The Bride Wore Blue Jeans Read online

  Yes, he thought with a deep pang, his loss. But you couldn’t miss what you’d never had, right? And he had a very odd feeling that kissing June would make him acutely aware of all that he had missed in his life. And would continue missing.

  This way was better.

  So he watched her thread her way back into the Salty and then entered himself, going in search of a familiar face to talk to.

  Lily stepped away from the window and frowned deeply. “Well, that didn’t exactly go brilliantly,” she muttered, acutely disappointed. She’d been watching Kevin and June since the moment of their arrival, waiting for the sparks to come. That they hadn’t left an abysmal feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wanted Kevin to be happy, the way she was happy. And since love had done it for her, she felt it was only fair to assume that it would do it for him as well. It was time her brother found a little happiness. He’d been in charge of theirs all these years.

  Max looked down at the surface of his beer, as if contemplating a deep philosophy. He took a sip, then raised his eyes to Lily’s face.

  “Wars aren’t won and lost on the first encounter, Lil, or even the second. This kind of thing takes a while. Don’t give up.”

  “A while,” she echoed with a deep sigh. “How long a while? The North and South went to fight the Civil War over the weekend and that lasted four years,” she lamented. The most impatient in the family, she always wanted things to happen yesterday.

  Max understood where she was coming from and why she felt the way she did. He’d harbored the same feelings about June, worried that his little sister was more interested in resurrecting defunct engines than having a home and family. But unlike Lily, he knew the worth of patience and exercised it every day.

  “There’ve been records of wars ending in under a month,” he told her. She looked at him, petulant. He kissed her temple, loving her more. “I’ve spent a lot of time studying people. Not much else to do up here when you’re isolated from the rest of the world,” he qualified. “Your brother’s been in a deep freeze for the past twenty years, Lily. Give him time. Give them both time. June hasn’t exactly had it easy herself. It’s going to take a while for them to realize that they just might be the best thing for each other. Or not,” he threw in, then laughed as Lily’s eyebrows rose so high they almost disappeared into her hairline.

  She looked at him, appalled. “How can you say that? They’re perfect for each other.”

  “You think they’re perfect for each other,” he pointed out. “They may have other ideas.”

  She frowned as she looked after her older brother. He was almost half a room away from June. This was not going well.

  “Then they’re wrong.” When she heard Jimmy laugh directly behind her, she swung around, immediately ready to take umbrage.

  But Jimmy was looking at Max. “Better get used to that, Max. Lily’s a control freak who always has to be right.” Lily shot him a dark look. “Well, you are, you know.”

  Before Lily could retort, Max slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her even closer to him than the allotted space already warranted. “We have ways of dealing with control freaks around here.”

  “Tell me more.” Lily forgot all about putting her brother in his place. Or trying to create a place for Kevin. Any words she might have spared melted as Max kissed her.

  “Get a room, you two,” Jimmy hooted.

  “Got one upstairs,” Ike volunteered, picking up a handful of mugs from the table behind them. “You’re welcome to it.”

  “I think you might be needing it for a few other people,” Max commented as he looked around. Here and there were the faces of men who had started wetting their whistles and lubricating themselves hours before the gathering had been labeled a party at the last minute. “Looks like some of these guys have already come close to filling their hollow legs.” Max took Lily’s hand in his. “Let’s go talk to your other brother and see if we can get him to unwind a little.”

  She loved him for things like that, Lily thought, following Max. And for a whole lot more.

  He’d watched her for most of the evening. In a room so crowded that air had to take a ticket in order to work its way in, Kevin found that he’d still been able to zero in on her.

  June had blond hair like her sister, but April’s was short and curly, while hers was long and straight and so light it looked like spun moonlight.

  He doubted if he’d ever seen a woman so beautiful.

  He’d thought that before, he realized.

  Kevin looked accusingly down at the glass in his hand. He felt intoxicated, but that wasn’t possible unless Ike had slipped something into his drink. He’d been nursing the same Scotch and soda, his second, for the past hour and a half. He held his liquor a lot better than that.

  Still, every time he looked up and saw June, something strange began going on in his chest, and in his gut. Both felt as if they were tightening.

  Maybe it was the lack of air.

  Maybe not.

  Though the room was echoing with unharnessed noise, he could have sworn he’d heard June laugh just then. He wondered who that was she was talking to. Over the course of the evening, there had been an endless parade of men seeking out her attention, some boisterous, some whispering things into her ear.

  All of them appearing to be far more familiar with her than he was.

  Which just made sense. But he didn’t have much use for sense tonight.

  He knew what was eating at him. He hadn’t kissed her when the opportunity had presented itself. Just something else he was going to have to live with.

  He’d had his chance and he’d turned it down.

  No, that wasn’t strictly true. The chance had all but been shoved into his face. Ever since he could recall, he hadn’t been the type to be led around by his nose. If he kissed someone it was because he wanted to, not because someone had dared him to do it.

  Trouble was, he really wanted to kiss her.

  When was the last time he’d kissed any woman?

