Lori Wilde - There Goes The Bride (32 page)

“Hey!” he snapped. “Five and a half inches is average-sized!”

“Little Dick.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Why? What are you going to do? Kill me?”

“Not if you don’t give me a good reason. Word to the wise, calling me Little Dick is bordering on a good reason.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Excuse me. My bad manners.”

How ridiculous! Here she was, apologizing to a kidnapper. It took a lot to totally shake off a lifetime of indoctrination in proper etiquette. Although, she doubted Emily Post had penned anything on kidnapping protocol.

“Where are you taking me?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“Too bad.”

“Remove these handcuffs,” she demanded and then added, “Please.”

“Nope.”

“They’re hurting my wrists.”

“You’ll live, princess.”

“Let me go. I’ll pay you.”

He didn’t answer.

“I have money.”

“It’s not just about that.”

“No? What else is it about then?”

“Not my place to tell you.”

“Are you an enemy of my father? Is this some business deal gone awry?”

“Nope.” He sounded too damn casual. “Now be a good girl and just sit back and relax.”

Oh, God, this guy really was kidnapping her for real. What were the odds of someone plotting to kidnap her on her wedding day? The exact same day she’d already hired someone to kidnap her? Impossibly high and suspiciously coincidental.

Suddenly the kidnapper sped up and Delaney was thrown backward onto the floorboards again. Real terror struck her then. Hard and coppery-tasting.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“Some asshole is chasing us.”

“Where?” Delaney twisted around and tried to peer out the back of the van, but a dirty window and the lace veil blocked her view. She’d wished on it for a way out of her impending marriage and she’d gotten her wish, but certainly not in the way she had expected.

What was it Claire Kelley had said? You get your most heartfelt wish, not necessarily the thing you wished for most. Maybe this was cosmic punishment for wishing on the veil when she’d promised Claire she wouldn’t.

She crawled to the back of the van with an unformed plan for escape, her handcuffed wrists held out in front to brace herself in case she fell over again. The progress was slow because the train of her dress kept wadding up underneath her. She would shuffle forward a bit, stop, pull the nest of collected material out from under her knees, and shuffle forward again. Just as she reached the back window, the nut job behind the wheel swerved crazily and she went down, weeble-wobbling into the side of the van.

“Drive like a human being,” she hollered. “My parents won’t pay you a single dime if I’m dead.”

The word “dead” echoed in the empty confines of the van, and for the first time the true reality of the situation struck Delaney.

“He’s trying to cut me off,” the kidnapper whined.

Hope vaulted into her chest. Was it someone from the wedding party out to save her? Could it be her daddy? Was it Evan? Oh, dear, how could she ever look her fiancé in the eyes again once he learned she’d hired someone to kidnap her? “Who’s trying to cut you off?”

“Some son of a bitch in a red Ford pickup truck. Friend of yours?”

That tenuous hope blossomed into full-blown optimistic joy. Her heart sang.

Nick!

But how could it be Nick? He hadn’t been invited to the wedding. He didn’t even know where it was being held.

He’s a cop, he could figure it out.

But why would Nick be after her?

Her mind spun a crazy fantasy worthy of
The Graduate.
Nick had come to rescue her from an ill-conceived wedding in the tradition of Leo and Lucia. Only to discover she’d already hired Louie to take her hostage. Except that had gone haywire, and now she was being spirited away by some unknown kidnapper. What the hell kind of wish-fulfilling magic threads was the veil made out of?

She had to get a look out that window and see if it was indeed Nick. Delaney finally made it over to the back window for a peek outside just as the red pickup truck pulled into the left lane beside the delivery van. All she could see was the bumper.

Bummer.

“The red truck,” she called to the driver, “can you see the dashboard?”

“Lady, it’s taking all my concentration to keep us from getting run off the road.”

“Look in your side-view mirror. Can you tell if there’s a hula girl shimmying away on his dashboard?”

“I can’t tell. Hold on. I see something. Yep, there’s a hula girl shaking it up on his dashboard. Mean something to you?”

Hello, it was her Nick! Shaking things up.

Her insides knotted with emotion. She felt giddy and scared and happy and surprised and so many other things she couldn’t even name them all.

The right front and back tires of the van veered off the road and rattled along the shoulder. Delaney ended up toppling over again. At this rate, she might as well stay on the floor until Nick got her out of this mess.

The van was making ominous noises, tires thrumming against the uneven asphalt. The smell of tar melting hotly in the August sun burned her nose. Delaney’s mouth tasted of dry anxiety. Her knees and elbows stung from carpet burn. The driver was twisting the van to and fro, trying to outrun Nick.

Fear spun her head. Her heart slammed her blood through her veins as rapidly as a six-piston pump.

“This bastard’s crazy!” The driver accelerated. “Hang on, I’m gonna cut across the freeway, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

The van swerved dramatically. Car horns blared. Tires squealed. Delaney shrieked before the van ever slammed the concrete median separating the southbound lane from the northbound lane.

The impact jarred her teeth as they bumped over the barrier. Her heart stilled suddenly and her chest felt tense and cold. She was going to die like this. Handcuffed. Wearing an outrageously overpriced wedding dress that she’d chosen for her wedding to a man she didn’t love in the right way, while she secretly longed for another man. A different man.

Her heart stirred restlessly. The very man who was risking his life to come after her. Closing her eyes, she prayed Nick would have sense enough not to follow them over the median.

“He’s still coming after us.”

No, Nick, no,
she thought, but could not contain her elation. He was coming after her. No concrete median or big-city traffic was going to stop her brave, daring cop.

“Holy shit!”

