“So that’s the infamous Flynn, hmm?” Annie Powell said several hours later, her long-lashed brown eyes sparkling as she watched the celebratory swirl on the dance floor. Among those coupled for a waltz were the bride and the best man. “You never mentioned he was such a hunk.”
Zoe nearly spewed out the sip of champagne she’d just imbibed. “H-hunk?” She stared at her former college roommate, shutting her mind to the memory of the wildfire lure of sexual attraction she’d felt outside the church. Her body was less amenable to discipline. She felt a quicksilver sluice of heat rinse through her veins. The tips of her breasts started to harden. “Hunk?”
“Oh, definitely,” Annie affirmed, fluffing her pertly bobbed hair. After a moment she transferred her gaze back to Zoe’s face. “Now I understand why you played it so cool when some of the hottest guys on the U. Va. campus were flinging themselves at your feet. What girl would settle for undergraduate frankfurters when she knew there was filet mignon in the world?”
Zoe struggled for control. She realized she was being teased. Teasing was one of Annie’s favorite activities. And most of the time she genuinely enjoyed her friend’s clever quips and perceptive little jokes. But on this particular occasion…
She wouldn’t have to stay much longer, she assured herself. During the traditional cutting of the wedding cake a short time ago, she’d noticed Peachy and Luc exchanging looks that indicated they were both eager for some privacy. A romantic getaway was definitely in the offing. As soon as the new Mr. and Mrs. Devereaux left the reception, she would be able to make a discreet exit from the scene.
And once she did that, she would never have to see Gabriel James McNally Flynn again. Out of Sight, Out of Mind was going to be her motto from this evening onward. She fully intended to forget her one-time rescuer as thoroughly as he seemed to have forgotten her.
She should have purged him from her thoughts a long time ago!
“I wasn’t playing at anything back at U. Va.,” she began, carefully placing her champagne glass on the small, linencovered table at which she and Annie were seated. “I was there to get a good education, not waste my time going to keg parties and football games with a bunch of frat rats. As for Flynn being prime filet mignon…well, you’re entitled to your opinion, of course. But all I see when I look at him is—is—” she searched furiously for a suitably scathing analogy “-gristle!”
Annie remained silent for several long seconds, appearing to subject this last assertion to a considerable amount of mental mastication. Zoe watched her dark eyes stray speculatively toward the dancers but refused to follow the visual cue. She knew Flynn was partnering Peachy and she felt no needno desire!—to watch him do it. She wondered nastily whether the former Special Forces officer realized that there was a world of difference between a waltz and a forced march. Bad luck for him if he didn’t. Although she didn’t know the new Mrs. Devereaux as well as she knew her older sister, Eden, she had a strong hunch that the former Pamela Gayle Keene wouldn’t take kindly to being ordered around like an incompetent recruit.
Her friend exhaled on a hissing breath then looked back at her with an oddly knowing expression. “He’s that tough, huh?”
“I told you what he did!” Zoe retorted, stung. In point of fact, Annie and Eden were the only two people in whom she’d ever confided the humiliating details of her five-day odyssey through the jungle. She’d given everyone else—the government officials who’d questioned her, even her mother and father—a carefully edited version of what had happened.
She never figured out exactly why she’d done this. She supposed it might have been because she’d harbored a fear that adults wouldn’t see anything wrong with Flynn’s behavior toward her. So he’d bruised her sensibilities, she’d imagined them saying to her. Didn’t she understand that he’d been acting in response to exigent circumstances? Couldn’t she see that what really, truly mattered was that he’d saved her life?
Her parents had actually declared that they thought their daughter’s rescuer deserved a medal. Whether formal action had ever been taken on this suggestion, Zoe didn’t know and had convinced herself she didn’t care. But given that inherited wealth and professional achievement had endowed Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick with a fair amount of pull in some pretty high places, she was inclined to guess that Flynn had at the very least received a glowing commendation for his personnel file at the Pentagon.
She’d wondered more than a few times what kind of accounting of his actions—and hers—Flynn had provided when he’d been debriefed by U.S. Army authorities, as he surely must have been. She’d also wondered whether he’d complained to his military buddies about “baby-sitting duty” as much as he’d complained to her.
“You told me he’d saved your life, Zoe,” Annie pointed out.
“I told you a lot of other things, too.”
“Well, yes. You did. It’s just that…uh…”
“Just what?”
Zoe watched as Annie began twiddling with the small bellshaped locket that dangled at the base of her throat. Except for the initial engraved on its softly gleaming surface, the exquisite silver ornament was identical to the ones hanging around her neck and that of the blushing bride.
“Annie?” she prodded.
Her friend stopped twiddling. “Okay,” she said, leaning forward. “First and foremost, I don’t doubt for a second that those five days you spent tromping around the jungle were every bit as awful as you told me and Eden.”
“I really appreciate your faith.”
The sugared sarcasm provoked a grimace of exasperation. “Come on, Zoe. I realize it was a terrible experience. And I’ll grant you that Flynn might have made it worse—”
“Might have?”
“All right. All right,” Annie backpedaled. “What I’m trying to say is that now that I’ve finally met you know who after so many years of hearing about him…well, to be perfectly honest, hon, Gabriel Flynn is not what I expected.”
“And just what, pray tell, was that?”
“It’s hard to put into words. Sort of a…mmm…sort of a cross between Rambo and a male chauvinist troglodyte.”
The observation was vintage Annie, Zoe thought wryly. “But now that you’ve seen him you’ve decided he’s a fine piece of beef?”
“He’s certainly no Congressman Talcott Emerson III.”
This jibe was vintage Annie, too.
“Please.” Zoe held up her right hand, palm forward, like a traffic cop. She should have known her friend would get around to this, she chided herself. She really should have. While Annie had never been particularly complimentary about her choice of men, she’d become increasingly vocal on the subject since marrying Matt Powell in late April. “Do not—I repeat, do not—start up with that, Hannah Elaine.”
Zoe had had a relationship with Congressman Talcott Emerson III referred to by many as T. E. Three—several years ago. She’d thought he was everything she wanted in a man. He was so solid. So stable. Yet when it had come to the crunch, when this seemingly perfect-for-her man had brought out an engagement ring set with a flawless two-carat diamond that had belonged to his grandmother and proposed marriage, she’d found herself shaking her head and shrinking away.
For reasons she still couldn’t explain, the idea of spending the rest of her life with Talcott had suddenly filled her with an irrational sense of nothingness. Her brain had told her that she was being offered the normalcy she craved as an antidote to her harum-scarum upbringing. Yet something else had ominously warned that this normalcy would be, for her at least, a very numbed-out form of existence. And so, to her vast astonishment, she’d wound up thanking Talcott for his proposal, then politely turning him down.
He’d