  Damn it, it had been far too long. He was on vacation, he argued silently. Nothing that happened in these three weeks was going to matter in a month. In three weeks, he would go back to being himself: steadfast, dependable, honorable to a fault. And living a life that was just this side of boring.

  But this was the end of the world as far as a lot of people were concerned. What a man did here could be completely out of character and still not count in the long run.

  He took another long drag from his glass, letting the Scotch snake its way through his system.

  For all he knew, Alaska could just be some strange dream, a product of some hermit’s overactive imagination. That made what a man did here inconsequential.

  Damn it, he was babbling to himself. Now he knew he’d had too much to drink, even if he’d been able to consume three times this amount and not feel its effects. There was no other explanation for the wild thoughts ricocheting around in his brain.

  She was leaving, he realized. Rather than meander toward someone else, June appeared to be purposely aiming for the door.

  He wanted to catch her.

  Looking at the old Russian miner who’d been steadily talking to him for the past fifteen minutes, the current beau, he’d been informed, of June’s grandmother, Kevin suddenly excused himself. He hadn’t really heard half of what the man had been saying anyway, just nodding whenever there’d been a pause in the man’s narrative. It didn’t seem to faze the old man any.

  “I’m sorry, there’s someone I need to talk to.”

  “But of course, my boy. Go. Hurry. Now,” Yuri all but ordered, sending him on his way.

  Kevin made it to the front door just as June was about to go through it. His hand on her shoulder caught her attention. “You’re leaving?”

  She turned to look at him in surprise. She’d been sure she’d seen the last of him this evening. As a matter of fact, she would have preferred it that way.

  Her voice was crisp as she said, �
��I’ve got to get up early tomorrow, so I thought I should call it a night.” She’d been the one who’d brought him here, so maybe an addendum was in order. She gave him one grudgingly. “I thought that April and Jimmy could take you home, seeing as how you’re staying with them until the wedding anyway.”

  “Sure, no problem.” He could feel the frost. Instinctively, he knew he deserved it. He nodded toward the parking area. “Walk you out?”

  She didn’t need anyone coming with her to her car. “I’ve been walking since—”

  Taking matters into his own hands, he took her arm and guided her outside. “Don’t you ever get tired of telling everyone how independent you are?”

  As far as she was concerned, he was trespassing now, butting in where he had no business being. “No,” she said stubbornly, “I don’t. People have a habit of forgetting that I’m independent, because I’m still walking around with ‘dew’ all over me.” Her eyebrows narrowed. “Wasn’t that the way you put it?”

  Yup, he was right. She was mad at him. He’d probably insulted her because he hadn’t kissed her. But insulting her had been the furthest thing from his mind.

  “Not quite.” Kevin supposed apologies were in order. “I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot with you.”

  “You didn’t get off on any foot at all.”

  If her glare was any colder, Kevin had a feeling he would have had to have been thawed out with a bon-fire. “Then why do I have the impression that you’re annoyed with me?”

  She walked faster to her Jeep, refusing to look at him. “I’m not.”

  “One thing I was always good at,” he told her tolerantly, “was spotting a lie.”

  Reaching her vehicle, she spun around to face him. “So now I’m not just a baby, I’m a liar, too?”

  No one could ever accuse him of having a glib tongue. But at least it was an honest one. He threw himself on her mercy. “This isn’t coming out right.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t come out at all.” She yanked open the door to her vehicle. The sooner she got out of here, the better. She didn’t know what had come over her before, all but throwing herself at Kevin. Maybe she just liked exercising her feminine wiles, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she’d felt humiliated when he said he wasn’t going to kiss her. “Good night, Kevin.”

  He caught her by the shoulders, turning her around to face him. “And maybe it should.”

  Captured between his hands, she was standing very close to him. So close that he could feel her breath as it entered and left her body. So close that he found his thoughts rebelling against the perfect order he’d filed them in. Anticipation telegraphed itself along the nerves that networked through him.

  He continued to stumble through his apology, wishing for all the world that just once, he could have been granted Jimmy’s smooth way with words. Jimmy was the operator in the family, not him. “If you’re angry because I didn’t kiss you—”

  He’d pressed the wrong buttons. Or the right ones, depending on whose point of view was being observed. In any event, her blue eyes flashed at him: two tiny white-hot bolts of lightning aimed straight at his heart.

  Furious, June yanked her shoulders free of his hold. “The hell I am. You think an awful lot of yourself, don’t you, Quintano?”

  “No,” he told her quietly, his eyes never leaving hers, “I think a lot of you. A lot about you,” he admitted softly without meaning to.

  The next thing he knew, his hands were back on her shoulders, holding her in place. Gently.

  A second after that, he lowered his head and brushed his lips against hers.

  Softly, wistfully. Achingly gentle.

  All of her life, she’d tried to be tough. To be one of the guys, except with curves, although she’d played down the latter, hiding them beneath jeans and overalls because, other than on her own terms and fleetingly, the last thing she wanted was to enter this male-female game that always came at such high stakes.

