More Than Words: Kissed By A Muse #3 (14 page)

But Ryan stepped to the side, catching her shoulders and moving her in a circle while he stepped toward the bathroom. ‘Nuh-uh. You have that look in your eye.’

‘What look?’ she asked innocently.

He grinned and stepped back, reaching for the bathroom door. ‘Mine. Only right now you’re way prettier than me, so if you pounce- I haven’t got a prayer.’

Leigh giggled and smacked his butt before the door closed and then locked between them, blushing furiously to know that she’d become predatory over night. She walked toward the edge of the bed and sat on the bedspread, which was still rumpled from their love-making earlier, and tried to position herself so that she wouldn’t rumple herself as much while she waited.

A funny feeling travelled up her spine then, something she couldn’t classify as fear, but an emotion, which felt slightly unsettling all the same. She glanced up at the television and frowned to see a rock star’s bride in a sexy white tutu dress, lay out in a coffin, and her heart seized. She pulled her iPad onto her lap and bit her lip- it was November twenty-ninth, and though the day had been bright before, she glanced out the window now, her senses picking up on shadows, and saw that the fading sunset was more grey than golden. Was it going to rain?

Leigh shivered and reached for the remote, telling herself that she was being silly and that the depressing rock music video had nothing but a coincidence, but when she flicked to MTV, was taken aback to see the clip for Pearl Jam’s Last Kiss playing.

I don’t hear that song for five years outside of my iPod, now I hear it played in two days? What does that even mean? Is the universe telling me I’m going to die or something?

Leigh almost laughed. Almost. She flicked up another channel, and almost fell off the edge of the bed to hear Alanis Morissette busting a lung over the irony of rainy wedding days. She growled and flicked wildly through the in-room stations, until she recognised a familiar face and flipped back, sighing in relief to see Rachael McAdams embrace Eric Bana on the screen. It wasn’t the Notebook, and it was still a depressing romance- but at least she didn’t have to worry about the irony of time travel working its way into her life. Feeling emotionally drained, Leigh leaned back on her hands and watched the screen flashback to a shot of him as an adult, and his partner as a small child, meeting in a field, but just as it got to one of her favorite parts, the screen switched to a commercial for toilet paper with a small puppy and a baby with a bare butt, and Leigh rolled her eyes. Two hundred cable channels- and she’d only managed to find something decent on a free to air network!

Leigh’s iPad flashed and she glanced at it, wondering why she was getting so many notifications, even though she hadn’t been online in over twenty-four hours. She picked it up and scrolled down the lock screen, laughing. That WAS why she was getting so many notifications. Not only had a bunch of people commented on her lack of info, but also she had a heap of private inboxes as well on Facebook and from her e-mail account. One from Bruce, asking if she was okay and he hoped she didn’t mind his interference, and three from a guy she didn’t recognize, until she peered down at the profile pic and realised it was the cute gay guy who’d been asking about her stuff the morning before.

LM: Hey seriously girlie- you’re in Australia? Queensland right? Me too! Look I’m going to level with you… I’ve just spent the whole day following your fan fiction trail, and I think we need to talk.

LM: What… no excitement at all? Hello! I’m an agent! A LITERARY agent and I like your writing! This is the part where you tell me that you’ve been working on an epic for years and I’m going to love it.

L.M: Miss Dallas Hone I am not very good at seducing women, but you’re actually hurting my feelings here. Write me back PLEASE, I think we could make beautiful literature together!

Leigh’s mouth fell open. He’d read her ridiculous fan fiction stories and thought she had something?

No wonder he’s so desperate for a response, this guy is clearly yet to back a winning horse, if he finds my crap impressive!

Leigh stared down at the iPad, trying to tell herself that she wasn’t excited or even mildly intrigued by the proposition the mysterious ‘LM’ was making, but she couldn’t make herself type a flat-out no to the enthusiastic guy.

I’ll think of an Indie or two who could use some exposure and write him back later, mentioning them. If he likes my blog, he must value my opinion right? Even if I don’t have a story to sell of my own, I sure know an author or two who are bankable!

