by Judy Duarte
“Why?” she asked, unable to think of a thing they needed to talk about.
His smile did things to her insides. “Because,” he said.
He gazed into her eyes with an expression she couldn’t read, but it confused her nevertheless. She moved aside.
When he entered, the room seemed to fill with life and energy and music…yes, music, although she couldn’t tell where it came from. She closed the door against the cool breeze that flowed inside.
Gesturing toward one of the chairs, she resumed her position on the sofa and tucked her feet under her. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked politely.
He shook his head and sat on the sofa, then placed a monitor on the coffee table so they could hear Stacy in case she awoke. “Sara,” he said, then was silent.
“Yes?” His stare was making her so nervous she was afraid she might drop the cup. She realized she had to take charge of the situation, or else she might melt into a puddle on the carpet. “Yes?” she said more strongly.
Cade didn’t blame her for watching him warily. He wanted to dispense with explanations and take her into his arms. He wanted to kiss her until neither of them could breathe. “Tonight I had a life-changing experience.”
The delicate arch of her eyebrows rose in question when he paused and smiled at the dramatic opening. The beautiful green eyes didn’t waver from his face as she waited for him to continue. No smile appeared on her alluring mouth.
“I listened to my daughter say her prayers,” he continued, solemn again. “She asked for a family, a baby brother and our friend Sara to like us again.”
He saw the soft pink lips tremble slightly. He observed as she raised the cup and took a sip, hiding behind its steamy surface until she had her emotions under control. He knew this woman. He knew her well.
“I’ve never stopped liking Stacy,” she said. “I’ll make a point of telling her tomorrow, also that I’m returning to the classroom Monday. I’ve decided to resume teaching. Although working in the ice-cream shop has been fun,” she added as if worried he might think she hadn’t liked it.
“Good.” It felt like a step in the right direction, but there was more he had to say. “I realized tonight that I wanted the same things as my five-year-old daughter—a family, perhaps more children…and for my friend Sara to like me again.”
Sara was completely taken by surprise. “I—I—well, of course I like you. That is…” She faded into silence.
“What I really want,” he continued, “is for you to love me. As I love you. I want to give Stacy that little brother she mentioned, but only if you’re the other part of the package. I want us to be a family.”
She started shaking her head before he finished.
“Why not?” he demanded, but gently.
“It wouldn’t work, Cade. Even if my mother was wrong, I could never like your father. I don’t think I could stand being in his house. It would be a constant source of discord between us, and it wouldn’t be fair to Stacy or the children we might have. You’ll have to find someone else.”
She clasped the cup tightly as she delivered this last bit of hurtful advice. Heaven help her, she did love him, but a life with him was impossible. Impossible!
“I’ve severed ties with my father.”
While she digested this, he removed the cup from her hands and set it aside, then he moved closer so she felt his presence as warmth that permeated her whole being. She’d missed him, she realized.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
For a second, she was afraid she’d said the words aloud. “Please, don’t.”
“Don’t miss you? I can’t help it. Don’t love you? I can’t stop. I don’t want to, not ever.”
She put her hands over her eyes. They felt hot and achy as pressure built behind them. “It wouldn’t work.”
“Why not, Sara? If we work really, really hard at it, I think we can do it. A friend and I are going to open our own law office, so there’ll be a lot of changes in our lives,” he murmured. “We can handle it. I have great faith in you and Stacy. You two will know how to head off problems.”
A thousand fragments of scattered thoughts roiled around in Sara’s brain. She couldn’t make them settle into any order at all. “Cade…”
“Yes?”
He leaned closer, crowding her into the corner, then he cupped her face and kissed her tenderly.
“I can’t breathe when you do that,” she whispered as he continued to kiss each corner of her mouth, then her eyes, her temple, ear, throat, chin, and back to her lips.
“Marry me, Sara. Make all my dreams come true.”
His voice was the south wind, warm and fragrant with the promise of flowers and spring buds, of life and growing things…babies…
“How can we?” she asked. “Your father—”
“My loyalty is to my wife,” he told her, lifting his head and looking earnestly into her eyes. “Trust me, Sara. That’s the one thing I have to have from you. Besides your love. Give me those, and I’ll give you everything that a man can give to the woman he loves. That’s my pledge to you.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did a bit of both. He kissed the few tears that spilled over her lashes and pulled her into his arms by the simple expedient of lifting her slender body into his lap.
“Sara, Sara,” he said in a low, heartfelt growl, “I’ve waited for years for you to come back to me. Don’t leave me now.”
In the battle between love and war that raged inside her, the outcome was assured. Love won.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his throat. She smelled the intoxicating aroma of his soap and talc and skin, the essence that was his alone, and knew she couldn’t deny her heart its hunger for a home.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Can’t love me?” he asked, his eyes dark as he gazed into her eyes.
She shook her head. “I can’t leave you. I love you, too.” She smoothed her hands over his lean cheeks and gazed her fill of his beloved face. “You always lived in my heart. You were my first love. My only love.”
