Cain's Salvation (Passion in Paradise - The Men of the McKinnon Sisters) (7 page)

“Ha!  I’m managing
to move Mohammed from his mountain.  I should get extra points in Saint
Peter’s blessed book for this,” Honor chuckled, pleased at her progress. 
Her smile faltered, however, as she opened the flap of her purse and pulled out
a black velvet box.  Passing it to Cain, she sighed.  “Maybe someday
you’ll be able to give that back to her and put it where it belongs.”

Staring down at the
box, Cain swallowed painfully.  “I didn’t ever expect her to give the ring
back, Honor,” he murmured, his voice thick with emotion.  “It’s
hers.  Only ever hers.”

“About a month after
Faith got your letter, she asked me to mail it to you.  I just…
couldn’t.  It just seemed so cruel.  And final,” Honor confessed
softly.  “Just do me a favor, don’t offer it to her again until you
know
you’re ready for it to stay on her finger.  Taking that ring off her hand
again just might kill my sister.”

“I won’t,” Cain replied
hoarsely, staring down at the box in his hand blindly. 

Nodding, Honor rose
from the swing and straightened her skirt.  “Alright.  Be at the bar
by seven.  I’ll take care of telling Faith and the rest of the girls about
your resurrection this afternoon.”

“She works tonight?” he
asked nervously, gripping the velvet box in one hand.

“She starts her shift
tonight at eight.  Usually it’s five, but I left a note this morning
telling her that she needed some extra rest.  Patience will be there when
you begin your shift.  I don’t permit drinking on the job, and I require
you to be sober when you arrive and when you leave.  Other than that, feel
free to eat and drink as much as you like.  I know you don’t need the
money, but I’ll add you to payroll all the same.  Patience will give you
the paperwork.”  Watching him nod jerkily, Honor’s gaze remained steady on
his face.  “This is your game to win or lose, Cain.  I know my sister
still loves you, but she won’t trust you again easily.”

“I realize that.”

“Good.  One more
thing, Cain.  While I pray that you and Faith find your way back to each
other, just know that if you hurt her again, I’ll singlehandedly make your
worst day in Afghanistan look like a day at Disneyland,” she threatened
ominously.

Chilled by the look in
her eyes, Cain could only nod.  “I don’t know what will happen between
your sister and me, Honor, but I swear, hurting her any more that I have is the
last thing that I want.”

“Then we understand
each other.”  Honor smiled and pulled her purse over her arm.  “I
know you have your doubts about this, but I wouldn’t have offered you the job
if I didn’t believe it was the right thing to do.  You need to join the
rest of the world again, and you also need to fix things with Faith.  It’s
a small town.  The longer these wounds fester, the worse it will be to
cure the infection.”

“I know you’re
right.  I just hope you know what you’re doing here, Honor,” Cain returned
uncertainly, his thoughts jumbled in his already cloudy mind.  “I don’t
want to be the source of trouble between you and your sister.”

“Oh, Faith’s going to
be spitting, clawing mad.  I am suffering no delusions about that. 
I’m hoping that she’ll also realize that I’d never do anything to deliberately
hurt her.  Like you, she’ll need time.  I can live with it.  God
knows, I’ve lived with far worse.” 

The sadness in her tone
when she spoke that last part had Cain reaching for her hand.  “Thank you,
Honor.  Most people in your position wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire
at their feet.”

“Cain, make no mistake,
I’ll light you on fire myself if you screw up this chance to make things
right.”  Bending, she brushed a chaste kiss against his marred jaw. 
“Tell your daddy I said hello.  I have to go face my own sheet of music
now.”

Watching as the young
woman made her way back to her car, Cain sighed.  Breathing in the crisp
cool air deeply, he silently assessed the way he was feeling.  A little
lighter…a little freer…almost like there might be hope for him again. 
Maybe he could actually pick up the threads of his life again.  It
wouldn’t be the same for him.  It couldn’t be.

But maybe he could find
his way to a new normal.

He just hoped he could
do it with Faith at his side.

“Tell me that I heard
you wrong!” Faith shrieked as she stared across the antique kitchen table
inside the McKinnon house.  Looking from Honor to her other stunned
sisters, she asked, “Did y’all just hear the same thing I did?”

Both Patience and
Harmony fidgeted uncomfortably, not quite meeting Faith’s eyes as Honor sat
motionless at the head of the table. 

“Will somebody please
say something?” she yelled, shoving her long blonde hair over her
shoulder.  Her heart pounded in her chest as she tried to wrap her head
around the fact that Honor had not only just told her that the man that had
eviscerated her heart was back in town, but that she’d invited the bastard to
work with her, too.

