“Oh, thank God.”
She inhaled deeply and then let out her breath, slowly, steadying herself to ask the questions she needed to know the answers to.
“Who are these men? If they’re professional mercenaries, frankly, they aren’t very good.”
His eyes flashed curiosity at her assessment but he simply nodded. “That’s correct. They’re not banditos. They’re farmers, from a small community just to the west. As you might expect, there’s a brisk business in the kidnapping and ransoming of American tourists throughout Central America. But, this region, this small area between Costa Rica and Nicaragua is quite safe, comparatively. In part that’s because the people are less desperately poor and the farming is more lucrative—thanks in part to the sustainable farming methods taught by the farmers your friend Dr. King works with. Also, this resort has made an effort to partner with the surrounding communities to train and hire local workers as staff. It’s been a model of community building for the region.” A note of anger crept into his voice. “A lot of people have worked very hard to create this model. And now these .... fools ... may ruin it all.”
“I don’t understand. Who are they? Why did they do this?”
He shook his head in irritation and his long wavy hair flew around his face. “There’s been an influx of survivalists in recent months. A group of American expatriates settled just to the north. They’ve formed a compound of sorts. At first, they kept their distance, but they eventually sought the help of locals in establishing and growing crops. They barter or pay in silver and preach self-reliance. I’m told by missionary friends that similar enclaves have taken hold throughout all of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, as well as Mexico.”
Preppers.
Of course. She knew from her last run in with the Pennsylvania Preppers Network that similar groups existed across the globe. They connected on Internet message boards and forums, just like every other special interest group from standard poodle owners to Jane Austen fans.
Once Bricker learned where she and Connelly were holding the wedding, it would have been easy for one of his militia members to make contact with a Nicaraguan prepper. She filed away for later the question of how he’d learned the wedding location.
“I see.”
“Apparently, these survivalists recruited a group of stupid young men to disrupt your wedding.”
“Why didn’t the expatriates do it themselves? They probably have some paramilitary training. These guys don’t seem to have any. It was a fool’s errand.”
“Clearly. But, these survivalists are toeing a fine line with the authorities as it is. They likely wanted to have some deniability if things went wrong. And they surely knew that avarice exists even in good men. Carlos has told me they were each paid two silver ingots with an equal amount promised if they delivered you and Leo to the compound.” His voice shook with disgust.
Sasha nodded distractedly. If Bricker wanted them to be taken to the compound alive that meant he had further plans for them. Adrenaline coursed through her body. Maybe he was headed to the compound himself.
“Can one of the men give you directions to this compound?” she asked, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice.
The former Jesuit placed a cautioning hand on her arm. “Sasha, I don’t think you understand, this compound isn’t a commune. It’s a gated stronghold, patrolled by men with rifles. The locals believe there are dynamite-loaded traps surrounding it. No one goes there without an invitation. You need to leave this to the Nicaraguan authorities, such as they are.”
“Can you get me directions?” she repeated.
His grip on her arm tightened. “I can. I will not.”
They stared at one another for a long moment before he relaxed the pressure on her arm. “You seem keen to respond to this invasion. I can understand that instinct. But you shouldn’t allow yourself to be distracted from your soul’s purpose. You’re here to join yourself to Leo for all eternity.”
The adrenaline drained from her veins as quickly as it had flooded them. He was right.
“No, of course.”
“The wedding is going forward tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
That would turn out to be untrue.
CHAPTER NINE
Sasha leaned against the bamboo lattice and inhaled the heady scent of the tropical flowers that snaked their way up the woodwork. The reflection of the low-slung moon shimmered in the silver-tipped waves, as she watched Jordan and Riley make their way up the aisle to the strains of Chris’s piano playing. Each of her sisters-in-law had traded her bouquet for her sleeping infant. And Sasha’s two youngest nephews nuzzled their mothers’ bare necks as they reached the front of the space.
Maisy, her hair freed from its updo in the chaos, followed behind, her blonde curls bouncing against her shoulders. Finally, Naya strode up the aisle, clutching her bouquet to chest as if it were a teddy bear.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Sasha’s father asked, offering her his arm with a look of concern.
She linked her elbow through his.
“Are you kidding me? I can’t wait to do this. With any luck, Father Alexander will keep the ceremony short enough that we’re married before midnight.”
He smiled. “Only you and Leo would react to a failed hostage-taking by moving up the wedding. I guess that’s why you belong together.”
She smiled back. They did belong together.
Charlotte and the resort manager had approached her before la policía had even finished processing the scene to offer to reschedule the wedding from the next day to some future later date. She and Connelly had been adamant that they were not interested in pushing off the date.
“If anything,” Connelly had half-joked, “after all this, we’d want to move it up.”
