Lady Be Good (Wynette, Texas #2)(94)

“This can’t be a legal marriage. It was too tawdry.”

“The state of Nevada doesn’t care about good taste. Just out of curiosity—That thing Torie mentioned . . . do I get to be Lord Kenny now?”

“You do not! Of all the absurd notions—” She stopped as she realized he was teasing.

He went on because, if he didn’t, he knew she’d start in again. “The way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can either keep your last name or you can use mine, but you’re damn well not going to string them all together. Nobody will ever take you seriously if you go around calling yourself Lady Emma Wells-Finch Traveler. At least not in Texas. Am I making myself clear about that?” He watched her glance down at her new gold wedding band.

“Perfectly.” As Emma twisted the ring, she wondered if her finger would turn green by tomorrow. She looked over at Kenny’s hand and wished she’d thought to buy him a ring, but it hadn’t occurred to her.

She’d spoken those vows of her own free will—he hadn’t forced them out of her—so why had she done it? Because she owed him, and restoring his reputation was the least she could do. But she couldn’t see how getting married was going to accomplish that. It would have been much more effective to simply have called Dallie and explained, except that every time she’d mentioned it, Kenny exploded.

She was lying to herself. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to say no, even though she knew it was wrong. The garish lights of the Strip splashed over the car, and shame at her own weakness overwhelmed her. She tried to distract herself by thinking of other things—how a stranger would be going through her possessions in the cottage and packing them up, Penelope’s reaction when she learned she was St. Gert’s new headmistress, Hugh’s spitefulness.

As she thought about Hugh, she once again experienced the sense that she’d missed something in his hotel room this morning. What was it he’d said? It had slipped by her at the time, but . . .

She shrugged off her uneasiness. She had enough real problems to worry about without creating imaginary ones. For example, what were the odds of ever seeing her luggage again? “I don’t have any clothes.”

“That’s not exactly a disadvantage from my point of view.”

“You don’t have any either.”

“That’s why God invented credit cards.”

“I’m not taking your money.”

“Our money. It’s all going into one big pool now, so get ready to open up your bank accounts and turn over all those pounds you’ve got tucked away.”

“There aren’t that many,” she said glumly.

The corner of his mouth curled. “We’ll work it out.”

Half an hour later she was standing under the shower in the spacious marbled bathroom of their hotel suite. The door slid open behind her and two suntanned arms encircled her waist. She leaned her head back against his chest. “Oh, Kenny, we should never have done this.”

“I don’t see what the big damn deal is, especially since you already told me you loved me.”

“Marriage bloody well is a big damn deal!”

“Don’t cuss. Profanity just isn’t effective with a British accent.” He nuzzled her ear. “Even if you all of a sudden let loose with the Big One, it’d still sound like something you could say from the pulpit.”

She sighed. What was she going to do with him?

“Wash my back, will you?”

She soaped the washcloth, slipped behind him, and began stroking it over his shoulders. Slowly, she moved lower, to his waist, his buttocks, his thighs. “You have to be faithful,” she said. “As long as we’re married, you have to be faithful.”

He took the soap from her and replied softly, “I’m not the one who tried to buy herself a gigolo.”

“Still . . .”

He dipped his head and kissed her. She kissed him back—loved the feel of his mouth, loved the slide of his tongue, the scratch of his whiskers—but, even so, her kiss turned into a yawn.

He drew back. “I think this’d better wait until you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

“Rubbish.” She could see what his consideration was costing him, and she mustered herself. “The only reason I yawned was that I didn’t sleep much last night either, and it’s late, and—Go ahead. Really. It’s fine.”

He lifted one eyebrow, turned her around, and began washing her in an impersonal fashion, as if he were taking care not to arouse either one of them. But it definitely wasn’t working for him, and as his finger accidentally brushed one of her nipples, she realized it wasn’t working for her either. She rubbed her soapy back against his front.

“Emma . . .” His voice held a husky, warning note.

She pulled his head under the shower and kissed him.

He took her right there in the shower, holding her against the wall, her thighs locked around his waist. Afterward, as they lay in bed together, their bodies were so closely entwined it was hard to decide where one of them began and the other left off. But as exhausted as she was, she didn’t fall asleep immediately.

As she listened to the deep sound of his breathing, she tried to absorb the fact that this man was her husband. She knew she loved him, and she certainly desired him, but that travesty of a marriage ceremony had given her no real connection to him. Where was the feeling of attachment she’d been searching for all her life? Despite Kenny’s ardent lovemaking and apparent fondness for her, he didn’t truly love her, and pretending anything else was too self-indulgent to even contemplate. Her relationship with him felt as transitory as those temporary bonds she’d had with teachers and friends, as fragile as her relationship with parents who were all too eager to forget they had a daughter.