I can't help but smile at the thought that we're pulling something over on those vultures.
Beyond them, the Pacific glows a warm purple tinged with orange from the swiftly setting sun.
Soon, I think. Soon I will be Mrs. Damien Stark.
"You're sure this is what you want?" Damien asks as the air fills with the thrum of his helicopter. It swoops down in front of us to settle gently on the helipad.
I take one more look at the panorama spread out before me. "I'm sure," I say, raising my voice to be heard over the rotors.
Below us, Gregory and Tony are loading suitcases into the bird.
I rise up on my toes and kiss Damien, hard and fast and deep. I pull away, breathless, and smile at the irony--it took a shove from my mother to drive home something I should have realized all along.
I press my palm to Damien's chest, wanting to feel the beat of his heart beneath my hand. "It's not the walk down the aisle that matters--it's the man waiting for me when I get there. You said it yourself, it's the only wedding I'll ever have, and this is the way I want it." No stress, no drama, no paparazzi. No polite chitchat, no worries about music or food or flowers or unexpected relatives showing up out of the blue. Just Damien and those two little words--I do.
"And all the work you've put into the reception?" he asks, even though we talked about this last night--about how I'd been working so hard for perfection that I lost sight of what Damien already knew--that so long as we end up as man and wife, "perfect" is a given.
Still, I indulge him by answering again. I understand he needs to be certain that I am sure I want to do this.
"The party's important, too," I say. "And they'll have a great one." I nod toward the beach. "Trust me. Jamie has it under control. If anyone knows how to make sure a crowd has a good time at a party, it's my best friend." I smile more broadly. "I asked Ryan to help her. They'll party through the night, and anyone who has a mind to can watch us get married in the morning. And Evelyn promised to spin the crap out of it for the press."
Damien's smile is as wide as my own. "I love you, Ms. Fairchild," he says.
"You won't be able to say that much longer. Soon it'll be Mrs. Stark."
He takes my hand and tugs me toward the stairs. "Then let's go," he says. "The sooner, the better."
We hurry hand in hand down the stairs, then sprint for the helicopter, heads down, laughing. Damien helps me aboard, and once we're strapped in, he signals the pilot and the bird takes off.
So, with the guests waving goodbye from the beach and the paparazzi snapping wildly, we elope into the sunset, leaving our wedding guests to eat our food, drink our champagne, and dance into the night.
Damien and I stand on a beach beside a foaming sea that is shifting away from the gray of night into a cacophony of colors with the rising sun. That was something else I'd realized: I couldn't get married at sunset. I had to have a sunrise wedding.
I am wearing my wedding dress and the necklace that Damien gave me, and when I saw the look in Damien's eyes as I walked the short distance down the aisle to him, I knew that whatever trouble it took to rescue the dress was worth it. I feel like a princess. Hell, I feel like a bride. And in Damien's eyes, I feel beautiful.
I am not wearing shoes, and I curl my toes into the sand, feeling wild and decadent and free. There is no stress, there are no worries. There is simply this wedding and the man beside me, and that is all that I need.
In front of us, a Mexican official is performing the ceremony in broken, heavily accented English. I am pretty sure I have never heard anything more beautiful.
"Do you take this man?" he asks, and I say the words that have been in my heart from the moment I first met Damien. "I do."
"I do," says Damien in turn. He is facing me as he speaks, and I can see the depth of emotion in his dual-colored eyes. Mine, he mouths, and I nod. It is true. I am his, and always will be.
And Damien Stark is mine.
A few feet away, a small boy who has been paid some pesos is holding Damien's phone, streaming video of our wedding back to Malibu, where Jamie is projecting the ceremony onto one of the tent walls, just in case any of the guests are still sober and awake after a long night of partying.
Here on our beach, the official pronounces us man and wife. The words crash over me, heavy with meaning, filling my soul. "That day," I whisper, my heart full to bursting. "That day when you asked me to pose for you--I never expected it to end like this."
"But it hasn't ended, Mrs. Stark. This is just the beginning." His voice sounds full to bursting, and his words are absolutely perfect.
