Zoe And The Best Man
Carole Buck
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u5cf829e3-fb73-5241-be85-a6a1445c21dc)
Excerpt (#u6b6bad3f-5d0d-5b80-95cd-2f1c16fc3ef1)
Dear Reader (#u666b60bf-67bf-503d-8ce6-22c1e3cfc814)
Title Page (#u6d44f979-dcab-58ab-8f50-c6b85986efce)
About The Author (#u3e318e11-1e21-55e9-b0ed-7c5bd41a8dba)
Dedication (#ub50bc598-7663-59e4-b40a-7f965f6ec90a)
One (#u7d7d68ab-2d92-5ab4-9535-6a57e7782a6e)
Two (#u20560aef-9f07-502b-b001-24f3c78fe5b0)
Three (#u1db286ef-2ab0-5ff9-adc3-9af4c38bd513)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Another Nice Catch, Goldilocks.”
“Oh. That. Well, no offense intended, Flynn, but if I ever again have to choose between snagging a bridal bouquet and preventing you from falling on a hardwood floor, I’m going for the flowers. You weigh a ton.”
“I’m fine now, really. You don’t have to stay here tonight.”
“Look,” Zoe said. “You’re on the road to recovery, let’s hope, but a long way from being one hundred percent. Suppose—suppose you start hallucinating.”
Something glinted, deep and dangerous, in his hazel eyes. “I thought I was when I opened the door and saw you standing on my threshold.”
“Really? I thought you were just surprised to see me.”
“That came after I was sure you were real….”
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the wonderful world of Silhouette Desire! This month, look for six scintillating love stories. I know you’re going to enjoy them all. First up is The Beauty, the Beast and the Baby, a fabulous MAN OF THE MONTH from Dixie Browning. It’s also the second book in her TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME miniseries.
The exciting SONS AND LOVERS series also continues with Leanne Banks’s Ridge: The Avenger. This is Leanne’s first Silhouette Desire, but she certainly isn’t new to writing romance. This month, Desire has Husband: Optional, the next installment of Marie Ferrarella’s THE BABY OF THE MONTH CLUB. Don’t worry if you’ve missed earlier titles in this series, because this book “stands alone.” And it’s so charming and breezy you’re sure to just love it!
The WEDDING BELLES series by Carole Buck is completed with Zoe and the Best Man. This series just keeps getting better and better, and Gabriel Flynn is one scrumptious hero. Next is Kristin James’ Desire, The Last Groom on Earth, a delicious opposites-attract story written with Kristin’s trademark sensuality.
Rounding out the month is an amnesia story (one of my favorite story twists), Just a Memory Away, by award-winning author Helen R. Myers.
And next month, we’re beginning CELEBRATION 1000, a very exciting, ultraspecial three-month promotion celebrating the publication of the 1000th Silhouette Desire. During April, May and June, look for books by some of your most beloved writers, including Mary Lynn Baxter, Annette Broadrick, Joan Johnston, Cait London, Ann Major and Diana Palmer, who is actually writing book #1000! These will be months to remember, filled with “keepers.”
As always, I wish you the very best,
Lucia Macro
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
Zoe and the Best Man
Carole Buck
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CAROLE BUCK
is a television news writer and movie reviewer who lives in Atlanta. She is single and her hobbies include cake decorating, ballet and traveling. She collects frogs, but does not kiss them. Carole says she’s in love with life; she hopes the books she writes reflect this. Readers can contact Carole Buck by writing to P.O. Box 78845, Atlanta, GA 30357-2845.
To Karen Taylor Richman, whose faith got the Wedding Belles ringing.
Thanks for your skill, support and editorial spirit!
One (#ulink_e2280622-c3d8-5363-b3ff-3950a13d0e60)
With barely ten minutes to go before the scheduled start of the wedding between “Peachy” Keene and “Luc” Devereaux, the best man had yet to arrive. One friend of the brideto-be was fervently hoping he wouldn’t put in an appearance until after the ceremony and reception were over, and she was winging her way home from New Orleans to Washington, D.C.
It wasn’t that she wanted anything irreparable to happen to him, Zoe Alexandra Armitage reassured herself as she stared at the quiet, tree-lined street in front of her. Given the debt she owed the man in question, there was no way she could ever wish him permanently ill. Still—
“Any sign of him?” a throaty voice asked.
Startled, Zoe turned toward the entrance of the small Garden District church where Peachy and Luc intended to exchange their vows before family and friends. The source of the anxious inquiry—a tall, clipboard-clutching individual clad in a stylish ensemble of beige brocade—was looming in the building’s arched, blossom-bedecked doorway.
“I’m afraid not, Terry,” she replied, smoothing the slightly belled skirt of her pale blue silk dress with an immaculately manicured hand. She wondered fleetingly whether she looked as flushed and unsettled as she felt. Some of her discomfort was attributable to the sultry August weather. As for the rest…
She didn’t want to think about the rest.
Terry Bellehurst checked his wristwatch and frowned. Like Peachy, he was a tenant in the Prytania Street mansion cum apartment house Luc Devereaux had purchased with a portion of the profits from his bestselling novels.
He was also the self-appointed coordinator of the day’s festivities, and from what Zoe had observed thus far, he was carrying out his job with great panache. The way he’d maneuvered her into “volunteering” to maintain a vigil for the best man had been particularly deft.
He’d nailed her about twenty minutes ago as she’d walked into the church’s flower-garlanded vestibule with the recently wed Annie and Matt Powell. Annie—the former Hannah Elaine Martin of Atlanta—had been one of two women with whom she’d shared a dorm suite in college. The other had been Peachy’s older sister, Eden, who just happened to be married to Matt Powell’s older brother, Rick. Approximately six months pregnant with her first child, Eden was serving as Peachy’s matron of honor.
“Zoe, honey, I need your help,” Terry had said after he’d eased her away from Annie and Matt. “The best man—Luc’s bonded-through-battle buddy, Gabriel Flynn—is still among the missing. But there’s word he’s been spotted at a private airstrip on the other side of the river. He supposedly rappeled out of a helicopter with his hands tied behind his back. Or parachuted from a plane without a crash helmet. I’m a little vague about the macho details. In any case, he’s allegedly on the ground, more or less in one piece and headed in this direction. Would you mind waiting outside until he shows up?”
“Would I?” she’d echoed, appalled by the request. The anxiety that had been building within her ever since she’d learned the identity of Luc’s best man escalated into something perilously close to panic.
“Somebody has to make certain Flynn gets where he’s supposed to go, wearing what he’s supposed to wear, once he finally arrives,” Terry had explained, seemingly unaware of her plight. “I’d do it myself, but I’m up to my eyebrows in last-minute details. I’m appealing to you because, well, I have the distinct impression that underneath that Princess Grace cool of yours—I love the ice blue dress, by the way. Calvin Klein, am I right? Of course I’m right. The color’s fabulous on you. And the French twist? To die for. I’ll bet you didn’t use one of those hairstyle helpers they sell on late-night TV, either. Are those things tacky or what? I mean—”
“Terry,” she’d interrupted.
“Sorry.” The apology had been accompanied by a quick, contrite smile. “Sometimes a tide of fashion enthusiasm just sweeps me away. Such a failing. But, back to the business at hand. My intuition tells me you’re a girl who’s capable of kicking butt and taking names. And it might come to that, depending on Flynn’s condition.” He’d waited a beat, then moved in for the kill. “So…what do you say?”
Reeling, she’d said the only thing she could say. Which was yes.
Zoe supposed there were some who might consider Terry Bellehurst an outrageous or even offensive character. He was, after all, a retired Super Bowl champion who’d abandoned a highly successful sportscasting career to embrace a new identity as Terree—accent on the second syllable—LaBelle, emcee of what was reputed to be the French Quarter’s classiest drag show. Despite his undeniable eccentricities, she found him quite endearing.
If truth be told, she liked all of Peachy’s neighbors. She particularly admired Dr. Laila Martigny, a regal-looking psychologist who’d put herself through school working as a housekeeper and who allegedly was descended from New Orleans’s legendary witch queen, Maria Laveau. The fiftyish Dr. Martigny was engaged to the newest member of the Prytania Street manage, Francis Sebastian Gilmore Smythe.
An elegant, erudite Englishman in his early sixties, Mr. Smythe had been introduced to Zoe at the previous night’s rehearsal dinner. He’d described himself as a semiretired dealer in objets d’art who was deeply privileged to have a longstanding acquaintanceship with her employer, Arietta Martel von Helsing Flynn Ogden.
Zoe had subsequently been told that although this characterization was accurate, it was less than complete. Yes, Francis Sebastian Gilmore Smythe was the well-connected connoisseur he claimed to be. But he was also a former spymaster for MI5, the British intelligence service.
