Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) (10 page)

He woke her up as they were turning into the courthouse parking lot. She ditched the cap and wrestled the sticky rubber band out of her hair, running her fingers through it for a moment in a futile attempt to get her curls under control. She considered slicking on a coat of lipstick and rejected the idea at once. Why pretend this was anything other than the final step of a business agreement?

One hour and a stream of words that flew by in a blur later, she was married.

Staring at the man who’d just sworn before what might have been a fish-and-game commissioner to love and cherish her until death—the official had insisted on “getting fancy with the lingo, folks”—she felt shaky and walked a little too close to the edge of crying. When Spencer simply looked at her after the official finished, and stuck out a hand, she blinked furiously and shook it.

“Congratulations,” said the man, who’d clearly seen odder things.

“Thank you.” They spoke in unison.

While Spencer finished up the paperwork, Addy stepped outside and dug her cell phone out of her backpack, taking a deep breath to collect herself. When her mother’s voice mail picked up, she’d never been so happy to get a recording. There was no joy to be shared in a moment like this.

He joined her moments after she pressed the call-end button. They stood outside the courthouse and stared at the bleak winter scene in front of them. Neither spoke for a minute.

“I keep thinking they’d be so disappointed in me,” she said at last. Feeling the question in his stance next to her, she struggled to find the right words. “My parents got married for love, against everyone’s disapproval, because there was nothing more they wanted in the world than to spend their
lives together.” She paused. “This just doesn’t seem right somehow.”

She sighed and then tried to shake the mood off. “Want me to drive back?”

As if he knew she needed the distraction, his answer was immediate.

“Absolutely.” She’d expected warnings about how to drive the precious automobile, but none came. “I could use the sleep.”

In the car, pulling on her seat belt, she thought to warn him. “You know, we’ll be expected for dinner with the family tomorrow night.”

“Of course.” He reached over and tugged on a lock of her hair. “Don’t worry. They’ll understand. They know why you’re doing this. It’s just a means to an end.” Then he settled back in his seat and went to sleep.

“A means to an end. Right.” She floored it. All of a sudden, she couldn’t wait to get home.

When she realized that she was still thinking of
home
as her apartment, she grimaced and drove faster. She’d be spending a lot of time at the office in the coming months. Anything that kept her out of her new
home.

Three hours later, Addy was wishing she had something to do or somewhere to go. Anything to get away from that man.

“I don’t see what the big deal is.” She stepped out of the car in the driveway of her great-aunt’s home as Spencer cornered the front fender in three big strides and yanked the keys out of her hands. “It’s not like I crashed the car. Your precious vehicle doesn’t have a scratch on it.”

“Hardly the point. Do you have any idea how horrifying it is to wake up in the middle of a high-speed pursuit?”

“Don’t exaggerate, Reed, it doesn’t suit you,” she said, throwing his own words back at him. She crossed her arms and faced him in the ankle-deep snow. “I was on the shoulder by the time you woke up. And it’s just a speeding ticket. Stop whining.”

“Whining? Why, you—” She saw his mouth moving but no words were coming out. He spun around and walked away from her. She shrugged and bent back into the car to retrieve her backpack. If he wanted to pout about a simple speeding ticket, let him. She’d already apologized several times in the car; she was ready to let the whole thing drop.

As she stood up, her eyes took in a detail and her brain screamed a warning, but she moved too slowly. An enormous swath of snow had been scraped off the hood of the car and Spencer was nowhere to be seen on the sidewalk up to the front door.

The snowball rocketed into the back of her head right as the word
Duck!
made it to conscious thought. Too late. A shower of ice crystals exploded around her head, down the back of her neck, in her hair.

“You…bas…tard,” she gasped around the sudden cold. Spinning around, she saw him standing there, grinning like a loon.

“Consider that payback for the ticket,” he said and stood there, watching. Addy had grown up with three siblings. All she saw was a sitting target.

“Payback
this.
”

She started sprinting for the opposite side of the BMW even before the armful of snow she swept off the roof of the car smacked him in the kisser. Scooping up more snow on the way, she prepped for her next shot.

