Czytaj książkę: «Blind Luck Bride»

Chapter One

“Mitch, you’re just as dumb as you look. Why, I could find another bride just like that.” Before taking another swig of his long-neck beer, Finn Reilly snapped his fingers to emphasize just how easy the task would be.

Good Lord, hadn’t he already been through enough today by being jilted at the altar? So why was Mitch Mulligan, his biggest contracting competitor and pain in his neck still giving him grief? Maybe if he closed his eyes, the three-hundred-pound genetic throwback to the woolly mammoth would vanish. Just in case, Finn blinked.

Damn, his bad luck hadn’t changed.

“Oh yeah?” Mitch said—and his beer breath—in Finn’s face. “Well, I’m gettin’ sick and tired of you thinkin’ you’re so hot with the women ’round here, Reilly.”

“That’s ’cause you’re jealous.”

“Ha! Jealous of what? The way your pretty little filly practically galloped out of that church to get away from you?”

Finn rolled his beer bottle across his throbbing forehead. Why did everyone keep bringing up the speed with which Vivian had left the church? While she’d vroomed into the sunset with that leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding bandit she met at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Finn had stood abandoned at the altar. Now honestly, did it seem as if he’d been at fault for their troubles?

Why couldn’t everyone at Lu’s Bar remember he was the injured party?

“Well, Reilly?” Mitch said. “What’ve you got to say for yourself?”

“Look, Mulligan.” Matt Marshall, Finn’s best friend since junior high, hollered above the dart-throwing, off duty firemen. “Give the guy a break. Can’t you see he’s in pain?”

“Pain? Pain?” Mitch laughed so hard he spouted beer all over the bar. “Oh, now that’s ripe. I always knew you were the prissy type, Reilly, but Matt here just gave me proof.”

“Can it,” Matt said. “My bud, Reilly, is no more prissy than your mother.”

“What’d you say about my mother?” Despite his size, Mitch scrambled to his feet in two-point-five seconds. “Nobody insults my mother without—”

A loud whistle came from behind the bar.

Finn winced.

Crazy Lu and her settle-down-boys banshee blast were landmarks in the small town of Greenleaf, Utah. She’d owned the burger and beer joint for as long as anyone could remember and while she put up with a lot of things, fights weren’t one of them. “Mitch Mulligan, either take it outside or take it up with me.” White-haired Lu couldn’t have topped five feet wearing heels and a tiara, but the row of ornery guys standing at the bar backed down as if their own mothers had issued the command.

Everyone, that is, except for the woolly mammoth. “Oh now, Lu, don’t go gettin’ your panties in a wad.”

“How do you even know I wear panties, Mitch? I agree with Matt. Just this once, give Reilly a break. Here,” she shoved a paper plate heaped with orange-rose-laden wedding cake across the bar. “Put some food in your belly. It’ll make you feel better. You prob’ly got gas from all that beer. It’s makin’ you nasty as a three-headed rattler.”

“I don’t want any cake and I’m always this nasty. The only thing I want a piece of is that punk sittin’ over there shaking in his boots.”

“Fine.” She winked Finn’s way. “Then make him a good honest bet. Just don’t mess up his pretty face for the next girl in line for his kisses.”

“Why, thank you, sweetheart.” Finn winked boldly. At least someone loved him, even if it wasn’t the stacked redhead he’d planned to be loving right about now.

“Sure thing, angel.”

Mitch snorted. “Angel, my—”

“Watch it,” Lu warned.

“Ha. All I wanna watch is how much crow Reilly here eats when he loses this bet.” Mitch pulled a wad of cash from the front pocket of his dingy jeans, peeled off ten hundred-dollar bills, then smacked them on the bar. “All right, pretty boy. I’ve got a thousand bucks—my entire payroll—says there’s no way you can find another woman stupid enough to marry you by the end of the week.”

“Mulligan,” Lu warned. “There’s families depending on that pay. Don’t go bettin’ away their suppers.”

With a wave of one of the massive paws he called hands, he brushed her off. “This here’s a sure bet. No one’s gonna lose but ol’ Reilly here. And seein’ how he just got the contract on that fancy new highway motel, he’s got plenty of cash to spare.”

Finn rolled his eyes. Was Mulligan ever going to get over the fact that Finn’s Custom Building consistently got more jobs than AAA Construction?

“Whatsa matter, pretty boy? Too chicken to take me up on a bet you know you’re gonna lose?”

That’s it. Finn slammed his bottle on the bar, then grappled to his feet.