This highly confidential information about Dr. Martigny’s urbane fiance had been supplied in excited whispers by Peachy’s next-door neighbors and bridesmaids, Mayrielle and Winona-Jolene Barnes. Collectively referred to by their fellow Prytania Street residents as “the MayWinnies,” the Misses Barnes were identical twins. Although they presented themselves as the epitome of white-gloved propriety, gossip claimed these spritely septuagenarians had once been considered among the best of the good times to be had in New Orleansassuming, of course, one was willing to meet their price.
While her time in Washington had taught Zoe to be extremely skeptical about not-for-attribution innuendo, she was inclined to think that this was one case where the rumors were right on target. For all their garden-party primness, the MayWinnies exuded the same born-to-beguile aura as her thrice-married and at-least-as-many-times mistressed employer. And that Arietta Martel von Helsing Flynn Ogden had been hot stuff in her heyday was a matter of public record. In point of fact, it was Zoe’s considered opinion that the reigning doyenne of D.C. society was still abundantly capable of charming the, er, socks off of just about any man she chose.
“The bride-to-be is beginning to get a little bit crazed,” Terry reported, consulting his clipboard with a slightly frazzled expression. “Ditto, the MayWinnies. The matron of honor seems all right, although I wish she’d sit down and keep her feet up until it’s time for the ceremony. I mean, my ankles are starting to balloon just from looking at her and that’s hell when you’re wearing heels. As for the groom, well, it’s hard to tell with him. He’s either very, very calm or entering the first stage of catatonia.”
Zoe nodded, mentally replaying part of a conversation she’d overheard during the rehearsal dinner. Peachy had been questioning her husband-to-be about the whereabouts of his best man. There’d been an unnerving reference to medical quarantines. And something about demilitarized zones.
“He’ll be here, cher,” Luc had said, very simply, very certainly. “He gave me his word.”
A breeze, heavy with humidity and redolent of the lush scent of late-summer flowers and foliage, sent a tendril of blond hair fluttering across Zoe’s left cheek. She brushed it back into place with an automatic gesture, experiencing a sudden flash of guilt about the hopes she’d been entertaining.
“Is there a backup plan?” she asked after a moment.
“You mean if…?” Terry gestured, plainly reluctant to put the possibility into words.
Zoe’s sense of guilt intensified. While she didn’t believe her wishes about Flynn had any real force, she knew she was going to feel at least partially responsible if he failed to fulfill the pledge he’d made to Luc Devereaux. And if Peachy’s wedding day was marred because her bridegroom’s best man didn’t get himself to the church on time…
“Yes,” she affirmed.
“Mr. Smythe’s on standby.”
“Would he be…all right?” Peachy had told her that Luc, who’d lost both his parents in an automobile accident at age nineteen, held the older man in very high esteem.
“Flynn would be better,” Terry said frankly, then glanced at his watch again. He gasped in dismay. “Oh, my God. It’s three minutes before the hour. I’ve got to get inside and tell the organist to stall. Maybe he can take requests from the congregation or something.” He gave Zoe an imploring look. “Will you stay out here a teensy-weensy while longer? Please?”
“No problem, Terry,” she acquiesced, summoning up what she hoped was a tranquil smile. “Just don’t start the ceremony without me.”
“Perish the thought, sweetie,” the former gridiron champion responded feelingly, then pirouetted on one foot and reentered the church.
Squaring her slim shoulders, Zoe turned back toward the street. She was getting all worked up over nothing, she told herself. There was no rational reason for her to be afraid of seeing Flynn again. She was an intelligent, independent, thirtytwo-year-old woman, for heaven’s sake. Luc’s putative best man posed no threat to her. He’d never posed a threat to her!
Except, perhaps, psychologically. There was no disputing that Flynn had had—continued to have—a diabolically disruptive effect on her peace of mind. But that was far more her fault than his at this point. If she’d had a shred of gumption, she would have put what had happened between them behind her a long, long time ago.
Not that what had happened between them had been all that earth-shatteringly significant. Flynn’s existence had intersected with hers for a scant five days nearly sixteen years ago. And during those five days, he’d…well, uh…he’d…
Oh, all right!
During those five days he’d saved her life.
Which wasn’t to say he’d done so because he’d genuinely wanted to, Zoe felt compelled to remind herself, clenching and unclenching her fingers. Oh, indeed, not. Twenty-three-yearold Lieutenant Gabriel James McNally Flynn had made it absolutely clear that he’d been given no choice in the matter. He’d been acting on orders from start to finish. Hauling her— or, rather, what he’d crudely referred to as her “skinny adolescent butt"—out of harm’s way had been nothing more than an assignment to him. And a damned undesirable assignment, too, for a highly trained member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.
Zoe gritted her teeth, remembering. She could have been a crate of kitty litter for all the consideration he’d shown her during the time they’d spent together!
She hadn’t even learned Flynn’s full name or age until after he’d delivered her into the custody of U.S. diplomats and departed for some classified location without so much as a goodbye or good riddance. Not that she hadn’t tried to discover them before that. She had. Repeatedly. Unfortunately, her taciturn military escort had proven to be about as giving as a block of granite when it came to answering questions or providing explanations.
He’d known her name and vital statistics, of course, thanks to what she’d gathered had been a very thorough pre-mission briefing. But he hadn’t deigned to call her Zoe more than a couple of times as he’d bullied her through nearly eighty miles of Central American jungle. He’d chosen instead to address her by the appellation “Goldilocks,” which had obviously been intended to goad.
Zoe closed her eyes, muttering a polyglot assortment of less than ladylike expressions she’d picked up during her singularly peripatetic formative years. Flynn had made her feel like such a…such a child during that treacherous five-day trek. She’d hated him for the way he’d treated her! And out of that hatred had come a furious desire to prove that she was more than the burdensome brat he so obviously considered her to be.
“I’ll show him” had been the mantra that had kept her going when every fiber in her body had been shrieking at her to slow down or stop. I’ll show him.
And she had.
“You didn’t think I’d make it, did you, Flynn?” she’d demanded when they’d finally reached safety. Exhausted to the point of illness, she’d been shaking like a leaf in a windstorm. She’d also been scared. For the first time in nearly 150 hours, she’d been scared out of her wits.
Flynn had stared at her without speaking for what had seemed like a very long time. During the course of that silence, she’d discovered that the deep-set eyes she’d thought were stone-cold gray were actually enlivened with flecks of green and gold. She’d also detected subtle hints of the same fear she was feeling in the lean features of the sun-bronzed face she’d come to believe was incapable of registering anything but disdain for her.
“You have no idea what I thought—or think—about you, Goldilocks,” he’d responded at last, his voice edged with an emotion she couldn’t identify.
Then he’d left her.
Zoe opened her eyes. Maybe seeing Flynn again would be good for her, she thought. It would be an opportunity to achieve…what was that popular talk-show term? Oh, yes. Closure. If nothing else, seeing Flynn again would allow her to say the thank-you she’d never had a chance to say. And after she’d uttered the requisite expressions of gratitude, maybe she’d allow herself the luxury of—
Rrrmm. Rrrmm.
An ominous rumbling disrupted what might have been a very pleasant revenge fantasy. Zoe cocked her head, listening. The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere down the street. But what on earth—
The arrogant, eat-my-dust noise got louder.
And louder.
Zoe lifted her right hand and shaded her eyes, uncomfortably conscious of a sudden acceleration in her pulse. A moment later a massive black motorcycle vroom-vroomed into view.
The bike was ridden by a veritable behemoth of a man. He was blue-jeaned, booted and sported a bushy beard. He was also naked from the waist up except for a thicket of coal black chest hair and a leather vest. The brightly colored insignias on the vest suggested that he maintained a closer fellowship with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang than the Boy Scouts of America.
Zoe stared, stunned.
Could it be? she wondered. Could the lean, mean military operative she’d known more than a decade and a half ago have metamorphosed into a hairy, masculine hulk whose appearance strongly suggested that he might rank high on the FBI’s Most Wanted list or low on the evolutionary chain, or both?
She’d realized that the passage of time would have altered him, of course. Flynn had only been a few years into his twenties when she’d met him. He was now pushing forty. But even so—
Zoe’s mind suddenly jumped back to a grainy black-andwhite photograph that had appeared in the Washington Post a little more than two years ago. It had accompanied an article about Gabriel Flynn’s successful transition from military man to roving troubleshooter for an ad hoc network of international aid organizations. The picture had shown him hunkered down, talking with a pair of bone-thin, big-eyed children. Both youngsters had been staring at him with something akin to awe.
