3 Brides for 3 Bad Boys (24 page)

"I'm sorry," he said again.

It didn't help any more this time than it had before. She was sorry, too, but they had embarked on a path that she had no choice but to follow to completion.

She shrugged, wondering how to tell him the rest of it.

"The last thing I remember was watching you dance. You looked like an angel."

"So that was why."

He took a drink. "Why what?"

"You kept calling me angel instead of Fayre. The next day, after I woke up alone, I figured it was the name you used for all your women."

"I don't have a lot of women. I'm not a player."

"You could have fooled me."

"I wasn't myself that night, Fayre."

"So you've said." And, damn it, she believed him.

Which left her in a really bad place.

He'd been drunk, not himself, and the consequences of that night weren't going to sit well on him. She just knew it. She'd suspected before coming down to Mexico, but then she'd believed he deserved to have his life disrupted like hers was. She wasn't feeling all that self-righteous now.

Just dumbfounded and a little scared.

"Anyway, I called you angel because that's what you looked like to me with that big feather headdress and the white shimmery cape you used in your final number."

She stared at him, feeling the nausea returning. "You just described the outfit for the lead dancer in our show. I danced in the chorus."

She couldn't believe it. Not only had he not really had any feelings for her, but the lust at first sight he'd experienced had been for their show's lead, Candy.

It just figured.

"I…" He was at a loss for words, and she could understand why.

It was all such a mess.

"You must have come backstage looking for Candy and found me instead."

What were the chances? "There's something funny in that; give me a minute and I'll find it."

The hitch in Fayre's voice told Colton that she saw nothing humorous at all in the fact he'd believed her to be the angel he watched dancing onstage.

"You're the one I spent three hours talking to."

She looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "I'm the one you forgot. You remember Candy, who you never even spoke to, and you forgot me, the woman you married and had sex with. I'm supposed to feel better because we had a conversation you have no recollection of? Give me a break."

"I told you, I don't remember anything after the third glass of champagne." His subconscious did, though, and the dreams were enough to send him over the deep end without a paddle.

She snorted, her sensual mouth pursing. "You didn't have to remember anything to see me in your bed the next morning. And you still left without a word. I guess I was pretty unmemorable sober as well, wasn't I?"

He wanted to look away. Those green eyes were filled with accusation and a pain he couldn't deal with, but he forced himself to focus on her dead on.

"I woke up with the daddy of all hangovers and in bed with a stranger. Your face was hidden by your hair. I couldn't remember anything, and I was kicking my own ass mentally for having unprotected sex with a woman I'd never met before."

"We used condoms."

He rubbed his hand over his face. "Yeah. I was pretty relieved when I realized that. And I figured I owed you for taking the precautions because I'm pretty sure I didn't think of it."

"You didn't."

"Thank you for taking care of it."

She averted her face, and her bottom lip began to tremble. She bit it.

"What is it?"

Something really serious was bothering her, more than just him forgetting who she was. He could feel it. He didn't know how or why, but he was definitely in tune with this woman.

"We didn't use a condom the last time."

"Why the hell not?" Wrong thing to say.

He knew it the minute the words were out of his mouth, but by then it was too late.

Green eyes fried him with furious flames. "You want to know why we didn't use a glove the last time we made love?"

At least she wasn't calling it having sex again. That bugged him, and he didn't care why.

She leaned across the table. "You, Mr. Persuasive, wanted to make love again, but we'd used the last condom. You told me you were clean, and I knew I was. You touched me until I was dying with pleasure and then said, 'Don't worry about it, Fayre. Would it really be that bad to start a family right away? Let's make a baby, angel.' And I bought it."

Unease crawled up his insides.

He looked at the soda crackers she'd been steadily nibbling throughout their conversation. She didn't have Montezuma's Revenge, or a stomach bug.

"We made a baby, didn't we? That's why you tracked me down here."

She didn't say anything, but her expression said it all. "Hell."

She erupted out of her seat and glared at him. "Don't worry about it, Mr.

Denning. I don't expect anything from you. I was the idiot who believed in the fairy tale, and I'll be the one to deal with the consequences."

She went to sweep by him, but he stopped her. Again. She had a real thing for trying to leave before they were done talking. He supposed he couldn't blame her after the way he'd left her, but she couldn't drop a bomb like that and just leave.

They had to deal with the aftermath. "Wait."

"No. Tomorrow we file for divorce, and then you can forget you ever met me.
It
shouldn't be too hard."

He winced at the dig, but he didn't let her go. "I'm not going to forget you're pregnant with my baby."

"It's nothing to do with you."

"How can you say that? I'm your baby's father."

"You're nothing in my life, Mr. Denning. Nothing." She spat the words out with a passion that singed him.

"You don't plan to have the baby?"

Had she come all the way down here to ask him to pay for an abortion?

If her glare had been hot before, now it was sulfuric. "I'm not killing my baby for your convenience."

"I didn't ask you to." Just the thought made him sick. "You just said—"

"You said I was nothing in your life. I thought that meant you planned to get rid of the baby."

"Your communication skills need a lot of work."

"Moonbeam says the same thing." He tried for a small smile, but Fayre stood in stone-faced silence, not responding at all. "Look, you can't leave right now."

"I can, and what's more, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'll drive down to Puerto Vallarta tonight. You can meet me there tomorrow, and we'll file the paperwork."

Las Playas del Blanco had a courthouse of sorts, but he wasn't about to tell her that. They were filing for divorce over his dead body. "You can't drive all the way to Puerto Vallarta alone."

"Why not? I drove all the way here from Vegas by myself."

