Wedding Party Collection: Once A Bridesmaid...: Here Comes the Bridesmaid / Falling for the Bridesmaid

She hit him with the cushion. ‘Don’t make me take you behind that wall and show you my shoe collection. I haven’t known a man yet who could cope with the sight.’

‘Are you really going there? Talking about the men you’ve had in here? I’ll go there if you want, Sunshine, but I don’t think you’ll like it.’

She opened her eyes at him. ‘Oh, that sounds very alpha male.’

He didn’t smile. ‘You’ll see alpha, beta, gamma, and zeta male if you go near another man, Sunshine.’

‘Oh, alpha, beta, and zeta?’

‘Alpha-beta-gamma-zeta. And don’t roll your eyes.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I said don’t roll your eyes.’

‘All right!’ Sunshine said, laughing.

‘So, I think,’ Leo said quietly, after a long moment, ‘we’re up to the bike, aren’t we?’

Sunshine nodded, sat a little straighter. ‘The bike,’ she said. She pulled a different cushion onto her lap and started playing with the fringe. ‘She bought it because she liked the wind in her face and the freedom of riding. It was too big for her, but she wouldn’t be told.’

She stopped there.

‘And...?’ he prompted.

Sunshine reached for the charms. ‘We were at a party. Her boyfriend du jour—Jeff—mixed us up and tried to kiss me. Moonbeam went into melodrama mode and stormed off, dragging me with her.’

‘Was she angry with you?’

‘God, no! She knew I would never poach. And truthfully...? She wasn’t even angry with Jeff. She was just restless. Bored with being in the city. And tired of Jeff. So what he did gave her an excuse to dump him. She thought...she thought he’d done it accidentally-on-purpose because he actually preferred me. We were dressed so differently, you see, it couldn’t have been a mix-up.’

‘Did that happen often? A boyfriend switching sides?’

‘No. Never before.’

‘And so...?’

‘And so we clambered onto the bike.’ She shivered. ‘She was wild that night, riding too fast. She took a turn badly, and...well. Moonbeam died instantly. Her neck snapped at the base of the helmet.’ She swallowed. ‘I got carted off to hospital, where I went through twenty-eight pints of blood.’ She moved restlessly. ‘Internal bleeding. They had to take my spleen—which apparently you don’t really need, so go figure! And they took half my liver, which was haemorrhaging. Actually, did you know that the liver regenerates? Which means the chunk of my liver they cut out has probably grown back. Amazing!’

‘I’m sorry, Sunshine,’ Leo said.

She rearranged herself in the bed again—flustery, unnecessary activity. ‘Which brings us to the important part of this discussion. Getting rid of your motorbike.’

Leo said nothing.

‘Leo? You understand, don’t you?’

He nodded slowly. ‘I understand why you hate motorbikes—because you blame yourself for the accident. You feel guilty because you couldn’t talk your sister out of that bike. Because she stayed in the city only for you, where she was an unhappy fish out of water. Because of what her boyfriend did. The way all those things led to both of you being on the bike at that precise moment at that speed. Because she died and you didn’t. And you’re here and she’s not.’

Sunshine brushed away a tear. ‘That’s about the sum of it. I just miss her so much. And I’d do anything to have her back.’ She looked at him. ‘But you can’t bring someone back from the dead. So please get rid of it, Leo. Please?’

‘You don’t understand what that bike means to me.’ He grimaced. ‘My parents...they were druggies, and they didn’t give a damn. Your parents made sure you had support. I was my own support—and Caleb’s. Your parents made sure you had money, but when I was still a child I had to steal it, beg it, or make it—and I did all three! There was never food on the table unless I put it there. So I haunted restaurants around the city, pleading for leftovers. Eventually one of the chefs took pity on me and I got a job in a kitchen, and...’ Shrug. ‘Here I am.’

Sunshine touched his hand.

He looked at where her hand was, on his, with an odd expression on his face. And then he drew his hand away.

‘I’m not telling you all that to get sympathy, just to explain,’ he said. ‘And it could have been a lot worse. We weren’t sexually abused. Or beaten—well, not Caleb. And me not often, or more than I could take. Mainly we were just not important. Like a giant mistake that you can’t fix so you try to forget it. I grew up fast and hard—I had to. The upshot is that I don’t do frivolity. I’m not sociable unless there’s something in it for me. I don’t stop to smell the roses and hug the trees. I just push on, without indulging myself. Except for my bike.’

‘I see,’ Sunshine said. And she did. It was so very simple. Leo had his bike the way she had Moon’s ashes. Something that connected you to what you’d lost—what you couldn’t have: in her case her sister; in his a carefree youth.

She swallowed around a sudden lump. ‘We’re not going to find common ground on this, are we? Because you deserve one piece of youthful folly and I can’t bear what that piece happens to be.’

She got out of bed, grabbed her kimono off the floor, quickly pulled it on, and turned to face him. ‘This means, of course, that we’ll have to call it quits at two.’

‘At two...what? O’clock?’

‘Two times—as in not four. As in assignations.’

‘Why?’

Why? She had a sudden memory of that electri-fried bat. ‘Because the thought of you on that bike already upsets me too much. That’s going to get harder, not easier, to cope with if we keep doing...this.’

‘This?’

‘Sex,’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s my fault for starting it, and I’ll cop to that. I threw myself at you when you didn’t want to go there. The blame is squarely here, with me.’

‘If we’re talking blame, I threw myself at you tonight.’

Sunshine dragged the edges of the kimono closed and started looking around for her sash. ‘Well, let’s unthrow ourselves.’

‘Come back to bed, Sunshine, and we’ll talk about it.’

‘Bed is the wrong place to talk.’

‘Four assignations was what we agreed on,’ Leo said.

‘Up to! They’re the salient words. Up to four. I’ve never got to four before. I’ve never got past two! And you can see why. It gets too emotional.’

Leo shoved the quilt aside, got out of bed. ‘I’ll do you a deal on the motorbike,’ he offered, and started tugging on his clothes.

‘What kind of deal?’

Wary. Very wary.

‘I’ll get rid of the bike the day after our fourth assignation. Or when you change your name to Allyn. Whichever comes first.’

She licked her lips nervously. ‘That’s an odd deal.’