by Diana Palmer
“Straight faces, now,” Cy murmured.
“You bet!” she agreed.
They walked down the aisle, to where Blake was waiting with his heart in his eyes when he saw Violet in that vision of white lace and satin, the veil delicately covering her pretty face. He thought his heart might burst.
The ceremony was brief, poignant, and unforgettable. Blake lifted the veil to kiss his bride, and Violet’s blue eyes brimmed over with tears as she returned the kiss with pure joy.
They walked out of the church into a soft rain of congratulations, confetti and rice.
“The rice is for fertility,” Libby Collins whispered loudly.
“It worked!” Blake exclaimed in a stage whisper, with wicked eyes.
Violet whacked him with her bouquet and winked at Libby.
They climbed into the waiting limousine and sped away to Blake’s house, to change clothes before the reception.
* * *
“What a good thing the reception isn’t for another hour,” Blake groaned as he kissed Violet hungrily in the big king-size bed.
“And you think we’ll still make it in time? Optimist!” Violet panted, lifting up to the hard, measured thrust of his body.
He laughed, but the sensations caught him unaware and he arched, groaning with pleasure so deep it felt like pain.
Violet went with him, flying up into the sky like a rocket, exploding in sudden, fierce delight.
He increased the rhythm, and the pressure, and seconds later, he was right there with her, burning up in a fiery satisfaction that was vaguely shocking in its length. It seemed to go on forever.
When he was finally able to breathe again, he was wet with sweat and shaking all over. So was Violet.
“Wow,” she whispered reverently as she met his eyes.
He nodded, bending to kiss her delicately. “See what a week of abstinence does to a normal man?” he murmured against her swollen lips.
“Want me to lock the bedroom door for a week to make it better…?” She jumped and cried out as he pinched her bottom.
He wrinkled his nose at her. “You lock it, I’ll break it down,” he challenged. “I hate abstinence!”
She wreathed her arms around his neck and smiled contentedly, although her heartbeat was still shaking her. She was wet with sweat, too, and working just to breathe.
“It’s better every time,” she said, dazed.
“I improve with practice,” he informed her.
She grinned and slid her legs around his. “Do you, really? Let’s see…!”
* * *
They knew the party was already underway before they got out of the shower. They dressed quickly in the clothing they’d laid out for the reception, a lacy pink dress for Violet and slacks with a white shirt, tie, and sports coat for Blake.
They were barely dressed, still smiling at each other in a daze of pleasure, when there was a loud rap on the front door.
They stared at each other. “Are we expecting anybody?” Blake asked curiously.
“I don’t think so.”
They went together to the front door and opened it.
Outside was most of the Jacobsville Police Department, with Chief Cash Grier, in uniform, leading the rest. He had a paper in his hand and he was grinning mischievously.
“Lady and gentleman,” he began, “your friends in the Jacobsville Police Department would like to congratulate you on your recent nuptials and remind you that if you are ever in need of assistance, we are only as far away as your telephone. We have…”
“I’ll call the governor!” Blake began, interrupting the speech.
Grier glared at him. “I have six pages to go.”
“I have ten pages,” Assistant Chief Judd Dunn announced, displaying them.
“I have a loaded shotgun,” Blake told him.
Judd and Cash looked at each other speculatively. “How many years could he get if he pointed it at us?” Judd wondered aloud.
“That wouldn’t be nice, on his wedding day,” Cash agreed, but he gave Blake a rakish grin.
Blake’s eyes narrowed. “Trespassing on private property,” he began, “creating a public nuisance, terroristic threats and acts…”
“I am not a terrorist!” Cash informed him.
“But you are a public nuisance,” Judd told Cash.
“Me?” Cash exclaimed.
Officer Dana Hall cleared her throat and elbowed both superior officers out of her way. She was holding a cake.
“This is the wedding cake from the reception,” she told them, giving it to Violet. “I’m really sorry, but it was all we were able to save.”
