as weddings.”
“Annulment means there’s been no marriage—or anything associated with the marriage—at all.”
“That’s right.” She pulled on her wrist, but his fingers held fast. They weren’t hurting. But they weren’t giving so much as a centimeter.
Instead, he reeled her in closer. He tucked one finger beneath her chin, and her mouth went dry.
He turned her face until she was looking back into the hotel suite.
Right at the bed.
“You sure an annulment is going to be all that easy?” His voice was low. Intimate. “We have a consummated marriage here, sweetheart.”
A flush ran through her veins, and her skin seemed to tingle.
“We don’t know that for sure,” she reminded, wishing that she sounded a lot less hoarse and a lot more certain.
His callused thumb moved slowly over her inner wrist. “You don’t remember the way we woke up?”
She wanted to block out his words as badly as she wanted to block out the truth. Because she did remember exactly the way she’d awakened.
Engulfed in his warmth. His hand on her breast. His hair-roughened thigh between hers.
He hadn’t been inside her. But he could have been. Everywhere she’d been soft and wanting, he’d been hard and insistent.
And for a moment, a wonderful, blissful moment, she’d imagined Andy weren’t dead. That he was there with her. They were together, finally, just the way they’d planned to be.
And then she’d realized the dream wasn’t a dream at all. But a nightmarish reality.
Because it wasn’t Andy’s arms surrounding her, causing her to feel so deliciously safe and cherished. It wasn’t Andy’s soft blue gaze and sweet smile she saw when she opened her eyes.
It was Quinn.
Quinn, with the seductive grin, and the devil-dark eyes that had always made her want to do anything and everything with him. Sanity had thankfully kicked in then, and she’d jumped out of bed like the hounds of Hades were nipping at her feet.
“I don’t care what that marriage certificate says. And I don’t care what went on in that—” she swallowed hard “—that bed. I am not your wife. You are not my husband. We are not married.”
Then she finally twisted her wrist free and rushed through the doorway to escape.
Quinn sighed, watching Penny race away from him. Her golden-streaked brown hair bounced around her shoulders. Her shapely hips swayed with every step.
Then she reached the end of the hallway and turned with almost military precision and marched out of sight altogether.
She didn’t look back at him.
Not that he’d expected she would.
He rubbed his hand over the throbbing pain inside his head and turned back into the hotel suite.
The digs his grandmother was footing the bill for were a helluva lot more luxurious than what he’d been used to for pretty much the last two decades. He couldn’t say that he didn’t appreciate all the comforts.
He did.
Nor could he say that he’d been overly disappointed waking up to find a beautiful, sexy woman draping her long legs and long hair all over him.
Because he hadn’t been.
Not until clarity had come blinking into Penny Garner’s startlingly blue eyes, and she’d bolted out of his arms as if he were the worst sort of snake alive.
If he’d really been a snake, he’d have taken what she’d offered all those years ago when she’d been just a precocious, well-developed teenager.
He wasn’t a snake. But he also wasn’t going to apologize for the way they’d woken up in this fancy hotel suite, tangled together. Because—he was thankful to say—these days, he was a relatively healthy man. And Penelope Garner’s teenage years were thankfully long past.
Yet her very existence was still causing no small amount of mischief.
Could that marriage certificate actually be authentic?
He closed the door to the suite and found the piece of paper—badly wrinkled now—on the counter in the bathroom.
Their signatures were plain. Recognizable.
Nothing about the document suggested it was a fake.
Which meant that until he could prove it was, he had to assume it was not.
He lifted his gaze to his reflection. He had more gray in his beard than he used to have. There were lines radiating from the corners of his eyes and lines in his forehead. His body had more aches and pains than he wanted to admit to.
In some circles, thirty-six wasn’t all that old.
In his line of work, though, it didn’t exactly make him young.
He was a member of the United States Air Force. Proud of it.
But no matter what his age, certain behaviors were frowned upon whether he was on duty or off. Finding yourself married after a night you couldn’t even remember didn’t exactly qualify as responsible behavior.
And now, regardless of Penny’s refusal to acknowledge it, he found himself apparently married.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing he could will away the throbbing pain inside his head. Instead, he turned away from the certificate and flipped on the shower before stripping off.
He wasn’t particularly concerned about pleasing or not pleasing his grandmother by being late for lunch. He hadn’t met her until he’d come home on leave a month ago. Until then, he’d only known the stories his father and uncle would occasionally tell about the dragon lady who’d been their mother.
Far as Quinn was concerned, the old lady was eccentric, for sure. But he had no gripe with her the way his dad did.
Of course, if Quinn hadn’t let himself be talked into coming along for this damn Las Vegas trip, he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in now, either. His triplet cousins—or the trips, as everyone referred to them—thought they’d maneuvered him into it. But really, he hadn’t agreed until he’d learned that Penny would be there.
Still, he could just imagine the case his father would make out of the mess. David Templeton was a pediatrician. But for all of his peaceful attitude when it came to dealing with his patients and their families, he’d still find some way to lay the blame for Quinn’s current predicament squarely at Vivian’s door, even though Quinn was a fully capable and functioning adult.
Maybe he was getting soft. But he didn’t want to be the cause of more dissension in his family. Not if he could help it, anyway. It wasn’t as if his grandmother was going to be around forever. She’d moved to Wyoming a few years ago to make peace with her estranged family. Only she’d had a lot more success with her grandchildren than she’d had with her two sons.
He stepped under the steaming shower spray and groaned a little as the heat penetrated. It’d been three months since he and the rest of his unit had woken up to grenades exploding right outside their quarters. Three months since his life had been thrown into chaos.
Three months since his closest friend had died in the attack. Three others had been badly injured. Men, good men, who reported to Quinn. Their lives had, fortunately, moved on. Two were already headed back to the Middle East. The third was due to head out to Japan in a few weeks.
Quinn’s status, however, was less certain.
Technically, his