Relentless. Leslie Kelly

“Ouch!” he yelped as he yanked his hand free. “I think she bit me!”

      Biting? Strippers? Prostitutes? Okay, Ken had seen enough. It was time to leave before they started bringing in the livestock.

      But he still hadn’t found his jacket. Since his car keys and phone were in the pocket, he didn’t think he was going to be able to just ditch it. Walking into the kitchen area of the suite, he glanced around and began digging through a pile of coats someone had dumped on the counter.

      He kept an eye on the party. Dan and another guest pulled the reluctant cart farther into the room, so it was practically right in front of the groom. Though the men tried to coax the dancer out, Peter didn’t seem too concerned about his entertainer’s reluctance. “We’ve got all night,” he said with a chuckle. The blonde on his lap curled tighter against him.

      “Better make it worthwhile, Pete, since it’s your last night of freedom,” one of the men said. Ken, who’d just about given up finding his coat, grabbed a canned soda from a cooler and rolled up his shirt sleeves. The room was getting hot and he imagined whoever the woman in the cake was, she was going to be wilted and steamy if she hid in there much longer.

      “I don’t think I’m going to miss my freedom much once I get my hands on my new wife. Holding her off has been killing me!”

      That got Ken’s attention like nothing else this evening had. It almost sounded like Peter was saying he and his bride hadn’t anticipated their wedding night, which would be a shock given the groom’s notorious sexual escapades.

      The blonde giggled. “You mean you haven’t…”

      “No. Princess has to be a virgin on her wedding night or Daddy won’t be happy, and that’s all that counts. After waiting this long, she better make tomorrow night worthwhile.”

      Though Pamela wasn’t here, couldn’t know what was being said, Ken felt a sharp pang of embarrassment for her. This jerk was spouting off locker-room talk about the woman he was going to marry! Not only that, he was talking to a roomful of men who got their paychecks every week from that woman’s father.

      “Whaddya mean keeping Daddy happy?” one of the less intoxicated guys asked.

      Peter’s beer consumption must have been pretty high, because he answered the question, not noticing or not caring how much of an insensitive ass his answer made him appear. “She comes with the keys to the kingdom. As long as I keep her pregnant, at home and away from those dregs from the inner city she’s so devoted to, I write my own ticket with dear old Dad-in-law. He and I have something of a ‘gentleman’s agreement.’”

      Ken felt sick on Pamela’s behalf. Because it sounded, from what Peter was saying, like Pamela’s own father had conspired with her fiancé to get her to give up her career and be the good little socialite wife. As much as he liked Jared Bradford, Ken had to concede that as far as Pamela went, the man probably wouldn’t be above such meddling.

      “You can’t imagine the hell I’ve gone through—my wife’s gonna be a wild one in bed, I can tell. Practically every time I’ve dropped her off lately she’s given me this pouty look with those lips of hers, and I’ve had to go cruising for some female company before I could go home!”

      Ken shook his head in disgust. Of course Peter hadn’t curbed his appetites in the months since his engagement. He was an oversexed cheating moron.

      As far as Ken was concerned, once you put a ring on a woman’s finger, you’ve promised her you’ll be faithful. It was like shaking a man’s hand over a business deal. You don’t welch, you don’t whine. You give your word to a colleague that you’ll accept his offer? You stick to it. You’re engaged to a woman but can’t have sex till the wedding night? You start enjoying cold showers and get damned friendly with your hand. You don’t cheat.

      Shaking his head, he gave one more quick glance around the room, again looking for his coat. Then he noticed something funny. The cake was shaking. It had started to tilt a bit, and now, from here behind the cart, Ken could see the back jerking as if the person inside was pounding on it. Slowly. Rhythmically.

      “If I’d known old man Bradford was that hot for someone to take the girl off his hands, I’da tried a lot harder to get her to go out with me,” someone said.

      “As if you didn’t already try enough—to the point that you made a complete idiot of yourself every time she walked by your cubicle,” another man replied. “Not that I blame you. She’s not hard on the eyes—she’s got legs that’d make a man weep.”

      “Not to mention her sweet…”

      Ken didn’t hear the last word because, suddenly, the cake erupted. Two fists punched through the paper and icing on the flat top, putting holes through the C in “Congratulations” and the R in “Peter.” The arms scissored, effectively slicing the paper down the middle, and a woman’s head and torso burst through the opening.

      “Oh, crap,” someone muttered. Ken understood why as soon as he saw that thick mass of chestnut-brown hair, held in a loose clasp at the nape of her neck.

      Pamela Bradford, who had obviously heard every word uttered since she’d been pushed into the room, emerged from the remains of the cake like a vengeful goddess.

      2

      PAMELA WASN’T THINKING, wasn’t quite coherent and probably wasn’t even completely sane when she burst out of the cake. She was acting on instinct, driven by rage-induced adrenaline. Thought played no part. She’d certainly never have made the conscious decision to emerge from the cake, dressed as she was, in front of a roomful of men.

      When the drunken fool who’d found the cake had brought her in, Pamela had sent up every prayer she knew that her bridesmaids would come to her rescue. She’d stayed snug inside, peeking through the holes left by the man who’d tried to coax her out, wondering how darn long it could take them to find a bar in a beachfront hotel in a party town like Fort Lauderdale!

      Seeing her fiancé holding a blond hooker had started her blood temperature rising. But she’d waited, giving him the benefit of the doubt, knowing it was his bachelor party. The woman had probably just planted herself on his lap.

      Then he’d begun groping her.

      She’d been furious, watching in sick disbelief. Her fiancé was feeling up some woman less than twelve hours before he was set to marry her. The fingers that had never once touched a single part of Pamela’s body, other than her hands or a casual squeeze around her waist, had been buried in the plump folds of flesh exposed by the blond floozy’s leather miniskirt. She’d begun to have major doubts about the whole wedding thing even before the stupid fathead had opened his mouth.

      Once he’d done that…well, Pamela’s blood had gone from simmer to raging boil in a matter of seconds. She’d been no more able to stay inside that cake than a volcano full of molten lava could keep from erupting. And erupt she did.

      “Pamela,” Peter exclaimed as she burst through the top with enough force to shatter the tack-wood cake frame into tiny pieces. Peter pushed the blonde off his lap so fast she landed in a heap at his feet.

      “Shut up, Peter. Just shut up,” Pamela ordered as she pushed her way through the paper and sticky icing, feeling it matting in her hair and smearing onto her thighs. Her foot got stuck under the cart shelf where she’d been sitting. Pamela had to tug it free, silently cursing the shoes, her fiancé, her father and her life.

      Peter reached out a hand. “Pamela, let me explain.”

      “Touch me and I’ll rip your arm off,” she snarled, feeling it was entirely possible she could do just that.

      “Darling…”

      “I’m not your darling!” Pamela finally got her foot free and stepped over the legs of the blonde, who watched with wide eyes from her position on the floor. “I was never your darling. And I’m not my father’s princess. So you can go tell the king the wedding’s