Girl Least Likely to Marry (18 page)

‘I was feeling sorry for myself. But not any more.’

‘You look better,’ Marnie said.

‘I feel much stronger,’ Cassie agreed.

‘Good. Our work here is done.’ Reese smiled, settling down onto
her pillow. ‘Now, turn the lights out and let’s get some sleep. We’ve got a long
drive back to New York in the morning and none of us are nineteen any more.’

Cassie reached out and flipped off the lights and was greeted
by a chorus of gasps. She looked up at hundreds of stars glowing down at
her.

‘Wow,’ Gina said.

‘Cassie,’ Marnie whispered. ‘It’s beautiful. Did you do
that?’

Cassie felt her eyes fill with tears and the stars grew halos,
then they danced and twisted as they refracted through the rapidly building
moisture.

‘No,’ she said, her voice wobbly. ‘Tuck did.’

Suddenly the pain in her stomach reached excruciating levels,
and then it exploded with such force it took her breath away. A sob rose in her
throat and she choked on it as her lungs fought for space inside a chest welling
with sensation. Another sob rose, and then another, until she was full-on
crying.

So much for feeling stronger.

Reese sat up. ‘Cassie?’

The others followed suit. Marnie reached over and flicked the
light back on. They stared at their friend, not sure what to do or say. They’d
never seen Cassie cry. It had only been tonight they’d seen her in any kind of
emotional quandary at all.

‘Cassie?’ Gina said, hauling Cassie upright and pulling her
into a big hug, stroking her hair.

‘What’s wrong, honey?’ Reese murmured, rubbing Cassie’s
back.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ Cassie howled into Gina’s
neck. But it was scaring the hell out of her. This loss of control was eerily
similar to that torrid time in her teens, and she was frightened she was losing
her mind. ‘I don’t cry. I
never
cry. I want it to
stop.’

‘It’s okay,’ Marnie added. ‘You cry all you want. Crying’s
good. It’s natural in this sort of situation. Trust me, I know it’s not big in
geek land, but sometimes, as a woman, there’s nothing that beats a good
old-fashioned howl.’

This
was natural? Cassie couldn’t
believe that something so preposterous could be true. But none of her friends
was looking at her as if she was going crazy, and nor did she seem to be able to
stop.

‘Really?’ she sobbed.

Everyone nodded, and somehow she felt reassured that this was
part and parcel of whatever the hell was happening to her, not a spiral into
something deep and dark, so she just kept her head on Gina’s shoulder and let
every single tear fall free.

Twenty minutes later the tears had settled to some hiccoughy
sighs, and Cassie pulled herself off Gina’s shoulder. Reese handed her a wad of
tissues. ‘Thanks,’ Cassie said. ‘I seriously don’t know what’s come over me
lately.’

‘Have you ever thought,’ Gina said, approaching the subject
gently, ‘maybe you love him?’

Reese and Marnie looked at each other, stunned that such a
thought had come from Gina, who had declared herself pretty much divorced from
the emotion herself.

Cassie shook her head again. ‘No. I told you I don’t believe in
love.’

‘Well, sometimes that doesn’t really matter,’ Reese said,
jumping in. God knew, she’d been whammied by love at a most inconvenient time.
‘Some of the world’s most sane and sensible women have fallen under its
influence.’

‘No,’ Cassie repeated. ‘I’ve barely known him a month.’

‘I knew with Mason after a week,’ Reese said gently.

Cassie snorted—what a debacle
that
had been. ‘No,’ she said again.

‘Okay, then,’ Reese said. ‘Tell me what you’re feeling right
now. Tell me what you were feeling just before you cried for twenty minutes.
What you’ve been feeling since Tuck left.’

‘Well, it sure as hell isn’t
love,
’
Cassie said indignantly. ‘I feel…’

She petered out. Cassie didn’t usually do this sort of
thing—talk about her feelings. Her feelings were generally pretty clear-cut. She
didn’t even know where to start.

‘Go on,’ Marnie encouraged, moving closer.

‘I can’t concentrate, and there’s this pain in my…gut. I keep
having these memories of our time together that won’t stop. I can…
smell
him when he’s not around. I can’t sleep—and I
really, really need to sleep. I eat, but I can’t taste the food. I’m not
interested in my research. I…I can’t even think straight any more.’

