the two of them were about to make love for the first time in a real bed.
“I’ll park around the side, behind that Dumpster,” he’d ordered in an attempt to quell her fears. “If your parents are right behind us, they won’t spot it there.”
Telling herself that if her mother and father were nipping at their heels, they were likely to slow down, scan the handful of cars in the parking lot and drive on without seeing Danny’s rundown Ford in the shadows, Cate had acquiesced. They’d been at the crux of their lovemaking, crying out and clutching each other in the throes of completion, when they’d been electrified by the sound of someone attempting to turn a key in the lock of their motel-room door.
A moment later the securely bolted door had come crashing in. Like modern-day bounty hunters, her parents and an armed sheriff’s deputy had burst into the room, followed by the cringing motel clerk. Only then, with her mother weeping and her father yelling profanities at the top of his lungs as she and Danny had scrambled to cover themselves, had she realized that they’d forgotten to use protection. It had been the one time in their history together that they’d been so careless.
Crisp and authoritative, the deputy had ordered them to get dressed. Wrapping the bedspread around herself for modesty’s sake, Cate had gathered up her clothes and put them on in the motel room’s cramped bathroom while her mother had wept and browbeaten her. She’d emerged to find Danny wearing handcuffs.
“No…please! Take those things off him!” she’d begged the deputy, tears running down her cheeks. “He didn’t do anything wrong! We’re married! You can’t arrest him!”
The scowl on Danny’s face had ordered her not to beg on his behalf.
Taking his cue from her parents, the deputy had declined to relent. “Sorry, miss,” he’d answered. “But you’re underage. I’m afraid you, your parents and your boyfriend will have to accompany me back to headquarters.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my husband,” she’d whispered, her steady flow of tears undermining her stubbornness.
Huddled miserably in the rear of her parents’ Oldsmobile, while Danny rode with the deputy in the caged back seat of his squad car, Cate had begun to realize the seriousness of their situation. Given her age, she’d guessed, Danny could be charged with statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, maybe even kidnapping. He could be subject to a jail sentence. Maybe even a prison term. With either on his record, the successful future he hoped to attain would be compromised. Somehow, she had to keep that from happening.
She hadn’t been worried on her own account, though she’d realized at once that her parents would separate them. For as long as they held sway over her, Jack and Susan McDonough would see to it that Danny Finn didn’t come within a thousand feet of the daughter who had so disappointed them.
On their arrival at the Clermont County Jail, Cate and her parents had been ushered into one interview room, Danny into another. The break between them had been complete. Her stomach in knots, Cate had wanted to charge down the hall and defend his honor to the stern, uniformed deputy, make him see that the young man he’d taken into custody wasn’t a criminal. Maybe if she took the blame…
Her father’s looming, wrathful presence had barred the way. As she’d huddled without speaking in a battered wooden chair, he and her mother had taken turns berating her.
“How could you have done this to us?” Susan McDonough had wailed, her words harsh with self-pity and condemnation. “Everyone’s sure to find out. We’ll be the town laughing stock. Your reputation…not to mention ours…will never recover from this!”
“Do you think she cares?” Jack McDonough’s mouth had contorted with fury and disgust. “All the little bi—” In response to the expression on his wife’s face, he’d checked himself before the slur could completely pass his lips. “All she cares about is her trashy, so-called husband,” he’d added instead. “Not the parents who raised her.” He’d turned to Cate. “To think a daughter of mine would give her virginity to someone like Danny Finn, a young man of questionable family with no prospects! Well, I promise you, girl…your mother and I are going to press charges to the fullest. Danny Finn’s going to jail for his part in this. And he’ll be there awhile.”
Hearing her father describe what would happen in so many words had made it seem even more threatening. The stories she’d heard about what befell young, good-looking men in jail or prison settings had made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t allow her parents to place Danny in that kind of jeopardy, no matter how much they hated him. I’ve got to make them relent, she’d realized. Promise whatever it takes to make them drop the charges. Unbending as he seems, that deputy was a teenager once. I can’t believe he’ll charge Danny with a crime if my parents don’t insist on it.
Brian came home, humming a song that was popular among teenagers at the moment and noisily burping pizza. His occasional, deliberate rudeness was part of the differentiation process, Cate guessed. A moment later her son turned on his stereo and her ears protested.
“Brian?” she called out, raising her voice so that it could be heard over what he euphemistically referred to as his “music.”
A moment later he materialized in her partly open doorway. “Yeah, Mom?” he asked with studied nonchalance, clearly aware that the volume at which he’d been playing his stereo would have awakened the dead, let alone a sleeping parent.
Though he wasn’t as forthcoming as the youngster he’d been just a year or two earlier, Brian still liked checking in with her. He just didn’t want it to be his idea.
“Did you have fun?” she asked.
He nodded. Grinned. “We met a couple of girls. One of them gave me her phone number. The pizza was pretty good. Yours is better, though.”
She smiled, too, despite her welter of conflicting emotions. “Thanks for the compliment,” she answered. “Sleep well. Don’t forget to use those earphones we talked about.”
On the night she’d eloped with Danny, Cate had been six months shy of her eighteenth birthday. Yet the short amount of time that had remained until they could marry legally had seemed like an eternity to her. She hadn’t wanted to be parted from the man she loved for a single moment. Yet, unable to consult him, she’d decided that their honeymoon would have to wait.
She’d thrust out her chin, unconsciously mimicking her father’s pugnacious attitude. “If you press charges against Danny, and he goes to jail, I’ll run away again, just as soon as I get the chance,” she’d threatened. “I don’t need Danny to leave. I can do it on my own. You and Mom can’t keep an eye on me every second.”
“You little ingrate!” The veins standing out against his temples, Jack McDonough had raised a hand as if to knock her off her feet.
“No, Jack!” Susan McDonough had exclaimed, clutching at his sleeve. “The police will arrest you, too, if you start hitting her! Everyone in Beckwith will find out if you’re charged with battery. We won’t be able to hold our heads up.”
She doesn’t care about me, Cate had thought. Just Dad, and what people will think of them. My feelings don’t count. “On the other hand,” she’d added, as if her father hadn’t spoken, “if you tell the deputy you don’t want Danny arrested, I’ll do whatever you want. Give him up. Stay home and finish high school. Go to college. Or work full-time in the hardware store. You won’t even have to pay me…”
Glancing