“Faith, you need to see
him,” Honor begged quietly.  “Just talk to him.  Let him try to
explain…”

“Fuck that, Honor!”
Faith cursed, exploding from her chair and knocking it over as she faced her
youngest sibling.  “I’ll gut him on sight!  You’ve lost your mind if
you think I can handle seeing him every day.  Have you been living under
some rock for the past six months?  You
saw
what he put me
through.  You watched it happen!  And still, you went to him and
offered him a job?  How could you?  How could you do that to me?”

“I did what I thought
was best.  You haven’t seen him, honey.  He’s
already
gutted.  I just wanted…”

“I don’t care what you
wanted,” Faith screamed, wiping the tears flowing down her pale cheeks with the
back of her hand.  “Undo it!  Call him and tell him that you’ve
changed your mind,” she demanded.  Betrayal burned in her stomach as she
glared at her sister.  Of all the people in the world that she ever
imagined would stab her in the back, she never once thought it would be Honor.

“No.”  Honor shook
her head.  “You have to face him, Faith.  If after you’ve seen him
you still want him gone, we can talk about it, but he stays for now.”

“You only own a quarter
of the business,” Faith retorted angrily.  “We could outvote you,” she
threatened, glancing toward their shared sisters.  “You guys can’t
possibly think this is fair!” 

“Faith, I know you’re
upset,” Harmony, the eldest of them, murmured quietly, “but you’ve got to calm
down.  You’re going to scare Heaven,” she warned, glancing into the living
room where the four year old sat at the coffee table coloring while cartoons
played on the television.

“I’m sorry,” Faith
apologized quickly, wincing as she peeked in the other room at her niece. 
Looking at her older sister, she whispered, “You can’t think this is right, can
you, Harm?  Patience?”  God, she needed
somebody
to take her
side here.  “He didn’t just break up with me, guys,” she groaned. 
“He sent a fucking letter.  He broke my goddamn heart in half a page of
scrawled words.  He couldn’t even bother with the courtesy of a phone
call.  You can’t tell me that any of you think that’s forgivable.”

“I think his head got
rattled over there,” Harmony said truthfully, crossing her arms over the pink I
Don’t Care Café t-shirt she wore.  “You just heard Honor say that he was
injured, Faith.”

“He’s well enough to
come back and fuck with my life again, though,” Faith retorted bitterly,
glaring at Honor.

“No.  He
isn’t.  It was at my urging that he’s doing this, Faith.  For that,
blame me.  Not him.  It was my idea.  He said the kindest thing
he could do for you is to stay the devil away from you.  He thinks he’s
damaged.  He’s convinced that he can’t be the man that you deserve,” Honor
explained in a low voice.

Blinking, Faith rubbed
her bare legs.  Already dressed for work in her denim shorts and pink
shirt, she’d been just about ready to head into the restaurant when Honor had
arrived home and called together this little pow wow to blindside her. 
What her younger sister was saying just didn’t make any sense.  Faith had
never given Cain a single reason to feel like she wasn’t more than satisfied
with him.  In every way.  God, he’d been her everything.  She’d
been planning their future, for God’s sake.  “I don’t understand,” she whispered,
cringing as she lifted a hand to cradle her aching head.  She’d had a
headache to begin with, but it was now rapidly approaching migraine
magnitude. 

“He was at war, Faith,”
Harmony said, moving closer to the table while Patience leaned, unspeaking,
against the counter.  “War changes a soldier.  It messes with his
mind.  That’s not an excuse.  It’s a fact of life,” she noted,
tucking strands of her chin-length blonde hair behind her ears.

“But to blow up our
life together?” Faith breathed, looking at her oldest sister with tear-filled
eyes.  “Because he was confused?  I was arranging our
wedding
,
Harmony.”

“It happens,” Harmony
replied gently.  “I’m not saying to forgive him.  That’s up to
you.  I do think you should at least give him a chance to explain to you
where his mind was at when he wrote that letter, though.  If nothing else,
you deserve to know how it all came to this.”

“What about you?” Faith
asked, looking at Patience.  If there was one sister in the room that could
hold a grudge, it was Patience.  Maybe the middle child would stand up for
her.  “I know you’ve got an opinion, Patience.”

“I don’t know. 
I’m not saying that Honor was right to do what she did, but I do know her heart
was in the right place,” Patience returned slowly after a pregnant pause. 
“I guess it all comes down to one thing.  Are you still in love with him?”

Faith felt her throat
swell with emotion.  What kind of question was that?  How was she
supposed to answer it?  Of course, she loved him.  He’d hurt
her.  Hell, he’d butchered her heart, but, yes, she still loved him. 

“Faith?” Harmony
questioned gently as she watched her sister’s face dissolve into tears.

