Maid of Dishonor (10 page)

You would though, if you knew who I was really with last night.

She patted Reese's fingers, then gently disengaged them from her arm. ‘Really it's okay. I was being ridiculously oversensitive. And I really do need to crash. I'll speak to you in the week about...' she lowered her voice to a whisper so only Reese could hear ‘...you know whose surprise party.'

‘All right, if you're sure.'

‘Sure, I'm sure.' She bade goodbye to the others and left, escaping before their gestures of support and concern could make her do something dopey, like bursting into tears.

It wasn't until she was in the cab home, bouncing across the cobblestoned street past Brooklyn Park, and she'd got the foolish urge to cry under lockdown, that she began to wonder where exactly the hot ball of resentment had come from that had caused her to end an immensely enjoyable morning of BFF bonding on such a sour note. And once she'd digested the only possible answer to that question, she then had to ask herself why she should resent what Reese and Cassie and Amber had—when she'd decided years ago that she would never want the same thing for herself.

* * *

Once back at the minute loft apartment she was struggling to pay the rent on in Brooklyn's funky Red Hook district, Gina stripped off her clothes, took another hot shower and crashed straight into the fanciful iron-framed double bed she'd crammed into the loft's bedroom. Given that she was now at the grand old age of twenty-nine and somewhat out of practice, clearly her all-nighter with Carter had taken a physical toll that had had emotional repercussions. But once she'd caught up on her sleep, she'd be herself again—and everything would snap back into sharp, vivid focus.

Several hours later, after a fitful nap that had been filled with far too many erotic dreams featuring the Mystery Studmuffin who should not be named, the door buzzer sounded. She crawled out of bed, her pulse pounding into her throat and a few other more intimate parts of her anatomy—until she spied Cassie's face through the peephole. The dip in her stomach had nothing whatsoever to do with disappointment, she decided as she yanked open the heavy security door.

‘Gina, you look wasted,' Cassie announced as she stepped into the flat with a garment bag hooked over her shoulder. ‘Maybe you're coming down with flu.'

If only.

‘No, I have the constitution of an ox. I'm just exhausted.'

Cassie sent her a bland look, but fortunately didn't probe. ‘Amber asked me to drop this off for you.' She handed her the garment bag, which had the white logo of Amber's Bridal emblazoned across it. ‘She told me to tell you she's done the necessary adjustments, but she needs you to try it on and send it back, just to make sure the fit's good before she starts adding the other bits.'

‘Thanks for bringing it over.' Gina laid the bag over the back of her sofa. ‘I'm sorry you had to come all this way. I should have stuck around, shouldn't I?'

Cassie simply said, ‘Are you asking me a question? Because I know absolutely nothing about the etiquette of bridal fittings.'

Gina smiled at the clueless comment. ‘How about a coffee for your trouble?'

‘Only if you're sure you don't want to get back to your nap?'

‘Positive,' Gina replied, keen to avoid returning to her nap, which was causing more problems than it solved.

To her great relief Cassie agreed to stay and Gina set about making the coffee.

‘Is everything okay? You seem a little shaky.' The cautious comment had Gina's hand halting as it ladled coffee into the French press. Cassie wasn't the most intuitive person in the world, so it had to be really obvious.

‘Yes, of course,' she said, determined to make it so as she started ladling again. ‘Why wouldn't it be?'

‘You totally overreacted to Reese's teasing,' Cassie replied with her customary bluntness. ‘Which made me wonder if something bad happened last night.'

Gina smoothed her palms down her robe, touched by Cassie's concern. She filled the French press with boiling water and faced her friend. ‘And there I was thinking I had my poker face on.'

‘I would strongly suggest you don't enter any poker tournaments, then—you wouldn't make much money.'

Gina sent Cassie a weak smile. ‘Don't worry, Cass, nothing bad happened. It was all good.'
Way too good, really
.

‘Was it Marnie's brother?' Cassie asked, her expression direct and totally non-judgmental. ‘The guy you were with last night?'

