Wedding Party Collection: Don't Tell The Bride: What the Bride Didn't Know / Black Widow Bride / His Valentine Bride

Nothing to sweat about at all.

* * *

Lena opened her suitcase while her husband took the longest shower in the history of mankind. She really wanted to see him when he emerged, slick with water and minus a towel. She figured that particular image ought to be engraved on her brain, concussion or not, but unfortunately she had no memory of it.

She found her toiletries bag amongst her clothes and opened it up and found all sorts of yummy things. Lovely brand-name make-up. A travel-sized bottle of rose-scented perfume, and she popped the cap and lifted it to her nose with the thought that a familiar scent might jog a few memories back into place, and it did, for she had a brief flash of a laughing dark-haired woman wearing a totally awesome headband full of feathers.

‘Do I know a Ruby?’ she asked as she stoppered the perfume and returned it to the toiletries bag.

‘Damon’s wife,’ came the rumble from the shower cubicle. ‘Ruby’s cool.’

‘Does she buy me perfume?’

‘She takes you frock shopping, for which I’m eternally grateful. She may have bought you perfume—I can’t say for sure.’

‘Why are you grateful?’ Lena couldn’t seem to find any frocks at all amongst the clothes she’d brought. These clothes ran more to casual trousers and tops that wouldn’t need ironing.

‘Ruby’s totally committed to bringing sexy back. I heartily approve.’

Lena rifled through her clothes again and lifted out the plainest pair of white cotton panties that she’d ever seen. What kind of woman took these on her honeymoon? ‘Maybe you should have married her.’

‘Nah. She can’t surf. Or hang-glide. Or put a bullet in a moving car wheel from half a kilometre away.’

‘And I can?’

This time he hesitated before answering. ‘You used to be able to. Little bit different now.’

She couldn’t remember any of that, but the notion that she’d once done all that didn’t particularly alarm her, so maybe it was true. ‘So how did I get all the scars? And the bad leg?’

The water cut off abruptly. Moments later the top half of Trig appeared, framed in the cutaway wall. Water ran off him in rivulets and muscle played over bone as he reached for a towel and set it to his face and then scrubbed his hair with it. She couldn’t see anything below mid waist, but even so...

All that sun-bronzed, spectacularly muscled glory and it was hers.

How in hell had she managed that?

‘You don’t remember what happened to your leg?’ he said when his face re-emerged from beneath the towel and the towel drifted lower. Never had a woman been more resentful of a wall.

‘No.’

‘You got shot. On a mission. Nineteen months ago. You’ve made a spectacular recovery, given the prognosis.’

‘What was the prognosis?’

‘A wheelchair.’

Oh. Well, then... ‘Good for me.’

‘Good for us all.’

His clothes went on and she mourned the loss of skin. She wondered if he wore PJs to bed and hoped he did not.

‘Shower’s free,’ he said on his way out and if that wasn’t a hint for her to wash away the smell of the street and the hospital, nothing was.

‘I’m getting there.’ She was. ‘But I can’t find my honeymoon nightie. Do you have it?’

Trig opened his mouth as if to speak and then shut it again with a snap. He shook his head. No.

She looked beneath the pillows. ‘Did we rip it?’

Still no sound from Trig.

‘Could be the cleaner mistook it for ribbon,’ he said at last.

‘Ribbon?’

‘There wasn’t much of it. But there were bows. Lots of bows. Made out of ribbon.’

‘Oh.’ Lena tried to reconcile ribbon nightwear with the rest of her clothing. ‘I really should be able to remember that.’

She passed her husband on the way to the shower and when she stepped beneath the spray she could have sworn she heard him whimper. So she’d screwed up their honeymoon by falling prey to a gang of pickpockets. She couldn’t have been much of an operative—they were probably glad to be rid of her.

She contemplated washing her hair and decided it could wait. Her hair took for ever to dry, the bump on her head was starting to ache and she wanted nothing more than to fall into bed in the arms of her husband and burrow into his warmth until she fell asleep. Tomorrow would be a better day. Tomorrow she’d have her memory back and they might even be able to continue on to wherever it was they were going.

It could have been worse. She might not have been married to a wonderful man who knew exactly how to take quiet control of hospital staff and taxi drivers and her.

She could have been alone.

* * *

Trig had set his laptop up at the table by the time Lena emerged from the shower, scrubbed pink and wrapped in a fluffy white towel. She rifled through her suitcase, but couldn’t seem to find whatever she was looking for.

‘What was I thinking?’ she grumbled, and disappeared back into the bathroom with a little grey T-shirt and a pair of yellow-and-white-striped boy-leg panties in hand.

Trig sent up silent thanks for small mercies given that she hadn’t dropped towel in front of him, and went back to surfing the net for local news, more specifically what had been happening in the port city of Bodrum on Turkey’s southwest coast. It killed the time. It could prove useful. And it gave him something to do while Lena prepared for bed.

Because Lena preparing for bed involved her sitting on the bed and applying scented lotion to every millimetre of visible skin. It involved the brushing of hair—and working gently around the bump on her head and it involved the gentle lift and fall of her breasts and slender arms as she wove her hair into a long loose plait that he immediately wanted to undo, much like the imaginary ribbon nightgown that he also wanted to undo.

Eventually, Lena slid between the sheets, but she didn’t lie down and the torture continued. She had pillows to divvy out and covers to turn down and Trig had no idea what was in the email he’d just read.

‘Will you be much longer?’ she asked, and he looked up to find her looking at him, her glorious grey-blue eyes full of silent entreaty.

He could be misreading her.

But he didn’t think so.

‘Why?’ he croaked, and cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Is the light bothering you? I still have some work to get through, but I can turn off the room lights, no problem.’ Maybe he wouldn’t covet what he couldn’t see. Worth a try. ‘It’s a backlit screen. I can keep working.’

‘I know you said we sometimes sleep in different beds but could you come to this bed tonight when you’re done?’