Gina, Reese and Marnie looked at each other. Gina winked. Reese
grinned. Marnie got the giggles. Then they all laughed.

Cassie glared at them. ‘What?’ she demanded.

‘That
is
love, silly,’ Reese
said.

Cassie blinked at the utterly ridiculous statement. ‘No.’ She
shook her head.

No one had ever called her silly in her life, and she certainly
wasn’t going to let Reese get away with it when she’d just made possibly the
most absurd statement she’d ever heard.

‘I’ve just rattled off a list that sounds more indicative of a
brain tumour
than anything else and you tell me
it’s
love? That’s
silly.’

She looked at Gina and Marnie, who were nodding their heads in
agreement with Reese.

‘You have all the symptoms,’ Marnie agreed.

‘Which you’d know, if you spent more time reading fiction and
watching romcoms instead of reading astronomy textbooks and watching science
fiction,’ Gina added.

They were serious. Deadly serious. And she believed them. If
there were three better experts on the subject anywhere in the world she’d be
surprised, and they’d never steered her wrong before.

‘
This
is love? I thought love was
supposed to be
wonderful?
This doesn’t feel
wonderful,’ she said, looking earnestly at each of her friends, wanting them to
tell her they’d made a mistake. ‘It feels awful. It…
sucks.
’

Reese laughed. ‘That it does.’

‘So I’m not going crazy?’ she asked, still shaky over her loss
of control.

‘Nope,’ Reese assured her.

Cassie’s chest felt tight both in relief and dread. What the
hell was she going to do now? Her mother had pretty much spent her life
regretting falling in love with her father.

‘How do I stop it?’ she asked.

Reese shook her head. ‘I’m afraid it’s terminal. But it
is
manageable. And I promise you can live to a ripe
old productive age.’

Marnie hummed ‘The Wedding March’ and Cassie stared at her. ‘I
have to
marry
him?’ she squeaked. ‘That didn’t work
out so well for my parents. They barely speak to each other.’

‘No.’ Gina sighed, glaring at Marnie. ‘Just…
be
with him. In whatever way that works for you
both.’

‘Compromise,’ Reese agreed. ‘You’re two smart cookies. You’ll
work it out. Just listen to your heart.’

‘But I…’ Cassie’s head was spinning. First she’d been
sideswiped by her libido and now a foreign emotion was taking over her
sensibilities. ‘I’m ruled by my head. I’m not ruled by my heart.’

‘You are now, hon,’ Reese said. ‘You are now.’

The next morning Cassie found herself ensconced in
Reese’s car, heading for New York. She had no idea what she was going to say to
Tuck when she got there. She just knew she’d lain awake going over and over it
in her head.

The thought that it could really be love she felt for Tuck was
still a foreign notion, but her friends were right. Whether she accepted the
premise or not, the answer to her conundrum seemed to be Tuck.
Being with Tuck.

And it was only
logical
to do
something about it. To put that part right so her life could fall back into the
order she liked and respected.

Reese chatted about her plans for the future with Mason and
other inane topics, for which Cassie was thankful, and eventually the miles were
gone and Reese had weaved through the New York traffic to deposit Cassie outside
her cousin’s apartment.

Reese pulled up and dialled Tuck’s apartment number on her
phone. His gruff. ‘What?’ confirmed he was inside.

‘Good—you’re home. I’ll be there in a sec,’ Reese said
pleasantly, and hung up. She turned to face Cassie. ‘You’re up,’ she said, then
dragged her in for a big hug. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘three little words will get
you everywhere, okay?’

Cassie nodded, even though she still couldn’t quite believe
this horrible affliction was
love.
But then they
were out of the car and Reese had sweet-talked Cassie past Tuck’s doorman, whom
she seemed to know quite well, and Cassie was in the lift to the penthouse
apartment before she could blink.

Tuck was standing on the other side of it, waiting for the lift
doors to open. If Reese thought she could come to his place and blast him over
some imagined slight to one of her closest friends—well, she could just turn
around and walk away again.

Cassiopeia Barclay had made it more than
clear she didn’t want him in her life
.

The lift dinged, the doors started to slide open and he opened
his mouth to let loose his tirade. But it died on his lips as Cassie stood
before him.

