OUR FIRST KISS came right after the officiant said, “You may now kiss your bride,” his heavy Mexican accent making it difficult to sort out the words. Good thing I’d gone to enough friends’ and teammates’ weddings in my day that I knew what was supposed to come next in the ceremony, whether I could understand the guy or not.
The sun was setting over the ocean, the sky turning to brilliant shades of purple and orange behind us. As far as weddings went, this one was epic. Tiny, sure, since I’d just snagged a couple of random people from the bar—ones who weren’t too terribly drunk yet—to act as witnesses, but the guest list wasn’t the important part.
Kiss her? Yeah, that needed to happen. So what if we’d only met each other about an hour before the ceremony? We were going to have to do a lot more than simply kiss if this was going to work out.
And I’d be damned if it wasn’t going to work. After everything that had gone down with Amanda and Colby only a couple of days ago…
But first things first. “What was your name again?” I asked her. Yeah, I felt like a giant ass for not remembering, but I had just met her about an hour or so ago, after all. And I was pretty drunk. Really drunk, to be honest. That tequila had gone straight to my head, and nowhere near enough time had passed for me to sober up yet.
Her dirty-blond hair was curling in the humidity, making me want to dig my fingers into it until they were knotted and tangled and stuck, and I was bound to get lost in her eyes if she kept looking at me like I’d just hung the moon and the stars.
Not that I minded her staring at me in that way. It definitely served up a nice stroke to my wounded ego.
She swallowed hard, drawing my eye to the slight bob in her throat as she did. I wanted to taste her there. Something told me her skin would be sweet, like everything else about her, not salty like the ocean air surrounding us.
“Mackenzie Cain,” she whispered. “Only I guess it isn’t Cain anymore, is it?”
Mackenzie. I could remember that, surely, no matter how drunk I was. Couldn’t I?
“I’m Riley,” I said. Then I added, “Jezek,” since Jezek was about to be her surname, too. Actually, I supposed it already was. Unless she didn’t want to take my name. We hadn’t exactly talked about that.
To be honest, we hadn’t really talked about much of anything.
She nodded, blinking so hard and fast it seemed she was trying to keep more tears at bay. She shouldn’t be crying now, should she? Before, when her former fiancé had revealed himself to be an asshole of epic proportions and left her stranded in a foreign country, sure. That was a reasonable time to cry.
But now that she was married to me and had a solution to her problems, shouldn’t everything be better?
I was a stand-up guy. One of the good guys out there. Wasn’t I?
I forced aside the niggling thought that I wasn’t such a good guy when considering my reasons for marrying her, because revenge against my brother and my ex didn’t seem so great.
They weren’t my only reasons for marrying her. Or even the biggest reasons. Were they? I wanted to help her out. I couldn’t stand seeing her so broken and desperate, like she’d been when she first walked into the bar tonight. That was the biggest reason I’d offered to marry her. Right? Right. Had to be.
Maybe she didn’t know much about me yet, but she’d learn soon enough.
I decided it was better not to wait for her to actually start crying again before kissing her, dipping my head down toward hers and tipping her chin up so our lips could meet.
Hers were soft and tentative as they brushed against mine, and a bit salty and wet from her tears. I inched my hand back toward the base of her skull, delving my fingers into the soft waves of her hair.
She tasted like peaches, and a tremulous sigh fell from her lips to lodge between us when she gave in to my insistent tongue and opened for me. It was only when I finally came up for air that I realized I’d crushed her against me and lifted her from her feet, her soft curves molding to my body like she was meant to be in my arms.
She’d wrapped her arms around my shoulders, holding on as if I were the one thing left to tether her to the earth and keep her from floating off in the clouds.
That was another much-needed stroke to my ego.
As I returned her to her feet, her lips were pink and slick and swollen from my kiss, and her eyes were slightly dazed. I’d never seen anything that turned me on more. Apparently, tequila dick wasn’t going to be an issue for me tonight. Thank fuck for that.
Yeah, this was going to work out, all right. I’d make sure of it.
Off in the distance, near the bar, a handful of other vacationers were hooting and applauding our performance. When Mackenzie noticed, she blushed, which only made her prettier. My dick stood up and took notice, which made me more certain than ever that everything would turn out just fine. Bam, just like that, I was hard as granite.
Maybe we didn’t know each other yet, but that could come in time. And we could start out by getting to know each other between the sheets.
There were worse ways to start a relationship. Weren’t there? Had to be.
I dipped my head toward hers for one more kiss, nipping her lower lip between my teeth just enough to get her to open for me again.
She sucked in a breath of surprise, but it was quickly followed by an almost imperceptible moan. I couldn’t wait to learn what sounds she’d make when I was inside her, and I didn’t think we’d be waiting very long.
The officiant cleared his throat. Reluctantly, I dragged myself away from Mackenzie long enough to glance over and see him waving the marriage certificate and holding out a pen, rattling off something in Spanish that I couldn’t make out.
