Taylor tried smiling but felt her face crumpling as her aunt’s faith in her instincts sank in and she remembered what Steve had said about distrusting his own. Then, as she’d done as a child when some dreadful misfortune had occurred, she fell into her aunt Sammie Jo’s warm embrace. She felt her aunt’s thin arms wrap around her, holding her as tightly as she’d held Jason earlier. “Darling girl. Sh. It’s okay, honey girl.”
Aunt Sammie Jo rocked her slowly, gently, murmuring her name over and over while she cried. Finally she patted Taylor on the back. “Time to buck up, Taylor. You’ve got guests in your living room and sons cheating at cards to worry about.”
Taylor felt five years old again as she straightened, brushed at her cheeks and fumbled on the nightstand for a tissue.
Her aunt waited until she’d cleared her nose before patting her knee. “Now you gotta face what Jason said out there.”
“It’s okay, Sammie Jo. He didn’t mean it. He was just worried.”
“I know that, doofus, but what I’m worried about is that you might be thinking along those lines yourself.”
“What...?”
Sammie Jo’s thin hand squeezed Taylor’s leg. “I know you’ve had the thought you would never deal with another peacekeeper. I’ve heard you say it myself. Then this handsome, soft-mouthed Steve Kessler comes along and turns your whole world upside down. Then he leaves. And now, like Doug, he’s been shot.”
Taylor stiffened. “I know. I’m fighting it, Aunt Sammie Jo. But I can’t help feeling a little bit like Jason did a while ago. If he is okay, and if he does come back here—and both of those are pretty big ifs right now—how can I just relax with him, knowing that he could go out there and get killed any second? How can I put my kids through that? Again?”
Sammie Jo shifted a little to face her. She reached up and gripped Taylor’s chin tightly between her bony fingers. The grip was painful and shot her straight back to her childhood.
“Now you listen to me, girlie girl. Everybody dies. That’s the only truism we got in life. The only one. Everything else is just gravy.”
“But—”
Sammie Jo’s hand squeezed even tighter, then she released her. “But nothing! The moment we’re born the clock starts ticking. Some go sooner than others. Like Craig. Like Doug. Like your mama and daddy. Hell, like your cousin Susie when she was just eighteen years old.”
For just a moment, a stark longing leapt to Aunt Sammie Jo’s face as she remembered her daughter and the long years without her.
Then she scowled. “Others, like that old buzzard Homer Chalmers, live for a hundred years and plague us every day they’re alive. But the simple fact is, we’re all going to go one of these days.”
“Not by bullets,” Taylor interjected. “Not by being a target for some psycho with a gun in his hand!”
Sammie Jo shrugged. “Piffle. I’ve never known you to talk such nonsense. A gun, a knife, a gruesome car accident... those are dreadful, sure, but so are heart attacks, cancers, this AIDS virus going around. What difference does the cause of death make? I’ll tell you, sweetie, none at all. And worrying about it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Look at me, honey. I know I’m going to die.”
“No, Aunt Sammie Jo—the chemo’s working!”
Sammie Jo chuckled. “See, there you go again, thinking cause not truth. The breast cancer may not get me, and God willing it won’t, but something will. A car, a heart attack or maybe Alva Lu’s sponge cake.”
Her aunt patted her cheek then and stood up. “You lost a good man when you lost Doug Smithton, Taylor. You know that and I know, too. It could be this young fellow might not make it through. That’d be a real pity. But, if he pulls out, I have to tell you I like what I see in this Steve Kessler. He’s been hurt some, and he’s been around the block a time or two. But that’s good because you’ve been hurt some, too, and you and him wouldn’t get to first base if the teeter-totter were unbalanced. You like him. The boys adore him. They need and want a daddy. And, Taylor, honey, you need somebody. And more than that, I think you want this somebody.”
Taylor felt tears well in her eyes again.
“Besides which, Cactus and I want a fourth for bridge.”
Chapter 17
It was close to midnight when Taylor’s front door crashed open, startling everyone still remaining in her living room.
Sammie Jo, who had been slumped against Alva Lu Harrigan, snoring softly, her wig again wildly askew, jumped some three inches and managed to jab a sleeping Mickey Sanders with her sharp elbow.
“Damn it, Taylor,” a deep male voice thundered in the doorway, “don’t you ever answer the phone?”
As one, the entire group gathered in Taylor’s living room turned to see who had arrived so late. And as one, all eyes widened. Then, with the exception of Taylor herself, everyone smiled and turned warm, congratulatory looks in her direction.
She didn’t see them. She only saw the man filling her doorway, filling her heart. “Steve...” she whispered, hoping she wasn’t asleep and dreaming.
He smiled at her and stepped across the threshold and into the living room.
“What—”
“How—”
“Sh! It doesn’t matter how he got here. He’s here.”
It seemed to Taylor that a thousand miles separated them, and yet, in some deep, inner core, she knew he would cross that chasm. One inexorable step after another.
“I thought he was shot?” Mickey said, her voice querulous from sleep.
Steve flicked her a glance. “I was. But I was wearing a vest.”
“But they said on TV...”
“I know,” he said. “I heard it. They also called it a melee. Jose Caldrerros just got the drop on me, that’s all.”
“But you were shot,” Sammie Jo said. “Tom Adams said.”
“Oh, yeah. Jose nailed me.” Steve rubbed his chest gingerly. “Knocked me about five feet and out cold.”
“You were shot in the chest and are up and walking?”
Steve shook his head. Taylor half wondered how a dream could be so realistic that she could notice such small details. “Yes and no. I was hit, but the vest blocked the actual bullet. Lucky for me he wasn’t packing an AK47. The best in the world wouldn’t have saved me then.”