‘Cassie?’

She looked just as he remembered. Terrible fashion sense,
carelessly tied back hair, no bra, dark frowny eyebrows, small serious face.

And his heart leapt, hungry at the sight of her.

Cassie didn’t move for a while and the lift doors started to
slide shut again. Tuck took two strides, slamming his hand up high on either
side of the shutting doors, wedging his body in between.

He looked big and blond and scruffy, and his pheromones filled
the lift—as lethal to her system as cyanide gas. Her chest filled with the same
pain and fullness she hadn’t been able to define until Reese had given it a
label.

Love.

So it was true. She did love him. Her cells recognised it—they
practically buzzed with it. She was suffering a terminal condition and the worst
part was the cause was the only cure.

The lift doors succumbed to Tuck’s unrelenting hold and jerked
open again. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

She gulped at the hardness in his voice. ‘I’d like to…talk to
you.’

‘If you’re here because you’re all horny again, you can forget
it. I’m not your own personal plaything.’

Tuck walked away from the lift because he knew he was being a
hypocrite. If she so much as looked at him with sex in her eyes he knew she
could use him six ways to Sunday and he’d be more than a willing partner.

Just thinking about it gave him a raging hard-on.

Cassie’s legs sparked into action as the lift doors started to
close again, and she walked into a spacious apartment dominated by the light
filtering through massive windows at the far end through which she could see the
Manhattan skyline.

‘No. I haven’t come for…’ She faltered. It seemed so bald to
speak it aloud. ‘It’s about something else.’

Tuck headed for his kitchen. He grabbed a heavy glass tumbler
from a cupboard and held it beneath the spout of the fridge’s ice dispenser.
Three cubes made a satisfying clinking noise. The bottle of Scotch which had
copped a fair amount of misuse this last week sat on his kitchen bench, almost
empty, and it was satisfying to pour the last of its contents over the ice.

He threw back half of it immediately, the burn sucking his
breath away. But it was preferable to the burn that had taken up permanent
residence in his gut. ‘You want a drink?’ he asked.

Cassie shook her head. ‘No. Thank you.’

They looked at each other across the room. ‘Well?’ Tuck said
eventually as the silence stretched.

‘I came to tell you…’ She stopped. Those three little words
seemed pretty bald, given the way they’d parted, but Reese did know her
love
stuff. ‘To tell you that I love you.’

Tuck almost choked on his next, more measured sip of Scotch.
They were the words he’d longed to hear a week ago, but the lack of emotion
behind them was startling.

‘You love me?’ he said. ‘Just like that?’

‘Well, no,’ Cassie said, taking a few more steps further into
the apartment. ‘I’m not good at this. I didn’t know that was what it was…this
thing. But Reese said—’

Tuck’s short, bitter laugh interrupted her. ‘Ah, Reese—all
loved up and eager to see everyone else loved up as well.’

Cassie frowned. ‘No. That’s not how it is.’

‘Well, how
is
it, then?’

‘I can’t think or concentrate any more. My research means
nothing to me…’

Tuck shrugged. ‘So this is about
your
work? Thinking about me interrupts your work? Which brings us
back to that libido of yours again. All right, then,’ he said, slamming his
glass down on the counter, reaching for his belt, undoing it, slipping it
through the loops. ‘Let’s go. Can’t have your sex-drive getting in the way of
important cosmic research.’

Cassie stepped back, horrified at his suggestion. ‘No. I’m
trying to tell you…’ Tuck pulled his shirt over his head. ‘I’m not very good at
this stuff.’

His hand was on his zip. The teeth parting seemed loud in the
building silence between them. Cassie covered the distance between them, placing
her hand on his to halt any further attempts at stripping.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to do this logically, to keep
this all straight in my head, and you’re not helping.’

Tuck could see desperation shimmering in her blue-grey eyes. It
wasn’t something he was used to seeing. Could she be telling the truth?
No matter how badly?
Dared he even hope?

‘I don’t care what’s in your head,’ he said, poking his index
finger at her forehead. ‘I don’t give a crap about logic.’ He needed to know she
felt
something. ‘I only care what’s in your
heart.’ He jabbed the same finger into the centre of her chest.