Jilted in January (9 page)

“This is a nice way to wake up,” he said, shifting so his legs entwined with hers.

“How long has it been since you woke up with someone?”

He thought of his last relationship. “About a year. I’ve been so busy with work, I hadn’t really thought about being with anyone, until I met you.”

“No dates, nothing?” He lifted her head and busied herself tracing circles on his chest with her thumb.

“A few. I work weekends. I find a lot of women don’t appreciate that.”

“Hmm.” She nodded. “I guess that’s hard on someone who works all week long and wants to go out Friday and Saturday nights.”

“You work all week long.” This wasn’t a road he wanted to go down at the moment. No use lying in bed trying to figure out why they would never work out as a couple.

She sat up, smiling. “Apparently I work weekends too, making centerpieces. And…oh crap. It’s Wednesday.”

“Yeah?”

“Part of that pesky week I have to work.” She threw herself across him, which he didn’t mind in the least, and grabbed her alarm clock off the nightstand. “I’ve got an hour and a half. Whew. Can I make you some breakfast?”

“Baby, I just had breakfast.” He rolled her over and kissed the back of her neck and down her spine. She squealed and wiggled out from under him, grabbing the sheet to wrap herself in.

“Ah, you’re clever. Distracting me like that. You can shower first if you want. I’ll make some toast and coffee.”

“Don’t worry about me.” He scooped up his clothes from the floor. “I’ll slip out quietly so the neighbors won’t gossip
, and I’ll go home. I don’t want to mess up your morning routine.”

She cocked a brow and gave him a sassy smirk. “Are you implying it’s routine for me to have
gentlemen callers in my bed on weekday mornings?”

He winked. “Only when you drink.”

She threw a pillow at him. “I’ll meet you downstairs. Bathroom is across the hall.”

He grudgingly obeyed and hurried off to the bathroom to slip on his hopelessly wrinkled shirt and pants. His tie hadn’t made it to her house
, and he only hoped none of the TF staff would have cause to go into the bridal suite first thing this morning. He hadn’t figured out how he would explain parts of his wardrobe having been left there.

* * * *

Harper threw on a nightshirt and a pair of sweats and ran downstairs, her heart thumping wildly and her stomach doing flip-flops. She’d really done it. She’d enticed Grant into her bed, and she wasn’t the least bit sorry. On the contrary, she felt fantastic. The thought of him, those deep blue eyes, his gentle skill in bed, the sound of him whispering her name—she had to hold on to the kitchen counter to keep her knees from buckling. Being bad had never been so much fun. She wanted to go to Taverna Fiora and just peek into the bridal suite. She’d never look wistfully at that room again. It was hers now. She owned it, and no bride would ever adore it as much as she did.

She had coffee brewing and toast
toasting by the time Grant came downstairs. He’d left the top button of his shirt open and had the collar standing up around his throat. His hair was mussed as though he’d tried to comb it with his fingers. She whimpered and clutched the counter. Who needed food? She could eat him alive.

“Your tie…”

“I lost it.” He grinned knowingly. “We were very careless with our clothes last night.”

“Hmm. I recall things being tossed all over the place.”

“Yeah. That’s why I need to get to work early.” He kissed her nose, her chin, her lips. She sighed.

“Okay. You sure you don’t want something to eat?”

He nibbled her ear lobe. “This is fine.” He kissed her lips. “And this.”

“Okay.”

He let her go, and she followed him to the front door. “I will call you later today. All right?”

“Sure, yes. Any time.”

She pulled the door open for him, reluctant to let him leave. Why hadn’t she picked a Saturday night to seduce him so he wouldn’t have to rush off at the crack of dawn?

“Who the hell is this?”
Bradley’s voice intruded on their good-bye kiss.

Harper’s spirits plummeted
, and her heart skipped a beat. In an instant all her giddy shamelessness transformed into guilt. This looked bad. Why? She couldn’t explain it. She knew she shouldn’t have had to. “What are you doing here, Brad?”

He thrust a plump paper bag into her hands. “I was bring
ing you bagels and coffee and I was going to suggest we have breakfast together and talk some more. I guess someone beat me to it.” He glared at Grant. “Who the hell are you again?”

Harper had to give Grant credit for his smooth style. His voice remained perfectly modulated and casual. “I’m Grant
,” he said as if that explained everything.

Brad shifted his hard gaze to Harper. “Now I get why you were so eager to break things off.”

“As I recall, I didn’t break things off. You walked out on our wedding. That, in my book, equals breaking things off.”

“And I suppose Grant here was just waiting in the wings.”

“Actually we met when she came to pick up the flowers at the catering hall,” Grant offered, his voice still even. He glanced at Harper, a question in his eyes. Should he leave? She didn’t want him to, but she also didn’t need him here to defend her.

“Oh, so I guess it’s all my fault
, then? I threw you two together?”

“Brad, I thought we’d been through this. It’s not going to work with us. Grant was just leaving
, and I think you should too.”

“So that’s it. You’re just going to walk away and not give me any chance to talk about what happened?”

Harper’s face had heated to the boiling point. Despite the frigid air sweeping in from outside, her blood was sizzling and not in a good way. She shoved the bagels back into Brad’s gloved hands. “Let’s get one thing straight, Brad. Stop saying ‘what happened.’ It didn’t ‘happen’—you caused it. You walking out on me was not something that just occurred out of the blue like a thunderstorm or a car crash. You made it happen. Let’s use the real words and call it
what you did
. And I gave you a chance to explain, and you know what? I don’t care about the explanation. It doesn’t matter why you left. You did, and I actually do respect that you had your reasons for doing it. Now it’s your turn to respect the fact that I have my reasons for being glad it ‘happened.’”