He stopped breathing for a few seconds, then exhaled in relief as her words penetrated all the way to the center of his soul. “As you are mine, young Sara.”
They kissed for long, slow, mind-dazzling minutes, then snuggled together on the comfortable sofa, hunger growing as they gave free rein to their feelings.
Cade fitted his body carefully over hers, their arms and legs entwined like the strongest love vine. “When can we be married?” he asked. “I don’t want to wait.”
“I don’t, either,” she admitted.
“Next weekend we could drive to Tahoe and be married on the Nevada side. I want some time alone with you. Em won’t mind having Stacy—”
“No, Stacy should be with us. She’ll want to take part,” Sara told him. “Or plan the whole ceremony.”
They smiled at each other in understanding.
“I know. Your twin sister can be your best woman and my brother can be my man of honor. After the wedding lunch, they can bring Stace back with them and we can have a night to ourselves for a honeymoon.”
His grin was wicked. “A one-night stand for a honeymoon, huh? I like the sounds of that.”
Sara poked him in the ribs, then kissed him in mad delight until they both went a little crazy. “I came here seeking vengeance. I found something wonderful.” She laid a hand in the middle of his chest. “You. Your love. It’s like getting a gift for being alive, a reward for surviving. How does one give thanks for such bounty?”
“By sticking it out together,” he said, laying his hand over hers. “By being the parents our children need. By loving each other all our lives.”
She took a deep breath. “My word of honor,” she said.
“And mine.”
They sealed it with a kiss.
“So when is Stacy going to get that baby brother she wants?” Sara asked. “She told me last week she thought
it was time. Her best friend has two little brothers. She feels she’s getting behind.”
Cade laughed. Sara loved the carefree sound of it and the happiness that inspired it. He nuzzled her ear.
“We can start right away,” he suggested in the sexiest voice.
“A man after my own heart.” Closing her eyes as they melded together, she realized she had found the one eternal truth—home is where the heart is.
Hers was here, in the arms of her beloved.
DIAMONDS AND DECEPTIONS
BY
MARIE FERRARELLA
Marie Ferrarella, a RITA®Award-winning author, has written over one hundred and twenty books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide.
To Charlie with love, forever and always
Chapter One
“Ow.”
The exclamation of pain, entirely involuntary, was followed by a darker curse. The edge of his razor, on its final pass over the sensitive area of his throat, had nicked him. A small, red blotch appeared.
He had to be more careful, he admonished himself.
Swallowing another curse, he splashed water over the nick, then waited for the wound to dry.
His hands braced on either side of the small, utilitarian bathroom sink, Mark Banning stared into the small, oval mirror that hung directly above it. The glass was still slightly hazy from the shower he’d just taken, but not hazy enough to obliterate the scar that his eyes instantly gravitated toward. The scar that was his anchor to his own reality.
It vaguely occurred to Mark that he’d had the scar for five years now. Five years as of last month. Oh, there were plenty of plastic surgeons around who could readily relieve him of that, who could smooth and tug and resurface the area just below his right eye until their pockets were full and the scar was all but a jagged memory. Nick had even gone so far as to give him several brochures that he’d gathered from a few of the various plastic surgeons who made San Francisco their home.
Mark wasn’t even sure if he’d thanked his younger brother for his concern. Probably not. A great deal that went between them went unspoken.
In any case, it was a futile exercise on Nick’s part. He didn’t want to get rid of the scar. The ugly welt set him apart. It kept the world at arm’s length and from growing too friendly. From trying to draw him into a realm where he knew he had no business being. A realm that, if he even ventured into, held only disappointment for him at the end.
Besides, the scar was a symbol of more than just the knife fight he’d been involved in back in New York. It stood for all the scars that he’d sustained within. The scars that no amount of surgery could ever remove or cover up.
The last blow had been the final one. When he’d come home to find that Dana, in a fit of overwhelming depression, had taken her own life, he knew that he was not one of those people destined for happiness. Holding his wife’s nude, lifeless body in his arms, willing her back into an existence that Dana had found fruitless and pointless despite all the love he’d tried to show her, he’d felt his own tenuous grasp on happiness irretrievably slipping from his fingers.
Shutting off the water, Mark continued to stare at the scar, at the face of the man who had become little more than an empty shell.
He’d had a hell of a life up to the day it had finally dawned on him that he wasn’t meant to be happy, to ever be happy. One of the other guys on the force had kidded him the day he’d made detective, saying that seeing his own parents gunned down in front of him at a downtown restaurant when he was little more than ten years old gave him something in common with Batman. Or at least his alter ego Bruce Wayne. And maybe it did.
It’d stolen his childhood away from him, made him old and somber before his time. Filled him with a sense of responsibility that should have, by all rights, come to him years later. But he was the older one, never mind that it was just by a year. His brother, Nick, needed someone to have faith in, even as they were separated, time and again, and sent to different foster homes.
So he had to be strong even when there was no strength left inside.
