Page 38 of Wedding Crasher

They both stared at the little bloom of blood on her fingertip and knew what was supposed to happen next. There wasn’t a convenient box of tissues on hand to blot it, and no one interrupted them with a well-timed knock on the door. Gabe’s warm hand closed over hers, and Marla’s breath hitched in her throat. He lifted it to his lips and sucked her fingertip gently. He didn’t take his eyes off hers and for a few seconds Marla felt as if he could see right inside her head, see just how much she wanted him to carry on. She’d been right all along. Hewasa vampire, and he’d glamoured her into submission. This was not her fault.

Jesus, his mouth was hot. And wet. And way, way too sexy to pull away. Up until that moment in her life, Marla had no idea about the secret vein that ran directly from her fingertip to her clitoris. But as Gabe circled his tongue slowly around her to seal the wound, each little suck on her finger fired off an answering volt of electricity between her legs. She closed her eyes, afraid he’d be able to see it there.Or did he know already?Marla squirmed in her seat, too turned on to get her breath properly. Or to care. On an erotic scale of one to ten, it was an eleven. Twenty. To infinity and beyond. The knuckles of her hand bumped against his jaw, rough stubble against soft skin. She suddenly wanted to know exactly how good that stubble would feel against her skin in much more private places. Her inner thighs, for instance. She almost cried out in protest when he slid her finger from his mouth and placed a whisper kiss on her palm, a barely there trail of his tongue against the vulnerable pulse point inside her wrist. She never wanted to open her eyes again.

But if shehad, she’d have seen a very dejected Rupert turn and slope away from the window, where he’d just spent the most crushing five minutes of his life.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was just after nine in the morning on the first Tuesday in May, and Emily lay curled in the crook of Tom’s shoulder, relishing the decadent pleasure of a long and lazy extended bank holiday. Around them everyone else had gone back to work this morning, but they’d planned otherwise and closed the curtains against the world. She fuzzily contemplated getting up to make coffee as the hairs on Tom’s chest tickled her closer to wakefulness. He traced sleepy circles low on the hollow of her back with his thumb, halfway towards soothing her to sleep and halfway towards turning her on.

She wriggled closer, and he slid his hand between her legs to settle the question.

This was who they were.

Emily and Tom. Tom and Emily.

The coffee could wait.

Half an hour later and fully awake, Emily slipped out of the warm circle of Tom’s arms and padded downstairs to make coffee. She scooped up the newspaper and letters from the mat as she passed and dropped them on the kitchen table. The last couple of weeks had been amazing, like a second honeymoon. Except for one thing. One painfully huge, enormous elephant in the room.

Dan.

What had happened on her birthday had been a long time coming, an inevitable consequence of the Chinese water torture-style erosion of their marriage. She had hit rock bottom, and Dan had been her soft landing. A soft landing that she’d paid a daily penance for ever since with the ever-present weight of guilt on her shoulders. She could, of course, tell Tom. But who would she really be doing it for? Did he have a right to know, or was it better to shoulder the guilt and spare him the pain? She’d turned the question over in her mind all day, every day, and each night she’d tussled with it in her dreams.

She skim-read the doom and gloom headlines as she waited for the kettle to boil, and her eyes were pulled back again to the date. May 2nd.May 2nd?How had her head become so full of other stuff that she’d managed to stop watching the calendar more closely than a death row inmate? She grabbed her trying-to-conceive diary from the kitchen shelf and fumbled through the pages with shaky fingers. April 2nd, day one of cycle. April 16th, ovulation due. And there, with a bold red ring around it, was April 30th. The day her regular-as-clockwork period was due. Two days ago. She sank down onto the nearest chair. Elation soared through her heart like a songbird, followed by a great crashing tsunami of fear. Three minutes later, a trip to the bathroom delivered the life-changing news she’d previously longed for. A precociously bright line popped up with indecent haste in the window that up to now had remained so stubbornly empty month on month.

