Finally a Bride (17 page)

“Colleen, too. Nick’s probably asking her right now,” Eric said.

“And Brenna and Josh. She’s too smart to keep turning him down.”

“And your mom and Wallace,” he gently reminded her.

She nodded. “And Wallace and Mom.”

“Are you okay with that?”

She smiled. “My dad would want her to be happy. And so do I. And you were right. All he had ever wanted for me was happiness.”

“Then I’ll do my best to make you happy, Molly McClintock, for the rest of our lives.”

H
E INTENDED TO REPEAT
that vow at their wedding—just a few short days later. Because they had been engaged the longest—nearly twenty years—everyone had agreed that they should get married first. Of course he’d threatened a couple of them with the bloody nose he’d given Molly’s first prom date.

“You know I could have fixed it,” Josh said as Eric stepped out of the kitchen slider and joined the doctor on the back deck.

Gazing out over the rows of chairs that had been arranged on the lawn between the cabin and the lake, Eric brushed his knuckles across his scar, thinking that was what the doctor referred to. “I couldn’t wait.”

“I know—you threatened me with a bloody nose,” Josh reminded him. “Which was an empty threat since I could have fixed whatever damage you did.”

“To our pretty faces,” the other
GQ
doctor piped up.

“How ‘bout you fix this scar,” Eric said, “when Molly and I get back from our honeymoon?”

Josh clasped his shoulder. “I’d love to. Our office is officially open now, so call for an appointment.”

“Sunday is supposed to be our appointment,” Rory grumbled as he and his brother joined the other groomsmen on the deck. “For fishing.”

“Your sister sank my boat,” Eric reminded the teenager. “Anyway, I need you for something a little more important than fishing.”

A grin spread across Rory’s still-boyish face. “Yeah, I’m your best man.”

“That remains to be seen, little brother,” Clayton cautioned him, but his dark eyes already filled with approval rather than censure.

“You guys gotta stay here and get your women,” Rory said as the preacher signaled from the dock.

As Eric walked down the aisle with his best man, several of the guests reached up and caught his hand, offering comments as well as congratulations: “‘Bout time.”

“Always knew you two would wind up together.”

And Pop’s, “See, son, it all worked out how it was meant to.”

Eric grinned and slapped the older man on the back. “Yes, it did.” He paused again in the first row and knelt beside his great-uncle’s wheelchair. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Recognition filled the old man’s gray eyes. “I wouldn’t have missed this for anything. I’m so proud of you, boy.”

Corporal Underwood, his chair pulled next to Uncle Harold’s, winked and nodded.

Eric stepped onto the white-carpeted dock, walking beside his best man. Then he stopped next to the preacher, within hearing distance of shore, and turned back to his and Molly’s guests—and wedding party.

Rory turned to him with his impish grin. “So you worried she’s gonna go out a window?”

“I know she’s going to,” Eric said, peering around the couples now that walked arm in arm down the aisle between the chairs. Clayton and Abby. Josh and Brenna. Nick and Colleen.

Finally, he saw her, stepping through his—
their—
bedroom slider onto the deck. She wore the dress with her veil this time. In the white strapless lace-and-satin gown, she looked like an angel, as if she’d stepped right off the top of a cake. Then the bridal march began, Rosie Hild playing the tune on the organ, which sat on a platform on the sand. And all the guests rose and turned toward his bride, hiding her from his view.

“You didn’t see Eric before the wedding?” her mom asked as she held Molly’s arm to escort her down the aisle.

“It wouldn’t matter if I had—or if I’d walked under a ladder and crossed the path of a black cat on my way to see him,” Molly assured her. “Nothing is going to stop me from marrying the man I love.”

Her mom grinned as they walked past Wallace, who sat with the Kellys. “Me neither.”

“Good.” When her mother had pulled out her lipstick earlier, Molly had seen the plane tickets to Vegas in the older woman’s purse. Departure was scheduled for that evening. Somehow it was appropriate that she and her mother share an anniversary.

“I couldn’t be happier today,” her mother said, tears sparkling in her brown eyes like sunlight sparkled on the water of the small fishing lake.

“Me neither.”

Mary McClintock tightened her grip on Molly’s arm—as they stepped together onto the dock—joining the three men already there. Molly didn’t see the other two; she saw only her groom, looking dashing in his black tux and crisp white pleated dress shirt. Through the lace of her veil, Molly met Eric’s gray gaze and everyone and everything else faded away. She barely heard the preacher’s words.

“We’re gathered here today for the wedding of this man to this woman…”

“About damn time,” someone—probably Pop or Mr. Carpenter—commented from the rows of guests.

Someone else twittered.

“Who gives this woman in marriage?” Reverend Howard asked.

“I do,” said Mary McClintock, her voice full of pride. She lifted her daughter’s veil and kissed her cheek, then she kissed Eric’s, right on his scar. But she didn’t join the other guests; she just stepped into her place at Molly’s side, as her matron of honor.

Eric reached out, taking Molly’s hands in his. He rubbed his thumbs across her bare knuckles. His voice shaking with emotion, he repeated the traditional vows. Then he added his own, “I have already loved you forever, Molly. And I will continue to love you until I draw my last breath….”

Tears blurred the sight of his handsome face. She blinked and returned his promise, “I will love you for eternity, Eric South.”

