Vegas Wedding, Weaver Bride
Vegas Wedding, Weaver Bride
Allison Leigh
What happened in Vegas…When Penny Garner and Quinn Templeton wake up in bed together – in Vegas – with rings and a marriage certificate on the bedside table it looks like they did more than just sleep! While they wait to see if their night had physical consequences, can Quinn convince Penny to leave her old heartbreak in the past and become his bride?
“I do. Wait...did I?”
Hometown girl Penny Garner is having a Vegas moment: waking up in bed with her teenage crush, a ring on her finger. Then there’s the matter of the marriage certificate. How did that happen? The jury’s out on whether it’s Penny’s dream come true or worst nightmare.
Quinn Templeton has to wonder what they actually did that night, too. And when they get back to Weaver, Wyoming, the air force pararescueman can’t just ignore the real feelings for his fake bride—especially if Penny’s pregnant. Will they remember what brought them to the altar in the first place...and maybe sign up for a repeat performance?
“It’s not real.”
She picked the paper up. Studied her signature on the line that said Bride. She took in Quinn’s slash of a signature, as well.
She looked up at him, then just as quickly away. When she’d been fifteen, she’d had a crazy mad crush on him. So much so that she’d thrown herself at him. He’d been home on leave from the air force. He’d ruthlessly brushed aside her immature advances.
Now she wished she still possessed some of the outrageous guts she’d had in her youth. Because it was more than a little mortifying to be knocking on the door of thirty and feeling wholly out of her depth when faced with a seriously naked, gorgeous man.
A man with whom she’d apparently spent the night.
A man with whom she’d apparently signed a marriage certificate.
* * *
Return to the Double C: Under the big blue Wyoming sky, this family discovers true love
Vegas Wedding, Weaver Bride
Allison Leigh
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
A frequent name on bestseller lists, ALLISON LEIGH’s high point as a writer is hearing from readers that they laughed, cried or lost sleep while reading her books. She credits her family with great patience for the time she’s parked at her computer, and for blessing her with the kind of love she wants her readers to share with the characters living in the pages of her books. Contact her at allisonleigh.com (http://www.allisonleigh.com).
For my husband.
Always surprising and ever holding my heart.
Contents
Cover (#u0392afcc-f551-53fa-9f53-b39b45d5ace6)
Back Cover Text (#u0bab319c-fd8f-5f5b-85dc-499aad7c6826)
Introduction (#u26aa36e5-dddd-56e8-8913-58d4fbd3e5bb)
Title Page (#uac986653-e2f5-5a67-96ad-f02b0ce052b3)
About the Author (#u537dccd2-c8b0-5a02-8621-b38fd773a8f2)
Dedication (#uce288c75-39d2-5fbb-82a5-506cb27e61ef)
Chapter One (#ue464972e-60a2-5e42-b056-43d7acc4cbc7)
Chapter Two (#ufd73fd81-a0f5-5130-b130-16b052251daf)
Chapter Three (#u833b2b2a-5b52-5b85-92c3-b0fc152306f2)
Chapter Four (#u6ac62752-9353-53ec-804a-d1caddba3186)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
Las Vegas, Nevada
Penny Garner stared at the piece of paper Quinn Templeton was holding between his long fingers. Her stomach, which had already been hovering somewhere two floors below her feet, sank even farther.
She clutched the white bedsheet closer against her naked body, trying desperately to pretend that Quinn wasn’t just as naked. He simply wasn’t bothering with a sheet to hide anything. From the top of his rumpled, dark-haired head to the long, vaguely bony toes on his feet, he was entirely, utterly, gloriously bare.
And he didn’t seem the least bit shy about it, either.
Which left Penny two choices.
Focus on him, or focus on the piece of paper he’d found on the nightstand next to the bed.
And the piece of paper—disturbing as it was—seemed safer at the moment. “What is that?”
Quinn flicked the official-looking document onto the bed that stood between them. The tumbled bed that Penny had scrambled out of only minutes earlier, dragging the sheet along with her. “You can read.”
She could read. But that didn’t mean the marriage certificate, lying with lopsided innocence against one of the bed pillows, made any sense.
She unwound one arm from the sheet to reach out for the sheet of paper. “It’s not real.”
She picked it up. Studied her signature on the line that said “Bride.” Penelope Garner was looped across it in familiar, lopsided cursive. The “Groom” line was similarly obscured under Quinn’s slashing signature.
She looked up at him. Then just as quickly away. When she’d been fifteen, she’d had a crazy mad crush on him. So much so, that she’d thrown herself at him. Tried, in her juvenile way, to seduce him. He’d been home on leave from the air force. She’d been living with her latest foster family, the Bennetts, across the street from where his parents lived.
At the time, he’d ruthlessly crushed her immature advances.
Now she wished she still possessed some of the outrageous guts she’d had in her youth. Because it was more than a little mortifying to be knocking on the door of thirty and feeling wholly out of her depth when faced for the first time with a seriously naked, gorgeous man.
A man with whom she’d spent the night.
A man with whom she’d signed a marriage certificate.
She sank onto the edge of the bed. Which at least gave her the advantage of turning her back toward him.
“This has to be a joke. Right?” It was hard enough to believe she’d slept with him. But marry? She set the certificate on the mattress beside her and wound her shaking hands inside the sheet twisted around her. “It looks like my signature. But I don’t remember signing it. Do you?”
“No.”
If she concentrated on the paper hard enough, then maybe she could forget the way she’d wakened.
Wrapped in his arms.
Intimately.
Fortunately, she’d come to her senses and scrambled out of bed, dragging the sheet with her.
Unfortunately, that was about the time he’d noticed the marriage certificate. And his brows had pulled together in the fiercest frown she’d ever seen.
Her fingers worried the edges of the sheet clutched above her breasts. “Then it’s got to be a joke.”
The fancy Las Vegas hotel suite had thick, plush carpet that easily swallowed the sound of Quinn’s footsteps as he rounded the bed to her side. “Who would play a joke like that?”
She averted her eyes before she got too much of an eyeful of his muscular nude body. He’d been injured during his latest deployment. Had spent months in the hospital, she knew. It didn’t seem logical that he could be so tanned all over the way he was. The only pale skin he possessed was—
She made herself look away again.
“I don’t know!” All her frustrated confusion sounded in her voice as she raked back her hair. “Your cousins? Your sister?”
“Maybe Viv?” His deep voice turned mocking. “God knows little old ladies like my recently discovered granny are prone to pulling off pranks like this.”
She made a face at him, only to get distracted yet again by all that...nakedness. She could only imagine how his granny would react if Viv knew her personal assistant had gotten into mischief with her grandson on what was supposed to be Vivian’s get-to-know-each-other-better trip with her grandchildren. “Would you please put on some clothes?”
“I remember a time when you wanted me to take ’em off.” But mercifully, he moved out of her sight again.
“Yeah, well, I was a kid,” she muttered. A wild, willful kid who’d only been trying to find her place in a world that seemed to have no place for her at all. “And if you were any sort of gentleman, you wouldn’t remind me of that.”
He snorted softly and sat on the side of the bed right next to her. “I’m not a gentleman.”
She peeked at the blue jeans now hugging his thighs and breathed a little easier. At least as easily as she could, considering his bare shoulder was brushing warmly against hers. “You’re in the air force. Isn’t being a gentleman a requirement?”
He didn’t answer that, but plucked the crumpling piece of paper from between them and held it between his hands. “At least you’re not jail bait anymore,” he muttered. “What’s the last thing you remember from last night?”
She felt her cheeks getting hot.
They were sitting on the edge of a hotel room bed. It was painfully obvious what had happened last night. Her imaginative mind had no trouble whatsoever filling in the blanks.
And wasn’t it ironic as all get-out that she’d finally shed her virginal state, but couldn’t actually remember a single detail of it?
Even as a teenager, he’d inspired insanity in her. As an adult, clearly nothing had changed.
Flushing even hotter, she pushed off the bed, dragging the unwieldy sheet with her. “I remember the nightclub.” His grandmother had been adamant that Penny join them. “I remember your grandmother kept ordering bottles of champagne.” Penny had been a little concerned. In addition to being the woman’s personal assistant, she was supposed to be watching out for Vivian’s health.
But Vivian had also been surrounded by five of her fully adult grandchildren. If they’d been cheering on their fully capable grandmother, how on earth could Penny have intervened?
“Viv does seem to like her champagne.” He pushed off the bed, too, grimacing a little as he straightened. He pressed his hand to his side, covering the long surgical scar there as he paced around the bed again, coming to a stop in front of the enormous sliding glass door that opened to a narrow balcony with a spectacular view of the city below. His hand went from his side to the window as he looked out.
The August sun was shining brightly outside the glass, and the sunlight threw his body into perfect relief. From the spread of his wide shoulders to the narrowness of his hips where the blue jeans clung a little too precariously, the only flaws he possessed were that long zipper-like scar and a scattering of small pale blotches on his side.
“Last thing I remember was dancing with you.” His thumb tapped the window. “We’d been at the bar. Champagne’s not usually my thing. I ordered a pitcher of margaritas for the table.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than her.
She felt perspiration spring out on her forehead. “It can’t be a real marriage certificate.”
“Yeah, well, unless we prove it one way or another—” He broke off when there was a knock on the door.
His eyes were as dark a brown as his hair and they looked toward her, questioningly. Combined with the whiskers blurring his jaw and the faint lines arrowing out from his eyes, it was a powerful combination.
“How should I know?” she whispered. “This is your suite.”
She’d been the one to make all the hotel arrangements for Vivian’s little Las Vegas jaunt. Quinn, his sister, Delia, his triplet cousins and Vivian were all on the same floor. Penny’s room was twenty floors below. Down in the less outrageously expensive section. Vivian had thought that particular touch was uproariously funny.
But then Vivian Archer Templeton had more money than Midas. She could afford expensive vacations like this for half her family anytime she wanted.
The knocking got louder, this time accompanied by feminine laughter. “Come on, Master Sergeant Templeton,” came the muffled voice through the door. “Get your lazy bones moving. You’re going to be late for lunch.”
Lunch.
Penny groaned. Vivian was expecting everyone in her suite for the lunch that Penny had arranged the day before. It was to be their last full day in Las Vegas before heading back home to Wyoming.
“They’re gonna get a kick out of this.” Quinn started for the door, but Penny grabbed his arm, feeling sheer panic flow through her veins.
“You can’t tell them!”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “How do you know they don’t already know?” He held up the certificate. “Maybe they were our wedding guests.”
She felt the blood drain out of her face. He was right. If neither one of them could remember the events of the previous night, how could she assume anything? “Don’t bring it up if they don’t,” she whispered fiercely. “Promise me!”
His eyes searched hers.
The knocking on the door got louder.
“Your leave is going to end. You’ll go back to your life,” she reminded him. “I’ll still be in Weaver. I don’t want the notoriety, okay? Gossip is the town’s best industry.”
His beautifully molded lips compressed. He looked like he wanted to argue.
“Please, Quinn. I’m begging here.”
“Fine.” He sounded none too pleased about it.
Relief still flooded through her. One thing she knew about Quinn Templeton was that he always kept his word.
She dashed around the bed, snatching up the items of her clothing that were visible, and raced toward the bathroom, only to nearly fall on her face as the sheet caught around her feet.
Quinn’s hand shot out, grabbing her arm and righting her.
“Quinn!” The knocking on the door hadn’t ceased.
“Dammit, Greer, I heard you the first time,” he said loudly. “Keep your pants on!” He pushed the crumpled marriage certificate into Penny’s hand and nudged her gently toward the bathroom. “Be more careful,” he murmured.
She ducked her chin, grabbed the sheet higher around her calves so she wouldn’t trip again and hurried into the luxuriously appointed bathroom, closing the door quietly after her.
The sight of her reflection in the wall-size mirror made her shudder. Guilt. Horror. Shock. All of that was in her face. Added to her rat’s nest hair and the whole bedsheet thing, she looked exactly as she’d expect a woman to look after waking up in a strange man’s bed.
Only he wasn’t really a stranger, was he, if she’d known him since she’d been a teenager? Or was that negated by the fact that—aside from his brief visits home to Wyoming—he’d been gone for more than the last decade?
She dumped the certificate, her dress and the one high-heeled sandal she’d found beside the bed on the marble counter and pressed her ear against the closed door.
All she could hear were muffled voices.
She raked her tangled hair away from her face. It was only then that she noticed the narrow band on her left finger. It was gold. Set with sparkling diamonds that circled all the way around. And it was beautiful.
She slid it off so fast it flew out of her fingers and rolled out of sight.
Her conscience nipped at her and she crawled around until she found it. Feeling decidedly nauseated, she set it on top of Quinn’s leather shaving kit, then went to sit on the side of the enormous round bathtub. Pins prickled behind her eyes and she pinched them closed. It was one thing to know she’d slept with him. But how could she have married him?
Once upon a time, she was supposed to have been a bride. A real one. Only instead of marrying Andy, she’d—
“Hey—”
She looked up to see Quinn had opened the door. He’d added a T-shirt over his jeans. The light gray cotton looked stretched almost to breaking point over his shoulders.
“You all right?”
She swiped her cheeks. “You ever hear of that thing called privacy?”
“That’s what locks are for.” His dark, dark eyes roved over her. “There’s no reason to cry. At least my cousin Greer didn’t mention anything unusual. This isn’t the end of the world.”
“Waking up married?” She waved her hand, only to feel her sheet slipping, and yanked it once again up to her neck. “Sure. Nothing to be worried about at all.”
He scrubbed his hand down his bristly jaw. The thick, wavy hair on his head was as dark as ever, but the whiskers there definitely held a touch of gray.
She wished she could say they detracted from his appeal.
But at least that long-fingered hand of his wasn’t sporting a wedding ring.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said.
“I don’t know how you can sound so calm.” She hitched up the long ends of the sheet and stood. “This is a disaster.” She slipped past him to return to the bedroom area. As oversize and opulent as the bathroom was, it was still too small with him in it.
His voice turned flat. “Stop being melodramatic.”
She spotted her other shoe peeking out from beneath the gold silk bedspread that was hanging off the mattress, and grabbed it. She couldn’t remember how the evening had ended the night before, but she distinctly remembered how it had started off—with her fully clothed and wearing her usual complement of panties and bra underneath.
“Maybe it’s not a disaster in comparison to your usual life.” She knew he was part of some special operations thing in the air force. To Penny, that was just code for some really dangerous thing in the air force. “But it is to mine. I have no desire to be anyone’s wife. Certainly not like this.” Not to another man already married to the military. She’d been through that before. Thanks to the army in which Andy had served and a close encounter with an IED on his way home for their wedding, she’d never even had the opportunity to be a widow. Much less a wife.
She went down onto her hands and knees to look under the bed. But the ivory carpet there was smoothly vacuumed and untarnished by discarded undies. She sat back on her knees.
“What are you looking for?”
“The rest of my clothes, obviously.” She hitched up the sheet again and stood. “I need to get back to my room. Clean up. Make sure everything’s set for the flight home tomorrow.”
“What about my grandmother’s lunch?”
“That’s for all of you. I’m the hired help, remember?” She shoved her long hair away from her face again as she walked back into the bathroom, carrying her second shoe.
She shut the door.
Pushed the door lock for good measure.
She dropped the sheet and pulled her stretchy dress over her head, dragging the dark purple fabric down over her bare hips and thighs. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious that she was entirely commando under the dress.
She raked her fingers through her hair, trying to restore a little order to the dishwater-blond mess, and splashed water over her face, using one of the plush towels stacked on a glass shelf before she pushed her bare feet into her high-heeled sandals and opened the door again.
Quinn was leaning against the wall opposite the door, his arms folded over his wide chest. “Feel better?”
