Kiss the Bride (74 page)

Alma was due to arrive on a freighter at midnight and Elysee had to be there to warn her. Once she knew both Alma and Rana were secreted away someplace safe, she’d call Cal Ackerman to come pick her up.

She arrived at the docks just in time to see the freighter come pulling into the shipping channel. It was awfully dark down there and pretty scary with all those big containers stacked everywhere. Plenty of places for a hired assassin to hide.

Up ahead, along the waterfront, she saw a flashlight beam bobbing, a beacon in the darkness.

“Rana,” she whispered. She had to get to Rana and warn her. She rushed ahead into a little clearing amid the containers, but stopped short in the shadows when she saw Shane and Tish, their hands bound in front of them with duct tape, being held at gunpoint by Pete Larkin only a few feet away from where she stood.

Her heart slammed into her chest. What to do? What to do?

Call 9-1-1.

She reached into her pocket for her cell phone, flipped it open, and pressed the 9.

In the quiet darkness that single soft beep was deafening.

Larkin’s head came up.

Their eyes met.

Elysee whirled.

Larkin dove.

She dropped the phone.

He grabbed her ankle, pulled her down on the dock.

She shrieked.

He yanked her by the front of her shirt with one hand and pulled her to her feet, while simultaneously spinning toward Shane, his gun outstretched. He caught Elysee’s neck in the crook of his arm, then pressed the gun against her temple.

“Don’t move, hero,” Larkin threatened.

Elysee held her breath.

Shane’s eyes met hers.

Larkin began backing up, dragging Elysee with him.

Shane launched himself at Larkin.

Instinctively, instantaneously, Larkin swung the gun around and fired without aiming in Shane’s direction.

Elysee heard a gasp of pain. “Shane?”

Her eyes widened. Shane hadn’t been hit. Tish had been standing right behind him.

With a soft “Oh,” Tish crumpled to the dock.

Shane whirled around just in time to see her collapse. He made a guttural sound of despair and dropped to his knees beside his ex-wife.

“You bastard!” Elysee cried.

Using a self-defense technique Shane had taught her, she reached up and pressed in just the right spot on
Larkin’s carotid artery. Two seconds later he lay incapacitated on the ground.

“Secret Service,” Cal Ackerman’s voice rang out from behind them all. “Don’t anybody move.”

The pain in her shoulder burned like liquid fire. Tish opened her eyes to find herself in a hospital bed.

Where was she? How had she gotten here?

She blinked and glanced around. Shane was perched in a chair at her bedside looking weary and sad, gazing down at his wounded hand. Elysee stood at the window, arms crossed over her chest, staring at something on the street below. Lola was kicked back in a recliner across the room, tapping something into her laptop. And Cal Ackerman was leaning his shoulder against the doorjamb.

She reached over and touched the thick bandage at her collarbone. Ouch!

Her head felt muzzy, her memory vague. The last thing she remembered was making love with Shane in the shipping pod. She smiled. They were a couple again.

“Hey, you guys?” she croaked, pushing the words past her dry lips.

“Tish!” everyone said in unison.

Lola closed her laptop. Elysee moved away from the window. Cal stood up straight. And Shane, an exhilarated smile on his face, took her hand.

“How are you feeling?” Shane asked. “You okay?”

“Fine, fine, just confused. How’d I get here? How long have I been here? I’m starving.”

“You’ve been unconscious for two days,” Lola said.

“Two days!” Her gaze flew to Shane’s. He nodded, confirming what Lola had said. “What happened to my shoulder?”

“Larkin shot you,” Shane said through gritted teeth, “but the bullet was a clean through-and-through. When you fell you hit your head, and that’s why you’ve been out. If it hadn’t been for Elysee’s quick thinking, Larkin would have killed all three of us.”

“Only because none of you trusted me enough to let me know what was going on.” Cal glowered. “If Elysee hadn’t been wearing her tracking device…”

“Elysee saved us?” Tish laughed, feeling giddy and happy to be alive.

“What’s so funny?” Elysee asked. “You don’t think I’m capable of saving someone?”

“No, no, not at all.”

“I’m tougher than I look.” She blew on her fingernails and rubbed them against her shirt in a comical gesture that said, “Yeah, I bested a badass rogue CIA agent and it was easy.”

Everyone laughed then.

“So what became of Larkin?”

“He’s in big-time trouble. Thanks to your videotape, he’ll be going to prison. Ambassador Kumar is in some pretty hot water himself.”

Tish shifted her gaze to Elysee. “What about Rana and Alma? Are they okay? Did Larkin get to them?”

“They’re both fine,” Elysee said. “Rana had never really intended to ship Alma via freighter. It was just a story she concocted because she knew how ruthless the men coming after Alma could be. She had to stay two steps ahead of them. Rana didn’t clue me in, thinking it would be safer for me if I didn’t know Alma’s real travel route. She never dreamed I would end up going to the docks.”

