it against the skin of her cheek, jaw and throat, and when his mouth came back to hers, she parted her lips. Her hand rested high on his shoulder, so the tips of two fingers grazed the skin at the side of his neck. The fingers of her other hand wound in his hair where it topped his jacket collar. She clenched them tighter, waiting.

  He took her top lip between his teeth, not quite nipping, but seeming more to test. She sighed, and his tongue lingered on her lips, finally slipping through slowly, exploring thoroughly. She felt the glide of his tongue against the sharply smooth ridge of her teeth and gave a small, smothered gasp of impatience. Then he was done with teasing, meeting her tongue and drawing it back into his mouth.

  She had the notion that her nerve endings had retreated from her limbs and brain, leaving them weightless and empty. But there seemed nerve endings to spare in other parts of her body, the parts in contact with his, where the impression of his flesh seemed to pass through layers of his clothes and hers, and into her skin.

  He shifted, bringing her into closer alignment with his body, so her breasts absorbed the firmness of his chest. Pressing his arm against her hips, he settled her into the narrow cradle created by his wider stance, and she recognized the sensation of another male firmness.

  For an instant, an instant without consequences, without responsibilities, she felt only a responsive softening and warming.

  But she had spent too much of her life following step after careful step toward a specific end not to know that with such incendiary steps as these, one thing would most definitely lead to another.

  She pulled away from his mouth with a gasp that was partly driven by a need for oxygen and partly by disappointment at the separation. A step backward got her nowhere because his arms held her fast, and pushing her hands against his chest got no results. For a breath, her mind acknowledged her situation, alone on the beach with a man strong enough to hold her against her will. But she didn’t truly fear him. Perhaps she would have if she hadn’t realized that the deep, uneven breaths he pulled in as he rested his cheek against her temple were his method of regaining equilibrium.

  He’s shaken, too, she thought. His reaction steadied her, making her own responses seem less extreme. She was also, at some level, grateful he hadn’t let her go. She wasn’t sure she could have stood alone in those first seconds.

  When, with a last long breath, he loosened his arms, she stepped clear of the heat. With quick, unconscious movements, she straightened her jacket, twisted her blouse into line, smoothed her skirt and ran her fingers through her hair. Only when her hands moved to her lips, a reflexive reaction to the burning sensation there, did she feel Paul watching her. His gaze slanted at her from the side. She stopped her gesture half-made.

  “I, uh—” She stopped to clear her throat, and started again. “I think we’d better get back now.”

  For a man so full of teasing words and easy talk, he could be amazingly quiet. She couldn’t even be sure if she heard or imagined the half sigh before he spoke the single word. “Okay.”

  They started across the sand toward the lights of Michigan Avenue. He seemed content to let silence stretch between them. She wished he wouldn’t. It gave her too much time to wonder what he was thinking, why he was so uncharacteristically—What? Almost solemn?

  Was that how he felt after kissing her? Solemn? If she’d learned anything about Paul Monroe over the past two evenings it was that solemnity lived outside his philosophy of life. She felt like a thundercloud at a picnic, and fought the ridiculous urge to shed a few raindrops right now.

  “Well, one thing for certain.”

  His voice made her jump, but she welcomed it and, as they emerged into the brighter lights and firmer ground of the city’s streets, she gladly supplied the line he’d demanded. “What’s that?”

  “I definitely won’t be doing my Christmas shopping early this year.”

  “Why not?” She didn’t really care, but as long as the wryness had returned to his voice, she’d encourage him.

  “Who can think about Christmas when they just went through a heat wave?”