Two Nights with His Bride (3 page)

She had a tail.

A
tail
.

He would never pry that image out of his mind.
Two nights in the woods with Nancylynn?
Engaged
Nancylynn? Engaged Nancylynn in a sexy bunny costume?

Yep. He was a dead man.

“So, Mister Mountain Man,” Polly Parker purred as she leaned into his side and stroked his biceps, “do you have a license for those muscles?”

Seriously?
She was a client, so he didn’t want to be rude, but damn it was a struggle not to roll his eyes. He forced himself
to give her a polite grin. “I do, but it’s back in the office.”

“Maybe you could show it to me sometime.”

The thought of TV starlet Polly Parker hitting on him would’ve once fueled his fantasies. Her doing it in person? Not so much. Before he could think of a way to discourage her, Nancylynn walked out of his store looking even cuter than she had as a bunny. The shorts were modest, and she was
probably a little less than average height for a woman, but they still seemed to leave miles of leg bare. She wore the fleece jacket zipped nearly to her neck. It swallowed up her not-very-curvy body, but thanks to the damn bunny costume he knew the curves she had were far too tempting for his mental health. Her dyed blond hair shifted in the breeze as she made her way through a group of customers
heading for the store, and he wondered why she’d changed its color. Naturally, it was a deep, dark red that had always made her stand out in a crowd. He could still remember spotting her hair as she hid in a hayloft as he made out with a girlfriend in one of the empty stalls below. These days her hair would blend in with that straw. For some reason, that struck him as a shame.

She joined them
and drew in a deep breath as she clasped her hands in front of her. “We just need to wait for one more person, and then we’ll be ready to go.”

Polly’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“Faye. I invited her to come, and she can’t wait.”

Ruby let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. I thought you were going to say Jared was coming, and I was about to put my foot down.”

Wyatt screwed up one side of his face.
“Why would Jared come?”

“Because he can’t let Nancy out of his sight.”

Nancy’s face flushed. “Of course he can. Do you see him here now?”

Ruby held up her hands. “All I’m saying is he tried to find out what we were doing this weekend, and he was pissed that I wouldn’t tell him.”

“Isn’t this a bachelorette party?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah.”

Why the hell would any man crash his fiancée’s bachelorette
party?
That time was sacred, just as a man’s last time going out with his buddies as a single man was. Wyatt kept the question to himself, but the conversation made his uneasiness grow. “Well, I’ve got a six-person raft tied to the trailer, so one more is no problem. You could even invite someone else, too.”

“No, just Faye,” Nancylynn said decisively.

They only had to wait a few more minutes
for Nancylynn’s assistant, a dark-haired pixie wearing retro glasses and purple eye makeup that would do interesting things once they hit the water. As soon as she arrived, Wyatt hustled the women into his van. Most of them climbed into the back, and Nancylynn hopped up into the front passenger’s seat. He’d already hooked up the trailer with the boat, and soon they were on their way.

“Where are
we going?” Nancylynn asked.

“Gardiner.”

“Where’s that?” Ruby asked.

“Just north of Yellowstone,” Nancy replied.

“Wait,” Ruby said, “I thought we were rafting
in
Yellowstone.”

“There’s no rafting in the park itself,” Wyatt explained, “but we’ll be on the Yellowstone River going through Paradise Valley. And it’s as spectacular as the name suggests. I’ll go over a full briefing when we get there,
so for now feel free to enjoy the scenery and keep an eye out for bald eagles. We grow ’em big around here.”

Polly gasped and pressed her face to the glass. They drove nearly an hour before arriving at the spot where they would put the raft into the river, and they all clambered out of the van. “I’m going to unload the boat. You guys should load up on sunscreen and put on these wetsuits. Water’s
colder than it looks this time of year.” He handed them each a Farmer Jane and got busy. Laughter bounced off the rock walls either side of the river, and he couldn’t help but smile. Women always seemed to take the Farmer Janes in stride, laughing at how they looked in the sleeveless wetsuits, while men usually grumbled about their Farmer Bills. Of course, men’s bodies looked pretty ridiculous
in them, while women’s bodies had one great advantage.

