Wedding Party Collection: Don't Tell The Bride: What the Bride Didn't Know / Black Widow Bride / His Valentine Bride. Kelly Hunter
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‘So, I needed help. Meaning I’m not exactly a scholar.’
‘Depends on the company. You topped your state in mathematics, which for most seventeen-year-old girls is an excellent result. You just happen to have a couple of geeky geniuses in the family. It skews your expectations.’
‘I sound insecure.’
She was insecure. More so since East Timor. She just couldn’t get it through her head that her family cherished her for who she was. That her common sense and iron will often carried them.
They’d reached the door and Trig set her down reluctantly and opened it. His bag stood just inside the door, he’d had the hotel staff shift it from last night’s room back to this one. The doctor had said to monitor Lena through the night. He’d figured he could do that better from her room than from his. At that point he’d still been under the impression that Lena knew she wasn’t his wife.
She looked at the two beds and slanted him a sideways glance. ‘Not exactly the honeymoon suite. Or the Ritz.’
‘Yeah, about that...’ Was now the right time to tell her that they weren’t married or would that news only confuse and alarm her more? Did he let her sleep on it and hope to hell she woke up with her memory back?
Who the hell knew?
‘Sometimes your leg bothers you and you need the extra space to stretch out. And tonight, for example, what with your head and your leg and the fact that you really don’t remember me...it’s probably a relief to you that we have twin beds tonight, right?’
She didn’t say ‘right,’ she said ‘oh,’ and for a moment looked utterly lost.
‘So, your gear’s all here,’ he continued doggedly and gestured towards the cupboard and her suitcase. ‘I, ah, can run you a bath while I have a quick shower. The bath takes a while to fill.’
‘No bath,’ she said. ‘I’ll shower after you and then jump into bed. This bed.’ She pointed to the one nearest the window. Trig nodded and slung his bag on the other one and rifled through it for clean underwear and a T-shirt and sweats. He needed a shower and a lot more distance from Lena than was currently available, but sometimes a man had to take what he could get.
He reached for the shutter divider between bathroom and bedroom.
‘Can you not?’ Lena asked hurriedly.
‘What?’
‘I mean, you can shut them, of course you can. But if you wanted to leave them open you could do that too. It’s just...I feel better when I can see you.’
How could he possibly close them after that?
He left them open. He walked around the other side of that half wall and into the bathroom and shucked his clothes quickly, no showing off allowed. He didn’t want Lena looking and wondering. He most emphatically didn’t want her coming and touching.
Much.
He stepped into the shower before he’d even turned on the taps. He washed away the stench of fear and let icy resolve replace it. He could offer Lena comfort and reassurance tonight. He’d spent plenty of nights in the chair beside her hospital bed—tonight would be a lot like that, what with Lena wounded and aching and him half worried out of his brain. They’d done this before. Nothing to sweat about.
Except for the bit where she thought he was her husband.
Nothing to sweat about at all.
* * *
Lena opened her suitcase while her husband took the longest shower in the history of mankind. She really wanted to see him when he emerged, slick with water and minus a towel. She figured that particular image ought to be engraved on her brain, concussion or not, but unfortunately she had no memory of it.
She found her toiletries bag amongst her clothes and opened it up and found all sorts of yummy things. Lovely brand-name make-up. A travel-sized bottle of rose-scented perfume, and she popped the cap and lifted it to her nose with the thought that a familiar scent might jog a few memories back into place, and it did, for she had a brief flash of a laughing dark-haired woman wearing a totally awesome headband full of feathers.
‘Do I know a Ruby?’ she asked as she stoppered the perfume and returned it to the toiletries bag.
‘Damon’s wife,’ came the rumble from the shower cubicle. ‘Ruby’s cool.’
‘Does she buy me perfume?’
‘She takes you frock shopping, for which I’m eternally grateful. She may have bought you perfume—I can’t say for sure.’
‘Why are you grateful?’ Lena couldn’t seem to find any frocks at all amongst the clothes she’d brought. These clothes ran more to casual trousers and tops that wouldn’t need ironing.
‘Ruby’s totally committed to bringing sexy back. I heartily approve.’
Lena rifled through her clothes again and lifted out the plainest pair of white cotton panties that she’d ever seen. What kind of woman took these on her honeymoon? ‘Maybe you should have married her.’
‘Nah. She can’t surf. Or hang-glide. Or put a bullet in a moving car wheel from half a kilometre away.’
‘And I can?’
This time he hesitated before answering. ‘You used to be able to. Little bit different now.’
She couldn’t remember any of that, but the notion that she’d once done all that didn’t particularly alarm her, so maybe it was true. ‘So how did I get all the scars? And the bad leg?’
The water cut off abruptly. Moments later the top half of Trig appeared, framed in the cutaway wall. Water ran off him in rivulets and muscle played over bone as he reached for a towel and set it to his face and then scrubbed his hair with it. She couldn’t see anything below mid waist, but even so...
All that sun-bronzed, spectacularly muscled glory and it was hers.
How in hell had she managed that?
‘You don’t remember what happened to your leg?’ he said when his face re-emerged from beneath the towel and the towel drifted lower. Never had a woman been more resentful of a wall.
‘No.’
‘You got shot. On a mission. Nineteen months ago. You’ve made a spectacular recovery, given the prognosis.’
‘What was the prognosis?’
‘A wheelchair.’
Oh. Well, then... ‘Good for me.’
‘Good for us all.’
His clothes went on and she mourned the loss of skin. She wondered if he wore PJs to bed and hoped he did not.
‘Shower’s free,’ he said on his way out and if that wasn’t a hint for her to wash away the smell of the street and the hospital, nothing was.
‘I’m getting there.’ She was. ‘But I can’t find my honeymoon nightie. Do you have it?’
Trig opened his mouth as if to speak and then shut it again with a snap. He shook his head. No.
She looked beneath the pillows. ‘Did we rip it?’
Still no sound from Trig.
‘Could be the cleaner mistook it for ribbon,’ he said at last.
‘Ribbon?’
‘There wasn’t much of it. But there were bows. Lots of bows. Made out of ribbon.’
‘Oh.’ Lena tried to reconcile ribbon nightwear with the rest of her clothing. ‘I really should be able to remember that.’
She passed her husband on the way to the shower and when she stepped beneath the spray she could have sworn she heard him whimper. So