She could feel herself flushing, but she gave a brisk nod anyway as she walked out of the bathroom. Without high heels, she was taller than average. With them, she stood close to six feet, putting her generally eye-to-eye with most men.
But not Quinn. He was still several inches taller than she was.
Which was a completely irrelevant point, she reminded herself as she scanned the room, hoping to spot her purse, because she truly did not want to have to go down to the lobby and get a new room key. Not looking the way she did.
Her relief when she finally found it half-hidden among the ivory leather couch cushions was almost comical. Her room key was tucked safely inside one of the pockets, exactly where she’d put it before joining Vivian and her family for dinner the evening before.
She felt her eyes drifting toward the bed and yanked them front and center.
Quinn hadn’t left his position against the wall. Which meant she had to walk past him once again to get to the door of the suite.
“You can’t run far, Penny.”
“I’m not running. You, however, are supposed to be sitting down to lunch with your grandmother.” She opened the door.
But he reached out and closed his hand around her wrist before she could leave. “Viv can wait. It’s not every day I wake up to a wife.”
Heat rushed up her throat into her face. “I’m not your wife.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Really? I know they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but we’re talking marriage here. And we’ve got a certificate that strongly suggests you’re most definitely my wife.”
She didn’t know if it was deliberate or not, but his thumb was pressed right against the racing pulse in her wrist. “Then we’ll get another certificate that undoes it! Annulments must be almost as popular in this state as weddings.”
“Annulment means there’s been no marriage—or anything associated with the marriage—at all.”
“That’s right.” She pulled on her wrist, but his fingers held fast. They weren’t hurting. But they weren’t giving so much as a centimeter.
Instead, he reeled her in closer. He tucked one finger beneath her chin, and her mouth went dry.
He turned her face until she was looking back into the hotel suite.
Right at the bed.
“You sure an annulment is going to be all that easy?” His voice was low. Intimate. “We have a consummated marriage here, sweetheart.”
A flush ran through her veins, and her skin seemed to tingle.
“We don’t know that for sure,” she reminded, wishing that she sounded a lot less hoarse and a lot more certain.
His callused thumb moved slowly over her inner wrist. “You don’t remember the way we woke up?”
She wanted to block out his words as badly as she wanted to block out the truth. Because she did remember exactly the way she’d awakened.
Engulfed in his warmth. His hand on her breast. His hair-roughened thigh between hers.
He hadn’t been inside her. But he could have been. Everywhere she’d been soft and wanting, he’d been hard and insistent.
And for a moment, a wonderful, blissful moment, she’d imagined Andy weren’t dead. That he was there with her. They were together, finally, just the way they’d planned to be.
And then she’d realized the dream wasn’t a dream at all. But a nightmarish reality.
Because it wasn’t Andy’s arms surrounding her, causing her to feel so deliciously safe and cherished. It wasn’t Andy’s soft blue gaze and sweet smile she saw when she opened her eyes.
It was Quinn.
Quinn, with the seductive grin, and the devil-dark eyes that had always made her want to do anything and everything with him. Sanity had thankfully kicked in then, and she’d jumped out of bed like the hounds of Hades were nipping at her feet.
“I don’t care what that marriage certificate says. And I don’t care what went on in that—” she swallowed hard “—that bed. I am not your wife. You are not my husband. We are not married.”
Then she finally twisted her wrist free and rushed through the doorway to escape.
Chapter Two (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
Quinn sighed, watching Penny race away from him. Her golden-streaked brown hair bounced around her shoulders. Her shapely hips swayed with every step.
Then she reached the end of the hallway and turned with almost military precision and marched out of sight altogether.
She didn’t look back at him.
Not that he’d expected she would.
He rubbed his hand over the throbbing pain inside his head and turned back into the hotel suite.
The digs his grandmother was footing the bill for were a helluva lot more luxurious than what he’d been used to for pretty much the last two decades. He couldn’t say that he didn’t appreciate all the comforts.
He did.
Nor could he say that he’d been overly disappointed waking up to find a beautiful, sexy woman draping her long legs and long hair all over him.
Because he hadn’t been.
Not until clarity had come blinking into Penny Garner’s startlingly blue eyes, and she’d bolted out of his arms as if he were the worst sort of snake alive.
If he’d really been a snake, he’d have taken what she’d offered all those years ago when she’d been just a precocious, well-developed teenager.
He wasn’t a snake. But he also wasn’t going to apologize for the way they’d woken up in this fancy hotel suite, tangled together. Because—he was thankful to say—these days, he was a relatively healthy man. And Penelope Garner’s teenage years were thankfully long past.
Yet her very existence was still causing no small amount of mischief.
Could that marriage certificate actually be authentic?
He closed the door to the suite and found the piece of paper—badly wrinkled now—on the counter in the bathroom.
Their signatures were plain. Recognizable.
Nothing about the document suggested it was a fake.
Which meant that until he could prove it was, he had to assume it was not.
He lifted his gaze to his reflection. He had more gray in his beard than he used to have. There were lines radiating from the corners of his eyes and lines in his forehead. His body had more aches and pains than he wanted to admit to.
In some circles, thirty-six wasn’t all that old.
In his line of work, though, it didn’t exactly make him young.
He was a member of the United States Air Force. Proud of it.
But no matter what his age, certain behaviors were frowned upon whether he was on duty or off. Finding yourself married after a night you couldn’t even remember didn’t exactly qualify as responsible behavior.
And now, regardless of Penny’s refusal to acknowledge it, he found himself apparently married.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing he could will away the throbbing pain inside his head. Instead, he turned away from the certificate and flipped on the shower before stripping off.
He wasn’t particularly concerned about pleasing or not pleasing his grandmother by being late for lunch. He hadn’t met her until he’d come home on leave a month ago. Until then, he’d only known the stories his father and uncle would occasionally tell about the dragon lady who’d been their mother.
Far as Quinn was concerned, the old lady was eccentric, for sure. But he had no gripe with her the way his dad did.
Of course, if Quinn hadn’t let himself be talked into coming along for this damn Las Vegas trip, he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in now, either. His triplet cousins—or the trips, as everyone referred to them—thought they’d maneuvered him into it. But really, he hadn’t agreed until he’d learned that Penny would be there.
Still, he could just imagine the case his father would make out of the mess. David Templeton was a pediatrician. But for all of his peaceful attitude when it came to dealing with his patients and their families, he’d still find some way to lay the blame for Quinn’s current predicament squarely at Vivian’s door, even though Quinn was a fully capable and functioning adult.
Maybe he was getting soft. But he didn’t want to be the cause of more dissension in his family. Not if he could help it, anyway. It wasn’t as if his grandmother was going to be around forever. She’d moved to Wyoming a few years ago to make peace with her estranged family. Only she’d had a lot more success with her grandchildren than she’d had with her two sons.
He stepped under the steaming shower spray and groaned a little as the heat penetrated. It’d been three months since he and the rest of his unit had woken up to grenades exploding right outside their quarters. Three months since his life had been thrown into chaos.
Three months since his closest friend had died in the attack. Three others had been badly injured. Men, good men, who reported to Quinn. Their lives had, fortunately, moved on. Two were already headed back to the Middle East. The third was due to head out to Japan in a few weeks.
Quinn’s status, however, was less certain.
Technically, his injuries were supposed to be healed. But that didn’t mean he didn’t still feel a gnawing ache every time he lifted his arm, courtesy of the shrapnel he’d taken during the attack. He’d spent an entire month in the hospital while the surgeons put together his shredded insides. Another month in physical therapy while the powers-that-be decided whether or not to give him the leave he’d requested.
Ultimately, he’d gotten the leave, as well as orders for ongoing therapy. The leave was supposed to last another month, if he wasn’t called back up—even for light duty—because of some new disaster.
And whether his leave lasted or not, a huge question remained. What role would he be called back to?
Which was another reason to have a throbbing pain inside his skull.
Quinn was a PJ. A Pararescueman. It was what he loved. It was where he excelled. “These things we do, that others may live,” was the PJ motto, but it was more than that for Quinn. It was a way of life. If a service member was in need of rescue on sea or on land, Quinn and others like him recovered and returned them to safety. They were commandos and they were paramedics. And they were equipped to handle anything and everything they encountered in order to complete their mission whether it was military or humanitarian in nature.
But if Quinn couldn’t stand up to the physical rigors of the job, he wasn’t going to be cleared for flight status. Which meant he wouldn’t be going back as a PJ.
And if he couldn’t go as a PJ, he wasn’t sure he could stand to go back at all.
Which left him with what?
There were too many questions circling his head, not the least of which was the matter of Penny Garner.
He ducked his head beneath the shower spray, feeling the hot water sluice down his shoulders. Even after a month Stateside, he hadn’t tired of the luxury of taking a shower that lasted as long as he wanted it to last.
Finally, though, aware of his grandmother’s expectation, he shut off the water. He pulled on clean jeans and shirt and left his room to join his grandmother and the others for lunch.
Even before he reached the double doors of Vivian’s suite, he could hear peals of laughter coming from inside.
One thing Quinn could say about the women in his family—they did know how to laugh.
He knocked on the door and a moment later, it was pulled open.
Only instead of facing his sister, Delia, or one of his cousins, it was Penny.
Like him, she’d obviously showered. Her wet hair was pulled to the back of her head into a ponytail. She’d also changed into a gray skirt that skimmed her ankles and a scoop-necked white T-shirt that lured his attention toward her lush curves.
Her eyes shied away from his as she backed out of the doorway so he could enter. “Everyone’s in the dining room.”
“I didn’t think you were going to be here.”
“Neither did I.” She toyed with one of her tiny gold stud earrings. “But when Mrs. Templeton says jump, it’s my job to ask how high.”
“Quinn, darling.” Vivian appeared in the archway leading to the dining room. She’d been widowed four times, and all of her husbands except the last had had money. Not as much as her, though, because her first husband—Quinn’s grandfather—had been a steel magnate. As a result, not even a regular hotel suite was good enough for her. Nope. For his granny, it was the presidential suite. Complete with two stories, four bedrooms—three of which were going empty—a full kitchen and butler’s pantry, and a formal dining room, all surrounded by an encompassing terrace if one was inclined to bake themselves in the hot Nevada sun.
“I was just getting ready to send Penny after you,” Vivian said. She was petite, white-haired and typically dressed in a pale pink Chanel suit. “Come.” She held out a beringed hand. “We’ve just been waiting for you.”
He allowed her to pull him into the dining room where places had been set at one end of the long, mahogany table. His cousins were already there. But not his baby sister. “Where’s Delia?”
“Still sleeping,” Greer drawled, with a roll of her eyes.
“Give her a break,” Maddie said calmly. “She was out all night.”
“We were all out all night,” Ali commented. She was spreading something green and obnoxious-looking across a tiny triangle of toast, and she pointed the tip of her knife at Quinn. “Except you.” She waved the knife a little, taking in Penny, who’d silently come up beside Quinn. “And you, Penny. The both of you disappeared around midnight shortly after we ran into that friend of yours.” She was a cop in Braden and she gave him what she obviously figured was her cop stare. But then she ruined it with a grin. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d be a little suspicious what you’d gotten up to with our dear Penny.”
He pulled out a chair across from Ali while Penny hurried over to the buffet that was laid out with silver serving dishes. “And what do you figure I was up to?” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver urn sitting in the center of the table.
“He was probably down in the fitness center working out like usual,” Greer answered before her sister could. “As if he’s not already in great shape.”
“Yeah, well, great shape’s not all it’ll take to get me cleared for parachuting again.” For that he might need a miracle. He managed a smile as he looked at their grandmother. On the bright side, at least he now knew for certain that none of his cousins had been participants in his and Penny’s marital antics the night before. “Viv, how’d you sleep after all that champagne last night?”
“Like a baby. Champagne is practically mother’s milk to me.” She waved an indolent hand. Her attention was on Penny as she fussed with the buffet. “Penny, dear. We have you to thank for this resplendent display. Sit down and enjoy it.”
Quinn wondered if he was the only one aware of the tight set to Penny’s shoulders as she finally carried a minimally filled plate over to the table. She sat two chairs away from Quinn.
“For Delia,” she murmured when he raised his eyebrows questioningly. “When she gets here.”
Knowing his little sister, she’d sleep until it was time to get up and party at the next nightclub. He grabbed the handle of the fancy coffeepot and leaned across the empty chair to fill Penny’s cup.
She flicked him a quick look. Murmured a thank-you.
It was obvious as hell that she wanted to be anywhere other than there.
“So how did you know Mike Lansing?” Maddie asked him. “It was so loud in the club last night, I never got that quite clear.”
Quinn didn’t plan to let them all know how little he remembered of the previous night and he let the name sift through his mind. He was thinking up a plausible answer when Greer took up the reins.
“They served together back in Africa,” she said as she got up to refill her plate. “He was a PJ, too. Though, frankly, the guy seemed like a jerk to me. All he did was talk about himself like he was a divine gift to women.” She looked at Quinn. “Fortunately, once you and Penny were gone, he didn’t hang around long.”
Maddie was nodding as if it all made sense.
It was beginning to make sense to Quinn, too. Thank God. Even though it was a good ten years ago since he’d met Lansing, he remembered him.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall encountering the man at all the night before.
“Strictly speaking,” he corrected, “Lansing was a CRO.” He pronounced it crow. “Combat Rescue Officer.” Which had put him ahead of Quinn—who was enlisted—in the pecking order. Until Lansing had gotten booted out for dishonorable conduct, that was.
“I don’t like talking about all this military stuff,” Vivian said.
Which made Quinn want to smile, because they were barely glossing the surface of military stuff where he was concerned.
“So, tell me. What is on everyone’s schedule this afternoon?” Vivian raised her brows as she looked at all of them.
“Massage,” Greer said promptly.
“Then the pool,” Maddie and Ali said in unison.
Greer nodded. “That, too.”
“What about you, Penny dear?”
Penny looked like she wanted to be drawn into the conversation about as much as she wanted to be thrown into the lion’s den. “Whatever you need me to take care of this afternoon, Mrs. Templeton.”
His grandmother made a face. “The only thing I’m doing this afternoon is resting and making a few calls.”
He caught the way Penny took a closer look at Vivian. “Resting?”
“Yes.” Vivian’s voice was deliberately patient. “Just resting. Which means you can go about and play the same as my grandchildren. Visit the spa. The pool. Shop. Whatever you like.”
“You know that I didn’t bring a swimsuit.” Penny didn’t look at anyone as she focused on the roll that she’d been methodically shredding.
“Then go buy one, like I’ve been telling you to do since we got here,” Vivian said firmly. “Charge it to my room. I’m sure the girls would go shopping with you.” As if the matter was settled, she turned her attention to Quinn. “And you, young man? Aside from the way you seemed to loosen up last night, I haven’t seen you even visit the gaming tables. You’ll be the first Templeton I’ve ever known who doesn’t like to try his hand at a little gambling.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.” It would be one way to pass the rest of the day. If he hadn’t had an unplanned marriage on his hands, the casino might have held a little more appeal.
“Come to the pool with us,” Maddie urged. “It’ll be fun.”
“What kind of calls do you need to make, Vivian?” Ali started to prop her elbows on the table, then seemed to think better of it as she focused on their grandmother. She grinned. “You can rest at the pool, too, you know.”
Vivian chuckled. “Well, my dear Arthur would have been the first to agree with you. But I have some business to take care of with my attorney in Pittsburgh. I’m considering selling my estate there.” Her smile took in all of them. “Since I’ve come to the conclusion that none of my grandchildren will likely want to take up residence there, I see no reason to keep hold of the place.”
Quinn had gotten accustomed to his grandmother’s references to her last late husband. “Dear Arthur” had been a public school teacher. A regular guy. And even dead, he still seemed to be a guiding force in her life. So much so that to honor his memory, she’d tried mending the lifelong rifts with the family she’d had with her first husband by moving to Wyoming where everything had to be entirely backwater in comparison to the life she’d led in Pennsylvania.