“You are my best friend,” he told her. “My heart. My soul.”

The tears streaked down her face now. At her side, her mother sniffled, too. And many of the wedding party and the guests dabbed their eyes.

Even Rory blinked hard as he handed over the rings.

The preacher held his hand over the bands, blessing them. “These rings are a symbol of your unbreakable bond.”

They didn’t need rings to symbolize what they already knew—what they’d known in their hearts since they were seven. But satisfaction, as well as love, filled Molly as Eric slid the wedding band onto her finger.

She was
finally
a bride.

Twenty years later…

Red and white fairy lights and balloons brightened the interior of the Cloverville American Legion post.

“I don’t understand what this party is,” Molly’s teenage daughter, Ronni, said, as the thin brunette settled onto a chair next to her mother.

“It’s an anniversary.”

“Of what? This isn’t the date when you and Dad were married.”

“It was supposed to be my wedding day,” she admitted with a smile. “To Josh Towers.”

“You were supposed to marry T.J. and Jamie’s dad?” They’d stopped calling Nicholas James Towers Buzz when his dark hair had grown halfway down his back. But he’d cut it when he and his twin had started medical school a couple of years ago. After their internships and residencies, they planned on joining their father and godfather’s private practice in Cloverville. “You were going to marry him instead of Dad?”

“I had accepted his proposal.”

Ronni’s gray eyes widened in shock and wonder. “But Josh is
hot,
Mom.”

Still, twenty years later, he was. And he was also blissfully happy with Brenna—with whom he swayed on the dance floor among all the twirling children. Many of the kids were theirs; some had their mother’s glorious red hair, others their father’s devastating combination of black hair and blue eyes.

Molly’s mother, in the arms of her husband, Wallace, watched all the children, her dark eyes warm with affection, as if they were all her grandchildren. Molly made a mental note to warn the older ones about her mother’s matchmaking.

Then her gaze followed her husband, in a dark suit, as he closed the short distance between them. And she figured she’d leave Mom be; she knew what she was doing, after all.

“Your father is hot, too,” Molly insisted as he joined them, sliding into the chair next to her so close that his thigh brushed hers. She tingled with awareness, their passion every bit as hot as it has been twenty—and twenty-eight—years ago.

“But, Dad…” Ronni’s face colored. “I saw pictures of you before Uncle Josh fixed your scar.”

He grinned. “Yes, I had a face only a mother could love.”

“And the right woman.”

“You’re the right woman, wife,” he agreed, pressing his mouth to hers in a kiss both deep and beautiful.

“Ewww…” their daughter groaned. “You guys are sick.”

“What’s sick?” their younger daughter, Rosie, asked, catching only her sister’s comment as she left her brother, Harry, on the dance floor.

“That hat is sick,” Ronni told her sister.

Eric tweaked the brim of the old straw hat and asked the ten-year-old, “Where’d you find that?”

“In the back of Mom’s closet.”

“I thought you might have pulled it out of a Dumpster,” he teased.

Molly smacked his shoulder. “I’m the one you pulled out of a Dumpster.”

“What?” both daughters shrieked, in shock.

“On the same day she’d gone out the church window instead of marrying Joshua Towers,” their father added.

“It’s like we don’t know you at all,” Ronni murmured, glancing up as her uncle joined them.

Rory gestured toward the punch Eric had brought them. “Do I need to check to see if that’s spiked?” he asked, his voice so deep now and full of authority.

“Nope, Sheriff,” Eric assured his brother-in-law. “It’s nonalcoholic, just like the label on the punch bowl says.” Rory hadn’t been back that long from his second tour as a Marine before Cloverville had elected the former troublemaker sheriff.

As if the thought of former troublemakers had conjured her up, Abby Hamilton-McClintock joined them; her bright blue eyes still alight with mischief.

“Uh-oh,” Rory said, shaking his head. “Here’s America’s most wanted.”

“
My
most wanted,” Clayton said as he wrapped his arms around his petite blond wife. Ever since Abby had returned to Cloverville twenty years ago, he’d never let her go. “But it’s a good thing our oldest just passed the bar.”

She would probably have to use her law license to keep her younger brother, Clay Jr., out of trouble. But Abby took it personally and jabbed an elbow into her husband’s ribs—gently—and protested, “
I
don’t get in trouble anymore.”

“You just make it,” Clayton teased his wife.

“Lara passed the bar?” Pride filled Molly. “Tell my niece congratulations.”

“She just walked in now,” Eric noted, still missing nothing. The petite blond looked exactly like her mother had twenty years ago. Gorgeous.

Behind Lara, hand in hand, walked in Colleen and Nick. Her older sister noted the wood chips and grass stuck to Colleen’s dress and tangled in her thick, dark hair; she and Nick still spent too much time in the park. She didn’t know how they managed, with all the kids they’d raised. Even though Colleen hadn’t been able to conceive children, they’d fostered many, many runaways over the past twenty years. Most of them were party guests.

“So what is this?” Ronni asked again, gesturing around at the lights and balloons.

“It’s the twenty-year anniversary of the wedding-that wasn’t,” explained her uncle Nick.

“A wedding party?” Rosie asked, having only caught a portion of what her uncle had said.

Happiness complete, Molly gazed around at all her family and friends. “No,
this
is my wedding party.”