Stand-in Groom (10 page)

Johnny had to laugh. “Well, that would make the choice a little tougher. I’d see if we could compromise—you’d put off selling the business for a year and after that I’d go to Dallas.”

“What if the deal wouldn’t wait a year? What if it had to happen immediately?”

She was damned good at thinking up worst-case scenarios. “God, Chelsea, I don’t know.”

“Or here’s a good one: What if I didn’t tell you
about the deal until after it had been done? What if you didn’t have a choice? What if I just came home and said, ‘Guess what, honey? We’re moving to Dallas!’”

Johnny was silent.

“Both my mother and Sierra have lived that scenario more than once,” she told him. “But I refuse to put myself into that situation. Because if it were
you
who had to go to Dallas, and I was the one who had to give up my job and my home and my friends … I wouldn’t go.” She gazed at him unblinkingly. “And
that’s
why I’ll never get married.”

“Hey. Hey, Chelsea. Seat-belt sign’s on. We’re coming in for a landing. …”

Chelsea stirred. She was so comfortable and
so
soundly asleep, but now someone was touching her shoulder, trying to wake her up.

“Time to sit up,” the voice said again. It was a familiar voice, husky and deep and sexy. She’d recognize that voice anywhere. It was … It was …?

“If you sit up, you can see the sunrise. It’s incredible—you’ve got to get a look at this.”

The voice was very persuasive—and very
familiar. Why couldn’t she remember who it belonged to?

“Please let this just be a dream,” Chelsea mumbled, snuggling into her pillow. “I’m too tired to wake up.”

“Come on, sleepyhead, open your eyes.”

“They’re open,” she murmured.

He laughed, and she remembered who he was. He was her husband.

Her
husband
…?

Chelsea opened her eyes and found herself staring directly at the fly on Johnny Anziano’s pants. She sprang up, bumping her back on the tray table in front of her seat and hitting her head on the luggage compartment.

She had been sleeping with her head in his lap.

“Whoa,” he said, reaching out to steady her and help her down into her seat.

“I’m sorry.” She was out of breath, her heart pounding. “I didn’t know I’d taken over your seat as well as mine.”

“I didn’t mind.”

Chelsea found herself gazing into Johnny’s chocolate-brown eyes. He was smiling very slightly
and she knew he was telling the truth. He hadn’t minded. In fact, on the contrary …

Her hair was falling down, and she used the excuse to look away from him as she pulled the remaining pins free. Searching her handbag, she found her brush and ran it through her hair.

“Check out the sunrise,” he said, gesturing out the window.

It was amazing. The tops of the clouds were pink and orange and glowing. It didn’t look real, yet there they were.

There they were, indeed.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Did you sleep at all?” Chelsea had to ask.

Johnny didn’t say yes or no. He just smiled. “I’m fine.”

In fact, he was better than fine. True, he hadn’t slept, but he hadn’t wanted to sleep. Chelsea had fallen fast asleep, leaning against the side of the plane. But then she’d shifted, trying to get comfortable, resting her head against his shoulder. He’d pulled up the armrests that were between their two seats in an effort to make her even more comfortable, and his movement had pushed her down so that her head was on his lap.

That had fueled a few hundred thousand fantasies or so.

He’d allowed himself the luxury of touching her silky-smooth hair. It was baby fine and so soft underneath his fingers, glistening in the dim cabin light like the most precious gold.

He’d spent the night watching her gentle breathing, letting her hair slide between his fingers, thinking about all that she’d told him.

If Chelsea loved him,
really
loved him, there was no place he wouldn’t go to be with her. Dallas, Boston, Timbuktu. If she were there, he’d be there, guaranteed.
If
she loved him.

But she’d made it more than clear that love wasn’t on her agenda.

He’d spent some time thinking about Benton Scott. Chelsea had been in love with the man—maybe she was still in love with him. If there were ever a guy more different from Johnny than night was from day, it was Benton Scott.

Could the man’s name sound any more Anglo-Saxon? He was one of Troy’s
Harvard
chums. He was the crown prince of the “us” club, while Johnny was the heir apparent of “them,” born into
his place—or lack of place—in the social registry, the same way Bent Scott had been born into his.

