Princes of the Outback Bundle (26 page)

And, yeah, he’d have missed
this
moment.

Defeated by her white-chocolate and raspberry dessert, she’d finally laid down spoon and fork and sighed with dreamy completion. And, yeah, he’d been watching her play with the stem of her champagne flute and thinking about another kind of completion, when she’d looked up at him and smiled. “How did you know this is what I needed?”

“Cheesecake?” he’d asked. “Or more champagne?”

“You know what I mean. Tonight. This afternoon. Everything. You’ve taken my mind off my problems, as you promised, and you’ve made me laugh when I thought I’d never laugh again. I haven’t thanked you.”

“I think you just did.”

She studied him a moment, her eyes solemn. Her expression serious. “Just saying thank you seems inadequate.”

“I’m enjoying your company.”

“Me, too.” Her smile flashed, soft and sincere. “This morning you said you were a good listener. You’re not so bad in the talking field, either.”

“I’m not just a pretty face.”

“No.” Their eyes met and her eyes flamed as if she, too, was thinking of other things. Other areas of expertise.

“You ready to find out what else I’m good at?” he asked slowly.

The pulse in her throat fluttered. Her smile faltered and her laugh sounded brittle and edgy with nerves. “Oh, I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready for that.”

“No? There’s an old saying my father liked to use.” He stood and held out his hand, daring her to take it. Daring her to trust him. “Fortune favors the brave.”

He didn’t take her back to their suite, as Cat had anticipated when his fingers wrapped hers in the promise of startling heat and solid purpose. He took her by the hand and led her to the casino—not to one of the high-rollers’ rooms with the other rich and famous and beautiful, but to the main floor and the endless raft of slot machines. Indulging her. Then rattling her by standing at her back and offering instruction close to her ear. Resting a casual hand on her shoulder. Engulfing the bare stretch of her back in the heat of his body.

She couldn’t concentrate on the mindless roll of symbols and pictures before her eyes. Not when her body wanted nothing else but to turn and press hard against him. To bite his ear and say:
Enough. Let’s go back to our room and see what you’re really good at.

It was better when the machine chomped her last credit and they moved to the roulette wheel…although that might have been due to their astonishing run of luck. Excited by the rattle of the wheel and the rush of color and the adrenaline hit when the ball dropped, she didn’t even blink when he turned and pressed a kiss to her lips.

When he grinned and said, “Our luck’s running hot, baby,” she smiled right back.

“Must be the green dress.”

“Nah,” he drawled. “It’s you.”

If only it were,
she thought, before she could stop herself. Then she excused herself that moment of whimsical dreaming by blaming the champagne and the touch of his hand on her back and the whole fantastical nature of this day.

A day out of time. A day out of reality. A day that would never be repeated.

Their number came up again and she laughed with a giddy lack of restraint at the pile of chips the croupier pushed their way. Except, at the end her laugh evolved into a giant yawn. Rafe, of course, noticed.

“You want to call it a night?” he asked.

Her stomach tightened, her pulse jittered, but she met his gaze with a reckless sense of what will be, will be. “I think I probably should before I pass out and you have to carry me home.”

“Now that sounds like fun.”

He put his arm around her as if he might actually follow through, and Cat panicked at the inglorious thought of him trying…and stumbling because she weighed more than this sexy green dress let on. “If you’re carrying me,” she said quickly, breathlessly, “then who’s going to carry all our winnings?”

“You won it. You get to carry it.”

“Me?” Cat shook her head. “Oh, no, I didn’t. This is all yours.”

“No,” he said easily. “This night’s all yours.”

Stunned, head spinning faster and louder than the roulette wheel at their back, she stared into his face. He looked serious. He looked like he meant it. “I can’t. You can’t. No way.”

“Think about it, Catriona. It’s a lot of money. In your situation—”

“It’s
your
money!”

Their eyes connected, clashed, and his flared with some kind of challenge. “Okay,” he said softly. “Let’s make this interesting.”

Everything inside her tensed, stilled, focused on that dangerous glint in his eyes. “Interesting?”

“Let’s up the ante.”

Cat had to swallow and moisten her Nevada-dry mouth before she could get her throat and mouth to cooperate. “What do you propose?”

