“Of course I do. Shoo. We’ve got a million things to do before this evening.” Martha Holden all but booted him out of the room.
Tim cast Francine a pleading glance on his way out the door.
“Really, Mom,” she protested on his behalf. “Don’t you think you’re going to extremes?”
“Perhaps. But that’s my prerogative as his future mother-in-law. I take my duty as mother of the bride seriously.” She laughed, her eyes gleaming with pride and happiness.
“You like Tim, don’t you?”
“You love him. That’s enough for me, but as it happens, I find him endearing. He reminds me a good deal of your father years ago. He’s got that same brash nature, with an appreciation for the mischievous. You’re going to be happy with this man, Francine. I couldn’t have chosen a husband better suited to you had I gone out and searched myself.”
Francine unloaded the first grocery sack. “I love him so much. I’ve been so afraid, ever since Murphy phoned with the news about Cain McClellan.”
“Afraid?”
Francine nodded. “I worried that Tim would somehow feel responsible for what happened. That his being there might have changed everything.”
“So that was what you were talking about when I interrupted you.”
“I was afraid to bring up the subject until now, then I decided I had to know. If Tim did feel that way, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Does he?” her mother asked gently.
Francine shook her head. “He assured me that part of his life is over. He means it, Mom. He really means it. I’m not a passing fancy to him, he honestly loves me.”
“He had the chance to learn that on his own,” her mother said gently. “He’s confident in his decision. But he might not have been that way had you pressured him into not going back to Florida. My heart ached for you when he left.”
“But he came back, Mom, and this time he’s going to stay.”
Knowing Tim was truly hers went through her mind as Francine walked down the aisle on her father’s arm later that evening.
The wedding was a simple affair, held in the church Francine had attended from the time she was a toddler. Her immediate family was there, along with several aunts, uncles, cousins, and longtime family friends. It amazed Francine that her mother had been able to arrange a wedding on such short notice.
Her wedding gown was made of antique white satin with a lace-and-pearl overlay. When she first saw Tim in his black tuxedo with tails, she didn’t recognize him. But when he winked and pointed to the jacket pocket, she knew it could be no other. He’d carried a condom with him to his own wedding.
Francine was sure her face turned a bright, fire-engine red.
When they spoke their vows, Tim’s voice boomed proudly as he pledged his life to hers. Apparently he felt he needed to convince her family of his sincerity by shouting out his promises. Francine’s own voice trembled with emotion and love.
The reception followed in the church hall. Her sisters-in-law stood ready to serve the cake and punch. The lace-covered table was stacked with an array of beautifully wrapped gifts. Francine was touched by such an abundant display of generosity, and Tim, too, repeatedly asked if all those gifts could possibly be for them.
“How soon can we escape?” her husband asked out of the corner of his mouth.
They’d barely arrived, and the reception line was just now getting started.
“Not yet,” she whispered, flustered by his question.
“This condom is burning a hole in my pocket,” he said as Francine’s eighty-year-old great-aunt approached. Fortunately Aunt Emma was hard of hearing.
“Tim!” Francine said.
“It’s the truth,” he muttered.
“I’m eager, too,” she assured him, and introduced him to Aunt Emma.
It didn’t take long for her family and friends to progress through the line. Afterward, Francine hurried the cake-cutting ceremony.
Before she knew where the time had gone, they’d arrived at the hotel. Tim carried her into the plush suite at the St. Francis in the heart of San Francisco. Instead of putting her down after crossing the threshold, as she expected, he went into each of the three rooms, giving her a walking tour. Only he was the one who did the walking.
He made her feel that she weighed no more than a bird, and she fretted about his bad leg. He silenced her worries with one deep kiss.
He had a bottle of French champagne on ice, and after laying her on top of the king-size mattress, he expertly opened the bottle.
He poured them each a glass, insisted she drink from his goblet, and when some dribbled down her chin, licked it from her face. His mouth trailed the slim column of her neck, dipping at the hollow of her throat.
Francine rolled back her head and sighed. Already she felt dizzy, and it wasn’t from her one sip of champagne, either.
“Tim.”
“Humm?”
“Make love to me.”
“I am.”
“I mean really make love to me.”
He paused and lifted his head to look her in the eye. “You mean you’re ready now?”
She laughed softly. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been ready for weeks.”
“But what about dinner? I thought we’d order room service.”
“We will,” she promised, so much in love with her husband, she felt as if she were about to burst. “But later. Okay?”
He stood and shucked off his suit jacket so fast, it was still in the air by the time he’d pulled the shirt over his head. He carelessly flung the shirt aside. As if he’d been too long away from her, he knelt on the edge of the mattress and kissed her once more. If he feared she was about to change her mind, he had no reason to worry.
One kiss, and in that time she felt seduced and wooed and deeply cherished. Francine opened her mouth to him and kissed him back, using her tongue as a blatant invitation for more intimacies.
Tim’s breath caught as if he’d been taken by surprise. His tongue probed deeply, swirling, mating with hers in a ritual as old as man himself. He broke off the kiss roughly and centered his attention on her neck, blazing a trail of hot kisses over her throat and back to the scented hollow.