He didn't know what he'd thought—that she'd flown into Puerto Vallarta and taken the bus up maybe. Which was bad enough, but he'd never even considered that she'd driven all the way from Vegas on her own. "You're a woman."

"So?"

"That was a totally stupid thing to do. You could have been hurt, mugged, stopped along the way by men with ugly intentions. Anything could have happened to you."

Her little chin set at a stubborn angle, and he had a totally inappropriate-to-the-circumstances urge to kiss that luscious pink mouth until she was moaning with need.

"Nothing happened to me."

"Well, if you think I'm going to let you go traipsing off to Puerto Vallarta, you're straight-on crazy."

Her eyes widened with more surprise than anger.
"Like you have anything to
say about it."

"I have plenty."

"How do you figure that?" Belligerent, she was pretty damn enticing.

It gave him an atavistic urge to tame her fire. He wondered how he could have remembered any woman but this one. She was so hot, his insides burned just looking at her.

"I'm your husband," he reminded her with exasperation. "Not too long ago you were asking for proof of that."

"Well, I don't need it now."

"Why not?"

What was it with women? She'd been deeply offended by his doubt in the first place, and now she was acting equally offended that he didn't need to see the certificate to believe they were married.

"You're only my husband on paper, and that will change tomorrow." Her eyes glittered with challenge, and her entire body defied him.

He towered over her, so frustrated he was ready to explode. "Like hell that's going to change."

C h a p t e r F i v e

"
A
re you saying you want to stay married?"

Not in all the fantasies she'd had about her meeting up with Colton again had she entertained the concept he might want to stay married. In her mind, he'd made his contempt of the marriage clear when he'd disappeared the next morning without a word. Finding out he didn't remember any of it didn't change the initial premise—that she meant nothing to him.

It couldn't. Not after finding out she wasn't even the woman he'd intended to seduce that night. She wasn't his angel.

"Yes." His intensity was a little frightening, and she wanted to step back, creating some distance between them, but he still had a hold on her arms. "I definitely plan on us staying married."

"That's ridiculous."

"You're pregnant with my baby." One of his hands dropped to settle over her lower abdomen in a possessive gesture that scared her because it felt so right. "I talked you into getting this way. Staying married doesn't seem ridiculous to me. It seems like the right thing to do."

She'd been listening with rapt attention right up until he said it was
the right
thing to do.
Was she ever, just once in her life, going to be somebody's best choice instead of an obligation they felt they had to fulfill?

Okay, so she admired him for wanting to do the honorable thing, but couldn't he care about
her,
just a little? She couldn't live with a marriage motivated by his overdeveloped sense of honor.

"You can't build a marriage on guilt and a night of great sex." Especially one he couldn't even recall. "It takes more than that to merge two people's lives."

"According to you, it will be three people pretty soon." His hand caressed her tummy. "Six weeks ago, you believed our lives could merge just fine."

"I was… " She tossed around in her mind for an excuse for her unbelievably naive behavior.

He shook his head. "You already said you weren't drunk when you agreed to marry me; that means you meant it."

The reminder that she'd been the sober idiot while he'd been the drunk one snapped what was left of her emotional control. Using a move she'd learned in self-defense class, she broke his hold and sent the huge man tumbling to the galley floor.

It wouldn't have worked if he'd been willing to hurt her to keep her with him, but she'd known he wasn't and taken shameless advantage of it. Unwilling to wait around for him to decide how to deal with her again, she jumped over his long legs and rushed up the stairs to the boat's deck.

Seconds later, she vaulted onto the dock from the gangplank. Sprinting as if she were competing in the Olympic hundred-yard dash, she headed for her car. She'd left it parked near the taverna, which wasn't far from the dock.

If she was lucky, she'd reach it before he could catch up with her … if he chased after her at all.

"Fayre!"

Oh, he was chasing all right. She looked back over her shoulder and bit back a scream. He was gaining on her, and the look in his eyes was anything but tame.

She turned her attention back to the ground in front of her and tried to run faster. Her breath was already billowing in and out, and she could feel sweat slithering down her back and temples. Increasing her pace made it worse, but she didn't care. She had to get away from him.

She reached her little Beetle with a sense of relief that lasted as long as it took her to dig the key out of her pocket and get it into the lock on the driver's side door. Two huge hands landed on either side of her, blocking her from opening the car. Colton's overmuscled body pressed against her back, hemming her in as effectively as if she'd stepped into a closet made of bricks.

His breath wasn't nearly as labored as hers, and for that alone she wanted to kick him.

"What's the matter with you, Fayre?" He didn't shout, but she had no doubt about the level of his displeasure. The man was pissed. "You can't go running like that when you're pregnant. What if you'd tripped and fallen?"

"I'm stupid about men, not clumsy. I'm a dancer, remember?" Maybe she hadn't been his angel and the lead of the show, but Fayre could at least lay claim to graceful in her self-description.

Landing a job as a dancer in even the chorus of the follies was not something to scoff at.

"Yeah, well, you're also my wife." His voice rumbled next to her ear, sending shivers of awareness down to her toes. "You aren't going haring off anywhere in this little excuse for a car."

That was it!

She spun to face him and poked his chest with her forefinger. "You take that back. My car is wonderful!"

"Your car is a lime green toy only marginally larger than my bathtub." He wasn't looking at the car, however. He was looking at her, and from the expression on his face, her sweaty, bedraggled appearance didn't bother him one iota. His eyes were locked on her lips.

"It must be a big bathtub because my car is not a toy." How could he disparage Esmerelda that way? That little car was her pride and joy. She'd saved like a miser so she could buy one of the very first new VW Beetles when they were released.

"It is." And still his gaze did not waver from her lips. "I'm a big man."