The movie came back on and Leigh put down her iPad. Who cared if she sank her blog from lack of use? She was about to marry someone rich anyway who’d be able to support her two book a day habit!

When Ryan emerged from the bathroom, he did so while still nervously toying with his tie. He wanted to keep it loose, because it looked more laid-back and him that way, but he felt like he had a little old lady stowed away in his brain who was shaking her finger at him and lecturing him about tie-etiquette on wedding days. He was about to ask Leigh’s opinion, but stopped still when he saw that his beautiful little swan was bawling her eyes out and batting at her face with a Kleenex.

‘Stupid!’ She scolded no one gently, moving to the other eye. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid…’

Ryan crossed to her quickly, alarmed not only by her tears, but the thunderheads amassing in the heavy sky outside their window. ‘Hey…’ he knelt at her feet, plucking another tissue from the box on her lap. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she whispered, her voice breaking as she pointed to the screen. ‘I’m just watching The Time Traveller’s Wife and…’

‘Ohh…’ he glanced at Eric Bana on the screen, and then back at Leigh. ‘Yeah, that’s a sad movie. I think I teared up at the end.’

‘It wasn’t that!’ She sniffled and dabbed at her nose, giving him a mournful look. ‘There was an ad about a little boy buying his busy father’s time… some sort of Christian outreach things and it was- was-’ she wailed, dropping her face into hands. ‘Sad.’

Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Oh Honey…’ he rubbed the warm, bare skin across her shoulders. ‘Do you miss your dad?’

Leigh nodded miserably. ‘He should be here… shouldn’t he?’

Ryan felt a twinge of guilt in his stomach. He lifted her face and stared into her watery eyes, which were all the more beautiful for the sheen of saltwater glossing them. ‘He’ll give you away when we do this right baby, I swear. But he’s not going to give you away at all to the guy who deflowered you without making an honest woman out of you first. And if you get pregnant well… I assume they can count?’’

‘It’s not just that…’ she sighed and looked down at the balled-up tissue clenched in her tiny little fingers. ‘I think it’s the giving away part that’s bugging me. My parents depend on me to be their Honey, I was already contemplating moving away to get some distance from them before this happened, and that was making me feel guilty. But now, if I move away and start a life with you, and have kids on another continent…’

‘We can live wherever you like,’ he whispered to her, lifting her to her feet. ‘We can take them with us, or stay two blocks away there.’

Leigh dabbed at her nose again. ‘Really?’

Ryan nodded. ‘I’d follow you to the ends of the earth. We can buy a house there and one here. We can have it all, my love.’ He took her in his arms and hugged her tightly, feeling like his swelling heart was going to burst. Leigh was right- there was just something about her that made him want to protect her for always and from everything, so he couldn’t imagine how protective her parents were of their cherished little girl.

‘No one can have it all,’ she whispered to him, smoothing down his tie. ‘I love you for trying so hard Ryan, but I really don’t think you should keep making such huge promises to me- not until you have your own mind back. What if you remember that your heart belongs to Alaska?’

Ryan snorted. ‘I’m sure I’ll get over it, if it does.’

Leigh bit her lip. ‘What if you find out that you already gave away your heart to someone else, and don’t want me anymore? God what if you’re married?’

Ryan smiled crookedly at her, though the thought had crossed his mind. ‘Then it’s a good thing I’ll have two fake names and citizenship on three different continents, eh? No one can play hide and seek like I can, and you’re small enough to fit in most overhead compartments...’

Leigh laughed. She didn’t believe him, but she laughed. Without saying another word, Ryan tugged on her hand, and led her out the door. He didn’t want to stand around and hypothesize about the likelihood of having another wife- he wanted her to be his, and the gods themselves wouldn’t prevent him from keeping his word to her.

FOURTEEN

T
hey didn’t go straight to the wedding chapel. First, Ryan took Leigh through the forum shops, telling her that as beautiful as she looked, her outfit wasn’t quite ‘right’ yet, and he needed to find her something to make their wedding day as fairytale as it could be, given the dubious circumstances. Besides, they had two hours to kill before they needed to show up at Doo Wop Diner for their ceremony anyway.

