Three Times A Bride

It wasn’t aggressive, as kisses between a man and a woman often were. There was no audacity, no thrusting invasion of privacy. He simply settled his lips on hers and let them rest there. Yet, for all that, it was a lover’s kiss, delicately, temptingly erotic. A hothouse flower on the brink of bursting into fragrant bloom—or more accurately, an echo so painfully sweet of a splendor she’d once known that she couldn’t bear to let it end.

She pressed herself to him, winding her arms around his neck and softening her mouth in acquiescence. A murmur escaped her—a plea for just a little more, just a little longer—soft enough that only he could hear it, yet able to deafen completely all those parts of her brain that were trying so hard to scream out a warning.

The hopeless, helpless longings she’d stored away, having found a crack through which to escape, took full advantage but she was too enthralled to notice. All she cared about was that Adam responded to her overtures by sliding his arms tightly around her and directing the seductive finesse he’d always employed so well to a different turn, one no longer defined by propriety.

His mouth grew bold, investigative, cajoling. As if she weren’t willing enough to surrender to its assault! He tested her lips, tasted them and, when they opened to him, accepted the implicit surrender they offered.

At least, she thought he did. Was so convinced, in fact, that it took a while for her to comprehend that he was declining after all. Not that he was so ungallant as to shove her away and remind her that she was supposed to be engaged to another man. He merely ended things. Slowly, regretfully even, but quite firmly, leaving her no choice but to abide by his refusal.

“Will that suffice?” he asked.

She wrapped her arms around her waist as the cool aftermath of his rejection infiltrated every pore of her skin to lay an icy wreath around her heart. Drawing in a great shuddering breath, she managed to nod.“Yes,” she said.

He prepared to leave again and had one foot out the door before he tossed a final word over his shoulder.“Liar,” he said.

Adam strode across the sidewalk and out into the rainslick road, narrowly missing being hit by a van that turned the corner too quickly. He barely noticed. It wasn’t his time to die; he’d already proved that with the business up north a year ago. And he had weightier things on his mind right now, like the lingering feel of Georgia in his arms, and the fact that some parts of him hadn’t been the least bit impaired by crash-landing in the frozen tundra of the Arctic.

“Hah,” he muttered with fake insouciance to the bronze statue of Eugene Piper that presided over the little public garden in the middle of the square, “that’ll teach her!”

But it had taught him, too—a lesson he’d briefly been disposed to forget: she was about to marry another man. While he’d been recovering from multiple fractures of the thigh, a dislocated shoulder and four broken ribs, not to mention a coma brought on by trauma to the brain and major bruising of just about every internal organ he owned, she’d been casting her net at Steven Drake.

The woman to whom he’d given his heart and his ring, and for whom he’d been willing to give up a career that he’d truly loved, had taken his apparent death in stride and gone ahead with her life without missing a beat. So what did he think he was doing, getting himself all fired up over a kiss when he ought to be congratulating himself on his lucky escape?

“Not that I expected her to spend the rest of her life alone, draped in widow’s weeds and burning a candle under my photo, you understand,” he grumbled to Eugene.“But couldn’t she have waited a decent interval? And chosen to look a bit further afield than my best friend?”

Eugene stared sightlessly ahead, rain dripping off his face mournfully. Some best friend, Adam, old buddy!

“I don’t blame him,” Adam said defensively.“He’s a nice guy who didn’t see what was headed his way until it was too late to duck. And at least he didn’t sweep me under the carpet the way she did. He showed some sort of conscience about the whole affair.”

In fact, from what Beverley had said, Steven had done a lot more than that. During the weeks immediately following the jet’s disastrous test flight, he’d been a frequent visitor at her house. He’d taken time out from consoling the bereaved fiancée to offer comfort to an opinionated, autocratic old lady who didn’t have another soul in the world who really gave a damn about her once her grandson had apparently shuffled off.

“He actually asked my permission to court that foolish child,” Beverley had told Adam, stemming her pleasure in his survival long enough to allude to Georgia with the customary disdain she reserved for all the Chamberlaines.“Under the circumstances I gave him my blessing and wished him luck. Heaven knows he’s going to need it, marrying into that straitlaced lot.”

She’d been referring, of course, to the long-standing feud between the Walshes and the Chamberlaines, two of Piper Landing’s founding families. It went back two generations, to the time when his maternal grandfather, Simon, had dumped Georgia’s paternal grandmother, Celeste, to marry Beverley. Well, the tables had been turned now, with a vengeance!

“In the long run it’s probably just as well that things fell apart between Georgia and me,” Adam confided to Eugene.“Hell, there’s enough grief in the world without a man finding himself caught in the crossfire between warring in-laws, wouldn’t you say?”

Although Eugene continued to stare commiseratingly into space, a young woman pushing a baby carriage through the little park heard Adam muttering to himself, flung him a startled glance, and gave him a wide berth.