Charlotte had taken the offhand remark to heart, and forty minutes later, here they were. Their wedding moved from sunset on New Year’s Eve to eleven p.m. on the night before New Year’s Eve. She would be Mrs. Leo Connelly before sunrise—technically, Sasha McCandless-Connelly, but no reason to quibble, she thought, as a thrill of anticipation shot through her.
Her father cocked his head and examined the ornate hairpin that she’d hastily used to secure her hair into an approximation of a chignon.
“Is that Mom’s kanzashi?”
“Yes.”
Her mother had insisted she wear it, and she was more than happy to comply.
The bedraggled waitstaff had gamely lit the tiki torches that were staked along the path leading to the bower and plated the hundreds of cookies that the guests had baked back in Pittsburgh and then transported to the resort.
Destination wedding or no, there had to be a cookie table. Sasha glanced back at the rows of dark wooden tables laden with tray after tray of tea cakes, biscotti, chocolate brownies, heart-shaped sugar cookies, fruit-filled cookies, coconut and lime cookies, and, front and center, Valentina’s own homemade ladylocks. It looked like a bakery had exploded.
After pulling together the display, the waiters had joined the rest of the wedding guests. Given what everyone present had just lived through, she and Connelly had invited the entire staff of the resort to attend the impromptu wedding. Extra chairs had been set up in hasty rows. Her older nieces and nephews, some wearing pajamas and clutching stuffed animals or blankets, looked around wide-eyed.
It wasn’t the wedding she’d envisioned, yet somehow it was better. Less storybook. More real.
Of course, Bricker was still out there, somewhere, intent on revenge. But even that couldn’t take away from what was about to happen. She was going to marry Leo Connelly. And nothing—and no one—could stop her.
The music paused, and Sasha knew Chris was about to start playing “Ode to Joy.”
“Game time,” she whispered to her father.
He squeezed her arm, and she pretended not to see the tears glistening in his green eyes, so like her own.
The soft chords floated on the a
ir, and she stepped forward. Then she hesitated in confusion. The music was wrong.
She glanced at Chris but his head was bent over the keys.
“Come on,” her dad whispered.
She started to walk again, trying to recognize the song. The notes were light, lively, and then they swelled like a wave. The music softened, and the tempo slowed.
Whatever the song was, it was beautiful. Sasha felt her mouth bow into a smile.
The song buoyed her along the path. She snuck a look over her shoulder at Aroostine and Hank. At Daniel and Larry, their bravery and selflessness shining as brightly as the stars. Her heart was full, threatening to explode.
This is really it.
She glided forward quickly, unhampered by the mermaid skirt. The slits she’d hastily slashed in the delicate fabric parted with each step as she crossed the pebble path to the bower and the man she loved.
Marisole hadn’t had time to repair the gown—although she had doused Sasha liberally with soda water in an effort to remove the bloodstains. Even she drew the line at getting married while drenched in someone else’s blood.
She shook the banditos out of her mind and pinned her eyes on her groom, who stood waiting for her at the end of the path under a bower lit with twinkling fairy lights.
And then, somehow, suddenly, there she was, standing right in front of Connelly.
Her father shook Connelly’s hand firmly, bracing his future son-in-law’s upper arm with his left hand, almost in a half-hug.
“Don’t bother trying to take care of her. Trust me, that’s impossible,” he advised. “Just love her as best you can.”
Connelly nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Sasha kissed her father’s cheek and turned to Connelly with a slightly embarrassed eye roll.
“Hi,” she managed around the lump that had suddenly materialized in her throat.
“Hi, yourself, beautiful.”
Connelly stared at her with a bemused smile.
He looked happy. And tired. And banged up. A bruise traced his cheek, and his split lip had swollen to twice its normal size. But there was a deep well of love shining in his gray eyes. He was amazing, perfect, hers.
The music stopped, and Father Alexander looked at the two of them, his eyes kind and serious.
“Hang on a second, okay, Father?” Sasha asked.
Before the officiant could respond, Sasha turned to look at Chris sitting on the piano bench.
“That was beautiful,” she said in an emotion-soaked voice. “Did you write that?”
“I did. My gift to the two of you.” He smiled.
“What do you call it?”
Chris looked over her shoulder to include Connelly in his answer. “Boundless Love.”
“Okay. We can start now,” she said to Father Alexander.
“I thought you might have changed your mind,” Connelly whispered, placing her hand on his chest so she could feel his heart thumping wildly under his linen shirt.
“Never.”
The hammering of his heart slowed under her palm as Father Alexander, a smudge of dirt bisecting his brow, raised his hands, allowed a smile to blossom across his face, and greeted their wedding guests.
Sasha ignored every part of her aching body, the smell of blood drying on her now-trashed gown, her raging headache, and her bone-deep exhaustion. She lost herself in Connelly’s cashmere gray eyes.
“This has certainly been an eventful evening,” Father Alexander began.
