Three Times A Bride

“I guess not.” His deceptively lazy gaze missed nothing as it swept over the studio’s costly display of jewelry before finally coming to rest on her. He stared insolently at her full-skirted silk and cashmere suit, the cameo brooch at her throat, the baroque pearl studs in her ears. And last of all, he looked long and hard at the two carat diamond solitaire engagement ring on her finger.“I guess life goes on, no matter what. Things change, people change. For a thirty-year-old woman, you’ve achieved impressive success, Georgia. Grief has worked wonders on you.”

She rounded on him, stung.“How dare you cheapen how I felt and turn it into something contemptible and shallow?”

He shrugged, his shoulders lifting easily under the supple doeskin jacket.“Those are your words, sweet pea, not mine,” he pointed out softly.

“But you’re thinking them,” she cried, “and you have no right. You don’t know the half of what I went through after you disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, “any more than you know what actually happened to me. One of the reasons I’m here now is that I think we’re both entitled to some enlightenment. But let’s strike a deal: I won’t ask your forgiveness for my sins of omission, if you won’t ask mine for yours of commission.”

“I don’t need your forgiveness because I haven’t done a damned thing wrong,” she shot back, an anger she’d almost forgotten sparking in response to his. Wasn’t this how it had always been between them? Raging passion, or raging fury? Sudden disagreements that erupted into flaming rows, followed by reconciliations whose intensity left them both drained and exhausted?

She sank into the chair behind her desk, the fight seeping out of her.“You know, we never would have made a go of marriage,” she said wearily.“We’re too much alike, both strong-willed—”

“I’m strong-willed,” Adam contradicted. “You’re just willful. Your trouble is, you were indulged as a child and grew up believing you had a right to whatever your little heart desired. It probably made perfect sense that, when you realized you’d made a mistake in dismissing one potential marriage candidate, you should simply turn around and snag the first available man to take his place.”

“Is that your explanation of why you were so quick to accept the decision to end our engagement?” she countered.“To avoid being chained to such a spoiled brat for the rest of your life?”

“Hardly!” He pushed himself away from the glass cabinet and she thought, as he crossed over to sit in a chair facing hers, that he limped a little.“If I’d wanted out of our engagement, I’d have said so up-front. Your family might have programmed you to believe it was your social duty to stop tongues wagging all over town by marrying the man you were sleeping with, but they never carried that much clout with me.”

Privately, Georgia felt her family ran a poor second to his grandmother when it came to trying to manipulate other people’s lives but she wasn’t about to get sidetracked by the issue now. She was, however, forced to accept the truth of the rest of his statement. Whatever else his faults, Adam Cabot had never been a coward.

“Why don’t you stop trying to outdo yourself in insults and tell me what happened to you?” she said.“Where did you disappear to for so long, and why have you shown up now, when it’s too late for either of us to go back and change things?”

“To answer your last question first, because—silly me!—I thought you might be pleased to discover I’m alive. And because I thought you deserved to hear the news from me before it became common knowledge all over town. As for the rest, official reports to the contrary, I didn’t go down with my aircraft. I managed to eject and bail out, got swept miles off course by a howling blizzard, and ended up breaking a number of bones and doing various other bodily damage when I landed in the frozen wastes of the sub-Arctic. That I didn’t get eaten alive by polar bears or die from exposure is entirely due to the kindly intercession of a band of nomadic Inuit hunters who, for reasons that escape me, find traipsing over the Polar Ice Cap a stimulating winter pastime.”

He made it sound so uttery reasonable and ordinary that she knew he was leaving out a good deal more than he was telling.“That might have kept you away for a few weeks, Adam, but it hardly explains your being gone fifteen months.”

He shrugged.“Some things take time,” he said ambiguously.“And considering the way we parted, you can’t blame me for not being in too much of a hurry to get back to you.”

Any sympathy she might have felt for him evaporated at that.“You’re the one who put our future together in jeopardy and allowed your ego to lure you out of retirement for one last chance at flying glory.”

“And you’re the one who threw my ring in my face and told me to take a hike. ‘Fly off the edge of the earth, for all I care,’ you said. Well, I did the next second-best thing, sweet pea.”

“You know I didn’t really mean that!” Georgia’s voice faltered for a moment as other memories of that last time together came surging back, but she’d be damned if she’d let them overwhelm her. She’d done all the crying she was going to do over this particular tragedy.“In case you’ve forgotten, Adam, we both said harsh things to each other. I called you selfish and chauvinistic and a lot of other things I’m ashamed to recall.”

“And I accused you of being cold and ambitious, which was equally unkind and untrue. It was your independence, the fact that you were as much a rebel as I was, that first attracted me to you.”