He’d had a beard in the photograph, she remembered with unsettling clarity. His thick brown hair had been sun streaked, shoulder length and shaggily unkempt. His clothing—a bizarre combination of jump boots, military-style khaki pants and what appeared to be a garishly flowered Hawaiian shirthad been filthy. He’d looked as though he’d smelled, maybe even stunk, to high heaven.
The motorcycle pulled up at the curb in front of the church. It was then that Zoe realized there was a second rider on the bike. He was about the same height as the bearded behemoth but a lot less bulky. He was clad in tight, faded jeans, a grubby white T-shirt and a badly stained khaki jacket. His eyes were shielded by a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses.
She knew him.
Utterly.
Absolutely.
Without a shadow of a doubt.
The second rider was Gabriel James McNally Flynn.
A half a lifetime’s worth of carefully cultivated emotional equilibrium tilted into confusion in the space of a single, thunderous heartbeat. The poise that had held firm during encounters with presidents, princes and potentates—to say nothing of movie stars and international moguls—threatened to crack like an empty eggshell.
Time spun backward. Suddenly Zoe Alexandra Armitage was sixteen years old again…and terrified.
She shivered as Flynn dismounted from the motorcycle with fluent athleticism. After raking a hand carelessly through his short-cropped hair and slinging the strap of a battered leather duffel bag over his left shoulder, he traded high-five palm slaps with his jumbo-size companion. There was a brief conversation. The bearded man grinned broadly, revealing a goldsheathed front tooth.
A few more words were exchanged. Flynn jerked a thumb toward the church. The other man grinned a second time but shook his head. Flynn spread his hands, palms up, apparently acquiescing to the refusal. The movement pulled his khaki jacket taut across his well-muscled back.
The motorcyclist gunned the engine of his gleaming black bike. Then, astonishingly, he squared his brawny shoulders, raised his right hand and snapped off a textbook-perfect subordinate-to-superior salute.
The gesture was returned, quick and clean.
A moment later the motorcycle roared off down the street.
Her chest tight, her fingers plucking at the sleekly expensive fabric of her dress, Zoe watched as Flynn pivoted away from the curb and strode up the walkway to the church with the fine, feral grace of a jungle predator.
Luc Devereaux’s best man came to a halt a step or two away from her. He lifted his right hand and shoved his wire-rimmed sunglasses up on top of his head. He squinted against the lateafternoon light. Zoe had the fleeting impression that he was having trouble focusing.
“Immature” was not an adjective she ever would have used to describe the Flynn she’d known nearly sixteen years ago. Still, it had been possible back then to discern in his face a few traces of the boy he’d once been. Those traces were gone now, obliterated by age, exposure and experience. In appearance and attitude, he was implacably adult, insistently male.
There was a fine network of wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. A pair of deeply etched lines bracketed his long, clever mouth. His tanned skin fit hard over sharply angled cheekbones. The nose she recalled as having been ferrule straight canted slightly to the right, as though it had been broken and left to mend on its own. His left temple bore an old two-inch scar. A barely scabbed cut bisected his stubborn chin.
The hair on his head was still plentiful and predominantly brown, but the lightest strands were silver rather than sunbleached gold. The stubble that shadowed his jaw showed touches of gray, too.
He was a rootless adventurer. The absolute antithesis of the settled, civilized kind of man with whom she hoped to make a life. Yet Gabriel James McNally Flynn impacted on Zoe Alexandra Armitage like an explosion, blowing what she’d cherished as certainties about who she was and what she wanted to smithereens.
Was this what she’d been afraid of? she asked herself desperately, trying to keep her expression neutral. Had something deep within her somehow known that seeing Flynn again—just seeing him!—would threaten to overturn the stable existence she’d worked so assiduously to establish for herself?
Zoe felt her one-time rescuer’s hazel gaze travel down her body and back up. The assessment was intimate, as proprietary as the stroke of a palm against naked skin. For one mind-blowing moment she thought her legs might buckle beneath her. While she was scarcely an innocent, she’d never experienced such a powerful tug of sexual attraction.
And then Flynn’s emerald- and amber-flecked eyes met her blue ones.
There was a sizzling pause.
“You’re…late,” Zoe finally managed to say. While she seemed to have regained a modicum of control over her lower extremities, her ability to breathe had been severely compromised.
“Who—” he began in a husky-hoarse voice that sandpapered her tattered nerves. “Finally!”
Zoe’s lungs emptied abruptly in a sickening rush of air.
“Terry?” Flynn questioned, shifting his attention to a point behind her. He blinked several times, like a man not quite certain whether he should believe what he thought he was seeing.
“Well, it’s not the queen of England,” Peachy’s self-styled wedding organizer retorted, gliding forward. He winked at Zoe as he moved by her. She just stood, too shaken to respond. Too shaken to do much of anything. “So what’s your excuse, soldier? Did some nasty old civil insurrection mess up your travel plans?”
The question provoked a dry laugh. “Try a small monsoon.”
“Mother Nature can be such a bitch,” Terry quipped, then wrinkled his nose in disgust as he came within sniffing distance of the latecomer. “Ugh! Flynn! Making a dramatic, last-minute entrance is one thing. But that stench! I mean, what have you been doing? Swimming in sheep dip? Wrestling with rotting yak carcasses?”
“Don’t ask,” Flynn advised trenchantly. He slanted an odd glance at Zoe. She thought for a moment that he was on the verge of addressing her. Instead, he returned his gaze to Terry and said, “When I told Luc I’d get here, I warned him there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming first class. He said he’d arrange—”
“There’s hot water, cold beer and a clean tuxedo waiting for you,” Terry interrupted. “To say nothing of a whole church full of people and an organist who’s going to be reduced to playing the love theme from The Terminator if you don’t get yourself in gear right this second.”
Zoe stepped aside as the two men headed into the church. Her heart was thudding, her head throbbing. She was trying to make sense of Flynn’s response to her. Granted, it had been a long time since their previous encounter. And granted, she’d changed a great deal since then. Still. The man had acted as though…as though…
“Thanks for your help, sweetie,” Terry called over his brocade-covered shoulder.
“No problem,” she answered numbly, grappling with a turn of events that unraveled every scenario she’d spun about having a second meeting with the man who’d saved her life.
The possibility had never occurred to her.
Never. Ever. Not once.
But there it was, and she had no choice but to face the reality of it.
Gabriel James McNally Flynn didn’t remember her.
The instant he’d caught sight of the coolly elegant blonde standing in front of the church where his best friend was going to get married, Flynn had known with visceral certainty that he knew her. But it wasn’t until the last few moments of the wedding ceremony—right after the presiding minister had informed the groom that it was time to kiss the bride, to be specific—that he finally figured out who the hell she was.
Zoe.
Zoe Alexandra Armitage.
Goldilocks.
The realization hit him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the skull. Flynn hid his reaction to it, but just barely. His normally ironclad self-discipline had been undermined by weeks of physical hardship and emotional stress. He passed a swift prayer of thanks that he’d had the good sense to forgo the well-chilled bottle of beer Luc had offered him when he’d finished toweling off after his first indoor shower in nearly a month. Coupled with a dangerous lack of sleep, the ingestion of alcohol on an almost empty stomach probably would have destroyed his ability to disguise the shock that was resonating to the core of his soul.
Who would have thought it? he asked himself, trying to focus on the blissfully oblivious couple whose first marital embrace was provoking an affectionate outpouring of laughter and applause from the gathered congregation. Who in the name of heaven would have imagined that the flat-chested, pixie-haired girl who’d demonstrated she had more guts than a lot of professional warriors would blossom into a champagne and sherbet beauty who looked as though the toughest task on her daily agenda was deciding what to wear?
Not he!
Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t thought about the sky-eyed Zoe Armitage now and again during the past decade and a half. Because he had. Memories of her courage had surfaced in his consciousness more times than he cared to count. Likewise, regrets that he’d never told her how brave she’d been or explained why he’d behaved so brutally.
About three years after their jungle ordeal, an impulse he still didn’t fully understand had prompted him to make a few discreet inquiries about Zoe’s situation. He’d learned that she was attending the University of Virginia. Her scholastic record was brilliant. Socially, she seemed remarkably settled for a young woman whose relentlessly nomadic parents—Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick, two of the world’s foremost anthropologists—’had never married, much less provided their only child with a permanent home.
Flynn had gathered this reassuring information at a distance, never seriously considering the possibility of making personal contact with Zoe. He supposed he might have acted differently if he’d felt the girl was in trouble. But since all indications had been that she was doing just fine—
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the minister suddenly intoned, derailing his train of thought. “Please welcome our newlyweds. For the first time, I give you Mr. and Mrs. Lucien Devereaux!”
There was another wave of applause as the wedding guests rose to their feet. While most of them were lit up with sunbeam smiles, more than a few were blinking back happy tears.
