Fortune's Valentine Bride Part 15

Wendy was pretending to pout, but there was affection in her voice as she mentioned the older woman. About to say something else, Wendy's smile faded a little as she looked at Katie. Her friend appeared a bit disheveled as well as perturbed. Not to mentioned rather annoyed.

Wendy's antennae immediately went up. Something was definitely going on.

"My G.o.d, who died?" she asked, only half joking. When Katie didn't immediately answer, Wendy's eyes widened. "No one did, did they?" she asked nervously. She quickly reviewed a tally in her head. Her parents and family hadn't flown back yet, but as far as she knew, they were leaving this morning. Her husband was driving them all to San Antonio. "I just saw Marcos this morning before he left, but-"

"No one died," Katie a.s.sured her, putting emphasis on the second word.

"Okay," she replied cautiously. "But what did die?" Wendy wanted to know.

Katie stared off into s.p.a.ce, waiting for the housekeeper to set down the tray and leave. When the woman finally did, closing the door behind her, Katie merely sighed. Silently, she called herself an idiot and seven kinds of a fool, but that didn't help anything or change anything, she thought darkly.

Blake was still racing into the arms of that woman. And she had helped to pave the way.

Oh, well, she tried to console herself, at least she'd had one good night out of it.

"Talk to me," Wendy urged and, from the sound of the exasperation in her voice, it wasn't the first time she'd said it. Katie hadn't even heard her say anything. "Didn't he take you out to dinner?" Wendy wanted to know.

"Yes, we had dinner," Katie replied. And I volunteered to be dessert.

"And?" Wendy pressed impatiently.

"He brought me home. Here," she clarified. in case Wendy thought she was referring to Scott's place, where Blake had been staying.

Nodding, she said again, "And?"

This time, the sigh was even deeper, coming from the very bottom of her soul. "And we made love."

Thrilled, Wendy clapped her hands together and all but cheered. "Wonderful!"

"Not so wonderful," Katie countered with a shake of her head.

Wendy's face fell as she obviously tried to fill in the blanks. "He's a bad lover?" There was an ocean of sympathy in her voice.

"Oh, no," Katie was quick to correct Wendy's wrong impression. "He's an utterly magnificent lover with incredible stamina. We made love twice and each time, he exceeded anything I could have ever imagined." And it's going to be so wasted on Brittany, she thought with a huge pang of regret.

Wendy didn't understand. "If he was so great, then why do you look like a kid who just found out that not only is there no Santa Claus, but she's going to be on the receiving end of coal for the rest of her life?"

"Because Santa Claus is on his way to Atlanta this morning for his 'big' date with Brittany at the fundraiser tomorrow," Katie bit off. And that, he'd said more than once these past few weeks, was going to be the beginning of his life from here on in.

Wendy looked utterly horrified. "No, he's not," she cried.

"Yes," Katie answered wearily, "he is." And then, as much as it pained her, she gave Wendy the information to back up what she was saying. "I do all of Blake's bookings for his trips. I made this reservation for him and, since he's not here this morning, having ducked out sometime in the middle of the night," she couldn't help adding bitterly, "it's safe to a.s.sume that he is even now on his way to San Antonio so that he can catch his flight to Atlanta." Katie could feel angry tears forming in the corners of her eyes and she blinked hard to scatter them. "He's gone."

Wendy asked pointedly, "The real question here is, what are you going to do?"

Katie raised her eyes to Wendy's. "Do?" she echoed quizzically. Do about what?

"Yes. Do," she emphasized. "According to you, the two of you had a really great time last night. And then, apparently, my brother just took off early this morning without saying or writing a single word to you. That's just not like him," Wendy insisted, shaking her head. "G.o.d knows that man doesn't always connect the dots, but I've never known him to act like a Neanderthal jerk, either." Scooting to the edge of her bed, she gave Katie her theory. "My guess is that maybe being with you like that last night really shook him up. He saw you in a completely different light-"

"Yeah, he saw me naked," Katie said cynically.

"So, again," Wendy continued as if she hadn't been interrupted, "my question to you is, what are you going to do about it?"

Katie sank down on the bed, feeling frustrated, hurt and confused, not to mention angry. What made things particularly difficult was that she was feeling all these emotions at the same time.

Her shoulders rose and fell in an impotent shrug. "What can I do?"

"How about fighting for him?" Wendy challenged. The look in her eyes dared Katie to not just give up like this.

Having to "fight" for Blake was just another way of saying she was lowering herself, Katie thought. Lines had to be drawn somewhere.

"Look," she began patiently, "if Blake doesn't want me-"

Wendy cut her off. "I really doubt if that's the case." She saw the disbelief in Katie's eyes and she persisted. "More than likely, my brother's really scared."

"Scared," Katie repeated sarcastically. Her tone of voice told Wendy that she thought that was just a big crock.