Brad sputtered a few choice words, dropped the bagels on the porch and stormed off. Grant let out a slow breath and slipped his arm around Harper’s shoulders. “I’m sorry about that. Should I have decked him?”

She deflated, her cheeks cooling. In a second she went from ready to explode to shivering, and she huddled against Grant’s warmth for a moment. “No. Thanks for offering. I didn’t expect him to still want to talk.”

“Are you okay?”

She nodded and smoothed his shirt, then tugged the zipper of his own jacket up higher against the winter chill. “I’m fine. It’s all fine.”

He held her gaze for a minute
, and the depth of his stare had her heart rate up again. “I just want to be sure of one thing. That, between you and Brad, looked like it was over, but if it’s not…if there’s still anything there that needs to be resolved, let me know. I’ll stay out of the way.”

“No. No.” She kissed him once, then again, longer and deeper. “I told him the truth. I’m not trying to make him jealous.” But it had sort of felt good to let Brad see she’d moved on. That thought made her cringe
, so she refused to dwell on it.

“Good. I don’t want to be
the guy in the middle. I think we went a little fast, and I would really hate it if we both ended up regretting last night.” He tilted her chin up and rubbed a thumb along her lower lip. “I don’t want to regret last night.”

“Never.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you later.” He kissed her once more and left, taking a moment to hand her the discarded bag of bagels.

Once inside, in a fit of annoyance, Harper tore open the bag. Brad had bought all of her favorites along with coffee in a spill-proof box. He’d even included a small jar of her favorite orange marmalade. She sat down at the kitchen table and rested her head in her hands. She didn’t love Brad anymore
, and that broke her heart. He wasn’t a bad guy, despite Audrey’s growing collection of nicknames for him, but now, she imagined, he thought
she
was a terrible person, a cheater, a slut of some kind. Audrey would tell her not to worry about it, but it bothered her, and she hated that it bothered her.

Frustrated tears spilled down her cheeks when she realized she was losing control of herself. She was trying to prove something to herself with Grant, and maybe trying to prove something to Bradley
, and she had to stop making statements with her actions and start making decisions about where to go from here. “What have I done?” she asked herself through tears. “And what am I going to do?”

“You didn’t waste any time, did you?” Mrs. Dawson’s normally kind voice had taken on a shrill tone, and her words blared out of Harper’s cell phone loudly enough to turn heads in the diner where she’d met Audrey for lunch.

Why didn’t I check the calle
r ID?
She rolled her eyes and forced her own voice to a neutral tone. “I can’t talk right now.”

“
There’s nothing you can say to me anyway. I’m appalled that you were out digging yourself up a new man while my son was home worrying about how to make things right with you.”

Harper squeezed the phone tight. Across the table, Audrey stared at her
, agape. She could hear every scathing word, as could the people in the next three booths. “You have the timeline wrong, Mrs. Dawson. I was out digging up a new man while your son was enjoying the honeymoon he should have been taking with me. He could have made things right by talking to me instead of leaving town.”

“Don’t try to turn this around. You cheated on him.”

“You can’t cheat on someone you’re not with. Good-bye, Mrs. Dawson.” Harper hung up. With shaking hands she thrust her phone back into her purse. “That didn’t take long, did it?”

“Five hours. I would have pegged it for fifteen minutes actually. She’s been stewing for a while.” Audrey shook her head. “She has a lot of nerve.”

“I expected as much. I’ve gone from jilted bride to slutty tart.”

“I’m so jealous.”

“Don’t be. She’ll tell everyone she knows. It was one thing putting up with the sympathetic looks. This will be unbearable.”

“But now you have Grant, so that makes up for it.”

Harper covered her face with her hands. “Do I really have Grant? It was one night, not a commitment of any kind. And who am I to be making commitments anyway?”

“So don’t make a commitment. And don’t worry about what people think. They may talk about it, but any woman who sees Grant will only be envious of you.”

Harper couldn’t dispute that. The very thought of Grant gave her butterflies. His ability to commit didn’t concern her half as much as her own. She had to get over that. “You’re right. Let them say what they want or think what they want. I’m going to enjoy this and just see where it goes.”

“Now you’re talking! Can we get back to details, please? I believe you were talking about the ceiling of the bridal suite before we were interrupted.”

* * * *

Despite the added urgency of tax season at her day job, and spending her evenings working on the centerpieces and gift baskets for the Auxiliary Club dinner, the week dragged on for Harper. She wanted desperately to see Grant again, but with his own grueling schedule and problems with the kitchen staff at TF, she was only able to talk to him a couple of times on the phone.

By the following Tuesday, the night of the dinner, she was a wreck. They’d spent one glorious night together and hadn’t seen each other for a moment since. Their conversations had been short and casual, and in her opinion, somewhat perfunctory. Something was wrong, but he refused to admit it, even when she asked him point-blank. Between his inexplicable coolness and the couple of encounters she’d had with Brad’s friends and family members, she was just about ready to fly off to Tahiti on her own and never come back.

Even Audrey, who’d volunteered to help cart the decorations to TF, couldn’t cheer her up.

“You’re overanalyzing again.”

“No, I’m not.”
Harper unlocked her trunk and started stacking boxes into Audrey’s waiting arms. “When I talk to him it’s like that night never happened.”

“You said yourself, he’s busy, right? The head chef quit, two waiters were in a car accident and can’t work, his head’s on the chopping block if the place doesn’t make good money
, and we’re heading into the doomsdays of winter when no one schedules any big parties. Not to mention, it’s tax season. You’re working overtime too. Give yourselves some breathing room.”

Harper dragged in a deep breath of frigid evening air.
“I’ve been doing so much damn breathing, I’m hyperventilating. If I breathe any more, I’ll pass out.”