Carole Buck - Zoe And The Best Man

The motorcycle pulled up at the curb in front of the church. It was then that Zoe realized there was a second rider on the bike. He was about the same height as the bearded behemoth but a lot less bulky. He was clad in tight, faded jeans, a grubby white T-shirt and a badly stained khaki jacket. His eyes were shielded by a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses.

She knew him.

Utterly.

Absolutely.

Without a shadow of a doubt.

The second rider was Gabriel James McNally Flynn.

A half a lifetime’s worth of carefully cultivated emotional equilibrium tilted into confusion in the space of a single, thunderous heartbeat. The poise that had held firm during encounters with presidents, princes and potentates—to say nothing of movie stars and international moguls—threatened to crack like an empty eggshell.

Time spun backward. Suddenly Zoe Alexandra Armitage was sixteen years old again…and terrified.

She shivered as Flynn dismounted from the motorcycle with fluent athleticism. After raking a hand carelessly through his short-cropped hair and slinging the strap of a battered leather duffel bag over his left shoulder, he traded high-five palm slaps with his jumbo-size companion. There was a brief conversation. The bearded man grinned broadly, revealing a goldsheathed front tooth.

A few more words were exchanged. Flynn jerked a thumb toward the church. The other man grinned a second time but shook his head. Flynn spread his hands, palms up, apparently acquiescing to the refusal. The movement pulled his khaki jacket taut across his well-muscled back.

The motorcyclist gunned the engine of his gleaming black bike. Then, astonishingly, he squared his brawny shoulders, raised his right hand and snapped off a textbook-perfect subordinate-to-superior salute.

The gesture was returned, quick and clean.

A moment later the motorcycle roared off down the street.

Her chest tight, her fingers plucking at the sleekly expensive fabric of her dress, Zoe watched as Flynn pivoted away from the curb and strode up the walkway to the church with the fine, feral grace of a jungle predator.

Luc Devereaux’s best man came to a halt a step or two away from her. He lifted his right hand and shoved his wire-rimmed sunglasses up on top of his head. He squinted against the lateafternoon light. Zoe had the fleeting impression that he was having trouble focusing.

“Immature” was not an adjective she ever would have used to describe the Flynn she’d known nearly sixteen years ago. Still, it had been possible back then to discern in his face a few traces of the boy he’d once been. Those traces were gone now, obliterated by age, exposure and experience. In appearance and attitude, he was implacably adult, insistently male.

There was a fine network of wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. A pair of deeply etched lines bracketed his long, clever mouth. His tanned skin fit hard over sharply angled cheekbones. The nose she recalled as having been ferrule straight canted slightly to the right, as though it had been broken and left to mend on its own. His left temple bore an old two-inch scar. A barely scabbed cut bisected his stubborn chin.

The hair on his head was still plentiful and predominantly brown, but the lightest strands were silver rather than sunbleached gold. The stubble that shadowed his jaw showed touches of gray, too.

He was a rootless adventurer. The absolute antithesis of the settled, civilized kind of man with whom she hoped to make a life. Yet Gabriel James McNally Flynn impacted on Zoe Alexandra Armitage like an explosion, blowing what she’d cherished as certainties about who she was and what she wanted to smithereens.

Was this what she’d been afraid of? she asked herself desperately, trying to keep her expression neutral. Had something deep within her somehow known that seeing Flynn again—just seeing him!—would threaten to overturn the stable existence she’d worked so assiduously to establish for herself?

Zoe felt her one-time rescuer’s hazel gaze travel down her body and back up. The assessment was intimate, as proprietary as the stroke of a palm against naked skin. For one mind-blowing moment she thought her legs might buckle beneath her. While she was scarcely an innocent, she’d never experienced such a powerful tug of sexual attraction.

And then Flynn’s emerald- and amber-flecked eyes met her blue ones.

There was a sizzling pause.

“You’re…late,” Zoe finally managed to say. While she seemed to have regained a modicum of control over her lower extremities, her ability to breathe had been severely compromised.

“Who—” he began in a husky-hoarse voice that sandpapered her tattered nerves. “Finally!”

Zoe’s lungs emptied abruptly in a sickening rush of air.

“Terry?” Flynn questioned, shifting his attention to a point behind her. He blinked several times, like a man not quite certain whether he should believe what he thought he was seeing.

“Well, it’s not the queen of England,” Peachy’s self-styled wedding organizer retorted, gliding forward. He winked at Zoe as he moved by her. She just stood, too shaken to respond. Too shaken to do much of anything. “So what’s your excuse, soldier? Did some nasty old civil insurrection mess up your travel plans?”

The question provoked a dry laugh. “Try a small monsoon.”

“Mother Nature can be such a bitch,” Terry quipped, then wrinkled his nose in disgust as he came within sniffing distance of the latecomer. “Ugh! Flynn! Making a dramatic, last-minute entrance is one thing. But that stench! I mean, what have you been doing? Swimming in sheep dip? Wrestling with rotting yak carcasses?”

“Don’t ask,” Flynn advised trenchantly. He slanted an odd glance at Zoe. She thought for a moment that he was on the verge of addressing her. Instead, he returned his gaze to Terry and said, “When I told Luc I’d get here, I warned him there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming first class. He said he’d arrange—”

“There’s hot water, cold beer and a clean tuxedo waiting for you,” Terry interrupted. “To say nothing of a whole church full of people and an organist who’s going to be reduced to playing the love theme from The Terminator if you don’t get yourself in gear right this second.”

Zoe stepped aside as the two men headed into the church. Her heart was thudding, her head throbbing. She was trying to make sense of Flynn’s response to her. Granted, it had been a long time since their previous encounter. And granted, she’d changed a great deal since then. Still. The man had acted as though…as though…

“Thanks for your help, sweetie,” Terry called over his brocade-covered shoulder.

“No problem,” she answered numbly, grappling with a turn of events that unraveled every scenario she’d spun about having a second meeting with the man who’d saved her life.

The possibility had never occurred to her.

Never. Ever. Not once.

But there it was, and she had no choice but to face the reality of it.

Gabriel James McNally Flynn didn’t remember her.

The instant he’d caught sight of the coolly elegant blonde standing in front of the church where his best friend was going to get married, Flynn had known with visceral certainty that he knew her. But it wasn’t until the last few moments of the wedding ceremony—right after the presiding minister had informed the groom that it was time to kiss the bride, to be specific—that he finally figured out who the hell she was.

Zoe.

Zoe Alexandra Armitage.

Goldilocks.

The realization hit him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the skull. Flynn hid his reaction to it, but just barely. His normally ironclad self-discipline had been undermined by weeks of physical hardship and emotional stress. He passed a swift prayer of thanks that he’d had the good sense to forgo the well-chilled bottle of beer Luc had offered him when he’d finished toweling off after his first indoor shower in nearly a month. Coupled with a dangerous lack of sleep, the ingestion of alcohol on an almost empty stomach probably would have destroyed his ability to disguise the shock that was resonating to the core of his soul.