“Guess we’d better sign and make it official, huh?” I murmured, my lips still close to Mackenzie’s. Although, to be honest, I had no desire to stop what we were doing, unless we were going to move to the next step. I didn’t even care how many people were watching us right now. I was more drunk from kissing her than I ever could have been from tequila.
She blinked a couple of times and nodded, stepping back from me. Then she stumbled slightly in the sand, so I shot out an arm to drag her against my side and steady her.
To be honest, holding her like that helped me steady myself, too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so light-headed from nothing more than a couple of simple kisses.
We both signed where the officiant directed us to, and he handed me some paperwork that was all in Spanish but which probably told us how to get an official copy of the marriage certificate to take home with us.
“So,” I said conversationally when he walked away from us, laughing his ass off. “We’re married.”
“We’re married,” Mackenzie repeated, sounding shocked.
Now what?
RILEY WAS LIMPING.
I hadn’t noticed it before. Probably because I was too caught up in my own misery and beating myself up for being such an idiot, so I hadn’t noticed much of anything about him beyond the fact that he was the absolute definition of tall, dark, and handsome.
He had wavy, dark hair and lean muscles that had flexed beneath my hands when he held me, and his brown eyes looked almost black now, at dusk. He seemed to be everything a romance hero should be, at least at first glance.
But now that we were making our way along the beach, hand in hand while he carried my suitcase on the other side, I couldn’t help but notice his problem. He kept kicking the sand up with his right foot because of it.
“You said you’d hurt your ankle?” I said, hoping to start up a conversation. Because, for the last little while, we hadn’t been talking with words even though our lips had done plenty of moving. And our tongues. I’d honestly never been kissed so thoroughly in my life, and I might have enjoyed it a bit too much. I was halfway tempted to kiss him again, here and now, instead of waiting until we got to wherever he was leading me.
“In a game.” Riley shifted my hand in his, somehow holding on to me more thoroughly than before. I couldn’t deny that the strength of his grip somehow made me feel steady and secure as we walked along the sand, even though he was injured and I was perfectly fine. “I play for the Portland Storm.” He said it like I was supposed to know what that meant.
I scrunched up my eyes. “What’s that?”
“You don’t follow hockey?”
I shook my head. “Never seen a game. Do you play professionally or something?”
“Yeah, or something,” he said, laughing, but I didn’t get the impression that he was poking fun at me—more that he was amused that I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Anyway, I went into the boards awkwardly. Just a bad sprain. Doc’ll have me go through all sorts of PT and whatnot when we get back to Portland, but he cleared me for this trip since I was supposed to be getting married. And…well, I suppose I still did.” He winked down at me, causing my heart to flutter.
Already, I was feeling better about my decision to marry him. The fact that he made my heart flutter instead of seizing up in terror was an excellent sign. He was miles ahead of Paul in that way.
We’d only been walking for a few minutes when a beachfront house with a fenced-in garden came into view, an enormous mountain range providing the backdrop. Riley opened the gate and started walking up a path toward the house, but I stopped short, in awe of my surroundings.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, turning around and grinning at me in a way that made my knees weak.
“You’re staying here?”
This place was practically paradise. The crashing waves were only a short walk down a quiet, nearly deserted beach. The moon was in the process of setting behind the mountains while the stars twinkled overhead far more brightly than I could ever remember seeing before. Jack and Donna had told me the sky came more alive at night when you got away from the city, but I’d never seen anything like this. I’d only ever lived in cities like Omaha, never out in the country. All sorts of exotic flora and fauna were growing in the fenced-in yard, making it a peaceful, beautiful oasis. Seeing it in the daylight must be something special.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I’d never been anywhere so beautiful before, at least not without being careful to avoid touching anything, lest I break it.
But Riley just grinned at me. “We are. We’ve got the place for four more nights before I have to fly back to Portland.”
“Portland,” I repeated.
“Portland, Oregon. Where I play hockey, remember?”
Yeah, I kind of remembered. Sort of. “To be honest, everything is swimming in and out of my head right now. I’m just trying to remember which end is up.”
“And you aren’t even the one who’s been drinking,” Riley said, winking at me again.
Good lord, he was way too good-looking for me to believe my eyes, especially when he grinned at me like that. He looked like a movie star. Or a rock star.
But no, he was a hockey player.
And he was my husband.
I’d never seen a hockey game. I didn’t know the first thing about it other than it was a game played on ice. But now I was married to a professional hockey player.
Riley held out a hand for me, urging me to join him. Nerves bouncing through my veins, heart pounding loudly enough he must hear it, I put my hand in his. The heat of his touch was nothing compared to the intensity of his gaze. It rattled through me, zipping and zinging like fireworks going off inside me.
I might have made another gargantuan mistake in marrying him when we didn’t know anything about each other. But something told me it would all be fine, everything would work out just like in all the romance novels I’d read over the years.
Riley headed into the gated garden, and I trailed behind him, the heat of his palm on mine, his strong fingers curled around my hand and wrist, giving me courage.
This was going to work out. It had to. I had no choice but to make it work.
Riley Jezek was going to be my happy-ever-after ending. And I would be his.
Somehow.