Read A Bride For Abel Greene Online
Authors: Cindy Gerard
A Bride For Abel Greene (18 page)
He nodded.
“How awful.”
“The Grunewald boy is missing.”
Her hand came involuntarily to her throat. “The Grunewald boy?”
Mark, his lip swollen and bruised, stepped out from the shadowed hallway and into the kitchen. “I want to help look for him.”
Abel looked from Mackenzie’s stricken face to Mark’s.
“He called. Ryan,” Mark clarified, responding to Mackenzie’s look of disbelief. “He said he heard everything Abel told his father. He said he got to thinking that Abel was right. And he was wrong. He said he was sorry about the things he said to me about you.”
Mark cast his eyes downward, his expression troubled. “He also said he told his old man that he was going to call and apologize. The creep told him that if he did, he wasn’t his son any longer.”
Mackenzie covered her mouth with her hand, wrapping her other arm tightly around her waist.
“I want to help look for him,” Mark repeated, and met her eyes with as much determination as appeal.
She wanted to order him to his room where he’d be safe. The storm was no place for him. He could get lost himself, and on a night like this the results could be fatal.
But as she looked at the determined set of his young face, she knew she’d lose him, anyway, if she didn’t let him go.
“Don’t skimp on the sweaters,” Abel said at her nod. “I’ll gas up the machines while you get ready.”
Mark took off for his room at a run.
Abel cupped her face in his hands. “I won’t let anything happen to him.”
She nodded, but couldn’t speak. Five minutes later they were gone.
The only thing predictable about fate is its unpredictability. It can be as fickle as it can be cruel. As twisted as it can be kind. The proof of that came when, out of the dozens of rescue teams looking for Ryan Grunewald, it was Abel and Mark who found him at midnight.
He’d wrapped his snowmobile around a tree halfway between Bordertown and a wilderness area known as Woodenfrog Landing. His blood alcohol level accounted for the empty flask they found beside the wreckage, and possibly for the fact that he’d escaped with nothing more than a broken arm and a little frostbite.
Mark and Abel wrapped him in a survival blanket and heat packs, then radioed for an ambulance that came within a half hour and transported Ryan to the Bordertown Community Hospital.
When the two of them walked through the cabin’s kitchen door an hour later, they were both attacked by a wildly weeping woman who alternately railed at them for the worry they’d put her through and hugged them within an inch of their lives.
Finally satisfied that, aside from being blue with cold, they were all right, Mackenzie asked about the Grunewald boy.
“He’ll be okay,” Abel said, warming his hands on the mug of hot chocolate she gave him. “He’s lucky the frostbite is confined to one patch on his cheek. He’ll have a scar, and his arm will be in a cast for several weeks, but he’ll live to tell the tale.”
“Thanks to you two,” she said, overcome with feelings of relief, pride and love for them both.
“What...?” she asked, when Mark and Abel shared poorly suppressed conspiratorial looks. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Mark was the one who caved, a grin splitting his face as he put the cap on the story.
“Ryan’s old man had offered a reward to anyone who found him. A fifty-thousand-dollar reward.”
Mackenzie’s eyes widened. “Fifty thousand dollars?”
“Guilt money,” Abel put in. “He’d put it together that he’d been responsible for driving the boy out into this storm.”
The significance of what Mark and Abel had just told her was mind-boggling. “Oh, my. What a hard pill that must have been for him to swallow...that the two of you—of all people—were the ones to find his son and claim the reward.”
Abel looked thoughtful. “The truth is, I think Grunewald was so glad to see Ryan alive, he wouldn’t have cared if the devil himself had brought him in. I actually found myself feeling sorry for him.”
Mackenzie’s heart softened a little more at this extension of her husband’s compassion.
“Abel wouldn’t take the money.”
Mackenzie looked from Mark to Abel.
“I don’t need his money. I didn’t do it for the money. I did it for the same reason Mark did. It was the right thing to do.”
Mackenzie couldn’t have loved either of them more. At least, she thought she couldn’t, until the next day when John Grunewald drove through the snow drifts and paid them a visit.
When her husband accepted a humbled John Grunewald’s thanks for saving his son’s life, along with his long-overdue apologies for the wrongs he’d done Abel, past and present, she realized she was just beginning to learn the measure of love she felt for this man.
Eleven
T
he Legend Lake grapevine was responsible for yet another potluck involving the Greenes—only this time it took place at the Crimson Falls Hotel.
he Legend Lake grapevine was responsible for yet another potluck involving the Greenes—only this time it took place at the Crimson Falls Hotel.