“Of course I love him,”
she admitted, choking on a sob.  “I don’t want to.  I’ve tried to
hate him.  I just can’t!”  Her shoulders heaved as she fell
apart.  She felt someone’s arms slip around her and she leaned against
them. 

“It’s okay, Faith,”
Honor murmured against Faith’s ear.  “Cry it out, honey,” she encouraged
softly, rocking her sister back and forth in her arms while she wept.

Faith pulled back when
the emotional storm passed.  Taking the napkin that Honor pressed into her
hand with numb fingers, she wiped her nose.  “I’m still pissed at you,”
she mumbled to the woman kneeling beside her. 

“I know,” Honor
acknowledged quietly.  “You have to believe that I’m not trying to hurt
you, Faith.  At some point, you knew you’d have to face him.”

Faith pushed a shaky
hand through her hair.  “Yeah.  On my terms.  In my time. 
I didn’t think my baby sister would hand him a company t-shirt and invite him
to join our family business.”

“Would you rather he
stayed out at the Turner place and drank himself to death?  Because that’s
what was going to happen if somebody didn’t do
something
.  I hate
how much he’s hurt you, Faith, but that man saved my life.  Literally
saved my life,” Honor stressed, squeezing her sister’s hand. 

“I know,” Faith
responded, her voice cracking.  “You’ll never know how grateful I am to
him for that.  It was one of the reasons I fell in love with him.  I
watched him with you.  He was so determined that you’d live.  No
matter how hard you tried to leave us, he hung onto you for us.”

“So, do you see, maybe
just a little, why I felt obligated to
try
and help him?” Honor asked
hopefully.

And in that moment,
there was a minor break in the dam that surrounded Faith’s heart. Closing her
eyes, Faith nodded stiffly.  “I do.  No matter what happens in the
future between Cain and me, I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,
either.”

Patience sighed as she
patted her sister’s shoulder.  “Faith, I’m pissed at him, too.  I
just think that if you still love him – and you just admitted that you did –
that you owe it to yourself to hear him out.  You don’t want to look back
on your life years from now and regret not giving him a chance to explain
things.”  Twirling a highlighted pink strand of hair around her finger
thoughtfully, Patience continued, “Even if you don’t work things out, this
would at least give you some resolution to the relationship.  Sorta like a
period at the end of a sentence.”

“I know you’re right,”
Faith agreed with a tired sigh.  “I just need to do this in my own
time.   I don’t need to talk to him to work with him.  He’s a bouncer. 
I’d only need him if I have any more problems.  Since I don’t intend for
that to happen, we should be able to steer clear of each other until I can
think clearly where he’s concerned.”

Harmony nodded. “That
sounds fair.”

“I’ll make sure he gets
the message, Faith,” Patience promised her sibling.  “Loud and clear,” she
added with a smirk.

“No!” Faith denied,
shaking her head furiously.  “I will talk to him when I decide the time is
right.  I love you guys, but from this point on, I want you to let
me
handle things with Cain.  This is
my
life here.  There is to
be
no
meddling.”  She gave each sister a fierce look and waited for
them to nod.

“You take the fun out
of everything,” Patience complained with a tiny smile.

“I didn’t say you
couldn’t torture him a little,” Faith replied, her blonde brow arching slightly
in jest.

“Oh, sis.  You
just made my night.”  Patience winked while Honor and Harmony
shuddered.  Of all of them, Patience was the most devious.  She’d
make it a mission to get under Cain’s skin.

“Go on to work,
Patience.  The rest of you enjoy your night.  I’m gonna go fix my
face,” Faith murmured huskily as she rose from the table.  She needed a
few minutes alone to compose herself before she faced the man that had broken
her heart. 

Alone in her room a few
minutes later, she sagged to the bed and clutched a pillow to her chest as she
stared at the wall.  In just a few short minutes, her life had yet again
been sent careening wildly out of control. 

Cain was home, alive,
but hurt on both the inside and out.  Her sister had been brutally honest
about the horrors Cain had faced, sparing nothing in the story.

Part of her wanted to
run to him, throw herself back in his arms and forget the past six months had
happened.  But the sane, rational woman she was knew that wasn’t
possible.  Too much had happened to each of them to simply go back to the
way they’d been.  There’d been too much pain and distance between them.

She couldn’t deny to
herself, however, that she wanted to breach that gap.    She’d
never loved anyone the way she loved Cain.  She couldn’t fathom ever
loving anyone else that deeply, either.  If she was fanciful enough to
believe in soul mates, he’d be hers.

She just didn’t know if
she could stand the pain of being disappointed by him again.

Certainly not when she
wasn’t sure if she’d ever recover from his first crushing blow.

For both of them, though, she had to
try.