Over the past couple of weeks, spending so much time with Jack while surrounded by the wedding industrial complex, she’d allowed herself to start dreaming of a wedding again. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened, when the daydreams had come back, when the guy at the end of the aisle in her daydreams had turned into Jack Nolan.
But, even though this had all started out as fake, simply a way to prove that she wasn’t a sad, bitter spinster-in-waiting, her feelings for Jack had certainly become real.
The wide-eyed bridal gown consultant hustled across the sales floor and back again, into the back room and back out, until her knees were buckling from the weight of all the dresses in her arms.
“I want to wear blush,” Madison said.
Mrs. Chapin sniffed. “Over your father’s dead body.”
“Maybe an off-white,” Sasha suggested.
Hannah should say something, but her eye kept snagging on a cream-colored dress that seemed to have walked right out of her dreams. It was simple, but she could almost feel it floating around her feet as she walked toward Jack. Danced with him at their wedding.
She shook her head, trying to clear it out. Even if she and Jack were really going to be together after the engagement party, after she came clean about using him to get ahead at work and confronted him about his strange behavior, it was way too soon to be thinking about marriage.
When Madison spoke to her, she realized she’d lost the thread of the conversation. Madison was holding the dress that Hannah saw herself wearing in the wedding she was not going to have to Jack. “You don’t like this one?”
Hannah flushed. “I do.” She tried to cover. “I think it would look stunning on you.”
Madison gave her a knowing smile. “No, I think it would be perfect on you.”
“You should try it on.” Oh sure, now Mrs. Chapin was down for some frivolity?
“Yeah, it would look fabulous with your skin tone.” Et tu, Sasha? When Hannah gave her a pointed look, she shrugged and said, “What? It’s true.”
“We’re not here for me. We’re here for Madison.” She was going to be firm on this. “And we should really be checking on the florists—”
“I insist you try on the dress, Hannah. It’s my appointment, and I can do what I want.”
Hannah looked around to find all the women in the room seemingly firm in their conviction to have her try on the stupid dress.
Her hands shook as the consultant helped her put on the dress. As though fate had decided to laugh at her, it fit perfectly. She was almost too nervous to look in the mirror, afraid she’d completely fall in love with the idea of being with Jack for real.
But she looked up when the consultant gasped. And then she gasped. The dress was absolutely perfect, better than she’d dreamed. And that was a huge problem.
The things she dreamt about were never better in reality. The life she’d planned out in her head with Noah hadn’t even come close to happening. And she’d been so careful to try to keep Jack out of her heart. A few yards of chiffon and some expert beading that made her tits look fantastic shouldn’t make her feel anything.
But seeing herself in the dress made everything real. She touched the fabric at her waist, ran her fingers over the seams. She couldn’t discern a specific pattern, but the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It all worked together.
She and Jack might not have gotten the most auspicious start, and she couldn’t quite see her way through how coming clean with him was going to go. He could very well never want to see her again if she told him she’d used him. And—outside of his very talented mouth—he hadn’t been anywhere close to perfect since their first actual date. But the way she felt with him was the way she wanted to feel—she felt like she belonged with him. She could be herself with him, which was something she’d never experienced with anyone else.
“Hannah?” Sasha had come looking for her. She must have been staring at herself in the mirror for a long-ass time.
“Be right out.” She had to get out of the dress before Sasha came in, but the bridal consultant must have been helping Madison, the real customer. So her best friend walked in on her and slapped her hands over her mouth.
“Hannah, it’s—”
“I know.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Help me get this thing off.”
* * *
—
JACK WOKE UP WITH Hannah straddling his hips with her long, sexy legs. He’d been dreaming of her, so it took him a moment to realize that the dream had ended and her smooth thighs were rubbing up against his jeans.
After running down more leads on his corruption story earlier that day, he’d been at loose ends. He’d taken the L up to the Loop and wandered around Millennium Park, even doing a stupid-tourist thing of staring at his own face in the Bean. About halfway through, he’d realized what an idiot he’d been and come back to his apartment to write.
He hadn’t meant to fall asleep as he waited for Hannah, but he hadn’t been sleeping much since his conversation with Irv. Luckily, he’d had a brief reprieve from the how-to game when a celebutante had gotten in a coke-fueled car crash and all of the site’s articles had to be about that for three days.
God bless the celebrity news cycle.
So, even though talking to Patrick and running down leads on the story about the senator hadn’t quite yielded a solution yet, he’d called Hannah and asked her to come over after she’d gotten done with some work stuff she had to do for the Chapin engagement party the next night. He hadn’t seen her in almost a week, not since he’d woken up in her bed, wrapped in her smell, and decided he’d do whatever he had to do to keep her. Not since Irv had threatened to destroy his professional reputation if he didn’t destroy his burgeoning relationship with Hannah.
They’d texted and talked on the phone, and he’d half-heartedly tried to be an ass. But neither of them, it seemed, could stand not to talk for even a day. And that wasn’t the same as tasting her skin and feasting on her gorgeous mouth. Nothing technology could come up with compared to having her weight pushing him into the couch.
Hannah smiled down at him, and he forgot all about his career. This was dangerous because he was supposed to be telling her the truth. But that would require his putting the brakes on what was happening now, and he just wasn’t prepared to do that when she put her hands on his face and pressed her mouth to his.
Not when he was trapped between waking and sleeping with a dream of a woman rubbing herself against his cock and moaning into his mouth as he got harder.
When she finally gave up his mouth, he said, “That’s some wake-up call.”
“Is it okay that the doorman let me in?” She nuzzled his jaw, sounding as soft and sleepy as he felt. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight to him.