“But Tom said—”
Taylor flinched but Steve didn’t bother to look in the direction of the speaker. His eyes were locked with hers. “Tom didn’t know if I was badly hit or not. We’ve lost a goodly number of officers from bruised hearts because of the impact. So it’s standard operating procedure to get a fallen officer to a hospital immediately without giving any information out to the public.”
“We weren’t the public,” Cactus Jack said irritably.
“That little twerp on TV was right about one thing— bullet-proof vests don’t protect against everything. I was out cold until we were almost in Lubbock. I’ve been on every heart-monitoring device known to man since then.”
For Taylor, much of this conversation seemed surreal, as if everyone in her living room were a part of her dream and, in that strange way dreams have, were speaking separate and foreign languages. The only reality for her was that Steve was alive and taking yet another step forward. And that was the most suspect reality of all.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer, afraid if she tried, the dream, the beautiful dream, would end and she would wake to find herself asleep in the easy chair, surrounded by other dozing supporters, and the eager news announcer would be informing them that he’d died.
“Taylor...?” he asked, his eyes locked with hers, his hat missing, his hand half-outstretched toward her.
“I thought it was like with Doug...” she whispered, linking her fingers together, afraid to reach for him, afraid to want anyone quite as much as she wanted him.
“It’s not like with Doug,” he said firmly. And took another step closer to her. “I’m not like Doug.”
“No...I know
.”
“Do you want another Doug?”
“No...”
“Good.”
The boys’ bedroom door banged open and her sons and their cousins bounded down the hallway and spilled into the living room.
“Steve?”
“Hey, like, way cool!”
“Steve’s back!”
“And he’s, like, alive and everything!”
The children eddied around her like water around a rock midstream, then continued onward. They fell upon Steve, hugging him, petting him, pushing him off balance. And yet he never took his eyes from hers.
“What did you say?”
“Was it you who shot Jose?”
“Is he dead?”
“We thought you were dead.”
“Like Dad.”
“But it’s not like Dad.”
Jason pulled on his sleeve, forcing him to look down at them. “Mom said it wasn’t wrong to wish you were our dad. She said it wasn’t wrong to want you to love us.”
Something on Steve’s face shifted, seemed to melt, and his eyes lifted to Taylor’s. “You told them that?”
She felt a frisson of reality work its way down her arms. She nodded.
With three boys attached to his legs and arms, he still managed to take another step closer to her. “And do you believe this?” he asked.
“’Course she does,” Jason said.
“Yeah, like, why would she tell Jason that if it wasn’t, like, true?”
“Are you gonna kiss her again?”
“Yes,” Steve said, and somehow gently freed himself from the remaining obstacles to reaching her.
Taylor held her breath, knowing she was awake now, more awake than she’d ever felt before in her life. She was both aware of all the eyes volleying between them and strangely ignorant of them. These were her friends, her family, her community. It seemed oddly fitting that they should be witness to this unusual moment, to this dramatic meeting.
Steve took the last step he needed to touch her and yet didn’t reach for her, merely waited for her to signal him, or perhaps for her to understand that he really was there, that he’d stopped distrusting his instincts.
“I tried to call you, Taylor,” he said.
She didn’t know if he meant during the week before or during the vigil and realized it didn’t matter. She nodded, still more than half-afraid to break the spell, but aware now that she wasn’t dreaming, that this was real, however perfect a dream.
“And I tried to run away from you.”
Again she nodded.
“But I couldn’t.”
She wanted to ask him why not, perhaps needing to hear the words.
As if reading her mind, he said, “Because I love you, Taylor. I always have. Tom Adams knew it. Maybe even Doug knew it. The women I married...they looked like you, but they weren’t like you at all. They weren’t kind. They weren’t warm. They didn’t have an entire town for a family. They didn’t have three great kids. You do, Taylor. You have all those things and so much more. All the things I’ve ever wanted in a woman. Ever wanted period.”
And still he didn’t touch her, didn’t draw her into his arms.
Sammie Jo clapped her hands loudly in a single, sharp slap that made everyone jump and jerk their eyes in her direction. “Dang it, girl, kiss him!”
“Yeah, Mom, like, kiss him!”
“We forgot about that...it’s like in that movie, she’s gotta kiss him back.”
“Oh, yeah, that movie.”
“So are you going to kiss me?” Steve asked, his eyes shy even though he was smiling down at her.
“Yes,” she said, meaning so much more. And she rose up on her toes to cup his face and press a kiss to his lips.
His smile faded and his arms wrapped around her and pulled her sharply to him. “God, Taylor, I love you so much it hurts.”
She pushed that strand of hair from his brow and smiled mistily up at him. “It doesn’t have to hurt, Steve. Because I love you, too.”
And oblivious of the crowd happily watching them—children, aunts, uncles, friends, well-wishers all—Taylor wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a deep, telling and utterly honest kiss.
It wasn’t a kiss of regret or even of longing. It was a kiss born of hope and dreams yet to come. And she knew, in his returned kiss, in the passion that flared between them, that he’d finally found what he’d most desperately wanted.
And in the silence around them, she knew their kiss, their love were sanctified and somehow blessed by her friends and family, by the town, and augmented by the hopes and dreams of everyone watching them.
Be sure to watch for the next book in the
ALMOST, TEXAS series, coming soon from
Silhouette Intimate Moments.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7253-8
ALMOST A FAMILY
Copyright © 1997 by Tracy LeCocq
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
This is what a family is supposed to be.
Letter to Reader
Books by Marilyn Tracy
About the Author
Dedication
Author Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Teaser chapter
Copyright
Almost A Family Page 21