Leigh was usually happy to oblige him, but she baulked at the door of Swarovski, shaking her head. ‘Ryan I can’t afford anything in there!’

‘I know. Therefore, I am showing off hardcore by buying you… something blue!’ Grinning, Ryan tugged her to a display case and tapped on the glass, as an obnoxious musician with cash to spare would in such a fancy shop. ‘Excuse me miss! I want the jeweled thong please-’ he glanced at Leigh and winked before turning back to the dazed looking shop girl. ‘Size: ‘Holy hell am I one lucky bastard!’

Leigh clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in a mortified squeal, but the cashier grinned and sauntered over- eyes full of Ryan. ‘Wedding night, I assume?’

Ryan pulled Leigh to his side, thwarting her efforts to back out of the room like he was performing a heist. ‘Sure is. This is my Honeybee, Honey-Leigh.’

Honey wished the earth would open up and swallow her, and she vowed to be the one doing the spanking the next time they were behind a closed door. He was playing up the rock star, shotgun-wedding, ridiculous-couple angle just to make her squirm, and Leigh knew that like a Chinese finger trap, the harder she tried to work her way out of the situation, the tighter he’d hold her.

‘Then naturally… you need something blue.’ The woman produced a set of keys and smiled at Leigh like Leigh had rolled in from the boonies snapping gum and snagged herself a lucky drunk, but she smiled back and draped herself over Ryan’s shoulders, deciding to play back.

‘I do...’ she purred, trying not to freak out over the fact that there were no price tags to be seen on anything, while deciding to make Ryan rue the day he rubbed his inheritance in her face- by playing her part. ‘But baby…’ she felt the woman’s eyes follow Leigh’s finger down Ryan’s incredible jaw. ‘You said I was your princess, remember? So don’t you think I should get a tiara too?’

She expected Ryan to stiffen, but instead he turned to her with a wide smile. ‘Why do you think I brought you here in the first place, funny-Honey of mine?’ He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her deeply and wetly, before releasing her and turning back to the cashier, pointing to the shelf below the thong to a stunning little headpiece on a comb. ‘Wrap that up too please. Actually no- we should put it on in here, don’t you think?’

Leigh’s mouth fell open, and she shook her head rapidly, holding up her hands. ‘Oh my god I was only-’

‘What my Honey wants, my Honey gets…’ Ryan spanked her playfully. ‘Can’t have a fairytale ending, without a crown, princess.’ The cashier turned away, snickering, and Ryan leaned over and whispered in her ear. ‘I’m going to spank you for every time you shake that pretty little head, got it?’

Leigh nodded. Oh boy, had she ‘gotten’ it!

Ryan continued to humiliate and spoil her through three more stores. At Agent Provocateur, he made her try on every single garter they had in stock, and made such a vulgar display of enjoying sliding each one on and off her stockinged legs that the salesgirl ended up hovering, clearly afraid her enthusiastic customer was going to vanish into the change room for two minutes alone with one. Leigh’s face was bright red, not only because he was making a scene, but because every time he slid one into place, he made a point of stretching his pinkie finger up under the hem of her skirt and pressing one of the little crystals into her swollen, now slick flesh and biting his lip. He was too smooth to be seen of course, but his confidence to pull off such a seduction with a woman standing right there knocked the wind out of Leigh, and the lip-biting thing was killing her. By the time he settled on a pale blue garter with crystal and pearl detailing she was breathless, horny and ready to do something incredibly humiliating, and she got the distinct impression that if she popped into the change rooms for two seconds, the blonde serving them would pounce Ryan and have her wicked way with him. And of course Ryan would still be laughing too hard at his own evil-doings to fend her off.

