Wedding Party Collection: Don't Tell The Bride. Kelly Hunter
clerk that Trig was her husband, who’d joined her on the trip unexpectedly, and the clerk had added Trig’s details to the booking without so much as a murmur.
‘You sure about this?’ he murmured as the clerk went to fetch their door cards.
‘Why? You want another room?’
He didn’t know.
‘It’s a twin room. Two beds.’
Still one room though.
And boy were quarters snug.
Trig eyed the short distance between the two beds with misgivings. They’d weathered plenty, he and Lena. Sharing a hotel room was not on the list.
He put her bag on the rack at the end of the bed farthest away from the door. Lena inspected the bathroom and proclaimed it satisfactory, because she’d wanted one with a spa bath and got it. Next thing he knew, the bath taps were on and Lena was rummaging through her belongings for fresh clothes.
‘You want to shower while the bath is running?’ she asked him. ‘Because—fair warning—when I get in the bath I am not going to want to get out.’
‘You’re sore?’
‘I just want to work the kinks out.’
‘Right.’ Trig cleared his throat and opened his bag, staring down at the mess of clothes he hadn’t bothered to fold, and tried not to think about Lena, naked in a bath not ten feet away from him. ‘So...okay, yeah. I can shower now.’ He grabbed at a faded pair of jeans and an equally well-worn T-shirt and then paused. ‘Where do you want to go for dinner?’ This could, conceivably, affect his choice of T-shirt.
‘I’m all in favour of room service, provided the menu looks good. And it’s not because I don’t want to walk anywhere,’ she added defensively. ‘Room service for dinner this evening has always been part of the plan.’
Far be it from him to mess with the plan. He eyeballed the distance between the beds again. ‘Is it just me or is this room kind of small?’
‘Maybe if you’d stop growing...’
‘I have.’ Okay, so he was extra tall and his shoulders were broad. For the most part, he was good with it. ‘You just think I should have stopped sooner.’ He eyed his little double bed with misgivings. ‘That’s not a double bed. It’s a miniature double bed.’
‘Princess.’
‘Are we bickering?’ he asked. ‘Because Poppy tells me she’s heartily sick of our bickering. I thought I might give it up for Lent.’
‘It’s not Lent,’ Lena informed him. ‘Besides, I like bickering with you. Makes me feel all comfortable and peachy-normal.’
Trig snorted. At sixteen, bickering with Lena had been his first line of defence against anyone discovering just how infatuated he was with her. He was still gone on her, no question. But these days the bickering got old fast.
He found his toiletries bag and stalked into the bathroom, only to find that that room was the size of a bath mat and that the spa was filling ever so slowly—a sneaky deterrent to filling it at all. Instead of four walls, the bathroom had two walls, a side door and one of those shuttered, half-walls dividing it from the main room. Trig reached for the shutters.
She-who-bickered would of a certainty want them shut.
He eyed the bathroom door and the floor mat in its way. He could shut that at the last minute. Never let it be said that Adrian Sinclair had more than a regular dislike for small spaces. Just don’t ever put him in a submarine.
‘Hey, Trig.’ Lena’s voice floated through the door. ‘Five things you never wanted to be. And don’t say, “Your babysitter”.’
Never wanted to be in love with my best friend’s sister, he thought darkly. Especially since she’d never once given him the slightest encouragement.
‘I never wanted to be a motor mechanic,’ he said instead.
‘Be serious.’
‘I am serious.’ He turned on the shower taps, hoping for a little pressure. Nope. Maybe if he turned the bath taps off. He shucked his clothes and dropped them on the floor. And Lena appeared in the doorway.
‘Dammit, Lena! Close quarters!’ But he didn’t reach for a towel or turn to hide his body. Most of it she’d seen before, and as for the rest...well...nothing to be ashamed of there.
Lena dropped her gaze, but not to the floor. She swallowed hard. ‘I, ah—’
‘Yes?’ he enquired silkily, half of him annoyed and half most emphatically not.
His brain thought she was objectifying him and he objected to that.
His body didn’t give a damn whether she objectified him or not.
‘I, ah—’ Finally she dragged her gaze up and over the rest of him and then, with what seemed like a whole lot of effort, looked away. ‘Sorry. Pretty sure I’ll remember what I wanted to tell you sooner or later.’
‘Size queen,’ he challenged softly.
‘Yeah, well. Who knew?’ She did the quickest about-turn he’d seen from her in a long time and headed back into the other part of the room, the part he couldn’t see. ‘I mean, I’d heard rumours... Your old girlfriends aren’t exactly discreet.’
‘No?’ He’d had girlfriends over the years—not plenty, but enough. He’d tried hard to fall for each and every one. ‘What are they?’
‘Grateful,’ she said dryly. ‘Now I know why.’
‘You really don’t,’ he felt obliged to point out, and left the bathroom door open and turned back towards the shower. ‘Who’s to say it wasn’t my winning personality?’
‘You do like to win,’ she said as he stepped beneath the spray and closed the shower door. Surely one closed door between them would be enough.
‘You keep saying that.’
‘Only because it’s true.’
All throughout their teens and beyond, he, Lena and Jared had pushed each other to be faster, cannier, more fearless. It had got them into plenty of trouble. Got them into the Secret Intelligence Service too. Jared rising through the ranks because he was a leader born, Trig and Lena rising with him because they had skills too and the suits knew the makings of a crack infiltration team when they saw one.
No space between him and Lena at all when it came to what they knew about each other. No strength or flaw left unexamined. No shortage of loyalty or love. Lena loved him like a brother and like a comrade-in-arms, and that was worth something. It was.
But sometimes she saw the reckless boy he’d once been rather than the man he was now.
Sometimes she coaxed him into competitive games he no longer had the heart to play.
He raised his voice so that she’d hear him over the spray. ‘Is there a burger on that menu?’
‘Hang on...’ She came back to the bathroom doorway, casual as you please now that a plate of frosted glass stood between her and his nakedness. ‘Yes, there’s a burger on the menu. Lamb burger on Turkish. Surprise. There’s also meatballs and potatoes, salads, green beans, and lots of pastries.’
‘Baklava?’
‘Oodles of baklava. Walnut, pistachio, cashew, pine nuts... You want yours drizzled in rose water?’
‘Rather have it in my mouth.’ He squirted shampoo in his palm and raised his hands to his head.
‘Are you posing on purpose?’
‘Are you looking on purpose?’ It seemed like a reasonable reply. ‘Because I’ve no objection. You want a closer look, all you gotta do is say.’ He reached for the shower door and smirked