Loe raamatut: «The Captains' Vegas Vows»

Chapter One

The first time she woke up, she was surrounded by diamonds and gold.

It was magical. It was right.

She smiled because she wasn’t awake enough to laugh, then she slipped back into sleep.

The second time she woke up, she blinked in the night, awake enough this time to be aware of the sounds of a city beyond the room. Beside the bed, diamonds and gold reflected the lights that filtered in, color after color, as if there were a party outside, turning the diamonds into a kaleidoscope. Since her pillow was very soft under her cheek, and since her whole body felt wonderfully soft and relaxed, too, she fell back asleep.

The third time she woke up, the diamonds and gold were brilliantly lit by the steady, white light of the sun.

She stared at the bedside table, an entire piece of furniture made of gold. The clear base of the lamp upon it was filled with diamonds. Why would anyone fill a lamp with diamonds?

Her brain began to grind into gear. The table had to be brass. The diamonds had to be crystals. That was only logical; no one had the money to fill a lamp with diamonds.

She wasn’t in her own bed—also logical. Of course she wasn’t in her own bed, because she’d moved out of her lonely house in Seattle and was driving 2,500 miles to Texas, staying in a different hotel in a different state each night.

The trip wasn’t exciting, just routine, because she was an officer in the US Army, and she had no choice but to move when the army told her to move—which, so far, had been five times in the past eight years. Each move had been predictable, from her initial training course in Missouri to her first assignment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from there to a deployment overseas, then back to Bragg. Her promotion to captain had been followed by another training course in Missouri, followed by two years as a company commander at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, just south of Seattle.

Everything occurred in the proper order on the proper timeline. Every time she was moved, she filled her car with suitcases, duffel bags and a reliable little toaster oven. The army stored her furniture, delivering it when they left her in one place for more than half a year. When it was time for the next move, the army sent workers to box it all up and store it again.

Because her life was full of duty, predictable duty, and because every mile she traveled was the shortest distance between two army-ordered points, and perhaps because it was nearly her thirtieth birthday (although thirty wasn’t any more significant than any other age—really, it wasn’t), she had decided to add some excitement, taken a detour and stopped for the night in Las Vegas.

Vegas, baby.

Oh, my God, I’m in Vegas.

Captain Helen Pallas bolted upright in the bed and realized immediately that not only was she in Vegas, she was nude, and she had a horrific headache. She pressed one hand to the side of her head and yanked the white sheet up to her neck to cover her breasts, which caused a little avalanche of rose petals to cascade down the sheet to her lap.

She was sitting in a bed—a gold bed—full of rose petals, a thousand of them under her legs, even between her toes. She stopped pressing her palm into the side of her pain-filled head and instead ruffled her newly bobbed hair, dislodging more petals. They fluttered over her shoulders and down her spine to land with a soft tickle behind her bare backside.

Roses are always going to make me think of sex now.

Helen clutched the sheet more tightly. Was that a real memory or had it been a dream?

“Roses are always going to make me think of sex now.”

“Is that a bad thing?” he murmured in her ear, laughter always underlying that deep bass. They’d just been laughing; they were going to laugh again.

She snuggled into him a little more deeply, loving the way they fit together, spooning on their sides with her bare back against his warm chest, loving the strength in his arm as he kept her securely against his body.

“Red roses are supposed to represent true love,” she said. “Romance. Not the hottest, wildest night of sex in your life.”

“True love and romance.” He scooped up a handful of rose petals and pressed them to her breast, cupping them to her skin. When he slid his thumb slowly over the curve of her breast, the velvet of a petal created a fragrant friction. “Like this?”

She shifted in response, sliding her legs together, feeling the pleasant abrasion of his masculine legs against her smooth ones, enjoying the casual intimacy of their bare feet touching. “No, I mean a wholesome, pure kind of love. You’re using roses to make me think of hot sex again. Right this second—yes, just like that. That’s sexy.”