Nobody called him prissy, pretty boy and chicken all on the same night—especially not when his own aunt had called him a poor, sweet thing just that afternoon. “By God, Mulligan, I’ll not only take you up on that bet—” he pulled honeymoon cash from the chest pocket of his tux, counting out a grand before smacking it beside Mitch’s “—but I’ll raise the stakes by throwing in my truck.”

“Finn,” Lu said. “You’re a bright boy. Be sensible. This is marriage we’re talkin’ about. A lifetime commitment—not to mention a brand spankin’ new black Chevy.”

“All respects, ma’am, but stay out of it—and I’m far from a boy.” He took another swig of beer. “I’m Grade A, genuine, M-A-N. And if it takes a stupid bet to prove any woman would be thrilled to marry me, then by God, bettin’ is what I’ll do.” He shoved the pile of money toward Lu. “Sweetheart, hold on to this until next Saturday night. If I’m not back wearin’ a ring by then…well, then you’d better give all that cash to old ugly over there.” He gestured to Mitch. “He’ll be needin’ it to pay for my funeral, ’cause one thing’s for sure…”

“What’s that?”

“If I’m not married by Saturday, I must be stone-cold dead.”

“NO, NO, NO,” Lilly Churchill cried, stomping her white satin pumps in frustration. Unfortunately, all that fussing raised a dust cloud, which caused her to sneeze, which in turn caused her to need a tissue—a tissue that was in her purse.

On the front seat.

Snuggled alongside her keys.

Keys to the car she’d just securely locked.

“Not now,” she said to an audience of a million twinkling stars. “Not when I was for once getting things right.” Hot tears threatened to spill, but she stoically held them back. This was not the time for a crying binge.

Hiking her heavy white skirts, she teetered across the restaurant’s gravel lot.

So, on the eve of her wedding she’d locked her keys in the car? Big deal.

It wasn’t an omen that her marriage was doomed. After all, look what’d happened at her big sister Mary’s wedding, and four years later, her marriage was still going strong.

Yeah, her conscience butted in, but don’t forget you were the cause of Mary and her three bridesmaids arriving over two hours late for her ceremony.

And how Robby the groom freaked out because he thought Mary had cold feet. And speaking of cold—remember how the delay caused the reception caterers to run out of Sterno to heat their hot wings, mini-pizzas, and quiches? Ick. To this day, Lilly could still taste the congealed grease.

Her brothers—and even Mary—assured their baby sister that running out of gas on the way to the ceremony hadn’t been her fault. That the old Nova’s gas gauge had always been cranky—especially below an eighth of a tank. But no matter how many times Lilly told herself the mishap could have happened to anyone, she knew that simply wasn’t true.

How? From the disappointment in her mom and dad’s eyes. From the looks that said how could such a rotten apple have landed in their perfect bushel?

The truth of the matter was that her sister’s wedding wasn’t the first time Lilly had seen those looks. They’d been there when she dropped out of the University of Utah after her first semester. They’d been there every time she’d lost her retainer, left the milk out, forgotten to take out the trash or feed the dog, bombed a high school final, missed curfew or lost a job. The list went on and on.

For Lilly’s whole life, her older, overachieving, straight-A brothers and sisters had done their best to cover up for her when she failed. They’d treated her like a pet they hated to see punished, but now that all of them were busy leading fabulous careers and marriages, she felt lost and alone in trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. She thought she knew, but then this whole mess had happened with Elliot, and now…

Now all she wanted to do was make her troubles go away—a goal easily enough accomplished by marrying Dallas. But then what? Would her parents view her marriage as just another bandage? Or, as for the first time in her twenty-five years, her way of taking responsibility for her biggest ever blunder?

FINN CRADLED his forehead in his hands.

Ugh, had he truly drunk all six of the long-necks standing like a row of not-so-pretty maidens on the bar?

The queasy churning in his gut, not to mention the sour taste on his tongue, told him that, yes, not only had he downed all those beers, but he’d downed them in a hurry.

What was the matter with him? He knew better than to drink like that—especially over a woman, but darn it all, he was ready to settle down. Seemed like he’d been ready ever since his parents and sister died when he was eight.

This afternoon he’d been damned close to making his dream of starting over with a new family finally come true, but then Vivian had pulled her disappearing act. Not only had she ruined their wedding by walking out right in the middle of it, but she’d stolen their honeymoon tickets to Cancun.

At the very least, he and Matt could have been toasting Finn’s sorrows beachside instead of in this stinkin’ bar.

