Dangerous Ladies (75 page)

“Come on, honey. Your
other
grandma loves you.” Sharon also wore a scarf wrapped around her bare head, and a wide hat to protect skin made fragile by a massive dose of radiation and the subsequent bone-marrow transplant.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Give her to me!” Grace took the dripping child and held her away from her pristine designer outfit.

Willow gave her a big, one-toothed grin.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Grace said again, and cuddled his baby. Revulsion at the sopping diaper battled with delight at Willow’s adoration. She smirked at Sharon.

Devlin exchanged a look with Meadow.

Their mothers were fighting again—what a surprise. Two more different women there could not be, and their rivalry was intense and focused—on Willow. Willow, who adored them, and had already learned to manipulate them both.

“Shall we start once more?” the minister asked.

Devlin’s shoes squished with water and sand as he joined Meadow under the arbor and took her hand. He smiled into her eyes.

The minister began the ceremony all over again.

Meadow wore a simple white dress. She had flowers in her red hair, carried a bouquet of orange blossoms, and, like her mother’s, her feet were bare. Her nose was freckled, she had a burn on her finger from her latest glass project, and she watched him as if everything he did and was amazed her.

Meadow was the bride of his dreams—and this was the wedding of his dreams.

Although the other weddings had been, each in its way, an experience he would treasure. The first wedding, occurring within two weeks of those traumatic events in the attic at Waldemar, took place in the cedar grove outside Meadow’s home in Washington, and involved not one, but two invalids. Sharon refused to start her radiation and bone-marrow transplant until after the ceremony, but although she’d welcomed Devlin with open arms, she’d been wan and quiet, and leaned hard on the much-warier River.

Devlin’s leg had supported him long enough for him to stand up with Meadow while the woo-woo holy woman (as his mother called her) had intoned a blessing and waved a crystal over the happy couple. Luckily, the pain helped him keep a straight face when he glanced at Grace, immaculate in her mother-of-the-groom dress with the matching pillbox hat, and standing lopsided with her Prada slingback heels sunk into the forest floor.

And at Four, equally immaculate in his idea of spring-wedding casual—a Dolce & Gabbana goatskin blazer and striped poplin pants.

And at Bradley Benjamin, dressed like a proper Southern gentleman
and torn between horror at the other guests, who consisted of artists and distressingly casual locals, and worry and affection for a daughter he’d barely met and from whom he desperately wanted to win acceptance.

But his bone marrow had matched Sharon’s on all six points, and his willingness—no, his need—to donate for Sharon and help her with her cure had begun the healing between father and daughter.

An interesting couple had crashed the wedding in Washington—a tall, broad-shouldered, Italian-looking man with a tall, gorgeous blonde on his arm. Devlin had recognized them right away; his brother Roberto Bartolini and his new wife, Brandi. That had been an interesting, potentially uncomfortable meeting made easy by Meadow’s openhearted welcome and Roberto’s Italian enthusiasm for family.

Now there were periodic phone calls and the occasional visits between the couples, and the idea of having brothers no longer seemed so alien to Devlin.

After that first wedding, Devlin and Meadow had lived in Washington. Meadow had cared for the artists’ colony and grown ever more pregnant. While commuting between the two coasts, Devlin had gotten to know all her friends, especially the Hunters, the Russian grape-growing family up the road.

Sharon received her father’s bone marrow—and damn near died. Devlin still broke a sweat when he remembered the look on Meadow’s face the day he walked in to find Sharon had checked herself out of the hospital and gone home to live out her days.

She’d survived, but it had been a near thing, and Devlin didn’t know whether Willow’s birth or Sharon’s stubborn determination to survive longer than Grace had contributed more to her continued existence.

A few months after Willow’s birth, he and Meadow celebrated their wedding and Willow’s christening at the Secret Garden
in
the secret garden by the waterfall. It had been, his mother announced with satisfaction, a real wedding with an ordained Methodist minister, Meadow trussed into a formal wedding gown, Devlin in a tux,
and the guests, including Sharon and River, suitably if uncomfortably attired in dresses and suits.

