Once Upon a Honeymoon (Harlequin American Romance) Page 2

  So what was he going to do?

  “Let’s see,” he mused darkly. “I don’t suppose we could get the police to cart them all off.”

  “Okay.” Rosa sounded a lot more cheerful, as if she really liked that idea. “I’ll call right away. But what do I tell them, you know, to get them to come?”

  That I’m such a stud, I’ve got rich girls six-deep at my office, all clamoring for my attention, and I need protection from them?

  Tripp Ashby, stud of the western world. What a joke. Okay, so he and his college friends had called themselves the Studs for a while way back when, but they were never serious about it. At least he didn’t think any of them took it seriously.

  “Listen,” he told his secretary, “there must be some way—”

  Even as he spoke, someone behind her with a very loud, very high-pitched voice demanded, “Is that him? You’re talking to Tripp, aren’t you?”

  Quickly Rosa mumbled, “Gotta go,” and hung up on him.

  He sat there, staring down at the dead receiver. Next he supposed some crew of lovestruck debs would be hiring bulldozers to crash through his wall.

  “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

  I told you so.

  There was no one in the room, but he could still hear the words as clear as day. His old friend Bridget Emerick might as well have been right there in the room with him, giving him one of her simmering lectures.

  With one hand on her hip and fire in her eyes, Bridgie would say, You wanted to be a Stud, didn’t you? I told you it was demeaning and sexist. I told you women were going to treat you like prime beef on the hoof. But you had to be a Stud.

  Tripp smiled to himself, enjoying the mental picture of Bridgie on her high horse. Even in the middle of this mess, the thought of Bridgie—earnest, fierce, smart as a whip—was pretty amusing. She was only medium height, rather slender, with a pretty heart-shaped face and long, straight, dark hair. As a matter of fact, Bridget looked like any other standard coed of the late seventies. It wasn’t her physical presence that was intimidating to members of the opposite sex—it was her attitude. Studious, driven, with a sense of responsibility worn like a mantle around her shoulders, Bridgie always seemed older and a lot more serious than the other college students.

  While they were partying and fooling around, Bridget was applying for special extra-credit internships in Washington. While they were planning keggers, she was writing position papers on sexual harassment on campus.

  He could still remember how irate she’d been when she’d first found out about the innocent little club he and his buddies had formed. Steve, Tripp, Ukiah and Deke—Studs by virtue of their combined initials. A quartet of college kids who’d thought it was amusing to call themselves Studs.

  It’s downright disgusting! she’d fumed.

  And, as usual, he’d pled innocence. He simply hadn’t understood what all the fuss was about.

  But Bridgie had been livid. Someday, Tripp Ashby, this thing is going to backfire on you. You’re going to be very sorry you ever wanted to call yourself a Stud.

  Trust Bridgie to call that one right on the nose.

  Back in the old days, when he was an aimless jock who constantly hovered on the edge of ineligibility, he had trusted her. The other guys thought she was a drag, but he knew he could trust her to yell at him when he was being an idiot, to stay up until 4:00 a.m. to help him write his anthropology paper, to bail him out of jail when he got picked up for violating curfew, to go through Hamlet with him, line by line, until he got the sense of the damn thing.

  Good old Bridgie. His ally through thick and thin.

  “Bridgie,” he said suddenly, sitting up straighter, reaching for the Rolodex. She was a woman. She understood how they thought. Surely she could get him out of this mess.

  His other friends were scattered all over the place, but Bridgie was downtown at a stuffy law firm in Chicago’s Loop, only thirty miles away from his suburban office. Good old Bridgie.

  Her phone picked up on the first ring.

  “Niles, Tweed and Sternham. This is Ms. Emerick’s office,” a cool voice answered.

  That was definitely not his old friend’s voice. “Is Bridgie in, please?”

  “Ms. Emerick,” she said in a disapproving tone, making it clear she would not bend far enough to recognize a nickname, “is meeting with a client. Is there some way I can help you?”

