Carrera's Bride

by Diana Palmer

  “But…why?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

  He perched himself on the edge of her desk and studied her intently. She’d cut her beautiful long hair. He grimaced, because he’d loved the length. She was wearing a dress that was obviously homemade, and not sexy at all. She dressed, and looked, like a woman who didn’t care how she appeared to men ever again. He was responsible for that. It hurt him.

  “The trap?” she prompted, because it made her uncomfortable to have him look at her that way.

  “I’ve been working with the feds to shut down Fred Warner.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Do you?” he asked quizzically. “Well, Fred was laundering money for Deluca, who wanted to move in on Paradise Island and set up his own casino. You can probably imagine what sort. Crooked. Anyway, Fred was already doing dirty banking for one of the bigger drug cartels in Colombia.”

  “Your brother was killed by them,” she recalled.

  He looked at her, surprised. “I guess I did tell you that.” He smiled apologetically. “Some things are still a little blurry. Yes, Carlo was killed by the cartel when he tipped off the feds about a shipment. They injected him with an overdose of cocaine to make it look like an overdose, but the medical examiner wasn’t fooled.”

  “Was he working for the government, too?” she wondered.

  His face was taut. “No. He wanted to get back at the guy who got him hooked. Your old pal Fred Warner,” he added.

  Her lips parted on a soft rush of breath. So that was the connection.

  “But the Colombian cartel Fred was laundering money for wanted revenge for that lost shipment, so they went after my brother and killed him,” he said sadly, his face hardening. “I swore I’d get Fred for doing that, so I cultivated him with a phony offer of working with me and Deluca. Deluca had contacted me, that’s true, and I drew the feds in before I approached Fred.”

  “But it didn’t bring back your brother,” she murmured sympathetically.

  “No,” he agreed, his tone sad. “If he’d just left that damned Fred Warner alone, and not tipped off the law about the cocaine shipment, he might still be alive,” he added coldly.

  She felt his sadness. “He did the right thing, though. You know he did.”

  “Yes. The right thing. But he died for it.” He grimaced. “I never could understand why he couldn’t stop using. I smoke cigars occasionally, but I can quit any time. I don’t like addictions, so I don’t have any. Carlo was different.”

  “I’ve known people who drank and couldn’t stop,” she replied gently. “I’ve always connected alcoholism and drug addiction with chemical imbalance. It seems to me that addictive personalities are basically depressed people who are trying desperately to find substances that will lift their moods. In fact, it does the opposite, and just makes it worse.”

  He searched her face quietly. “That’s one of the first things I liked about you,” he said. “You’re not judgmental. You always look for reasons why people do the things they do. Me, I just shoot from the hip.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I thought you didn’t like anything about me.”

  He ground his teeth together. He hated the memory of that last conversation they’d had before she left the Bahamas.

  She turned. “I’m glad you came by,” she said. “But I really have to go back to work now.”

  “Delia.”

  She didn’t want to look at him again. It hurt too much. But she forced herself to face him.

  He was holding something in a bag. She hadn’t noticed until now. He held it out to her, almost hesitantly.

  She took the carrier, set it on the desk and opened it. Tears blinded her to its beauty for a few seconds. She lifted it out, blinking away moisture, and spread it slowly on the surface of the desk.

  It was a baby quilt. It had a block with a Texas landscape and one with Navy Pier in Chicago. Another one was of Blackbeard’s Tower in Nassau, and a house with casuarina trees on the ocean. It had a block of a man and a woman at a table on the beach. It had one of a yacht, another of a woman making a quilt, and a man cutting a pattern. In one, there was a couple holding hands silhouetted against the ocean and the moon. In the center, there was a baby dressed in a lacy white gown and a white cap, with a halo over its head.

  “It’s our baby,” she whispered brokenly, without choosing her words.

  “Yes,” he bit off.

  She looked up. His face was tragic, as she imagined her own might be. There was a suspicious moisture in his own eyes.

