Wait for Me
Page 19
He opened his eyes, but he had to tip his head a bit to see her.
“Don’t cry anymore. I can’t stand it.”
“Okay. I won’t cry anymore.” She hastily wiped her cheeks dry.
“And will you do me a favor?”
“Anything, Oliver.”
“Don’t ever change who you are, okay? Not for me. Not for anyone.”
“No. I won’t.”
“And Holly? One more thing?”
“What?”
“Will you marry me, before you burn all my money?”
It would be many years yet before Oliver told his wife about the strange dreams he had after he was shot that afternoon. Weird yet pleasing dreams that would return now and again in the night and cause him to wake and ponder life and the universe beyond.
Nimbus sort of dreams, clouded and light, with no faces or entities, but with voices that were as real and familiar to him as hers was as she promised tearfully to love him, honor him, and spend all his money.
Secret sort of dreams, the kind you’re afraid to talk about before breakfast, because they might come true if you do. And it wasn’t that the dreams were so terrible, it was just that they sometimes felt more real to him than certain parts of his life.
Deep-seated dreams. They were rooted firmly in both his conscious and subconscious mind and triggered by external stimuli—usually Holly. The simplest things would call them to mind... Holly with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face, saying, “There you are. I couldn’t find you anywhere.” Or Holly halfway up the stairs to their bedroom, her eyes bright with desire and her lips whispering, “Hurry.” Or Holly coming home two hours late with a child in each hand, her hair standing on end, as she complained, “I got lost. I took the wrong exit. I was completely lost.”
And always, always, it would be on the tip of his tongue to tell her, “Wait for me.”
A Biography of Mary Kay McComas
Mary Kay McComas is an acclaimed romance novelist and the author of twenty-one short contemporary romances, five novellas, and three novels. McComas has received several honors and awards for her work, including the Washington Romance Writers’ Outstanding Achievement Award and two Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times (one for Best New Author and another for Innovative Series Romance).
Born in Spokane, Washington, the third child of six siblings, McComas graduated with a bachelor of science degree in nursing. She worked for ten years as an intensive care nurse. After marrying her husband and having their first child, the family moved to the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia, and McComas soon retired from nursing to raise her family, which included three more children.
Throughout her childhood and into college, McComas battled undiagnosed dyslexia. As a result, she was an infrequent reader in her youth and early adulthood. It wasn’t until after the birth of her youngest son that McComas began reading for pleasure—books hand-picked by her older sister for their humor. Gradually, she branched out with her own choices, reading widely, until one book changed her life. “Eventually I bought IT. You know … that one novel that even a dyslexic amateur can tell is poorly written, with no plot and horrible characters,” she explains. “I told my voracious-reader husband, ‘I can do better than this!’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’”
McComas’s first book landed her an agent, who helped sell four of McComas’s stories and secured the author a four-book contract within a year. McComas published her first book, Devine Design, in 1988, and followed it with seven more paperback novels.
A favorite of both fans and reviewers, McComas has been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award eight times and has been a Romance Writers of America RITA Award finalist twice, once for Best Short Contemporary Fiction and once for Best Novella. Over the course of her “third career,” as McComas refers to it, she has expanded her scope beyond contemporary romances. She frequently contributes to Nora Robert’s J. D. Robb anthologies and her paranormal novellas have garnered continuous praise.
McComas continues to live in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband, three dogs, and a cat. Her four grown children live nearby. Read more about Mary Kay at marykaymccomas.com.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1994 by Mary Kay McComas
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-8621-0
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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