He raised his head to look around.

For eleven o’clock on Halloween night, the crowd had grown thin. Old Judge Crawford sat in his usual booth in the corner, and Betty and Bob Bristow, the county’s finest line dancers, two-stepped to a honky-tonk tune blaring from the jukebox. They made a cute couple in their alien costumes. Doc Walsh and her house husband wore hospital whites—Mr. Walsh wearing a not-too-flattering nurse’s cap and gown.

Though not a single patron currently held a cigarette, a thick haze clung to the renovated barn’s ceiling, accompanied by the smell of one too many grease fires.

Finn shook his head.

Yep, after today, he was supposed to have been living the good life. Eating plenty of home-cooked meals. Getting back rubs. Indulging in stimulating conversation and—

What the…

A woman—no, an angel—stood at the red vinyl door. Dressed in a gown of gossamer-white, carrying a bouquet of full pink roses, she looked ready to star in a wedding.

Even worse—or maybe better—she was headed his way.

“Excuse me?” she asked, her melodic voice about as loud as a marshmallow being dropped on a cloud. “But…are you by any chance…”

“Waiting to get married?” This had to be a joke. Mulligan had to have sent her.

“Yes, me too. I’m Lilly and you must be Dallas.”

Dallas?

She held out her hand. A tiny, white-gloved affair that when he briefly gripped it, felt lost in Finn’s palm. Lilly. Such a fitting name for this delicate flower of a woman.

A rush of protectiveness flooded his system.

But wait a minute…Since Mitch had obviously hired this woman to mess with Finn’s head, why should he feel anything for her, let alone protective?

Giving the blonde a cool appraisal, in his mind’s eye, Finn unfurled the enemy’s master plan. Mitch must have met this “bride” at a buddy’s Halloween party, then bribed her to feign interest in Finn. Hell, maybe he’d even paid her enough to pretend she was actually going to marry him, then, just when Finn wagged a marriage license in the mammoth’s ugly face, Mitch would drop his bomb that this angel was no bride, but someone he hired to cause Finn to lose the bet! To most folks’ way of thinking, Finn would have won by marrying, but Mitch wasn’t most folks. Mitch was crafty—wily enough to deduce that if Finn wed a bride who was lying about her name, then the marriage wouldn’t be legal. Thus causing Finn to lose on a technicality.

And trust Mitch to have not even thought his plan through well enough to tell the woman the name of the guy she was supposed to dupe. “Yep,” Finn said with a knowing smile. “I’m Dallas. That’s me.”

“Thank goodness. I’ve been driving for hours. I never thought I’d find this place.” Her shoulders sagged. “Even now, Dallas, I must say I’m surprised. When you described Luigi’s, I thought it would be a little more…”

Finn followed her sweeping, and maybe even a bit fearful, gaze as it flitted from face to face to land on old drunken Pete who sat half-asleep and mumbling at the other end of the bar.

“You thought this was Luigi’s?” That place was the swankiest restaurant for miles. Swallowing hard, Finn blocked the memory of how beautiful Vivian had looked the night he’d taken her there to propose.

“Well…yes. It is, isn’t it? I saw the L-U-apostrophe-S on the sign.”

“Sure. This is Luigi’s. I’m glad you found it.”

“Me, too.” She licked her lips. Kissable lips. Lips that on a good night could drive a man all the way to distraction.

After the day he’d had, did he feel like going for a ride? Hell, yes.

“So?” she said. “Shouldn’t we get going? I made all the plans. All we have to do is…exchange our vows.” She smoothed the front of her satin gown, looking up at him with impossibly wide, impossibly blue eyes.

He gulped.

Mitch had certainly done his homework in hiring this gal. She was a real pro to have almost had Finn falling for her—almost.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Lilly said, fighting the urge to flee. When Dallas had said in that morning’s e-mail that he was suit-and-tie handsome, he’d been way off in his description. Deliciously off.

She couldn’t really marry a man like him, could she?

Do I really have a choice? It wasn’t as if guys were lined up around the block waiting to marry a woman in her condition.

“Not come?” He snatched a French fry from a basket on the bar. She tracked his hand all the way to his mouth. A mouth with lips that looked chiseled from the most fascinating stone. “How could I have stayed away from our big day? Or—” another fry in hand, he waved toward a darkened window “—I guess that would be night.”

When he spied her gaze lingering on his mouth, he offered her his latest fry, but she shook her head, flushed with heat at the mere possibility of consuming food that had come so perilously close to his lips.

