November Harlequin Presents 1(147)

Suddenly the room fell silent. The buzzing, chattering, brilliant birds of paradise stopped moving, stopped talking, became totally still. And over at the far side of the marquee he could see her. Tall and slender—and totally in white…plain, simple, unadorned white from head to toe, in stark contrast to the colours all around him. When he saw her his tense jaw fell open for a moment as he snatched in a breath, then his teeth came together with a snap as he turned, headed straight for her. The crowd parted to let him through, a wide, clear path was opening up, taking him straight to her.

He couldn’t see her face, not even the blur of pink that was everyone else. She was white. Nothing but white. Did she even have a face?

And then, as he came nearer, nearer, suddenly he could hear a single voice, a young, female voice, loud and clear and bubbling with contained laughter, barely held back.

‘I do—I do—I do!’

‘I do—I do—I do…’

The words repeated over and over in his head until his thoughts swam with the force of it.

‘I do—I do—I do…’

And behind him the crowd murmured and laughed and broke into spontaneous applause. Applause that swung around and over the words, breaking into them but never quite drowning them out.

‘I do—I do—I do…’

His head was aching from it, the pressure at his temples unendurable. He wanted to lift his hands and rub at them to ease the pressure but he found he couldn’t do so. Something had them trapped, tying them down, keeping them from moving. He heard another voice groan aloud and realised with a violent shock to his system that it was his, and that the words he had been trying to form were the same as those in the laughing voice inside his head.

I do.

I do!

Rough and unclear, they were enough to make the white-clad figure before him turn sharply. Blinking hard, he found that his gaze would focus more, his vision sharpening just a little. She was wearing a veil, he realised. A long white, flowing veil that hid her face, concealing it completely. But when she saw him she smiled. He couldn’t see the smile but he knew it was there. He could sense it with some primitive instinct that came to him with the dream. He knew that she smiled in the same way that he knew he didn’t like the smile one little bit.

‘Andreas…’ she said and her voice was low, huskily seductive.

And then she threw back her veil and all he could see were her eyes—her amazing, pale blue eyes—sea-coloured eyes…

And in his head all that he could hear was that laughter-filled voice saying yet again, ‘Oh, I do—I do—I do…’

Becca!

The step he took backwards in his dream, the jolt it gave him, brought him awake in rush. Awake to a realisation that the deep green lawn, the marquee, the guests, were all a fantasy. Reality was that he was in his bed, in the villa, that the growing darkness of dusk was gathering round…

And that he was not alone.

He smelled her skin before he opened his eyes, inhaled the warm, intensely personal fragrance of her body, heard the soft sound of her breathing, and knew that some woman shared his bed. The scent of passion, too, was on the sheets, a wild intensity of sex, the after-effects of which still lingered in the heaviness of his limbs, the feeling of deep fulfilment, the strong reluctance to move at all. But at the same time something was nagging at his thoughts, taking him back into his dream for a moment and then out again, back into the present. Something that warned him he had to wake up, had to think, had to act.

With an effort he forced his heavy eyelids open and found himself looking straight into those same beautiful sea-coloured eyes. The eyes of the woman in his dream. Eyes that were watching him with a look of wary apprehension in their smoky depths.

And the taste of betrayal was terrible and sour in his mouth.

‘Rebecca!’

No one said her name quite like Andreas, Becca reflected privately. No one else put quite that exotic intonation onto the syllables, making it sound like a totally different word. And no one else had ever put such an icy tone into his use of her name, a freezing fury that made her feel as if she had suddenly stepped onto the most dangerous black ice.

‘My darling wife—what the hell are you doing here?’

‘I—should have thought that that was obvious.’

She regretted the words the minute she had spoken them. Regretted the stupid attempt at flippancy in her tone, the even rasher gesture of her hand that indicated the rumpled bed on which they lay, the disorder of the sheets, the crumpled pillows. It also, to her deep mortification, drew attention to her naked state, brought those frozen black eyes to skim over her body, seeming to sear the delicate skin as they went so that hot colour flooded her cheeks and in a moment of pure embarrassment she reached desperately for the nearest sheet.