Wedding Party Collection: Don't Tell The Bride. Kelly Hunter

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       FOUR

      Trig woke to the sound of morning prayer at a nearby mosque. His bed had been big enough but his dreams had been chaotic. Loss, always loss. Lena walking away from him because he’d asked too much of her. Lena disappearing into the gluggy grey mud of East Timor. Slipping away from him, one way or another, with Trig powerless to prevent any of it.

      The prayer song was hypnotic.

      Trig closed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair and sent up a prayer of his own that this day would be a good day and that Lena wouldn’t be freaking out about last night’s declaration of undying devotion—or whatever it was that he’d declared.

      She wouldn’t run; she was smarter than that.

      But she might feel uneasy with him and he wouldn’t put it past her to have argued herself around to thinking that she wasn’t good enough for him or that he’d be better off without her. For someone so magnificent, she had the lowest sense of self-worth he’d ever encountered.

      She’d told him once that it came of being an ordinary person in an extraordinary family. She’d never seen herself as extraordinary too.

      He reached for the hotel phone, tapped in the other room number and waited.

      She wouldn’t have done a runner. If nothing else, she knew he’d track her through Amos Carter if he had to. She might reschedule but she wouldn’t blow that meeting off. Her need to find Jared was too strong.

      ‘What?’ she finally mumbled, once she’d picked up.

      ‘You want to have breakfast at this little café I saw on my walk last night?’

      ‘When?’

      ‘Now.’

      ‘What time is it?’

      ‘Five-seventeen.’

      Lena groaned, a sleepy, sexy sound that had him shifting restlessly. ‘You want to have breakfast now?’

      ‘I’m starving.’

      ‘You’re always starving.’

      ‘Their breakfast special is lentil soup, a loaf of sourdough and a big chunk of cheese.’

      ‘Go get ’em, Tiger. Bring me back a cup of tea,’ she muttered and hung up.

      Trig grinned and shoved the sheet aside, suddenly hungry to seize the day. She hadn’t said no and she hadn’t been wary. She hadn’t said, ‘Darling, come make me yours,’ yet either, but that was pure fantasy anyway.

      He got breakfast.

      He went walking and found the gate where Lena would meet up with Carter and set about exploring exit options and observation points. By the time the seven a.m. prayer session sounded, he was back at the hotel and knocking on Lena’s door, takeaway tea in one hand and a tub of yoghurt and honey in the other.

      ‘Breakfast,’ he said when she opened the door, and she let him through and closed the door behind him and yawned.

      She looked like a waif. A little too slender, a halo of tangled black hair and those startling bluish-grey eyes, smudged with black lashes. A modelling agency had offered to contract her once after seeing her on the beach. Surfing sponsors had come after her too. She’d turned down both offers with startled surprise. Couldn’t see what they’d seen in her. Didn’t want what they’d offered anyway.

      ‘Is this the courting you?’ she wanted to know as he set the tea and yoghurt on the table.

      ‘This is the impatient me,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen this me before. I’m waiting to see if you want me to court you before I start that.’

      ‘My mistake.’ Lena smirked and carefully removed the lid on her tea. ‘What’s got you all pepped up?’

      ‘You mean besides wanting to know if you’ll go out with me?’

      ‘Yeah, besides that. Because I’m not awake enough yet to make a definitive decision on that. I couldn’t think clearly enough to make a decision on it last night either.’

      ‘Red wine does that.’