The blush fired up Gina's neck as she opened her mouth to deny it—but her mind went completely blank, and the manufactured outrage, the clever evasions, the bald-faced lie she wanted to tell got trapped in her throat somewhere in the region of her Adam's apple. Until all she could manage to choke out on a panicked whisper was: ‘How did you know?'

‘It was obvious once I'd analysed the available data.' Cassie stirred sugar into her coffee, apparently unfazed by the admission of guilt.

‘Which was?'

Cassie shrugged and sipped. ‘Marnie took a call from him just before you arrived, and arranged to meet him at The Standard Hotel for lunch on Tuesday, so I knew he was in town.' Cassie placed her mug on the counter with calm deliberation. ‘And the only other time I've seen you blush like that is the morning after you slept with him the first time. Well, until right this minute, that is.'

‘Terrific.' Gina's teeth ground together as the heat scalded her ears. ‘Did you share your brilliant powers of deduction with anyone else?'

‘No.' A tiny frown bisected Cassie's brow as Gina's breath gushed out and the knots in her shoulders loosened a little. ‘But why would that be bad?' Cassie asked, giving a slow owlish blink—which Gina knew meant she was trying to process something particularly complex.

‘Because I don't want Reese and Marnie to know.' She ruthlessly resisted the urge to say ‘Duh'. It wasn't Cassie's fault she'd figured out the truth, or that she was so clueless about the dynamics of female friendships.

‘Why don't you want them to know?'

Oh, for Pete's sake.

‘Because I screwed up this friendship once before by screwing Marnie's brother—and I don't want to do it again.'

‘But you did screw him again, so whether they know or not is sort of academic, isn't it?'

‘Yes, but...' Gina stammered to a halt, totally lost for words in the face of Cassie's objective reasoning. ‘I can't believe I've done this again. It's like I've got a genetic compulsion to screw up this friendship.'

‘Not necessarily,' Cassie said, taking the statement literally as always. ‘To determine that you'd have to examine the cause and effect.'

‘The.... Well, it wasn't planned, if that's what you're asking.' Because who knew what the heck Cassie was on about now? ‘I went to his hotel to apologise to him.'

‘What for?' Cassie cut in, looking shocked for the first time.

‘For the failure of his marriage.'

‘How was that your fault?'

‘Apparently it wasn't,' Gina added, suddenly keen to end this topic of conversation. Because the apology excuse for seeing Carter again was sounding less and less valid, even to her. ‘Do you want to hear the rest or not?'

Cassie's eyebrows rose fractionally at the tone. ‘Yes.'

‘Fine, well, then, after he'd told me his divorce was none of my concern, we had a few drinks, one thing led to another and before I knew it we were tearing each other's clothes off in his very nice corner suite overlooking the Hudson.' She sighed. ‘The views really are spectacular from that hotel, by the way.'

‘What view are we talking about?' Cassie said, so dryly Gina choked out a laugh, the burden of guilt lifting for the first time since her meltdown at the salon.

‘It's not funny,' she replied. ‘It's disastrous. I know that. But the good news is, it won't happen again. I told him in no uncertain terms this morning that we'd made a mistake.' Well, the terms hadn't been that uncertain, but still.

‘How was it?' Cassie asked.

‘How was what?'

‘The mistake?'

‘You mean the sex?'

Cassie nodded.

‘Honestly?'

Another nod.

‘Fabulous.' Why lie about it? ‘As I believe I mentioned ten years ago, the man was a gifted amateur. He's more than lived up to that early promise.' Which she was beginning to realise only made the mistake of sleeping with him all the more enormous—because her ability to conjure up an image of him naked and ready with complete clarity was not helping.

‘Maybe that explains it, then,' Cassie mused.

‘Explains what?'

‘Why you slept with him, despite your misgivings. Studies have shown the release of endorphins triggered by orgasm—which for the purposes of this discussion we'll call fabulous sex—can impair your cognitive skills. They certainly impaired mine when I had sex with Tuck the first time. And the second. And the...'

