Three Weddings and a Baby. Fiona Harper
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normal, when she spoke, which surprised her to no end. She didn’t take her eyes off the man dominating her personal space.
‘Coreen, this is. This is Alex Dangerfield.’
Alex nodded at Coreen, but he, too, didn’t look away. Maybe he couldn’t either. And it wasn’t just her sight—every sense was locked on to him. But it had always been that way. Right from the very start.
‘You know him, then?’ Coreen sounded more than a little relieved.
And then he spoke in his low, rich voice and it rumbled through her, sending tingles up the backs of Jennie’s knees.
‘She really ought to,’ he said, not even a twitch of a smile softening the sarcastic tone. ‘I’m her husband.’
CHAPTER TWO
COREEN, who had stood up some time after Alex’s arrival, now sat abruptly back down in her chair. For a long time she just stared at him, and then she transferred her gaze to Jennie.
‘Your…?’ She trailed off, seemingly unable to utter the word husband.
Jennie knew exactly how she felt.
Coreen’s eyes grew wide. ‘Is this true?’
Jennie nodded. Unfortunately, it was. She’d have heartily liked to deny it, but Alex was the irritating sort of man who would undoubtedly produce a pristine marriage certificate from his inside pocket at an inconvenient moment like this. The thought infuriated her.
In his absence, her anger towards him had been muddled up with stupid yearnings, weighed down with grief and regrets, but now it sprang free, unpolluted and unfettered, and rose up from the pit of her stomach and clouded her eyes just as effectively as her earlier tears had done.
Now? Here? At Cameron’s wedding?
What was he playing at?
She opened her mouth to ask him just that, but he cut her off by talking across her to Coreen.
‘Now we’ve made the introductions, do you think I might have a private word with my wife?’
Jennie flinched as he said the last word. She didn’t feel like his wife. Didn’t feel like the centre of his universe.
Coreen regained some of her usual faultless composure where men were concerned. A glint in her eyes told Jennie she was ready to give Alex some of her legendary sass if he tried anything funny. ‘I’m not leaving you alone with Jennie unless she says it’s okay.’
Jennie almost laughed. If the situation were less dire, she’d have been the first to book a ringside seat for a face-off between Coreen and Alex. But then she glanced at her husband and she changed her mind. She’d never seen him like this—so cold, so…hostile. Maybe, if she’d seen this side of him during their whirlwind courtship she wouldn’t have been stupid enough to say ‘I do’ quite so hastily.
After all he’d put her through, she certainly didn’t. Or, even if that wasn’t quite true, she wanted it to be. So it almost counted.
‘It’s okay,’ she told Coreen, and stood up. ‘Alex and I. Well, we…’
‘Have unfinished business,’ he said.
We are unfinished business, she wanted to say as she tried to work out if this was all some weird hallucination, as the thump of the music filtered back into her consciousness and she became aware of other people in the room again. Lots of people. Reality felt just as strange and unconnected, too, she discovered.
But it struck her that as much as she wanted to grab Alex by the scruff of his neck and make him explain properly why having a honeymoon with his new bride hadn’t been the top of his list of priorities, she didn’t have that luxury at present.
She had to get Alex out of here. Now. Before her father and Marion appeared. Jennie glanced around the room, suddenly glad the party was still in full swing. It made it much easier to blend into the background—something that was normally her worst fear. If things had wound down by now there would have been far too many speculative glances, far too many itching ears.
And, as much as she hated the idea of being the obedient little wife, the only way she could see that happening was if she did what Alex wanted and had this ‘private word’ with him.
It was ironic that during their pitifully short marriage—record-breakingly short—she’d craved nothing more than private time with him.
‘Shall we?’ he said, and motioned for Jennie to walk ahead of him. He’d gestured towards the large double doors that led to the hotel foyer. Jennie gave a tight smile to Coreen, then strode through the packed dance floor, weaving nimbly round the miscellaneous dancers.
Nobody could find out who Alex was. The uproar it would cause would not only get her in a lot of hot water, but the family scandal would overshadow the whole day. Normally, she wasn’t averse to stealing the limelight from just about anybody, and she knew quite well that hers were the antics everybody filed their social memories by.
Do you remember at Josh’s christening when Jennie…? Or Barb’s fiftieth when she…?
And that couldn’t happen to Alice and Cameron’s wedding day. If she caused a scene, nobody would remember how delicately beautiful the bride had looked or how heart-breakingly romantic the groom’s speech had been; they’d just label the day as the one when Jennie and her secret husband had given them a firework display they’d never forget.
Thankfully, Alex was her polar opposite when it came to hogging the spotlight, and she was counting on him to want somewhere quiet and civilised to say whatever he had to say.
They were almost at the doors now and she glanced over her shoulder. Why, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t need her eyes to check if Alex was following her; the prickles running up and down her back confirmed he was close enough to reach out and grab her if she was tempted to bolt. Which she was. He was a very sensible man.
She quickly turned to stare straight ahead again. There was a fire in his eyes that was anything but sensible, and then she began to worry that she’d read the whole situation wrong. He didn’t look as if he was on the verge of being quiet or civilised. Perhaps it’d be a better plan to convince him to meet her somewhere else in the morning, when they were both in a better frame of mind.
Why was he here? Why now?
Scalding anger spiralled up inside her. What gave him the right to come and capsize her life again? What more could he possibly want from her that he hadn’t already taken?
As they reached the foyer, she could see it was virtually empty, populated only by a couple of tired-looking hotel employees and a guest she didn’t recognize. Once they were through the double doors, she headed into a quiet nook, just under the shelter of the grand staircase, and turned to face Alex.
Despite her swift about-face, he didn’t bump into her. Not quite. But he stopped perilously close, only millimetres away. The prickles running up and down her spine shifted accordingly, flowing round to the front of her body, then up her neck and into her cheeks, making every follicle on her head tense. It was like being jabbed all over by a thousand acupuncture needles—and nowhere near as relaxing.
She took a step backwards and asked the question that had been clanging around her head ever since he’d materialised out of nowhere in the function room. ‘What are you doing here, Alex?’
He stood there, terrifyingly still, not even blinking. ‘Jennie, you’re my wife! Why would you think that I wouldn’t come and find you?’
Hot, salty tears burned the back of Jennie’s eyelids. This was what she’d wanted, what she’d prayed for—to hear those words in his deep, rumbling voice. When she’d run away from him, deep down in her subconscious, this was what she’d ached for. But it was only when he hadn’t followed that she’d picked her emotions apart and realised it.
But