Flynn experienced a sharp pang of emotion as he watched Luc link hands with the ethereal, green-eyed redhead he’d vowed to love, come what may, for the rest of his life. He’d never seen his friend look so happy. So whole. So…at peace with himself.
His mind flashed back nearly twelve weeks to the night he’d confronted a drunken, despairing Lucien Devereaux across a small wooden table in a dingy French Quarter bar.
“Wallowing in self-pitying gloom” had been his sardonic diagnosis of his former comrade-in-arms’ condition. He’d intended the words to flick on the psychological raw and it had been plain to see that they had. In much the way he’d once prodded Luc into making his first parachute jump, he’d goaded his friend out of the emotional mire and gotten him talking about why he believed his relationship with Peachy was doomed.
Flynn had received an incredible earful, starting with an inebriated explanation of how the shock of an emergency landing during a flight back from a wedding in Atlanta—to wit, the realization that if the plane she was on had crashed, she might very well have died without ever having “done it"—had prompted Peachy to ask her landlord of two years to deflower her.
Luc had become increasingly lucid as he’d recounted how he’d initially resisted this lunatic proposal, then changed his mind and decided to pretend to accept the one-time-only offer in order to protect his temporarily traumatized tenant from her own impulses. He’d been nearly sober when he’d bitterly declared that it was his unruly impulses about which he should have been concerned.
“That first morning, I was thinking commitment,” Luc had confessed rawly. “Commitment, as in marriage. Commitment, as in making a home and having a family.” He’d given a humorless laugh. “You know my history. Can you honestly see me—me!—playing the loving husband and adoring daddy?”
“Playing?” Flynn had echoed. “No. Being? Yeah. Sure. No problem.”
His friend’s expression had gone stark with disbelief at that point. His response to this had been predicated on a conviction that had been growing within him for a number of years.
“You haven’t figured it out, have you?” he’d said.
“Figured out, what?”
“That if you really were the alienated son of a bitch you seem to think you are, you would have bedded your little virgin without a second thought and moved on. That you would’ve spent every dime of the money you’ve earned from your books on yourself instead of using a big chunk of it to bankroll the dreams of people like that high school buddy of yours who always wanted his own restaurant. And that you’d be holed up in solitary splendor in some Manhattan bachelor pad instead of landlording over an eccentric old apartment building that’s stocked with folks you’ve made into the family you never had.”
“I—”
“Think about it.” He’d shifted into his “Shut up, Soldier, and listen” mode without hesitation. While self-control had been something he’d had to work hard to develop, the knack of commanding other people had always come easily to him. “You’ve got a surrogate mother in Laila Martigny. A surrogate father in Francis Smythe. A pair of doting great-aunts in May and Winnie Barnes. So what if the dynamics are a little kinky? You care about the people back at Prytania Street. Deep down in that place you seem to think is so incapable of making a connection, you care about them. And they sure as hell care about you.”
He’d watched Luc absorb the words and slowly begin to. accept their meaning. Finally the younger man had asked, “What about Terry Bellehurst?”
Flynn had allowed himself a grin. “He’s a twofer. A big brother and a big sister.”
“And…Peachy?”
“I think you’ve known the answer to that since the day she walked into your life.”
He’d carted Luc back to Prytania Street shortly before dawn and dumped him on the couch in the living room of his apartment. Before he’d departed, he’d pledged to his friend that if— no, when—things worked out, he would stand up as the best man during the “I do’s.” Had he known then how complicated keeping his word was going to turn out to be—
“I’m glad you were able to make it, Mr. Flynn,” a dulcetly feminine voice said, suddenly bringing him back to the present.
The assertion came from his right. Wondering uneasily how long he’d been meandering down memory lane, Flynn turned to face its source—a classically pretty woman who’d been one of Peachy’s three bridal attendants. Dressed in blush pink silk, she had chestnut-colored hair and crystalline gray eyes. She was somewhere in her early thirties and she was very obviously expecting a child.
Some long-suppressed lesson in etiquette prompted him to offer the woman his arm. She accepted it with a charming smile and they started down the aisle behind the newlyweds. The other two bridesmaids—the May Winnies, vivacious in raspberry lace and pearls—brought up the rear.
“It’s just Flynn,” he corrected after a second or two. “And I apologize for holding up the proceedings, Mrs…”
“Powell,” she supplied, giving him a look he couldn’t interpret. He had the peculiar feeling that something about him had surprised her. That he wasn’t what she’d expected. Although why this woman would have expectations about him, he had no idea. “Eden Powell. I’m Peachy’s sister. And considering that Luc mentioned you probably had to risk life and limb to get here, I’m willing to cut you a little slack vis-a-vis your late arrival.”
The name Eden rang a bell somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind. Had he not been half-dead on his feet, he probably would have pursued the matter. He didn’t like loose ends.
“Ah,” was all he said, glancing to his left.
It was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Because he shifted his attention at precisely the same moment he reached the row of pews in which Zoe was seated.
She was on the aisle. Close enough so that for one crazy instant he imagined he could smell the scent of her smooth, feminine flesh and fair, silken hair. Certainly close enough so that he could have touched her if he’d chosen to do so.
Again Flynn was buffeted by the changes he saw, and sensed, in her. The difference between Zoe’s appearance now and the way she’d looked nearly sixteen years ago was extraordinary enough. But the rest of it…
Her eyes met his. Her gentian blue gaze was cool. Selfcontained. Politely curious.
Nothing more.
After a moment she cocked her well-shaped chin upward a fraction of an inch. The long, lovely line of her throat arched, ever so slightly. Some fragment of his exhaustion-hazed brain registered that she was wearing a delicate silver chain and locket. He wondered with a surge of savagery whether the dainty piece of jewelry was a token from a lover.
Her brows lifted. Her expression clearly communicated the message that she was not the kind of female who was likely to be flattered by a stranger’s stare.
Flynn’s muscles clenched.
A stranger?
“Mr. Flynn, are you all right?” he heard the woman who’d identified herself as Eden Powell ask through the sudden pounding of his pulse. He was dimly conscious of the anxious pressure of her fingertips against his forearm.
“Never better,” he lied through his teeth, struggling to come to terms with what seemed to be the only possible explanation for Zoe’s distant manner.
Damn her!
She didn’t remember him.
Two (#ulink_4956354b-2dd1-5e29-8942-1bc86de8353a)
“So that’s the infamous Flynn, hmm?” Annie Powell said several hours later, her long-lashed brown eyes sparkling as she watched the celebratory swirl on the dance floor. Among those coupled for a waltz were the bride and the best man. “You never mentioned he was such a hunk.”
Zoe nearly spewed out the sip of champagne she’d just imbibed. “H-hunk?” She stared at her former college roommate, shutting her mind to the memory of the wildfire lure of sexual attraction she’d felt outside the church. Her body was less amenable to discipline. She felt a quicksilver sluice of heat rinse through her veins. The tips of her breasts started to harden. “Hunk?”
“Oh, definitely,” Annie affirmed, fluffing her pertly bobbed hair. After a moment she transferred her gaze back to Zoe’s face. “Now I understand why you played it so cool when some of the hottest guys on the U. Va. campus were flinging themselves at your feet. What girl would settle for undergraduate frankfurters when she knew there was filet mignon in the world?”
Zoe struggled for control. She realized she was being teased. Teasing was one of Annie’s favorite activities. And most of the time she genuinely enjoyed her friend’s clever quips and perceptive little jokes. But on this particular occasion…
She wouldn’t have to stay much longer, she assured herself. During the traditional cutting of the wedding cake a short time ago, she’d noticed Peachy and Luc exchanging looks that indicated they were both eager for some privacy. A romantic getaway was definitely in the offing. As soon as the new Mr. and Mrs. Devereaux left the reception, she would be able to make a discreet exit from the scene.
And once she did that, she would never have to see Gabriel James McNally Flynn again. Out of Sight, Out of Mind was going to be her motto from this evening onward. She fully intended to forget her one-time rescuer as thoroughly as he seemed to have forgotten her.
She should have purged him from her thoughts a long time ago!
“I wasn’t playing at anything back at U. Va.,” she began, carefully placing her champagne glass on the small, linencovered table at which she and Annie were seated. “I was there to get a good education, not waste my time going to keg parties and football games with a bunch of frat rats. As for Flynn being prime filet mignon…well, you’re entitled to your opinion, of course. But all I see when I look at him is—is—” she searched furiously for a suitably scathing analogy “-gristle!”
