Wedding Survivor (25 page)

They rode home in companionable silence, Marnie smiling quietly, her hand in his. When they arrived at her house, he met her at the front of his truck. His blue gaze roamed her face, and a strange little smile lifted one corner of his lips. He gave her a light, tender kiss, a squeeze of her hip, then stood back and watched her walk up to her front door and disappear inside.

It wasn't until much later after she'd bathed and tied her hair in a knot and had settled at the kitchen table with a bowl of ice cream and the wedding budget before her that she stopped to wonder if she'd actually been dumped or not.

ELI kicked himself all the way home. That
kiss
was definitely not supposed to have happened, but dammit, she'd looked so mad and cute and oddly vulnerable during her speech that he'd supped.

Okay, all right. He was having a little more trouble than he'd bargained for in keeping his distance from her. Well, sure—she was a very appealing woman. But she wasn't the first appealing woman he'd ever known, and he usually had a little more self-control. Tonight, he'd proven his deepest fears—that he was a complete putz of a man who could be easily sucked in by
cute
.

Jesus.

Trish never did cute, he had to admit. She used tears to get her way, and it always felt like a sucker punch, because Eli was not the sort of man who dealt very well with a woman's tears. They always made him feel frantic to do something to stop them.

He usually didn't have any trouble when a woman was arguing with him, either, but Marnie, hell—there she was, talking a mile a minute, the fire in her eyes getting brighter and brighter as she tried to cover her disappointment, and he had felt that panic to make her stop. Frantic enough to kiss her. For a really long time.

Long enough to make him ache to be with her again.

Goddammit!

He drove recklessly, screeched to a halt in his drive, walked into his house, and threw his keys at the Mayan bowl where he usually kept them, missing the bowl and hitting the wall instead. He stalked into the kitchen, flung open the fridge, grabbed a beer, and kicked the fridge shut. And then he went out onto the terrace to sit under his trellis and stare glumly at the lights of the valley.

The best thing to do was lay low. He had a little less than two weeks before he and Vince and Olivia and Cooper took off to do the canyoning in the San Juan Mountains. After that, the wedding, and directly after that, thank God, the Amazon trip with the Japanese. He needed the Amazon trip to clear his head and get it on straight.

So three weeks max, and then it was over. Just like that, she'd be history. He could go on with his life, she could go on with hers, and they'd both be a whole lot happier doing it.

Three weeks. He could do three weeks standing on his head. Well… unless she argued. Or cried. Or smiled that big moon smile at him. No, no, he could handle it, he could do this. He was not ready for a relationship, and he really wasn't ready for Marnie, no matter how appealing she was.

Seriously. He wasn't.

He took a swig of beer and absolutely refused to listen to the little voice inside his head telling him he was a big fat coward and a really bad liar.

MARNIE didn't hear from Eli the next day, but she was far too busy to think much about it, because Olivia had a dress crisis. As in, she absolutely despised the dress she'd com-missioned from the new hot designer Ming Xioong. Ming had made the dress based on Olivia's exact specifications, and Ming had delivered. Marnie thought the gown was gorgeous.

"It looks like a potato sack!" Olivia wailed over the phone.

"But Olivia," Marnie tried, "she
hand-sewed
it. And she embroidered it."

"I don't care if she picked the silk and spun it! It's horrible and I am not paying twenty thousand dollars for that rag!"

For starters, Marnie didn't think that you
picked
silk, but she set up an emergency meeting with Ming for the very next day, which she managed to squeeze in between her emergency meeting about the reception pavilion and the emergency phone conference about the antique altar Olivia now wanted.

Together, Ming and Marnie convinced Olivia to at least try on the dress. Olivia tried it on, stood up on the little platform before three floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and cried.

"You can't
see
it?" Olivia demanded tearfully when Marnie asked her what was wrong with it.

"I swear to God, I don't see anything," Marnie said. "You look absolutely gorgeous."

"No I don't! Just look at this!" she wailed, gesturing lamely at her chest.

Ming and Marnie looked at her boobs, then at one another. Suddenly, everything was clear. "So… you don't like the bodice?" Marnie asked carefully.

"Would
you
?" Olivia snapped.

The problem was that Olivia was less than well endowed in the chest area, and Marnie wondered, with all her freakin' money, why Olivia hadn't gotten on the breast-enhancement bandwagon like the rest of L.A. But she hadn't, and the result was a bodice that didn't hang exactly right. It had nothing to
hang from
.