‘I get the picture,' Gina muttered. Trust Cassie to come up with a scientific solution—that made perfect sense to her and no sense in the real world. ‘Cass, what you and Tuck have is not the same as what Carter and I have. Frankly, having sex with Carter could turn me into Dumbo, but all it would ultimately prove is that Marnie was right about me all along.'

Cassie gave a pensive hum. ‘Are you sure you're giving Marnie enough credit? Why don't you ask her whether she cares about you and Carter getting back together.'

Gina choked on her coffee. ‘Are you on crack or something?' she whispered furiously. ‘Carter and I are
not
back together, because we never were together. This isn't a relationship. It's one night of madness.'

‘Two now, actually.'

‘All right, two,' Gina conceded. Trust Cassie to be pedantic about the maths. ‘But now it's over.' Of that much she was certain.

‘Did you tell him about the baby?'

The blood drained out of Gina's face and slammed into her heart. ‘No, of course not. Why would I?'

‘I just thought...' Cassie began. ‘He's not married any more—so why would you need to keep it a secret still?'

‘Because it's ancient history. Because there would be no point in telling him all these years after the fact.' She coughed, trying to lower her voice, which had become a little shrill in the face of Cassie's passive-aggressive interrogation techniques. ‘And anyway it was never a baby. It was a miscarriage.' And she'd spent a great deal of time, not to mention money, making herself believe that.

It had taken her years to repair the damage she'd done to her sense of self-worth and self-esteem. And even longer to become a more stable, sorted person—a person who could actually look at herself in the mirror every morning and like what she saw. She'd had to get over the insecurities of her childhood, the recklessness of her adolescence and the horror of what had happened when she'd returned to England with Carter's child growing inside her womb, harbouring some idiotic notion that she'd fallen in love with a man who was totally unattainable.

But none of that had really had anything to do with Carter. She'd latched onto him, because he'd listened to her that night, he'd been sensitive and sweet and the few things he'd told her about his father had made her think they might be kindred spirits. But the truth was, he'd just been the catalyst.

Unfortunately, last night proved that she still had a ways to go before she could rely on herself to resist all temptations. But last night had no real bearing on her past. It had been nothing more than a biological urge. An irresistible biological urge. Which meant the decision not to see Carter again, and stir up any more irresistible biological urges, was the mature choice. And if Cassie would just back off, and stop making ridiculous suggestions, she might actually be able to embrace it.

‘Okay, if you say so,' Cassie interrupted her panicked revelry, her calm grey eyes fixed on Gina's face.

‘I do say so, because it's the truth.'

Cassie looked doubtful—what she wasn't saying hanging in the air between them, like a huge pulsing neon sign. And Gina knew exactly what the sign said.

You're in denial.

She could see Cassie believed it wasn't panic over screwing up her relationship with her friends that had Gina steering clear of Carter now. It was all the messy, unfinished business between the two of them that she didn't want to confront.

And it was hardly surprising Cassie had that misconception.

Because during those months after Gina had left Hillbrook—when she'd discovered the pregnancy and a few crucial months later lost the baby—Reese and Cassie had been there to help her pick up the pieces, at the end of a transatlantic phone line. They'd let Gina rant and rave, and cry and carry on and finally come to terms with her loss and her grief, but there had been one thing her two best friends had disagreed with her about. They both felt Gina should have contacted Carter. That he should have been forced to share some of the emotional burden, because he had been as responsible as Gina for that short, helpless little life.

Gina placed her fingers on Cassie's arm and squeezed. ‘It's not what you think, Cass. Honestly. I'm not a basketcase any more. I'm all grown up. I got over it. I couldn't be more different from that girl. And Carter's a completely different guy too. Give or take the odd super power in the sack,' she added wryly.

Cassie sent her a tentative smile. ‘Maybe you're right.'

‘I know I am.'

‘But if that's the case, it does pose another question.'

‘Which is?'

‘If all the variables have changed, and Reese and Marnie never need to know about this—what's preventing you from availing yourself of Carter's super powers again?'