She could read. But that didn’t mean the marriage certificate, lying with lopsided innocence against one of the bed pillows, made any sense.
She unwound one arm from the sheet to reach out for the sheet of paper. “It’s not real.”
She picked it up. Studied her signature on the line that said “Bride.” Penelope Garner was looped across it in familiar, lopsided cursive. The “Groom” line was similarly obscured under Quinn’s slashing signature.
She looked up at him. Then just as quickly away. When she’d been fifteen, she’d had a crazy mad crush on him. So much so, that she’d thrown herself at him. Tried, in her juvenile way, to seduce him. He’d been home on leave from the air force. She’d been living with her latest foster family, the Bennetts, across the street from where his parents lived.
At the time, he’d ruthlessly crushed her immature advances.
Now she wished she still possessed some of the outrageous guts she’d had in her youth. Because it was more than a little mortifying to be knocking on the door of thirty and feeling wholly out of her depth when faced for the first time with a seriously naked, gorgeous man.
A man with whom she’d spent the night.
A man with whom she’d signed a marriage certificate.
She sank onto the edge of the bed. Which at least gave her the advantage of turning her back toward him.
“This has to be a joke. Right?” It was hard enough to believe she’d slept with him. But marry? She set the certificate on the mattress beside her and wound her shaking hands inside the sheet twisted around her. “It looks like my signature. But I don’t remember signing it. Do you?”
“No.”
If she concentrated on the paper hard enough, then maybe she could forget the way she’d wakened.
Wrapped in his arms.
Intimately.
Fortunately, she’d come to her senses and scrambled out of bed, dragging the sheet with her.
Unfortunately, that was about the time he’d noticed the marriage certificate. And his brows had pulled together in the fiercest frown she’d ever seen.
Her fingers worried the edges of the sheet clutched above her breasts. “Then it’s got to be a joke.”
The fancy Las Vegas hotel suite had thick, plush carpet that easily swallowed the sound of Quinn’s footsteps as he rounded the bed to her side. “Who would play a joke like that?”
She averted her eyes before she got too much of an eyeful of his muscular nude body. He’d been injured during his latest deployment. Had spent months in the hospital, she knew. It didn’t seem logical that he could be so tanned all over the way he was. The only pale skin he possessed was—
She made herself look away again.
“I don’t know!” All her frustrated confusion sounded in her voice as she raked back her hair. “Your cousins? Your sister?”
“Maybe Viv?” His deep voice turned mocking. “God knows little old ladies like my recently discovered granny are prone to pulling off pranks like this.”
She made a face at him, only to get distracted yet again by all that...nakedness. She could only imagine how his granny would react if Viv knew her personal assistant had gotten into mischief with her grandson on what was supposed to be Vivian’s get-to-know-each-other-better trip with her grandchildren. “Would you please put on some clothes?”
“I remember a time when you wanted me to take ’em off.” But mercifully, he moved out of her sight again.
“Yeah, well, I was a kid,” she muttered. A wild, willful kid who’d only been trying to find her place in a world that seemed to have no place for her at all. “And if you were any sort of gentleman, you wouldn’t remind me of that.”
He snorted softly and sat on the side of the bed right next to her. “I’m not a gentleman.”
She peeked at the blue jeans now hugging his thighs and breathed a little easier. At least as easily as she could, considering his bare shoulder was brushing warmly against hers. “You’re in the air force. Isn’t being a gentleman a requirement?”
He didn’t answer that, but plucked the crumpling piece of paper from between them and held it between his hands. “At least you’re not jail bait anymore,” he muttered. “What’s the last thing you remember from last night?”
She felt her cheeks getting hot.
They were sitting on the edge of a hotel room bed. It was painfully obvious what had happened last night. Her imaginative mind had no trouble whatsoever filling in the blanks.
And wasn’t it ironic as all get-out that she’d finally shed her virginal state, but couldn’t actually remember a single detail of it?
Even as a teenager, he’d inspired insanity in her. As an adult, clearly nothing had changed.
Flushing even hotter, she pushed off the bed, dragging the unwieldy sheet with her. “I remember the nightclub.” His grandmother had been adamant that Penny join them. “I remember your grandmother kept ordering bottles of champagne.” Penny had been a little concerned. In addition to being the woman’s personal assistant, she was supposed to be watching out for Vivian’s health.
But Vivian had also been surrounded by five of her fully adult grandchildren. If they’d been cheering on their fully capable grandmother, how on earth could Penny have intervened?
“Viv does seem to like her champagne.” He pushed off the bed, too, grimacing a little as he straightened. He pressed his hand to his side, covering the long surgical scar there as he paced around the bed again, coming to a stop in front of the enormous sliding glass door that opened to a narrow balcony with a spectacular view of the city below. His hand went from his side to the window as he looked out.
The August sun was shining brightly outside the glass, and the sunlight threw his body into perfect relief. From the spread of his wide shoulders to the narrowness of his hips where the blue jeans clung a little too precariously, the only flaws he possessed were that long zipper-like scar and a scattering of small pale blotches on his side.
“Last thing I remember was dancing with you.” His thumb tapped the window. “We’d been at the bar. Champagne’s not usually my thing. I ordered a pitcher of margaritas for the table.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than her.
She felt perspiration spring out on her forehead. “It can’t be a real marriage certificate.”
“Yeah, well, unless we prove it one way or another—” He broke off when there was a knock on the door.
His eyes were as dark a brown as his hair and they looked toward her, questioningly. Combined with the whiskers blurring his jaw and the faint lines arrowing out from his eyes, it was a powerful combination.
“How should I know?” she whispered. “This is your suite.”
She’d been the one to make all the hotel arrangements