His voice was grave and sincere enough to soften granite. If she let him, he’d throw her life into turmoil a second time and hurt innocent bystanders in the process. Under cover of the desk, she dug her finger nails into the palms of her hands and plowed through the rest of what she had to say.“I’m not a rebel anymore, Adam. Ten days after you left, a uniformed stranger showed up at my door and told me that pieces of your precious fighter jet had been found scattered over miles but that there was no sign and absolutely no chance that you had survived. In the space of five minutes my world collapsed and nothing has been the same since, especially not me.”

“I agree. The Georgia I used to know would never have made such a remarkable recovery from grief that she’d be ready to marry someone else so soon.”

“Recovery?” Her voice cracked with emotion and she felt the tears pricking behind her eyes despite her most stringent effort to keep them in check.“I fell apart almost literally! I didn’t sleep for weeks, didn’t want to eat or go out of the apartment. I wished I had died with you, Adam, because I’d lost everything that truly mattered to me.”

More, in fact, than you can begin to guess!

She squeezed her eyes shut, even though doing so meant the tears escaped and drizzled down her face.“I felt guilty. And angry. And alone.”

“You don’t know the first thing about being alone. You had your family.”

“Who were no help at all. My mother could scarcely contain her relief at being spared having you for a sonin-law.” Georgia swiped at the tears with the back of her hand, angry and appalled at the ease with which the misery was finding chinks in her armor.

Adam leaned over, plucked a tissue from the box on the corner of her desk, and passed it to her.“But your father must have cared. He was never mean-spirited like that.”

“He was sympathetic but…”

“Too henpecked to dare take a stand.” Adam nodded.“Yeah, I’d forgotten how thoroughly your mother and sister keep poor old Arthur in line.”

“Precisely.” She drew in a deep breath and managed to get herself under control again.“And that’s when I found out what a real friend Steven was.”

“Well, good old Steven,” Adam jeered softly.

“He saved my life,” Georgia shot back, declining to mention that it was thanks to Steven that she hadn’t hemorrhaged to death when she’d miscarried Adam’s baby in the kitchen of her apartment.“If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I would have gone on. I felt responsible for what had happened to you.”

“Rubbish!” Adam scoffed.“The prototype’s malfunction had nothing at all to do with you.”

“But I didn’t know that. I nursed the idea that you’d been too preoccupied over our disagreement to pay proper attention to what you were doing. The guilt festered, made more complicated by the reaction of everyone I met. Pity is a corrosive thing when it’s flung in your face every time you turn around. Steven saved my sanity.”

“So what are you telling me?” Adam wanted to know.“That you’re marrying him out of gratitude? That it’s no great love affair?”

They were the same questions that had kept her awake most of last night.“It’s not quite that simple,” she wailed.

“It is to me,” Adam said bluntly.“When a man finds himself staring death in the face, things become very simple. It’s a case of fight or go under. So do you love Steven, or don’t you?”

“Of course I love him!”

“Well, that’s one of the things I came back to find out. Now that I know, I guess you and I have nothing more to say to each other.” He rose and zipped up his jacket.“Have a happy life, Georgia,” he said, and turned away.

Eyes suddenly swimming again, she watched as he covered the distance to the front doors. Sometimes, it seemed that was what she remembered most vividly of all their times together: her watching as he walked away from her. And every time, it broke her heart all over again.

Let him go! the voice of sanity begged. Do it just one more time and you’ll never have to do it again.

Yes, she thought.

And promptly accused, in a woebegone little voice, “That’s what you did after we broke up, too. Just turned and walked away without even kissing me goodbye.”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_8f116eb1-1a85-523a-996d-94c0d3eb86f2)

HE STOPPED and turned back to face her. He looked at her long and thoughtfuly then, as he retraced his steps, said with ominous intent, “Did I really? Well, that’s one mistake I certainly don’t have to repeat.”

Georgia’s heart flapped around behind her ribs like a chicken trying to save its neck from the hatchet but Adam didn’t care. He just kept moving until he loomed no more than twelve inches from where she stood rooted to the plush blue carpet under her feet.

Trapped by the desk behind her and the reckless words she’d flung at him, she did the only thing she could without losing what was left of her pride. She tilted her head to one side and with regal condescension, offered him her cheek.

“Oh, no,” he murmured, capturing her face in cool fingers and turning it back toward him and bending his head to hers.“Not like that at all. Like this.”

As soon as he touched her, she fell apart. A soft roaring filled her mind, dimming her hearing and clouding her vision. Her legs buckled, sending her reeling into him for support. She grabbed at him blindly, intending only to anchor herself upright, and instead found herself smoothing her hands over his face in tactile renewal of its beauty.

His mouth lowered. She felt the warm drift of his breath against her lips. And then, in excruciating slow motion, he kissed her.