“Holy cow! My boobs look
amazing
in this!” Polly shouted.

Yep, that was it. With their front zipper, the tight suits held in all those areas women seemed to think of as problems—and Wyatt thought of as assets—while pushing their breasts up and out. Even women with modest cleavage ended up with great racks.

He tried not to look at Nancylynn
as he unloaded the gear. It annoyed the hell out of him that he’d been set up like this. So far, he’d managed to avoid the endless hassle her wedding had caused various businesses in town. Everywhere he went he heard offhand remarks about her changing her mind about music or flowers or whatever the hell else. As much as he admired her for wanting to promote local businesses, she hadn’t seemed
to grasp how much a big wedding could throw a little town into a tizzy.

He’d thought he was safe, since his business had nothing to do with weddings—well, except for that one with the bride and groom who’d met while fly-fishing and wanted him to outfit all their guests with rods and reels. Now
that
was his kind of wedding, not the frou-frou Hollywood affair that hemorrhaged money as a way to
avoid focusing on the detail that mattered most—preparing for a lifelong marriage, not an hour-long ceremony.

But whatever. Nancylynn wasn’t his responsibility and hadn’t been for a long time.

When he had the boat and gear out and had parked the van where one of his staff would pick it up later, he called the women over to the edge of the water, where he held onto the raft. “First order of business
is our safety briefing. We’re going to have a lot of fun and see some incredible wildlife, but my most important job is keeping you guys safe. At all times, you need to listen to me. If I tell you to paddle hard, you paddle hard. If I tell you to sit down or lean a certain way, you do it. I want us all to have a great time this weekend, and it would really suck if someone drowned.”

Nancylynn
pressed her lips together as if trying to suppress a smile.

“There’s very little chance of the boat flipping, but if it does and you end up in the water, hold onto your paddle and float on your back with your feet facing downriver. I’ll climb onto the raft and flip it over, and then you can swim toward me and I’ll help you onto the raft.”

“What if we lose our paddles? Will we drown?” Polly asked.

“Your life vests will keep you afloat—”

“So will your boobs,” Faye muttered. Nancy elbowed her ribs, and she shut up.

“But you need to hang onto your paddles because if we lose them, we’ll be up a shit creek without a…” He looked at them expectantly.

“Paddle.”

“Good. So don’t lose them.”

An uncomfortable heat generated around his crotch, the same kind of prickly, hair-raising sensation of
being watched without his knowledge, and his gaze shifted across the four women. Sure enough, Ruby’s stare was locked on his groin like a starving rottweiler eying a kielbasa. He fought the urge to cover his junk.

This was going to be the longest two nights of his life.

‡

“I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”

—Rita Rudner

S
everal groups of
rafters and kayakers wandered past on their way to the river, and Nancy adjusted the floppy brim of her new sun hat so it shielded whatever parts of her face her sunglasses didn’t.
There were times she wanted to be recognized—like when she wanted to eat at an overbooked restaurant or get upgraded to first class—and there were times she didn’t. Standing a few feet from Wyatt when he wore only the bottom half of a skintight neoprene wetsuit, leaving his tanned chest and arms bare, was one of the latter.

“I think we’re all set,” Wyatt said. “We just need to put on our life
vests and get in the boat.”

“Wait!” Polly threw her hand up. “We need to document this moment. Here, Faye.” She thrust her phone into Nancy’s assistant’s hands. “Take a picture of us.”

“Faye should be in the picture, too,” Nancy said.

Faye shook her head. “I’m totally fine skipping this one. Let me get one of you all in the raft, and then I’ll climb in.”

Nancy narrowed her eyes. “You’re not
going to push us off and run for the van are you?”

