Here Comes the Bride by Gayle Kasper

alone.”
    “I know. It’s all this wedding folderol. Did you have a nice time last night, Fiona?”
    Fiona studied his face for some hidden meaning, but it was an innocent question. He hadn’t seen her slip away with Nick to the gazebo. Or the way Nick had held her when they’d danced, making her skin burn hot from his very touch.
    “Yes, a nice time, Dad.” A little too nice, she added silently. She hadn’t been able to sleep last night for remembering it. She hadn’t been able to get Nick out of her mind today. “I like Camille. We had a chance to talk, to get acquainted.”
    “Oh, that’s good.” He beamed. “I’d hoped we could all become a family.”
    A family. She didn’t know about that.What she felt for Nick was far from … cousinly.
    Just then the waiter brought their order. When he disappeared again, Fiona took a slow sip of wine.
    “So, Dad, I guess we’ll have to find a home for your furniture, unless, of course, Winnie wants to mix it in with her things.” She knew how he loved that old recliner of his—brown tweed, one broken leg, propped up with a copy of a Louis L’Amour novel.
    His eyes widened at her across the table. “Furniture? We hadn’t talked about my furniture.”
    “Well, I’m certain Winnie will work out something. The same way she’ll find room for your collection of
National Geographic
, your baseball caps, the wine bottles, and your cuckoo clocks.”
    Unless her father had changed radically in the past few months, those clocks went off every hour, a raucous cacophony.
    Walter Ames put down his steak knife with a clatter. “Fiona, what is it you’re getting at?”
    She set her wineglass on the table and leaned forward across her salad. “I’m asking if you’re ready to give up your lifestyle for this woman?”
    Her eyes bored into him, not allowing him to evade the issue. She wanted an answer.
    “Lifestyle. That’s one of those buzzwordsyou young people throw around these days. Like relationship, involvement, feelings, verbal sharing. Claptrap, Fiona. Winnie and I love each other—bottom line.”
    “But, Dad, how do you know it’s really love?”
    “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck … Fiona, I don’t have to examine it under a microscope. When it hits you, you know it’s right.”
    His words bounced around in her head for a moment.
When it hits you
. She thought of Nick and that powerful force of something she felt whenever he smiled at her, touched her hand … kissed her.
    But she barely knew Nick.
    Her father didn’t know Winnie.
    Love did not happen overnight.
    She’d been in love once, but time had proven that a mistake. And time could come along and crush her father, too.
    She didn’t want that for him. “Dad—”
    “Fiona, I don’t want to have any further discussion about where my furniture will or will not go. Winnie and I can work that out between us, I’m sure.” His cheeks sported twin dots of high color. Hot indignation.
    The man was stubborn. And adamant about his beloved Winnie. She wanted desperately to believe he was right, that everything would work out for them.
    And maybe it would. She hoped so.
    “Okay, Dad.” She busied herself with her salad, chasing a cherry tomato around on her plate. As she gave her father a smile she inwardly resigned herself to tossing rice tomorrow night and toasting the happy twosome with champagne.
    Fiona stood naked in front of the mirror in her small suite and checked for tan lines. She’d spent the afternoon soaking up the sun by one of the hotel’s three Olympic-size swimming pools.
    She’d felt as lazy as a beach bunny, but she hadn’t cared. She was beginning to look like a native, a
rested
native. Her New England pallor had faded, replaced by a rich, golden tan. Not one dark circle hovered beneath her eyes. She turned, inspecting her backside.
    The high cut of her swimsuit made her look like a leggy model and the bronzed color on her back dipped low enough to accommodate