Page 15 of Rebel Bride
I took a breath. “I know I’ve been asking nothing but favors from you, but I have one more.”
Still silent.
I turned my back and peeked over my shoulder. “I need help undoing my bustier. It has a ton of little hooks I can’t reach.”
He didn’t move. Just stood there like a statue or a particularly gloomy gargoyle. For a second, I worried he hadn’t heard me, but just as I was about to repeat my request, he moved forward.
His fingers brushed my skin above the zipper.
I shivered.
He didn’t apologize for cold hands, probably because they weren’t cold. We both knew why I shivered as that electricity zinged through me. The scrape of the dress’s zipper sounded foreign. Forbidden. This would have been my husband’s privilege, yet here I was asking a stranger to undress me on what should have been my wedding night.
With the back of my bustier revealed, I insisted that this was a necessary evil. How else could I get undressed?
His breath felt hot against my neck.
“You just need to?—”
“I know what to do.” His voice sounded strained. God, he really did not like me.
There had to be about twenty hooks, and each one took an eternity. But with each successive unfastening, I felt a corresponding shift in my chest. Liberation. Freedom from the past five years.
With the last hook undone, I pressed the loose undergarment to my chest and turned to thank him. His expression was pained, the awfulness of this experience plain to see.
“I’m-I’m sorry I had to ask you to do that.”
His troubled gaze clouded over, immediately replaced with familiar contempt.
“Anything else?” He may as well have tacked on, “your highness.”
“No, that’s it. Thank you.”
He left the room, closing the door behind him and leaving me disheveled and doubt ridden. As each piece of the wedding get-up dropped to the floor, I tried to see it as a positive. A fresh start. But a dress in a puddle didn’t look fresh. It looked soiled. Finally, I removed my engagement ring, an oval cut diamond in a nested jeweled setting. I’d always thought it ostentatious, but Dash said he wanted everyone to know I belonged to him.
In the bathroom, I stripped quickly from my underwear. I unpinned my hair, stepped into the shower, and scrubbed until my skin turned raw and the water ran cold.
Drying myself, I studied my reflection in the mirror. I had lost so much weight this past six months, initially because I wanted to look good on my wedding day. But I realized now that a lot of it was worry about the commitment I was about to make. Wrapping my skin-and-bone frame in a fluffy towel, I opened the door to the bedroom. My wedding dress still lay in a heap but now there were spare clothes on the bed.
Hatch Kershaw anticipating my needs once again.
Chapter Six
Hatch
* * *
I must have been out of my mind.
What was I thinking taking Summer here of all places? So I’d planned to head here after the ceremony, even had a suitcase in the trunk. Probably poor form not to attend the reception but I would have done my duty. I was looking forward to a little alone time, a chance to decompress after the season.
But just the sight of her, bedraggled, thin, scared, but doing everything in her power to hold it together, had me jumping in to play the savior. Completely absurd because that wasn’t me.
That was my dad. He was the kind of guy who rescued people. When he knocked up my mom—with me—he stepped up to the plate immediately. He never had doubts about what should happen next, and that certainty played a big part in how he wooed my mom. She needed that, someone to take the reins. If the stories my great-gran told me were to be believed, my mom resisted big time. But that push-pull eventually settled into the balance they had now.
We were alike in looks, my dad and me, but not so much in temperament. I suffered a lot of comparisons to him, mostly about our game, but sometimes about our personality differences. Where my dad was easygoing, I was less likely to let things slide.
None of this really explained my behavior. I didn’t usually jump in and take over. I was typically more cautious than that. But today—no. Very little thinking and a whole lot of acting on instinct.
