Annie O'Neil - Tempted By The Bridesmaid

“I’m just trying—” Bea’s friend clamped her full, pink lips tight when her eyes met his.

The rest of the party was moving down the corridor as Luca wrestled with her revelation. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? The damage you’ve caused?”

Stillness enveloped her as his words seemed to take hold.

Such was the power of the moment, Luca was hurtled back to a time and place when he, too, had been incapable of motion. Only there had been a doctor and a priest then.

Stillness had been the only way to let the news sink in.

Mother. Father. His sister, her husband—all of them save his beautiful niece. Gone. And he’d been the one behind the wheel.

He closed his eyes and willed the memory away, forcing himself to focus on the bridesmaid in front of him. Still utterly stationary—a deer in the headlights.

Another time, another place he would have said she was pretty. Beautiful, even. Honey-gold hair. Full, almost-pouty lips he didn’t think had more than a slick of gloss on them. Eyes so blue he would have sworn they were a perfect match to the Adriatic Sea not a handful of meters from the basilica.

“Don’t you dare—” She took in a jagged breath, tears filming her eyes. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t understand what speaking up means.”

Luca’s gut tightened as she spoke. Behind those tears there was nothing but honesty. The type of honesty that would change everything.

His mind reeled through the facts. Beatrice was one of his most respected friends. They’d known each other all their lives and had been even closer during med school. Their career trajectories had shot them off in opposite directions, much to their parents’ chagrin. He’d not missed their hints, their hopes that their friendship would blossom into something more.

Beautiful as Beatrice was, theirs would always be a platonic relationship. When she’d taken up with Marco he’d almost been relieved. Si, he had a playboy’s reputation, but he was a grown man now. A prince with an aristocratic duty to fulfill—a legacy to uphold. When Marco had asked him to be best man he’d been honored. Proud, even, to play a role in Beatrice’s wedding.

Cheating just minutes before he was due to marry? What kind of man would do that?

He shot a glance at Marco, who was raising his hands in protest before launching into an impassioned appeal to both Bea and the cardinal.

Marco and a bridesmaid in a premarital clinch? As much as he hated to admit it, he couldn’t imagine it was the type of thing a true friend would conjure up just to add some drama to Italy’s most talked-about wedding.

He glanced down at her hands, each clutching a fistful of the fairy-tale fabric billowing out from her dress in the light wind. No rings.

A Cinderella story, perhaps? The not-so-ugly stepsister throwing a spanner into the works, hoping to catch the eye of the Prince?

Each time she pulled at her dress she revealed the fact that she was actually wearing flip-flops in lieu of any Italian woman’s obligatory heels. No glass slippers, then. Just rainbow-painted toes that would have brought the twitch of a smile to his lips if his mind hadn’t been racing for ways to fend off disaster.

She’d be far less high maintenance than his only-the-best-will-do girlfriend.

He shook off this reminder that he and Marina needed “a talk” and forced himself to meet the blonde’s gaze again. Tearstained but defiant. A surge of compassion shot through him. If what she was saying was true she was a messenger who wouldn’t escape unscathed.

“I saw them!” she insisted, tendrils of blond hair coming loose from the intricate hairdo the half-dozen or so bridesmaids were all wearing. All of the bridesmaids including his girlfriend. “It’s not like you’re the one who’s been cheated on,” she whisper-hissed, her blue eyes flicking toward Beatrice, who, unlike her, was remaining stoically tear-free.

Luca took hold of her elbow and steered her farther away from the small group, doing his best to ignore how soft her skin felt under the work-hardened pads of his fingertips. Quite a change from the soft-as-a-surgeon’s hands he’d been so proud of. Funny what a bit of unexpected tragedy could do to a man.

“Perhaps we should leave the bride and groom to chat with the cardinal.” A shard of discord lodged in his spine as he heard himself speak. It had been in the icy tone he’d only ever heard come out of his mouth once before. The day his father had confessed he’d gambled away the last of the family’s savings.

“I’m Francesca, by the way,” she said, as if adding a personal touch would blunt the edges of this unbelievable scenario. Or perhaps she was grasping at straws, just as he was. “I think I saw you at the cocktail party last night.”

“I would say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but...”

She waved away his platitudes. They both knew they were beyond social niceties.

“Francesca...” He drew her name out on the premise of buying time. He caught himself tasting it upon his tongue as one might bite into a lemon on a dare, surprised to find it sweet when he had been expecting the bitterness of pith, the sourness of an unripe fruit.

Focus, man.

Luca clenched his jaw so tightly he saw Francesca’s eyes flick to the telltale twitch in his cheek. The one with the scar.

Let her stare.

He swallowed down the hit of bile that came with the thought. He knew better than most that nothing good came from a life built on illusion.

“I don’t think I need to remind you what our roles are here. I promised to be best man at this wedding. To vouch for the man about to marry our mutual friend.”

He moved closer toward her and caught a gentle waft of something. Honeysuckle with a hint of grass? His eyes met hers and for a moment...one solitary moment...they were connected. Magnetically. Sensually.

Luca stepped back and gave his jaw a rough scrub, far too aware that Francesca had felt it, too.

“There is no one in the world I would defend more than Bea.” Francesca’s words shattered the moment, forcing him to confront reality. “And, believe me, of all the people standing here I know how awful this is.”

Something in her eyes told him she wasn’t lying. Something in his heart told him he already knew the truth.

“I’d want to know,” she insisted. “Wouldn’t you?”

Luca looked away from the clear blue appeal in her eyes, redirecting the daggers he was shooting toward her to the elaborately painted ceiling of the marble-and-flagstone passageway. The hundreds of years it had taken to build the basilica evaporated to nothing in comparison to the milliseconds it had taken to grind this wedding to a halt.

A wedding. A marriage. It was meant to last a lifetime.

“Of course I’d want to know,” he bit out. “But your claims are too far-fetched. The place where you’re saying you saw them is not even private.”

“I know! It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Francesca’s eyes widened and the tears resting on her eyelids cascaded onto her cheeks before zipping down to her chin and plopping unceremoniously into the hollow of her throat. Luca only just stopped himself from lifting both his hands to her collarbone and swiping them away with his thumbs. First one, then the other... Perhaps tracing the path of one of those tears slipping straight between the soft swell and lift of—

Focus!

“Which one was it? Which woman?”

Francesca’s blue eyes, darkened with emotion, flicked up and to the right. “She had dark hair. Black.”

The information began to register in slow motion. Not Suzette...a flame-bright redhead. And the others were barely into their teens.

Elimination left him with only one option.