He slid the handful of rose petals down her body, their softness exquisite, her skin more sensitive than she’d known it could be. Everything with him was better than she’d known it could be. She smiled even as she shivered when his hand stopped just below her belly button.

He kissed her shoulder, scraped his teeth along it gently, then a little lick, another kiss. “But the roses came after I pledged myself to you. So did the sex.”

He slid the petals lower still, down to the most sensitive part of her body, and gently pressed them in a firm circle, or two, or three. She tried to breathe deeply, but anticipation had her panting. He let go of the petals to slip his hand under her thigh, to lift her leg and position her a little differently. A little better. “First, we promised true love.”

She ached with desire as she listened to his voice.

“They showered us with rose petals after.” He held her in place with a strong hand on her hip, and stroked into her, joining their bodies. They sucked in their breaths, in unison, at the sensation. “Love first, then roses.” Another smooth stroke, his velvet friction inside her, the velvet roses all around her. “So rose-scented sex, hot sex, all the wild nights in our future—” his body inside hers, his hands on her skin, his words in her heart “—started with pure, wholesome, true love. Wouldn’t you agree—”

Stroke.

“—Mrs.—”

Stroke.

“—Cross?”

“Oh, my God.” Helen whispered the words in a panic. Her head throbbed. Her mouth was dry. She was married.

Was she?

She grabbed a fistful of her hair and tugged gently, but she couldn’t remember anything else. The night wasn’t even a blur in her memory; it just wasn’t there at all. Yet here she was, naked in a bed, panicking on a pile of petals.

Mrs. Cross?

No. Please no. I would never—

She wasn’t Mrs. Anyone. She was Captain Helen Pallas, and she was never going to change that for a man, never again, no way, no how. Her divorce had been final just two days ago. She’d gotten the court papers, gotten her army orders, gotten on the highway.

She let go of her hair and slowly held out her left hand. Diamonds and gold surrounded her ring finger, glittering in the morning light as she trembled.

She’d gotten married.

A doorbell rang. Helen snatched her hand back to clutch the sheet more tightly around her neck. This bedroom was part of a suite, because the door was open a few inches and she could see a little bit of a Liberace-worthy candelabra and a shiny satin sofa in the next room. It sounded like a door in that living room opened, then men’s voices murmured. She looked frantically around the floor, but not one piece of clothing cluttered the carpet. She kept the sheet clutched to her neck with one hand as she stood and started jerking the rest of the sheet off the bed with her other hand, petals fluttering in the air like startled butterflies.

“Will that be all, sir?” asked one male voice.

“Yes.”

Helen stopped moving. That one syllable, yes, was spoken in a voice so deep, she knew it was the man who had said other syllables, words like sex and love, words that had made her melt.

Dark hair—he’d had dark hair. And he was big, not just tall but broad shouldered, hard muscled and—and tan skin, and—

And—

She could only hiss at herself for not knowing who had put a ring on her finger. She yanked the giant California-king-size sheet free and started wrapping it around herself. The sheet was white, but the red petals had left pink splotches everywhere. She’d heard of sprinkling rose petals on a bed, of course, but she’d never heard that the luxurious, romantic gesture caused stains. No one mentioned that part.

Of course it ruined the sheets. What romantic gesture didn’t turn into a disaster?

“Thank you, sir.” The more-talkative man sounded so cheerful, Helen could only assume he’d gotten a generous tip. “Congratulations again to you both. Just call us if you need anything else, anything else at all.”

Helen held her breath, but the deep voice she listened for didn’t make any answer. The outer door opened and shut again. With the sheet wrapped around her chest and securely tucked under her arms, she braced herself for the coming confrontation. She stood still, practically at attention, and waited for the man who’d said yes to come into the bedroom to talk to her, his new bride.

A bride. Good God, Helen, what is wrong with you?

