One Night With Morelli by Kim Lawrence Page A

wrong; he had seen that sultry mouth but not the emotional baggage that came with it. It was a good thing he had discovered his error now, before things had gone too far, he told himself.
    She was high maintenance, and he was a bastard who had no intention of changing. Always better in his experience to call a spade a spade.
    ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked.
    He was not about to make an indecent proposal with his daughter just outside the door but even so her heartbeat kicked into a higher gear. ‘That depends.’
    ‘Smile and try not to look so tragic.’
    She stiffened, her spine snapping to attention. ‘Pardon me?’
    ‘I’d like to stay a hero for as long as I can in my daughter’s eyes, so I’d be grateful if you could suck it up and look like I waved my magic wand and made everything better. It’s not as if you’re the only one who doesn’t like weddings. I suspect with me it’s that they remind me too much of my own,’ he admitted with a frankness she was beginning to find disturbing.
    It was a day he was able to think about with a degree of objectivity now, but for a long time it hadn’t been that way. Now he was able to admit that he had known halfway through exchanging his vows that he was making the biggest mistake of his life, and it was doubtful it would even have got that far if his parents hadn’t been so against it, and delivered an ultimatum.
    He had been twenty and had thought he knew everything. Their parental disapproval had been like a red rag to a bull, and what better way to display his maturity than to get married against their wishes and show them how wrong they were?
    ‘Suck it up?’ she repeated in a low, dangerous voice. ‘Suck it up? What the hell do you think I’ve been doing all d-d-day? As for your marriage, I…I…spare me the details.’ She glared at him, daring him to comment on her stutter. These days it rarely surfaced but she was always conscious that it could at any moment—and it was his fault that it just had.
    Eve felt something snap inside her. ‘You think you don’t like weddings, let me tell you,’ she huffed, ‘about my day!’ She reached inside the bodice of her dress and after a grunt produced a wad of tissues, which she waved at him. ‘Did you have to stuff your bra full of tissues to keep your dress up? Did you have to watch your mother, who is the best,
totally
best person you know, marry a man who is so far beneath her in every way?’ Eve’s voice dropped a husky octave but shook with the strength of the emotion that gripped her as she concluded, ‘And it wouldn’t even be happening now if the scumbag hadn’t got her pregnant!’
    For about three seconds she felt the intense relief of getting it off her chest…and then she looked at the tissues in her hand and gulped quite literally. The wave of horror that followed made her want to vanish… What had she been thinking of, telling a total stranger such private things?
    Her green eyes lifted to his face, her insides churning sickly. ‘If you tell anyone I’ll—’
    ‘Be forced to have me killed. Don’t worry—your secret is safe with me,’ Eve heard him drawl with teeth-clenching sarcasm.
    ‘The idea is growing on me,’ she declared grimly.
    Forgetting the cold shoulder he had intended to present to her, he grinned. ‘I’m curious—have you got any more tissues down there or is what remains all you?’
    She pressed her hand to the neckline of her strapless gown; without the extra padding to fill it he had a view all the way down to her waist and he was certainly looking.
    ‘You’re hateful!’ Eve looked at the wad of tissues and threw them at him.
    Laughing, he reached out and caught them. ‘Seriously.’ Actually he had been
seriously
impressed by the view of her small but perfect breasts like plump little apples in their lacy covering. He could just imagine them filling his hand—only they wouldn’t because she was high maintenance. She was an innocent…