But Wendy wasn't about to let Katie just cast that-and her chances of real happiness-aside. From where Wendy sat, it sounded like a very plausible explanation. Sometimes the thought of finding real love-committing to that love-was a scary proposition. Besides, she knew a thing or two about how the male mind worked. Katie had been the girl next door, but she hadn't actually grown up with three brothers the way Wendy had. That kind of hands-on experience inevitably taught a person things.

"Yes, scared," Wendy insisted as she emphasized the word. "My brother's been telling himself all this time that he's in love with Brittany, and then the lid blew off his world when he saw you last night all decked out and s.e.xy." Wendy warmed up to her subject. "And, just like that, the two of you wind up making love. A guy who's in love with one woman doesn't make love to another woman with wild abandonment," she concluded knowingly.

Rather than challenge Wendy's choice of words-the woman had seen too many romantic comedies, she merely stated, "It happens all the time."

Wendy remained firm. "Not to Blake. He's the faithful type. Go after your man, Katie," she urged her best friend. "Make him realize that he wants you, belongs with you. Face it, Katie, if you go after him, what have you got to lose?"

"My dignity comes to mind," Katie answered tersely.

Wendy shook her head, dismissing the excuse. "Seems to me that dignity would provide you with cold comfort if you're all by yourself, thinking about what might have been if you'd only had the courage to act...." She let her voice trail off, watching to see Katie's reaction. She knew that Katie hated the thought of coming off like a coward.

And she was right.

"Okay," Katie finally cried, exasperated. "I'll go! But if this winds up blowing up in my face, I am going to come back and haunt you every day for the rest of my natural life-and then I'll come back as a ghost and continue to haunt you for all eternity."

Wendy smiled at her serenely. "I'm not worried. Now, go, get a flight out," she said, shooing her away with her hands as if Katie were a sparrow feeding on birdseed on the windowsill. "I'll have Juanita drive you to the airport when you're ready. Stop my brother from making a really stupid mistake." She leaned forward and took hold of Katie's hand. She squeezed it affectionately. "You're the best thing that ever happened to him and it's about time he admitted it and stopped running."

Katie really had her doubts about Wendy's take on the situation. But she knew that she really wished that her friend was right.

"Whatever you say," Katie answered as she extricated herself and then walked out of the room.

She was walking faster by the time she reached her own bedroom.

As it turned out, because of a severe storm and the threat of a possible tornado in the Atlanta area, Katie couldn't get a flight out until the middle of the next day. By then, after spending the night at the airport, she'd had enough time to work herself up to the point that she was very close to having steam coming out of her ears.

The upshot of it was that she was no longer hurt, she was just plain angry. Angry at Blake for leaving her the way he had, without a word, as if she was some woman he'd encountered at a party and gone on to have casual s.e.x with. There was definitely nothing casual about the s.e.x they'd had-because, from her perspective, it hadn't been s.e.x, it had been lovemaking.

She wouldn't have felt what she had, the earth wouldn't have moved the way it had, if she hadn't invested her emotions in it. And, she was certain, though he hadn't said a word, that Blake had felt the same way. They had even made love one more time in the middle of the night. She woken up to his stroking her arm. When she'd turned her head and seen the look in his eyes-not a look a man had when he'd had just casual s.e.x with a person he didn't intend to see again-she'd been so moved that, well, one thing had led to another and then another and they'd made love again.

If he loved Brittany the way he claimed, that wouldn't have happened, she silently insisted as she sat rigidly in her seat, waiting for the Atlanta-bound plane to land so that she could get this speech off her chest and onto her lips.

Then, after he heard her out, if he still wanted to remain with Brittany, well, there wasn't anything she could do about that. If he was that mentally impaired, then he and Brittany deserved each other and she didn't want him anyway.

But even if that did come to pa.s.s, at least she would have gotten a chance to tell him what she thought of him for being so thoughtlessly self-centered-and for throwing away something precious and real that they could have had between them.

Not that she would have allowed Blake to get away with that, Katie thought as she braced herself for a landing. She would have confronted him as he tried to make his exit. She would have put him on the spot, even though she really wouldn't have known what to say.

At least this way, she told herself, she'd had time to get her thoughts in order. She only hoped that once she saw him, she wouldn't become so angry all over again that she just wound up sputtering at him like some old engine that had run out of gas.

Oh, G.o.d, was she fooling herself about him? Or was Wendy right? Had Blake beaten a hasty retreat in the middle of the night because what had happened between them had scared him?

If that was true, G.o.d knew he wasn't the only one. The intensity of what had gone on between them that night had scared her, too.

But what scared her even more was the thought of living the rest of her life without him.

With all her heart, she prayed that it was really the same way for him.

Chapter Fifteen.

This was a mistake.