Violet was staring at her blankly.
Officer Hall cleared her throat. “Somebody spiked the punch. Harden and Evan Tremayne drank it before they realized. One of the local cattlemen also drank some and made a very loud, unpleasant remark about lunatics who raised organic cattle just as Cy Parks walked in with J. D. Langley.”
Cash cleared his throat. “Judd and I had to, sort of, shut down your wedding reception and lock up a few of your guests. But we saved your cake. There was some punch, too, but Officer Palmer there,” he noted a tall, handsome blond officer with odd-colored highlights in his hair, “is wearing it.”
Blake burst out laughing. Only in Jacobsville, he was thinking.
“Anyway, you’re leaving right away on your honeymoon, right?” Judd asked them. “So you can get all the sandwiches and punch you want where you’re going.”
“Your jail is full, I guess?” Violet teased.
“Uh, yes it is, and he—” Cash indicated Blake “—represents Cy Parks and the Tremaynes. They want him to come down and get them out.”
“That explains the cake,” Blake told Violet.
She grinned at him. “We can detour through town on the way to the airport, can’t we? After all, Mr. Parks did give me away.”
“Good point.” He sighed. “Okay, tell them I’m on the way. And, thanks for the cake.”
“And the punch,” Violet said with a glance at Palmer, who grinned back.
The police force got into its cars and left. Violet put the cake in the freezer. The house was quiet without Mee and Yow, who were being boarded for the honeymoon. Mrs. Hardy was staying at her house with a nurse.
“Would you like your wedding present now?” Blake asked as they were turning off the lights.
She turned and looked at him. “What is it?” she asked, surprised.
He pulled her close and kissed her. “Janet Collins cut a deal with the San Antonio D.A. She pled guilty for a reduced sentence, so there won’t be a trial. You and your mother won’t have the stress of a court trial.”
“Oh, Blake!” She kissed him hungrily. “You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”
He nodded, smiling. “I’ve been working on it for two weeks. It came through yesterday. I saved the news for today.”
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it fervently. She’d dreaded the idea of dredging the painful episode in public.
“I have to take care of my best girl,” he whispered. “And the mother of my child.” His big hand rested softly on her slightly swollen belly. “You were the most beautiful bride who ever walked down an aisle.”
“And you were the handsomest groom.” She kissed him back. “Well, shall we go and rescue some prominent local citizens on our way out of town?”
“Works for me,” he chuckled.
They walked to the car hand in hand.
“Today is the first day of the rest of our lives,” Blake mused.
“The rest of those days will be wonderful,” she said softly.
They were.
* * * * *
Be sure to check out
Diana Palmer’s classic romance,
ALL THAT GLITTERS.
Ivory Keene has come to New York City to make her fortune in a major design house—but she’s confounded by her arrogant boss, wealthy Curry Kells. As they butt heads, sparks fly, but will secrets an
d heartache prevent true love from blossoming?
Keep reading to get a glimpse of
ALL THAT GLITTERS.
The bright Texas sun was hot on Ivory Keene’s short, wavy blond hair. She’d only just had it cut. Its natural wave gave it golden highlights, adding to the soft radiance of her oval face with its creamy complexion and faintly tormented warm gray eyes.
Her youth made the woman standing on the porch, watching her, feel her age even more. It added to Marlene’s resentment toward her only child. She took an impatient draw from her cigarette with her too-red lips, wrinkled a little around the edges from years of smoking. She used concealers, but they were cheap and didn’t work. If Ivory had taken the modeling job Marlene had tried to push her into, she would have had money for expensive cosmetics. She’d coaxed and demanded and cried, but for once, she hadn’t been able to move the silly girl. Instead Ivory had managed to get a scholarship to a fashion design school in Houston and now she was determined to go there.
“You’ve been out of high school for two years. You’ll be older than most of the other students,” Marlene argued from the porch, still hoping to keep Ivory from leaving. “Besides, you don’t even know how to set a proper table or get along in polite society,” she added meanly.
