and the stigma his family hung around his neck like a heavy, damning albatross. A reputation he could only live down if he got away, now, right now, before this beautiful, innocent woman-child suffered for its stain. That made him a hero in her eyes, a coward in his own.
She didn’t argue the point. That always surprised him, her willingness to just let things go considering that arbitration and critical examination were part of her family tradition. The Calvins loved to sink their teeth into any situation…and bite down hard until they won that point, whether they were right in the first place or not. Blind justice and closed minds. A dangerous combination when it came to courting a rich man’s daughter. Courting in the shadows because the honorable front door had always been locked tight for security’s sake where he was concerned.
But then he’d gone and stolen their most valuable possession anyway, despite their precautions. Like a thief in the night. That’s how he felt at this fragile moment. And he hated it, along with the name that made him so unacceptable.
She sat up, letting the sweater drop, exposing her creamy, perfect breasts without a trace of guile or manipulative intent. Between them, on a slender sterling chain, where it should have warded him off like a virgin-corrupting vampire, was the religious medallion her father had given her upon her confirmation. She slipped it over her head and then reached for one of his hands, turning it palm upward to make a cup into which she poured that trickle of silver. She curled his fingers over the St. Christopher’s medal and pressed them tight with both her hands. Her touch was cool, her hands trembling.
“I want you to take this.”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“God won’t care. I don’t care. I just want you to have a piece of me with you wherever you go.”
Silly girl. Didn’t she know she had already carved out a permanent niche within his soul?
“Okay.” His tone sounded brusque despite the shaky state of his own emotions. He couldn’t afford to let her know how much the gift meant to him. How much she meant to him at this very moment when parting was only hours away.
She released him so he could loop the chain about his neck. The medallion fell against his chest, next to the agitation of his heartbeats, the metal still warm from her skin. Burning there with the heat of their desperate passion. He knew he’d never take it off, that sacred symbol of their love.
“You’ll write?” Her question quivered slightly with intensity.
“I’d like to but—”
“I’ve got a post office box in Roseville so no one will know. Please.”
He tried to ignore an angry jab of unfairness at that necessity. So no one would guess what the two of them had become to one another. Loves. Lovers.
“Whenever I can,” he promised a bit tersely.
“It won’t be like this forever,” was the promise she gave him in return.
He’d heard it before. An empty promise made from a pure and painfully innocent soul. One not yet scarred by the ugliness of the society denying them approval and legitimacy in their relationship. Things a girl like Barbara Calvin needed. Deserved.
“They’ll change their minds. I’ll start working on them the minute you leave and will have them worn down by the time you come home a hero.”
Didn’t she realize it would take more than a chestful of medals to outshine the blackness of his past? But because she looked so hopeful, so damned gorgeous in her conviction, he only nodded.
She leaned forward to kiss him. Passion tasted wild and fierce in that long, wet exchange. And when she sat back, her expression was set with a strength that almost convinced him.
“I will marry you, Taggert McGee. You keep that promise close to your heart, too, and you come back for me. I’ll be waiting.”
So he took that promise with him on the bus the next day, along with a PO box number. He pretended he didn’t see her standing at the edge of the curb trying to hide her tears.
He carried that promise through the rigors of basic training while he sent off letters and waited anxiously for a reply. A reply that never came.
And the next time he heard anything about her, just before he shipped out, was that she now carried his best friend’s last name.
Even after thirty years, the pain of that discovery was still close to unbearable. Even as he stood in the cemetery glaring down at the name carved into pale marble. A stone as hard as his heart had become.
“You son of a bitch. You were supposed to take care of her. You’re the one she should be depending on, not me.”
Pride wouldn’t allow him to rejoice in his chance to take Robert D’Angelo’s place. That place promised to him one sultry evening a lifetime ago, and now offered again only because it was a matter of need, not love.
He crumpled the note that had pulled him back into the painful hell that was his past, letting it drop on a true hero’s grave. Walking away, because he wasn’t now, as he hadn’t been then, worthy of the woman they’d all loved.
Chapter 1
Death hung suspended at arm’s length.
She stared with hypnotic horror down the barrel of the gun, seeing no light at the end of that long black tunnel. Only darkness and death.
Hers and her daughter’s.
Lifting her gaze from the empty hole that held her demise, she looked into the eyes of her killer. What had she expected to find there? Sympathy? Regret? There was nothing, a flat void of expression as deadly and cold as the bore of the gun.
Was this what her husband had seen, this empty, soulless stare, in the last seconds of his life?
Would this be the last intimacy exchanged between man and wife, this shared precursor to their own end at the same indifferent, yet well-known, hand?
Robert D’Angelo was dead already, his life taken in this same room some months before by this same man. By this man who’d been his friend, his betrayer.
Her heart beat fast and frantically, pounding in her chest, hammering inside her head, the sound amplifying, intensifying like a desperate, unvoiced scream.
Please! I don’t want to die!
Tessa sat beside her, calm, fierce, her father’s daughter. Instead of begging for mercy, she argued with, even taunted, the man who held their futures in cruel hands. So brave, so confident. So precious. In the twenty-eight years they’d shared, had she told her how precious she was?
An anguished plea burned in her throat, twisting, tearing for release.
Don’t take my daughter.
If she jumped forward, if she grabbed the gun, using her body for a shield, perhaps Tessa could get away. There was a chance one of them might survive. Tessa. It should be Tessa, who had so much to live for.
Her breathing caught as an awful realization slammed through her. These could be the last moments of her life.
And