He'd made a huge mistake, Blake thought, not for the first time in the past two days.

The uneasy thought that he was running from something rather than to something had hit him a couple of minutes before he'd presented his boarding pa.s.s to the attendant at the airport. Because it was around that time that it had finally hit him that the scenarios he was replaying in his head were all about the night he'd spent with Katie, and not the possible future he was going toward by flying back to Atlanta.

By flying back to Brittany.

It was Katie's face he saw when he closed his eyes, Katie's skin he felt beneath his fingertips when he had allowed his mind to drift off for a moment as he'd stared out the window at the cloud formations on the horizon.

Yes, his pulse raced when he thought of Brittany, raced like the pulse of an adolescent involved with his first crush.

But the emotions that filled him when his thoughts turned to Katie belonged not to a boy, or to a hormonal teenager, but to a man, with a man's desires. And a man's needs.

Was it just a case of not knowing what he wanted? he'd challenged himself. Was he doomed just to want what he didn't have, or couldn't have at the moment?

Here he was, sitting at a table with Brittany at the fundraiser, just as he had been fantasizing about for the past three weeks, and the only thing he could think about was Katie.

Would he be sitting and pining after Brittany if he were sitting here with Katie?

No, he realized, he wouldn't.

Because he hadn't.

When he had been with Katie that night, made love with Katie that night, there wasn't so much as a single molecule in his body that longed for Brittany. He'd wanted to be just where he was-with Katie. Making love with Katie.

And he'd known it, he told himself. Known it because, even as he landed in Atlanta, he'd called his father to let him know that he'd decided not to attend the fundraiser.

His father had not been happy.

"You will attend." No request, just a command. The way it had always been. "You're representing the family at the fundraiser. If you don't attend with Brittany, there'll be all sorts of talk about it by morning. I won't have it."

He'd wanted to say he didn't care. That people would always gossip because they had no lives of their own to occupy themselves with, but Blake knew how much his father despised gossips and rumors, wanting to always be above both. The man worked hard and he was exceedingly image-conscious.

"It's not like I'm asking you to marry her," his father went on to say. "Although-" he paused to speculate "-a merger between the two families might not be such a bad idea."

This was where Blake had drawn a line. He'd had to. "My marriage isn't going to be a merger, Dad," he'd said in no uncertain terms.

"Suit yourself," his father had responded, controlling his annoyance. "But you are attending the fundraiser."

To refuse would have been to fuel a huge argument he'd wanted no part of, so Blake had agreed.

Which was how he came to be sitting here, at the fundraiser, with a woman who was garnering all sorts of appreciative looks from men who obviously envied him his close proximity to her. He knew that a good many of those men would have given their eyeteeth to be in his position. As ever, Brittany was enchantingly beautiful-and he had absolutely nothing to say to her. Not a single word.

He had outgrown the Brittany he remembered. And, quite honestly, she was coming up lacking in every way when he compared her to Katie. She didn't have the deep commitments that Katie had-to her this fundraiser wasn't so much about collecting money for the proposed new pediatric wing that the hospital wanted to build as it was about being seen-and admired-by the right people. She certainly didn't have the broad spectrum of interests that Katie had. Her interests all seemed to center around fas.h.i.+ons-specifically, which ones were the most becoming on her.

She'd been expounding on the subject for what felt like an eternity now.

What could he have been thinking, wanting to win this woman? he upbraided himself. It would be like winning a gag gift, he thought, shaking his head.

Feeling trapped and counting the minutes until he could leave, Blake nodded his head periodically as Brittany droned on. Absently, he looked around the ballroom, searching for a familiar face that could afford him at least a temporary excuse to leave the table for a few minutes of respite. He really needed to clear his head of Brittany's endless chatter.

As he scanned the area, his eyes washed over a sea of faces, some very vaguely familiar, but most not.

Blake froze as his eyes widened.

Oh, G.o.d, now his mind was playing tricks on him. He actually thought that he saw Katie in the room. But that was impossible. This was a black tie, invitation only affair. She wouldn't have been able to get in.

d.a.m.n it, that was Katie, he realized. He'd know that determined expression on her face anywhere. It was hers exclusively. He stopped wondering how she'd gotten in and began wondering why she'd gotten in.

Was something wrong?

He sat up at attention as he watched her cut across the floor. She was heading for his table like a bullet-and right behind her, huffing and puffing as he attempted to catch up, was the heavyset man who had been standing at the entrance to the reserved ballroom, checking everyone's invitation.

Darting around the corpulent man as he tried once again-unsuccessfully-to grab her, Katie arrived at his and Brittany's table.

"So you are here," she declared angrily. A part of her had prayed that she wouldn't find him here. That at the last moment, he had realized how vapid Brittany was and had bowed out of the fundraiser, sending in a silent pledge in his place.