I nod, because he is right, and because I am so overwhelmed by the moment I can manage nothing else.
"I'm going to kiss you now," he says, then captures my mouth with his. The kiss is long and deep, and all around us the locals clap and cheer.
I cling to Damien, never wanting to let go, as the sun continues to rise around us, casting us in the glow of morning.
Perfect, I think. Because the sun will never set between Damien and me. Not today, not ever.
Excerpt from WANTED
If you loved the Stark Trilogy, you won't want to miss
WANTED
The first book in J. Kenner's hot new
Most Wanted series
Coming soon from Headline Eternal
Read on for an excerpt . . .
Chapter One
I know exactly when my life shifted. That precise instant when his eyes met mine and I no longer saw the bland look of familiarity, but danger and fire, lust and hunger.
Perhaps I should have turned away. Perhaps I should have run.
I didn't. I wanted him. More, I needed him. The man, and the fire that he ignited inside of me.
And in his eyes, I saw that he needed me, too.
That was the moment everything changed. Me most of all.
But whether it changed for good or for ill . . . well, that remains to be seen.
Even dead, my uncle Jahn knew how to throw one hell of a party.
His Chicago lakeside penthouse was bursting at the seams with an eclectic collection of mourners, most of whom had imbibed so much wine from the famous Howard Jahn cellar that whatever melancholy they'd brought with them had been sweetly erased, and now this wake or reception or whatever the hell you wanted to call it wasn't the least bit somber. Politicians mingled with financiers mingled with artists and academics, and everyone was smiling and laughing and toasting the deceased.
At his request, there'd been no formal funeral. Just this gathering of friends and family, food and drink, music and mirth. Jahn--he hated the name Howard--had lived a vibrant life, and that was never more obvious than now in his death.
I missed him so damn much, but I hadn't cried. Hadn't screamed and ranted. Hadn't done anything, really, except move through the days and nights lost in a haze of emotions, my mind numb. My body anesthetized.
I sighed and fingered the charm on my silver bracelet. He'd presented me with the tiny motorcycle just over a month ago, and the gift had made me smile. I hadn't talked about wanting to ride a motorcycle since before I turned sixteen. And it had been years since I'd ridden behind a boy, my arms tight around his waist and my hair blowing in the wind.
But Uncle Jahn knew me better than anyone. He saw past the princess to the girl hidden inside. A girl who'd built up walls out of necessity, but still desperately wanted to break free. Who longed to slip on a pair of well-worn jeans, grab a battered leather jacket, and go a little wild.
Sometimes, she even did. And sometimes it didn't end right at all.
I tightened my grip on the charm as the memory of Jahn holding my hand--of him promising to keep my secrets--swept over me, finally bringing tears to my eyes. He should be beside me, dammit, and the swell of laughter and conversation that filled the room was making me a little sick.
Despite the fact that I knew Jahn wanted it this way, it was all I could do not to smack all the people who'd hugged me and murmured softly that
he was in a better place and wasn't it wonderful that he'd lived such a full life. That was such bullshit--he hadn't even turned sixty yet. Vibrant men in their fifties shouldn't drop dead from aneurysms, and there weren't enough pithy Hallmark quotes in the universe to make me think otherwise.
Antsy, I shifted my weight from foot to foot. There was a bar set up on the other side of the room, and I'd positioned myself as far away as physically possible because right then I wanted the burn of tequila. Wanted to let go, to explode through the numbness that clung to me like a cocoon. To run. To feel.
But that wasn't going to happen. No alcohol was passing these lips tonight. I was Jahn's niece, after all, and that made me some kind of hostess-by-default, which meant I was stuck in the penthouse. Four thousand square feet, but I swear I could feel the art-covered walls pressing in around me.
I wanted to race up the spiral staircase to the rooftop patio, then leap over the balcony into the darkening sky. I wanted to take flight over Lake Michigan and the whole world. I wanted to break things and scream and rant and curse this damned universe that had taken away a good man.
