“WHAT TIME DOES THE MOVIE START?” Bobby asked as he cleared the Chinese food containers off the kitchen table.
“Seven thirty-five. We have to leave in ten minutes.” Colleen was going through the mail, opening today’s responses to the wedding invitations. She looked tired—she’d been getting up early to meet with the administrators of a local San Diego women’s shelter who were in the process of buying a big old house. She was handling tomorrow morning’s closing—pro bono, of course.
“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked.
She looked up. Smiled. “Yes. Absolutely. You’ve wanted to see this movie for weeks. If we don’t go tonight…”
“We’ll go another night,” he told her. They were getting married. They had a lifetime to see movies together. The thought still made him a little dizzy. She loved him….
“No,” she said. “I definitely want to go tonight.”
Aside from her legal work, there were a million things to do, what with finding a new apartment big enough for the two of them and all the wedding plans.
They were getting married in four weeks, in Colleen’s mother’s hometown in Oklahoma. It was where the Skellys had settled after her dad had retired from the Navy. Colleen had only lived there her last few years of high school, but her grandparents and a whole pack of cousins were there. Besides, softhearted Colleen knew how important it was to her mother to see her daughter married in the same church in which she’d taken her own wedding vows.
But it made planning this wedding a real juggling act.
And no way was Bobby willingly going to let Colleen head back to Oklahoma for the next four weeks. No, he’d gotten real used to having her around, real fast. They were just going to have to get good at juggling.
She frowned down at the reply card she’d just opened. “Spaceman’s not coming to the wedding?”
“No, he told me he’s going in for surgery on his knees.”
“Oh, rats!”
Bobby tried to sound casual. “Is it really that big a deal?”
Colleen looked up at him. “Are you jealous?”
“No.”
“You are.” She laughed as she stood up and came toward him. “What, do you think I want him there so I can change my mind at the last minute and marry him instead of you?” She wrapped her arms around his neck as she twinkled her eyes at him.
Something tightened in his chest and he pulled her more tightly to him. “Just try it.”
“I was going to try to set him up with Ashley.”
Ashley? And Jim Slade? Bobby didn’t laugh. At least not aloud.
“Ashley DeWitt,” Colleen said. “My roommate from Boston?”
“I know who she is. And…I don’t think so, Colleen.” He tried to be tactful. “She’s not exactly his type. You know, icy blonde?”
“Ash is very warm.”
“Yeah, well…”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Her warmth has nothing to do with it. What you really mean is that she’s too skinny. She’s not stacked enough for Spaceman, is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Yes. Don’t you hate him now? Thank God he’s not coming to the wedding.”
She laughed and his chest got even tighter. He wanted to kiss her, but that would mean that he’d have to stop looking at her, and he loved looking at her.
“Didn’t he have that friend who started that camp—you know, mock SEAL training for corporate executives?” she asked. “Kind of an Outward Bound program for business geeks? Someone—Rio, I think—was telling me about it.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, settling on sliding his hand up beneath the edge of her T-shirt and running his fingers across the smooth skin of her back. “Randy Something—former SEAL from Team Two. Down in Florida. He’s doing really well—he’s constantly understaffed.”
“Ashley wants to do something like that,” Colleen told him. “Can you find out Randy’s phone number so I can give it to her?”
Ashley DeWitt, in her designer suits, would last about ten minutes in the kind of program Randy ran. But Bobby kept his mouth shut because, who knows? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she’d kick butt.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll call Spaceman first thing tomorrow.”
Colleen touched his face. “Thank you,” she said. And he knew she wasn’t talking about his promise to call Spaceman. She’d read his mind, and was thanking him for not discounting Ashley. “I love you so much.”
And that feeling in his chest got tighter than ever.
“I love you, too,” he told her. He’d started telling her that whenever he got this feeling. Not that it necessarily made his chest any less tight, but it made her eyes soften, made her smile, made her kiss him.
She kissed him now, and he closed his eyes as he kissed her back, losing himself in her sweetness, pulling her closer, igniting the fire he knew he’d feel for her until the end of time.
“We’ll be late for the movie,” she whispered, but then whooped as he swung her up into his arms and carried her down the hall to the bedroom.
“What movie?” Bobby asked, and kicked the bedroom door closed.