Eddy hadn’t been able to return from Europe in time for the first wedding in Washington, but this time he did indeed make a radiant maid of honor.

The first two weddings had been for their parents.

This wedding on the beach on Majorca at sunset was for them.

When Devlin and Meadow finished their vows and faced the smiling crowd, he knew he had truly given his heart and soul into Meadow’s safekeeping.

And she knew he nurtured her heart and soul with equal care.

She looked around at her family and friends.

At her mother, cancer-free at last. At her father, quietly pleased for his daughter, but even more than that, ecstatic at the chance to visit the famous glassblowing centers of Europe. At Grace, wrinkled, disheveled, and thoroughly in love with her granddaughter. At Willow, wearing Grandmother’s hat and teething on Grandmother’s Christian Dior sunglasses. At Four, fidgeting because he’d given up his cigarettes. And at Bradley Benjamin, who, God help him, had tried for casual and managed old-guy absurd in a flowered shirt, shorts, and sandals with socks.

And at Devlin, still too rugged to be handsome, still tall and dark, still hers . . . and still alive. She had nightmares about that scene in the attic, about the amount of blood he’d lost before the paramedics got the bleeding stopped, about the damage done by the bullet to the muscle. He had survived both the hospital and rehab without incident, but when she woke at night and snuggled close and kissed him, he always kissed her back.

He’d been too close to death for her to take his existence for granted.

Now he lifted her hand in his and announced, “The party’s set up in my yard right above the beach. Let’s go up and celebrate our wedding!”

“Again!” Four raised his sweating glass to them.

“We’re well married,” Meadow answered.

“Third time’s a charm,” Devlin said cheerfully.

On the fringe of the crowd, an uninvited guest caught her eye. He removed his sunglasses and nodded once.

She gripped Devlin’s arm. “Look. It’s Sam!”

The day he rode away in the ambulance with Mr. Hopkins was the last time they’d seen him. The ambulance had been found empty except for the frightened driver and his dead assistant. Mr. Hopkins had disappeared completely. And repeated inquiries about Sam to the government and other officials had yielded no information.

The Rembrandt had gone to auction and brought in twenty-nine million American dollars. Judith had plea-bargained for a lesser sentence, and with her testimony and Four’s, the feds had put a price on Mr. Hopkins’s head.

The $29 million was rightfully Devlin’s, but he had declared he was no fool. He’d turned the fortune over to Meadow, who had paid her mother’s bills, given Bradley Benjamin a generous finder’s fee, set up a small trust fund for Four—because, as she told Devlin, how else was he going to survive? He wasn’t good for anything except entertainment—and used the rest for art scholarships in her grandmother’s name.

Now Sam appeared, apparently hale and healthy. He watched their guests trudge up the path to Devlin’s estate; then, as solemn as ever, he walked toward them. “Congratulations on your marriage.”

“Oh, Sam!” Meadow threw her arms around him. “We hoped you were alive!”

Sam suffered her embrace without yielding an inch.

When she let him go, Devlin shook his hand. “Good to see you again, Sam.”

“Good to see you, too, Mr. Fitzwilliam. And thank you for asking about me. At the time I wasn’t able to respond to your inquiries.”

“We suspected you were in deep cover.” It was so good to see his pleasure at meeting them. At least, Meadow thought it was
pleasure—with Sam, pleasure looked pretty much like indifference or anger or relaxation.

“I wanted to thank you both for your assistance with my investigation last year. In my line of employment I work for a lot of people, and Mr. Fitzwilliam, your organizational abilities and astute eye made my task easier.” Sam replaced his sunglasses. “If you ever would like a job with the government—”

“What? No!” Indignant and incensed, Meadow stepped between Sam and Devlin. “He does
not
want a job with the government, and if I ever caught wind of him taking a job with the government—and I’m just as astute as he is—I would hunt you down and hurt you, Sam Whoever-you-are!”