  It was too much. She ran to him, one arm holding the quilt, the other open to embrace him.

  He swept her up without a word and stood just holding her, rocking her, while she cried and cried. Tears ran down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. She cried until the pain became almost bearable, and still he held her close.

  “The past three months have been pure hell,” he whispered roughly at her ear. “A hundred times I’ve picked up the phone to call you and put it down, or started to write a card, or thought about buying an airplane ticket. But I didn’t think you’d even speak to me, and I didn’t want to upset you any more. Barb and Barney said you weren’t having anything to do with them. Well, until three days ago, they got a card from you.” He chuckled, although his voice sounded oddly hoarse. “Then I figured, hey, if she can forgive them, maybe she can forgive me. So I got on a plane and flew to San Antonio. It’s taken me two days just to get up the nerve to come down here.”

  She rubbed her wet eyes against his throat. “Did you rent a car?”

  “Hell, I rented a limo. I’m not driving you around in some budget sedan and having your friends say I was too cheap to do the thing right.”

  She pulled back and looked up at him with her whole heart in her eyes, smiling through the tears. He looked older, too, and almost as worn as she did. She reached up, hesitantly, to touch the dark circles under his eyes. There was moisture there.

  He caught her hand and pulled it to his mouth, as if he didn’t want her to know how it had affected him, when she saw the quilt.

  “I was so glad that Dunagan and Mr. Smith’s friends kept you safe,” she confessed, smiling through her tears.

  His eyebrows lifted. “How did you find that out? You haven’t been talking to Barb or Barney. They’d have told me.”

  She looked sheepish. “Mr. Smith wrote to me,” she admitted, “and I wrote back, to a post office box he’s got in Nassau.”

  He caught his breath. “So that’s how you knew what was going on! If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been so miserable. I’ll shoot Smith for not telling me!”

  “No, you can’t do that,” she said with a smile. “I made him promise not to tell you. I was worried, and since I wasn’t speaking to my…parents,” she said the word for the first time, “there was no other way I could know how you were.”

  “You cared how I was, after the way I treated you?” he asked with humility.

  She touched his wide mouth with her fingertips. “You didn’t remember me,” she said softly. “You couldn’t help it.”

  “You gave up on me,” he accused. “You went away and left me with that poisonous brunette.”

  “I thought you might really be engaged to her,” she pointed out. “She said you were, and you’d already told me not to contact you, after we went out with Karen on the yacht. I knew about her father, but it wouldn’t be the first time a woman got involved with a man against her father’s wishes. For all I knew, I could have been a fling.”

  “Some fling,” he murmured, his eyes eating her. “I breathed you from the minute we met. I’ve been half a man for months.”

  She managed a weak smile. “Me, too.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “Figuratively speaking,” she corrected.

  He bent and touched his mouth to her soft lips, tenderly. “I want to take you out to supper tonight. I’ve got something for you. There’s a hotel in San Antonio, the Bartholomew,” he added. �
�I booked a table for seven o’clock. Okay?”

  “Why do you have to go to San Antonio to give it to me?” she wondered. “It will be expensive, to have the limousine go there and back again…”

  “I’m rich. Didn’t you notice?”

  She sighed. “I was too busy noticing how sexy you were,” she confessed.

  He grinned.

  She lifted the quilt in her hands and looked at it again, this time with pleasure as well as pain. “This is beautiful.”

  “We’ll keep it in a special place. But I’m working on another one,” he added. “One with blocks with numbers and letters in them, and little animals in separate blocks. I’m going to do a blue and pink and yellow one, so it will work for a boy or a girl.”

  She was confused. “Why?”

  He looked down at her with poignant feeling. “I thought, if I asked nicely, you might give me another baby.”

  Her heart felt near to bursting. That didn’t sound like he wanted an affair.

  “We’ll talk more about it tonight.”