Annie remained silent for several long seconds, appearing to subject this last assertion to a considerable amount of mental mastication. Zoe watched her dark eyes stray speculatively toward the dancers but refused to follow the visual cue. She knew Flynn was partnering Peachy and she felt no needno desire!—to watch him do it. She wondered nastily whether the former Special Forces officer realized that there was a world of difference between a waltz and a forced march. Bad luck for him if he didn’t. Although she didn’t know the new Mrs. Devereaux as well as she knew her older sister, Eden, she had a strong hunch that the former Pamela Gayle Keene wouldn’t take kindly to being ordered around like an incompetent recruit.
Her friend exhaled on a hissing breath then looked back at her with an oddly knowing expression. “He’s that tough, huh?”
“I told you what he did!” Zoe retorted, stung. In point of fact, Annie and Eden were the only two people in whom she’d ever confided the humiliating details of her five-day odyssey through the jungle. She’d given everyone else—the government officials who’d questioned her, even her mother and father—a carefully edited version of what had happened.
She never figured out exactly why she’d done this. She supposed it might have been because she’d harbored a fear that adults wouldn’t see anything wrong with Flynn’s behavior toward her. So he’d bruised her sensibilities, she’d imagined them saying to her. Didn’t she understand that he’d been acting in response to exigent circumstances? Couldn’t she see that what really, truly mattered was that he’d saved her life?
Her parents had actually declared that they thought their daughter’s rescuer deserved a medal. Whether formal action had ever been taken on this suggestion, Zoe didn’t know and had convinced herself she didn’t care. But given that inherited wealth and professional achievement had endowed Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick with a fair amount of pull in some pretty high places, she was inclined to guess that Flynn had at the very least received a glowing commendation for his personnel file at the Pentagon.
She’d wondered more than a few times what kind of accounting of his actions—and hers—Flynn had provided when he’d been debriefed by U.S. Army authorities, as he surely must have been. She’d also wondered whether he’d complained to his military buddies about “baby-sitting duty” as much as he’d complained to her.
“You told me he’d saved your life, Zoe,” Annie pointed out.
“I told you a lot of other things, too.”
“Well, yes. You did. It’s just that…uh…”
“Just what?”
Zoe watched as Annie began twiddling with the small bellshaped locket that dangled at the base of her throat. Except for the initial engraved on its softly gleaming surface, the exquisite silver ornament was identical to the ones hanging around her neck and that of the blushing bride.
“Annie?” she prodded.
Her friend stopped twiddling. “Okay,” she said, leaning forward. “First and foremost, I don’t doubt for a second that those five days you spent tromping around the jungle were every bit as awful as you told me and Eden.”
“I really appreciate your faith.”
The sugared sarcasm provoked a grimace of exasperation. “Come on, Zoe. I realize it was a terrible experience. And I’ll grant you that Flynn might have made it worse—”
“Might have?”
“All right. All right,” Annie backpedaled. “What I’m trying to say is that now that I’ve finally met you know who after so many years of hearing about him…well, to be perfectly honest, hon, Gabriel Flynn is not what I expected.”
“And just what, pray tell, was that?”
“It’s hard to put into words. Sort of a…mmm…sort of a cross between Rambo and a male chauvinist troglodyte.”
The observation was vintage Annie, Zoe thought wryly. “But now that you’ve seen him you’ve decided he’s a fine piece of beef?”
“He’s certainly no Congressman Talcott Emerson III.”
This jibe was vintage Annie, too.
“Please.” Zoe held up her right hand, palm forward, like a traffic cop. She should have known her friend would get around to this, she chided herself. She really should have. While Annie had never been particularly complimentary about her choice of men, she’d become increasingly vocal on the subject since marrying Matt Powell in late April. “Do not—I repeat, do not—start up with that, Hannah Elaine.”
Zoe had had a relationship with Congressman Talcott Emerson III referred to by many as T. E. Three—several years ago. She’d thought he was everything she wanted in a man. He was so solid. So stable. Yet when it had come to the crunch, when this seemingly perfect-for-her man had brought out an engagement ring set with a flawless two-carat diamond that had belonged to his grandmother and proposed marriage, she’d found herself shaking her head and shrinking away.
For reasons she still couldn’t explain, the idea of spending the rest of her life with Talcott had suddenly filled her with an irrational sense of nothingness. Her brain had told her that she was being offered the normalcy she craved as an antidote to her harum-scarum upbringing. Yet something else had ominously warned that this normalcy would be, for her at least, a very numbed-out form of existence. And so, to her vast astonishment, she’d wound up thanking Talcott for his proposal, then politely turning him down.
He’d seemed surprised by the rejection but not terribly upset. He hadn’t even suggested that she might like to take a bit more time to think it over.
His political handlers had been less sanguine in their reaction. Apparently convinced that she was prime congressional spouse material—“A potential First Lady!” one of them had enthused—they’d come to her without Talcott’s knowledge and pleaded with her to change her mind.
She hadn’t.
Her employer, Arietta Ogden, had assured her that she’d done the right thing in saying no to Talcott. So, too, had Annie. After a certain amount of soul-searching, and some intensive questioning of her sanity, Zoe had decided that she agreed.
“I wasn’t denigrating your ex-almost fiance,” Annie protested. “My opinion of him has been going up ever since he punched out Trent Barnes, who, incidentally, Peachy tells me just happens to be the MayWinnies’ great-nephew, during that ambush-interview attempt on the local TV news last December. Just a few mornings ago I said something very nice about him. There was a photograph of him and the soon-to-be Mrs. Congressman Talcott Emerson III—you know, the multimarried Melissa ‘Call me Honeychile’ Reeves—on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. I pointed it out to Matt, and I told him that even though nobody’s ever going to mistake T. E. Three for a wild and crazy guy, he’s definitely looking a lot less stodgy than he did back when you were going out with him.”
Zoe groaned.
“Speaking of stodgy—”
“Don’t.”
“I was just wondering about your latest beau,” Annie said, all brown-eyed innocence. “The Harvard-educated lawyer you met at the White House. You know. The one with the reversible name.”
Zoe reclaimed her champagne flute and took a healthy gulp. “Carter Howard.”
“Oh, right. Carter Howard.” Annie edged forward in her seat, her expression conspiratorial. “How would you rate him against Flynn?”
Zoe drained the remainder of her sparkling wine and signaled a passing waiter for a refill. “I wouldn’t.”
There was an unpleasant silence. It came to an end when Annie heaved a remorseful-sounding sigh and said, “I’m sorry, Zoe. Really. Forget I asked. I don’t know what got into me. I’d blame PMS, but it’s not that time of the month.”
Zoe fingered the slender stem of the flute for a second or two, then gave her friend a crooked smile of conciliation. “That’s all right. I probably overreacted. But it’s a sensitive subject with me.”
“‘It’ being—” Annie inclined her head toward the dance floor “-him.”
This time Zoe did look. But only for an instant. Flynn’s tuxedoed image was already burned into her brain. She’d entertained a desperate hope that he’d resemble a trussed-up penguin in formal wear. That hope had died as she’d watched him take his place next to Luc at the altar for the start of the wedding ceremony. To say that black-tie elegance suited Flynn was to understate the case.
“Exactly,” she confirmed, her throat constricting.
“After nearly sixteen years?” Annie’s forehead was furrowed. She looked genuinely concerned.
“Don’t worry.” Zoe pushed the champagne glass away from her and gave a humorless little laugh. “I’ll be over it tomorrow morning.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. I’m going for closure.”
Annie grimaced. “I thought you had to spill your guts on some sleazy syndicated talk show to get that.”
“What can I say?” Zoe shrugged. “I like to do things on my own.”
“Mmm.”
There was another silence. Less charged with tension than the previous one, but still not particularly comfortable. Eventually Zoe felt compelled to say, “I’m okay, Annie. Honestly.”
Annie shook her head slowly, her eyes narrowing. “I don’t think so.”
“Annie—”
“No, Zoe.” The tone was determined, brooking no dispute. “I can’t let this go. I have never seen you as unraveled as you were a few minutes ago when I was ragging you about Flynn. You’ve always been the epitome of poise. And that’s not just my opinion. Last night at the rehearsal dinner, I overheard Terry Bellehurst tell someone it’s too bad the United States doesn’t have a titled aristocracy because you’d make a fabulous Serene Highness. He also thinks you’d look swell in a tiara, by the way, but that’s neither here nor there. The thing is…this, uh, ‘sensitivity’ you say you’re going to get over…is it because you, uh, uh—Lord, I don’t know how to put this. Okay. Okay. Let me ask you this. How…different is Gabriel Flynn now from what he was before? In the jungle, I mean. With you. For those, uh, five days.”
“He’s older.”
“Zoe!”
“Well, he is.”
“And so are you. Is he more intense?”
“I don’t-”
“More attractive?”
“Annie—”
“Sexier?”
“What do you really want to know?” Zoe glared at her friend. “Whether he was as much of a hunk then as he is now?”
God.
Oh, God.
What had she said?