“What, what?” Delaney’s eyes flew open. She struggled toward the back window again, desperate to see what was happening. An eighteen-wheeler’s horn blared. Brakes screamed.

“Your boyfriend in the red pickup . . . holy shit . . .”

“What is it, what is it?” she cried.

But the loud noise of metal smacking metal said it all.

“He just wiped out.”

Chapter 17

A
fter an SUV sideswiped his bumper, Nick battled physics to keep the pickup truck on the road. He squeezed the steering wheel in a death grip and his right leg quivered from the adrenaline rush and quick tromping from the brake to the gas pedal.

Cars swerved, drivers flipped him off. He spied a couple of people with shocked expressions on their faces, grabbing their cell phones, no doubt phoning 911.

Good. He could use all the help he could get.

In the meantime, he was hell-bent on catching up with the bastard in the white van who’d taken off with Delaney before the vehicle disappeared from Nick’s sight. His heart was willing; his pickup truck, however, was made of weaker stuff. The tires shimmied as he turned on his blinker and guided the clattering vehicle into the middle lane. His muffler had been knocked loose in the impact, but he had no time to worry about it.

Delaney needed him.

His pulse pumped hard and fast. Who had taken her hostage and why?

Why? Well, her father was one of the richest men in Houston. That was motive enough.

Nick’s cop mind wasn’t buying it. The kidnapping was too much of a coincidence, what with Delaney already hiring her own abductor. There had to be another connection, something important that he was missing.

But he couldn’t think. His emotions were strangling him, pushing him forward, stamping out caution and common sense. He was ready to fight. To battle anyone who got in his way. He was getting Delaney back.

He tromped on the accelerator, anxious to close the widening gap between him and the white van. In the distance, he heard the sound of sirens. He didn’t slow down. Nothing was going to keep him from his woman.

His woman?

What the hell was that?

Nick’s chest tightened. Okay, he was ready to admit it. He felt possessive of Delaney.

Up ahead, the van took the exit ramp. Nick tried to coax more power from the pickup, pushing the gas pedal to the floor, but nothing doing. The engine rumbled ominously. Nick swore.

He changed lanes, swerving around a slow-moving Caddy, and followed the van off the freeway.

There was a traffic signal up ahead turning from yellow to red. The van never slowed, just sailed right through the intersection, accompanied by a cacophony of honking horns.

“Dammit, Delaney,” he muttered, cursing because he knew no other way to deal with the intensity of his feelings. “Hang in there, babe, I’m coming, I’m coming.”

But just as he declared it, the pickup sputtered and died right in the middle of the crossroads.

Honey made James Robert take her home before she would tell him the truth. But even once they were there, she realized it was the hardest thing she would ever have to admit. She had no idea how to explain to her husband that the woman he’d been sleeping beside for thirty-four years had never really existed. That she’d been living a lie, that their marriage was a sham.

They’d sent the maid home and turned off the ringer on the phone. The neon numbers on the answering machine blinked wildly. Twenty-seven messages. Everyone wanting to know what had happened to Delaney. Honey wondered if any of the calls were from Evan, but she didn’t have the energy to think about him. She had enough problems on her hands. Evan and the Van Zandts would just have to wait.

James Robert sat on the leather sofa in the living room while Honey paced in front of him, still wearing her stiff, uncomfortable mother-of-the-bride dress and high heels.
Tap, tap, tap,
went her shoes as she moved back and forth, top teeth sunk into her bottom lip as she tried to decide how to begin.

“Just tell me,” James Robert said. “Why are you being blackmailed?”

Honey cleared her throat and glanced over at him. He looked at her with haunted eyes, pleading for her to deny everything. But her past had finally caught up with her. It was time for the truth. He deserved the truth. Even if afterward he told her he wanted a divorce. That he never wanted to see her again.

Her heart cleaved. This was a mess of her own making and she knew it. The rubber had smacked up against the road. Time for the truth.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she said at last.

James Robert blinked. “I don’t get it.”

“I’m not Honey Montgomery.”

“What are you talking about?”

Fear of losing everything in the world she loved cemented her throat. She shook her head. “I . . . I . . .”

“If you’re not Honey Montgomery, who are you?”

She took a deep breath and spoke the name she hadn’t said aloud in over thirty years. “My real name is Fayrene Doggett.”

“I don’t understand. How? Why?”

Honey sat down across from him, hands clasped in her lap, shoulders razor-straight the way she’d taught herself to sit. She wanted to duck her head to look away, but that wasn’t her style. She might be a liar and a fraud, but she wasn’t a coward.

James Robert’s eyes searched hers. He looked bewildered, confused, but not judgmental or angry. That would change. When he learned how she had deceived him, discovered who she really was deep inside.

“Let me get this straight. You’re not in the social registry? You’re not a Philadelphia blue blood?”

“No.”

He didn’t say a word—just studied her intently, as if she were some alien pod person who’d kidnapped his wife. In a way, she was. Honey wished he’d yell at her or curse or slam his fist into the expensive coffee table imported from Germany. But he did not.

The lie, her admission, his shock, her betrayal, cohered into a thick, dark wall of emotion and tension, vibrated the bleak air between them.

Honey spied the slightest quiver in his hands and her own body quaked in response.

The long moment of silence stretched between them. Sweat beaded on Honey’s upper lip in spite of the air-conditioning cooling their vast home to a balmy seventy-five degrees. She noticed how the lines around her husband’s eyes had deepened with the years. How the loss of their daughter had etched pain into his face. She wanted to reach out to stroke his cheek, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t deserve to touch him. Not after what she’d done.