Once he’d dumped his brother off at the airport, Sean had nothing to do but kill time until it was time to get Emma back in his bed. Or her bed, actually. He tried out the sound of their bed, but his mind shied away from it. Made them sound too much like a real couple.
As long as Emma was naked in it, he didn’t really care whose bed it was. He’d been quick on the trigger last night and, while he didn’t have anything to prove, he intended to take his time with her tonight. If tonight ever came. The only time he’d ever seen clocks move so slowly was during his flight back to the States.
Emma’s truck wasn’t in the driveway when he pulled in and, at first, he thought the house was empty. But then he heard laughter and looked out the window to find Cat in the backyard swing, the cordless house phone pressed to her ear. Since he wasn’t about to interrupt her conversation to ask her where Emma had taken off to, he grabbed his book and stretched out on the couch to read.
He must have dozed off because the next thing he knew, the sun had shifted and he could hear Emma’s voice coming from the direction of the kitchen. He stretched and sat up to set his book on the coffee table. That wasn’t a bad way to kill some time. After a detour upstairs to take a leak and kill the nap breath, he went looking for the women. They were on the deck, but they had the windows and the back door open to let in the light breeze, so he could hear them clearly as he opened the fridge to grab a beer.
“So Lisa as your matron of honor and Stephanie as bridesmaid,” Cat was saying. “Do you know who Sean wants as best man?”
“No. We haven’t gotten that far yet.” He didn’t hear any tension in Emma’s voice, but he guessed she was feeling it. Planning a wedding that wasn’t going to happen was weird, to say the least.
“Maybe he could ask Mike’s oldest son—Joey, right?—to be a groomsman so he can escort Stephanie.”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “I don’t think it’s very fair to ask one of the boys and not the others.”
“True. Maybe they could be ushers and then join their parents once everybody’s seated.”
Sean had just decided to beat a fast retreat back to the living room when he heard a chair scrape back. “We can talk about that later, Gram. Right now I should go wake Sean so he’s not still groggy when we ask him to fire up the grill.”
He didn’t have time to escape, so he leaned against the counter and twisted the top of his beer. Emma paused when she saw him, and then grabbed his hand and dragged him down the hall to the living room.
“Where did you disappear to?” he asked.
“What? Oh, a client had an emergency. But—”
“There are gardening emergencies?”
She blew out an exasperated breath. “Yes. When you’re rich, everything’s an emergency. But did you hear what Gram was saying?”
“Yeah. How the hell are guys supposed to pick a best man, anyway? I’ve got three brothers and I like them all. And what about Mikey? Or Kevin or Joe? It seems easier to pick a stranger off the street so you don’t have to play favorites. I guess maybe I’d ask Mitch. He’s the oldest, so most of what the rest of us know about catching a woman we learned from him.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, you haven’t actually caught a woman yet. And it doesn’t really matter who you choose, because there is no wedding.”
She was wound up like an eight-day clock, so he didn’t dare laugh at her. Her cheeks were bright and she kept spinning her ring around and around on her finger. Since there was nothing he could say to make her feel better about Cat wanting to plan their fake wedding, he slid the hand not holding his beer around her waist and hauled her close.
“You worry too much,” he told her.
“And you—”
He kissed her to shut her up. And because all he’d been able to think about since the last time he’d had his hands on her was getting his hands on her again. And, most of all, because he liked kissing her. A lot. Maybe too much, if he thought about it.
So he didn’t think about it. Instead, he lost himself in the taste of her mouth and the softness of her lips and the way her hands slid over his lower back, holding him close.
“Oh,” Cat said from behind him. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No,” Emma said. “We were just…talking.”
“I can see that.”
Since it was going to be at least a couple of minutes before he was fit to turn around and face anybody, never mind her grandmother, Sean sidestepped around Emma and grabbed the television remote. “I’m going to see if I can catch tomorrow’s weather and then I’ll start the grill.”
Fortunately, they made it through the evening without any more talk of bridesmaids and ushers thanks to Emma and him steering the conversation toward Florida and television and anything else they could think of that didn’t involve weddings. But if he’d thought the minutes were slow to tick away before, the seemingly endless time between dinner and bedtime was excruciating.