she had pink paint in her hair, and reptilian spots all over her arms. Which, to give her credit, Abby didn’t know about.
Yet.
“How could she do this to me?” she murmured, to herself, but out loud this time. She gave her head a rueful shake, hoping to clear the spell she was floundering under and become herself. Cosmopolitan. Sophisticated. Witty. In control.
“Pardon?” He took a step back and glanced hopefully for an apartment number, as if he were suddenly wishing he was in the wrong place.
There was no number. Hers was just one set of stairs in a long line of them that came up from the back lane to the stuffy little apartments located over the main street businesses.
“Are you Brittany? Brittany Patterson?”
“Unfortunately.”
“I’m sorry. Who did what to you?” He cocked an eyebrow at her, tilted his head.
“My sister. You.”
“My father, Jordan Hamilton, asked me if I would escort you to your sister’s wedding,” he said with a certain stiff dignity.
She realized he had been roped into the task of escorting her to Abby’s wedding. And that he obviously was not nearly as swayed by her, as she was by him.
Adjectives kept running through her head, as she gazed helplessly at him. Gorgeous. Stunning. Dazzling.
Because she wanted more than anything else for him to want to take her to her sister’s wedding. And because that made her feel weak and silly, and the way she least liked to feel—vulnerable—she said, “I’m sure everyone’s intentions were great, but I certainly don’t need an escort. I’m quite happy to go by myself.”
His eyes narrowed and she felt a funny shiver go down her spine as she recognized that his will was at least as strong as hers. Perhaps, heaven forbid, stronger.
“My orders are to get you to the church on time.” He slid back an impeccable sleeve and glanced at a watch. A Rolex watch. “Which means we have to leave. Now.”
She noticed again his voice, deep-timbred, even more sensual with that note of implacable sternness in it. But for all the smooth confidence of his voice that same hint of something wild ran at the edges of it.
Of course, the autocratic note she could do without.
With incredible effort she pulled herself together. That would be the day when she ever let a man like this get the upper hand, let him think she would allow herself to be bossed around like an errant child!
“Well, we can’t leave right now,” she said firmly. “I can’t. I’m not ready.”
This invited his inspection. He looked at her closely, his gaze suddenly uncomfortably intense, nothing in it suggesting he was coming up with a lovely list of adjectives to describe her.
“You look fine to me.”
Fine?
“Except you seem to have,” he reached out a tentative hand, and touched, “something in your hair. Bubble gum?”
She jerked away from his hand, appalled by the ridiculous sensation that electricity had shot from his fingertips.
“Paint! It’s on my arms, too. This is unbelievable.” That she was standing here talking to this ravishing man about this. “It will not come off. How can they manufacture something like that? Aren’t there laws?”
“I’m afraid laws concerning paint products are not my specialty.” His amusement was reluctant.
“What am I going to do?” she asked, more to herself than him.
“Hope for dim lighting,” he suggested, without an appropriate amount of sympathy. “We have to go now.”
“I can’t. You don’t understand.” He really didn’t understand, how important it was that today, of all days, she be absolutely faultless. And not for herself and not so he could see her at her ravishing best, though certainly that would have been a bonus.
“It’s Abby’s day,” she whispered, “and it needs to be perfect. I’m a bridesmaid. I’ll be in all the pictures. I can’t wreck her pictures.”
She had the funniest feeling that she had just revealed something more of herself than she was prepared to have rejected by his Royal Handsomeness, because he was looking at her closely as if he was seeing something he hadn’t seen before.
“The pictures will probably be in that horrible little paper,” she said swiftly. “I can’t be seen like this.”
His eyes became impatient, but his voice did not. “It doesn’t look that bad. Bubble gum is obviously not your shade, but I really don’t think it’s that noticeable. Not like, say, neon green.”
“Please stop calling it bubble gum. It’s frosted dawn,” she informed him regally.
“And how did, er, frosted dawn, end up on bleached blond?”
Bleached blond? She wasn’t even going to dignify that by responding to it. This man knew how to make an enemy.
“I happen to be painting,” she informed him in a chilled tone.
“An artist,” he said, as if that explained all kinds of eccentricities. “The last show the museum brought in was done by a dog. Seriously. He had had his tail dipped in paint, and wagged it over the canvas.”
The most handsome man she had ever, ever laid eyes on, had casually grouped her, the bleached blonde, in the same category as a dog that painted with its tail.
She sighed. She had looked forward to this day with eagerness and delight. It was the day of her sister’s wedding, a day that confirmed miracles really did happen to the most ordinary of people, a day that celebrated love. A day that filled her with this wistful, secret hope that maybe one day, in the not too distant future, she too would be a bride.
Now, she could tell things were just not going to go exactly as per her plan. Anything close to her plan. For today. And that probably included the rest of her life, too.
“I’m not an artist!” she told him coldly. “I’m painting the walls. In my business.”
He looked at the shade in her hair incredulously. “Really?”
“This shade looks much better on the walls.”
“Really?” he said again. A slow smile was spreading across those firm lips, slow and warm and sexy.
How could Abby do this to her?
“It’s not funny,” she told him desperately.
“Of course not,” he said, in a voice that could easily have tacked “Your Honor” on the end of his response. The smile disappeared. “But do you know what really wouldn’t be amusing? Being late for the wedding. That could spoil the occasion. This, on the other hand,” he gestured at her hair, “will probably
