Read Wedding Survivor for Free Online

legs wrapped tightly around it, her hands white-knuckled in their grip as the rope swung lazily.
    Eli winced when she didn't move for a long moment. "Just use your legs and inch your way up," he suggested.
    "Right!" she said brightly. But she didn't move.
    "It's okay, let go," Eli said, putting his hand on the rope.
    "No! I can do it," she gasped, trying to shake his hand off with a wiggle of her hips. "I just have to
pull
..." She made a very strange sound and managed to get one hand above the other.
    For a moment, he thought she was going to make it. But then she began to whimper.
    "Let go, let go," Eli urged her, and grabbed the rope, began to peel her fingers from it, one by one. When she was in danger of falling, she let go and landed off balance, knocking into him. Eli grabbed her shoulders and straightened her up.
    A frown creased her brow as she pushed some loose hair behind her ears. "You made me lose my grip!"
    "Actually," he said with a hint of a smile, "you were gripping the hemp out of that sucker."
    "I was?"
    He nodded.
    Marnie sighed. "That bad, huh?"
    Worse. It was horrible. No upper-body strength at all. Marnie groaned, but Eli said, "Hey, it wasn't too bad!" and patted her kindly on the shoulder. "I thought it was great. A for effort."
    Marnie smiled gratefully, and Eli noticed with some surprise just how warm that smile of hers was.
    "Well," Coop said, shaking his head as he sauntered up to them, "I guess we can try running."
    They escorted Marnie through the garden and around a stand of trees to a small, half-mile track Vincent kept to stay in shape. She exclaimed her surprise when she saw it, and exclaimed even louder when Michael told her they wanted to get a feel for her endurance. "If you could just run around the track a couple of times," he said, making a circular motion with his hand. "Maybe four. That's all we need."
    Marnie looked down at her white silk blouse. "I wish I'd known to wear something a little sportier."
    "I said 'banging around'!" Eli objected again.
    She flashed him a look that said she thought he was clearly a moron and walked to the starting line. She paused, fixed her hat and her hair, and pulled her shirttails out of her pants. "Do I have to be fast?" she asked.
    "Nah," Michael said easily. "Just run." And the four of them lined up behind her, watched as she started to jog… well, bounce, really… around the track.
    "Gotta say, this one is a definite improvement over the last one," Coop said with a grin.
    "Not bad, not bad," Michael added, smiling appreciatively, too, as they watched a very nice ass bounce as she ran by. "But she runs like a girl."
    "This is the dumbest idea we've ever come up with," Eli snorted. Not that he wasn't appreciating the package bouncing around the track along with the guys. "We're making a wedding planner run around a track. Do you know how stupid that is?"
    "Shut up," Jack said. "I'm enjoying the show."
    Marnie made it around one and a half times before she had to stop and put her hands on her knees to get some air. When the guys joined her, she apologized between gulps of air, and admitted to being very amazed that her trips to the gym hadn't yielded a better performance.
    While they all hastened to assure her that it was quite all right—they admired her willingness to try—there wasn't a man among them who didn't wonder if she could pull her own weight at eleven thousand feet. They were used to enduring extreme conditions with strong men. Not women who ran like girls.
    Fortunately, Marnie fared much better on the next phase. The idea, as they had developed it, was to make sure their wedding planner could handle the press. In the pavilion, Michael began to fire a set of nonsensical questions at her, asking and reasking the same thing, trying to shake her up.
    Marnie did a great job—none of the questions about affairs or babies or drugs rattled her in the least. She had a great laugh and a charming smile, and laughed appropriately at the