The Wrong Wife

Not this morning, though. This morning his sophisticated image was ruined by his poor, reddened eyes and the dark stubble of his beard.

She smiled at him tremulously. “Good morning,” she whispered.

His eyes widened, then froze in an expression of absolute horror. “Oh. my God.”

She almost got away.

Gideon’s reactions were slowed by guilt and the worst hangover of his life. Cassie and the sheet made it to the edge of the bed before his sluggish brain caught on to the fact that she was leaving him and taking the covers. And he was naked. Naked and in bed with his best friend’s little sister.

He grabbed the end of the sheet and pulled. She fell back onto the bed, her breath whooshing out. The mattress bounced from her weight. He managed not to throw up. He closed his aching eyes, tucked the corner of the sheet around his hips, and lay very still, praying that she’d be still, too.

After a moment the room and his stomach stopped pitching, though the construction crew restructuring his skull from the inside out didn’t take a break. He realized Cassie hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word since he’d recaptured the sheet she’d been trying to escape with.

The attempted escape had been typical Cassie—all emotion and impulse. This stillness and silence was not. “Cassie,” he muttered without opening his eyes. The sound of his voice bounced around painfully inside his head. “I’m sorry.” Sorry? At the moment he hated himself more than he’d ever hated anyone in his life. Even his father. “I don’t—Whatever happened, I’m sorry.”

“Whatever happened?” Her voice was thin, high. “You don’t remember?”

The construction crew in his head had his mental landscape all torn up. He tried to sort through the fragments, tried to grasp how he could be here. How could he be in bed with Cassie? It was supposed to be Melissa....

But Melissa had dumped him. Four days before the wedding Melissa had called him and rather hysterically backed out.

Gideon had not taken it well. He felt it still, the anger, the bewilderment. Gideon was used to wresting what he wanted from life. He’d wanted to marry Melissa. After getting to know him, she hadn’t wanted to marry him. He still didn’t know why.

“I called Ryan,” he said, remembering. He’d been at the Blue Parrot yesterday, and after a few drinks he’d decided to hold a wake for the dreams Melissa had tossed out the window when she’d rejected him.

The wedding that didn’t take place was the first important failure of Gideon’s life. He’d planned that wedding for years, since long before he met Melissa, and he was a man who accomplished what he set out to do. Hadn’t he reached every other important goal he’d set, from his college degree to his current financial success? But he’d failed at the most important goal, the one that all the others were supposed to lead up to—finding a woman, the right woman, who would marry him and give him what he had no way of getting for himself. A home.

When he’d thought of a wake, naturally he’d called Ryan O’Grady.

But Ryan’s little sister had come with him, little Cassie with the short, fiery hair and fey eyes. “He shouldn’t have brought you,” Gideon said now, harsh with the onslaught of fear because he couldn’t remember—which meant he’d gotten much. more drunk than he’d intended. He’d lost control. And Gideon never lost control. “What the hell was Ryan thinking of?”

“Drinking,” she said tartly. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? Someone to get drunk with. So I came along to do the driving and keep the two of you out of trouble.”

That’s what she always used to say, back when she was a skinny little nuisance trying to tag along with the two collegeage boys—that they needed her to keep them out of trouble. Of course, neither of them wanted to avoid trouble at that age. He used to call her... “Mermaid,” he said with rough affection. Those memories, at least, were untouched.

“Don’t call me that! Not after—not when you don’t remember!”

He flinched. Not after last night. Not after he, apparently, got so damned drunk he took his best friend’s sister to some damned hotel room and then took her to bed.

There had been a time, shortly after Cassie turned sixteen, when he’d been terrified that something like this would happen—when he’d been unable to keep his body from reacting to the sweet, new curves of a girl much too young for the lechery his mind kept picturing. But Gideon always did what had to be done. He’d learned to control his mind; eventually he’d even subdued the worst of his body’s responses, so that he’d been able to be around little Cassie without fearing he’d do something to frighten her or destroy his friendship with her or her brother.

Yet now... “How could Ryan let me do this?” he groaned. “Where the hell was your brother?”

“Don’t you remember anything?” Now her voice sounded thick with tears. “It was his idea.”

It was what? Gideon’s eyes popped open as he jerked to a sitting position. The construction crew promptly drove two burning stakes through his eyeballs. He flopped back down and breathed. Slowly. Carefully. And more pieces of the day before fell into place.

Ryan’s idea. It had been Ryan’s idea to charter the plane when there weren’t any commercial flights available. Or had that part been Gideon’s contribution? He wasn’t sure. He had drunk so damned much he’d lost pieces of his life. Gideon had to wrestle with self-loathing before he could turn his attention to the memories he did have.

Absurdly, the first memory that floated to the surface was of a pirate ship, complete with cannons blazing and men wielding cutlasses. And another ship, a frigate, and a battle between the two that took place... in front of a hotel?