“Are you sure you want to get rid of Templeton Manor for good?” Maddie looked concerned. “You lived there with Daddy’s dad.”
Vivian smiled faintly. “I lived there with all of my husbands. But Sawyer first of all, of course. It’s the home where both of your fathers grew up.” Then she made a face. “And we all know neither one of them wants to step foot there ever again.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Maddie soothed.
“Darling, you’re very sweet. But I am very certain. Even though the car crash that killed their father was an accident, both Carter and David still blame me for his death. Nothing I say or do now is going to change that. But—” she placed her palms on the table beside her plate, and the diamonds on her fingers caught the light shining through the two-storied windows “—I have not given up on my grandchildren. Which is why I am so delighted that all of you were able to join me on this little jaunt to Las Vegas. I wish the rest of your siblings had been able to join us, but I’m still delighted all the same. My dear Arthur always said I’d get a kick out of this place and he was right.” She stood from the table and went over to the windows. “Such ridiculous ostentation,” she said, then gave them a wink. “I positively love it.”
Looking at her mischievous expression, Quinn found it almost hard to believe that Vivian wasn’t quite the picture of health that she appeared to be.
The reason? She called it the “little thing squatting inside my head.” Quinn and everyone else in the family called it what it was. An inoperable brain tumor.
So if she wanted to treat her grandkids—those who could get away on such short notice, at least—to this impetuous, lavish trip to Las Vegas, who was he to argue?
He couldn’t solve the problems between her, and his dad and uncle. But he could make sure he didn’t add to the hassles between them.
Which was a good reason to get the whole marriage certificate thing with Penny squared away as soon as possible.
Almost as if she’d read his mind, Penny suddenly stood up from the table and began clearing away her dishes.
“Penny,” Vivian chided softly. “There’s a butler here who takes care of that.”
“I know.” Penny didn’t stop what she was doing. “Old habits are just too hard to break, I’m afraid.” She disappeared through the connecting door into the kitchen.
“Well, I don’t mind breaking habits,” Greer said drily. “Someone else to clean up my dishes? I’m all for that.”
Quinn tuned out his cousins’ chatter as he swallowed the rest of his food, and then carried his plate and coffee into the kitchen after Penny.
She was standing at the sink with her shoulders slumped and visibly jumped when she noticed him.
“Sorry.” He set his plate on the counter next to the sink. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t.”
It was such an obvious lie, he let it go unchallenged.
“We’ll get it worked out, Penny.”
Her jaw shifted from side to side. “I don’t want to talk about it here.”
“I have the feeling you don’t want to talk about it anywhere.”
She shot him a pained look.
He sighed and looked over his shoulder through to the dining room. His cousins and grandmother were still sitting at the long table. “The certificate’s signed by an officiant. I’m going to check it out this afternoon. See what I can learn.” He considered asking if she wanted to accompany him but decided not to. If she didn’t want to discuss it, he doubted she’d want to traipse around with him looking into it.
“We were drunk. Obviously.” Her voice was low. “There’s no other explanation. It’s probably not even legal.”
He wasn’t going to debate the matter when he didn’t know the legalities, either. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Her long lashes swept down, hiding her vividly blue eyes again. She nodded and turned on the faucet to rinse another plate before leaning over to place it inside the built-in dishwasher.
There didn’t seem much point hanging there. Particularly when the only thing his eyes wanted to do was linger on the creamy skin exposed below her T-shirt when she’d leaned over.
His fingers twitched slightly, tingling. He knew exactly how her smooth, supple skin felt.
He also knew exactly how her skin tasted. It was there inside his memory, bright and vivid, even though he didn’t specifically recall anything besides waking up with his arms full of her warm body.
“Quinn!”
He dragged his mind into the present when he heard his name being called from the other room.
Penny had straightened and was rinsing another dish beneath the faucet. Shoulders hunched. Eyes averted.
He curled his fingers against his palms but the prickling sensation didn’t go away.
“Quinn!” Typically impatient, Ali came to the kitchen doorway. “Have beans in your ears? I’ve been calling you.”
He ignored her. “We’ll get it worked out, Penny,” he said again in a low voice, before turning to face his cousin. “What?”
Ali’s gaze was flipping from him to Penny and back to him again. Her cop’s mind was undoubtedly conjecturing. “Nothing,” she said after a moment. “Nothing at all.” Smiling faintly, she turned and left the room.
“And that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it here,” Penny muttered behind him.
He glanced at her. “You going to be one of those wives who always has to be right?”
She flushed. Gave him a look fit to do more damage than the grenades had done. “I am not your wife,” she muttered between her teeth.
“For both our sakes, darlin’, I hope you’re right.”
Chapter Three (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
The clerk at the county marriage bureau was polite, friendly and adamant.
It was entirely likely that Penny Garner really was his wife.
And the pain inside Quinn’s head rose to a new level.
“The officiant—” the clerk deciphered the signature on the marriage certificate “—Marvin Morales, has ten days to file your certificate. We often get them within a few days of the wedding, though. Once the marriage is recorded, a certified copy is typically available after a day or so.” She handed him back his crumpled paper. She’d already told him it was merely his keepsake certificate versus the official document. If she had any personal opinion about the state of the piece of paper, she kept it to herself. “You can get certified copies in person, via regular mail or order them online.”
Even though it was Sunday afternoon, there was a long line of people waiting behind him for their turn at the counter.
The Las Vegas wedding business was clearly in fine form.
“And this Morales guy. He’s legit?”
She turned to her computer and tapped on the keys. “Certainly is,” she assured. “I’m not showing any address or organizational affiliation for him, though.”
That didn’t sound overly legitimate to him. “Is that normal?”
“It’s a little unusual, but not unheard of.” She smiled. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr. Templeton?”
Right next to his elbow a large sign was posted, indicating the bureau would not issue marriage licenses to individuals who were clearly intoxicated. He nodded toward it. “You really enforce that?”
For the first time the clerk looked a little miffed. “Of course, sir. We take our responsibilities here quite seriously.”
“I’m sure you do.” He folded the certificate. “I appreciate your time.”
“Certainly. I wish you and your bride every happiness.”
He managed a smile as he turned away from the counter. He had barely vacated the spot when it was replaced by a young couple who were practically bouncing out of their shoes with excitement.
Outside the building, the sun was bright and hot. A good twenty-five degrees hotter than it was back in Wyoming. He didn’t particularly mind the heat, though. He’d served all over the world. He was used to temperature extremes.
He wound his way through the wedding-chapel vendors hawking their services outside the building and even though there were plenty of cabs he could have hailed, he walked back to the hotel.
The moment he entered, cold air and piped music engulfed him. If he went one direction, he could head toward his hotel suite. If he headed the opposite direction, he’d end up in one of the endless casinos. Another direction and it was one of the hotel’s several pools.
He wasn’t one for indecision, but he just stood there on the sea of gleaming marble tile, feeling the artificially cooled air blowing down over his head while he ran his thumb along the folded edges of the marriage certificate.
“Looks like you survived the fun last night, Sarge.”
At the greeting, Quinn looked up to see Mike Lansing a few feet away. Even if the trips hadn’t mentioned him from the night before, Quinn still would have recognized the other man. He had one arm looped over the shoulders of a bored-looking blonde and held a drink in his other hand.
“I did.” Quinn slid the folded square in his back pocket. “You?”
The blonde pursed her lips and looked up at Mike. “Are we going to the shops or not?”
Mike pulled out a wad of cash and pushed it into her hand. “You go, baby. I’m gonna grab another drink with my old buddy, here.”
The woman’s boredom visibly brightened as she tucked the money down her bra. She pulled Mike’s head down and gave him a noisy kiss. “See you later in the room.” Even though her voice was loaded with innuendo, she still ran her eyes up and down Quinn when she turned and walked away.
“Nice girl,” Quinn commented blandly.
Mike laughed. “Better be, considering how much she’s costing me.”
Since that could be taken a couple of ways, Quinn refrained from comment.
“C’mon.” Mike gestured with his half-full glass. “There’s a sweet little cocktail waitress I’ve been eyeing.”
“What about Miss Shopper?”
Mike just grinned and led the way toward the casino. “What about her?”
Quinn shook his head and followed. He didn’t care at all about Mike in a general sense, but the guy had evidently been around the night before. Quinn was willing to put up with most anything if it helped jog his memory of what had occurred.
They went straight to the lounge and had barely settled at one of the high-tops before a shapely redhead in a short black dress came over to take their orders. Mike ordered another whiskey and the waitress turned her smile toward Quinn. “And for you, sir?”
“Ginger ale.”
Mike gave him a look. “Dude.”
“Ginger ale,” Quinn repeated drily to the waitress.
She smiled at him, ignored the leer in Mike’s eyes and walked away.
“Talk about a fine-looking pair of legs,” Mike murmured, watching her go. “Not as good as those hot cousins of yours, but still fine.”
Quinn’s jaw tightened. “Can’t remember if you said last night what you’re doing here in Vegas.”
Mike laughed as if it was uproariously funny. He clapped Quinn on the shoulder. “I’ll bet you can’t remember.” He sat back and finished off his drink just in time to exchange it for the fresh one the redhead returned with. “Thanks, sweetheart. What time you get off work?”
“Soon as my husband picks up our twin babies,” she replied with a sweet smile. She set Quinn’s glass of soda on a round coaster. “I’ll be back to check on you boys.”
“Babies.” Mike shuddered. “God forbid. Least we’ve both been smart enough to avoid that nightmare. Remember Rollie? The way his old lady was always harping on him? Deployments keeping him away from her and those kids she kept poppin’ out? Ask me, I bet more than one of them wasn’t even Rollie’s. Always said the smartest guys are the ones who don’t bother putting a ring on it.”
Quinn didn’t entirely disagree. The divorce rate among special operators was astronomically high. He also knew many of the guys kept trying anyway. Maybe it was the hope to keep something normal in a world that was anything but normal.
Some succeeded.
More didn’t.
For his part, Quinn had always figured that if he’d ever met a woman he wanted to marry, he’d expect to put as much commitment into that marriage as he had into his career.
He’d just never met a woman that special.
The folded marriage certificate inside his pocket felt like it was burning a tattoo into his butt.
He shifted. “You got out a long time ago,” he reminded Mike, skirting the actual facts of the guy’s discharge. “What have you been doing since?”
“Contract work.” Mike grinned. “Money is really good, dude. Still get to make bad guys dead, but the bennies are a lot better than Uncle Sam ever coughed up. You decide you want to make some real dough, say the word. You think the uniform is a chick magnet, you should see what a bankroll can do. I’ll make some introductions.”
“If money had ever been my goal, I’d have become an officer like you were,” Quinn drawled. His first impressions of Mike Lansing had held up over the years. The hot five-mile walk from the marriage bureau building hadn’t made him want a shower as badly as sitting there with Mike did.
Mike laughed again. “You’re a master sergeant now. Good reason to feel uptight right there. Must suck being stuck running the action from the ground.”
Quinn hadn’t been stuck running things from the ground, but it was a definite possibility facing him. Even though every single member of the combat rescue team was valuable, running things from the ground wasn’t a role he relished. He’d spent too long in the action. Too long as a team leader.
“Just say the word and I’ll hook you up with another hit that’ll have you loosening up again in no time.” Mike grinned, mimicking dropping something into his drink.
His attention abruptly targeted on Mike. “Another hit. Of what?”
“A little something I keep handy.”
Quinn’s fists curled. “Exactly what little something?”
“Nothing that’ll pop in a blood test,” Mike assured, as if that made everything all right. “Just an herbal cocktail I learned about last time I was in India. Makes life a little...brighter. Your sister thought it was pretty hilarious. She switched drinks with yours—” He broke off when Quinn stood and started walking away. “Hey, Sarge. Where’re you going?”
Anywhere other than there.
Quinn didn’t stop. Didn’t even bother looking back. If he did, he was afraid of what he’d do to the other man.
Mike was a worm. Always had been and it seemed nothing in the intervening decade had changed.
But the last thing Quinn needed was to be caught grinding his fist into a worm’s face. He didn’t need an assault charge haunting him, no matter how well deserved his actions felt.
He strode through the casino until he located the elevators and went up to Delia’s hotel suite. Banged on the door. “Delia!”
Relief hit him when she finally yanked open the door. She was clearly dressed for the swimming pool in a bikini and a flimsy cover-up that didn’t cover up a damn thing. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, obviously.” He sounded annoyed and didn’t care. Because he was annoyed. Not only at Mike’s stunt, but also with her. “What the hell are you walking around like that for? You’re practically naked.”
Her eyebrows shot up and she propped her hand on her hip. She was dark-haired like him but that was about the end of the similarities. “I’m a long way from naked and I’m not exactly sixteen anymore, so can the protective growl!”
He would always feel protective where Delia was concerned. Mostly because she was the baby of his family. But also—and he ordinarily said it with love—she was kind of a ditz.
Their father was a pediatrician. Their mother was a retired psychologist. Their other sister, Grace, was doing her residency at Duke. Much to his father’s chagrin at the time, Quinn hadn’t taken the educational route, but he’d still made a career out of his military service and gotten a hell of a lot of education along the way.
Delia, though? She seemed entirely happy coasting through life, never settling on anything or anyone for any length of time.
“Did you see Lansing doctor my drink last night?”
She pursed her lips. “Maybe.”
God help him. He wanted to shake her. “Yes or no?”
“Good grief, Quinn. Keep your shorts on.” She picked up an oversize shoulder bag sitting on a chair. A floppy hat and a rolled towel were sticking out of it. “Of course I saw. He put some drops in Penny’s drink, too.”
“And you switched drinks.”
“So?”
He wanted to yell at her. But Delia never responded well to shouting. She just crumpled up in tears and shut down. “Are you crazy? I suppose you just drank it, too. Did he spike anyone else’s?”
She glared. “No, I did not drink it,” she snapped. “I dumped them both in a plant by the table! And no, I didn’t see him do anything else.”
“Did it occur to you to say anything? He could have been putting anything in our drinks. I can’t even remember coming back to the hotel last night.” But that wasn’t entirely accurate, either. Because already he had images hovering on the edges of his pain-addled brain. Vivid city lights. Penny’s blue gaze. A glossy limousine interior...
“When was I supposed to tell you, Quinn? When you were busy feeling up Penny on the dance floor? Besides, the guy was all hands! By the time I got that dealt with, you and Penny had already disappeared!”
“You could have found a way,” he said through his teeth. “You have no idea what a mess this has caused.”
“Well?” She spread her hands, clearly waiting. “What mess?”
He clenched his jaw, remembering his promise to Penny. “Lansing’s been a lost cause for ten years. But you’re my sister. You’re twenty-seven years old. You see something wrong, you speak up!”
“At least I was more aware of what was going on than you were.” She snatched a small vial from her pool bag and thrust it at him. “I stole it from his jacket while he was trying to stick his tongue down my throat. You’re welcome.”
He exhaled roughly, rubbing his hand down his face as he swore. At her. At Lansing. At the fact that he’d found himself married to a woman who was more appalled at the idea than he was. But mostly at himself. Because Delia was right. If he’d been more aware, none of this would have happened. “Thank you,” he muttered.
Delia sniffed, clearly unimpressed as she shoved past him with her pool bag and strode away.
“Perfect.” He opened the nearly empty vial and took a sniff, which told him nothing. He twisted the cap back in place and pocketed it.
He realized he didn’t know the number of Penny’s room as he headed toward the elevator. He used the house phone to call the front desk and, thanks to the beauty of dropping his granny’s name, received the information he needed.
He took the elevator down to Penny’s floor and knocked on the door. Given the way the day had gone so far, he didn’t expect her to be there, so when the door opened a second later, he couldn’t hide his surprise.
