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not to gaze at the way his eyes creased so deliciously when he smiled.
    “Your parents sound cool,” he said.
    “They do their thing, I do mine.”
    “Meaning?”
    She braced herself for his reaction. “I left the commune behind me years ago.”
    His eyebrows rose. Just like all their eyebrows rose.
    “You lived on a commune? Where?”
    People reacted with varying degrees of fascination when they heard she’d grown up on a hippie commune. She’d learned to fend them off with jokes and throwaway stories. What she didn’t tell them was how hard she’d worked to leave the alternate lifestyle behind her. And that the wedding to Howard was meant to eradicate every final trace of it.
    “California, of course. I was a real hippie child. Flowers in my hair. The whole thing.” She kept her voice flippant.
    “So your parents didn’t approve of your wedding?”
    “They did not.”
    That was the understatement of all time. Matt Slade was perceptive. And she’d said too much already.
    “Your parents sound like my kind of people.”
    His words surprised her. Howard had found it difficult to mask his discomfort around her unconventional parents. For that reason alone she shouldn’t have even contemplated marrying him.
    But then she looked at Matt Slade again—at his long hair, worn jeans, his battered leather boat shoes. Why should she be surprised at his reaction? He hardly seemed Wall Street material. Not that that was a bad thing. A made-to-measure-suit was no guarantee of a decent person. Howard had proved that today.
    Now her rescuer’s smile was replaced by an expression so serious it was verging on grim.
    “I approve of people who take a different look at the society we live in. And I’m right behind them when it comes to weddings. A wedding is a no-win contract for all concerned.”
    “Pardon me?” Where did that come from?
    “You just said your parents don’t believe in marriage?”
    She stared at him. “I… hey, you’ve got it wrong. Their commune isn’t the free-love kind of set-up. They’ve been happily married for thirty years and faithful to each other the whole time. They do believe in marriage. That’s why they were so upset about—”
    She stopped mid-word, aghast. She’d said way too much. And had no intention of saying anything more.
    But Matt Slade’s eyes gleamed with interest. “About what?”
    “About nothing,” she mumbled.
    No way in the world was she going to admit to this man the real reason why her parents had boycotted her marriage to Howard.
    Somehow she sensed that Matt Slade would not approve either. And for some powerful, unreasoning impulse, she wanted him to be on her side. Why it mattered she couldn’t fathom. But she didn’t want to see disapproval cloud this man’s eyes when he looked at her.
     

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    Matt knew he was staring, but he found himself unable to tear his eyes away from Cristy’s face.
    In his experience, many beautiful women’s faces were virtually expressionless—cold, lovely masks. But that wasn’t the case with this beautiful woman.
    No matter how hard she might try to suppress them, Cristy’s emotions danced across her features—revealing themselves in the warm sparkle of her cornflower blue eyes, in the lilt of her mouth, in the anxious crease of her creamy brow.
    Right now she looked like a little girl with a guilty secret.
    “What did you do that was so terrible your parents went to an ashram instead of your wedding?”
    The bride answered with a defiant tilt of her chin. “It wasn’t so terrible, my mom was just over-reacting.”
    Matt suppressed a smile. She was strong-minded, not easily swayed. He liked that. He itched to know what had so upset her laid-back parents that they’d boycotted her wedding.
    From vowing to get her off his boat pronto, Matt now found himself intrigued by this runaway bride. Cristy Walters looked like she was born and bred to be a rich man’s trophy wife—not someone who’d grown up on a