“I’ll learn those things,” Ivory replied in her quiet drawl. “I’m not stupid.”
I’ll have to learn everything you never taught me, Ivory thought as she stood in front of the house, watching for the neighbor who was giving her a lift to the bus station. Her mother had never been sober long enough to teach her much except how to fetch glasses and bottles and wait on her boyfriends. She felt a chill, even in the hot sun. Come on, she called silently to her neighbor, please come on, before she finds some way to stop me!
“You don’t even own a decent dress,” her mother scoffed. She herself was wearing a nice dress, a present from her last boyfriend. Ivory’s was a homemade cotton one, an original design and nicely made, if cheap. The girl could sew, all right, but one needed more than a little talent to become a famous designer. It amused Marlene that Ivory thought she had the brains or the personality for such a career. Now, Marlene knew she could have done it herself when she was younger. Except that she’d never learned to sew, and she didn’t want to spend every waking hour working.
Ivory’s slender hands clenched the old suitcase. “I’ll get a job. I know how to work,” she added pointedly. Her mother had always made sure that Ivory had had jobs since she had been old enough to be employed.
The sarcasm didn’t faze Marlene, though. It was early morning, but she had already had her first drink of the day. She was moderately pleasant, for the moment. “Don’t forget to send me some of your salary,” she reminded Ivory. “You wouldn’t want me to tell all the neighbors how you walked out and left me to starve, would you?”
Ivory wanted to ask her mother if she could possibly do any more damage to her reputation in the community than Marlene had already done, but there was no point in starting an argument now. She was so close to freedom that she could almost taste it!
“You’ll be back,” Marlene added smugly and took another puff on the cigarette. “Without me, you’ll fall flat on your face.”
Ivory gritted her teeth. She would not reply. She was twenty. She’d managed to finish high school in spite of having to work and in spite of her alcoholic mother. She’d tried to understand why Marlene was the way she was; she’d tried to encourage her mother to get help with her drinking problem. All her efforts had failed. There had been one or two incidents that would be hard to forgive, much less forget. In the end, she’d taken the advice of the family doctor. You can’t help someone who doesn’t think she has a problem, he told her. Get out, he said, before she destroys you, too. Ivory hadn’t wanted to desert the only relative she had in the world. On the other hand, her mother was more than she could handle. She had to leave while she still could. If she could manage to get through design school, her talent might help her rise above the poverty she’d endured all her life.
She looked down the road and thought back to her school days, to the children who had laughed at the way she lived, made fun of her clothes and her ramshackle house and her poor, sharecropper father’s illiterate drawl. They had all heard that her mother had been forced to marry Ivory’s father because she’d gotten pregnant when she was just fourteen, and that knowledge had damaged her own reputation in the community. Marlene had boyfriends, too. A little while after Ivory’s father died, her mother had taken up with one of her lovers, the town’s richest citizen, and painted her child as an immoral, ungrateful thief. Marlene had gained some respect because of her lover’s financial power; but even so, little Ivory was never invited to other children’s parties. She was the outsider. Always, it seemed, people here had laughed about her, gossiped about her. But she was young and strong. She had one chance to escape all of it and make a fresh start somewhere she wasn’t known. She was going to take it.
“You’ll be back,” Marlene said again, with cruel satisfaction, as a car appeared on the horizon.
Ivory’s heart leaped. Her hands were sweaty on the handle of the suitcase. She looked behind her at the dilapidated old house with its sagging porch and peeling paint, her mother in a fancy dress and high heels with too much makeup on her thin face and black color on her thin hair. Marlene had been pretty once, but now she looked like a caricature of her old self, and her blue eyes were glazed most of the time. Since her lover’s death earlier in the year, she’d started to drink more heavily. The money he’d left her was running out, too. Soon, it would be gone and she’d want someone to support her, namely, her daughter.