Shit. I sucked in a breath and looked down at the exquisite ancient-looking notebook inside the glass-and-chrome display case I'd been leaning against. The leather-bound book was an exceptionally well-done copy of a recently discovered Da Vinci notebook. Dubbed the Creature Notebook, it had sixteen pages of animal studies and was open to the center, revealing a stunning sketch the young master had drawn--his study for the famous, but never located, dragon shield. Jahn had attempted to acquire the notebook, and I remember just how angry he'd been when he'd lost out to Victor Neely, another Chicago businessman, with a private collection that rivaled my uncle's.
At the time, I'd just started at Northwestern with a major in poli sci and a minor in art history. I'm not particularly talented, but I've sketched my whole life, and I've been fascinated with art--and in particular with Leonardo da Vinci--since my parents took me to my first museum at the age of three.
I thought the Creature Notebook was beyond cool, and I'd been irritated on Jahn's behalf when he not only lost out on it, but when the press had poured salt in the wound by prattling on about Neely's amazing new acquisition.
About a year later, Jahn showed me the facsimile, bright and shiny in the custom-made display case. As a general rule, my uncle never owned a copy. If he couldn't have the original--be it a Rembrandt or a Rauschenberg or a Da Vinci--he simply moved on. When I'd asked why he'd made an exception for the Creature Notebook, he shrugged and told me that the images were at least as interesting as the provenance. "Besides, anyone who can successfully copy a Da Vinci has created a masterpiece himself."
Despite the fact that it wasn't authentic, the notebook was my favorite of Jahn's many manuscripts and artifacts, and now, standing with my hands pressed to the glass, I felt as if he was, in some small way, beside me.
I drew in a breath, knowing I had to get my act together, if for no other reason than the more wrecked I looked, the more the guests would try to cheer me up. Not that I looked particularly wrecked. When you grow up as Angelina Hayden Raine, with a United States senator for a father and a mother who served on the board of over a dozen international nonprofit organizations, you learn the difference between a public and a private face very early on. Especially when you have your own secrets to keep.
"This is so goddamn fucked up it makes me want to scream."
I felt a whisper of a smile touch my lips and turned around to find myself looking into Kat's bloodshot eyes.
"Oh, hell, Angie," she said. "He shouldn't be dead."
"He'd be pissed if he knew you'd been crying," I said, blinking away the last of my own tears.
"Fuck that."
I almost laughed. Katrina Laron had a talent for cutting straight through the bullshit.
I'm not sure which one of us leaned in first, but we caught each other in a bone-crushing hug. With a sniffle, I finally pulled away. Perverse, maybe, but just knowing that someone else was acknowledging the utter horror of the situation made me feel infinitesimally better.
"Every time I turn a corner, I feel like I'm going to see him," I said. "I almost wish I'd stayed in my old place."
I'd moved in four months ago when Uncle Jahn's aneurysm was discovered. I'd taken time off from work--easy when you work for your uncle. For two weeks I'd played nurse after he came home from the hospital, and when he'd been given the all-clear by the doctors--yeah, like that was a good call--I'd accepted his invitation to move in permanently. Why not? The tiny apartment I'd shared with my lifelong friend, Flynn, wasn't exactly the lap of luxury. And although I loved Flynn, he wasn't the easiest person to cohabitate with. He knew me too well, and it always made me uneasy when people saw what I wanted to keep hidden.
Now, though, I craved both the cocoonlike comfort of my tiny room and Flynn's steady presence. As much as I loved the condo, without my uncle it was cold and hollow, and just being in it made me feel brittle. As if at any moment I would shatter into a million pieces.
Kat's eyes were warm and understanding. "I know. But he loved having you here. God knows why," she added with a quirky grin. "You're nothing but trouble."
I rolled my eyes. At twenty-seven, Katrina Laron was only four years older than me, but that didn't stop her from pulling the older-and-wiser card whenever she got the chance. The fact that we'd become friends under decidedly dodgy circumstances probably played a role, too.
She'd been working at one of the coffee shops in Evanston where I used to mainline caffeine during my first year at Northwestern. We'd chatted a couple of times in an "extra cream, please, it's been a bitch of a day" kind of way, but we were hardly on a first-name basis.