She was pregnant.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘Champagne, please. Your best.’ Marla cringed a little at Rupert’s dismissive tone, and smiled at the unimpressed waitress.

‘Are we celebrating?’ She shuffled along the bench seat in the booth to give herself some breathing space from Rupert, who’d shunted himself in right next to her.

‘Ta-da!’ He whipped the freshly printed wedding supplement for the upcoming Sunday edition out of his briefcase and slapped it down on the table in front of them. ‘Look. Go on, centre spread.’

She smoothed it out on the restaurant table and studied the splash of wedding pictures from Alaric and Gelvira’s big day.The Heraldphotographer had managed to perfectly capture the essence of the day with his lens, the pictures bubbled over with fun and love. The accompanying piece on the chapel was undeniably fabulous PR, and would hopefully encourage the villagers to feel proud of the unique chapel in their midst.

She laughed at the shot of Bluey in the top hat, and then found herself unable to look away from Gabe in the background of the frame. It had been just over two weeks since the finger-sucking incident, and she’d gone to considerable lengths to avoid him. She could only thank her lucky stars that on that memorable day, Rupert had texted to let her know that he’d be there in five minutes, or else who knows what he might have walked in on. She badly needed to cool her engines as far as Gabe was concerned. She was old enough to have learned the hard way that a physical reaction to someone meant next to nothing; being turned on by a hot body was never to be confused with real feelings. She couldn’t deny that the chemical reaction between herself and Gabriel fizzed like popping candy, but she also knew that too much candy would make a girl sick.

Marla accepted a glass of champagne from Rupert with a grateful smile, and clinked obediently when he held his own glass out with an expectant look.

‘It’s brilliant. Thank you, Rupert.’

‘Should piss on Gabriel Ryan’s bonfire, anyway,’ he smirked. Marla’s smile faltered. As much as she appreciated Rupert’s help, sometimes she wondered if he was more interested in saving the chapel or bringing Gabe down. He was right though; the article would be a strong piece of supportive evidence to include in the dossier she was preparing to submit to the council on the matter. The petition might have been sidelined, but she was still intent on lobbying the council to make them see sense about the situation.

The feel of Rupert’s hand massaging her knee under the table brought her swiftly back to the present.

‘So, am I the best boyfriend you’ve ever had, or what?’

She laughed and rolled her eyes. ‘And so modest, too.’

‘Should I take that as a yes, then?’ Marla coughed on her champagne.Jeez, it wasn’t a rhetorical question.He actually wanted an answer. But then, it was one of those questions with only one possible answer anyway, wasn’t it?

‘Um … let me think.’ She smiled and played for time.Washe the best boyfriend she’d ever had? Was he even her boyfriend? It seemed such an arbitrary title. She hadn’t planned on their relationship status progressing beyond friends with benefits, yet they’d somehow slipped into the more official roles of boyfriend and girlfriend regardless. He knew how she took her coffee. She knew his shoe size from a recent shopping trip. He rubbed her aching shoulders at the end of a busy day. She’d mastered the art of Welsh rarebit because he’d mentioned in passing that it had been his childhood favourite. If these familiarities and kindnesses could be considered markers of a relationship, then yes, Rupert was indeed her boyfriend, and given how bad her other boyfriends had been, he, bizarrely, stood every chance of being the best one she’d had to date. He wasn’t married to anyone else, for a start, which gave him a big advantage over the other two men who’d made up her significant romantic history to date. She enjoyed his company, and he could make her squirm with pleasure in bed – or at least hehadbeen able to, before a certain dark-eyed Irishman had set up his X-rated camp temporarily in her head. Rupert was entertaining. He made her laugh, and behind closed doors he could be kind and thoughtful. But the most important thing about Rupert was that her heart was safe. He would never break it, because it would never be his to break.

‘You know what, Rupert? I can hand on heart say that, yes, you are the best boyfriend I’ve ever had.’

He leaned in and kissed her for longer than she was entirely comfortable with in a restaurant, even if they were tucked away in a booth.

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