Allison Leigh - Vegas Wedding, Weaver Bride

Only he wasn’t really a stranger, was he, if she’d known him since she’d been a teenager? Or was that negated by the fact that—aside from his brief visits home to Wyoming—he’d been gone for more than the last decade?

She dumped the certificate, her dress and the one high-heeled sandal she’d found beside the bed on the marble counter and pressed her ear against the closed door.

All she could hear were muffled voices.

She raked her tangled hair away from her face. It was only then that she noticed the narrow band on her left finger. It was gold. Set with sparkling diamonds that circled all the way around. And it was beautiful.

She slid it off so fast it flew out of her fingers and rolled out of sight.

Her conscience nipped at her and she crawled around until she found it. Feeling decidedly nauseated, she set it on top of Quinn’s leather shaving kit, then went to sit on the side of the enormous round bathtub. Pins prickled behind her eyes and she pinched them closed. It was one thing to know she’d slept with him. But how could she have married him?

Once upon a time, she was supposed to have been a bride. A real one. Only instead of marrying Andy, she’d—

“Hey—”

She looked up to see Quinn had opened the door. He’d added a T-shirt over his jeans. The light gray cotton looked stretched almost to breaking point over his shoulders.

“You all right?”

She swiped her cheeks. “You ever hear of that thing called privacy?”

“That’s what locks are for.” His dark, dark eyes roved over her. “There’s no reason to cry. At least my cousin Greer didn’t mention anything unusual. This isn’t the end of the world.”

“Waking up married?” She waved her hand, only to feel her sheet slipping, and yanked it once again up to her neck. “Sure. Nothing to be worried about at all.”

He scrubbed his hand down his bristly jaw. The thick, wavy hair on his head was as dark as ever, but the whiskers there definitely held a touch of gray.

She wished she could say they detracted from his appeal.

But at least that long-fingered hand of his wasn’t sporting a wedding ring.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said.

“I don’t know how you can sound so calm.” She hitched up the long ends of the sheet and stood. “This is a disaster.” She slipped past him to return to the bedroom area. As oversize and opulent as the bathroom was, it was still too small with him in it.

His voice turned flat. “Stop being melodramatic.”

She spotted her other shoe peeking out from beneath the gold silk bedspread that was hanging off the mattress, and grabbed it. She couldn’t remember how the evening had ended the night before, but she distinctly remembered how it had started off—with her fully clothed and wearing her usual complement of panties and bra underneath.

“Maybe it’s not a disaster in comparison to your usual life.” She knew he was part of some special operations thing in the air force. To Penny, that was just code for some really dangerous thing in the air force. “But it is to mine. I have no desire to be anyone’s wife. Certainly not like this.” Not to another man already married to the military. She’d been through that before. Thanks to the army in which Andy had served and a close encounter with an IED on his way home for their wedding, she’d never even had the opportunity to be a widow. Much less a wife.

She went down onto her hands and knees to look under the bed. But the ivory carpet there was smoothly vacuumed and untarnished by discarded undies. She sat back on her knees.

“What are you looking for?”

“The rest of my clothes, obviously.” She hitched up the sheet again and stood. “I need to get back to my room. Clean up. Make sure everything’s set for the flight home tomorrow.”

“What about my grandmother’s lunch?”

“That’s for all of you. I’m the hired help, remember?” She shoved her long hair away from her face again as she walked back into the bathroom, carrying her second shoe.

She shut the door.

Pushed the door lock for good measure.

She dropped the sheet and pulled her stretchy dress over her head, dragging the dark purple fabric down over her bare hips and thighs. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious that she was entirely commando under the dress.

She raked her fingers through her hair, trying to restore a little order to the dishwater-blond mess, and splashed water over her face, using one of the plush towels stacked on a glass shelf before she pushed her bare feet into her high-heeled sandals and opened the door again.

Quinn was leaning against the wall opposite the door, his arms folded over his wide chest. “Feel better?”

She could feel herself flushing, but she gave a brisk nod anyway as she walked out of the bathroom. Without high heels, she was taller than average. With them, she stood close to six feet, putting her generally eye-to-eye with most men.

But not Quinn. He was still several inches taller than she was.

Which was a completely irrelevant point, she reminded herself as she scanned the room, hoping to spot her purse, because she truly did not want to have to go down to the lobby and get a new room key. Not looking the way she did.

Her relief when she finally found it half-hidden among the ivory leather couch cushions was almost comical. Her room key was tucked safely inside one of the pockets, exactly where she’d put it before joining Vivian and her family for dinner the evening before.

She felt her eyes drifting toward the bed and yanked them front and center.

Quinn hadn’t left his position against the wall. Which meant she had to walk past him once again to get to the door of the suite.

“You can’t run far, Penny.”

“I’m not running. You, however, are supposed to be sitting down to lunch with your grandmother.” She opened the door.

But he reached out and closed his hand around her wrist before she could leave. “Viv can wait. It’s not every day I wake up to a wife.”

Heat rushed up her throat into her face. “I’m not your wife.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Really? I know they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but we’re talking marriage here. And we’ve got a certificate that strongly suggests you’re most definitely my wife.”

She didn’t know if it was deliberate or not, but his thumb was pressed right against the racing pulse in her wrist. “Then we’ll get another certificate that undoes it! Annulments must be almost as popular in this state as weddings.”

“Annulment means there’s been no marriage—or anything associated with the marriage—at all.”

“That’s right.” She pulled on her wrist, but his fingers held fast. They weren’t hurting. But they weren’t giving so much as a centimeter.

Instead, he reeled her in closer. He tucked one finger beneath her chin, and her mouth went dry.

He turned her face until she was looking back into the hotel suite.

Right at the bed.

“You sure an annulment is going to be all that easy?” His voice was low. Intimate. “We have a consummated marriage here, sweetheart.”

A flush ran through her veins, and her skin seemed to tingle.

“We don’t know that for sure,” she reminded, wishing that she sounded a lot less hoarse and a lot more certain.

His callused thumb moved slowly over her inner wrist. “You don’t remember the way we woke up?”

She wanted to block out his words as badly as she wanted to block out the truth. Because she did remember exactly the way she’d awakened.

Engulfed in his warmth. His hand on her breast. His hair-roughened thigh between hers.

He hadn’t been inside her. But he could have been. Everywhere she’d been soft and wanting, he’d been hard and insistent.