And throughout it all, he’d always managed to keep track of Nick, never losing sight of his brother no matter what. There were times that Nick had been his sole focus in life, the only reason he kept on going. The reason he made something of himself. Because Nick needed him. In a way, Nick had been his salvation, just as he had been Nick’s. And then things had changed. For the better, he’d thought. And for a precious time, it had been.
While he was still in college, he’d met Dana Dean. Beautiful, adventurous, ambitious, wonderful Dana, who actually made him believe that there really was such a thing as happiness in the world and that maybe, just maybe, he was as entitled to it as the next person.
So he’d married her.
That’s what you did when you thought you’d found your soul mate, your main reason for living. Married her and moved, with Nick in tow, to New York because Dana had dreams, huge, boundless dreams of seeing her name up in lights. Of someday—and soon—being the biggest star on Broadway.
That was when the doubts began to appear. They hovered about like giant enemy fighterjets, searching for a place to land. Doubts that everything would work itself out after all.
Dana irrationally insisted that the process from aspiring actress to world-famous icon was going to be a short one, at least for her. She believed in overnight successes. When she was handed rejections instead of accolades, she began to withdraw into herself. Time and again she would come home and alternately rant and sob over her lack of achievement, her lack of progress. The light that had drawn him to her was very quickly extinguished no matter how hard he tried to keep it going, no matter how much support he gave her.
When she quit the part-time job she was holding down, he took on more shifts, determined that money worries were not to be added to Dana’s burdens. He wanted her free to pursue her goals.
She became angrier and more depressed. He thought it was all part of the process. Actors were supposed to be a moody lot, there were all those untapped emotions running through them. In his heart, he’d felt sure that once things began going her way, she’d snap out of it and become the Dana he’d fallen in love with. The Dana he still loved with all his heart.
Some detective he was.
He never saw it coming.
Never had a clue that Dana had become so enormously despondent that she could actually end her own life, end it while he was part of her life. He dealt with the rawer side of life every day, but it had never dawned on him that Dana could be sucked down to those kinds of dark depths.
He’d learned. Learned that having him there, loving her, wasn’t enough for Dana. That he wasn’t enough. It was something he wasn’t about to get over.
Ever.
Because when he came home after working a longer shift than usual and found her in the tub, her wrists slashed, the water a cold, red, transparent shroud around her body, he blamed himself. Blamed himself for working an extra shift and not finding her in time. If he had seen the signs, he could have saved her. If he had come home at his usual time, he could have saved her.
If.
If.
If.
After a while, there were no more ifs, there was only blame. It began to feel as if Death followed him wherever he went. At least, the death of those he loved. So he decided not to love anymore. There was only Nick left in his world to remind him that he had once been something other than the walking wounded.
He’d wanted to kill himself then. Nick had seen him through the first night and several of the ones that followed, acting as his anchor. Keeping him in this world instead of letting him follow Dana and his parents into the next.
So, unable to take his own life, he’d tried the next best thing. He tried to lose himself in his work.
The mouth on the face in the mirror curved ever so slightly. No, that wasn’t strictly true. He didn’t try to lose himself in his work, he’d tried to find a way
to have his work conduct the execution he couldn’t, in all good conscience, carry out himself. If he couldn’t hold the gun barrel to his head and pull the trigger himself, then he’d volunteer for the roughest assignments, forge recklessly ahead when common sense had others hanging back. And he did.
He felt he had nothing to lose.
But he was wrong.
He still had Nick to lose. And in the end, he supposed, in an offbeat way, Nick once again wound up being his salvation, saving him from self-extermination or death in the line of duty.
But not before the knife fight in the alley almost became the answer to his unspoken prayers. Foiling a robbery, he’d run after the so-called suspect, only to have the latter ambush him in the alley with a hunting knife. He’d had only his wits, his hands and a discarded trash lid to fight back with. When the suspect had drawn blood, his innate will to live had mysteriously kicked in, making him fight back.
It was a fight he nearly lost. It left him with the jagged scar and had almost ended his life. Twice he’d closed his eyes in that hospital bed and hoped that he’d die.
It was Nick, showing up at the hospital E.R., Nick, who looked at him with such sadness in his eyes, who had managed to catch his soul before it spiraled down, to be sucked into an endless black hole. Nick, who begged him to get well.
So he got better, at least physically. And when he was well enough, he quit the force, took Nick and himself and moved as far away from New York, from the constant reminder of who and what he had lost, as he could. He’d picked San Francisco because the city was anonymous enough for him to get lost in.
It was on the impersonal streets of San Francisco that Mark finally began to pick up the strands of his life, moving forward because he had no other choice. Death was no longer an option.
But neither was living, not really. He made his way as a private investigator, observing others, watching others have lives while he had an existence, nothing more. But then, he figured he wasn’t entitled to anything more.
Eventually, over the course of the last five years, he built a reputation. Now, at thirty, he was sought after, able to pick and choose his assignments. He needed little money, just enough to pay the rent, nothing more. Personal indulgences didn’t factor into anything, and Nick was independent, pursuing his own career on the San Francisco police force.
