All Fired Up (Kate Meader) (8 page)

“I googled it.” She moved behind her desk, sat in one of those fancy ergonomic chairs, and flipped open her laptop. It had a pink cover that matched her sweats and the Post-it note on his door this morning, the one that had told him to move his damn bike out of her damn space before she took a damn baseball bat to it. Except it wasn’t that nice.

“We can get an annulment. Just fill out a form and it can be done and dusted in about three weeks.” She sounded pleased with herself, downright smug in fact. That frosted him a bit.

He stood and moved to her side of the desk, leaning against the edge. “So not a divorce, then?”

“We can get an annulment because we didn’t…Well, it wouldn’t have mattered if we did.” She hesitated, and he could see the gears going round as she rethought her position.

“What if we did?” he asked, tamping down on the glee in his voice.

“What if we did what?”

“What if we did sleep together? What if we had sex?”

The way he said it could be construed as past sex or the promise of it. The promise of can’t-walk-for-a-week good times between a man and a woman. “That wouldn’t make a difference?”

“But we didn’t.” Her brow creased in puzzlement and horror descended to her mouth. “But we didn’t,” she repeated, less sure now.

He couldn’t keep it up but every inch of him—every hardening inch—wished it were true. “Nah, we didn’t.”

“Shane!” She socked him in the side and broke into that laugh that he’d fallen in love with the minute she’d graced him with it in the third bar of the crawl. It had taken him that long to get it but it had been worth every bad joke, every cheesy pun, every flash of the dimple Aunt Jo said would be a woman’s downfall. The old girl had neglected to mention it would be his downfall as well.

The laughter faded, and she turned serious again. “It wouldn’t matter if we had…well, you know. People make these mistakes all the time, so they have procedures in place.”

“Procedures to clean up idiotic mistakes?”

There was that crease between her brows again. She didn’t like that she’d made a mistake and lost control of a situation. That was so not Cara.

“Right.” But her expression didn’t match the word’s surety. “I’ll take care of the papers, then?” she prompted with a couple of quick nods. The swallow in her throat was so pronounced it made the slender column of her neck expand. It also made him feel like prodding her some more. See how far he could take it.

“What if I don’t sign?”

She shot up out of her seat, her lemon fall of hair swishing vehemently behind her head. He got a whiff of herbal shampoo and sunshine. “Why would you do that?”

“Just tell me what would happen, LT.”

The nickname slipped from his lips without thinking, as if his brain had been waiting for her to get into a sexy hissy fit. That night he had abbreviated Lemon Tart for expediency’s sake and found that it suited her bossy, military-style hauteur. Lemon Tart, the Lieutenant, LT.

She wasn’t so haughty or self-possessed now. Her hands flailed, at complete odds with cool Cara. The more riled she got, the more his attraction to her burned.

“Well, if one party doesn’t sign, it’ll still happen. It just takes longer. Six to eight weeks.”

If one party doesn’t sign.
So cold. So clinical. He nodded, thinking about how he wanted to phrase the next sentence. The silence drew heavily between them and he worked it for a few seconds because, shit, he was starting to enjoy himself now.

“Paddy, you’re not seriously thinking of not signing those papers. I mean, what would be gained from that?”

“A marriage, Cara. The marriage you wanted.” He hauled in a deep breath because he had a feeling he was going to need it. “After all, this was your brilliant idea.”

Chapter 4

Cara’s brain splintered and thoughts scattered about the office. She couldn’t have heard him right. Never mind the crazy accusation of who exactly was responsible for this mess, he wouldn’t sign the papers. The papers that bound them together.

“But that’s—that’s just nuts.”

Folding his arms across his chest caused his biceps to bulge indecently against the short-sleeve hems of his chef’s jacket. He ignored her distress and studied the events board behind her.

“Looks like you’ll be busy the next month or so.” With a slow brush of his fingertip, he rubbed one of the Post-its. It took all her strength to tear her gaze away from that slow, provocative slide and the faint trace of flour he left behind.

“Did you not hear what I said? You have to sign those papers. We can’t be married.”

“Yet, we are.”

His voice traveled low and serious through the air, landing on her with such force that she slumped in her chair. Paralyzed by his words, her body solidified into deadweight. She tried to push off from the floor and send the Aeron chair into a safer zone beyond the orbit of this lunatic Irishman. It got stuck. Her personal trainer said he’d never met a one-hundred-and-ten-pound woman with more defined muscle tone than Cara, that her feet were powerful enough to be classified as lethal weapons, but they couldn’t find any traction against the plastic underlay.

“What did Uncle Aldo do?” he asked.

“What?”

He waved at the seating plan for Jack and Lili’s wedding, the one that required all her diplomatic skills to ensure years of infighting and grudges didn’t explode into a bloodbath. “Uncle Aldo’s off to the side with what I can only assume are the rest of the troublemakers. Can’t find a place for him?”

“It’s a long story involving a second cousin’s wife and a leg of prosciutto. He’s also a butt pincher—stop trying to change the subject.”

Leaving off his thousand-yard stare at the wall, he leveled her with his brown-eyed gaze. “We can’t deny that it happened, Cara.”

“I’m not trying to deny it, you crazy peat-bog dweller—”

“Flatterer.”

Agh!

“I’m trying to deal with it,” she finished. Somehow, she managed to pull herself to a stand, which had the unfortunate effect of bringing her closer to him. The smell of baking bread and virile man sent her stomach into a loop-the-loop.

“It happened for a reason,” he said, in a rational tone that was starting to bug the hell out of her.

“A one-hundred-proof reason.”

“Perhaps, but there had to be underlying factors, don’t you think, LT?”

LT.
Her silly heart went dunkity-dunk. In Vegas, he had taken her nickname and turned it into something personal and familiar between them.