Resisting the impulse to lower her guard and chase the snow sliding down her collar, she kept her eyes on Spencer and circled slowly around the car as he readied his throw. He threw and she ducked, letting out a triumphant shout as the missile went sailing over her head. She popped up and let loose her return fire, only to be nailed in the chest by the second snowball he’d hidden from view.

She muttered curses under her breath and got serious.

The battle raged fiercely for several minutes. Both sides took heavy losses, until Addy was sure they resembled two snowmen chasing each other around the car. After a spectac
ular fake out, followed by a direct hit to the enemy, she took off sprinting for the porch, hoping to make it indoors before Spencer managed to scrape the snow out of his eyes. She only managed three strides up the front walk before a slick patch of ice had her ankle twisting beneath her, spilling her to the ground in a split second.

In a moment, Spencer was crouching next to her, snowball arsenal spilling to the ground as he looked her over and dusted ice crystals off her.

“Are you okay?”

“Just glad I’m wearing gloves, or I’d be picking sidewalk out of my palms.” She braced her hands beneath her to boost herself up, only to land on her butt again as a sharp pain burst in her ankle and snatched her breath. “Ouch. That’s not good.”

“Let me see.”

He stripped off his gloves and probed at her ankle with his bare fingers, provoking a hissing intake of breath by Addy as he hit the sore spots. After a few moments, she pushed his hands away. With the thrill and energy of the snowball fight gone, she was left sitting cold and wet and sore on icy cement, feeling her body heat getting sucked out of her in rapid fashion.

“Just give me a hand up, okay?” She leveraged her good foot beneath her and started to rise. His arms were around her in an instant, pulling her up and against him in a secure grip, supporting most of her weight.

She took a tentative step and hissed again at the pain. His grip shifted.

“Wait. I’ll carry you in.”

“I’m fine.”

“Addy, don’t be foolish. You shouldn’t put weight on that ankle,” he began.

“Just help me walk.”

“Addy.”

“Look, Reed.” Her tone was sharper than she’d meant it to be. She could feel her ankle throbbing now. She twisted her neck to look at him and caught the genuine concern in his
eyes. She tried to gentle her voice, but embarrassment made it hard. “I appreciate the offer, but there is no way on earth I’m letting you carry me over the threshold.”

All expression on his face froze and then was carefully wiped clean. She blew out a breath, then dropped her head and shook it. Even trying to be nice, she’d managed to offend him. Without a word, he hitched one arm around her and, using his free hand to support her elbow, started walking her slowly toward the house.

Once inside, Addy mumbled a few words of thanks and limped slowly up the stairs to her room. All she wanted to do right now was lie down for a while and sleep. Say, for the next six months or so. That would be the perfect nap. She could wake up like an abbreviated Rip Van Winkle to a completely new world.

On the slow walk up to the second floor, she felt his eyes on her the entire way.

At the foot of the stairs, Spencer stood with his hands in his pockets, strangling the urge he felt to bound up the stairs, scoop Addy up in his arms and then tuck her into bed.

Preferably his.

Even in pain, though—and he had seen by the whiteness in her face that she was hurting—she would rather suffer through on her own efforts than accept the barest measure of help from him.

Even on the day she’d married him.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew that their marriage existed simply to allow Addy to fulfill the conditions of her great-aunt’s will and that she would likely be counting the seconds until the end of the six months in order to file divorce papers.

She would
likely
do that.

Spencer had nearly made it to the altar twice before this sudden hurdle to matrimony. Each time he had proposed, it was to a woman who had seemed eminently suitable to him. Similar backgrounds, coolly professional beauties with polite relationships to their families and friends, women who
seemed unflappably calm in all situations and unlikely to make overwrought emotional demands on his time.

Come to think of it, his conversations with both women regarding marriage had felt less like proposals and more like the settling of terms between two companies arranging a merger. Negotiated compromises that had pleased him at the time because they seemed to ensure that there would be no surprises down the line.

