3 Brides for 3 Bad Boys (21 page)

"It didn't go away. The ache, or the wanting, and being in New York didn't make any difference. I figured that even if I couldn't do love, I knew I could do fidelity. I was already doing it."

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "You couldn't have wanted me that much." Her voice cracked on tears that insisted on rolling down her cheeks.

"You're right." He pulled her into his lap and cradled her against him, brushing the tears from her cheeks with his fingers. "It wasn't just want. It was love. I don't understand it, but I know it's real."

She leaned into him, inhaling his scent, soaking in his warmth. "Oh, yes, it's real."

"A forever kind of real."

She leaned up to kiss him, and that led to more touching, which led to pleasure that left her in tears all over again.

Later, curled into his body, her legs entwined with his and on the verge of sleep, she laid her hand against his heart. "Forever."

C O L T O N ' S

C h a p t e r O n e

S
omebody had stuck a vise on Colton Denning's temples, and it was so tight, he thought his head might explode.
Idiot.

He never drank, but had that stopped him from finishing off an entire bottle of champagne by himself? No, it had not.

Now he had to live with the consequences.

A head that wanted somebody to shoot it and put it out of its misery. A mouth that tasted as if it had been stuffed with sawdust used to soak up a wrestler's sweat. Okay, that image had been a little too graphic. His stomach roiled, and his throat convulsed.

He forced one eyelid open. He was facedown on a bed. That was good. The last thing he remembered was watching the follies in the showroom at his Vegas hotel. At least he'd made it back to his room. Now, if he could just make it to the bathroom before he lost whatever was in his stomach.

With an unmanly groan he would never have let another person hear, he shoved one leg off the side of the bed. Then the other one. Using his arms as leverage, he pushed upward. If he couldn't make it off of his knees, at least he could crawl to the bathroom.

Bleary eyes took in the details of his bed. The bedspread was hanging off the end of the mattress, and the covers were a mess, really lumpy.

Make that extremely lumpy.

The shock of what he was seeing sent him staggering to his feet. He reeled backward, then staggered forward again until his shins ran right into the side of the bed. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, but it didn't erase what he saw.

A woman.

A naked, very voluptuous woman was in his bed.

Long, chestnut hair covered her averted face, but he didn't need to see her features to be absolutely certain he didn't know her. Because the blankets
did not
cover her body. Perfectly formed breasts with wine rose tips peaked at him from amidst the white linen. Her arms were thrown above her head in sleepy abandon.

The sheet and blanket that barely covered her belly were twisted around her shapely calves and did nothing to hide the feminine curls at the apex of her very toned thighs.

Aw, hell. With a body like that, she had to be a showgirl.

He didn't date showgirls. He wasn't big on dating, period, but when he did date, he took out women who thought flamboyant was wearing a red sweater set instead of brown. Nothing like his mother, Moonbeam, the original flower child who'd never grown out of her tie-dye T-shirts and bangle bracelets. And definitely nothing like this gorgeous creature in his bed.

Of course, she hadn't been a date.

She'd been a one-night stand. Another never for him.

Even as his dick responded to the sight of her oh-so-perfect body, his stomach clenched at the idiocy of going to bed with a stranger. His initial reason for forcing his body from the bed made itself known again. He spun on his heel, which sent the vise on his temples into a pulsating mode, but he didn't care. He had to get to the bathroom.

He made it, shutting the door with a jerky movement. Afterward, he brushed his teeth and drank several glasses of water from the tap, downing some aspirin with one of them.

He leaned against the counter, refusing to even glance in the mirror at the fool who'd taken an unknown woman to bed and risked his life for a night of sex he couldn't even remember. He felt as though he'd been run over by one of his excavation units, and what was he supposed to say to the woman lying in his bed?

He didn't even know her name.

No doubt, she'd really get a kick out of learning that fact. It suddenly occurred to him that he had no desire to stick around for an awkward morning after.

Had his bathroom ablutions woken the woman in his bed? He snuck a peak around the partially closed bathroom door.

She'd turned onto her side, exposing luscious, round cheeks he wished he could remember touching because sure as certain, he wasn't going to be touching them again. Her soft, slow breathing indicated she was still asleep.

He quietly snuck back into the main room and started searching for the clothes he'd been wearing the night before. He found his slacks in a pile under some spangly white thing. Her costume. It didn't look as if it covered up much more than the sheet was doing this morning.

He tossed it aside and grabbed the pants, his knees about buckling with relief as several opened condom packets scattered to the floor. At least they'd practiced safe sex. Having no memory of the previous night after his third glass of champagne, he had to assume he owed the woman in his bed thanks for making sure they had used protection.

He grabbed the rest of his clothes off the floor and tossed them into his duffel bag with the others he'd packed yesterday. He'd planned to get an early start on his trip to Mexico this morning. He was supposed to meet his brothers on Luna Island in three days, and he still had to confirm delivery of the exploratory mining equipment to Las Playas del Blanco and arrange its transport to the island.

He dragged on a pair of tan Dockers and a T-shirt. He would have to forgo a shower. No way was he risking waking the woman up with the sound of running water.

He'd grabbed his shaving kit from the bathroom, slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and had his hand on the door handle when he stopped. Okay, so maybe it had been a one-night stand, but could he just leave her like that? Naked and in his bed. She deserved a note or something.

Considering the number of condoms they'd used, he had to figure she'd given him a heck of a night, even if he couldn't remember it. He went back to the desk under the window and pulled out a sheet of hotel stationery.

It took him several minutes to decide what to write, but finally he had it down and was on his way out the door.

He stopped at the front desk and paid the exorbitant fee Vegas hotels charged for keeping his room a night longer than his reservation. He didn't want her being kicked out of bed by housekeeping later that afternoon.

