Kiss the Bride (43 page)

He reached up a hand to touch his scalp. It was prickly with hair stubble. He’d been burred before. In the Air Force. In boot camp. He didn’t care about the hair. His fingers crept to his right temple, the spot that ached, and he found the raw seam of stitches four fingers long.

“I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but that’s not everything.” She smoothed the bedcovers with her fingers, and she couldn’t meet his gaze.

He laughed. He didn’t mean to laugh at her. It just came out. “No?”

“Your hand.”

His chest tightened. She didn’t have to say it. He guessed. “Yeah?”

“It was crushed by the backhoe. They managed to save
your hand, but it’s very doubtful you’ll ever regain full use. You’re probably going to have to give up protective detail for a desk job.”

He couldn’t absorb that information. Not now. Not yet. To hear the news that he could no longer be a Secret Service agent on protective detail was more than he could handle at the moment. So he refused to acknowledge it. If he didn’t acknowledge it, then how could it be true?

“How are you?” He tightened the fingers of his good hand around hers. “Are you doing all right?”

“Unscathed except for skinned knees when you knocked me down and a little worn out from this bedside vigil. Otherwise A-okay.” She canted her head, smiled wryly.

His memory finally flashed and he saw himself pushing Elysee to the platform as the backhoe bucket descended. “And the backhoe operator?”

“He’s fine, too.”

“No,” Shane said. “I mean why was the bastard trying to kill you?”

Elysee gave a gentle laugh. “He wasn’t trying to kill me. He’d been up all night because his wife had been giving birth to their first child, but he didn’t tell his boss he was sleep-deprived because he wanted to be at the groundbreaking to meet me. He just made a mistake. Pushed the wrong levers, then panicked and kept pushing them.”

“You could have been killed.”

“But I wasn’t, because of you.”

The tenderness in her eyes separated his heart from his chest. He felt it free-falling straight to his feet.

“You saved my life,” Elysee whispered, her cheeks pinking. “You saved me, Shane. At great personal cost to your own safety.”

He’d done his job. Elysee was safe. That’s all that mattered.

“I called your parents,” she said. “I thought they should know.”

“Are they here? In Austin?” His parents were supposed to be on an around-the-world cruise celebrating his father’s retirement. They’d been looking forward to this trip their entire lives. He hated to think that they’d been forced to cut their travels short because of him.

“No, I downplayed your injuries. I hope that’s okay.” Elysee looked anxious. “I remembered you told me how important this trip was to them and I knew you’d hate being responsible for ruining it. I felt a little guilty myself. If you hadn’t been rescuing me, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“You did good,” he said. “Thank you.”

In that moment, in that serious exchange of glances, he felt as if he’d known her his entire life. Her calm energy was as comforting as a kitten’s purr. He already knew her so well. She was predictable, safe. He liked that about her. With Tish things had always been exciting and electric, but keeping up with her boundless energy had taken constant effort. Elysee was effortless.

“Thank you.” Her eyes glistened.

His ego inflated. To think she was looking at him, a scarred war dog, with such adoration and respect. Heady stuff. Was their friendship growing into something more?

It was a scary thought. This wasn’t smart, these budding feelings he was having for her—he hadn’t been involved with anyone since Tish. Right now, he was feeling pretty damned vulnerable.

Shane thought of Tish again. Wild and rebellious and passionate. Never a dull moment. Life with her had often
mimicked an episode of
I Love Lucy
. Madcap, adventuresome, filled with irrepressible spirit. She’d been like a lit firecracker in his hand. Sizzling hot and ready to detonate.

And explode she had.

Their marriage had been the collateral damage.

Shane had learned the hard way that blistering passion was bound to blow up in your face. He’d followed his heart and not his head and it had nearly ruined him.

Elysee was Tish’s polar opposite. Not a risk taker at all. It had made guarding her easy and being friends with her even easier. Being married to a woman like her would be serene. And right now, nothing seemed more appealing than serenity.

Shane closed his eyes, unable to keep them open any longer. Waking up, jogging his memory, learning that his skull had been cracked and his hand had been shattered had taken a toll.

He felt the gentle brush of Elysee’s lips against his cheek. “That’s right, darling,” she whispered. “Sleep.”

Darling
?

The word befuddled him, but he was already sliding away, unable to make sense of why the President’s daughter was kissing him and speaking in terms of endearment.

T
ish usually got over the blues by going shopping, but this time, shopping had caused her blues. How was she going to get over that?

At ten o’clock in the morning, she sat in Delaney’s Acura outside the Galleria. She wanted to go in and buy a new outfit to cheer herself up, but she was broke. Completely tapped out. Ninety-seven dollars and fifty cents was all she had left in her savings account; there were no groceries in the house and no new wedding gigs in sight.

October was a slow month for weddings. She’d planned to make ends meet by taking the gray tweed suit back and living on her credit card until she had another wedding to photograph. But the suit had been ruined, her credit cards ruthlessly massacred, and her car repossessed.

Unless she could manage to sell a few of her used clothes on e-bay, she was royally screwed. And seriously regretting having closed out her Macy’s account after paying it off with the money she’d earned from videotaping Delaney’s wedding.

Go in. Go shopping. With ninety-seven fifty you could buy an accessory, or an autumn blouse, or a new pair of jeans.

E-bay. She’d do it tonight. In the meantime, the mall beckoned.

Tish opened the car door and swung her legs to the asphalt.

She poised there, half in, half out of the car, taking stock of her life and the mess she’d made of it.

Stop thinking. Just go shopping. Remember what Mom always taught you. Affluence attracts affluence. You wouldn’t have met Delaney if you hadn’t been following Mom’s hard-and-fast rule.