Money. Education. Bent Scott had it over Johnny in every way imaginable. Looks. A woman who went for fair-haired, blue-eyed, slender men like Bent wouldn’t give Johnny a second glance.

Night and day.

He’d had to stop and untangle a lock of Chelsea’s hair from where it had gotten caught around his wedding band, and he’d realized something he’d been trying his best to ignore.

It wouldn’t take much for this woman to entangle herself around his heart. If he wasn’t careful, he could very easily fall head over heels in love … with his wife.

“Y
OU SURE
I can’t talk you into coming into the water?” Johnny asked. “It’s
great
. You should see the fish, just swimming around out there—all colors, like something you’d see in someone’s tank, only
huge
. They’ll swim right up to you.”

Chelsea looked up from her powerbook to see Johnny smiling at her, water dripping off of his hard-muscled body, his wet hair plastered against his head, water beading on his eyelashes.

His bathing suit was the loose-fitting, knee-length kind, but on him, it looked transcendently sexy.

Standing there on the white sand, with the turquoise Caribbean ocean and the crystal-blue Caribbean sky behind him, her husband looked like a walking, breathing advertisement for hedonistic temptations.

Husband in name only, she reminded herself.

He held out his hand. “Come on, Chelsea. You can do whatever you’re doing later, can’t you?”

She steeled herself before looking into his eyes. “I really can’t,” she lied. “I have to fax these reports to Moira first thing in the morning.”

He sat down on the edge of the lounge chair next to hers. “Okay,” he said reasonably. “You take a couple of hours, finish up those reports, and then we’ll have dinner together. I was reading one of the guidebooks about this place called the Mafali—it’s an open-air restaurant up on the side of the mountain, overlooking the harbor. The food’s not fancy—mostly grilled steaks, but the view’s supposed to be—”

“I can’t.”

“—fabulous. Why not?”

He knew damn well why not. Sure, she could give him more excuses. She had more reports to write, more work to do. She’d brought enough
with her to keep her occupied every waking moment of this trip. But she didn’t want to play games.

“I don’t want to have dinner with you,” she told him bluntly. “I don’t want to pretend that we’re newlyweds, I don’t even want to be friends with you. I think it would be best if we just went our separate ways over the next three days.”

Johnny laughed. “This is perfect,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Here I’ve gone and
married
you, and you
still
won’t go out on a date with me. How pathetic is that?”

It was pathetic. But she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t dare let herself get any closer to him. Instead of waking up with her head in his lap, God knows where she’d find herself waking up next.

“I can’t talk you into changing your mind?”

Chelsea shook her head. She refused to acknowledge the disappointment she could see in his eyes. She focused all of her attention on her power-book screen as she tried to distance herself from him, to pull back, to not care. After all, disappointment was a part of life.

From the corner of her eye, she could see him, still sitting next to her, just watching her work for
several long minutes after she had, in a sense, dismissed him.

Finally, he stood up and walked away.

Chelsea looked up then, unable to resist watching him head for the resort bar, unable truly to keep her distance, despite what she would have him believe.

Because she cared. Somehow Giovanni Anziano had gotten under her skin, and try as she might, she couldn’t help but care.

“Do the names Edward and Susan Farber ring any bells?” Johnny said into the telephone as soon as Chelsea picked up.

“Um,” she said, “yeah. The Farbers. Friends of my parents—from the country club, I think?” He could picture her doing a mental double take, realizing what he had asked her. Her voice went up an octave. “Oh my God, are they
here
?”

“They’re sitting in the resort dining room right this very minute,” he told her.

Chelsea swore sharply. “Have they seen you?”

“Of
course
they’ve seen me.” Johnny let his frustration ring in his voice. This trip wasn’t turning
out the way he’d hoped—not by a long shot. The last time he’d even gotten within range of Chelsea had been two days earlier, in the afternoon, on the beach. She’d been plugged into her computer and had barely even looked up to tell him to forget about dinner, forget about talking, forget about
anything
. She wasn’t interested. Since then, she’d done her best to avoid him. “You don’t honestly expect that I’d recognized
them
after meeting them for fifteen seconds in a receiving line—two out of the five hundred and something people I met for the first time a few days ago?”

