Free (Rainshadow, #2) Deception Cove by Jayne Castle Page B

assault or . . . worse.”
    Drake searched her face. “Do you really think she might send someone to kill you?”
    “That’s just it. I have no idea what she’ll do next. I don’t know the woman. I just know she wants revenge.”
    “I can’t even imagine the toll that kind of stress has taken on you this past year.”
    “Yeah, well, you get used to it,” Alice said, going for tough and breezy.
    “I doubt it.”
    “Is there something bothering you?” she asked. “I mean, aside from the situation on Rainshadow? You’ve been acting a little weird ever since we signed those papers a few minutes ago.”
    “The clerk back there in the courthouse,” Drake said.
    “What about her? I thought she seemed pleasant and efficient.”
    “She thinks I’m marrying you in an MC because it’s a socially acceptable way for a man to keep a mistress happy for a while.”
    “Oh, that,” Alice said, relaxing. “Well, naturally. What else would she think under the circumstances? I didn’t realize that you had noticed.”
    “You didn’t think I was aware of how she was looking at me?”
    “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. She has no way of knowing that you married me to protect me from my ex-mother-in-law.”
    Drake flattened one hand on the roof of the car and looked off into the shadows of the garage.
    “There’s something you should know before we drive out of here,” he said.
    “You’re starting to make me nervous. We’ve already discussed sea monsters, paranormal weather disturbances, dangerous ocean currents, and an overheating island. What else is it that you want me to know?”
    He turned to look at her. Light from the overhead fixture glinted on his mirrored shades. “When the clerk said that I could kiss the bride, I wanted to.”
    Once again everything within her seemed to still. Her intuition spiked but not the way it had a moment ago. There was danger here but not the kind that she had been running from for the past year.
    “Oh,” she said. It took everything she had to squelch the thrill that feathered her senses. She managed another stage smile. “Well, why didn’t you?”
    “Why didn’t I?” he said a little too evenly.
    “I would have understood.” She waved one hand in a dismissing motion. “A kiss would have made the scene look more natural to her.”
    Drake did a single staccato drumroll on the car roof with his fingers. His jaw tightened.
    “I didn’t kiss you because I knew what the clerk was thinking. Also, I was pretty sure I knew what you were thinking and I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
    “Well, that was very thoughtful of you, but I can assure you that after what I’ve been through this past year, it would take a lot more than a fake kiss in front of a courthouse clerk to embarrass me.”
    “That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Drake said. “The kiss would not have been fake.”
    She caught her breath. “Oh.”
    She did not dare to move for fear of shattering the crystalline moment.
    “It would have been this kind of kiss,” Drake said.
    He wrapped a hand around the back of her neck, drew her close, and covered her mouth with his own.

Chapter 7

    THE KISS WAS REAL, ALL RIGHT. SHE HAD BEEN OUT OF practice for a year, but she had no problem recognizing the genuine article when it sent shock waves across all her senses.
    Behind the shock waves of that first intimate connection came the slow burn of an exquisitely controlled but breathtakingly masculine passion.
    Fire and ice splashed through her veins. The kiss was beyond real. At least it was beyond the reality of any kiss she had ever before experienced. It dazzled and astonished her. A strange confusion and a sparkling chaos made her head spin.
It was just a kiss,
she thought.
Just a kiss. Get a grip
.
    But the energy of the embrace was having a bizarre effect on her. She was breathless, overwrought, and overwhelmed. It was too much. She had been walking an invisible tightrope for so long, lurching