Devlin caught her arm and pulled her toward him. “I believe I just declined, Sam.”

“So I see.” Something that might pass for a smile on anyone else tugged at Sam’s lips.

“Would you like to come to the party?” Devlin gestured up the path.

“No, actually, I’m leaving the island as soon as possible.” Yet Sam lingered, scrutinizing them as if looking for a flaw. Abruptly he said, “The investigation into your father and the disappearance of his fortune is reaching a climax, and soon there’ll be closure for you and your brothers.”

“How many brothers?” Meadow asked.

“What kind of closure?” Devlin took a step toward him.

“I can’t say. I just wanted you to know.” With a peculiarly Sam-like nod of farewell, he strode off down the beach until the setting sun swallowed him.

“That is a seriously weird guy,” Meadow said. “I thought so the first time I opened my eyes and saw him, and I think so now.”

“Hmm. Yes. I remember. You took one look at me and fell at my feet.”

“Who has amnesia now?”
Smart-ass.

Devlin tugged her toward him. “What did you think the first time you opened your eyes and saw me?”

She sniffed. “I thought you were rude and scary.”

“And?”

“And sexy. And you smelled good.”

“That’s better.”

From the party above them, the music started. People were laughing. Someone was singing. They heard the popping of corks and the clinking of glasses.

But here on the beach they were alone with the sea and the sunset—and each other.

He smiled down at her. “I thank God for the night you broke into my house and fell on your head hard enough to declare you had amnesia.”

“And I thank God you saw my resemblance to Isabelle and said we were married.”

“I don’t know what wild hair got into me to make me say that.” He shook his head, as if his own behavior bewildered him.

“I don’t either, but every time you made up one of those fantasies about Majorca, I fell deeper under your spell.” She kissed his chin.

“Have you ever wondered . . . ?” But it was such a silly thing to say.

“Have I ever wondered . . . what?”

He wanted to hold her, but he didn’t want her looking at him while he offered his idea, so he wrapped his arms around her and brought her close, her back to his chest. “Have you ever wondered if your grandmother Isabelle sent you to Waldemar because she loved Bradley and wanted to give him another shot at happiness?”

“What a nice idea.” Meadow leaned her head back against his chest. “You do realize my family’s woo-woo quotient is rubbing off on you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He looked over her head and across the water, where the last rays of the sun tipped the waves with gold. “I’m
Southern, and while Washington state was still primal forest, we had ghosts haunting our houses.”

“You and I aren’t so different after all.”

He hooted. “Are you kidding? Did you see our guests? Our families? And look at us!” He indicated her bare feet and his ruined leather shoes. “We’ve got nothing in common.”

She twisted in his arms. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Celebrate the difference, my dear.” He gathered her close to kiss her. “Celebrate the difference.”

Christina Dodd
is a
New York Times
bestselling author whose novels have been translated into twelve languages, featured by Doubleday Book Club
^®
, recorded on books on tape for the blind, given Romance Writers of America’s prestigious Golden Heart and RITA awards, called the year’s best by
Library Journal
and, at the pinnacle of her illustrious career, used as a clue in the
Los Angeles Times
crossword puzzle. Christina Dodd lives in Washington with her husband and two dogs. Sign up for her newsletter at
www.christinadodd.com
.

T
he four-piece ensemble ceased playing, and with exquisite timing, Comte Cloutier delivered the line sure to command the attention of all the guests within earshot. “Have you heard, Lady Lettice, of the ghost who rides in the night?”

Certainly, he commanded the attention of the Englishman Michael Durant, heir apparent to the duke of Nevitt. There had been very little to interest him at Lord Thibault’s exclusive ball. The musicians had played, the guests had danced, the food was exquisite, and the gambling room was full. But of gossip, there had been nothing . . . until now. And now, Michael knew, only because Cloutier failed to comprehend the seriousness of his faux pas. He failed to comprehend that by tomorrow, he would be gone, traveling back to France and cursing his penchant for gossip.