She’d been through this once already, and once had been one time too many. If this Mr. Cross was any kind of decent human being, he’d know—he must know—that she’d been drunk last night, and he wouldn’t dream of holding her to any drunken promises she might have made.

She didn’t want to rehash a night she could barely recall with a man she could barely recall. She was thirsty. Her stomach was unsettled. She needed breakfast. If this Mr. Cross would let her eat and then let her go and pretend nothing had ever happened, that would make him Mr. Right.

She heard some rustling about in the next room and swallowed down her sense of...anticipation? Surely not. Panic? She didn’t like to think of herself as someone who panicked. She was an army officer. She could handle whoever came through that bedroom door.

Nobody did. Instead, a shower started running. The hotel suite must be very big, with more than one bathroom, because the bathroom attached to this bedroom was empty. Somewhere beyond this bedroom, her groom was taking a shower, something apparently more important than checking on his new wife.

Stop expecting anything else. Ever. From anyone.

The fake gold and fake diamonds in the bedroom furniture were ridiculous. The rose petals were impractical and staining, and the gold-and-diamond band on her finger was—well, it was returnable, surely. She just needed to go tell her supposed groom that he could return it, and if any kind of legal document existed, they’d have to undo that, too. Yes, she’d just tell...what was his name?

“Mrs.—”

Stroke.

“—Cross.”

Stroke.

Cross. Tom Cross. Not Thomas, but Tom. It was coming back to her.

Helen kept facing the bedroom door, but as she looked at the opulent bed out of the corner of her eye, something else in her brain stirred. Something significant had happened on that bed. Sex, the wildest sex of her life, had taken place there, and it had been... She held her breath again, willing her brain to work.

Fragments, just little bits and pieces of memory, ran through her mind, but they were enough. It wasn’t that the sex had been wild. It hadn’t been a Kama Sutra reenactment or anything, but it had been...unrestrained. She’d been unrestrained, fearlessly surrendering to him, letting him set the pace, letting him have his fill of her. She’d felt so safe, so relaxed, she could do anything, say anything, have anything from him she wanted. Over and over again, she’d responded to his touch, to that deep voice in her ear—oh, what exactly had he said?

Her skin felt warm. Her heart was beating hard. She’d loved whatever he said, she knew that much, because her body was responding—please yes more—to her fractured, incomplete memories.

Arousal was useless right now. Helen couldn’t crawl back in that bed and wait for the man to get out of the shower, even if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. She couldn’t—she needed to extricate herself from this situation and get back on the road to Fort Hood. She had to report to her new unit by noon tomorrow. There were no clocks in this room, but judging by the sun, it was full morning, and she still had at least eighteen hours to drive. She was not going to report late to her new post because of a one-night stand. That wasn’t acceptable to the army. It wasn’t acceptable to her. Captain Pallas would never be so unreliable. Never so unprofessional.

How many times had her ex-husband mocked her for that?

Once, Helen, just once, would it kill you to be late to formation when I want to have sex with my wife? Not every chick in the military is as uptight as you are, thank God.

The headache that had started to recede came back in full force, but Helen couldn’t let a little thing like physical pain stop her. She had orders to obey.

She’d taken an oath for the army long before she’d made any vows with this Tom Cross. Unlike a husband, the army would never change its mind. Legally, she had to be in Texas by 1200 hours tomorrow, or she would be AWOL—absent without leave.

A real commitment like that made decisions easy. She would bid farewell to this Tom Cross, give him back his ring and hit the road. There was no other option.

The sound of the running water stopped. Helen marched out the bedroom door, head throbbing. The sheet trailed behind her like a train, a mockery of a wedding gown. This wasn’t a real marriage, anyway, thank goodness. She wouldn’t survive another goodbye like the one that had ended her real marriage. This was just a one-night stand. She’d never had a one-night stand before, but how hard could it be to say goodbye to a stranger?