  “Do you know how long she’s expected to be in the meeting?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  He sensed a definite chill coming from the other end of the receiver, but he had no idea what he’d done to deserve it. Women. They were either too hot or too cold—nothing in between.

  The noise level in his outer office suddenly accelerated to a roar. What was going on out there? It sounded like a riot.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” the woman in Bridgie’s office asked again, with a frostier edge this time.

  You can help me by getting Bridget out of the damn meeting, he wanted to yell. His situation was getting desperate here. He spun his chair around on its casters, as far away as possible from the source of the disturbance in the outer office, and then spoke quietly into the receiver. “The minute she comes out of her meeting, please tell her that Tripp called. I’d like her to call me back as soon as she possibly can.”

  “Would that be Mr. Tripp?” the woman on the other end asked suspiciously.

  “Tripp Ashby. But I doubt she knows more than one Tripp.”

  “And this is regarding...?”

  “A private matter,” he said plainly. “Please just give her my message, okay?”

  “And would she have your number?” the woman asked doubtfully.

  “Yes, she would.”

  “I think I should write it down anyway. She might not have it handy,” she droned on, as he began to worry whether debutantes wielding antique tennis rackets and baseball bats were going to come crashing through his office door at any moment.

  “She has my number,” he said abruptly. “Thank you.”

  Having difficulty maintaining his temper, Tripp slammed the receiver back into its cradle. First he had to fight off a bunch of society bimbos, and now he was forced to be polite to a snotty receptionist who didn’t want to take his message.

  He’d no sooner dropped the phone than it rang again. “Bridgie?” he asked eagerly.

  “No, it’s me,” Rosa, his secretary hissed. “I got the police to come out. But when I told them what was wrong, they started laughing too hard to arrest anybody. Plus your friend Mr. Monroe just got here, and...”

  Tripp covered his eyes with his hand. The police, the women and his influential client, all out there in the lobby, slugging it out. He saw his life over, his business washed up.

  Rosa’s voice dropped even lower. “Mr. Monroe is making it even worse! First he tried to get the cops to lay odds on which one of the women would get to you first, and then he used my phone so he could call some of his friends and get them in on the betting pool. The Tripp Ashby Matrimonial Sweepstakes, he’s calling it, with choice of dates and possible brides.” There was a pause. “So what should I do?”

  “Bet the farm on no wedding and no bride,” Tripp said grimly.

  The Tripp Ashby Matrimonial Sweepstakes. Could things get any worse?

  Chapter Two

  Bridget Emerick was having a very good day.

  With some canny negotiating and a push in the right direction, she’d swung a 1.5 million-dollar settlement for a very important client, a client she had persuaded to hire Niles, Tweed and Sternham. And she’d done it without ever setting foot in court. Not one motion, not one deposition, and her client was a millionaire. Well, he was already a millionaire, but now he was even richer.

  And her firm took in a cool one-third. All for about a week’s worth of work.

  “Just call me Ms. Rainmaker,” she said with satisfaction. This would make the senior partners sit up and take notice.

&
nbsp; With a smile on her face, she sailed into her small, but exquisitely decorated office. She was all prepared to put her pumps up and look out the window at the Chicago River, which she could see a tiny corner of if she craned her neck. And then she could relax for, oh, maybe ten minutes.

  Life was good.

  Until she saw her brand-new, and very officious secretary, Marie, lying in wait, blocking her path.

  “Your phone has been ringing off the hook,” Marie said sourly, waving a thick sheaf of little pink slips in the air. “I thought you’d never get out of that meeting.”

  Bridget gave the woman a quelling stare. Marie had only been here for two weeks, and already she was a major annoyance. Gossipy, officious, smug and superior, Marie drove everyone crazy. It was difficult for Bridget to make the most of her authority; she really didn’t like having to yell at people to keep them in line. But Bridget was getting very close to singeing her secretary down to her shoelaces.

  “Who called?” she asked quickly, running down the short list of people whose messages she was always sure to return ASAP. “Rogers? Hayworth? Barry Chase?”