“One last spin. Red or black. All or nothing. If you win, you keep all the money. Enough to pay off your debts and some to spare.”

“And if I lose?” Cat’s voice was barely a whisper.

“You marry me. You have my baby. And I pay off your debts.”

A
fterward, Cat couldn’t believe that she’d accepted such a crazy fantastical wager. That she’d calmly pushed all their chips onto black, before standing at the center of a hushed crowd watching the wheel spin and the numbers whirl and the colors slow from a gyrating blur to a distinguishable red-black-red-black sequence.

She hadn’t thought he meant it. She hadn’t believed he would go through with it. But then, she hadn’t known that a person—two people, actually—could stroll right into the Marriage License Bureau and fill out the necessary paperwork for a wedding.

Little more than an hour after the fateful ball rattled to its resting place on red seven, she found herself married to the man at her side.

Rafferty Keane Carlisle. She hadn’t even known his full name until they applied for that license. He was a virtual stranger, and he was her husband.

Somewhere between the wedding chapel and the hotel lobby, the molasses-thick stupor in Cat’s mind stopped swirling long enough to let that detail seep in, along with all its ramifications. At the roulette table tonight, she’d won herself a husband. A rich husband who would pay off her debts so she could keep Corroboree.

A husband who wanted a baby conceived as soon as possible.

That particular ramification ambushed her completely as the elevator doors slid noiselessly shut, and the mirror-lined cubicle commenced its smooth ascent. Earlier she’d thought about sleeping with him, at least a dozen times during dinner alone. She’d decided that this night would probably end in his bed, but that had been part of the whole fantasy twenty-four hours. Part of the makeover, of licking her wounds, of rebounding from the Drew debacle and reasserting herself as a woman. Something to regret in the morning, and to walk away from once she returned to the real world.

But during that adrenaline-and champagne-and lust-fueled casino madness, she’d allowed fantasy and reality to collide. To connect. To join and meld and bond.

A wave of heat shadowed that thought. A rippling montage of bodies joining and melding and bonding in a tangle of Egyptian cotton sheets. She felt the heat in her cheeks and her eyes and the softened fullness of her lips, and she let her head drop a little, away from the telltale evidence in the mirror before her.

From the corner of her eye she could see his right hand tapping a lazy beat against the elevator wall, and she remembered the soft brush of those fingers in a dozen places, a dozen times. She remembered, and her pulse began to drum in time with his fingers.

Unable to watch any longer—not without taking that hand and drawing it to the achy heat of her body—she lifted her head and let it roll back against the cool, mirrored wall. For
a second she closed her eyes and attempted to block out that insistent beat of desire with the image of their left hands joined by the celebrant. Left hands wearing the plain gold bands borrowed from the hotel concierge and about as disconnected from reality as this whole surreal night.

But that carefully constructed mental image faded, replaced by another. His hand drawing her into his body. His face blurring in and out of her dazed focus as he bent and pressed his lips to hers.
Go ahead and kiss the bride, now.
Heat washed through her veins, pooled sweet and liquid, low in her body.

She needed to think. They needed to talk before this went any further. Before this sexual energy took total possession of her mind as well as her body.

Restless, she rolled her shoulders. Shifted her feet. Their upper arms bumped and parted in what should have been a casual brush of contact, except it charged Cat with enough power to light up the whole Vegas strip.

Her eyes jolted open. A low, needy sound growled up from her throat. At first she thought it was in her mind, her own silent howl of protest because that one grazing brush of his jacket against her bare skin left her baying for more. But then their eyes met in the mirror with a hot, electric force that rocked her to her toes.

Oh, yes, she had groaned out loud. That knowledge was in his hot stare. It tugged tight in her belly and ached in her breasts.

Oh, yes, she wanted him. But somehow she’d imagined falling into bed with the Rafe from tonight’s dinner, from the long conversations during their night on the plane, from the breakfast table at Corroboree. The man who’d lounged naked in her guest-room bathroom without batting an eyelid. The flirt with the knowing smile and the drawled lines that made her laugh or roll her eyes or fire back a cynical retort.

The man in the mirror was not that Rafe.