There was no dark-haired man in the gilded living room. Instead, there was breakfast for two, a beautiful table set with linens and silverware and more roses, white and pale pink and pastel yellow, forming delicate bouquets in mini crystal vases.

Roses are always going to make me think of sex with you.

Not just sex, but sex with you. She’d forgotten that part. There’d been something special about him.

Or at least she’d thought so while under the influence—obviously, or she wouldn’t be here right now, staring at a wedding breakfast while her stomach churned and her mouth felt like it was full of cotton.

She walked up to the table, gathering her train around her. Silver domes were keeping the plates warm. Nothing about this beautiful table said one-night stand. It was her idea of a real wedding breakfast, every detail of it lovely, as if the man who’d ordered it had wanted her to have the best. She could be the pampered bride of the perfect man.

Tears stung her eyes.

She could be a sucker. Any man could play the prince for twenty-four hours. Her ex-husband had pulled it off for several months, actually, before the two years of misery had begun. This Vegas guy was being charming for one meal. Helen wasn’t going to get all mushy because some man she’d frolicked with in a king-size bed was being charming for one meal.

She ignored the sparkle of the ring on her finger as she grabbed a crystal goblet and chugged orange juice like it was water from a canteen during a twelve-mile road march.

Better. She plunked the empty goblet down and lifted a silver dome. The heavenly scent of bacon made her mouth water. She took one bite before reaching for the carafe of coffee. It would help her headache and keep her awake for the eighteen-hour drive that lay ahead of her. She held the strip of bacon between her teeth, so she could use two hands to pour.

“Good morning, beautiful.”

That deep bass—Helen whirled around, cup in one hand, carafe in the other, bacon dangling from her teeth.

Good God, he was gorgeous.

I slept with that?

Mr. Cross had short, thick, black hair, yet his eyes were an arresting, brilliant blue. He leaned more toward rugged than pretty, with the great bone structure that could sell expensive watches or yachts in a magazine for men who wanted to be more manly. But no—it wasn’t that rugged handsomeness that would make men want to be like him. It was the way he carried himself, the way he stood before her with only a towel wrapped around his waist, unselfconscious despite being half-naked, that really knocked her out. Confidence was sexy to her. A man with an athletic body and a handsome face who seemed in charge, in control—and comfortable to be so—was sexy as hell.

I slept with that!

Well, damn, she was impressed with herself.

He smiled at her, a real smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle and revealed some perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. Where had she found this man?

She didn’t realize she was smiling back as he walked across the room toward her—confidently, of course—until he took the dangling strip of bacon from her mouth. Her smile faded as she looked into those blue eyes. He was really looking at her. Only her. All his attention was on her.

“Good morning,” he said again. He tossed the bacon onto the table, slid his arms around her and kissed her.

She melted instantly, going completely boneless in some kind of Pavlovian response that required no conscious thought at all. The cup and saucer slid from her fingers to hit the floor with a crash, the carafe landed with a thud in the tangled train of sheets, but she wouldn’t fall, not as long as he held her in his strong arms. She made a little sound, a whimper of longing, a pant of excitement, and he broke off the kiss to cup the back of her head in his hand and whisper over her lips. “I thought I dreamed you. You’re real.”

They stared at each other a moment, then he was kissing her again and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She couldn’t keep any thought in her head, except to know she could surrender, she could lose herself and let go, and she’d be safe and happy and a part of him. She was glad when his hands untucked the sheet, grateful when he nudged her back toward the couch, where they fell together as they pushed yards of sheets and one plush towel out of their way. She was greedy to touch him once more, to feel again all that strength and power and male grace. She wanted it all, forever.

Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?

I do.

His body filled hers completely, and the whole world became just the two of them and the way they felt, the way they made each other feel, the way they moved together. They whispered their amazement to each other in syllables that never became full words—ah, oh, ess—and in words that never became sentences—my, you, there. They climaxed together, then lay still, catching their breaths in silence.

I now pronounce you man and wife.

Mrs. Cross started to cry.