  “Oh, no, no, they’re all from—”

  “Oh, no. Jay.” Bridget frowned. Jay Philpott, her fiancé as of yesterday, had had his secretary launch this sort of phone assault when he couldn’t find her and he thought it was important. Jay simply didn’t know how to take “no” for an answer when he was on a roll. Of course the things Jay dealt with—urban renewal, universal health care, getting himself elected to the Senate—really were extremely important. But so was her 1.5 million-dollar client! “Are those messages from Jay?”

  “No, they’re not from him. These are from some other man, who took a very personal tone if you ask me.” Marie’s lips pursed in a severe line. “I don’t think these are business calls. He keeps calling you Birdie or something. Every time, I answer very carefully, ‘Ms. Emerick’s office.’ And every time, he calls you Birdie. I just hate that, when people don’t understand when you try to be professional and businesslike.”

  But Bridget tuned out everything after the word birdie. He keeps calling you Birdie. Not Birdie. Bridgie. She began to feel a funny fluttering in the pit of her stomach. Only one person called her anything besides Bridget.

  Tripp.

  “Please, Lord, not Tripp,” she whispered.

  The funny fluttering turned into major league bells and whistles. Alarms. Sirens.

  She did her best to ignore it. Calm, steady, in control, she told herself. She was going to marry Jay, and they would create beautiful, bright, socially committed children. She was going to make senior partner at Niles, Tweed and Sternham, successfully juggling family, career and a husband in the Senate. Everything was all set—all perfect—all normal and safe and perfectly placid.

  But not if larger-than-life, reckless, irresponsible, golden-boy Tripp, the center of her life and the focal point of her dreamiest fantasies since the impressionable age of eighteen, decided to come careening back into her life, disrupting everything one more time.

  A note of panic threaded her voice. “Tell me it wasn’t Tripp. Not today.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s exactly who it was.” Marie peered down at the pink slips. “Seven messages. All from this Tripp person, all within the last two hours. And Tripp is a really stupid name for a grown man, if you ask me.”

  “It’s a family name,” Bridget said stiffly. “Thomas Michael Trippett Ashby. The third.”

  “Well, la-de-da. So who is he? A friend of yours? An old boyfriend, maybe, hmm?”

  “No, no, not at all,” she said quickly. She had to get Tripp and “boyfriend” out of the same sentence immediately. “He’s a friend from college. We keep in touch every so often. But he’s never been what you might call consistent about that sort of thing.”

  Or consistent about anything, for that matter. Except in the way he created havoc in her life.

  Yesterday, when she had finally decided to marry Jay and set sail for the future, she had made a vow—she would no longer spare so much as a corner of her life for this ridiculous attachment to Tripp Ashby, who was too good-looking and too careless and too...everything for his own good.

  Bridget sat down abruptly, taking the nearest chair without even looking. Her mind was far, far away from the stuffy offices of Niles, Tweed and Sternham.

  Tripp. Always Tripp.

  When she’d first met him, back at small, private, tree-lined Beckett College in upstate New York, she’d hated him on sight. Him and his friends. Every one of the self-styled Studs was a hunk and a half, and Bridget Emerick had no time for that sort of vain, spoiled college creep.

  She had goals,ambition—the steely-eyed determination to be somebody, to go places, to make a difference in the world.

  She was, by choice, totally immersed in her studies, so smart and so unhip they called her Egghead Emerick, and Tripp was definitely not the kind of guy she imagined herself hanging around with. He had his pick of cheerleaders and sorority babes, and every time she saw him, he had a different one on his arm. Stud, indeed.

  But then she was assigned as his tutor. The money she could earn was more important than her scruples at that moment in time, so she took the assignment. Grumbling, feeling very superior, she’d arrived with the complete works of Shakespeare in hand, ready to be smug and unpleasant and disdainful of Tripp Ashby, boy jock.

  But the more she found out about Tripp, regardless of her lofty principles about her place in the world, the more of a mystery and a fascination he became. And the deeper she fell.

  She was young and foolish. He was gorgeous. And even more than his looks, she found herself absolutely mesmerized by the air of dark, wounded vulnerability that clung to him. To an impressionable English major, Tripp Ashby seemed like Heathcliff, Hamlet and Lord Byron, all rolled into one.