His eyes burned with a fierce flame. The lines of his classically hewn face were set with an intensity that both thrilled and terrified her.

And it struck her, in that long, drawn-out moment, that he’d barely spoken a word since that fateful moment in the casino. Nothing beyond the necessary instructions, as he took over and swept her along with an efficiency and purpose she’d not seen in him before. Up until now she’d been too dazed, too shocked, too brain-sluggish to work that all out.

Her heart beat slow and heavy in her chest. Pounding with the knowledge that she’d underestimated Rafe Carlisle. Pounding with the fear that she’d bitten off way more than she could chew.

The elevator chimed their floor, a brief rich peal that barely impacted on the tension inside the car. The tension inside Cat. “We’re here,” she said, surprising herself with the calm clarity of her voice. Yet she couldn’t coax her limbs to move or force her gaze to disconnect from his.

“Finally.”

And that one quietly uttered word propelled Rafe into action. Before she realized his purpose, he’d turned and ducked one arm under her thighs to swing her into his arms.

Her eyes widened as he carted her out of the elevator. “No, you can’t. I’m too—”

“Too what, Mrs. Carlisle?” He stopped and met her startled eyes with a look of grim satisfaction.

Crikey. Mrs. Carlisle. That was her!

That whammy effectively wiped her mind clean of whatever she’d been about to say and a good lot else besides. He started striding toward their suite, and the combination of that motion and the wall of his body hard against hers joggled Cat’s senses back to life.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on tight.

Her dangling legs brushed his hip and thigh, curling her toes with raw heat. One of her sexy new shoes fell from her
arched foot, and she almost told him to leave it be. But he turned and dropped down on his haunches so quickly that her world tilted and spun.

“Put me down. I’m too heavy,” she gasped as he came back up again, one delicate, glittery stiletto dangling from his hand. “You don’t have to carry me.”

“Yeah, I do. I have to carry you over the threshold. It’s a tradition.”

“I thought you said Alex was the old-fashioned one in your family. Since when have you worried about tradition?”

“Since I decided to marry you.”

She huffed out a dubious breath. “So, about an hour, give or take? That hardly makes you an expert.”

“An hour? What gives you that impression?” Stopped at the door to their suite, he looked long and hard into her eyes. “I made up my mind about you last week, baby. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

Too much information? Admitted too soon?

As he extricated the key card from her itsy little nothing of a purse, Rafe suffered a moment’s unease. She’d gone silent again, and he felt the stiffness of her body—a far different kind from his—against his chest and arms. Even through the intense buzz of arousal, he swore he could hear her mind ticking with questions. If he gave her half a chance, she’d launch a debate on the logic of what they’d just done. If he didn’t keep her occupied, she might try to wangle another crazy handshake deal with him.

He wasn’t about to give her
half
of half a chance. And once he got her inside, he intended to keep her very occupied.

The door swung open and he angled her through, swinging her with enough velocity that she gasped and caught hard at his shoulders and neck. Yeah, he liked the clutch of her fingers. The puff of her breath against his skin. But mostly he’d wanted to distract her from that thinking. From voicing the question he’d seen forming on her lush lips.

“I’m too big for this rubbish,” she reprimanded. “You’re lucky you haven’t done yourself an injury!”

“Yeah, well, I’ve always considered myself a lucky bastard.” He stopped spinning her and looked into her eyes. “And I’ve been particularly lucky with you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That roulette bet was only even money. A fifty-fifty chance, either way.”

“True, but that’s not what I meant.” Luck had been on his side from the moment that storm sent him Catriona’s way, and he’d caught one lucky break after another ever since. Her changing her mind. Finding the cowboy in Vegas. His impulsive challenge to up the ante.

“Then…what? And what did you mean about this not being spur-of-the-moment?”

Ignoring her questions, he started moving again, carrying her through the sitting room toward her bedroom.

“Stop.” She pushed at his chest. “Put me down. We have to talk about this.”

“Yeah, we do and we will. But not now. This is my wedding night, and the only thing I’m interested in discussing is how we’re going to spend it.” At the door he stopped and looked into her face. “And where. Is your bedroom okay or would you prefer we went to mine?”

Stunned eyes stared back into his.

