They started down the stairs to the first floor of the courthouse. It finally dawned on her that Drake was not merely in a hurry. He was quietly furious.
“Why were you so concerned about getting the MC registered immediately?” she asked.
“Ethel Whitcomb is obsessed with you,” Drake said. “Trust me, when she hears you’re married to me, she’ll verify the facts.”
Alice glanced at him, fascinated by his certainty. “You’re probably right.”
“If I sent an investigator to find you and he came back with a story about an MC, I’d sure as hell double- check.”
She was not sure how to take that. He sounded as if he would be seriously annoyed if he discovered that she was in an MC with another man. It was hypothetical, but why was he simmering?
Drake whisked her outside and across the street to the parking garage. They walked through the shadowy space to the slot where the rental car waited. Drake opened the door on the passenger side.
Delighted at the prospect of another car ride, Houdini fluttered down from Alice’s shoulder, scurried into the front of the vehicle, and hopped up onto the back of the seat.
“He’s a little speed junkie,” Alice explained.
“He’s going to love the company jet.”
“Probably.”
Alice made to slip into the front seat, but Drake touched her shoulder. She stilled, intensely aware of the energy flaring in the atmosphere around them. Her heart rate kicked up and her intuition went into the hot zone.
“What is it?” she whispered, searching the nearby shadows. “Something wrong?”
His hand tightened gently on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe. No need to disappear again.”
“Sorry.” She tried for a smile. “I have a tendency to overreact these days. Parking garages always make me nervous. So many shadows. So many hiding places. I sometimes wonder if one day Ethel will go over the edge and escalate her campaign of harassment to physical assault or . . . worse.”
Drake searched her face. “Do you really think she might send someone to kill you?”
“That’s just it. I have no idea what she’ll do next. I don’t know the woman. I just know she wants revenge.”
“I can’t even imagine the toll that kind of stress has taken on you this past year.”
“Yeah, well, you get used to it,” Alice said, going for tough and breezy.
“I doubt it.”
“Is there something bothering you?” she asked. “I mean, aside from the situation on Rainshadow? You’ve been acting a little weird ever since we signed those papers a few minutes ago.”
“The clerk back there in the courthouse,” Drake said.
“What about her? I thought she seemed pleasant and efficient.”
“She thinks I’m marrying you in an MC because it’s a socially acceptable way for a man to keep a mistress happy for a while.”
“Oh, that,” Alice said, relaxing. “Well, naturally. What else would she think under the circumstances? I didn’t realize that you had noticed.”
“You didn’t think I was aware of how she was looking at me?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. She has no way of knowing that you married me to protect me from my ex-mother-in-law.”
Drake flattened one hand on the roof of the car and looked off into the shadows of the garage.
“There’s something you should know before we drive out of here,” he said.
“You’re starting to make me nervous. We’ve already discussed sea monsters, paranormal weather disturbances, dangerous ocean currents, and an overheating island. What else is it that you want me to know?”
He turned to look at her. Light from the overhead fixture glinted on his mirrored shades. “When the clerk said that I could kiss the bride, I wanted to.”
Once again everything within her seemed to still. Her intuition spiked but not the way it had a moment ago. There was danger here but not the kind that she had been running from for the past year.
“Oh,” she said. It took everything she had to squelch the thrill that feathered her senses. She managed another stage smile. “Well, why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I?” he said a little too evenly.
“I would have understood.” She waved one hand in a dismissing motion. “A kiss would have made the scene look more natural to her.”
Drake did a single staccato drumroll on the car roof with his fingers. His jaw tightened.
“I didn’t kiss you because I knew what the clerk was thinking. Also, I was pretty sure I knew what you were thinking and I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
“Well, that was very thoughtful of you, but I can assure you that after what I’ve been through this past year, it would take a lot more than a fake kiss in front of a courthouse clerk to embarrass me.”
“That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Drake said. “The kiss would not have been fake.”
She caught her breath. “Oh.”
She did not dare to move for fear of shattering the crystalline moment.
“It would have been this kind of kiss,” Drake said.
He wrapped a hand around the back of her neck, drew her close, and covered her mouth with his own.
Chapter 7
THE KISS WAS REAL, ALL RIGHT. SHE HAD BEEN OUT OF practice for a year, but she had no problem recognizing the genuine article when it sent shock waves across all her senses.
Behind the shock waves of that first intimate connection came the slow burn of an exquisitely controlled but breathtakingly masculine passion.
Fire and ice splashed through her veins. The kiss was beyond real. At least it was beyond the reality of any kiss she had ever before experienced. It dazzled and astonished her. A strange confusion and a sparkling chaos made her head spin.
But the energy of the embrace was having a bizarre effect on her. She was breathless, overwrought, and overwhelmed. It was too much. She had been walking an invisible tightrope for so long, lurching from crisis to crisis. She ricocheted between bursts of adrenaline and fury at her own inability to escape Ethel Whitcomb’s net. There had been too many nights when she had slammed her fist into her pillow, which were nights of bad dreams and cold sweats. Too many useless crying jags in the shower. Too many times when she had been forced to vanish at a moment’s notice. Too many times when she walked the floor until dawn with Houdini in her arms, searching for a way out.
Everything within her had been precariously balanced on high-alert status ever since she had run from the man who had tried to kill her. The edgy fire of Drake’s kiss sent her over the edge.
She clutched at his shoulders and threw herself into the embrace with ferocious abandon. She was frantic for release, any kind of release. She needed something, and in that moment she did not care if it came in the form of an act of violence or an act of passion. She just wanted to be free of her invisible prison, if only for a short time.
If Drake was startled or taken aback by her fierce response, he did not show it. There were a few seconds—the span of a couple of fast heartbeats—during which he seemed to be adjusting to the unexpected development in their short acquaintance. And then, like a driver who thought he was going to be getting behind the wheel of a compact car but discovers that he is piloting a turbo-rezzed sports car instead, he took back control of the kiss and floored the accelerator.