All that changed when we bumped into each other on a day when extra cream wasn't going to cut it for me--not by a long shot. It was in the Michigan Avenue Neiman Marcus and I'd been surfing on adrenaline, using it to soothe the rough edges of a particularly crappy day. Specifically, I'd just succumbed to my personal demons and surreptitiously dropped a pair of fifteen-dollar clearance earrings into my purse. But, apparently, not as surreptitiously as I'd thought.
"Well, aren't you the stumbling amateur?" she'd whispered as she steered me toward women's shoes. "With a shit technique like that, it's a wonder you haven't been arrested yet."
"Arrested!" I squeaked, as if that word would carry all the way to Washington and to my father's all-hearing ears. The fear of getting caught might be part of the excitement, but actually getting caught wasn't a good thing at all. "No, I didn't--I mean--"
She cut off my protests with a casual flip of her hand. "All I'm saying is, be smart. If you're going to take a risk, at least make it worth the trouble. Those earrings? Really not the bomb."
"It's not about the earrings," I'd snapped, then immediately cringed. The words had been a knee-jerk response, but they were also true. It wasn't about the earrings. It was about my dad, and the grad school lectures and the career-planning talks, and the never-spoken certainty that no matter what I did, my sister would have done it better.
It was about the oppressive, overwhelming weight of my life and my future that was bearing down on me, harder and harder until I was certain that if I didn't do something to break out a little I'd spontaneously combust.
Kat had glanced at my purse as if she could see through the soft Coach leather to the contraband inside. Then she slowly lifted her eyes back to my face. The silence hung between us for a full minute. She nodded. "Don't worry. I get it." She cocked her head toward the exit. "Come on."
Relief flooded through me, and my limbs, which had frozen in both fear and mortification, began to thaw. She steered me to her car, a cherry-red Mustang that she drove at more or less the speed of light. She careened down Michigan Avenue, maneuvered her way onto Lake Shore Drive, and came so close to the other cars as she zipped in and out of traffic that I'm surprised her convertible didn't lose a layer of paint. In other words, it was freaking awesome. The top was down,
the wind was whipping my hair into my face and mouth, and all I could do was tilt my head back and laugh.
Kat risked our lives long enough to shoot me one sideways glance. "Yeah," she said. "We're going to get along just fine."
From that moment on, I'd adored Kat. Now, with Jahn's death sending my universe reeling, I realized that I not only loved her--I relied on her.
"I'm really glad you're here," I said.
"Where else would I be?" She scanned the room. "Are your mom and dad around somewhere?"
"They couldn't make it. They're stuck overseas." The familiar numbness settled over me again as I remembered my mother's hysterical sobs and the deep well of sorrow that had filled my father's voice when he'd learned about his half-brother. "I hated calling them," I whispered. "It felt like Gracie all over again."
"I'm so sorry." Kat had never met my sister, but she'd heard the story. The public version, anyway, and I knew her sympathy was real.
I managed a wavering smile. "I know. That means a lot to me."
"The whole thing sucks," Kat said. "It's so unfair. Your uncle was too damn cool to die."
"I guess the universe doesn't give a shit about coolness."
"The universe can be a raving bitch sometimes," Kat said. She exhaled loudly. "Want me to crash here tonight so you won't be alone? We could stay up late getting so wasted that there's no way in hell either one of us will dream."
"Thanks, but I think I'll be okay."
She eyed me uncertainly. She was one of the few people I'd confided in about my nightmares, and while I appreciated the sympathy, sometimes I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.
"Really," I said earnestly. "Kevin's here."
"Oh, yeah? And how's that going? Engaged yet?"
"Not quite," I said wryly. I supposed we were dating since I'd slept with him twice, but so far I'd dodged the let's-be-exclusive conversation. I wasn't sure why I was so reticent. The sex wasn't mind-blowing, but it did the job. And I genuinely liked the guy. But I'd spent the last few months holding him at arm's length, telling him I needed to keep my attention on Jahn's surgery, then his recovery.