Zoe would have given almost anything to recall the words that had just erupted out of her. Because implicit in them was something she’d never admitted to herself, much less to anyone else.
She’d gone from girlish oblivion to womanly awareness during those five days in the jungle with Gabriel James McNally Flynn. And one of the reasons she’d hated him so much was that he’d never noticed.
Annie blinked several times, clearly taken aback. But she recovered very swiftly. “Yeah,” she said after a second or two, her voice mild. “Basically. Was he?”
Zoe leaned back in her seat, shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters. Look, Zoe, both Eden and I have always taken it as gospel that Gabriel Flynn was a Neanderthal in camouflage whose hobbies probably included biting the heads off live chickens. But after seeing him today, after hearing Luc and other people talk about him…”
“You think I’ve been unfair to him?”
“I’m not saying that,” Annie denied. “Maybe the guy had an emotional epiphany after he left you and totally transformed himself. People can change. Improve. Still, I can’t help thinking, if the Flynn of sixteen years ago was essentially a younger version of the Flynn of today, he probably was capable of having a pretty stunning effect on members of the opposite sex. Especially those without any real…experience. Heck, if I’d been thrown together with someone like him back in my virginal days I would have been lucky to escape without having my psychological circuitry permanently fried! So what I’m wondering is, well, is it possible you developed some sort of, uh, crush on Flynn?”
Zoe said nothing. This was partly because there was nothing to say, partly because she seriously doubted that she had the wherewithal to utter a single syllable. She wanted to avert her head but the same paralysis that had gripped her vocal chords seemed to have severed the link between her brain and body.
“Oh, honey.” Annie reached forward and placed a soothing hand on her arm. “You don’t have to look like that! It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not—” Zoe gulped convulsively “—ashamed.”
But she was. Lord in heaven help her, she was. And it was all Flynn’s fault!
“Embarrassed, then,” Annie quickly amended. “Look. I don’t have any idea what happened when you and Flynn saw each other outside the church before the wedding but I don’t imagine you had time for any meaningful conversation. I do know that you’ve been avoiding him since then. And except for that incendiary stare he gave you when he was walking down the aisle with Eden after the ceremony was over, he’s more or less been ignoring you. You’re not going to achieve that ‘closure’ you were talking about earlier unless you make contact with the man. So why don’t you get up and go talk with him as soon as he finishes dancing with Peachy?”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can. Tell you what—I’ll even go over with you.”
“Oh, great.” There was a bitter taste on Zoe’s tongue. “You can perform the necessary introductions.”
“Huh?”
She looked her friend directly in the eye, wanting there to be no misunderstanding. Then, slowly and distinctly she said, “He doesn’t remember me, Annie.”
“Who doesn’t remember you, Zoe?”
The source of this pleasant, baritone inquiry was Annie’s husband of roughly four months, Matthew Douglas Powell, who’d just materialized next to the table where Zoe and Annie were seated.
Stunned by the interruption, Zoe watched as Matt dropped a brief but obviously tender kiss on the top of his wife’s head. He then sat down next to Annie, saying, “Sorry I took so long. I bumped into Francis Smythe—you know, the Brit who supposedly used to be a spy—outside the men’s room, and we started talking about cyberspace security.”
“Heavens.” Annie’s lips curved in a deeply affectionate smile as she shifted emotional gears with no apparent glitch. “I’m surprised you came back at all.”
Matt, who co-owned a small but highly successful Atlanta computer company with his older brother, Rick, grinned seemingly unaware that he’d disrupted a minor psychodrama. “Well, I was tempted to ask whether he could offer any tips about hacking into the Bank of England and borrowing a couple of billion pounds, but I managed to restrain myself.”
“Such willpower.”
“I can resist everything but you, love,” Matt declared, scooting his chair closer to Annie’s and slipping an arm around her shoulders.
“Funny,” his wife riposted as she snuggled contentedly into his embrace. “You seem to do a pretty good job resisting me whenever I ask you to pick up your socks.”
Matt gave Zoe a comic look. “I guess this means the honeymoon’s over. Just wait. She’ll start nagging me about leaving the toilet seat up next.”
“I’ve given up on that,” Annie informed him sweetly. “I’m resigned to having my tush hit water every time I sit down on the commode.”
Zoe slumped in her seat, dizzyingly grateful for the diversionary banter. Matt and Annie shared one of the most remarkable relationships she’d ever seen. They’d been friends all their lives. Literally. Born in the same Atlanta hospital just twenty-four hours apart, they’d grown up next door to each other. The first time Annie had spoken to Zoe about him, she’d described him as “my best buddy.”
There’d been nothing sexual between them for thirty-one years. Indeed, Zoe could remember Annie guffawing—and occasionally getting angry—at people who suggested there might be. Their platonic bond had unexpectedly turned to passion after the untimely death of Matt’s wife, Lisa.
Zoe knew Lisa had been Matt’s first love. He’d fallen for her—“Like he was struck by lightning,” Annie had recalled during an all-night gab session back in college—at age seventeen and married her some nine years later. He’d taken her loss, after less than five years of marriage, very, very hard.
He’d needed a long time to recover from his grief. Zoe had heard a lot about his struggle during anguished telephone conversations with Annie, who’d been terrified he might surrender to his grief and do something irreparable. Fortunately Matt had stumbled back from the brink and healed to the point where he’d decided that he should try to move on with his life. He’d turned to his happily single, socially active “best buddy” for help in doing so.
If she lived to be 150, Zoe doubted she would forget the phone call during which Annie had reluctantly confided in her what was going on. Looking at Annie and Matt now, it was difficult to believe that that phone call had taken place just a little more than a year ago.
“I know how worried you’ve been about Matt since Lisa died,” she’d said, realizing that her friend was deeply troubled and wanting to discover why. “I should think you’d be relieved that he’s finally getting out and about.”
“I am,” Annie had claimed. “It’s just that Matt and I…we, uh, dated a few times.”
“What?” Zoe had been unable to hide her shock.
“It was for practice,” Annie had rushed on. “Matt decided he didn’t know much about being single. I mean, he spent his entire adult life with Lisa. From the first time he saw her, he was totally in love. She was his all. His everything. He never thought about another woman. He never had a chance to get into the, uh, contemporary male-female thing.”
“I see.” She hadn’t, of course. But what else could she have said?
“It was Matt’s idea.” Annie had stressed the possessive with great force.
“The dating?”
“The practicing.”
She’d stayed silent for several moments, acutely aware that she was treading on very alien territory. Still, as the daughter of anthropologists, she was accustomed to trying to make sense out of strange-seeming situations. Finally she’d said, “This ‘practicing’ you and Matt did. I gather it didn’t…ahem, work out?”
“Of course it worked out!” Annie had sounded indignant. No, worse. Insulted.
“Then what?”
“He kissed me, Zoe.”
“Matt kissed you?” She’d been flummoxed. “Where? When?”
“Outside my condo. At the end of our third practice date.”
“And you…”
“I—I kissed him back.”
“So who’s the guy, Zoe?” Matt’s friendly query jerked her back to the present.
“Wh-what?” she stammered.
“The one who doesn’t remember you.”
Zoe caught her breath and just narrowly managed to prevent herself from slanting a betraying glance toward the dance floor. “Oh, uh…”
“The best man,” came the calm response from her former roommate.
“You know Gabriel Flynn?”
Zoe shot a quelling look at Annie. “I met him once,” she replied in what she hoped was a casual tone. “A long time ago.” She mentioned the small Central American country in which she and Flynn had found sanctuary at the end of their five-day odyssey.
“What in heaven’s name were you doing—” Matt stopped in midquestion, comprehension dawning in his blue-gray eyes. “Oh. Of course. You were there with your parents, right? Annie says they started taking you into the field when you were a baby.”
“Exactly.” Zoe affirmed his less than accurate assumption without hesitation. “I met Flynn with my parents.”
“But he doesn’t remember you, huh?”
“As I said, it was a long time ago.”
“Nearly sixteen years,” Annie contributed, apparently trying to help.
“I was just a—” Zoe darted another sharp look at her friend “-child.”
“Uh-huh.” Matt toyed with the delicate silver chain that encircled his wife’s neck. Zoe could tell he was not persuaded. After a few seconds he asked rather warily, “Is there some kind of, a ‘girl thing’ going on here?”
Annie wrinkled her nose. “Well, actually, yes. Sort of.”
“Do you want me to leave you two ladies alone until you get it squared away?” The tone was wry, but Zoe sensed that the offer was genuine. “I could lumber off and find some guys to bond with. We could guzzle beer. Grunt about babes in swimsuits and last year’s Super Bowl. Indulge in the usual testosterone-crazed activities—”
“Matt!” The laughing admonition was accompanied by a wifely elbow to the ribs.