“I intended to go much slower than this,” he whispered, and Francine could hear the apprehension in his voice.
“Next time we’ll go slow,” she promised. She sat up and lifted her hands behind her back in an effort to unfasten the row of pearl buttons that stretched down the length of the wedding dress. Her hair, which she’d wore unplaited, continued to get in the way.
Tim walked on his knees across the mattress to assist her. Francine held her hair up and out of the way.
“I didn’t know virgins were this red hot.”
“Do you want me to be shy and retiring?”
“No,” he muttered, cursing under his breath at the difficulty the buttons gave him. “This damned dress is worse than a chastity belt.”
Francine giggled and reached for her wineglass, sipping champagne. “Want me to help you undress?” she asked.
“Not when it’s going to take the two of us all night to get you out of this contraption.”
Francine couldn’t remember a time she’d been happier. “We can cut it off me.”
He cursed again. “It might come to that.”
He made progress, but it was agonizingly slow.
“I could always lift my skirts and let you have your way with me.” With that she sighed dramatically.
“The hell we will. I want you naked and beneath me. I’ve waited too damn long to get you in that position to be outsmarted by a blasted wedding dress. Who designed this thing, anyway? The Sisters of Perpetual Frustration?”
Francine smiled, and as he freed the bodice, she worked her arms free and peeled off the upper half. When he’d progressed sufficiently, she stood and slipped the material over her hips, letting the gown pool at her feet.
When she looked up, she found Tim sta
ring at her.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I had no idea a woman wore so many underthings. Are these going to be as difficult to remove?”
“Not at all.” She proved it by stripping them off one by one with what she hoped was a maddening lack of haste. It gave her a certain pleasure to watch her husband’s eyes widen with admiration.
Until she’d met Tim, Francine had always been self-conscious of her body. She was tall and thick waisted and built more like a lumberjack than a beauty queen. Yet Tim made her feel delicate and beautiful.
His eyes feasted on her. When she’d finished, he reached for her and took her back to the bed. She stood before him while he sat at the edge of the mattress. A slow smile brightened his features.
“How is it a woman so beautiful would ever marry a man like me?”
“You’re just lucky, I guess,” she told him, and reached for this man who was her husband.
Cain felt as if he were lost in a tunnel of pain. Drugged pain. The agony was there, but not the white-hot, searing agony he’d experienced soon after being wounded. This pain was chilling. As cold as a grave.
The drugs smothered the worst of it. He didn’t fight it—he hadn’t the strength. Instead he waited impatiently for the angel of death to arrive. The will to resist was gone, the will to live tenuous.
“Cain?”
Linette’s voice came to him on a cloud, sounding ethereal, celestial. An angel of life when he’d expected the Grim Reaper to come swooping down to claim his soul.
He struggled to open his eyes but discovered he hadn’t the strength. Linette, here? It wasn’t possible. Perhaps he was already dead and didn’t realize it. But if that were the case, he didn’t understand why he should continue to hurt this way. Was this hell, to be trapped within earshot of the woman he loved? Already he’d been cursed never to hold her or love her again. He was sentenced to hear her call to him from another world and helpless to respond. Cursed to love her until his heart felt as if it would burst wide open and be unable to give her the assurance of his caring.
Perhaps this was all some part of a drug-induced dream. He must be dreaming, and yet…and yet, he felt her hand pressed over his, heard her soft voice, trembling with anxiety.
He’d never mentioned Linette to any of the men of Deliverance Company. Not even Mallory. He’d wanted to protect her from who he was and what he did. She was honest and pure, and he didn’t want to taint her goodness.
“Oh, Cain,” Linette said breathily. She must be close, because he could feel her soft breath fan his face. “Listen carefully, my darling. I love you. I’m here.”
With every ounce of strength he possessed, Cain tried to respond, but the effort quickly drained what reservoir of energy he possessed.
“I’m praying,” Linette continued, her voice trembling with emotion, “that you’ll feel my love for you. Feel it, Cain. Let it be your shelter.”
His shelter.
It was as if he’d walked out of the freezing cold into a room with a fire burning in the fireplace.
“I’m sorry, miss, you’ll have to leave now.”
The authoritative female voice sounded from behind Linette. Cain tried to protest but once more found it impossible to so much as flutter his eyelids.
“So soon?” Linette protested.
“I’m sorry,” the other woman said, sounding sympathetic. “But you can only spend five minutes every hour with your friend. Those are the rules.”
To hell with the rules! Cain screamed in his mind. He needed Linette.
“I’ll be back,” Linette promised. Her lips brushed his brow, and her fingers squeezed his. “Just remember what I said,” she whispered in parting. “Let my love be your shelter.”
A crushing pain filled his chest when she walked away. The agony was familiar. This was what it had felt without love in his life. This emptiness. This loneliness.
Before he was aware of time passing, Linette was back.
“Hello, my darling,” she whispered. She spoke to him in soothing tones, and he felt it again—the warmth he’d experienced when she’d first arrived. It was as though a heated blanket had been wrapped about his shoulders. Around his heart.