Later on, he’d come to wonder if the beginning of his unhappiness with these arrangements was that maybe, perhaps, guaranteeing no surprises turned out to be a little, well, dull. And looking ahead to a lifetime of polite relations with his own wife provoked only a yawn.

When he’d realized with each of his fiancées that he was seen as the grand prize finally won and certainly not as someone they cared about—at least not other than feeling a mild sort of gratitude for the social position marriage to Spencer Reed would provide them—breaking things off had turned out to be easy. Particularly when he spoke of his desire to have children and discovered each time that his fiancée saw children as an obstacle to enjoying her own life. They had no intention of inconveniencing themselves by being pregnant once, much less two or three times. When he’d ended it, both women had thrown mild fits of anger, as if to test his seriousness, but then after a few days had returned to their normal state of cool aplomb and moved on to the next engagement faster than he could cancel the caterers.

Spencer was left with the conviction that his existing system for determining the perfect woman for him to marry was clearly flawed in a major way.

Which was part of the reason why he’d drawn himself into this sham marriage with Addy Tyler. The other was the fact that the woman herself appealed to him on some instinctual, sexual level that had every muscle in his body tightening in need the moment she walked into a room with him.

Addy obviously did not consider being married to Spencer
Reed to be a privilege of any sort. That she’d seriously considered marrying a man who was
already
married in order to avoid the simpler solution of marrying Spencer made it abundantly clear that she didn’t see his wealth or social standing as any kind of incentive.

When it came to matters of unpredictability, Addy seemed likely to represent a leap into the opposite far extreme. It didn’t take much insight to see that time spent with her would always be full of surprises. And although as a rule he preferred his surprises to be limited to such matters as what vintage cabernet sauvignon would be served with dinner, he was willing to go along with it. Besides, she seemed to bring out much the same behavior in him. He was fairly sure, for instance, that he hadn’t incited a snowball fight since he was twelve years old or so.

Spencer considered himself to be a fair man. Having admitted that both women he’d thought would make excellent wives had turned out to be disasters, he was willing to throw caution to the winds, in a careful sort of way, and see what sort of relationship developed between Addy and him.

Who could tell? Perhaps in six months’ time they’d decide that they were getting along tolerably well, and Addy might agree that continuing on the same course would be a satisfying solution for both of them.

And if somewhere along the line he got to tug Addy, with her bright eyes, tangled hair and hunger-inspiring curves, into a private room and consummate this marriage, then the sooner the better.

Spencer had the feeling that in six months’ time he wouldn’t even be worrying about the private room. If he had to wait that long, on the front lawn in plain sight of the neighbors would probably suit him just fine.

That is, if he didn’t throttle her first.

Heading back to the kitchen to make coffee—the solution to all problems—Spencer pictured again the look on Addy’s face as she’d told him not to carry her into the house. Half em
barrassed, half defiant, she’d blushed but stared him straight in the eyes.

As if he’d meant anything by the gesture other than an offer of assistance. He snorted and paced the length of the counter in front of the coffee machine. Hardly. And who would have thought Ms. Tyler put such stock in old-fashioned symbols like that? How melodramatic.

Snagging the pot as soon as it had a mug’s worth of coffee in it, he poured himself a cup, ignoring the hiss of still-brewing coffee spilling onto the hot plate beneath.

Just because he was willing, maybe, to see how things developed between the two of them, didn’t mean that he was going to start getting all
romantic
on her. Carrying her over the threshold. Please.

Mug in hand, Spencer started up the stairs, deciding that it was definitely time for another conversation about the rules of their relationship, although this time he’d be the one to lay down some instructions.

Don’t start reading romantic gestures into simple offers of assistance
being rule number one on the Reed list of How to Get Along with Your New Not-Quite Husband.

He told himself that he wasn’t stomping up the stairs like an irritated, overtired child. At the entrance to Addy’s room, he lifted his fist to bang soundly on the door, only stopping himself as he became aware of the complete lack of noise coming from within.