Guilt swept across Faye’s face. “Uh…”

“Take the picture of us standing on the shore. That way we can tackle you if you try to escape.”

“Crap,” Faye muttered. But she lifted the phone and looked at the screen. “Okay, get close to each other.”

Polly nearly knocked Nancy over in her eagerness to cuddle up next to Wyatt, and annoyance snapped
through Nancy. Then Ruby plastered herself to the other side of him, and suddenly the scene looked like a promo shot of a sexy, shirtless wilderness guide with a couple of
Playboy
bunnies. She shared a look of exasperation with Faye.

“It might be good if Nancy was in the picture, too,” Faye said, her voice dry. “Y’know, since it’s her weekend. Just a suggestion. Feel free to do whatever the hell
you two want. You have since she got engaged. Why stop now?”

Wyatt dislodged Polly and stretched out his hand toward Nancy. “Come stand next to me.”
Please,
his gaze silently added.

Interesting. Most heterosexual men would be soaking up the attention. She felt weirdly glad he was so uncomfortable with it that he’d practically beg her to rescue him.

Polly pouted but gave up her space to let
Nancy in. Wyatt looped one arm around Ruby’s shoulders and his other around Nancy’s. His hand rested on her shoulder in a purely innocent, friendly way, but heat spread from his fingers down to her heart. She suppressed a shiver and made sure her body was angled toward the camera, not him.

“Make sure you get my boobs in the picture.” Polly pulled the front zipper down a bit more and adjusted
her cleavage.

Faye rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, they’re pushed up so high I can hardly see your face. Everyone ready? On the count of three, say
anti­dis­establish­ment­arian­ism
. One, two—”

“Cheese!”

The phone clicked, and Faye handed it back to Polly, who showed the picture to Nancy. “Okay if I tweet this?”

She looked closely at it. At one time in her life, she would’ve checked that her
eyes were open, her facial expression wasn’t stupid, and her nipples were fully covered. At some point in the past eight months, her questions had funneled down to just one:
Will Jared be okay with this picture?

He didn’t like seeing her with other men, something she understood because ugly creatures twisted inside her when she saw pictures of him cuddling up with other women—a hard thing to
avoid in their line of work.

She thought this picture would be okay. Sure, Wyatt was shirtless and had the tanned, sculpted-from-stone torso that men in L.A. spent eight-hour days in the gym to achieve. And his hand was on her shoulder. But there were a couple inches of fresh air between their bodies, and Ruby’s seductive pose on his other side seemed to emphasize that space even more.

Then
again, sometimes he reacted to things she never would’ve expected him to, and she really didn’t need the frustration right now. They’d found plenty to argue about throughout the wedding planning process, and they still hadn’t agreed on the musical selection. Why poke a pissed-off bear? “You know what? Let’s keep this one just for us. Don’t tweet it.”

Polly’s lips thinned in an
Are you kidding
me?
expression, and Nancy gave her an apologetic shrug. “Can’t we just keep some things private?”

“I’m annoyed because I know
why
you want to keep this private.”

“All right,” Wyatt said. “Life jackets and helmets on, and let’s get going.”

Maybe seeing Wyatt again so unexpectedly—being confronted with a past she thought she’d left behind—sparked a few realizations, but she didn’t like the thoughts
tumbling through her head as Wyatt helped her into the raft.
Jared would be so pissed if he saw Wyatt holding my hand like this as I climb into the raft. Should I have let Polly tweet that picture? It’s totally innocent, but sometimes he sees things I don’t.

Her rational brain argued with the self-doubt.
He sees things that aren’t there. He gets jealous for no reason.

It’s because he loves me
so much.

But sometimes I don’t like the ways he shows it.

She clasped her paddle as Wyatt pushed the raft into the current and hoisted himself into it. Water streamed off his legs, and heat radiated off him as he settled next to her. She could look at him and see he was an attractive man, just like she could look at Ruby, Polly and Faye and see they were attractive women. It didn’t mean she
was attracted to them.