“You sound annoyed.” There was real surprise in her voice.

“I
am
annoyed. You better get your butt down here, unless you want Eddie and Sue getting the word back to Mumsy and Dadsy that they saw Chelsea’s bridegroom eating dinner all by himself three days after the wedding.”

“Can’t you come up—pretend we’re ordering in tonight?”

“No,” Johnny told her flatly. “I was already sitting in the restaurant when they saw me. I told them you were running late—that you’d be down in a minute.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” she finally asked.

He had to answer her truthfully. “No,” he said. “Not mad. Disappointed. I thought we were starting to become friends.”

He heard her sigh, heard the rustling of papers on the other end of the telephone. “Have you ordered your dinner yet?”

“Yes, I did. I thought I’d give the so-called chef a chance to ruin some swordfish steaks tonight.”

She laughed nervously. “Wow, this is a side of you I’ve never seen before.”

“Yeah, well, I guess the honeymoon’s over, huh?”

“Could you order me a large salad?” she asked. “No cheese, no bacon, vinaigrette dressing on the side? Then give me three minutes, and I’ll be right down.”

Johnny hung up the phone and briefly closed his eyes. God bless the Farbers. Chelsea was going to have dinner with him.

It took Chelsea a little bit longer than three minutes, but not much. When Johnny spotted her coming into the lobby, she was wearing a loose-fitting,
long flowing blue island print sundress, and her hair was up on top of her head.

She looked beautiful, and Johnny let himself stare while she was still all the way across the room, while she stopped at the Farbers’ table and said a brief hello. He knew that once she sat down across from him, he wouldn’t be able to look at her this way. She wouldn’t want him to.

How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this situation?

“Hi,” she said almost shyly, and he rose to his feet to greet her.

“How’s work?” he asked, sitting down across from her.

There was a candle in the middle of the table, and its flickering flame threw light and shadows across Chelsea’s face as she gazed at him. “I’ve gotten quite a bit done.” She looked out across the patio, toward the beach and the moonlit water. “It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?”

Johnny felt a flash of frustration. Small talk. They could go on like this all night. But he didn’t want to talk about the weather. He had bigger fish to fry. He leaned forward. “I don’t understand what the problem is, Chelsea,” he told her. “I
signed the agreements you wanted me to sign, and I promised to keep sex out of the picture. I gave you my word, but you won’t trust me. And I’m finding that hard to deal with.”

He more than expected her to slip into Ice Princess mode and regard him with haughty disdain. But she didn’t. Instead, she sighed, and gazed out at the moonlight, unable to meet his eyes. Up close like this, she looked a little anxious and a little tired, as if she weren’t sleeping well at all. “I guess you don’t want to talk about the weather.”

“The weather here is perfect. There’s nothing to say about it.”

Chelsea took a sip from her water glass, trying to pretend that her hand wasn’t shaking as she glanced up at him. “So what
do
you want to talk about? My deeply rooted problem with trust? It probably goes back to my childhood—we could be here for quite some time.”

“I’ve got time.”

Chelsea let herself really look at the man sitting across the table from her. He was quite possibly the man they had in mind when they coined the phrase
tall, dark, and handsome
. He usually seemed to be on the verge of smiling—except for
now. Right now he was uncharacteristically solemn, his dark eyes sober yet no less intense as he watched her.

“Maybe we could start by talking about something easier,” Chelsea said.

“You’re afraid of me, because I’m legally your husband,” he guessed with unerring perception.

She drew in a deep breath. “Or we could start with something even harder.”

“Or maybe you’re afraid that you’re going to like being married to me too much.”

Chelsea forced a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous—”

“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is, then?” He spoke softly, urgently. He really wanted to know. “We were doing fine on the flight from Vegas, then all of a sudden, we’re at the hotel and you’re telling me that you don’t even want to be my
friend?
What the hell is that about? What did I do? Did I offend you in some way? Chelsea, did I say or do something that makes you think you can’t trust me?”