“Yours, then.” He nudged her door open with his shoulder. “I’ve been fantasizing about undressing you in this room all night.”

He heard the soft explosion of her breath. “You didn’t have to marry me to do that!”

Holding her tighter, he looked into her eyes and smiled. “I know. That’s not why I married you.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because you’re going to be the mother of my baby.”

The shock of that line registered deep in her eyes and resounded deep in Rafe’s gut. The baby he’d only thought about
as his mother’s grandchild had tonight taken shape and substance. A baby with Catriona’s changeling eyes and calm strength and solid values.

“How can you say that?” She began to struggle again, this time with more determination. “I might not be able to get pregnant. I might not be able to carry a baby. Did you think about that?”

“I’m prepared to take my chances.”

“Do you even
know
what those chances are?”

“Is there a reason you ask?” He carried her to the bed. Sat with her in his arms. “Something in your history I should know about?”

“No.”

“Are you on any form of contraception?”

“No.”

“Then why bring it up?”

All uptight and irritated, she clicked her tongue. “To illustrate why this was such a dumb idea!”

“You get your debts paid off. How is that dumb?”

“From
your
point of view. Marrying me doesn’t ensure you get this baby you need.” Agitated, she started to wiggle in his lap, trying to extricate herself from his arms. “I don’t understand why you had to go and marry me! I would have slept with you without a marriage license. I know that. You know that.”

“Do I?” he asked evenly. “Because the way you’re trying to get away from me isn’t exactly filling me with confidence.”

Somehow, in her struggles, she’d managed to wiggle her hip hard against him. She went still, and he watched her expression change from flushed annoyance to flushed knowledge. Watched her eyes flash with heat and spirit. “From where I’m sitting you feel pretty damn full of confidence!”

“Him? Yeah, well, he’s always confident.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he has reason,” she fired right back. “With all your talk of wedding night expectations!”

She was really something, his wife. Sharp, smart, straight. And from where he sat, Rafe could see a choice of two options. Kiss her into submission—his first and favorite option. Or give her a better explanation of his motivation…before kissing her into submission.

Readjusting her to a more comfortable—and less distracting—listening position, he sighed resignedly.

“Say we’d walked away from that wheel tonight. Say we’d come back here and I’d got very lucky and talked my way out of that handshake agreement.” Her eyes widened as if she’d forgotten about the deal they’d struck on the plane. “Say I’d managed to talk you into letting me touch you, any way I wanted to, every way I wanted to. Say you’d stripped out of that sexy little dress and invited me into your bed and your body.”

She swallowed. Rafe’s gaze dropped to that convulsive movement and saw the flutter of pulse in her throat. Satisfaction beat hard in his blood as his gaze returned to hers.

“Would you have still felt the same when the champagne wore off? Would you have woken up beside me in the morning? Would you have stuck around long enough to make this baby I need?”

She didn’t answer, but then she didn’t have to. Rafe knew a one-night stand would not sit right with a woman like Catriona, not the morning after. Nor would the kind of affair that consisted of baby-sex without any commitment.

“That’s why I married you, Catriona. To make a baby.” Slowly, gently, he palmed the curve of her stomach where that baby might one day grow. Felt the soft shiver of reaction in her flesh and saw it reflected in her eyes. “To do it right.”

“You can’t know I’m the right woman.” That same shiver roughened the edges of her voice. “You don’t know me. I don’t know you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anything. I didn’t even know your full name.” Rattled, edgy, her words came out in a rush. “I thought it might be Rafael.”

“I’m Rafferty after my Gaelic grandfather—my mother’s father. My brother Alex couldn’t get the whole mouthful out when he was a tot, so he shortened it to Rafe. It stuck.”

“See? I didn’t know that. The Gaelic thing, I mean. You look Mediterranean.”

“Courtesy of my birth father,” he said shortly. He didn’t share his background with many people, but Catriona had a right to know. This much at least. “My mother’s Irish, though. Her name was Maura Keane.”

“Your second name,” she said softly. And that was enough, Rafe decided. Time to change the subject. He stroked the length of her arm, up and down, then paused at her shoulder. Touching the fabric of her dress with one fingertip. “My favorite color is green.”