  “It isn’t very fancy, is it?” she worried. “I don’t have a lot of nice clothes, Marcus.”

  “Anything you wear will be fine,” he promised, but in the back of his mind, a plot was already forming. “What time do you close up?”

  “At five.”

  “I’ll be here about five-thirty. That okay?”

  She nodded.

  He reached down to kiss her, softly. “Don’t forget.”

  “How could I?” she wondered in a breathless tone.

  He turned to go, pausing with his hand on the door handle. “I’m glad you’re better,” he said. “I had hell living with the things I said to you. It was worse, knowing you lost the baby saving me.”

  “You think I could have stood by and let him shoot you?” she asked sadly.

  “No more than I could have let him shoot you, honey,” he replied huskily.

  She fed her eyes on him. He was beautiful to her. She never got tired of looking at him. And a man like that had come all this way to take her out to eat. She was amazed.

  “I’ll see you later,” he promised, and winked as he left the shop.

  He walked right into an elderly lady who’d been standing outside the door. He apologized and backed into a young couple. As he turned to apologize again, three people he hadn’t seen excused themselves for being in the way. A few yards away, a woman was taking pictures of the black super stretch limousine sitting outside Delia Mason’s combination house and shop.

  “Nice day, isn’t it?” the elderly woman asked, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Yeah. Real nice.”

  Marcus dived into the limousine with a total lack of grace and slammed the door. “Get me the hell out of here!” he told the driver.

  At precisely five o’clock, Marcus knocked on Delia’s front door, peering warily around him while the limousine sat at the curb with its motor running.

  Delia opened the door, still in the dress she’d been wearing earlier, shocked. “You said five-thirty!” she exclaimed. “I haven’t even started to dress…!”

  “I know.” He took a long box from under his arm and handed it to her. He put another box on top of that one. He pulled a jewelry case out of his pocket and added that to the stack. “Five-thirty,” he said.

  She knew the labels on the boxes. One was that of a couture fashion house, the other a leading shoe manufacturer. He hadn’t got these things off any rack. “But you don’t know my size!”

  “I called Barb,” he replied.

  He climbed back into the limousine and it took off. Delia closed the door. It felt like Christmas.

  Inside the big box was a black silk dress, just her size, and cut to emphasize her slender figure. It fell to her ankles in soft ruffled folds. In the shoe box was a pair of high heels to match. In the jewelry case lay a thick gold necklace encrusted with emeralds and diamonds, and two matching earrings lay in the center of it. She knew before she looked that the gold was 18 karat and the stones were genuine and of the highest quality. Barb had taught her about fine jewelry.

  She got out her best underwear, which was still a poor match for the finery Marcus had brought, and started dressing. Fortunately her blond hair had some natural wave, and it didn’t look bad at all to her. She used more makeup than normal and pulled out a fancy black velvet coat that Barb had given her to wear with the dress.

  When Marcus knocked at the door, she was ready.

  “I forgot about the coat,” he remarked. “We can get you a fur if you want one. I’ll phone and have one sent down right now—”

  “I can’t wear fur, Marcus,” she interrupted softly. “I’m allergic. Sorry.”

  “Are you allergic to cats and dogs?”

  “No. I’ve got a dog, remember? Sam has a fenced yard out back and a doghouse. My pet chicken Henrietta has her own little fenced corner and a henhouse. I’ll introduce you to them another time. I’m only allergic to fur coats.”

  “Thank God.” He noted her curious stare. “While I had amnesia, I adopted two big Persian cats.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Search me. That was just after I put in a koi pond.”

  “I remember you showing it off before I left the Bahamas. I still can’t believe you have a pond full of those beautiful, colorful Japanese fish like the ones we saw in that botanical garden we visited.”

  He was surprised she knew about koi. He hadn’t remembered. Or had he?

  She was fascinated. “When we walked around the garden, I told you that I loved them. You said you weren’t that interested in fish!”