At least that was the excuse he used while he adjusted to the sight of her. She was wearing a black swimsuit with an opaque black scarf tied around her hips. The sleek one-piece was a lot less revealing than Delia’s bikini had been, but disturbed him a hell of a lot more.
It wasn’t easy to believe he’d wedded Penny, but it was all too easy to understand why he’d bedded her.
No amount of artificial stimulants needed on that score.
“I see you went shopping for a swimsuit.”
Her hair was still pulled back in a ponytail—dry now—and she had a pair of sunglasses hiding her eyes. “Yes.”
“Can I come in?”
She hesitated.
He led with what he considered the most critical info. “The guy Maddie mentioned at lunch—Lansing. He drugged our drinks last night.”
Her lips parted. She slowly pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head.
“With what?” She backed away, pulling the door open wider so he could enter.
Her hotel room was just a regular hotel room. Nice, yeah. But nothing at all like the fancy-dancy suites the rest of them had. It was also neat as a pin. The bed perfectly made because she hadn’t even spent the last night in it. “Supposedly it’s some herbal crap.” He showed her the vial.
She paled. “What kind of herbal crap?”
I don’t know, but I know someone who can test it. He pushed the vial in his pocket again and put his hand on her forehead. The skin was cool. Velvety smooth. “How are you feeling? A headache? Any nausea? Problems breathing?”
She shook her head, pulling away from his touch. “No. Well, a headache. But I just attributed that to...you know.” She turned away from him.
The back straps of her swimsuit were comprised of an intriguing series of strings crisscrossing over the small of her spine in a way that only emphasized her hourglass figure. And even though he couldn’t see beneath the scarf, he had no problem imagining her long legs and curvy butt being shown off to perfection...
He cleared his throat and looked away.
She was pacing in the space between the bed and the window. “We’ve all heard to watch out for that sort of thing, but to have it actually happen—” She plopped on the side of the bed. “Has this happened to you before?”
He sighed and went to sit beside her. “No.” He folded her hand in his. “I’m sorry.”
“Because your friend is an ass?”
“He was kicked out of the service ten years ago. And he was never my friend. But yeah.”
She looked at him. Her brows were pulled together over those oddly luminous eyes. “You didn’t know. None of us knew.”
“Except Delia.” He let go of her hand, pushing off the bed. “She saw him do it. And if she’d said something—” he yanked the marriage certificate out of his back pocket and tossed it on the bed beside her “—maybe we wouldn’t have that to deal with.”
She got off the bed as if she didn’t want to be anywhere near the certificate. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? No, I didn’t tell her. I told you I wouldn’t say anything to anyone yet and I haven’t.” He gestured at the paper. “The guy who signed it is registered with the county to perform marriages. I’ll have to keep checking back to get proof it’s legal, but we’ll know that within ten days. That’s how long he has to file the paperwork.”
“Ten days!”
“Could be sooner.” He told her everything the marriage bureau employee had told him.
“So we were lucid enough to apply for a marriage license. Presumably get through a ceremony of some sort and sign our names on the marriage certificate. Then pass out in bed. It doesn’t mean we can’t get an annulment.” Her cheeks were red. “We don’t know that...that...anything physical happened.”
“Don’t pretend you’re that naive. I can’t see us being in bed together and not being in bed together.” The way they’d woken all tangled together was proof enough for him. He’d been hard as a rock and she’d been warm and wet.
She’d pressed her hands over her ears and was shaking her head. “I’m not listening.”
He went over to her and gently wrapped his fingers around her wrists. Her pulse rate was off the charts. “Like it or not, Penny, it’s a given that you and I consummated whatever vows we exchanged.” He exhaled heavily and admitted the worst. “But I can’t even be certain that you were willing!”
Her lips parted. She swallowed. “Quinn—”
He let her go and shoved his hand through his hair. “If you want go to the hospital, I can take you. Or arrange for someone else to, if you’re more comfortable that way.” His voice was gruff. The thought that he might have coerced her was nauseating. “You can get an exam. If you were forced—”
“Oh my God!” She looked horrified. “I don’t need an exam to prove what I already know. You were just as much a victim of this as I was. Maybe you were the one who wasn’t, you know...on board.” Her cheeks turned red. “That’d be more in line with our history.”
“Trust me.” His voice was dark. “I would’ve been more than willing back then if you’d have been legal. And now—” He broke off because her face was nearly scarlet now. He exhaled. “You’re a beautiful woman, Penny. Let’s just leave it at that.”
She cleared her throat, not looking at him. “And you’re a handsome man.” The words seemed to come reluctantly. “Anyway, it’s all moot,” she continued abruptly. “I don’t care what sort of influence you were under. You’d never do something against a woman’s will. You wouldn’t even be worried if not for what that scum of a man did. So just stop thinking about it and talking about...about tests and stuff.”
His chest felt tight. Trust like that was more than a little humbling. And he still wasn’t sure it was merited. How could he ever be truly sure?
“Promise me, Quinn.”
It was the second promise she’d asked of him that day. “Fine.”
Fortunately, she accepted the answer. She put a few paces between them, busying herself with retying the knot in the silky scarf. “And maybe we didn’t. It’s possible,” she insisted at his look. “Maybe we both just passed out before we could—you know.”
“Have sex?”
“Yes.” Obviously, the very idea of it embarrassed her. “Regardless, we’re the only ones who would know. And if we say we didn’t...consummate things, we could still get an annulment.”
“You mean lie.”
“It’s not a lie if there’s any room for doubt.”
He made a face and she huffed. “Neither one of us wants to be married to the other. This is just one big fiasco from start to finish. And the only way to rectify it—if there’s anything to actually rectify—is to get an annulment. Everything’ll be right back to normal.”
“You’re forgetting one thing.”
She raised her brows, waiting.
“When we had sex—”
“If we had sex.”
“When we had sex,” he repeated over her interruption, “we didn’t use anything.” No condom. No condom wrapper. No evidence of any sort of protection had been in his hotel suite. “Now, I’ve had every medical test known to man over the past few months. You don’t have to worry about catching anything from me. I’m assuming you’ve always been careful in the past?”
Her cheeks had gone red again. After a moment she gave a stiff nod.
“Then there’s just one question left. Are you on birth control?“
Chapter Four (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
Quinn’s words jangled inside Penny’s mind.
He was standing there, annoyingly handsome and militarily straight, waiting for an answer.
She wanted to ask him if they hadn’t already had enough blows for one day.
She was still grappling with the notion that some idiot had spiked their drinks. The only thing gained by knowing that fact was that they now had an explanation for ending up in Quinn’s hotel suite the way they had. They had an explanation for not being able to remember any of it. She already knew Quinn had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. If he learned she’d also been a virgin—
“Penny?” Quinn took a step toward her. His eyebrows were like straight slashes above his level brown eyes. “Are you on birth control or not?”
“I don’t really think that’s any of your business,” she said evasively.
His eyebrows shot up. “Until I know otherwise, you’re my wife. I think that does make it my business. So are you on the pill? Implant? Anything?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She managed a nod, trying valiantly to pretend her neck wasn’t getting hot.
His eyes narrowed. “You’re lying.”
The heat spread up her jaw and into her cheeks. Her forehead. Until her entire head felt like it might well be smoking. “Why would I lie about that?”
He suddenly leaned back against the dresser in front of the bed and folded his arms across his wide chest. “I don’t know,” he said calmly. “Why are you?”
She’d been a better liar when she’d been ten than she was now.
She turned her back on him and went over to look out the window. Unlike his suite with that stellar city view and balcony, her room looked out over a roof and a bunch of mechanical equipment. There was one window. No balcony. And it was still costing Mrs. Templeton over four hundred dollars a night.
“No, I’m not on the pill,” she admitted flatly. “There’s nobody in my life. Hasn’t been for a while.” She wasn’t going to tell him that there’d never been anyone. Not that way. She and her fiancé, Andy, had been foster kids living in the same foster home. They’d never chanced it, knowing that they’d be separated in a nanosecond if they were caught doing anything improper. Then he’d graduated from high school, announced to their foster parents during his graduation party that they were engaged, and he’d headed to boot camp a day later, leaving Penny behind to finish high school.
Quinn’s silence penetrated her memories and she looked over her shoulder at him. “What?”
“You’re not on anything?”
She shook her head.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his fingertips against his temples. “So you could be pregnant. On top of everything else.”
“What? No!”
He gave her a look. “I don’t have to spell out the details of unprotected sex, do I?”
She made a face. “Obviously not.”
“Then you know there’s a chance just as well as I do.” He inhaled deeply, then straightened once more. “Which means nothing’s happening about anything until we know one way or the other.”
She couldn’t remember making love. She darn shooting couldn’t imagine having conceived a baby with him. She and Andy had talked about having a half-dozen kids. About having the kind of real family that neither one of them had grown up with.
Her throat felt tight. “I can’t talk about this anymore.” She hurried past him and yanked open the room door. “I need you to go.”
“Penny.”
She stared hard at the gold patterned carpet beneath her sandals, willing away the tears that burned behind her eyes. “Please, Quinn. Not now.” Not ever, if she was lucky.
She heard the impatience in his sigh as he came over to the door. But there was no hint of impatience at all in the way he touched her shoulder. And no matter how badly she wanted to ignore him, she couldn’t help looking up at him.
For a man who could look as fierce as he could look, he also had an unsettling capacity for showing extreme gentleness.
And she felt shaky because of it.
“Whatever happens, whatever we learn, we will work it out together. All right?”
Her teeth were practically gnawing a chunk out of the inside of her cheek. “I’m not your responsibility, Quinn.”
“Well, now, I’m going to have to disagree, since you seem to be my wife.”
“An unintentional one.”
“Doesn’t make it any less real as far as I’m concerned. And as such, you are my responsibility.”
“Doesn’t that make you my responsibility, as well?”
His thumb rubbed her bare shoulder before falling away. “You can handle it. You handle Vivian, after all. And she’s a lot more to take on than me.”
Despite everything, Penny felt a tearful laugh catch in her throat. “I’d just gotten off the phone with her when you knocked on my door.” Her hand felt sweaty on the door handle.
“How’d you end up working for her anyway? You get tired of working for my dad or something? You worked for him a long time.”
“Ten years,” she murmured. So long that she’d even become Dr. Templeton’s office manager. “I met Mrs. Templeton when she came to see your dad at his office last summer.”
“Bet that went well.” His voice was dry.
She nodded. “They had a shouting match. About what you’d expect. Before she left, she told me that I looked intelligent enough if not for the fact that I worked for her son.”
“Nice.”
“I think the only reason she started calling me to come work for her as her assistant was because she knew it annoyed your father.” She hesitated because she wasn’t sure Dr. T would appreciate her sharing the truth, even with his own son. “Eventually, she offered double my salary. Your dad said I should take it. I started working for her shortly before last Christmas.”
“Just like that. Ten years of loyalty tossed aside for a few dollars more?”
The accusation accomplished what nothing else did. It dried up the knot of tears threatening to break loose inside her.
“He said I should take it for the money, and then he asked me to keep my eye on her for him. No matter what he says about not caring about your grandmother, your dad does care. Very much. And because I care about Dr. Templeton, I did what he asked.”
“You did what my son asked, dear?”
Penny caught her breath and looked out the door she was holding open to see Vivian standing a few feet away in the hall.
How much had she heard?
Vivian’s carefully penciled eyebrows went up as she approached. “Well?”
Penny couldn’t seem to form an answer to save her life. She looked up at Quinn. He looked surprised, but definitely wasn’t at a loss.
“She told him she’d keep an eye on me while we were here in Vegas,” he lied easily. “You know what Dad’s like.”
“Overprotective,” Vivian said crisply. “When it comes to my possible bad influence.” Her bright gaze was running back and forth between Penny’s face and her grandson’s. “Well, I can’t say that’s much of a surprise.” She brushed her hand down the lapel of her chenille jacket as if she were brushing away the thought. “Is that what the two of you are doing together in your room, Penny? Looking after my grandson?”
Penny’s face went hot.
Which seemed to be exactly the response that Vivian was looking for, because the elderly woman gave a faint smile and a sage-looking nod.
If Quinn noticed, he ignored it. “What’re you doing slumming on the fifth floor anyway, Vivian?”
“Now you sound like dear Arthur. He had that attitude about me when we first met.”
“You cured him of it?” Quinn’s voice was wry.
“He cured me of it,” Vivian said simply. “Now, Penny dear. I came down to tell you that we’re starting a new project.”
Wariness coursed through her. Vivian’s latest project had been planning this Las Vegas jaunt.
And look where that had landed them.
“What project is that, Mrs. Templeton?”
“I’ve decided to run for the open seat on the town council.”
Penny blinked. She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “Weaver’s town council?”
“Well, not Las Vegas’s town council,” Vivian said humorously. “Now, the vote isn’t until September, which gives us a little over six weeks to mount my campaign.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in politics.”
“Oh.” Vivian looked annoyed. “I’m not. But somebody needs to run against that coot, Squire Clay, and since nobody else in town has stepped up to do it, I will. I’m hardly afraid of an old cattle rancher, even if he does think he owns the entire town. Do you know that he actually tried to keep me from building my house where I wanted it? Said I was impinging on the natural view from the town. You can’t even see my house from the edge of town.”
Penny had never met Squire Clay, herself, though she’d certainly heard the man’s name. The Clay family owned one of the largest cattle ranches in the state and as far as she knew, they formed a good portion of the very backbone of Weaver. The Clays were also relatives of the Templetons, though that was a recent revelation Vivian had admitted to only after she’d moved to Weaver from Pittsburgh.
“Vivian,” Quinn offered reasonably, “I’ve heard you and Clay aren’t the best of friends, but—”
“We’re not even the best of enemies.” Vivian cut off Quinn. “He’s as bad as my two sons when it comes to holding old grudges. I can’t imagine how any sister of my Sawyer—illegitimate or otherwise—could have had the bad taste to marry a man like Squire. He was a boor sixty years ago and nothing has changed in the years since. It’s amazing to me that he actually found another woman willing to marry him after Sarah died.” She focused on Penny again. “So, the first order of business is to make sure my name is filed right away as a candidate. I want you to take care of that even before we leave for home. All right?”
“Of course.” Penny had no clue whatsoever what was involved, but she knew how to pick up a phone and ask questions.
“Very good.” Vivian smiled, running her gaze approvingly over the bathing suit that Penny had reluctantly purchased at her boss’s insistence. “Now, run along, you two. Get to the pool. The manager here has invited me to join him for dinner, so you’ll be on your own this evening. We’ll all have breakfast in my suite before we check out of the hotel, so I’d appreciate you arranging that, Penny. Quinn, make sure Delia drags herself to breakfast, also. Until then, I trust you’ll find something to entertain yourselves.” Smiling slightly, she turned on her heel and strode away.
Neither Penny nor Quinn spoke until the old woman was out of sight.
“So that tumor is making her crazy now,” he finally said.
“She’s definitely not crazy.”
He was silent for a moment. A moment in which she became painfully aware of the warmth of his shoulder where it brushed against hers.
“My old man really asked you to keep an eye on her?”
She moistened her lips. Little prickles of sensation were springing to life beneath her skin. “He really asked me.” If Quinn would move even an inch, she could have slid past him back into the safety of her hotel room instead of standing there in the opened doorway.
But he wasn’t moving.
Not even an inch.
She tugged at the knot on her scarf, tightening the slick fabric once more. Ali had been the one to insist the bathing suit was perfect. But Maddie had tossed in the scarf, obviously understanding that Penny didn’t feel comfortable parading around in a suit that left so much of her butt exposed.