  Sure, her brother and sister seemed happy now, far happier than she’d ever seen her own mother. And her grandmother was never happier than when she was involved with a man.

  But that wasn’t her way.

  She wasn’t going to get tangled up in anything that had the capability of stripping her soul down to the last layer, of mortally wounding her so that she couldn’t recover, the way her mother hadn’t recovered after her father had left them.

  The others thought she was too young to remember. But she remembered. Vividly remembered. The image of her mother, pale and wan, sitting by the window and staring vacant-eyed out at the lonely terrain, waiting for a man who never returned, waiting until the day she died, was firmly imprinted on her brain.

  And it wasn’t going to happen to her.

  Ever.

  When she kissed a man, she kissed him on her own terms and then went on, free-spirited and unaffected. That had always been the case, without exception.

  Except, that wasn’t happening now.

  This wasn’t on her own terms and she wasn’t moving on at the moment of contact, wasn’t being disinterested or bored.

  What she was being, was melted.

  The very gentleness of the kiss was causing a huge core meltdown within her. So much so that she had to wrap her arms around Kevin’s neck and hold on for all she was worth before there was nothing left of her but a warm puddle pooling at his feet.

  And when the kiss deepened, as neither of them had planned it would, it ensnared both of them even as they struggled to break free.

  The woman tasted of desire and all that was forbidden, all that he’d denied himself these long years. All that he’d missed.

  Without meaning to, he kissed her harder, longer, and felt himself falling down a winding abyss filled with every northern light that had ever been conceived.

  And the path back to firm ground had disintegrated.

  Chapter Five

  “He is kissing her!”

  Excited, Yuri waved Ursula over to the window just as she’d completed her rounds, bidding Max and April goodbye.

  “Come, Ursula, you are missing it.” He waved to Ursula again.

  Enthused, Ursula elbowed her way through the crowd, moving far more swiftly and gracefully than women half her age. Her eyes were eager as she joined her current beau.

  From his vantage point, Yuri had a clear view of the parking lot where June had left her vehicle. And where the young woman and Kevin were now standing, oblivious to the rest of the world.

  The trim salt-and-pepper beard on Yuri’s cheeks spread widely as he pointed to the couple outside.

  Ursula wiggled into the space right before him, then sighed.

  “About time.” She nodded her approval. “Handsome devil.” Looking over her shoulder, Ursula slanted a glance at the man behind her. “Not as handsome as you, of course.”

  “Of course,” he echoed, humor curving his generous mouth.

  “But there’s a lot of potential there.” She turned away as the couple drew apart. “Hope they’ve both got the good sense to know that.”

  “And if they do not?” He knew the answer to that. Hades’s postmistress was well-known for arranging people’s lives when things were moving too slowly for her liking. It only proved she cared.

  One shoulder lifted in a half shrug. She knew what he was thinking.

  “Nothing wrong in prodding a slow couple on their way.” She thought of her best triumph. “Like I did for April with my heart trouble.”

  Yuri gave the love of his life a knowing look and chucked her under the chin fondly. “There are some things, Ninotchka, that even you cannot control. Although, those things are not many, I must agree.”

  The indignation that might have been generated never materialized. Instead, her eyes crinkled into a pleased smile. “You do know how to turn a lady’s head.”

  He laughed at the thought. “I do not want to turn your head. I want it just where it is.” He ran his forefinger over the outline of her mouth. “Within ran
ge of my lips. Home?”

  “Home.” And then she looked out the window. “But let’s give them a couple of minutes.”

  As always, he agreed. Yuri knew when he had a good thing going.

  He had to come up for air.

  The thought beat against Kevin’s brain even as reluctance to part from her flooded his veins. Air was not nearly as sweet, as heady, as kissing June’s lips.

  But if he didn’t get some soon, he was in danger of having his knees buckle out from under him, and that would be an embarrassment he wasn’t sure he could live down. He had a feeling Hades wasn’t a place that let things die quietly. Movie theater or not, entertainment was in scarce supply here.

  Steady, June, steady. She drew her head back as she felt him do the same. If she didn’t know better, she would have said they were having another earthquake. The ground felt as if it was shimmying beneath her feet.

  But he wasn’t moving, so the earthquake had to be an internal one.

  Hers.

  She was careful to draw air back into her lungs slowly. “So, that’s what you think of me,” she murmured. Desperate not to look like some thunderstruck teenager, she’d leaped on the last thing he’d said to her before the flares had gone off in her head.

  Before he’d kissed her and redefined the boundaries of the known universe.

  June knew that she was young and not all that experienced, but she didn’t need to have led her grandmother’s flamboyant life to know that what had just happened here was something special. If there’d been snow on the ground, she had a feeling it would have melted in a circle around her feet.

  Still feeling wobbly, she reached for the car door and held on to it, hoping she wasn’t being obvious. Forcing a smile to her lips, she cleared her throat.

  “I’d better be getting back to my place. Jimmy’ll take you home.”

  Was she making any sense? she wondered. Her thoughts were assaulting her like pillaging Vikings, coming in from all sides without any uniformity at all.