When Mackenzie had relayed to Scarlett the unexpected turn of events surrounding Grunewald’s change of heart, Scarlett had promptly called J.D. and Maggie who had instantly declared it a wonderful reason to have a party.
Mackenzie had been enchanted by the old hotel that had been built at the turn of the century to accommodate loggers and fur traders from both Canada and the United States. She hated to leave when the time came.
As she climbed on the back of Abel’s snowmobile and they followed J.D. and Maggie, with Mark leading the pack home, she waved reluctant goodbyes to Scarlett and Casey where they stood bundled in their sweaters on the wraparound veranda.
“It’s such a special place,” Mackenzie said later, when both Nashata and her pups and Mark were settled in for the night and she and Abel were in bed.
She snuggled close to him. If the incentive of being held by her husband wasn’t enough, the wonderful wealth of heat his big body generated was too much to resist.
“I see why you worry about Casey and Scarlett, though,” she said as he drew her leg across his thigh and held it there with his hand. “It’s such a big, rambling old place. And it’s so isolated.”
“Scarlett’s tough. And as she so often reminds me, she can take care of herself.”
“I know. It’s just that...” She sighed, troubled.
“It’s just that you’d like to see her happily married like Maggie and you?” he suggested, grinning down at her.
“Yeah. Something like that,” she agreed, then put her own twist on his summation. “I’d like to see her happily married like J.D. and you.”
She pushed herself up on an elbow and sought his eyes. The darkness was diluted only by the mellow, cocooning glow of a waning moon that peeked in through the bedroom window. “You are happily married...aren’t you?” she added hesitantly.
He cupped her jaw and drew her mouth to his for a gentle kiss. “Am I happily married?” he whispered, watching the play of his fingers as he brushed them across her lips. “Let me see if I can tell you how happily married I am.”
Tunneling his hand under the covers, he drew her tight against his side with a possessive caress. On his back, in the dark, with her cuddled as tightly as a satin sheet to a mattress, he idly stroked the smooth expanse of her bare hip.
“One of the stories my mother used to tell me was the legend of the summer birds.”
She sighed into the curve of his neck, feeling loved and lucky and enfolded in a sense of fulfillment she’d never in her life thought within her reach. “Tell me.”
“Once, long ago, a wendigo—a crazed, unlucky hunter—stole the summer birds from the land. The people and the animals suffered for his cruel theft. Life became one long, bitterly cold winter. Even in the summer, snow and ice covered the land, and the people shivered in their lodges, huddled around the fires and yearned for the birds to come back and bring the warmth of the sun with them.
“But they didn’t come back, because the wendigo kept them imprisoned in cages and wouldn’t set them free. Finally the people and the animals held a council to decide what to do. It was the fisher—one of the smallest of the animals—who volunteered to go in search of the wendigo and free the summer birds.”
The story was so lovely, his voice so soft as he stroked her back and let the tale unfold.
“He went on a long journey, suffered much hardship but finally found the wendigo’s lodge. In the dark of night he snuck into the wigwam while the wendigo slept. Very quietly he opened the cages and set the summer birds free. As each one flew away from its prison, the air warmed a little, the snow began to melt, the plants broke through and flowers blossomed. The summer birds, happy in their freedom, flew farther and farther north, bringing summer with them and melting the ice and the bitterness the people had felt in their hearts.”
He leaned over her, his black hair spilling across his shoulder and trailing over her breasts. “To ask if I’m a happily married man is to ask if the people were happy to have the summer return to their lives.
“Yes, wife, I’m happy. You are my summer bird. You flew into my life with your warmth and your spirit, and you melted the ice that had hardened in my soul.”
Tears misted her eyes as she looked into the face of this man who had introduced her to a love as boundless and magical as the legends of the Chippewa. “And you are my Manabozho.” She wound a fistful of his hair around her hand and drew his mouth to hers. “My miracle worker who can warm my heart on the coldest winter night.”
“Never fly away from me, little bird,” he whispered against her lips.
“This is my home,” she said, responding to the depth of his need and the truth of his heart. “And you are my life. I’ve waited so long for both. Now that I’ve found you, there’s no place on earth I would ever want to go.”
His dark eyes glittered in the moonlit room.
“Make love to me,” she said, pulling his body over hers. “Let me give you something I couldn’t live without any more than I could live without you. Let me give you my heart.”
He took it humbly, with gentleness and need, with passion and fire. But above all else, he took it with trust and with a love that would bind him to his summer bird forever.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7140-1
A BRIDE FOR ABEL GREENE
Copyright © 1997 by Cindy Gerard
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.
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