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Allison Leigh
What happened in Vegas…When Penny Garner and Quinn Templeton wake up in bed together – in Vegas – with rings and a marriage certificate on the bedside table it looks like they did more than just sleep! While they wait to see if their night had physical consequences, can Quinn convince Penny to leave her old heartbreak in the past and become his bride?
“I do. Wait...did I?”
Hometown girl Penny Garner is having a Vegas moment: waking up in bed with her teenage crush, a ring on her finger. Then there’s the matter of the marriage certificate. How did that happen? The jury’s out on whether it’s Penny’s dream come true or worst nightmare.
Quinn Templeton has to wonder what they actually did that night, too. And when they get back to Weaver, Wyoming, the air force pararescueman can’t just ignore the real feelings for his fake bride—especially if Penny’s pregnant. Will they remember what brought them to the altar in the first place...and maybe sign up for a repeat performance?
“It’s not real.”
She picked the paper up. Studied her signature on the line that said Bride. She took in Quinn’s slash of a signature, as well.
She looked up at him, then just as quickly away. When she’d been fifteen, she’d had a crazy mad crush on him. So much so that she’d thrown herself at him. He’d been home on leave from the air force. He’d ruthlessly brushed aside her immature advances.
Now she wished she still possessed some of the outrageous guts she’d had in her youth. Because it was more than a little mortifying to be knocking on the door of thirty and feeling wholly out of her depth when faced with a seriously naked, gorgeous man.
A man with whom she’d apparently spent the night.
A man with whom she’d apparently signed a marriage certificate.
* * *
Return to the Double C: Under the big blue Wyoming sky, this family discovers true love
Vegas Wedding, Weaver Bride
Allison Leigh
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
A frequent name on bestseller lists, ALLISON LEIGH’s high point as a writer is hearing from readers that they laughed, cried or lost sleep while reading her books. She credits her family with great patience for the time she’s parked at her computer, and for blessing her with the kind of love she wants her readers to share with the characters living in the pages of her books. Contact her at allisonleigh.com (http://www.allisonleigh.com).
For my husband.
Always surprising and ever holding my heart.
Contents
Cover (#u0392afcc-f551-53fa-9f53-b39b45d5ace6)
Back Cover Text (#u0bab319c-fd8f-5f5b-85dc-499aad7c6826)
Introduction (#u26aa36e5-dddd-56e8-8913-58d4fbd3e5bb)
Title Page (#uac986653-e2f5-5a67-96ad-f02b0ce052b3)
About the Author (#u537dccd2-c8b0-5a02-8621-b38fd773a8f2)
Dedication (#uce288c75-39d2-5fbb-82a5-506cb27e61ef)
Chapter One (#ue464972e-60a2-5e42-b056-43d7acc4cbc7)
Chapter Two (#ufd73fd81-a0f5-5130-b130-16b052251daf)
Chapter Three (#u833b2b2a-5b52-5b85-92c3-b0fc152306f2)
Chapter Four (#u6ac62752-9353-53ec-804a-d1caddba3186)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
Las Vegas, Nevada
Penny Garner stared at the piece of paper Quinn Templeton was holding between his long fingers. Her stomach, which had already been hovering somewhere two floors below her feet, sank even farther.
She clutched the white bedsheet closer against her naked body, trying desperately to pretend that Quinn wasn’t just as naked. He simply wasn’t bothering with a sheet to hide anything. From the top of his rumpled, dark-haired head to the long, vaguely bony toes on his feet, he was entirely, utterly, gloriously bare.
And he didn’t seem the least bit shy about it, either.
Which left Penny two choices.
Focus on him, or focus on the piece of paper he’d found on the nightstand next to the bed.
And the piece of paper—disturbing as it was—seemed safer at the moment. “What is that?”
Quinn flicked the official-looking document onto the bed that stood between them. The tumbled bed that Penny had scrambled out of only minutes earlier, dragging the sheet along with her. “You can read.”
She could read. But that didn’t mean the marriage certificate, lying with lopsided innocence against one of the bed pillows, made any sense.
She unwound one arm from the sheet to reach out for the sheet of paper. “It’s not real.”
She picked it up. Studied her signature on the line that said “Bride.” Penelope Garner was looped across it in familiar, lopsided cursive. The “Groom” line was similarly obscured under Quinn’s slashing signature.
She looked up at him. Then just as quickly away. When she’d been fifteen, she’d had a crazy mad crush on him. So much so, that she’d thrown herself at him. Tried, in her juvenile way, to seduce him. He’d been home on leave from the air force. She’d been living with her latest foster family, the Bennetts, across the street from where his parents lived.
At the time, he’d ruthlessly crushed her immature advances.
Now she wished she still possessed some of the outrageous guts she’d had in her youth. Because it was more than a little mortifying to be knocking on the door of thirty and feeling wholly out of her depth when faced for the first time with a seriously naked, gorgeous man.
A man with whom she’d spent the night.
A man with whom she’d signed a marriage certificate.
She sank onto the edge of the bed. Which at least gave her the advantage of turning her back toward him.
“This has to be a joke. Right?” It was hard enough to believe she’d slept with him. But marry? She set the certificate on the mattress beside her and wound her shaking hands inside the sheet twisted around her. “It looks like my signature. But I don’t remember signing it. Do you?”
“No.”
If she concentrated on the paper hard enough, then maybe she could forget the way she’d wakened.
Wrapped in his arms.
Intimately.
Fortunately, she’d come to her senses and scrambled out of bed, dragging the sheet with her.
Unfortunately, that was about the time he’d noticed the marriage certificate. And his brows had pulled together in the fiercest frown she’d ever seen.
Her fingers worried the edges of the sheet clutched above her breasts. “Then it’s got to be a joke.”
The fancy Las Vegas hotel suite had thick, plush carpet that easily swallowed the sound of Quinn’s footsteps as he rounded the bed to her side. “Who would play a joke like that?”
She averted her eyes before she got too much of an eyeful of his muscular nude body. He’d been injured during his latest deployment. Had spent months in the hospital, she knew. It didn’t seem logical that he could be so tanned all over the way he was. The only pale skin he possessed was—
She made herself look away again.
“I don’t know!” All her frustrated confusion sounded in her voice as she raked back her hair. “Your cousins? Your sister?”
“Maybe Viv?” His deep voice turned mocking. “God knows little old ladies like my recently discovered granny are prone to pulling off pranks like this.”
She made a face at him, only to get distracted yet again by all that...nakedness. She could only imagine how his granny would react if Viv knew her personal assistant had gotten into mischief with her grandson on what was supposed to be Vivian’s get-to-know-each-other-better trip with her grandchildren. “Would you please put on some clothes?”
“I remember a time when you wanted me to take ’em off.” But mercifully, he moved out of her sight again.
“Yeah, well, I was a kid,” she muttered. A wild, willful kid who’d only been trying to find her place in a world that seemed to have no place for her at all. “And if you were any sort of gentleman, you wouldn’t remind me of that.”
He snorted softly and sat on the side of the bed right next to her. “I’m not a gentleman.”
She peeked at the blue jeans now hugging his thighs and breathed a little easier. At least as easily as she could, considering his bare shoulder was brushing warmly against hers. “You’re in the air force. Isn’t being a gentleman a requirement?”
He didn’t answer that, but plucked the crumpling piece of paper from between them and held it between his hands. “At least you’re not jail bait anymore,” he muttered. “What’s the last thing you remember from last night?”
She felt her cheeks getting hot.
They were sitting on the edge of a hotel room bed. It was painfully obvious what had happened last night. Her imaginative mind had no trouble whatsoever filling in the blanks.
And wasn’t it ironic as all get-out that she’d finally shed her virginal state, but couldn’t actually remember a single detail of it?
Even as a teenager, he’d inspired insanity in her. As an adult, clearly nothing had changed.
Flushing even hotter, she pushed off the bed, dragging the unwieldy sheet with her. “I remember the nightclub.” His grandmother had been adamant that Penny join them. “I remember your grandmother kept ordering bottles of champagne.” Penny had been a little concerned. In addition to being the woman’s personal assistant, she was supposed to be watching out for Vivian’s health.
But Vivian had also been surrounded by five of her fully adult grandchildren. If they’d been cheering on their fully capable grandmother, how on earth could Penny have intervened?
“Viv does seem to like her champagne.” He pushed off the bed, too, grimacing a little as he straightened. He pressed his hand to his side, covering the long surgical scar there as he paced around the bed again, coming to a stop in front of the enormous sliding glass door that opened to a narrow balcony with a spectacular view of the city below. His hand went from his side to the window as he looked out.
The August sun was shining brightly outside the glass, and the sunlight threw his body into perfect relief. From the spread of his wide shoulders to the narrowness of his hips where the blue jeans clung a little too precariously, the only flaws he possessed were that long zipper-like scar and a scattering of small pale blotches on his side.
“Last thing I remember was dancing with you.” His thumb tapped the window. “We’d been at the bar. Champagne’s not usually my thing. I ordered a pitcher of margaritas for the table.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than her.
She felt perspiration spring out on her forehead. “It can’t be a real marriage certificate.”
“Yeah, well, unless we prove it one way or another—” He broke off when there was a knock on the door.
His eyes were as dark a brown as his hair and they looked toward her, questioningly. Combined with the whiskers blurring his jaw and the faint lines arrowing out from his eyes, it was a powerful combination.
“How should I know?” she whispered. “This is your suite.”
She’d been the one to make all the hotel arrangements for Vivian’s little Las Vegas jaunt. Quinn, his sister, Delia, his triplet cousins and Vivian were all on the same floor. Penny’s room was twenty floors below. Down in the less outrageously expensive section. Vivian had thought that particular touch was uproariously funny.
But then Vivian Archer Templeton had more money than Midas. She could afford expensive vacations like this for half her family anytime she wanted.
The knocking got louder, this time accompanied by feminine laughter. “Come on, Master Sergeant Templeton,” came the muffled voice through the door. “Get your lazy bones moving. You’re going to be late for lunch.”
Lunch.
Penny groaned. Vivian was expecting everyone in her suite for the lunch that Penny had arranged the day before. It was to be their last full day in Las Vegas before heading back home to Wyoming.
“They’re gonna get a kick out of this.” Quinn started for the door, but Penny grabbed his arm, feeling sheer panic flow through her veins.
“You can’t tell them!”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “How do you know they don’t already know?” He held up the certificate. “Maybe they were our wedding guests.”
She felt the blood drain out of her face. He was right. If neither one of them could remember the events of the previous night, how could she assume anything? “Don’t bring it up if they don’t,” she whispered fiercely. “Promise me!”
His eyes searched hers.
The knocking on the door got louder.
“Your leave is going to end. You’ll go back to your life,” she reminded him. “I’ll still be in Weaver. I don’t want the notoriety, okay? Gossip is the town’s best industry.”
His beautifully molded lips compressed. He looked like he wanted to argue.
“Please, Quinn. I’m begging here.”
“Fine.” He sounded none too pleased about it.
Relief still flooded through her. One thing she knew about Quinn Templeton was that he always kept his word.
She dashed around the bed, snatching up the items of her clothing that were visible, and raced toward the bathroom, only to nearly fall on her face as the sheet caught around her feet.
Quinn’s hand shot out, grabbing her arm and righting her.
“Quinn!” The knocking on the door hadn’t ceased.
“Dammit, Greer, I heard you the first time,” he said loudly. “Keep your pants on!” He pushed the crumpled marriage certificate into Penny’s hand and nudged her gently toward the bathroom. “Be more careful,” he murmured.
She ducked her chin, grabbed the sheet higher around her calves so she wouldn’t trip again and hurried into the luxuriously appointed bathroom, closing the door quietly after her.
The sight of her reflection in the wall-size mirror made her shudder. Guilt. Horror. Shock. All of that was in her face. Added to her rat’s nest hair and the whole bedsheet thing, she looked exactly as she’d expect a woman to look after waking up in a strange man’s bed.
Only he wasn’t really a stranger, was he, if she’d known him since she’d been a teenager? Or was that negated by the fact that—aside from his brief visits home to Wyoming—he’d been gone for more than the last decade?
She dumped the certificate, her dress and the one high-heeled sandal she’d found beside the bed on the marble counter and pressed her ear against the closed door.
All she could hear were muffled voices.
She raked her tangled hair away from her face. It was only then that she noticed the narrow band on her left finger. It was gold. Set with sparkling diamonds that circled all the way around. And it was beautiful.
She slid it off so fast it flew out of her fingers and rolled out of sight.
Her conscience nipped at her and she crawled around until she found it. Feeling decidedly nauseated, she set it on top of Quinn’s leather shaving kit, then went to sit on the side of the enormous round bathtub. Pins prickled behind her eyes and she pinched them closed. It was one thing to know she’d slept with him. But how could she have married him?
Once upon a time, she was supposed to have been a bride. A real one. Only instead of marrying Andy, she’d—
“Hey—”
She looked up to see Quinn had opened the door. He’d added a T-shirt over his jeans. The light gray cotton looked stretched almost to breaking point over his shoulders.
“You all right?”
She swiped her cheeks. “You ever hear of that thing called privacy?”
“That’s what locks are for.” His dark, dark eyes roved over her. “There’s no reason to cry. At least my cousin Greer didn’t mention anything unusual. This isn’t the end of the world.”
“Waking up married?” She waved her hand, only to feel her sheet slipping, and yanked it once again up to her neck. “Sure. Nothing to be worried about at all.”
He scrubbed his hand down his bristly jaw. The thick, wavy hair on his head was as dark as ever, but the whiskers there definitely held a touch of gray.
She wished she could say they detracted from his appeal.
But at least that long-fingered hand of his wasn’t sporting a wedding ring.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said.
“I don’t know how you can sound so calm.” She hitched up the long ends of the sheet and stood. “This is a disaster.” She slipped past him to return to the bedroom area. As oversize and opulent as the bathroom was, it was still too small with him in it.
His voice turned flat. “Stop being melodramatic.”
She spotted her other shoe peeking out from beneath the gold silk bedspread that was hanging off the mattress, and grabbed it. She couldn’t remember how the evening had ended the night before, but she distinctly remembered how it had started off—with her fully clothed and wearing her usual complement of panties and bra underneath.
“Maybe it’s not a disaster in comparison to your usual life.” She knew he was part of some special operations thing in the air force. To Penny, that was just code for some really dangerous thing in the air force. “But it is to mine. I have no desire to be anyone’s wife. Certainly not like this.” Not to another man already married to the military. She’d been through that before. Thanks to the army in which Andy had served and a close encounter with an IED on his way home for their wedding, she’d never even had the opportunity to be a widow. Much less a wife.
She went down onto her hands and knees to look under the bed. But the ivory carpet there was smoothly vacuumed and untarnished by discarded undies. She sat back on her knees.
“What are you looking for?”
“The rest of my clothes, obviously.” She hitched up the sheet again and stood. “I need to get back to my room. Clean up. Make sure everything’s set for the flight home tomorrow.”
“What about my grandmother’s lunch?”
“That’s for all of you. I’m the hired help, remember?” She shoved her long hair away from her face again as she walked back into the bathroom, carrying her second shoe.
She shut the door.
Pushed the door lock for good measure.
She dropped the sheet and pulled her stretchy dress over her head, dragging the dark purple fabric down over her bare hips and thighs. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious that she was entirely commando under the dress.
She raked her fingers through her hair, trying to restore a little order to the dishwater-blond mess, and splashed water over her face, using one of the plush towels stacked on a glass shelf before she pushed her bare feet into her high-heeled sandals and opened the door again.
Quinn was leaning against the wall opposite the door, his arms folded over his wide chest. “Feel better?”
She could feel herself flushing, but she gave a brisk nod anyway as she walked out of the bathroom. Without high heels, she was taller than average. With them, she stood close to six feet, putting her generally eye-to-eye with most men.
But not Quinn. He was still several inches taller than she was.