“I met your friends,” she whispered. “They love you, too.”
If he’d had the strength, Cain would have laughed out loud. He’d never thought of Murphy as the loving type. He was well aware his men respected him. Leave it to a woman to confuse regard with love.
“I’ll be back soon,” Linette promised.
He heard her footsteps against the floor as she walked out of the room. This time the warmth didn’t go with her. It stayed, and for the first time since he’d been shot Cain realized he was going to live.
He knew this with a certainty he didn’t question.
Linette was with him.
Linette loved him. He had a reason to fight.
14
Cain’s men didn’t like her. In the beginning, Linette thought it might have been her imagination, but the resentment was far too real to ignore. At times it seemed to come at her in waves, as though she were responsible for what had happened to their leader, their friend.
The man called Murphy was the worst. He acted as if she were an intruder. He made it plain that he didn’t want her at the hospital. She could feel his indignation every time she returned from her hourly five minutes with Cain. Murphy seemed to believe he should be the one to linger at Cain’s bedside. Yet when Linette had offered to let him visit Cain instead of her, he’d gruffly insisted she be the one.
“How’s Cain doing?” Jack Keller asked when she stepped back into the waiting area. She’d been in Grenada a week now. In that time Cain had revealed only a few visible signs of improvement. Linette celebrated each one. The doctors weren’t making predictions on his chances of survival. They claimed Cain had hung on far longer than the experts had anticipated. If anyone would break the record, it would be he.
Those brief five-minute sessions with Cain drained Linette’s energy. It was as if he demanded every ounce of strength she possessed, as though her being with him were what gave him the energy to live.
She frequently returned to the waiting area exhausted and literally collapsed onto the chair. More often than not, Murphy, Keller, or one of the other men would be waiting for her, eager for word of Cain’s condition.
Although he hadn’t spoken, Cain knew she was there. He’d squeezed her hand the day before, the action so weak that Linette had nearly wept. First with joy and relief and then with despair that he’d stepped so close to death’s door—that she’d come so close to losing him.
“Cain’s better, I think,” she answered Keller’s question. Of the men of Deliverance Company whom she’d met, Linette liked Keller the best. He was a no-nonsense sort of person, a little rough around the edges, with a hard-as-tacks exterior, but he cared deeply about Cain.
Keller—she never had learned any of the men’s first names—was a pacer. In the week she’d been in Grenada, Linette had watched the gruff-looking man make deep grooves in the carpet with his constant pacing.
Murphy was the dark, silent type. Exactly why he didn’t want her in Grenada Linette couldn’t fathom. It was as if she were trespassing over territory he considered sacred.
“You think Cain’s better?” Murphy’s low voice mocked her. He looked her way, and his gaze narrowed with dislike he didn’t bother to disguise.
“Have I done something to offend you?” Linette asked. She hated confrontation, avoided it whenever possible, but she’d had about all she could take of this man’s attitude.
“Not me, you haven’t,” Murphy returned.
“Who, then?”
“Cain.”
“Cain?” Linette felt at a loss to understand this sullen man. “How have I hurt Cain?” If they were going to keep tabs, she could name a few infractions he’d committed against her, beginning with concealing the truth about himself.
“You messed up his head,?
?? Murphy said, glaring at her. “We all knew something wasn’t right with Cain, and hasn’t been for months. What we should have guessed was that it involved a woman.”
“You can’t blame me for what happened to Cain.”
“You messed up his thinking,” Murphy shot back. “Cain was willing to sacrifice his life, and now I know why. He couldn’t think straight anymore.”
Linette found she was shaking—not because of what Murphy told her; she’d guessed as much herself—but because she was tired and worried and afraid. Afraid what he said was true, that Cain had taken unnecessary chances because his mind had been on her instead of the mission.
“Lay off her,” Keller snarled at Murphy. “Can’t you see she’s had about all she can take already?”
“See what I mean?” Murphy flared. “We barely know her, and already she’s causing dissension between us. Women are nothing but trouble.”
“You didn’t have to tell me about Cain,” Linette said, fast losing her patience. “I’d never have known if Tim Mallory hadn’t contacted me.”
“Mallory’s a prime example of what a woman can do to ruin a decent fighting man.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s true,” Murphy insisted. “Mallory used to be one of us. He was as good a man as any I’ve known, then he had to go and fall in love. Look what’s happened to him since.” He rammed his fingers through his short hair and pinched his lips as if to bite back a curse.
“Within a week of his return to Deliverance Company, there wasn’t a one of us could bear the sight of him. He was rude, cantankerous, and miserable, and all because of a woman.”
Linette briefly remembered Tim Mallory mentioning his fiancée.
“From what I understand, Mallory’s got a ring looped through his nose and is being led around some pasture in Washington State. Mallory married. I never thought I’d see the day.”
“I heard he was raising llamas,” Keller inserted, shaking his head in wonder.
“Llamas?” Murphy cried. From the way he said it, one would have thought his cohort had desecrated a national monument. The mercenary slapped his hands against his thighs. “I rest my case.”