“There’s no reason for you to go, Matt,” Zoe assured him. “Annie and I are done with the subject of Gabriel Flynn, aren’t we, Annie? To tell the truth, I didn’t even recognize him at first. He came roaring up to the church on the back of a motorcycle—”
“He hitched a ride from some DEA agent who served a couple years in the same Special Forces team as he and Luc,” Matt interpolated.
Zoe blinked, totally thrown by this unexpected tidbit. “A federal drug agent?”
Matt nodded. “Mr. Smythe mentioned that Luc was a tad ticked off the guy didn’t stick around for the wedding. Anyway, you just said you didn’t recognize Flynn at first, right? Maybe that’s his problem with you. Not recognizing rather than not remembering, I mean. People change in—” he glanced at Annie “—what did you say? Nearly sixteen years? Besides, while you probably wouldn’t guess it to look at him, I gather the best man’s not exactly functioning on all cylinders at the moment. He traveled more than forty-eight hours straight from some refugee camp in Asia to get here. Through a monsoon, if you can believe Terry Bellehurst. So—”
“So he’s probably having difficulty not walking into walls, much less identifying old acquaintances,” Annie concluded. “You should definitely make a point of reintroducing yourself to the man, Zoe. It would be rude not to.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Zoe concurred with deliberate ambiguity. It would be rude. But not as rude as a lot of other scenarios she could envision.
That her friend would have pressed the matter, she had no doubt. Fortunately the band chose that moment to segue into a jazz-flavored medley of tunes Zoe instantly associated with Fred Astaire. She made the link because Annie, who had a long-standing passion for the debonair entertainer, had made her watch the movie musical from which the songs came about a dozen times when they’d been roommates.
“’Top Hat,’” Matt said with an assurance that suggested to Zoe that he, too, had more than a passing familiarity with the score of the celluloid classic. He rose to his feet and extended a hand to his wife. “They’re playing our song, Mrs. Powell.”
Annie favored her husband with an intimate smile as she accepted his invitation. “I thought the theme from 2001 was our song, Mr. Powell.”
“That’s our other song. And it’s impossible to dance to.” Matt turned. “Zoe, would you mind?”
She shook her head. “Absolutely not. Please. Go enjoy yourselves.” She gestured toward the dance floor. Just gesturing would have been fine. But something made Zoe shift her gaze as she spoke. And in the same instant she did so, Flynn danced by with Peachy.
Forget about the man not recognizing or remembering her.
From where Zoe sat, frozen like a fawn caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, he didn’t even seem to register her existence.
“Are you okay, Flynn?” Peachy asked.
“Just fine,” Flynn answered automatically. He’d been a fool to look at Zoe again, he berated himself. What did he think? If he stared at her enough times he would arouse some glimmer of recognition? Provoke some spark of response?
She didn’t know him. Didn’t want to know him. She radiated indifference from every pore of her exquisite, ivory-rose skin.
“You must be exhausted,” Peachy said after a moment or two, her voice sympathetic. “I know it was hard for you to get here.”
Flynn shrugged. “It would have been harder if I hadn’t been able to.”
“Because you gave Luc your word.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it means a lot to him, having you for his best man.”
“It’s my honor.”
“I just wish—what’s his name? The man who brought you to the church?”
Flynn smiled fleetingly. “Grizz.”
“Oh. Yes. Well, I just wish Grizz had stayed for the ceremony. Or at least had come to the reception. I know Luc wishes it, too.”
“Grizz didn’t feel he was appropriately attired for the occasion.”
“As if appearance matters with friends,” Peachy scoffed. “I mean, I wouldn’t have minded if the other Wedding Belles had shown up in sneakers and sequins—not that either one of them would, of course—as long as they’d come today.”
Flynn gave himself a few moments to try to sort this last sentence out. He failed.
“What’s a Wedding Belle?” he finally asked.
The question drew a winsome smile. Not for the first time, Flynn thought that Luc Devereaux was a very lucky man.
“I guess you could say we’re like members of a sorority,” the bride declared. “The Wedding Belles—that’s Belles with two e’s, like Scarlett in Gone with the Wind—got their start more than ten years ago, a few days before my older sister Eden’s marriage to Rick Powell. She’s expecting now.”
Flynn feigned surprise. “Oh, really?”
“All right, all right,” Peachy said, laughing. Her red-gold hair shimmered in the illumination from the overhead lighting. “I know her condition is abundantly obvious. I suppose I keep telling people who are perfectly capable of noticing for themselves because it seems like such a miracle to me. Eden getting pregnant, that is. She and Rick had pretty much given up on being able to have a baby.”
“She certainly looks very happy—and healthy.”
Peachy’s green eyes sparked with mischief. “She also looks like she’s going to give birth to the entire state of Rhode Island any minute. Poor Terry nearly passed out when he saw her. I’m sure he had visions of her going into labor and disrupting all his carefully organized wedding arrangements. The truth is, she’s not due until mid-October.”
“I’m relieved.”
“But you would have known exactly what to do if Eden had started having her baby, am I right?”
“I’ve helped with a few deliveries in the field,” Flynn admitted neutrally. He closed his mind to the memory of the first time he’d held a newborn infant he’d helped bring into the world. The elation he’d felt had been astounding. It had also been very short-lived. It had died when he’d looked around at the dire poverty which would define the baby’s existence.
As though sensing his withdrawal, Peachy let a few measures of music go by before she reverted to their original topic. “Anyway,” she picked up. “Back to the Belles. There are three of us. We were bridesmaids at Eden’s wedding. And the weekend before she got married, Eden gave each one of us—” she glanced downward at herself “—an engraved silver locket shaped like a bell.”
Flynn let his gaze drop for a moment, registering the pretty pendant gleaming against the bride’s milky skin. His mind flashed back to the piece of jewelry he’d seen Zoe wearing.
A split second later he realized why the name Eden had seemed familiar when the matron of honor had introduced herself on the way down the aisle after the ceremony. One of Zoe’s two college roommates had been called Eden.
Eden Keene.
“I see,” Flynn said, keeping his tone even, his expression politely interested. “So who are the other Belles? The ones you wouldn’t have minded showing up today in sneakers and sequins?”
“There’s Annie,” Peachy answered. “See the brown-haired woman over there in the green? Doing the Ginger Rogers imitation?”
Flynn nodded. Oh, yes. He saw her. And he’d seen her with Zoe a few minutes earlier when he’d practically tripped over his own feet.
“Well, that’s Annie. Her real name’s Hannah Elaine. She was Annie Martin—”
God! Another familiar name from the information he’d gleaned about Zoe.
It was proof of how far below par he was that he interjected, “She roomed with your sister at the University of Virginia.”
“That’s right,” Peachy confirmed, clearly startled. “But how did you know?”
Flynn gave himself a savage mental kick. “I, uh, think Eden mentioned something about it. She and I talked a little. Right after the ceremony.”
“Oh.” The new Mrs. Devereaux seemed to accept this mendacious explanation. “Well, then, you probably know that she and Annie are sisters-in-law now.”
“Mmm.”
“Annie married Matt Powell—that’s Eden’s husband’s younger brother—in April in Atlanta.” Peachy smiled suddenly, a soft blush flooding her cheeks. “I caught the bridal bouquet.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
The band transitioned seamlessly from one song to another. Flynn forced himself to wait several moments, then asked, “What about the third Wedding Belle?”
“Zoe Armitage. You met her when you arrived, didn’t you? Outside the church?”
“Briefly.”
“She’s not married, in case you’re interested.”
Flynn was interested, of course. Deeply interested. He couldn’t tell whether his dancing partner had divined this or was simply indulging in a little speculative matchmaking. Either way…
“The only ringless Belle, hmm?” he inquired blandly.
Peachy gave a ripple of laughter. “Exactly. She almost got engaged to some congressman a few years ago. I don’t know what happened beyond the fact that Annie told Eden it was a good thing Zoe turned the guy down. And nowadays I think she’s dating some Harvard-educated lawyer in Washington. The type who charges hundreds of dollars per hour and prowls the corridors of power in polished loafers.”
Flynn knew the type extremely well. They ran in one side of his family. The side that had disowned his father and disdained his mother. The side that had done its collective best to shape him to its mold after his parents’ death.
“Zoe lives in Washington, then?”
“Uh-huh. She’s a really remarkable person. Her parents are internationally famous anthropologists and they raised her all over the world. She speaks something like a dozen languages, including a couple of obscure dialects I’ve never heard of. The State Department’s asked her to lecture to new foreign service officers a bunch of times.”