Which was a completely irrelevant point, she reminded herself as she scanned the room, hoping to spot her purse, because she truly did not want to have to go down to the lobby and get a new room key. Not looking the way she did.
Her relief when she finally found it half-hidden among the ivory leather couch cushions was almost comical. Her room key was tucked safely inside one of the pockets, exactly where she’d put it before joining Vivian and her family for dinner the evening before.
She felt her eyes drifting toward the bed and yanked them front and center.
Quinn hadn’t left his position against the wall. Which meant she had to walk past him once again to get to the door of the suite.
“You can’t run far, Penny.”
“I’m not running. You, however, are supposed to be sitting down to lunch with your grandmother.” She opened the door.
But he reached out and closed his hand around her wrist before she could leave. “Viv can wait. It’s not every day I wake up to a wife.”
Heat rushed up her throat into her face. “I’m not your wife.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Really? I know they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but we’re talking marriage here. And we’ve got a certificate that strongly suggests you’re most definitely my wife.”
She didn’t know if it was deliberate or not, but his thumb was pressed right against the racing pulse in her wrist. “Then we’ll get another certificate that undoes it! Annulments must be almost as popular in this state as weddings.”
“Annulment means there’s been no marriage—or anything associated with the marriage—at all.”
“That’s right.” She pulled on her wrist, but his fingers held fast. They weren’t hurting. But they weren’t giving so much as a centimeter.
Instead, he reeled her in closer. He tucked one finger beneath her chin, and her mouth went dry.
He turned her face until she was looking back into the hotel suite.
Right at the bed.
“You sure an annulment is going to be all that easy?” His voice was low. Intimate. “We have a consummated marriage here, sweetheart.”
A flush ran through her veins, and her skin seemed to tingle.
“We don’t know that for sure,” she reminded, wishing that she sounded a lot less hoarse and a lot more certain.
His callused thumb moved slowly over her inner wrist. “You don’t remember the way we woke up?”
She wanted to block out his words as badly as she wanted to block out the truth. Because she did remember exactly the way she’d awakened.
Engulfed in his warmth. His hand on her breast. His hair-roughened thigh between hers.
He hadn’t been inside her. But he could have been. Everywhere she’d been soft and wanting, he’d been hard and insistent.
And for a moment, a wonderful, blissful moment, she’d imagined Andy weren’t dead. That he was there with her. They were together, finally, just the way they’d planned to be.
And then she’d realized the dream wasn’t a dream at all. But a nightmarish reality.
Because it wasn’t Andy’s arms surrounding her, causing her to feel so deliciously safe and cherished. It wasn’t Andy’s soft blue gaze and sweet smile she saw when she opened her eyes.
It was Quinn.
Quinn, with the seductive grin, and the devil-dark eyes that had always made her want to do anything and everything with him. Sanity had thankfully kicked in then, and she’d jumped out of bed like the hounds of Hades were nipping at her feet.
“I don’t care what that marriage certificate says. And I don’t care what went on in that—” she swallowed hard “—that bed. I am not your wife. You are not my husband. We are not married.”
Then she finally twisted her wrist free and rushed through the doorway to escape.
Chapter Two (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
Quinn sighed, watching Penny race away from him. Her golden-streaked brown hair bounced around her shoulders. Her shapely hips swayed with every step.
Then she reached the end of the hallway and turned with almost military precision and marched out of sight altogether.
She didn’t look back at him.
Not that he’d expected she would.
He rubbed his hand over the throbbing pain inside his head and turned back into the hotel suite.
The digs his grandmother was footing the bill for were a helluva lot more luxurious than what he’d been used to for pretty much the last two decades. He couldn’t say that he didn’t appreciate all the comforts.
He did.
Nor could he say that he’d been overly disappointed waking up to find a beautiful, sexy woman draping her long legs and long hair all over him.
Because he hadn’t been.
Not until clarity had come blinking into Penny Garner’s startlingly blue eyes, and she’d bolted out of his arms as if he were the worst sort of snake alive.
If he’d really been a snake, he’d have taken what she’d offered all those years ago when she’d been just a precocious, well-developed teenager.
He wasn’t a snake. But he also wasn’t going to apologize for the way they’d woken up in this fancy hotel suite, tangled together. Because—he was thankful to say—these days, he was a relatively healthy man. And Penelope Garner’s teenage years were thankfully long past.
Yet her very existence was still causing no small amount of mischief.
Could that marriage certificate actually be authentic?
He closed the door to the suite and found the piece of paper—badly wrinkled now—on the counter in the bathroom.
Their signatures were plain. Recognizable.
Nothing about the document suggested it was a fake.
Which meant that until he could prove it was, he had to assume it was not.
He lifted his gaze to his reflection. He had more gray in his beard than he used to have. There were lines radiating from the corners of his eyes and lines in his forehead. His body had more aches and pains than he wanted to admit to.
In some circles, thirty-six wasn’t all that old.
In his line of work, though, it didn’t exactly make him young.
He was a member of the United States Air Force. Proud of it.
But no matter what his age, certain behaviors were frowned upon whether he was on duty or off. Finding yourself married after a night you couldn’t even remember didn’t exactly qualify as responsible behavior.
And now, regardless of Penny’s refusal to acknowledge it, he found himself apparently married.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing he could will away the throbbing pain inside his head. Instead, he turned away from the certificate and flipped on the shower before stripping off.
He wasn’t particularly concerned about pleasing or not pleasing his grandmother by being late for lunch. He hadn’t met her until he’d come home on leave a month ago. Until then, he’d only known the stories his father and uncle would occasionally tell about the dragon lady who’d been their mother.
Far as Quinn was concerned, the old lady was eccentric, for sure. But he had no gripe with her the way his dad did.
Of course, if Quinn hadn’t let himself be talked into coming along for this damn Las Vegas trip, he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in now, either. His triplet cousins—or the trips, as everyone referred to them—thought they’d maneuvered him into it. But really, he hadn’t agreed until he’d learned that Penny would be there.
Still, he could just imagine the case his father would make out of the mess. David Templeton was a pediatrician. But for all of his peaceful attitude when it came to dealing with his patients and their families, he’d still find some way to lay the blame for Quinn’s current predicament squarely at Vivian’s door, even though Quinn was a fully capable and functioning adult.
Maybe he was getting soft. But he didn’t want to be the cause of more dissension in his family. Not if he could help it, anyway. It wasn’t as if his grandmother was going to be around forever. She’d moved to Wyoming a few years ago to make peace with her estranged family. Only she’d had a lot more success with her grandchildren than she’d had with her two sons.
He stepped under the steaming shower spray and groaned a little as the heat penetrated. It’d been three months since he and the rest of his unit had woken up to grenades exploding right outside their quarters. Three months since his life had been thrown into chaos.
Three months since his closest friend had died in the attack. Three others had been badly injured. Men, good men, who reported to Quinn. Their lives had, fortunately, moved on. Two were already headed back to the Middle East. The third was due to head out to Japan in a few weeks.
Quinn’s status, however, was less certain.
Technically, his injuries were supposed to be healed. But that didn’t mean he didn’t still feel a gnawing ache every time he lifted his arm, courtesy of the shrapnel he’d taken during the attack. He’d spent an entire month in the hospital while the surgeons put together his shredded insides. Another month in physical therapy while the powers-that-be decided whether or not to give him the leave he’d requested.
Ultimately, he’d gotten the leave, as well as orders for ongoing therapy. The leave was supposed to last another month, if he wasn’t called back up—even for light duty—because of some new disaster.
And whether his leave lasted or not, a huge question remained. What role would he be called back to?
Which was another reason to have a throbbing pain inside his skull.
Quinn was a PJ. A Pararescueman. It was what he loved. It was where he excelled. “These things we do, that others may live,” was the PJ motto, but it was more than that for Quinn. It was a way of life. If a service member was in need of rescue on sea or on land, Quinn and others like him recovered and returned them to safety. They were commandos and they were paramedics. And they were equipped to handle anything and everything they encountered in order to complete their mission whether it was military or humanitarian in nature.
But if Quinn couldn’t stand up to the physical rigors of the job, he wasn’t going to be cleared for flight status. Which meant he wouldn’t be going back as a PJ.
And if he couldn’t go as a PJ, he wasn’t sure he could stand to go back at all.
Which left him with what?
There were too many questions circling his head, not the least of which was the matter of Penny Garner.
He ducked his head beneath the shower spray, feeling the hot water sluice down his shoulders. Even after a month Stateside, he hadn’t tired of the luxury of taking a shower that lasted as long as he wanted it to last.
Finally, though, aware of his grandmother’s expectation, he shut off the water. He pulled on clean jeans and shirt and left his room to join his grandmother and the others for lunch.
Even before he reached the double doors of Vivian’s suite, he could hear peals of laughter coming from inside.
One thing Quinn could say about the women in his family—they did know how to laugh.
He knocked on the door and a moment later, it was pulled open.
Only instead of facing his sister, Delia, or one of his cousins, it was Penny.
Like him, she’d obviously showered. Her wet hair was pulled to the back of her head into a ponytail. She’d also changed into a gray skirt that skimmed her ankles and a scoop-necked white T-shirt that lured his attention toward her lush curves.
Her eyes shied away from his as she backed out of the doorway so he could enter. “Everyone’s in the dining room.”
“I didn’t think you were going to be here.”
“Neither did I.” She toyed with one of her tiny gold stud earrings. “But when Mrs. Templeton says jump, it’s my job to ask how high.”
“Quinn, darling.” Vivian appeared in the archway leading to the dining room. She’d been widowed four times, and all of her husbands except the last had had money. Not as much as her, though, because her first husband—Quinn’s grandfather—had been a steel magnate. As a result, not even a regular hotel suite was good enough for her. Nope. For his granny, it was the presidential suite. Complete with two stories, four bedrooms—three of which were going empty—a full kitchen and butler’s pantry, and a formal dining room, all surrounded by an encompassing terrace if one was inclined to bake themselves in the hot Nevada sun.
“I was just getting ready to send Penny after you,” Vivian said. She was petite, white-haired and typically dressed in a pale pink Chanel suit. “Come.” She held out a beringed hand. “We’ve just been waiting for you.”
He allowed her to pull him into the dining room where places had been set at one end of the long, mahogany table. His cousins were already there. But not his baby sister. “Where’s Delia?”
“Still sleeping,” Greer drawled, with a roll of her eyes.
“Give her a break,” Maddie said calmly. “She was out all night.”
“We were all out all night,” Ali commented. She was spreading something green and obnoxious-looking across a tiny triangle of toast, and she pointed the tip of her knife at Quinn. “Except you.” She waved the knife a little, taking in Penny, who’d silently come up beside Quinn. “And you, Penny. The both of you disappeared around midnight shortly after we ran into that friend of yours.” She was a cop in Braden and she gave him what she obviously figured was her cop stare. But then she ruined it with a grin. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d be a little suspicious what you’d gotten up to with our dear Penny.”
He pulled out a chair across from Ali while Penny hurried over to the buffet that was laid out with silver serving dishes. “And what do you figure I was up to?” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver urn sitting in the center of the table.
“He was probably down in the fitness center working out like usual,” Greer answered before her sister could. “As if he’s not already in great shape.”
“Yeah, well, great shape’s not all it’ll take to get me cleared for parachuting again.” For that he might need a miracle. He managed a smile as he looked at their grandmother. On the bright side, at least he now knew for certain that none of his cousins had been participants in his and Penny’s marital antics the night before. “Viv, how’d you sleep after all that champagne last night?”
“Like a baby. Champagne is practically mother’s milk to me.” She waved an indolent hand. Her attention was on Penny as she fussed with the buffet. “Penny, dear. We have you to thank for this resplendent display. Sit down and enjoy it.”
Quinn wondered if he was the only one aware of the tight set to Penny’s shoulders as she finally carried a minimally filled plate over to the table. She sat two chairs away from Quinn.
“For Delia,” she murmured when he raised his eyebrows questioningly. “When she gets here.”
Knowing his little sister, she’d sleep until it was time to get up and party at the next nightclub. He grabbed the handle of the fancy coffeepot and leaned across the empty chair to fill Penny’s cup.
She flicked him a quick look. Murmured a thank-you.
It was obvious as hell that she wanted to be anywhere other than there.
“So how did you know Mike Lansing?” Maddie asked him. “It was so loud in the club last night, I never got that quite clear.”
Quinn didn’t plan to let them all know how little he remembered of the previous night and he let the name sift through his mind. He was thinking up a plausible answer when Greer took up the reins.
“They served together back in Africa,” she said as she got up to refill her plate. “He was a PJ, too. Though, frankly, the guy seemed like a jerk to me. All he did was talk about himself like he was a divine gift to women.” She looked at Quinn. “Fortunately, once you and Penny were gone, he didn’t hang around long.”
Maddie was nodding as if it all made sense.
It was beginning to make sense to Quinn, too. Thank God. Even though it was a good ten years ago since he’d met Lansing, he remembered him.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall encountering the man at all the night before.
“Strictly speaking,” he corrected, “Lansing was a CRO.” He pronounced it crow. “Combat Rescue Officer.” Which had put him ahead of Quinn—who was enlisted—in the pecking order. Until Lansing had gotten booted out for dishonorable conduct, that was.
“I don’t like talking about all this military stuff,” Vivian said.
Which made Quinn want to smile, because they were barely glossing the surface of military stuff where he was concerned.
“So, tell me. What is on everyone’s schedule this afternoon?” Vivian raised her brows as she looked at all of them.
“Massage,” Greer said promptly.
“Then the pool,” Maddie and Ali said in unison.
Greer nodded. “That, too.”
“What about you, Penny dear?”
Penny looked like she wanted to be drawn into the conversation about as much as she wanted to be thrown into the lion’s den. “Whatever you need me to take care of this afternoon, Mrs. Templeton.”
His grandmother made a face. “The only thing I’m doing this afternoon is resting and making a few calls.”
He caught the way Penny took a closer look at Vivian. “Resting?”
“Yes.” Vivian’s voice was deliberately patient. “Just resting. Which means you can go about and play the same as my grandchildren. Visit the spa. The pool. Shop. Whatever you like.”
“You know that I didn’t bring a swimsuit.” Penny didn’t look at anyone as she focused on the roll that she’d been methodically shredding.
“Then go buy one, like I’ve been telling you to do since we got here,” Vivian said firmly. “Charge it to my room. I’m sure the girls would go shopping with you.” As if the matter was settled, she turned her attention to Quinn. “And you, young man? Aside from the way you seemed to loosen up last night, I haven’t seen you even visit the gaming tables. You’ll be the first Templeton I’ve ever known who doesn’t like to try his hand at a little gambling.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.” It would be one way to pass the rest of the day. If he hadn’t had an unplanned marriage on his hands, the casino might have held a little more appeal.
“Come to the pool with us,” Maddie urged. “It’ll be fun.”
“What kind of calls do you need to make, Vivian?” Ali started to prop her elbows on the table, then seemed to think better of it as she focused on their grandmother. She grinned. “You can rest at the pool, too, you know.”
Vivian chuckled. “Well, my dear Arthur would have been the first to agree with you. But I have some business to take care of with my attorney in Pittsburgh. I’m considering selling my estate there.” Her smile took in all of them. “Since I’ve come to the conclusion that none of my grandchildren will likely want to take up residence there, I see no reason to keep hold of the place.”
Quinn had gotten accustomed to his grandmother’s references to her last late husband. “Dear Arthur” had been a public school teacher. A regular guy. And even dead, he still seemed to be a guiding force in her life. So much so that to honor his memory, she’d tried mending the lifelong rifts with the family she’d had with her first husband by moving to Wyoming where everything had to be entirely backwater in comparison to the life she’d led in Pennsylvania.
“Are you sure you want to get rid of Templeton Manor for good?” Maddie looked concerned. “You lived there with Daddy’s dad.”