It was the best he could do for her.

Fayre kicked the flat tire on her lime green Volkswagen Beetle.

She was going to kill him. When she caught up with that too damn sexy, good-for-nothing, lying, leave-a-woman-sleeping-in-bed-while-he-snuck-out creep, she was going to murder him. Slowly. And she was going to enjoy doing it.

But murder and mayhem had to wait while she changed the tire on her little car, the hot sun making her oversized T-shirt and crop pants feel like an Eskimo parka.

Oh, she was going to make him pay.

She really was.

Right after he explained how he could just walk out like that after all the things he'd said.

A crack of almost hysterical laughter echoed around her. Why even bother asking? Mr. Colton Denning had just been another frickin' bad choice in men. The kind she excelled at.

When was she going to learn?

But, damn it, he'd seemed so sincere.

She didn't trust men, never, not anymore. So, how had she let herself fall for his line? He'd
seemed
so sincere. He'd
seemed
different than the other creeps who saw her body and nothing else.

He hadn't been, and it had hurt more than she'd thought possible to hurt anymore. She should be inured to that kind of thing by now, the love her, leave her crap. So, how had he gotten under her skin and right into her heart?

She'd believed his line about love at first sight because she'd felt the same thing.

Only she hadn't. Oh, what she'd felt had been real enough. Hence the pain in her heart that would not go away, but he hadn't felt anything more than the twitching of his oversized dick in his custom-tailored pants.

The sound of another car coming on the deserted highway sent her thoughts scattering. She spun around to look, shielding her eyes from the sun, even though she was wearing her Donna Karan sunglasses. It was an old rattle-trap truck, too many colors to distinguish which had been the original. Pulling to a stop behind her car, the engine shuddered to a halt.

Fear coursed through her. She was a woman alone on a deserted road in Mexico, and her Spanish was only marginally better than her grasp of nuclear physics. She read dictionaries for pleasure, but they were in English.

The sun glared off the windshield, blocking her from seeing the driver, and her body went tense in preparation for night or fight. But it wasn't the driver's door that opened first.

The passenger door banged open, and two small children tumbled out of the truck cab. They were followed by an obviously pregnant woman who had Fayre's immediate empathy.

Finally, the driver's door opened, and a stocky Mexican man stepped out. He smiled at Fayre, said something to his wife that made
her
smile and something to his children that sent them rushing to the back of the truck. He walked over to his wife and took her arm, helping her walk with all the solicitude of gentle and obvious love.

Fayre's eyes smarted with tears for no good reason she could think of.

The two came over to where she stood next to a half-jacked-up car and her spare tire. "I help you, señorita?"

On a normal day, she would have refused his help, saying she could do it herself. But this wasn't a normal day, and she offered the tire jack to him without a single argument and a heartfelt, "Thank you."

He nodded, smiled again and finished jacking up her little car. It looked like he knew what he was doing, so she left him to it.

"You go to Puerto Vallarta?" the woman asked, naming a city popular with tourists farther south on the coast.

Fayre forced her normally mobile mouth into a smile. "No. I'm going to Luna Island."

"Is pretty place."

Fayre wouldn't know. All she did know was that was where the owner of Denning Mining Operations had gone, and she was determined to track the snake down.

However, she smiled again and nodded.

The children ran up, offering Fayre a piece of fruit. She knew to refuse would offend the small family, so she accepted, but then pulled some Cokes and other snacks from her food store in the small trunk of her car to share with them. The kids were ecstatic, and watching them brought the first real grin to her face in days.

A half an hour later, she was again behind the wheel of her car, and the Mexican family was on its way.

Now, that was a man. He stopped to help a woman in distress, took care of his pregnant wife and was tender with his children. He was not some slimy toad who talked a woman into his bed and then dumped her in the morning with a note on the hotel stationery no less. Frickin' cheap and uninspired, that's what Colton Denning was.

C h a p t e r T w o

S
eated at the small table in the back of the Las Playas del Blanco Taverna, Colton sipped at his coffee while he waited for his weekly supplies to be loaded onto his boat.

The coffee was bitter and lukewarm, but he hadn't had so much as a beer since the disaster in Vegas.

The woman haunted his dreams, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he was reliving the wild night in his sleeping fantasies. If that was the case, he was the biggest fool that had ever walked God's green earth for leaving her behind without so much as a goodbye.

Even if his dreams were nothing related to what really happened, his conscience ate at him when he thought of her waking up to nothing but a note and an empty hotel room.

He should have stuck around, no matter how uncomfortable it would have been. Moonbeam would be appalled if she knew he'd treated a woman like that.

His mother might live wild in a lot of ways, but she'd raised him to respect the opposite sex and protect them when at all possible. He'd done very little of that with the woman he'd left behind.

If he could remember her name, he would have called her to apologize, or maybe sent her flowers in care of the follies.

Something. If he could even remember her face, he would make plans to go back to Vegas and find her to tell her he was sorry in person. Hell, he might do it anyway.

He knew three things about her. She was a showgirl, she danced in the follies at his hotel and she was a natural brunette … or was that shade of chestnut considered a redhead? Anyway, he knew what color her hair was.

He knew what her ass looked like, too, and he'd give an awful lot to see it again, but her face remained a mystery. Even in his dreams.

And it bothered him.

He looked up as the doors to the taverna swung inward and a woman walked in. She was tall, easily five-ten, but that was about all he could really tell about her. She'd camouflaged her figure behind a baggy T-shirt that hung down to her thighs and loose-fitting crop pants. A pair of designer sunglasses hid her eyes, and a baseball cap covered her hair, which was scraped back into a ponytail away from a face that said the word in cranky.