She cleared her throat. “I, ah, don’t blame you if you’ve changed your mind. I mean, this is kind of sudden.”

“Nonsense.” He swallowed his bite of fry.

“It’s okay. Really. I wouldn’t be too upset if you want to back out.”

“Nope. Not me.”

“Great.” Lilly released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. In the month they’d known each other via the Marriage of Convenience board on Singles com, this was what she liked more every day about Dallas. He was a man driven by convictions. Okay, so he wasn’t marrying her out of love, but his conviction to succeed in his ultraconservative law firm—the same firm that told him he needed a wife—but she was okay with that. All she needed was a husband—the rest would work itself out in time.

“Let’s go,” she said. “I set up the ceremony for ten tomorrow morning, but even driving all night, that doesn’t give us much time.”

“All night? I don’t get it.”

“Vegas. That’s where we’ll be taking our vows. Remember? How you told me your mother always wanted to be married there?”

“Oh.” He conked his temple. “Of course. Mom. The Elvis Chapel. How could I forget?”

“I thought she liked Wayne Newton?”

“Um…Wayne, Elvis, she liked ’em all.”

Lilly drew her lower lip into her mouth and nibbled. As relieved as she’d been only a minute earlier to have finally found her man, something now told her riding off into the night with this virtual stranger wasn’t one of her brighter ideas. It didn’t matter that she and Dallas had talked via e-mail for the better part of a month. His not remembering his own mother’s favorite recording artist concerned her. Where was the man who bragged of having a photographic memory? The man who cited countless statistics on the reasons why arranged marriages were infinitely better than the real thing?

The whisker-stubbled, bona fide stud seated before her surely didn’t give a flip about dry statistics, and he looked as if he’d be far more comfortable listening to a Garth Brooks song than to Aida, his supposedly favorite opera.

Should she ask to see his driver’s license?

No. Too direct. Yes, she needed to verify he was who he said he was, but surely she could think of a less combatant way. She cleared her throat. “I, ah, realize this may sound a tad off the subject, but could you please tell me what my favorite food is?”

His eyes narrowed, and he took a long time before saying in a sexy twang, “Aw, now, angel, you already know that I know what your favorite food is.” He reached for her left hand and rolled down the cuff of her satin glove, exposing the frantically beating pulse on her inner wrist. “Why don’t you ask me something a little tougher….”

Oh my gosh! He was actually drawing her wrist to his mouth! He was—oh no. Oh no, he did not just kiss her on the wrist. As an employee of Tree House Books, she read a lot, but in her favorite novel of all time, Whispered Winds, the hero, Duncan, kissed his bride’s wrist at their third wedding. True, it had taken them three times to get their relationship right, but oh, how right it had finally been. Favorite food be damned. The fact that Dallas remembered how much she adored that scene proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was not only who he claimed to be, but that first and foremost, he was the man destined to be her husband.

Closing her eyes, Lilly surrendered to the hot-cold champagne bubbles zinging through her body.

The white-haired woman keeping bar interrupted Lilly’s almost-wedded bliss. “S’cuse me,” she said to Dallas, “but what in tarnation do you think you’re doin’?”

“Mind your own business, Lu, this is my future bride.”

“Isn’t one bride per day enough for you, Fi—”

“That’s it. We’ve gotta go.” Finn nearly fell off his bar stool trying to slip his hand beneath his bride-to-be’s elbow while at the same time shooting Lu a would-you-please-hush look of desperation. By God, if she went and ruined this for him, he’d take her to court to cover the small fortune in cash and pride he’d have to fork over to Mitch. He might be able to handle a lot of bad situations, but voluntarily losing a bet to ornery old Mitch Mulligan wasn’t one of them. He knew it wasn’t neighborly, but he just plain despised the man, and he’d do anything to get the better of him. Even if it meant marrying this loco filly in the morning only to up and divorce her the next afternoon.

While all that sounded real good in theory, a pang of confusion rippled through Finn at the all-too-fresh memory of how badly Vivian had hurt him.

All his life he’d only wanted one thing—to once again be part of a family. So sure, by going through with this marriage, he’d make Mitch look like the fool he was, but in doing that, he’d also be making a mockery of his heart’s lifelong ambition. Was that wise?

A whiff of pretty-as-a-spring-meadow perfume wove its way like a love potion through Finn’s senses. He took one look at the vision in bridal white standing before him and decided what the heck?

He needed to lighten up.

Besides, what was the worst that could happen on a trip to Vegas?