"I see this all the time," Ming said knowingly. She dis-appeared into another room, and then reappeared with a padded push-up bra. "Put this on," she said to Olivia.

"I am not going to wear artificial enhancements," Olivia said stiffly.

"You can have one or the other," Ming said matter-of-factly. "If you wear the push-up, I can make some adjustments and you will look beautiful. If you don't want enhancements, then this is the best I can do, and you still owe me twenty thousand dollars."

Olivia looked at Marnie. Marnie mouthed,
Wear the push-up
.

"Fine!" Olivia huffed, and stepped off the podium, snatched the bra from Ming's hand, and went into the dressing room.

She reappeared a few minutes later and looked as if she was seeing the gown for the first time. She beamed at her reflection in the three-way mirror. "This is
so
much better," she said, as if she had thought of the bra herself, and caught Marnie frowning at her. "You just don't understand how stressful this all is, Marnie."

Actually, Marnie thought she had a pretty good idea of how stressful it was.

Olivia turned one way, then the other, admiring herself. "Wow. I look
fantastic
. I love wedding gowns. They're so beautiful. Do you ever think about getting married, Marnie?"

That question certainly caught Marnie off guard.

"Every woman thinks of getting married!" Ming scoffed when Marnie didn't answer right away.

"Sure, I've thought about it. Sort of," Marnie said.

"Ohmigod," Olivia said, her eyes going wide. "I don't even know if you have a boyfriend! I can't believe I never asked you that!" she cried. "I mean, I know about the guy who slept with you and never called you again, but I never thought to ask about a boyfriend. How terrible of me—
do
you have a boyfriend?"

Marnie could feel herself coloring and looked sheep-ishly at Ming's invoice (which Ming had shoved at Marnie the moment they entered her studio).

"Uh-oh," Olivia said as Ming began to pin her gown. "This is awkward. I shouldn't have brought it up."

"No, no," Marnie said, with a laugh and a wave of her hand. "There's a guy," she said with a sheepish laugh.

"
Oh
?" the Olivia and Ming chorus asked at the very same time, and both of them stopped what they were doing to look at her.

"Sort of," she said. "I mean, we've been… close. But then, not so close."

"Ah," Olivia said, nodding sagely. "
That's
the guy."

"Did you sleep with him?" Ming demanded.

Oh man, this was awful. "Maybe."

"No maybe to it. Either you did or you didn't."

"She slept with him. But he never called her, can you believe it?" Olivia volunteered.

"
Bastard
!" Ming spat.

Clearly, she was going to have to discuss this, and Marnie put the invoice aside so she'd have her hands free to talk. "Okay, he
did
call. Eventually. But here's the thing—neither of us meant for it to happen, but it did. And it
was fabulous
. Fantastic!" It was indeed the highlight of her sexual life thus far. "We'd been sort of building this friendship, and it happened, and honestly, he seemed really into it. But the next time I saw him, he told me he didn't think we really ought to go there for a lot of reasons, which, okay, I could understand. But then he kissed me! And it wasn't a good-bye kiss, either. It was a
kiss
."

"Asshole," Ming said with a flick of her wrist. "Men are such chickenshits. They don't like to fall too hard or too fast, and when they do, forget it. They try and act like nothing happened, that it was only you and not him, blah blah blah. But he won't be able to keep that up if he's really fallen for you. He'll come crawling back with some lame excuse."

"Really?" Marnie asked hopefully. "You think?"

"Bullshit," Olivia opined. "He got what he wanted, and now he's done. Don't kid yourself, Mam," she said, studying her hair in the mirror as Ming pinned her gown. "Men are beasts. They will do or say anything for a fuck."

"Really?" Marnie asked, slumping in her chair.

"Really. Forget him. He doesn't deserve you anyway."

"Don't listen to her," Ming said. "He's getting his nerve up."

"He's not getting his nerve up. He got his dick up and now—Ming!" Olivia cried. "You
pinned
me!"

"Sorry!" Ming said, and yanked the pin clear of Olivia.

Marnie put her fist on her chin and moped.

With the dress crisis resolved, she returned home to work from the kitchen table. Only she didn't get much work done, because she couldn't stop thinking about what Olivia and Ming had said. It was sort of hard to argue that Eli had been after only one thing, especially when she'd done the initiating. But neither could she buy the theory that he'd fallen fast and hard.

She didn't know what to make of it, and sat with her feet propped on one of her mom's silk-covered dining chairs, drumming her pen against the table.

"Marnie, honey?" Mom asked, poking her head out of the kitchen. "Could you stop that, please?"