Vivian smiled faintly. “I lived there with all of my husbands. But Sawyer first of all, of course. It’s the home where both of your fathers grew up.” Then she made a face. “And we all know neither one of them wants to step foot there ever again.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Maddie soothed.
“Darling, you’re very sweet. But I am very certain. Even though the car crash that killed their father was an accident, both Carter and David still blame me for his death. Nothing I say or do now is going to change that. But—” she placed her palms on the table beside her plate, and the diamonds on her fingers caught the light shining through the two-storied windows “—I have not given up on my grandchildren. Which is why I am so delighted that all of you were able to join me on this little jaunt to Las Vegas. I wish the rest of your siblings had been able to join us, but I’m still delighted all the same. My dear Arthur always said I’d get a kick out of this place and he was right.” She stood from the table and went over to the windows. “Such ridiculous ostentation,” she said, then gave them a wink. “I positively love it.”
Looking at her mischievous expression, Quinn found it almost hard to believe that Vivian wasn’t quite the picture of health that she appeared to be.
The reason? She called it the “little thing squatting inside my head.” Quinn and everyone else in the family called it what it was. An inoperable brain tumor.
So if she wanted to treat her grandkids—those who could get away on such short notice, at least—to this impetuous, lavish trip to Las Vegas, who was he to argue?
He couldn’t solve the problems between her, and his dad and uncle. But he could make sure he didn’t add to the hassles between them.
Which was a good reason to get the whole marriage certificate thing with Penny squared away as soon as possible.
Almost as if she’d read his mind, Penny suddenly stood up from the table and began clearing away her dishes.
“Penny,” Vivian chided softly. “There’s a butler here who takes care of that.”
“I know.” Penny didn’t stop what she was doing. “Old habits are just too hard to break, I’m afraid.” She disappeared through the connecting door into the kitchen.
“Well, I don’t mind breaking habits,” Greer said drily. “Someone else to clean up my dishes? I’m all for that.”
Quinn tuned out his cousins’ chatter as he swallowed the rest of his food, and then carried his plate and coffee into the kitchen after Penny.
She was standing at the sink with her shoulders slumped and visibly jumped when she noticed him.
“Sorry.” He set his plate on the counter next to the sink. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t.”
It was such an obvious lie, he let it go unchallenged.
“We’ll get it worked out, Penny.”
Her jaw shifted from side to side. “I don’t want to talk about it here.”
“I have the feeling you don’t want to talk about it anywhere.”
She shot him a pained look.
He sighed and looked over his shoulder through to the dining room. His cousins and grandmother were still sitting at the long table. “The certificate’s signed by an officiant. I’m going to check it out this afternoon. See what I can learn.” He considered asking if she wanted to accompany him but decided not to. If she didn’t want to discuss it, he doubted she’d want to traipse around with him looking into it.
“We were drunk. Obviously.” Her voice was low. “There’s no other explanation. It’s probably not even legal.”
He wasn’t going to debate the matter when he didn’t know the legalities, either. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Her long lashes swept down, hiding her vividly blue eyes again. She nodded and turned on the faucet to rinse another plate before leaning over to place it inside the built-in dishwasher.
There didn’t seem much point hanging there. Particularly when the only thing his eyes wanted to do was linger on the creamy skin exposed below her T-shirt when she’d leaned over.
His fingers twitched slightly, tingling. He knew exactly how her smooth, supple skin felt.
He also knew exactly how her skin tasted. It was there inside his memory, bright and vivid, even though he didn’t specifically recall anything besides waking up with his arms full of her warm body.
“Quinn!”
He dragged his mind into the present when he heard his name being called from the other room.
Penny had straightened and was rinsing another dish beneath the faucet. Shoulders hunched. Eyes averted.
He curled his fingers against his palms but the prickling sensation didn’t go away.
“Quinn!” Typically impatient, Ali came to the kitchen doorway. “Have beans in your ears? I’ve been calling you.”
He ignored her. “We’ll get it worked out, Penny,” he said again in a low voice, before turning to face his cousin. “What?”
Ali’s gaze was flipping from him to Penny and back to him again. Her cop’s mind was undoubtedly conjecturing. “Nothing,” she said after a moment. “Nothing at all.” Smiling faintly, she turned and left the room.
“And that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it here,” Penny muttered behind him.
He glanced at her. “You going to be one of those wives who always has to be right?”
She flushed. Gave him a look fit to do more damage than the grenades had done. “I am not your wife,” she muttered between her teeth.
“For both our sakes, darlin’, I hope you’re right.”
Chapter Three (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
The clerk at the county marriage bureau was polite, friendly and adamant.
It was entirely likely that Penny Garner really was his wife.
And the pain inside Quinn’s head rose to a new level.
“The officiant—” the clerk deciphered the signature on the marriage certificate “—Marvin Morales, has ten days to file your certificate. We often get them within a few days of the wedding, though. Once the marriage is recorded, a certified copy is typically available after a day or so.” She handed him back his crumpled paper. She’d already told him it was merely his keepsake certificate versus the official document. If she had any personal opinion about the state of the piece of paper, she kept it to herself. “You can get certified copies in person, via regular mail or order them online.”
Even though it was Sunday afternoon, there was a long line of people waiting behind him for their turn at the counter.
The Las Vegas wedding business was clearly in fine form.
“And this Morales guy. He’s legit?”
She turned to her computer and tapped on the keys. “Certainly is,” she assured. “I’m not showing any address or organizational affiliation for him, though.”
That didn’t sound overly legitimate to him. “Is that normal?”
“It’s a little unusual, but not unheard of.” She smiled. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr. Templeton?”
Right next to his elbow a large sign was posted, indicating the bureau would not issue marriage licenses to individuals who were clearly intoxicated. He nodded toward it. “You really enforce that?”
For the first time the clerk looked a little miffed. “Of course, sir. We take our responsibilities here quite seriously.”
“I’m sure you do.” He folded the certificate. “I appreciate your time.”
“Certainly. I wish you and your bride every happiness.”
He managed a smile as he turned away from the counter. He had barely vacated the spot when it was replaced by a young couple who were practically bouncing out of their shoes with excitement.
Outside the building, the sun was bright and hot. A good twenty-five degrees hotter than it was back in Wyoming. He didn’t particularly mind the heat, though. He’d served all over the world. He was used to temperature extremes.
He wound his way through the wedding-chapel vendors hawking their services outside the building and even though there were plenty of cabs he could have hailed, he walked back to the hotel.
The moment he entered, cold air and piped music engulfed him. If he went one direction, he could head toward his hotel suite. If he headed the opposite direction, he’d end up in one of the endless casinos. Another direction and it was one of the hotel’s several pools.
He wasn’t one for indecision, but he just stood there on the sea of gleaming marble tile, feeling the artificially cooled air blowing down over his head while he ran his thumb along the folded edges of the marriage certificate.
“Looks like you survived the fun last night, Sarge.”
At the greeting, Quinn looked up to see Mike Lansing a few feet away. Even if the trips hadn’t mentioned him from the night before, Quinn still would have recognized the other man. He had one arm looped over the shoulders of a bored-looking blonde and held a drink in his other hand.
“I did.” Quinn slid the folded square in his back pocket. “You?”
The blonde pursed her lips and looked up at Mike. “Are we going to the shops or not?”
Mike pulled out a wad of cash and pushed it into her hand. “You go, baby. I’m gonna grab another drink with my old buddy, here.”
The woman’s boredom visibly brightened as she tucked the money down her bra. She pulled Mike’s head down and gave him a noisy kiss. “See you later in the room.” Even though her voice was loaded with innuendo, she still ran her eyes up and down Quinn when she turned and walked away.
“Nice girl,” Quinn commented blandly.
Mike laughed. “Better be, considering how much she’s costing me.”
Since that could be taken a couple of ways, Quinn refrained from comment.
“C’mon.” Mike gestured with his half-full glass. “There’s a sweet little cocktail waitress I’ve been eyeing.”
“What about Miss Shopper?”
Mike just grinned and led the way toward the casino. “What about her?”
Quinn shook his head and followed. He didn’t care at all about Mike in a general sense, but the guy had evidently been around the night before. Quinn was willing to put up with most anything if it helped jog his memory of what had occurred.
They went straight to the lounge and had barely settled at one of the high-tops before a shapely redhead in a short black dress came over to take their orders. Mike ordered another whiskey and the waitress turned her smile toward Quinn. “And for you, sir?”
“Ginger ale.”
Mike gave him a look. “Dude.”
“Ginger ale,” Quinn repeated drily to the waitress.
She smiled at him, ignored the leer in Mike’s eyes and walked away.
“Talk about a fine-looking pair of legs,” Mike murmured, watching her go. “Not as good as those hot cousins of yours, but still fine.”
Quinn’s jaw tightened. “Can’t remember if you said last night what you’re doing here in Vegas.”
Mike laughed as if it was uproariously funny. He clapped Quinn on the shoulder. “I’ll bet you can’t remember.” He sat back and finished off his drink just in time to exchange it for the fresh one the redhead returned with. “Thanks, sweetheart. What time you get off work?”
“Soon as my husband picks up our twin babies,” she replied with a sweet smile. She set Quinn’s glass of soda on a round coaster. “I’ll be back to check on you boys.”
“Babies.” Mike shuddered. “God forbid. Least we’ve both been smart enough to avoid that nightmare. Remember Rollie? The way his old lady was always harping on him? Deployments keeping him away from her and those kids she kept poppin’ out? Ask me, I bet more than one of them wasn’t even Rollie’s. Always said the smartest guys are the ones who don’t bother putting a ring on it.”
Quinn didn’t entirely disagree. The divorce rate among special operators was astronomically high. He also knew many of the guys kept trying anyway. Maybe it was the hope to keep something normal in a world that was anything but normal.
Some succeeded.
More didn’t.
For his part, Quinn had always figured that if he’d ever met a woman he wanted to marry, he’d expect to put as much commitment into that marriage as he had into his career.
He’d just never met a woman that special.
The folded marriage certificate inside his pocket felt like it was burning a tattoo into his butt.
He shifted. “You got out a long time ago,” he reminded Mike, skirting the actual facts of the guy’s discharge. “What have you been doing since?”
“Contract work.” Mike grinned. “Money is really good, dude. Still get to make bad guys dead, but the bennies are a lot better than Uncle Sam ever coughed up. You decide you want to make some real dough, say the word. You think the uniform is a chick magnet, you should see what a bankroll can do. I’ll make some introductions.”
“If money had ever been my goal, I’d have become an officer like you were,” Quinn drawled. His first impressions of Mike Lansing had held up over the years. The hot five-mile walk from the marriage bureau building hadn’t made him want a shower as badly as sitting there with Mike did.
Mike laughed again. “You’re a master sergeant now. Good reason to feel uptight right there. Must suck being stuck running the action from the ground.”
Quinn hadn’t been stuck running things from the ground, but it was a definite possibility facing him. Even though every single member of the combat rescue team was valuable, running things from the ground wasn’t a role he relished. He’d spent too long in the action. Too long as a team leader.
“Just say the word and I’ll hook you up with another hit that’ll have you loosening up again in no time.” Mike grinned, mimicking dropping something into his drink.
His attention abruptly targeted on Mike. “Another hit. Of what?”
“A little something I keep handy.”
Quinn’s fists curled. “Exactly what little something?”
“Nothing that’ll pop in a blood test,” Mike assured, as if that made everything all right. “Just an herbal cocktail I learned about last time I was in India. Makes life a little...brighter. Your sister thought it was pretty hilarious. She switched drinks with yours—” He broke off when Quinn stood and started walking away. “Hey, Sarge. Where’re you going?”
Anywhere other than there.
Quinn didn’t stop. Didn’t even bother looking back. If he did, he was afraid of what he’d do to the other man.
Mike was a worm. Always had been and it seemed nothing in the intervening decade had changed.
But the last thing Quinn needed was to be caught grinding his fist into a worm’s face. He didn’t need an assault charge haunting him, no matter how well deserved his actions felt.
He strode through the casino until he located the elevators and went up to Delia’s hotel suite. Banged on the door. “Delia!”
Relief hit him when she finally yanked open the door. She was clearly dressed for the swimming pool in a bikini and a flimsy cover-up that didn’t cover up a damn thing. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, obviously.” He sounded annoyed and didn’t care. Because he was annoyed. Not only at Mike’s stunt, but also with her. “What the hell are you walking around like that for? You’re practically naked.”
Her eyebrows shot up and she propped her hand on her hip. She was dark-haired like him but that was about the end of the similarities. “I’m a long way from naked and I’m not exactly sixteen anymore, so can the protective growl!”
He would always feel protective where Delia was concerned. Mostly because she was the baby of his family. But also—and he ordinarily said it with love—she was kind of a ditz.
Their father was a pediatrician. Their mother was a retired psychologist. Their other sister, Grace, was doing her residency at Duke. Much to his father’s chagrin at the time, Quinn hadn’t taken the educational route, but he’d still made a career out of his military service and gotten a hell of a lot of education along the way.
Delia, though? She seemed entirely happy coasting through life, never settling on anything or anyone for any length of time.
“Did you see Lansing doctor my drink last night?”
She pursed her lips. “Maybe.”
God help him. He wanted to shake her. “Yes or no?”
“Good grief, Quinn. Keep your shorts on.” She picked up an oversize shoulder bag sitting on a chair. A floppy hat and a rolled towel were sticking out of it. “Of course I saw. He put some drops in Penny’s drink, too.”
“And you switched drinks.”
“So?”
He wanted to yell at her. But Delia never responded well to shouting. She just crumpled up in tears and shut down. “Are you crazy? I suppose you just drank it, too. Did he spike anyone else’s?”
She glared. “No, I did not drink it,” she snapped. “I dumped them both in a plant by the table! And no, I didn’t see him do anything else.”
“Did it occur to you to say anything? He could have been putting anything in our drinks. I can’t even remember coming back to the hotel last night.” But that wasn’t entirely accurate, either. Because already he had images hovering on the edges of his pain-addled brain. Vivid city lights. Penny’s blue gaze. A glossy limousine interior...
“When was I supposed to tell you, Quinn? When you were busy feeling up Penny on the dance floor? Besides, the guy was all hands! By the time I got that dealt with, you and Penny had already disappeared!”
“You could have found a way,” he said through his teeth. “You have no idea what a mess this has caused.”
“Well?” She spread her hands, clearly waiting. “What mess?”
He clenched his jaw, remembering his promise to Penny. “Lansing’s been a lost cause for ten years. But you’re my sister. You’re twenty-seven years old. You see something wrong, you speak up!”
“At least I was more aware of what was going on than you were.” She snatched a small vial from her pool bag and thrust it at him. “I stole it from his jacket while he was trying to stick his tongue down my throat. You’re welcome.”
He exhaled roughly, rubbing his hand down his face as he swore. At her. At Lansing. At the fact that he’d found himself married to a woman who was more appalled at the idea than he was. But mostly at himself. Because Delia was right. If he’d been more aware, none of this would have happened. “Thank you,” he muttered.
Delia sniffed, clearly unimpressed as she shoved past him with her pool bag and strode away.
“Perfect.” He opened the nearly empty vial and took a sniff, which told him nothing. He twisted the cap back in place and pocketed it.
He realized he didn’t know the number of Penny’s room as he headed toward the elevator. He used the house phone to call the front desk and, thanks to the beauty of dropping his granny’s name, received the information he needed.
He took the elevator down to Penny’s floor and knocked on the door. Given the way the day had gone so far, he didn’t expect her to be there, so when the door opened a second later, he couldn’t hide his surprise.
At least that was the excuse he used while he adjusted to the sight of her. She was wearing a black swimsuit with an opaque black scarf tied around her hips. The sleek one-piece was a lot less revealing than Delia’s bikini had been, but disturbed him a hell of a lot more.