  Mostly she loved trying to figure him out.

  He was very intelligent, yet he did poorly in his classes, too bored or too negligent to apply himself. He never had more than a few quarters in his pockets, and he was at Beckett on an athletic scholarship, yet he had closets full of cashmere sweaters and expensive tweed jackets that he never wore, all sent by his mother. He hated making a spectacle of himself in public, yet he starred on the basketball and track teams. He had a wickedly funny sense of humor, yet he kept his mouth shut around all but his closest friends.

  Tripp was always dancing on the edge of trouble, and Bridget was always pulling him away from the cliff just in the nick of time.

  Heathcliff. Hamlet. Lord Byron.

  Well, no more. She squared her shoulders. That was then, and this is now. As of yesterday, she was operating under new rules. And those rules forbade any contact with Tripp Ashby.

  She snatched up the pink phone slips and marched back toward the privacy of her own office, ready to throw out the messages and forget he’d ever called.

  But then the phone on Marie’s desk began to ring.

  As the secretary sprinted over to get it, making a big show of how fast she was moving, she muttered, “I’ll bet that’s him again. Well, at least this time you can talk to him yourself.”

  “No!” It sounded a little too loud, a little too panicked, even to her own ears. Faced with a phone that might have Tripp on the other end, her knees went weak, her heart pounded, she felt faint....

  This was exactly what she was trying to avoid.

  “Tell him I’m in a meeting, or in conference or indisposed. Tell him I’m really, really busy and I can’t call him back. Tell him anything,” she said in a rush. “But don’t, on pain of death, do not ring him through!”

  As she scrambled toward her office, she heard Marie say, “Ms. Emerick is in conference. May I take a message?”

  She paused. Maybe it wasn’t him.

  “I can hardly hear you,” Marie complained in her usual put-upon tone. “Could you speak up please? What was your name again? Could you spell that for me?” She shot Bridget a meaningful glance. “T-r-i-p-p. Yes, I’ve got it.�
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  Bridget jumped into her office and slammed the door shut, flattening herself against the back of it.

  She knew she was behaving in a completely irrational manner, and she didn’t care. Batten down the hatches—bar the doors—she was willing to do whatever it took to keep away from Tripp.

  * * *

  WHY HADN’T SHE CALLED him back? He depended on her. He needed her. It wasn’t like his pal Bridgie to leave him hanging out to dry like this. It wasn’t like Bridgie at all.

  Wasn’t she the no-nonsense queen of personal responsibility? She shouldered her burdens, she met her deadlines and she always returned phone calls. Until today.

  Meanwhile, his plucky secretary, Rosa, who was going to get a major raise as soon as he could afford it, managed to convince the police and Marv Monroe to leave, and to take several of the women with them. Then she told the holdouts that Tripp had sneaked out the back door. Although there was no back exit, they all went flying out to find him, and Rosa locked the door behind them.

  Finally, calm was restored to Touch the Sky.

  And Bridget still hadn’t returned his calls. “If I didn’t know better,” he mused, “I’d think she was trying to avoid me.”

  But just then Rosa shouted, “All clear.”

  “You’re sure they’re not lying in wait outside the door?”

  “I’m sure. I saw the last one roar off in her Range Rover. But I’m warning you, Tripp, if any of them come back tomorrow, I’m not fooling with them. I’m outta here.”

  “Take the day off tomorrow, just in case. Right now, I’m outta here.”

  He really shouldn’t be celebrating, since he’d lost in all the brouhaha both a potential client and what he’d hoped would be a very big sale. But he still felt triumphant, just to get rid of all those crazy women.

  Without wasting any time, he hightailed it out to his car, ready to race home where he could hide out in relative comfort.

  But he’d no sooner turned out of the parking lot than he heard a suspicious rustling in the back seat. Unwilling to take his eyes off the road for more than a second in the usual crush of heavy traffic and crazy drivers, he hazarded a quick glance back there.