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all they’d been through tonight, she thought at least he would say something to wrap up the occasion, like “Nice to meet you,” or maybe “Have a nice life.”
    But he’d said nothing.
    Never mind. Doesn’t matter. You have to get out of this dress.
    She reached her hands behind her back. Felt for a button. When she came up short, she stretched her arms a little more. Felt around again. Still nothing.
    And then it struck her.
    It had taken Hilda and Jill ten minutes to fasten this dress up the back, one minuscule button at a time. Kari realized she might be able to unhook some of the lower ones, but she didn’t have a prayer with the ones in the middle of her back.
    A tremor of panic seized her. She might as well have been in a straitjacket. She dropped her hands to her sides and considered her options. As it turned out, she had only one.
    Hoisting as much of the muddy train as she could, she hurried to the door and yanked it open.
    “Wait!”
    A few seconds later, Marc came back up the stairs and peered at her from the landing. “What?”
    “I have a little problem.”
    His brows drew together with irritation. “What problem?”
    “Uh…this dress…”
    “What about it?”
    “The buttons are in the back. There are about a thousand of them, and they’re really tiny.”
    “So?”
    “So…I can’t get out of it by myself.”
    Marc blinked. “What do you mean, you can’t get out of it by yourself?”
    “I need you to take it off me.”

Chapter 3
    M arc was stunned. Take it off her? As in undress her?
    “I can’t do that.”
    “You have to,” Kari said.
    “No. I don’t believe I do.”
    “I told you I can’t breathe. If I don’t get out of this dress, I’ll probably faint dead away. Is that what you want?”
    Her hand went to her stomach again, her already-pale complexion turning white. He couldn’t exactly hand this one off to Gus. But with Estelle gone, what was he supposed to do? Beat on doors until he found a woman who wouldn’t mind unbuttoning a wedding dress?
    He came to her door, dropping his voice. “You don’t even know me, and you want me to unbutton your dress? Hadn’t you better rethink that?”
    “I don’t know. Do I need to rethink it?”
    He narrowed his eyes. “How do you know I’m not a dangerous man?”
    “Are you a dangerous man?”
    “Of course not!”
    “Then there’s no problem, is there?”
    “You don’t take the word of a dangerous man when he tells you he’s not dangerous!”
    “But if you’re not dangerous, I can take your word for it, right?”
    Marc’s number two pet peeve. Convoluted logic that led to the right conclusion. God , he hated that.
    “Actually,” Kari said, “it was dumber for me to get into your truck with you. God only knows where you might have taken me. At least here if I scream, somebody will hear me, right?”
    Right , Marc thought, even though he didn’t want to say so, particularly since she smiled when she said it. He wasn’t finding a whole lot funny about any of this.
    “And if you had nefarious intent,” Kari added, “would you have taken the trouble to bring me here?”
    Marc screwed up his face. “‘Nefarious intent’?”
    “Sorry. I was a lit major. I like big words.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, stepping back inside the room. He moved around behind her, nudging her dress out of the way with his foot so he could come up closer to her. She was right. There were approximately four thousand tiny buttons closed with fabric loops. He tried the first button, but his fingers were just too damned big. It was as if she was asking him to thread a needle with a rope.
    “Uh…how’s it going back there?” she asked.
    “I’m working on it.”
    He pulled one of the little loops, and after a while he managed to shove the button through it.
    “There,” he said.
    “There what?”
    “I got one of them.”
    “ One? ”
    “Do you know how tiny these buttons are?”
    “You’re going to have to work