Fireworks, not cannon fire. That’s what he’d seen, a carefully staged extravaganza. He remembered going inside the hotel, where the huge lobby gleamed with gold fixtures and a floor shiny enough to see yourself in. And he remembered Cassie’s body, slim and warm, tucked up against his as they walked into that hotel lobby. He hadn’t wanted to let her go even for a minute, because she might change her mind.

He remembered a taxi ride, and Cassie’s face, pale with nerves. The fare had been twelve dollars. He’d given the cabbie a twenty and asked him to wait.

“Vegas,” he said quietly. “We’re in Las Vegas.”

Her silence was confirmation enough. Or almost enough. After a long pause, he made himself move, propping up on one elbow. The jackhammers went crazy inside his head. He ignored them.

He looked down at Cassie’s triangular face. Even first thing in the morning her hair was too short and fine to hold a curl or a tangle. It framed her unhappy face in a fringe the color of sunrise. Her chameleon eyes were as gray as rain at the moment, and shiny with tears. Before this morning he would have sworn those eyes were as true and guileless as Cassie herself.

The twist of disillusionment went deep.

His gaze drifted down her slender neck to smooth, white shoulders speckled with a few pale freckles. Impossibly, his body stirred at the sight, which drew his brows together in a tighter scowl. Deliberately he looked from her shoulders to her small breasts, covered by the sheet she clutched tightly in place, and let his eyes linger on the slim gold band on the third finger of her left hand.

Finally he looked back at her face. “Congratulations, Mrs. Wilde,” he said bitterly. “A few others have tried to trick their way into sharing the name that goes on my bank statements, but I wasn’t expecting it from you. How much will it cost me to buy my way out of this mess?”

She reared up and punched him in the nose.

When Cassie stood under the hot spray of the shower six minutes later she was still shocked at herself. She’d never hit anyone before. Well, not since the fifth grade, anyway, when Sara Sue Leggett had told everyone Cassie got her clothes from the Dumpster behind the Salvation Army.

She ought to feel guilty. She really should. The man obviously had a wretched hangover, and she’d hit him.

Oh, she hoped his nose bled and bled. She just wished she could use up all the hot water so that he’d have to take a cold shower, but that was hard to do in a Las Vegas luxury hotel.

Las Vegas. Cassie bit her lip and poured shampoo into her palm from the little bottle the hotel furnished.

She’d known he might have regrets this morning, but she hadn’t known he could look at her the way he had. In the sixteen years since Ryan brought Gideon Wilde home with him from college for the first time, Cassie had seen Gideon’s face ice over like that before. He didn’t suffer fools gently, and he despised dishonesty. His scorn could be as withering as winter’s first frost. But he’d never turned that expression on her before. Not on her. She hadn’t expected that.

The shampoo smelled of almonds and lathered beautifully. It was, she noticed, a more expensive brand than she normally bought. Cassie sighed and ran her thumb over the unfamiliar ring on the third finger of her left hand. Gideon thought she’d married him so she could afford a better brand of shampoo.

How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let those two talk her into this?

They’d been at the Blue Parrot, a dinky little bar where Ryan and Gideon used to hang out during their impoverished college days. Maybe the location, with its nostalgic associations, had been partly responsible for the turn the conversation took. Ryan had grown increasingly Irish and sentimental as the afternoon waned into evening, and both men had put away a great deal more liquor than they normally would have.

But Cassie suspected that Ryan had drunk less than Gideon, while encouraging him to drink more. He’d gotten that crafty look in his eyes after the first couple of drinks, the expression that said he thought he was being sly...an expression that usually meant disaster was on its way. Her brother was about as successfully sneaky as a grizzly bear, a big, red-haired grizzly, who created the most havoc when he tried to tiptoe up on a problem instead of charging it with gleeful, bearlike rage. No, subtlety was not a virtue that ran in their family. But Ryan had never seemed to grasp how poor he was at it.

Gideon, unfortunately, had been a bit too intoxicated by then to recognize that gleam in Ryan’s eye.

“I have to kill him,” Cassie muttered, scrubbing her scalp vigorously. Her brother loved her. She knew he did. He also drove her crazy. Their father had died when Cassie was little, leaving their mother to raise them as best she could on split shifts and a waitress’s income. Ryan, six years older than Cassie, had appointed himself in charge of his sister’s life from that day on.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, he’d decided to put someone else in charge of taking care of Cassie—his best friend, Gideon, who needed a woman with more staying power than the blond icicle he’d been engaged to. A loyal woman. A woman, Ryan had emphasized, who could cook.

Cassie had tried hitting him at that point, but even drunk, Ryan’s reflexes were better than hers.

At least, she thought as the hot water rinsed the suds from her hair, my brother stopped short of pointing out just why he thought I’d go along with his stupid idea. He knew, though. He’d known for years and years.

She considered letting him live.