“Because, Cupcake.” Sam hoisted up the lighter of Gwenyth’s two suitcases and handed it over to her. “We’re gettin’ married.”
Chapter 13
The plane ride to Las Vegas was, for the most part, a quiet one. Sam barely spoke a word, grunting and gesturing instead to get his points across.
When Gwenyth didn’t touch the food that had been brought to her, Sam grunted and pointed at it, indicating she should eat. When she failed to drink the wine that he’d ordered in a timely enough fashion to suit him, he grunted and pointed at her glass, then raised it to her lips and held it there. All in all, the grunting and pointing was steadily wearing on Gwenyth’s nerves. She idly considered the fact that the comparison she’d made last week between Sam and a Neanderthal wasn’t terribly off course.
But Gwenyth was too busy reflecting on the fact that Sam wanted to marry her to pay his odious behavior too much attention. It seemed impossible. Like a dream.
When Sam had first made his announcement that they were flying to Las Vegas to get married, Gwenyth had been too shocked to protest. She was still feeling much the same way. Why would Sam want to marry her? And what if marriage was merely Sam’s way of assuaging his male ego after she’d run out on him? What if he regretted marrying her tomorrow, or next week, or next year? Could she take that chance? Or more to the point, would she take that chance?
“Stop it, Cupcake.”
Since it was the first coherent sentence Sam had uttered in over two hours, it had the effect of gaining Gwenyth’s undivided attention. “Huh?”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
Sam sighed. “Thinkin’.”
Gwenyth narrowed her eyes. “Stop thinking?”
“That’s what I said.”
She blew out a dramatic breath. “Why?”
“Because as of late I generally don’t care for your thoughts any more than I do your words or your behavior.” Sam inclined his head and raised an impervious brow. “We are gettin’ married, Gwenyth Marie. Tonight. As soon as this plane lands. The end. No discussion.”
Gwenyth shook her head at his ego. “Will I be permitted to think after we’re married?” she asked incredulously.
Sam rubbed his chin while he considered her question. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “A man can only plan so far in advance. Right now I’ve got my mind on which chapel we’ll be tyin’ the knot in. Will it be Elvis’ Chapel of Love, or Bubba’s Barn of Bliss?”
Gwenyth gritted her teeth. “If you’re referring to that red-roofed monstrosity on the strip whose flashing neon sign reads:Bag a stag or marry your gal: All night rodeos and marriage ceremonies performed inside, you can forget it.” She slashed her hand definitively through the air. “I won’t have it.”
Sam merely grunted.
The rest of the plane ride was spent in silence. It was as if both of their emotions were too raw and unpredictable to wager speaking to the other. It was just as well. Gwenyth needed the time to try and absorb what was happening. She was a thinker, a planner, not at all unpredictable and spontaneous like Sam.
While Gwenyth worried her lip and stared at the passing clouds from the vantage point of the tiny window to her right, Sam flexed his fingers, clenching and unclenching them, as he considered how best to get Gwen to marry him. The knowledge that she might simply refuse to take part in their upcoming nuptials was unnerving.
So what was he to do? How could he force her to the altar? Times were definitely much simpler back in the days of the Greeks and Romans when a man took what was his and brooked no arguments about it.
Sam sighed dejectedly. Whatever he came up with, it had better be good.
* * * * *
“Sam, I don’t know about this. I mean, what will my family say?” Gwenyth’s eyes widened nervously as a bouquet of flowers was thrust into her hand by her newly acquired maid of honor, a bald woman of indiscriminate age who had tattoos over every square inch of her body and a nose ring pierced through her septum.
Sam pulled Gwenyth’s hair out of its topknot and watched the curls cascade around her shoulders and down her back. “I want your hair down for our weddin’, Cupcake.” He leaned into her and inhaled the fragrance of the sweet, strawberry-scented mane. “It’s so beautiful.”
Gwenyth closed her eyes briefly against the longing she saw in Sam’s face. There was a vast world of difference between lust and love, she reminded herself, and Gwenyth needed both before she could even consider getting married. How was she going to tell Sam that she simply couldn’t go through with this? How could she even begin to make him understand that if he was going to give her back the dream she’d let go of in adolescence, she had to have the whole thing? “Sam, we need to talk,” she quietly insisted. Glancing at her formidable maid of honor, she then added, “alone.”
Sam sighed, but in the end he acquiesced with a nod. He reached for Gwenyth’s arm and gently drew her to the other side of the chapel. “What is it, Gwen?”