Just then, the Courthouse clock struck the quarter hour, reminding him that he was taking Beverley to lunch at one.“Well, enough of this rubbish,” he decided, turning up the collar of his jacket and heading for his grandmother’s 1979 Rolls-Royce which he’d prudently parked on the far side of the square, just in case Georgia had spotted it and decided not to answer the door to her chichi little establishment.“All I need is to have it rumored abroad that I’ve come back from the dead with half my marbles missing and was spotted wandering around town talking to myself!”

The minute they were seated at their usual window table at the Riverside Club, Natalie Chamberlaine went into a recital of the prenuptial affairs being hosted during the coming week in Georgia’s honor. What she forgot to mention, Samantha, Georgia’s younger sister, supplied.

Georgia bent her mouth into what she hoped passed for a smile and tried to look interested. Apparently, she didn’t try hard enough.

“You know, Georgia,” her mother commented, visibly annoyed, “people are going to quite a lot of trouble for you. It seems to me that the least you could do is show a little enthusiasm and appreciation in return. It is the second time they’ve done this, after all.”

“Yes.” Samantha nodded smugly, secure in the knowledge that, unlike her older sister, she’d managed to get married on the first try without making a botch of things.“Smarten up, Georgia. It’s not as if we’re just recycling leftovers from the first time.”

Except for Adam! Georgia thought, and fought to stifle a burst of hysterical laughter.

“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong, dear?” Her mother peered at her narrowly.“You really don’t seem yourself today.”

Georgia toyed with her spinach salad. All morning long she’d debated on when and how to tell her family the news that was doing a great job of turning her nicely ordered world upside-down. But she’d held back because she knew there’d be an uproar from both her mother and sister when they heard. On the other hand, Adam wasn’t exactly sneaking around in secret, so how long could she afford to wait before letting them in on the fact that he’d turned up again?

Perhaps now was as good a time as any, after all. If nothing else, it would keep the outcry of protests down to a dull roar because nothing less than seeing her daughters held up at gunpoint would allow Natalie Chamberlaine to indulge in public hysteria. It wasn’t considered seemly behaviour for members of the upper echelon of Piper Landing society.

“Actually, there is something I need to tell you,” Georgia admitted.

“I don’t like your tone of voice,” Natalie broke in, playing nervously with the string of pearls around her throat.“I don’t like it at all, Georgia. It’s not bad news, is it?”

“That all depends on your point of view, I suppose…”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Georgia!” Samantha leaned back in her chair and rolled her eyes, very much the smart young matron thoroughly in charge of her own affairs and unable to comprehend why everyone else coudn’t follow her fine example.“Are you going to spit it out, whatever it is, or would you like us to drag it out of you, one syllable at a time?”

When they had been children, Georgia had sometimes found Samantha so intolerable that she’d forgotten she was always supposed to act like a little lady and had hauled off and smacked her sister. She felt like doing the same thing now.

“I’m trying to find the words to lead up to this gently, Samantha,” she said.“It’s not something I feel I can just ‘spit out’.”

Doing her best to ignore Samantha’s heaving sigh of exasperation, she glanced around the dining room, searching for the inspiration that would enable her to detonate her little bombshell casually and discreetly, with a minimum of aftershock. However, when her gaze fastened on the sight of Adam and his grandmother entering the dining room and being shown to a table not ten feet away, all thought of nonchalance or restraint fled her mind.“Adam isn’t dead,” she blurted out.

Natalie’s head shot up, though not quite as high as her voice. “What did you say?”

“Adam isn’t dead, Mother. I saw him last night, and again this morning.”

“Georgia, if this is your idea of a joke…” Natalie groped for her wineglass.

But Samantha, too, had seen, and was staring fixedly across the room.“She isn’t joking, Mother,” she confirmed faintly.

Natalie swiveled round in her chair, her gasp of dismay attesting to what most of the other people in the room also were noticing: the not-so-late Lieutenant Colonel Adam Cabot, large as life, sitting across from his grandmother and inspecting the menu.

Gradually becoming aware that the dining room had grown unusually silent, he looked around and found himself the object of everyone’s stunned attention, not the least among them Natalie and Samantha. Excusing himself to his grandmother, he rose from the table. Georgia supposed it was too much to hope he wouldn’t come over to theirs, and she was right.

“Hello, Mrs. Chamberlaine,” he said, as easily as if he’d last seen her only the week before.“How are you?”

If there was one thing a person could depend on, Georgia thought, watching the exchange with horrified fascination, it was that Natalie Chamberlaine never forgot her manners. She rose beautifully, if shakily, to the occasion.“Very well, thank you, Adam. And you?”

“Never better,” he said, all charming smiles.

Samantha didn’t fare quite as well as her mother.“We thought you were dead,” she said.

Adam’s smile assumed an edge that would have cut glass.“Lovely to see you again, too, Sammie.”

“People don’t call me by that name now that I’m married,” she said, smoothing her impeccably cut hair.

“Married? Little Sammie?”

Only Samantha could have missed the amused irony in his tone.“Yes,” she said, and held out her hand defiantly to show off her broad platinum wedding ring.