He was just trying to distract her, though as to the “why” she had no earthly idea.

“You wanted to see where Paul Newman was married,” she said, straining for patience. “Not Elvis or Sinatra like a normal person. Paul Newman.” Cara wasn’t given to broad Italian gestures of exasperation but right now, her DNA was primed and ready for an explosion.

“What we got here is a failure to communicate,” he said with a faraway look in his eyes.

“Come again?”

“
Cool Hand Luke.
It’s one of my favorite movies,” he said, still as reasonable as all get out.

“I know. You wouldn’t shut up about it until we went to the chapel.”

Shane laughed, and his eyes clouded over in recollection. Crap, he was remembering something nice when she could recall only snatches. She wanted to remember everything. A girl should have some special memories from her wedding day, shouldn’t she?

He sat his fine Irish ass on her desk, crumpling up her invoices. She wanted to dig her hands into that ass and push him off—so she could uncrumple those invoices, of course. His houndstooth-check pants, standard issue for the kitchen, stretched tight against his muscular thighs. Thighs that had slotted against hers in perfect symmetry when he rocked her to sleep…Huh, her cherry-picking brain remembered that all right.

“We were drunk,” she said, grasping onto this undeniable fact like a shallow-rooted plant at the edge of a cliff.

“True, but you can’t entirely blame the alcohol. We were upright enough to go get a license from the clerk. Which was your idea, by the way.”

She shoved him hard in his surprisingly resistant chest. There he went again with the ridiculous blame game. “What an outrageous thing to say. Take that back.”

There was pity in his smile. “No, I won’t. You asked me to marry you and I said yes. So there must have been some part of you that wanted this to happen. That wanted us to happen. And we need to respect that.”

“There is no part of me that wanted this to happen, Shane.” The words sounded wrong as soon as they tumbled out. Realization stung the air around her eyes like she had blinked in a cloud of pepper spray. She fell back heavily in the chair, her outrage fizzling in the face of something she couldn’t even name.

“I did ask you.”
Oh God.

He nodded once, and his eyes, soft buttons of melting chocolate, grew larger in acknowledgment of her admission.

“I had some sort of brain malfunction and asked a complete stranger to marry me.”

“Yes, you did. And I’m inclined to think it’s not your usual MO.”

It was not. Control was her watchword. Controlling her mind, her body, her life. It got her a fair amount of ribbing from the people she knew but the perimeter she had set was enough to keep most of the barbs at bay. A necessary electric fence so she didn’t spiral into the destructive behaviors that had marred her teens and twenties.

But there was something inside her, something that didn’t agree with her carefully wrought life and her struggle for Zen-like balance. A part of her would always be that stupid girl primed to revolt against the strictures of her Italian family and the exacting standards she had set for herself. On the wrong side of thirty, she was a little old to be a rebel.

“I did ask you several times if you were sure,” he said. “And you kept saying yes, and you seemed so enthusiastic, and well, I got swept up in it. You’re a very persuasive woman when you set your mind to something.”

Thinking more clearly now, she had a better explanation. By the second bar in Vegas, Shane’s interest had been obvious and Gina hadn’t liked it one bit.

Near in age, the cousins had never been close. They could blame it on the unfortunate incident of the peroxide and the hair curling iron that left Gina with bald patches or the countless times they’d one-upped each other with stolen clothes and fickle boyfriends. Cara’s last-minute assistance with Gina’s wedding should have helped to ease the tension but that wasn’t enough for the toxic midget.

Her cousin’s sniping had begun the moment they got on the plane after Gina had already downed several vodka tonics in the departure lounge. The jibes about how Cara wouldn’t need a bachelorette party of her own so she should try to enjoy this one. How a hotshot career girl like her wouldn’t need a wedding. Over the years, Cara had loaded the shotgun with her own defensive pronouncements against marriage; it just needed a few adult beverages for Gina to curl her fingers around the trigger. Outside the third or maybe fourth bar, her cousin pulled her aside and told her to lay off an eligible piece like Shane.
Give the rest of the girls a go, Cara.

She had let a keg’s worth of vodka and a few bull’s-eye comments push her into doing something crazy. Something she had always craved. Normality, relationships, marriage. But only normal women get to experience these things, and that night, freak-show Cara had taken a shortcut and headed straight for the minister in the Hawaiian shirt.

She had tried to cheat fate.

Part of her had wanted to flip those bitches the bird. Not only was she getting married, but she was doing it without fanfare and before the rest of them. Before Gina.

Before Lili.

No, that couldn’t be right. She couldn’t possibly have done this to feel superior to Lili. Gina, perhaps, but not her baby sister, who deserved nothing but the best after everything Cara had put her through during Mom’s bout with cancer. Cara beating Lili to the altar was just another example of big sis putting herself first. Was her brain so marriage-addled that she would try to upstage Lili like that?

Now, a week later, it was impossible to know what her state of mind was when she’d held hands with a cute guy and let him dimple her defenses to death. But she knew her mind now.

She wanted out.

“It was a mistake.”

He leaned closer, his forehead almost touching hers, his breath warm on her cheek. “How do we know it was? Maybe it was supposed to happen this way.”

She moved back, away from that knee-weakening scent of man and bread. His dimple winked at her. For God’s sake, not the dimple. “Maybe we should try it on for size.”

“Try what on for size?” Her voice pitched high in protest. “I don’t know you. You don’t know me.”

“Then we get to know each other.”

He was insane. Absolutely insane. And she was absolutely insane to be listening to another word out of his crazy, gorgeous mouth.

Her plain old lunch lay at the edge of the desk, cooling, and she wanted to eat. She had a plan for expanding the events business. She had figured out how to extract herself from this insufferable situation with Shane. It was a good day and she wanted to eat.

“You’re not going to sign the papers.”

“Not yet.”