Tish had met her best friend during college when she’d pledged Phi Beta Kappa at Rice University and had blown her entire IRS refund on a new wardrobe to look the part, with money originally earmarked for tuition.

She and Delaney had ended up rooming together, and if it hadn’t been for Delaney feeding her and sharing her textbooks, Tish wouldn’t have made it through. Even with Delaney’s help, a night job, and the scholarships she’d received, Tish had barely finished college.

Promising herself that she was only going to window-shop, Tish climbed out of the car and headed inside the mall. Nordstrom’s was having a sale. She felt the immediate squeeze of excitement. This wasn’t just any sale, it was a fire sale—everything except new arrivals was listed at the lowest prices of the year.

Adrenaline streamed her down the aisles. Fossil watches normally priced at seventy-five dollars and up were marked thirty percent off.

Her heart beat faster.

Lingerie was slashed forty percent. Since she had no one to wear sexy lingerie for, Tish skipped over to the next department.

Shoes. Omigosh, shoes!

Sixty percent off! Designer names. Stilettos and pumps and sandals and boots. Red and blue and black and tan.

Blood rushed through her ears. She felt breathless, faint. A sixty-percent-off sale on expensive designer shoes, and she was dead broke.

Not dead broke. You have ninety-seven fifty.

Tish paused. It wouldn’t hurt just to try on a few pairs. Sixty percent off for great shoes. How often did one find a deal like that?

But you have no money and no credit cards.

She walked into the shoe department. Women were grabbing shoes, elbowing each other out of the way. The display racks were a mess. Shoes and shoeboxes were scattered everywhere. Harried salespeople ran to and fro, trying to find missing slippers for disgruntled Cinderellas. After circling the area a few times, Tish found an adorable pair of red Stuart Weitzman sandals.

And they were in her size.

Hands shaking, she took the sandals, sat down in an out-of-the-way area, and slipped them on her feet. They fit like a dream. She got up and walked around. Like walking on whipped cream. She was already halfway in love and she had the perfect red cocktail dress to go with them.

She went back to her seat and nervously lifted the box. They were regularly two hundred and fifteen dollars. She was lousy at math, but she thought she might just have enough.

Clutching the shoes to her chest, she waited in line for the cashier.

Put them back, Tish; this is insane.

She turned to get out of line, but then she thought of the shoes, how cute her feet looked in them. How they made her feel like a princess.

You’ve got six boxes of Ramen noodles in your pantry. You can hit a couple of happy-hour free buffets. Maybe you can call up an old boyfriend or two and see if you can finagle dinner. The shoes are worth it.

She thought of how it had felt when the waiter chopped up her credit cards, when Mrs. James walked out on her, when she’d discovered her car had been repossessed.

“Next,” the cashier called out and Tish realized the woman was talking to her.

She hesitated.

Go ahead. You can always return them.

Tish stepped up and slid the shoes across the counter. She’d let fate decide. If the total came to more than ninety-seven fifty, well, it was out of her hands.

“Ninety-three seventy-two,” the cashier said.

Feeling as if she’d just won the lottery, Tish grinned and ran her debit card through the card reader. But just as she punched in her debit code and the machine accepted it, the cahier said, “All sales are final. Absolutely no refunds.”

Panic gripped her. She had shoes she did not need and less than four dollars in her checking account.

That’s when she knew she’d hit rock bottom.

Hello, my name is Tish Gallagher and I’m a shopaholic.

Every night he was in the hospital, Shane dreamed of Tish. Whether it was the painkillers or his head injury or the combination of both he didn’t know, but he just couldn’t seem to peel his ex-wife off his subconscious mind.

He dreamed of the way she’d looked when he’d walked out the door, her mouth pressed into an unyielding line unable to say the words he needed to hear. Her jaw
clenched, but her eyes begging him to forgive her, begging him to understand, begging him to stay.

But he’d just kept going. If she couldn’t learn to ask for what she needed from him, he couldn’t continue to try to read her mysterious mind. Now he realized how stubbornly stupid he’d been, how fragile Tish was, in spite of the toughness she projected. He’d wounded her. She’d wounded him. They’d stupidly wounded each other.

Then he’d wake up and look over at Elysee, his dear friend who would touch his good hand, murmur words of reassurance. She looked so serene. He came to expect her, looked forward to opening his eyes and seeing her face. A smile from Elysee sent his demons running for the shadows.

Three weeks he had been stuck in the hospital, enduring a series of tests, undergoing therapy, recovering from surgery. Elysee had steadfastly refused to leave his bedside for any length of time.

Her new bodyguard turned out to be his old partner Cal Ackerman. Cal lurked in the hallway, waiting patiently, watching for danger. Doing Shane’s job while he was stuck in the bed.

Wounded. Infirm. Weak. He hated it.

The doctors had told him it would take several months of physical therapy for him to regain partial use of his right hand. They’d told him he would never have full range of motion. He couldn’t make a fist, couldn’t even hold a spoon. And although there would be no long-term damage from his head injury, he still had headaches. He felt as raw and vulnerable as he had during his first week at boot camp.

“You’re being released tomorrow,” Elysee said. “And you’re going to need a place to recuperate.”

“I’ll be fine at home,” he said, although he’d been dreading the thought of staring at the bare walls of his apartment, having no one to talk to, no place to go except physical therapy three times a week. He realized then how narrow his life had become since the Secret Service had promoted him to protective detail.

“I’ve spoken to Daddy,” she said. “He’s agreed the best place for you to recover is at our ranch in Katy.”

“I appreciate the offer, Elysee, but this isn’t your problem.”

“You saved my life.” She sounded hurt. “I thought we were friends.