With Just One Kiss (Seriously Sweet St Louis #4) - Cindy Kirk Page 0,3
in her chest. For their marriage to stand a chance, they would both have to decide to make it work. She couldn’t do it alone.
She stared at David for a long moment and wondered what he would say if she told him she wanted to see if they could beat the odds. Would he be willing to back such a long shot? Could she convince him to go for broke and try to make their made-in-Vegas vows work?
David tossed Christy’s room key onto the desk in his room and sank into a nearby chair. After making sure the reporter had gone, he’d made his getaway, leaving Christy to shower and get dressed. Over breakfast they would discuss their future.
Married.
It hardly seemed possible. Granted, he’d expected to come back from Las Vegas engaged. But it was his longtime friend Lauren Carlyle who he’d thought would be wearing his ring.
After all, he was pushing thirty and he needed a wife. His grandfather’s dictate had made that clear. Marrying for love just didn’t seem to be in the cards. But he and Lauren were good friends. They both wanted the same things out of life—a home, a couple of kids and time to spend with family and friends. She said she loved him. He’d hoped that one day he’d love her, too.
When he’d seen a marquis diamond advertised as part of a “take a chance on romance” promotion, David had taken it as a sign. He’d pop the question and give Lauren the ring during the Las Vegas trip.
But instead, the diamond had ended up on Christy’s hand. One minute they were sitting in the lounge laughing about his need for a wife and her need for a husband and the next thing he knew they were flipping a coin—heads they married, tails they walked away. It had started out as a joke. Now the joke was on him.
He’d married a woman just like his mother. A woman so focused on her career that her family would always come second. A woman who could never give him the kind of home life he craved.
He would have asked himself how it had happened, but David already knew the answer. Whenever he and Christy got together electricity sizzled in the air. They were like two magnets fighting to keep a distance but drawn to each other by an unseen force.
David raked his fingers through his hair. He’d had more sense when he was eighteen. At least then he’d walked away from her. Now, thanks to one reckless impulse, she was his wife. For the moment, anyway.
“I know it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Christy sat back against the vinyl seat of the restaurant booth and pushed the food around the plate with a fork. “But right now I haven’t a clue what we were thinking.”
“Didn’t you tell me your publicist thought being married would be a big boost to your career?” David gazed at her over the top of his coffee cup.
Christy frowned at his emphasis on the word career. He made it sound like a dirty word. “That’s true, but I’d told him I wasn’t going to marry just to get better tour sponsors.”
She could tell by the look in his eyes that he didn’t believe her, but she didn’t waste her breath trying to convince him.
David set his cup on the table and folded his hands. “Knowing the chemistry between us, if I had it to do over again, when I saw you in that lobby I’d have walked the other way. I’m guessing you’d do the same.”
Christy slowly nodded. She wished she’d never set eyes on David Warner. Or that wedding chapel.
“But what’s done is done,” David said. “The only question that matters is, where do we go from here?”
The same doubts and fears that she could hear in his voice were fluttering like a thousand crazy butterflies in her stomach. She didn’t want to be married any more than he did, but she didn’t want to make a second mistake by rushing into divorce, either. “We could try to make it work?”
David stared at his coffee cup for a long moment before heaving a resigned sigh. “The way I look at it, if we split now, not only will your career suffer but I’ll lose my chance to take over Warner Enterprises. Granddad won’t sign the company over until I’ve been married a year. So we don’t have much choice except to stay together.”