“She’s a diplomat?” His opinion of the striped pants brigade was decidedly mixed. He knew part of his attitude was a legacy of his years in the military. Trained as he’d been to take action, he had problems dealing with people who seemed dedicated to holding allegedly frank and constructive discussions that accomplished absolutely nothing. While his current profession had connected him with a few Foggy Bottom officials who did a hell of a lot more than jack their jaws and dispense red tape, he was inclined to classify these individuals as exceptions to the rule rather than harbingers of a new approach to the conduct of world affairs.
“She’s a social secretary.”
Flynn couldn’t disguise his disbelief. “What?”
“Her job’s a lot more than calligraphy and canapés,” Peachy advised him. “She works for a woman who’s practically a legend in her own time. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Arietta Ogden? Arietta Martel von Helsing—uh—” Her eyes widened. “Oh my God! I just remembered. Luc once said something about someone he knew in the service being a relative of hers. Mrs. Ogden’s, I mean. Was that—is that you?”
“The connection was through a marriage that’s been over for a lot of years,” Flynn replied after a moment, his mind racing. “And it was a very tenuous one even when the bonds of matrimony were still holding. I doubt that Mrs. Ogden would acknowledge it today.”
“Still.” Peachy paused, seeming to marvel at the situation. “It’s a pretty amazing coincidence. Small world, hmm?”
With a flourish, the band finished the medley it had been playing.
“Small world,” Flynn echoed, speaking as much to himself as to his partner. “And shrinking all the time.”
“Attention!” Terry Bellehurst said about thirty minutes later, speaking into a microphone that had been set up in front of the band. A pink-cheeked Peachy was standing to his right, fidgeting with a beribboned bundle of white flowers. Luc was standing next to her, surveying the scene from beneath partially lowered eyelids. “Attention, please! Before our newlyweds leave, the bride has to throw her bouquet. So, if we can have all the unmarried ladies out on the floor—”
“That’s your cue, Zoe,” Annie declared.
“I think I’ll just watch the festivities, thank you,” Zoe answered. She was feeling reasonably calm again. She hadn’t seen Flynn in some time and she was beginning to think—hope— that he’d decided to slip away from the reception.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” her friend disputed with a laugh. “It’s your duty as a single female wedding guest to get up and fight for the bouquet.”
“Annie, honestly—”
“Up, up, up.” Annie underscored the instruction with a gesture. “Come on. Be a real Wedding Belle.”
“Yeah,” Matt concurred with a grin. “Do your best to dodge the bouquet the way Annie did when Eden got married.”
His wife rolled her eyes but didn’t deny the allegation.
“Ladies…” Terry intoned imperiously, placing his hands on his hips and shifting into his Terree LaBelle persona. “I don’t want to have to drag you out, but I will if you don’t cooperate.”
“I’d get moving if I were you,” Annie counseled.
Zoe rose to her feet with a sigh of resignation. After casting a darkling glance at her former college roommate, she walked out onto the dance floor and joined the small throng of women gathering there. She positioned herself near the back of the high-spirited group, noting with a hint of humor that the MayWinnies were delicately elbowing for advantage up in front.
“Wonderful,” Terry approved, then turned toward the star of the moment. “All right, sweetie. You’re on.”
The color in Peachy’s cheeks intensified. Zoe saw her dart an appealing glance at Luc. He flashed back a roguish grin, then made a gesture that clearly indicated she was on her own where this particular nuptial tradition was concerned.
Peachy took a step forward. She scanned the women gathered before her for a second or two, almost as though she were picking out a target for her toss.
“You have to turn your back, Peachy,” Terry said in a reproving tone. “No fair aiming at somebody specific.”
The bride continued her careful perusal for a moment more, then did as she’d been bidden. The cream chiffon of her vaguely flapperesque wedding gown swirled gracefully around her legs as she pivoted.
Zoe heard several of the women around her suck in their breaths expectantly and saw others shift their stances as though preparing to jump or lunge. In the midst of her amusement at this behavior, she was startled to feel an anticipatory tightening of her own muscles. She forced herself to relax, discreetly twining her fingers into the silk of her skirt.
Peachy flung her bridal flowers up…and back over her head.
The bouquet tumbled over and over, its pale satin ribbons fluttering as it flew through the air.
“I’ve got it!” one of the women in front of Zoe squealed rapturously, leaping up.
But she didn’t. She lost her balance instead, colliding heavily with Zoe. Zoe extended her arms, instinctively trying to keep herself—and the other woman—upright.
A split second later Peachy’s bouquet dropped into her hands. Zoe clutched the fragrant flowers to her breast before she fully registered what she was doing.
The next minute or so passed in a blur of teasing congratulations and nosy questions about her marital prospects. Zoe smiled at the well-wishers and deflected their inquiries as graciously as she could. She was considerably relieved when an announcement that it was time to bid adieu to Peachy and Luc shifted people’s attention away from her and back to the happy couple.
And then…
It began as an odd quiver of awareness. There was something instinctual—almost atavistic—about the sensation.
The quiver became an electric tingle. Her skin prickled with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Her pulse skipped into an unfamiliar rhythm. Her breathing became quick and shallow.
Zoe pivoted. She had no choice. She felt as though she were being willed to turn around.
She found herself staring up into hazel eyes that seemed to peer into the very marrow of her bones. She realized she was trembling.
Zoe whispered a single syllable name.
One corner of the sensual male mouth she once would have sworn was incapable of smiling kicked up. After a moment the man known by the name she’d so shakily invoked said in a husky voice, “Nice catch, Goldilocks.”
Three (#ulink_6d6c0c1e-ba1f-5a01-8700-4de6ae38d273)
Nice catch, Goldilocks.
Those three words were still reverberating in Zoe’s mind late the following Monday afternoon as she sat in the book-lined library of Arietta Martel von Helsing Flynn Ogden’s exquisitely appointed home in Georgetown. The older woman had dubbed the room her “command headquarters” because it was the setting in which she laid out her hostessing strategies. Although intended as a joke, the nickname was very apt.
Looming most imperatively on Mrs. Ogden’s social horizon: a cocktail-reception scheduled for three days hence. Zoe had spent nearly an hour detailing the arrangements for her. Having finally satisfied herself that what needed to be done had been done and done superlatively, her employer had decreed that it was time for a break.
Her long-time butler, Hugo, had materialized a minute or two later with a laden tea tray. While tucking into the delicious repast with a relish that belied her slim figure, Mrs. Ogden had asked about Zoe’s weekend in New Orleans.
Accustomed to the older woman’s inquisitive nature—and to the fact that Mrs. Ogden tended to treat her more like a favorite niece than a paid staffer—Zoe had braced herself for this eventuality. She’d promptly launched into an account of Peachy and Luc’s wedding, putting special emphasis on the role played by Terry Bellehurst. Mrs. Ogden had seemed amused. She’d also nodded knowingly at a description of the MayWinnies and their supposedly scandalous background. And she’d been visibly pleased to hear about the forthcoming marriage of her old acquaintance, Francis Smythe, to Laila Martigny.
For a variety of reasons, Zoe hadn’t intended to say anything about Flynn. His name had slipped out in response to an offhand comment from Mrs. Ogden. At least she’d thought the comment had been offhand. But as her single reference had expanded into something akin to a full-scale confession, she’d begun to wonder whether it hadn’t been as calculated as the placement of the guests at one of her employer’s famous formal dinners.
“And that’s when I realized I was wrong about his not remembering me,” she finally concluded, grimacing as she realized that she’d reduced a perfectly good scone to crumbs during the course of her verbal outpouring.
“Remarkable,” the older woman said, taking a sip of Earl Grey from a blue-and-white Wedgwood teacup. A cabochon sapphire set in platinum flashed on the ring finger of her right hand.
Zoe sighed. “I know I should have told you about me and Flynn a long time ago.”
“Oh, no.” Mrs. Ogden shook her perfectly coiffed head. Once raven-haired, she’d gone silver-gray very suddenly in her early fifties and declined to try to reclaim her “natural” color through dye. “Not at all.”
“Of course, I didn’t realize you had a connection with him when I started to work for you—”
“I’d hardly call it a connection, dear.” The older woman set her teacup down on its saucer with a genteel clink. “It was a rather distant link by marriage for what cannot, in all honesty, be considered a significant period of time. Which isn’t to say I didn’t develop a fondness for the boy. I did. And I quite sympathized with his situation. Imagine being orphaned at age ten, then packed off to live with a bunch of hidebound rela fives who make no secret of the fact that they don’t consider you worthy to bear their family name. It would be enough to drive anyone wild, much less a youngster of Gabriel’s spirit and sensitivity.”
Zoe bridled automatically at this last characterization. Then her mind replayed the truly unsettling portion of what’d she’d just heard. The part about being orphaned and unwanted at age ten. How in God’s name could people consider a young, probably grief-stricken boy unworthy of anything? she asked herself, appalled.
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