  He laughed. He had remembered. “I’ve thought about doing some koi quilts.”

  Her eyes brightened. “Oh, I’d love to do some of those, too.”

  “Then we’ll have to talk about having you come live on Paradise Island,” he murmured dryly. “Because I don’t think my nerves will let me live here.”

  “Why?” she asked blankly.

  He turned and pointed to the limousine. On the sidewalk near it, the same woman was taking photographs of it again. A new couple was standing near a tree, apparently talking, but they were both staring at Marcus and Delia. An elderly woman down one end of the street was pruning roses. Two girls in the upstairs window of the house next door were giving Marcus thumbs-up signals. And a police car was going slowly down the street while the officer driving it looked at the floor show. Out back, the dog was raising the devil. He was going to upset her hen, Henrietta, in her nice little caged lot, and there would be no eggs for days.

  “I forgot that Callie Kirby and her stepfather lived here before she married Micah Steele,” Delia said on a sigh. “They still tell stories about their courting days.”

  “The crowds, you mean?” he asked, glowering at the crowd nearby.

  “It’s a very small town,” she pointed out. “The only real crime we’ve had in years was when our local mercenaries shut down a notorious drug dealer. Oh, and Tippy Moore batting a would-be assassin on the head with an iron skillet. They say when Cash Grier got there, the man ran out to the police cars pleading for the officers to save him from Tippy.”

  He chuckled. “I’ve met the lady, and I don’t doubt the story.”

  She smiled up at him. She touched the emeralds gingerly. “You shouldn’t have done this,” she said.

  “You needed a dress and some accessories,” he said simply, catching her by the hand. “Lock the door and we’ll take a bow before we leave.”

  She fiddled with the lock, only half hearing him. “A bow?”

  He pulled her into his arms, bent her back against one of them, bent and kissed the breath out of her.

  When he let her go, the elderly woman had her hand on her heart and looked as if she might faint. The couple nearby was watching, openmouthed. The girls at the window were cheering. The woman taking the photo of the limousine was now snapping pictures of Marcus and Delia. And the police car was stopped in the road, blocking traffic, wh
ile the man inside leaned out the window to shout at them.

  “I’d give that a Nine-Plus on a scale of Ten!” Police chief Cash Grier called to Marcus.

  “You’re blocking traffic, Grier!” Marcus called back.

  Grier just chuckled and waved as he drove off.

  Marcus escorted Delia to the car with continental flair, waited while the uniformed driver opened the door, put her inside and dived in after her.

  “So much for satisfying our public,” he teased, laughing at her still-dazed expression.

  The restaurant was crowded, and Delia was still reeling from Marcus’s stage kiss. She gave her coat to the clerk at the coat room and took Marcus’s hand as they followed the waiter to their table.

  Sitting at it were Barney and Barb, dressed to the nines and looking nervous and even a little frightened.

  That softened Delia’s heart even more. She went straight to Barb with her arms wide open.

  Barb ran into them and hugged her close, crying. “Oh, baby, we’ve missed you so much!”

  “Hello, stranger,” Barney added, opening his own arms to be hugged.

  “I’m sorry,” Barb began.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Delia said at the same time, and laughed because they sounded like echoes. “I just had to get used to it,” she added. “But now I’m glad. I’m so glad! I love you both very much.”

  “We love you, too, baby,” Barney said, and turned away before he lost his composure.

  “I told you it was going to be a surprise,” Marcus told Delia with a grin.

  “It really was,” Delia said, laughing through her tears. “Oh, I’m so glad to see all of you!” she exclaimed, including Marcus as she swept her eyes over the three most important people in her life. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain,” she added softly, to her parents. “I’ll try to make up for it, honest.”

  “You had so many hard knocks, baby,” Barb told her. “It’s no wonder it hit you so hard. We understood.” She glanced at Marcus with a wry smile. “And Marcus has kept our spirits up, too.”