The assembled group shared a soft, knowing laugh.
“But how appropriate that Sasha and Leo have decided to end the night on a note of hope, affirmation, and love.” He smiled broadly. “In fact, I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, which begins ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.’ I’m not certain the Bard had in mind the sort of impediments that this couple has faced tonight, but these events are a good metaphor for the high highs and low lows that every married couple encounters as they walk through life together. Shakespeare goes on, ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.’ I think we can agree that the man and woman standing before us look on tempests and are never shaken. May the strength they’ve found in dealing with the extraordinary follow them through to much more mundane struggles during the course of their marriage. And may the strength that their friends and families displayed this evening hold them up during life’s ordinary challenges.”
Mundane struggles and ordinary challenges sounded positively devine to Sasha.
She blinked away tears.
First Bodhi and then Hank stood and read by candlelight passages they’d chosen especially for Sasha and Connelly.
She’d have to ask them to give her copies of the readings, because the words, so carefully selected, had rolled over her in waves of wisdom and meaning that somehow couldn’t penetrate her brain, which was screaming We’re getting married! over and over, like the world’s most enthusiastic bridesmaid.
Apparently, the readings were over, and she was supposed to be doing something because Father Alexander was smiling at her indulgently.
“Before Sasha and Leo exchange the vows they wrote, I’d like to ask them to share something else with you and one another. I had asked each of them separately to find a passage from literature, a scene from a movie or television show, or a musical lyric that best encapsulates the feelings they each have for one another as they start this adventure together.” He held up an envelope. “They gave me their choices, but I didn’t share them. So, tonight, I’d like them to share them with each other. Sasha?”
Sasha laughed shakily, and her cheeks burned hot.
She turned to her groom and spoke in a low voice, just loud enough for him to hear. “Well, my choice is more Shakespeare. It’s a passage from Romeo and Juliet, it goes like this, ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea ...”
She trailed off and stared in disbelief as Connelly’s shoulders shook with barely suppressed laughter.
Seriously? He was laughing at her?
She tamped down her rising irritation and continued.
But before she could speak, Connelly huskily chimed in, “My love as deep.”
She stared at him in confusion for a second.
Then they finished the passage in unison, his voice weaving around hers, the two entwined like ribbons. “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”
As the verse ended, a goopy, idiotic grin spread across Sasha’s face.
Connelly winked at her, and then his mouth quirked into the sexy, lopsided grin that made her stomach do flips.
Father Alexander laughed. “In all the years I’ve done this, no couple has ever selected the same passage before tonight. Make of that what you will.”
Connelly squeezed her hand softly.
They recited their vows and exchanged their rings in a blur of joy and love, and suddenly Father Alexander was pronouncing them husband and wife and urging them to kiss.
Husband and wife.
Sasha blinked up at Connelly, who seemed as surprised as she did that the wedding was over.
They were married.
She stretched on her toes and threw her arms around his neck. He leaned down and cupped her face in his hands.
His kiss was long and gentle and full of promise. In that moment, no one else existed on that expanse of beach. It was just her, him, the crashing waves, the shimmering stars, and their boundless love.
Then Chris started to play “What a Wonderful World,” and the spell was broken.
“Now what?” she teased.
He waggled an eyebrow at her. “Think we can sneak away without anyone noticing?”
“Doubtful.”
“In that case, I believe it’s time for cookies.”
THANK YOU
Thank you for reading A Marriage of True Minds. I hope you enjoyed Sasha and Leo’s wedding, but, as
you may have guessed, married life will be anything but boring for them, what with Jeffrey Bricker on the loose and bent on vengeance! I’m hard at work on the next book in the series. I also have plans to give Aroostine and Bodhi each a series to call their own. While I’m furiously writing, here are some more suggestions to keep you busy:
Share it. If you liked this book, please lend your copy to a friend who might enjoy it.
Review it. Please consider posting a short review on Amazon. Reader reviews help others decide whether they’ll enjoy a book.
Connect with me. I’d love to hear from you by email at [email protected]. Or you can stop by my Facebook page for updates, cover reveals, and general time wasting at https://www.facebook.com/authormelissafmiller
Sign up. To be the first to know when I have a new release, sign up for my email newsletter at www.melissafmiller.com. I only send emails when I have book news—I promise.
Finally, you can always find an up-to-date list of the entire series for Kindle at smarturl.it/sashaseries
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa F. Miller is a commercial litigator. She has practiced in the offices of international law firms in Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, D.C. She and her husband now practice law together in their two-person firm in South Central Pennsylvania, where they live with their three young children. When not in court or on the playground, Melissa writes crime fiction. Like Sasha McCandless, she drinks entirely too much coffee; unlike Sasha, she cannot kill you with her bare hands.
A Marriage of True Minds: A Sasha McCandless Novella Page 6