But they left, both unmolested, and by the time Ryan had picked up a soft leather whip from the Playboy store, a gorgeous set of matching platinum wedding bands from Cartier, and had convinced the people at Baccarat to allow them to borrow a single glass rose for the evening, (provided he left them with the five hundred dollars it was worth) Leigh had given up shaking her head and was in stitches. He was just such a goof-ball and though she’d always prided herself on having a high threshold for embarrassment, his antics spoke volumes of an epic level of self-confidence, and she fell more in more in love with him, with every passing minute.

‘Why the glass rose?’ she asked as they waited for a cab. ‘I get the tiara and the garter and lord, even the thong- but why borrow a glass rose, of all things?’

Ryan hailed the next cab and opened the door for her, and she slid in. ‘Well, you’re sort of like Belle from Beauty and The Beast, you know?’ He slid in after her and closed the door. ‘Bellagio Fountain please,’ he said to the driver, and then settled back beside her. ‘With the books and everything. Besides… I don’t see any risk in borrowing that. And I want you to see that just because something may appear to be too beautiful and fragile to last… doesn’t mean that it won’t.’ He leaned over and kissed her jaw. ‘That’s my heart. And I’m trusting you not to break it. Just like you have to trust me, with yours.’

Leigh stared at him wordlessly, and he tweaked the end of her nose. ‘Don’t cry on me, woman. We don’t have any replacement mascara here, and besides… it’s five hundred bucks, not a million. After the way you went down those stairs the other night, I’m not willing to risk anything more expensive!’

Leigh bopped him on the head with it, but she was smiling. ‘Just testing how durable it is.’

‘The head? Or the rose?’ he joked, rubbing his head, but like her, he was grinning.

*

At The Bellagio, Ryan led her to the edge of a massive fountain where they waited with hundreds of people under a now-rumbling sky, and when the opening strains to ‘My Heart Will Go On’ began to play, Leigh felt her heart flip over within her chest.

Another tragic love song? Really? Can’t we get some Salt ‘N Peppa going around here? Eminem maybe?

But then the water began to arc and dip, synchronized to the harmony, and it wasn’t long before Leigh was able to shake off the negative imagery from the awful end of Titanic, to gawk mindlessly instead. The show was beautiful, and she was moved to tears by the sheer resplendence of the display. Ryan held her tightly and sang along in a husky whisper, and Leigh wondered if any woman had ever come as close to Nirvana before, as she did in this man’s arms.

‘I haven’t been here before,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘I was afraid that things would come back to me, but nothing has. This place belongs to us, Honey- this memory will never be overshadowed by any other. I can’t say that about anywhere else in the world, just yet, but I’ll take you everywhere and do so much with you, that we would have lived five lifetimes, by the time I get the memories of one back.’ He kissed her. ‘Hopefully it won’t be long, until you’re as convinced as I am, that this is the only life that could possibly count for me.’

In his arms, Honey shivered with hope.

When the show was over and she was an emotional wreck, Ryan hailed another cab and directed it to The Venetian. Five minutes later, they were being rowed along an artificial canal beneath an artificial, sunny sky and Leigh’s head couldn’t move around fast enough to take everything in. Now that she understood that Ryan was trying to create as many memories for them as possible in the shortest amount of time, she was eager to help him- eager to make them count more than any other star-crossed romance ever had. She lay back in his lap, listening to him sing along with the man rowing and singing in perfect Italian, and then treated him to a hot dog from a little street vendor as they walked the next block to the bridge overpass near Paris Paris. The sky was so heavy by then that the stars were impossible to see, but Vegas shimmered beneath them and the frigid desert wind did sexy things to Ryan’s hair. She dropped sauce on herself of course, but it missed her white dress and landed on her shoe, and Ryan knelt to dab it away. She knew she’d eaten off her lipstick and was going to be incredibly wind-blown by the time they got to exchange their vows, but she just didn’t care.

‘Okay so I have something new- several something’s’ new,’ Leigh said, licking mustard off her thumb and then accepting a sip from the novelty cup he’d picked up from another street vendor, filled with a frozen margarita. ‘The thong is blue, the rose is borrowed…’ she touched her earrings. ‘And these pearls are about two years old. They count as my something old, don’t they?’