It wasn’t easy to believe he’d wedded Penny, but it was all too easy to understand why he’d bedded her.
No amount of artificial stimulants needed on that score.
“I see you went shopping for a swimsuit.”
Her hair was still pulled back in a ponytail—dry now—and she had a pair of sunglasses hiding her eyes. “Yes.”
“Can I come in?”
She hesitated.
He led with what he considered the most critical info. “The guy Maddie mentioned at lunch—Lansing. He drugged our drinks last night.”
Her lips parted. She slowly pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head.
“With what?” She backed away, pulling the door open wider so he could enter.
Her hotel room was just a regular hotel room. Nice, yeah. But nothing at all like the fancy-dancy suites the rest of them had. It was also neat as a pin. The bed perfectly made because she hadn’t even spent the last night in it. “Supposedly it’s some herbal crap.” He showed her the vial.
She paled. “What kind of herbal crap?”
I don’t know, but I know someone who can test it. He pushed the vial in his pocket again and put his hand on her forehead. The skin was cool. Velvety smooth. “How are you feeling? A headache? Any nausea? Problems breathing?”
She shook her head, pulling away from his touch. “No. Well, a headache. But I just attributed that to...you know.” She turned away from him.
The back straps of her swimsuit were comprised of an intriguing series of strings crisscrossing over the small of her spine in a way that only emphasized her hourglass figure. And even though he couldn’t see beneath the scarf, he had no problem imagining her long legs and curvy butt being shown off to perfection...
He cleared his throat and looked away.
She was pacing in the space between the bed and the window. “We’ve all heard to watch out for that sort of thing, but to have it actually happen—” She plopped on the side of the bed. “Has this happened to you before?”
He sighed and went to sit beside her. “No.” He folded her hand in his. “I’m sorry.”
“Because your friend is an ass?”
“He was kicked out of the service ten years ago. And he was never my friend. But yeah.”
She looked at him. Her brows were pulled together over those oddly luminous eyes. “You didn’t know. None of us knew.”
“Except Delia.” He let go of her hand, pushing off the bed. “She saw him do it. And if she’d said something—” he yanked the marriage certificate out of his back pocket and tossed it on the bed beside her “—maybe we wouldn’t have that to deal with.”
She got off the bed as if she didn’t want to be anywhere near the certificate. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? No, I didn’t tell her. I told you I wouldn’t say anything to anyone yet and I haven’t.” He gestured at the paper. “The guy who signed it is registered with the county to perform marriages. I’ll have to keep checking back to get proof it’s legal, but we’ll know that within ten days. That’s how long he has to file the paperwork.”
“Ten days!”
“Could be sooner.” He told her everything the marriage bureau employee had told him.
“So we were lucid enough to apply for a marriage license. Presumably get through a ceremony of some sort and sign our names on the marriage certificate. Then pass out in bed. It doesn’t mean we can’t get an annulment.” Her cheeks were red. “We don’t know that...that...anything physical happened.”
“Don’t pretend you’re that naive. I can’t see us being in bed together and not being in bed together.” The way they’d woken all tangled together was proof enough for him. He’d been hard as a rock and she’d been warm and wet.
She’d pressed her hands over her ears and was shaking her head. “I’m not listening.”
He went over to her and gently wrapped his fingers around her wrists. Her pulse rate was off the charts. “Like it or not, Penny, it’s a given that you and I consummated whatever vows we exchanged.” He exhaled heavily and admitted the worst. “But I can’t even be certain that you were willing!”
Her lips parted. She swallowed. “Quinn—”
He let her go and shoved his hand through his hair. “If you want go to the hospital, I can take you. Or arrange for someone else to, if you’re more comfortable that way.” His voice was gruff. The thought that he might have coerced her was nauseating. “You can get an exam. If you were forced—”
“Oh my God!” She looked horrified. “I don’t need an exam to prove what I already know. You were just as much a victim of this as I was. Maybe you were the one who wasn’t, you know...on board.” Her cheeks turned red. “That’d be more in line with our history.”
“Trust me.” His voice was dark. “I would’ve been more than willing back then if you’d have been legal. And now—” He broke off because her face was nearly scarlet now. He exhaled. “You’re a beautiful woman, Penny. Let’s just leave it at that.”
She cleared her throat, not looking at him. “And you’re a handsome man.” The words seemed to come reluctantly. “Anyway, it’s all moot,” she continued abruptly. “I don’t care what sort of influence you were under. You’d never do something against a woman’s will. You wouldn’t even be worried if not for what that scum of a man did. So just stop thinking about it and talking about...about tests and stuff.”
His chest felt tight. Trust like that was more than a little humbling. And he still wasn’t sure it was merited. How could he ever be truly sure?
“Promise me, Quinn.”
It was the second promise she’d asked of him that day. “Fine.”
Fortunately, she accepted the answer. She put a few paces between them, busying herself with retying the knot in the silky scarf. “And maybe we didn’t. It’s possible,” she insisted at his look. “Maybe we both just passed out before we could—you know.”
“Have sex?”
“Yes.” Obviously, the very idea of it embarrassed her. “Regardless, we’re the only ones who would know. And if we say we didn’t...consummate things, we could still get an annulment.”
“You mean lie.”
“It’s not a lie if there’s any room for doubt.”
He made a face and she huffed. “Neither one of us wants to be married to the other. This is just one big fiasco from start to finish. And the only way to rectify it—if there’s anything to actually rectify—is to get an annulment. Everything’ll be right back to normal.”
“You’re forgetting one thing.”
She raised her brows, waiting.
“When we had sex—”
“If we had sex.”
“When we had sex,” he repeated over her interruption, “we didn’t use anything.” No condom. No condom wrapper. No evidence of any sort of protection had been in his hotel suite. “Now, I’ve had every medical test known to man over the past few months. You don’t have to worry about catching anything from me. I’m assuming you’ve always been careful in the past?”
Her cheeks had gone red again. After a moment she gave a stiff nod.
“Then there’s just one question left. Are you on birth control?“
Chapter Four (#uf3543834-16d8-56c9-88a7-7df410760aeb)
Quinn’s words jangled inside Penny’s mind.
He was standing there, annoyingly handsome and militarily straight, waiting for an answer.
She wanted to ask him if they hadn’t already had enough blows for one day.
She was still grappling with the notion that some idiot had spiked their drinks. The only thing gained by knowing that fact was that they now had an explanation for ending up in Quinn’s hotel suite the way they had. They had an explanation for not being able to remember any of it. She already knew Quinn had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. If he learned she’d also been a virgin—
“Penny?” Quinn took a step toward her. His eyebrows were like straight slashes above his level brown eyes. “Are you on birth control or not?”
“I don’t really think that’s any of your business,” she said evasively.
His eyebrows shot up. “Until I know otherwise, you’re my wife. I think that does make it my business. So are you on the pill? Implant? Anything?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She managed a nod, trying valiantly to pretend her neck wasn’t getting hot.
His eyes narrowed. “You’re lying.”
The heat spread up her jaw and into her cheeks. Her forehead. Until her entire head felt like it might well be smoking. “Why would I lie about that?”
He suddenly leaned back against the dresser in front of the bed and folded his arms across his wide chest. “I don’t know,” he said calmly. “Why are you?”
She’d been a better liar when she’d been ten than she was now.
She turned her back on him and went over to look out the window. Unlike his suite with that stellar city view and balcony, her room looked out over a roof and a bunch of mechanical equipment. There was one window. No balcony. And it was still costing Mrs. Templeton over four hundred dollars a night.
“No, I’m not on the pill,” she admitted flatly. “There’s nobody in my life. Hasn’t been for a while.” She wasn’t going to tell him that there’d never been anyone. Not that way. She and her fiancé, Andy, had been foster kids living in the same foster home. They’d never chanced it, knowing that they’d be separated in a nanosecond if they were caught doing anything improper. Then he’d graduated from high school, announced to their foster parents during his graduation party that they were engaged, and he’d headed to boot camp a day later, leaving Penny behind to finish high school.
Quinn’s silence penetrated her memories and she looked over her shoulder at him. “What?”
“You’re not on anything?”
She shook her head.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his fingertips against his temples. “So you could be pregnant. On top of everything else.”
“What? No!”
He gave her a look. “I don’t have to spell out the details of unprotected sex, do I?”
She made a face. “Obviously not.”
“Then you know there’s a chance just as well as I do.” He inhaled deeply, then straightened once more. “Which means nothing’s happening about anything until we know one way or the other.”
She couldn’t remember making love. She darn shooting couldn’t imagine having conceived a baby with him. She and Andy had talked about having a half-dozen kids. About having the kind of real family that neither one of them had grown up with.
Her throat felt tight. “I can’t talk about this anymore.” She hurried past him and yanked open the room door. “I need you to go.”
“Penny.”
She stared hard at the gold patterned carpet beneath her sandals, willing away the tears that burned behind her eyes. “Please, Quinn. Not now.” Not ever, if she was lucky.
She heard the impatience in his sigh as he came over to the door. But there was no hint of impatience at all in the way he touched her shoulder. And no matter how badly she wanted to ignore him, she couldn’t help looking up at him.
For a man who could look as fierce as he could look, he also had an unsettling capacity for showing extreme gentleness.
And she felt shaky because of it.
“Whatever happens, whatever we learn, we will work it out together. All right?”
Her teeth were practically gnawing a chunk out of the inside of her cheek. “I’m not your responsibility, Quinn.”
“Well, now, I’m going to have to disagree, since you seem to be my wife.”
“An unintentional one.”
“Doesn’t make it any less real as far as I’m concerned. And as such, you are my responsibility.”
“Doesn’t that make you my responsibility, as well?”
His thumb rubbed her bare shoulder before falling away. “You can handle it. You handle Vivian, after all. And she’s a lot more to take on than me.”
Despite everything, Penny felt a tearful laugh catch in her throat. “I’d just gotten off the phone with her when you knocked on my door.” Her hand felt sweaty on the door handle.
“How’d you end up working for her anyway? You get tired of working for my dad or something? You worked for him a long time.”
“Ten years,” she murmured. So long that she’d even become Dr. Templeton’s office manager. “I met Mrs. Templeton when she came to see your dad at his office last summer.”
“Bet that went well.” His voice was dry.
She nodded. “They had a shouting match. About what you’d expect. Before she left, she told me that I looked intelligent enough if not for the fact that I worked for her son.”
“Nice.”
“I think the only reason she started calling me to come work for her as her assistant was because she knew it annoyed your father.” She hesitated because she wasn’t sure Dr. T would appreciate her sharing the truth, even with his own son. “Eventually, she offered double my salary. Your dad said I should take it. I started working for her shortly before last Christmas.”
“Just like that. Ten years of loyalty tossed aside for a few dollars more?”
The accusation accomplished what nothing else did. It dried up the knot of tears threatening to break loose inside her.
“He said I should take it for the money, and then he asked me to keep my eye on her for him. No matter what he says about not caring about your grandmother, your dad does care. Very much. And because I care about Dr. Templeton, I did what he asked.”
“You did what my son asked, dear?”
Penny caught her breath and looked out the door she was holding open to see Vivian standing a few feet away in the hall.
How much had she heard?
Vivian’s carefully penciled eyebrows went up as she approached. “Well?”
Penny couldn’t seem to form an answer to save her life. She looked up at Quinn. He looked surprised, but definitely wasn’t at a loss.
“She told him she’d keep an eye on me while we were here in Vegas,” he lied easily. “You know what Dad’s like.”
“Overprotective,” Vivian said crisply. “When it comes to my possible bad influence.” Her bright gaze was running back and forth between Penny’s face and her grandson’s. “Well, I can’t say that’s much of a surprise.” She brushed her hand down the lapel of her chenille jacket as if she were brushing away the thought. “Is that what the two of you are doing together in your room, Penny? Looking after my grandson?”
Penny’s face went hot.
Which seemed to be exactly the response that Vivian was looking for, because the elderly woman gave a faint smile and a sage-looking nod.
If Quinn noticed, he ignored it. “What’re you doing slumming on the fifth floor anyway, Vivian?”
“Now you sound like dear Arthur. He had that attitude about me when we first met.”
“You cured him of it?” Quinn’s voice was wry.
“He cured me of it,” Vivian said simply. “Now, Penny dear. I came down to tell you that we’re starting a new project.”
Wariness coursed through her. Vivian’s latest project had been planning this Las Vegas jaunt.
And look where that had landed them.
“What project is that, Mrs. Templeton?”
“I’ve decided to run for the open seat on the town council.”
Penny blinked. She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “Weaver’s town council?”
“Well, not Las Vegas’s town council,” Vivian said humorously. “Now, the vote isn’t until September, which gives us a little over six weeks to mount my campaign.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in politics.”
“Oh.” Vivian looked annoyed. “I’m not. But somebody needs to run against that coot, Squire Clay, and since nobody else in town has stepped up to do it, I will. I’m hardly afraid of an old cattle rancher, even if he does think he owns the entire town. Do you know that he actually tried to keep me from building my house where I wanted it? Said I was impinging on the natural view from the town. You can’t even see my house from the edge of town.”
Penny had never met Squire Clay, herself, though she’d certainly heard the man’s name. The Clay family owned one of the largest cattle ranches in the state and as far as she knew, they formed a good portion of the very backbone of Weaver. The Clays were also relatives of the Templetons, though that was a recent revelation Vivian had admitted to only after she’d moved to Weaver from Pittsburgh.
“Vivian,” Quinn offered reasonably, “I’ve heard you and Clay aren’t the best of friends, but—”
“We’re not even the best of enemies.” Vivian cut off Quinn. “He’s as bad as my two sons when it comes to holding old grudges. I can’t imagine how any sister of my Sawyer—illegitimate or otherwise—could have had the bad taste to marry a man like Squire. He was a boor sixty years ago and nothing has changed in the years since. It’s amazing to me that he actually found another woman willing to marry him after Sarah died.” She focused on Penny again. “So, the first order of business is to make sure my name is filed right away as a candidate. I want you to take care of that even before we leave for home. All right?”
“Of course.” Penny had no clue whatsoever what was involved, but she knew how to pick up a phone and ask questions.
“Very good.” Vivian smiled, running her gaze approvingly over the bathing suit that Penny had reluctantly purchased at her boss’s insistence. “Now, run along, you two. Get to the pool. The manager here has invited me to join him for dinner, so you’ll be on your own this evening. We’ll all have breakfast in my suite before we check out of the hotel, so I’d appreciate you arranging that, Penny. Quinn, make sure Delia drags herself to breakfast, also. Until then, I trust you’ll find something to entertain yourselves.” Smiling slightly, she turned on her heel and strode away.
Neither Penny nor Quinn spoke until the old woman was out of sight.
“So that tumor is making her crazy now,” he finally said.
“She’s definitely not crazy.”
He was silent for a moment. A moment in which she became painfully aware of the warmth of his shoulder where it brushed against hers.
“My old man really asked you to keep an eye on her?”
She moistened her lips. Little prickles of sensation were springing to life beneath her skin. “He really asked me.” If Quinn would move even an inch, she could have slid past him back into the safety of her hotel room instead of standing there in the opened doorway.
But he wasn’t moving.
Not even an inch.
She tugged at the knot on her scarf, tightening the slick fabric once more. Ali had been the one to insist the bathing suit was perfect. But Maddie had tossed in the scarf, obviously understanding that Penny didn’t feel comfortable parading around in a suit that left so much of her butt exposed.
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Allison Leigh
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: What happened in Vegas…When Penny Garner and Quinn Templeton wake up in bed together – in Vegas – with rings and a marriage certificate on the bedside table it looks like they did more than just sleep! While they wait to see if their night had physical consequences, can Quinn convince Penny to leave her old heartbreak in the past and become his bride?