Jennifer Greene: The Honor Bound Groom

Later that evening, he’d taken Kelly to her home, sat with her until she calmed down, poured her a glass of milk and himself a bourbon—it was the only alcohol drink she had in her apartment—and proposed marriage. It was the first time he’d heard her even try to laugh that evening. And when she realized he was serious, she got another case of hiccups.

Marrying a woman because she was pregnant would never necessarily have aroused Mac’s sense of honor. Hell, you couldn’t solve one disaster by compounding it with another. But that happened to be his nephew growing in her womb. A Fortune child. And whether she’d volunteered for the problems that came with being a Fortune when she fell for his scoundrel of a brother, there was no escaping them now. The baby had the best chance of being protected from within the family circle—the Fortune name, the Fortune power, the Fortune protection. She had the chance to give the baby his birthright as well as insure the child’s future. Mac wasn’t closing any doors to choices down the pike—for her, or for him. Hell, he knew she was in love with his brother—but love had nothing to do with this problem and couldn’t solve it. Right then the only choice he saw to effectively protect the child was a legal alliance between them.

She’d said yes that night—Mac knew—because she’d been scared. Not just scared from the attack itself, but stunned-scared from realizing that attack could be just the tip of an iceberg. Maybe she’d just fallen in love with a man, but her making love with a Fortune had volunteered her for a ton of repercussions she’d never expected.

And belatedly, Mac suddenly recognized that Kelly looked scared right now. Not terrorized or anything that traumatic, but one of the few things—in fact, damn near the only thing—Mac knew about his bride was how she responded when she was shook up. Her face was tilted up to his, so it wasn’t as if she was trying to hide her expression from him. Two dots of fire-engine red dotted her cheeks. The pulse in her throat was beating like a manic clock. Her soft blue eyes were shooting him an increasingly urgent message. Hell, she was probably going to start hiccuping any second.

With a frown, he glanced at the minister. Reverend Lowry was as red-faced as Kelly. The instant he caught the groom’s eyes, he repeated loudly, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride. Now, Mac.”

Sheesh. Mac could have kicked himself. This was no time to be woolgathering, and more to the point, one short buss for his bride and the two of them were done with this blasted ordeal and closer to being out of there.

He pushed up the fragile, lacy veil to get the nuisance thing out of the way and bent down. For some Godunknown reason, Kelly’s eyes flashed an even more frantic message than before. He couldn’t imagine what she was worried about. This was just a kiss. A traditional gesture. It wasn’t going to take a quarter of a second. Surely she knew she had nothing to fear from him.

And then he kissed her.

The kiss was fast. Faster than a man could suck in a lungful of oxygen—hell, his bride had been a stronger brick through the ceremony than he had. Mac owed her a thankyou. He owed her a promise that she had nothing to fear from him, ever. And when his lips touched down, there was nothing on his mind but a quick, impersonal kiss that shared a mutual desire to get this over with.

But in that blink of time, something went haywire. He couldn’t explain it. It was just...her lips were warmer than a summer sun, and soft. Soft like spring, like the stroke of a restless silky breeze. She tasted young and sweet and vibrant, and it seemed like a thousand years since Mac had felt that way. He was a grown man. He’d put aside his boyhood idealism a century ago, but he suddenly remembered that time in his life when he’d been young, so stupid—young, back when love was everything and life of fered a nonstop excitement of possibilities. Until that second, he hadn’t remembered that huge, yearning, alluring hunger to love in years. He couldn’t fathom why a quartersecond kiss from Kelly could possibly have invoked it.

But when he swiftly lifted his head, two dots of color heated his cheeks. And the pulse in his throat was beating like an out-of-control battery.

Two

“How much farther?”

“About five miles.” Mac scratched his chin. “About a quarter mile less than the last time you asked me. Is there a problem?”

Now there was a hysterically funny question, Kelly thought dryly. She was freshly married to a stranger. The kiss that sealed their vows had shaken her socks off. The snowstorm had escalated to a mean-cold, wind-howling blizzard, with snow slooshing down so hard that even Mac’s elegant Mercedes’s windshield wipers could barely keep up. They’d turned off the highway a while back, and she hadn’t seen a single car on the road since, much less buildings or lights or any sign of civilized rescue potential if they got stranded—assuming they found anything open this late on a New Year’s Eve.

Offhand, yeah, she thought they had a few problems. Yet all those details seemed itsy bitsy compared to the serious problem troubling Kelly at the moment. “How long does it usually take you to drive home from the Fortune headquarters?”

“Fifteen minutes, twenty max. But it’s pretty hard to move faster than a crawl pace with this snow.”

“I know, Mac. I didn’t mean to sound impatient.”

“You’re not cold, are you? Because I could turn up the heat—”

“No, I’m fine.” He’d already cranked up the heater and defroster to full blast. She couldn’t be warmer if she were curled up in front of an oven.

“If you’re tired, you can put the seat back—”

His concern touched her, but the subject of exhaustion again teased her sense of irony. If anything in life were normal, she’d be snoozing right now. From the beginning of the pregnancy, she’d been prone to nap at the drop of a hat. And after all the stress of the wedding and reception, technically she should be as comatose as a zombie. But that kiss from Mac had shaken her whole equilibrium.

She knew he’d meant nothing by it. She knew she was imagining a potent, sizzling connection that had never happened. It was just hormones again. Kelly had had seven months to discover that pregnancy made a woman emotionally goofy. Impatiently she twisted in her seat. “I’m fine, not the least tired. And the car couldn’t be more comfortable,” she assured him.

Mac glanced at her again as if unconvinced, but of necessity his gaze zipped swiftly back to the road. She could barely see his face in the pitch-dark car—just a glimpse of his patrician profile and a flash of his dark eyes now and then. There simply wasn’t enough light to judge from his expression what he might be thinking—about the wedding or the weather or anything else. From the tone of his voice, though, Kelly understood he was deliberately trying to sound calm and quietly reassuring. “If you’re worried about the weather, try to take it easy. I’ve lived here all my life, which means I’ve driven in a hundred blizzards. This one has the makings of a doozy—I think we could be socked in for a couple of days—but we’ll be under cover before the worst of it hits. The roads are rough, but the problem is snow, not ice. Trust me, we’re not going to have any trouble making it home.”

“That’s good to hear.”

But when Mac caught her shifting in her seat again, he seemed to think his previous reassurances hadn’t been enough. “Kelly... this whole day’s been a pressure cooker, and I know you have to be worried about things. All kinds of things. But we were both honest with each other going into this, and we both want the same thing—to make this work out. I think if we just take it slow and easy, we’ll find answers for whatever we need to, one problem at a time. Try and believe it’s going to be okay, all right?”