‘They could…’ Ryan leaned against the railing of the bridge and wiped his fingers on a napkin before stuffing it into a shopping bag. ‘But if you don’t mind… I have something else I’d like you to keep on you tonight... from someone important.’ He reached his fingers into the pocket of his leather pants, and produced a frayed, white piece of cloth which he then handed to her. ‘It was Imogen’s favorite…’ he said softly. ‘I found it last night and I think she’d like you to have it.’

Leigh took the scrap of cloth from him and examined it, smiling to see that it was a book mark. ‘Black Beauty…’ she whispered, tracing the horse with her fingertip. ‘Wow. It’s pretty special- I’d be honored to keep it on me.’

‘Yeah?’

Leigh looked up into his nervous smile. ‘Of course- if you’re certain that she’d be okay with you and I.’

‘I know it’s what she wanted.’ He took it from her and wrapped it around her wrist. It was just long enough to knot twice. ‘Do you like that book?’

‘I’ve never read it,’ Leigh said honestly.

‘Really?’

‘Really. I haven’t read a whole lot of those children's stories, you know? I was onto Danielle Steel by the fourth grade, and sort of bypassed the age of reading innocence. I only got around to Anne Of Green Gables, because it was sitting in a doctor’s surgery when I was little and I was a bored kid so…’ she touched her fingers to the band. ‘But I’ll read it next, okay? For her.’

Ryan took her hand. ‘Now I know that she’d love you.’

In front of the Eiffel Tower and fresh from a romantic canal ride in Italy, Leigh kissed him, knowing she’d be home wherever he was, forever more.

Ryan

It was strange that their wedding- their entire reason for them having come to Vegas in the first place and the thing he’d been obsessing about the most for twenty-four hours straight- ended up being the lowest key moment that he and Leigh had shared together yet.

There was no stress and no nervousness. No cried of identity fraud, no dramatic outbursts from disgruntled exes or cranky parents- Ryan took his place at the altar (which was right by a jukebox in the retro-themed diner) and watched Leigh approach him while the Elvis impersonator beside him crooned: ‘Can’t Helping Falling In Love’. The song brought tears to his eyes, as did the shy smile on Leigh’s face, but once again, it was that look of wonder that drew his focus more than anything else. She tried her hardest to keep her eyes on Ryan, but he knew that the diner was so ‘her’ that it wasn’t even funny, so watching her trying to keep a straight face and not dart across the room to order a milkshake or fondle the shiny chrome counter tops was highly amusing. He kind of wish he’d smuggled in a squirrel, just so he could set it off during the ceremony and watch her writhe with the need to chase it and damn the solemn vows.

But eventually, her frenzied gaze landed on him, and he saw her soften and relax, and her beautiful, adoring and still slightly-awestruck smile moved him more than any ballad ever could. She looked like an angel, the tiny tiara glittering on top of that cap of freshly-smoothed, satiny blonde hair, the playful, incredibly tempting dress hugging every delectable curve, those pretty silver shoes gleaming like glass slippers on the end of her long, slender legs… she was a princess, and though her knuckles were white around the stem of the delicate glass rose, conveying her lingering doubts, he knew that he already was Prince Charming to her… she just wasn’t ready to believe that it would last forever.

They were married by the king in a matter of minutes, and witnessed by two people employed by the little chapel. Leigh choked up when she repeated her ‘I do’ which was impressive to Ryan because he was so beside himself that he had to practically creak the words out.

‘I now pronounce-’

Ryan had her in his arms and was kissing her passionately in a heartbeat, and he hadn’t realised, until the words ‘Husband and wife’ followed over the top of their heads, that he’d been terrified that something was going to happen to prevent their marriage from happening, and knowing that it was said and done filled him with such elation that he swept her up into his arms, unable to kiss her deeply enough, falling more in love with her when she didn’t squeal with embarrassment or try and kick him away.

She flung her arms around his neck, stabbing him a little in the back of the head with the glass rose and whispered: ‘I was scared too,’ against his mouth and he groaned, knowing that the term ‘soul-mates’ was a very real thing, and that he had found his.