Ivory was going to escape, though. She was going to get away from the smothering dependence of her mother and the contemptuous attitude of her community at last! She was going to make a name for herself. Then, one day, she’d come back here dressed in furs and glittering with diamonds, and then the people who’d made fun of her would see that she wasn’t worthless!
The late-model Ford stopped at the front gate, raising a cloud of dust on the farm road. Their neighbor, a middle-aged man in a suit, leaned across and pushed the door open.
“Hop in, girl, I’m late for my flight already,” he said kindly.
“Hello, Bartley,” Marlene said sweetly, leaning in the window after Ivory had closed the door. “My, don’t you look handsome today!”
Bartley smiled at her. “Hello, honey. You look pretty good yourself.”
“Come over for a drink when you have a minute,” she invited. “I’m going to be all alone now that my daughter’s deserting me.”
“Mother,” Ivory protested miserably.
“She thinks she wants to be a fashion designer. It doesn’t bother her in the least to leave me out here all alone with nobody to look after me if I get sick,” Marlene said on a sigh.
“You have the Blakes and the Harrises,” Ivory reminded her, “just up the road. And you’re perfectly healthy.”
“She likes to think so,” Marlene told Bartley. “Children can be so ungrateful. Now you be sure to write, Ivory, and do try to stay out of trouble, because other people won’t be as understanding as I am about…well, about money disappearing.”
Ivory went red in the face. She’d never been in trouble, but her mother had most of the local people convinced that her daughter stole from her and attacked her. Ivory had never been able to contradict her successfully, because Marlene had a way of laughing and agreeing with her while her eyes made a lie of everything she said. At least she’d get a chance to start over in Houston.
“I don’t steal, Mother,” Ivory declared tensely.
Marlene smiled sweetly at Bartley and rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t, darling!”
“We’d better go,” Bartley said, uncomfortably restraining himself from checking to make sure his wallet was still in his hip pocket. “See you soon, Marlene.”
“You do that, Bartley, honey,” she drawled. She patted Ivory’s arm. “
Be good, dear.”
Ivory didn’t say a word. Her mouth was tightly closed as the car pulled away. Her last sight of her mother was bittersweet, as she thought of all the pain and humiliation she’d suffered and how different everything could have been if her mother had wanted a child in the first place.
Houston might not be perfect, but it would give Ivory a chance at a career and a brighter future. Her mother wouldn’t be there to criticize and demean her. She would assume a life of class and style that would make her forget that she’d ever lived in Harmony, Texas. Once she made her way to the top, she thought, she’d never have to look back again.
CHAPTER ONE
The November air was brisk and cold. The stark streetlights of the Queens neighborhood wore halos of frosty mist. The young woman, warm in her faded tweed overcoat and a white beret, sat huddled beside a small boy on the narrow steps of an apartment house that had been converted into a shelter for the homeless. She looked past the dingy faces of the buildings and the oil-stained streets. Her soft gray eyes were on the stars she couldn’t see. One day, she promised herself, she was going to reach right up through the hopelessness and grab one for herself. In fact, she was already on the way there. She’d won a national contest during her last month of design school in Houston, and first prize was a job with Kells-Meredith, Incorporated, a big clothing firm in New York City.
“What you thinking about, Ivory?”
She glanced down at the small, dark figure sitting at her side. His curly brown hair was barely visible under a moth-eaten gray stocking cap. His jacket was shabbier than her tweed coat and his shoes were stuffed with cardboard to cover the holes in the soles. A tooth was missing where his father had hit him in a drunken rage a year or so before the family had lost their apartment. It was a permanent tooth, and it wouldn’t grow back. But there was no money for cosmetic dentistry. There wasn’t even enough money to fill a cavity.
“I’m thinking about a nice, warm room, Tim,” she said. She slid an affectionate arm around him and hugged him close for warmth. “Plenty of good food to eat. A car to drive. A new coat…a jacket for you,” she teased, and hugged him closer.