“It would have been smarter,” Cal chided, “if you hadn’t ditched your bodyguard.”

“Good thing you showed up,” Shane said. “I hate to think what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”

“But how did you know Larkin would be there?”

“I didn’t know for sure it was Larkin, but your videotape led me to the docks.”

“My videotape?”

“You caught Ambassador Kumar on tape hiring Larkin to murder Alma. They were speaking in Hindi and I understood it. So ultimately, Tish, you were the one who broke the case,” Elysee explained.

“There was so much left to chance.” Tish shook her head. “If Shane hadn’t given me his phone with the GPS tracking, if you hadn’t watched the video, I’d be dead. Thank you, Elysee, for saving my life.”

Elysee smiled. “I think everything happened the way it did for a reason. We’re connected. All of us.”

Tish smiled back, recognizing the truth of it. They were all connected in some way.

“Your mother’s been here,” Shane said, “and your friends Delaney and Rachael. Jillian called from San Francisco. Everyone’s been pretty worried about you.”

“My head’s so fuzzy. I really don’t remember much of what happened.”

Lola said. “Cal confessed that the reason he had red lava gravel on his shoes from the garden outside your apartment was because he’d gone there to tell you that Shane was still in love with you.”

“You knew?”

“Please,” Cal said gruffly. “I knew you two were meant to be together the night you took him home from Louie’s.”

Tish glanced over at Shane. Their eyes met and his smile tipped up at the corners. She was barely aware that Elysee, Cal, and Lola had tiptoed out of the room.

“I think we’re alone now,” he whispered.

“I thought they’d never leave.” Her gaze took him in. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He managed to look both crisp and relaxed.

His face was full of tenderness. “I got something for you.”

“Oh?”

He reached behind him for something on the floor and pulled up a package wrapped in a turquoise bow.

“You got me a present?” Her grin widened.

“Open it.”

Eagerly, she pulled off the ribbon and lifted the lid. The minute she saw it her heart stilled and her bottom lip started to quiver. “Shane, it’s magnificent.”

From the box she lifted the Jack bookend, a perfect match to her Jill. “Where did you find him?”

“E-bay, and I paid a pretty penny for express-mail shipping. Jill’s in the box, too. Dick Tracy brought her by yesterday. The investigation’s closed since Larkin confessed to starting the fire.”

Tish took Jill from the box, sat her next to Jack in her lap. They were together again, balancing each other.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

“No,” he said. “Thank you for loving me and never stopping.”

She slipped out of bed and settled into his lap. Kissing him lightly on the lips, she slid her arms around his neck. He held her close. She could hear the steady lub-dub of his heart.

They sat there in the hospital room, gazing into each other’s eyes, drinking each other in. All this time, never knowing, they’d been on a journey back to each other.

She stared into the depths of his breathtaking brown eyes and her heart filled with contentment. They were better now than they’d been. Stronger, wiser, braver.

“My love, my life, my wife,” he whispered. “For now, forever, for always. Marry me again, Tish. This time we’ll do it right.”

There was only one thing to say. With a sweet sigh of pleasure, Tish said, “Yes.”

A
djusting his boutonniere in his parents’ backyard, the ex–Secret Service agent, turned business manager to his high-profile videographer wife, scanned the crowd.

All the usual suspects were there. Tish’s friends—Delaney with her rounded belly and her husband, Nick; Jillian, who’d just made Assistant DA in Harris County; Rachael, who was still single and searching; Shane’s parents and his sister, Amy; Tish’s mom, Dixie Ann.

The special guest of honor, one class act, Elysee Benedict, was present. Cal was there, too, keeping an eye on Elysee.

They had so many friends, such a loving family. They were so blessed it was hard to believe that they had once gotten so off track. But that detour had taught them a very valuable lesson neither one of them would ever forget.

Balance. That was key. Shane had learned to stop identifying with an impossible image of heroism that he could never achieve and accept himself, flaws and all. Tish had learned to ask for what she needed rather than burying her emotions under excess spending.

Some big changes had been made, and they were all for the better.

Once the vows had been taken and the ceremony completed, his beautiful wife tugged off her wedding veil and handed it to her friend Rachael with a bold wink. Then she pulled him off to the side for a big kiss.

“I love you, Shane Tremont. I have from the moment you punched that bald guy on my behalf at Louie’s.”

“And I love you, Tish Gallagher Tremont. From the first night you took me to bed and wouldn’t let me touch you.”

He wrapped his right arm around her waist with the hand that was now almost healed. “I never stopped loving you, not one time during all the sadness and confusion over losing Johnny.”

“Shh,” she said. “It’s okay. Everything is as it should be.”

“I have a very smart wife.”

And that’s how Shane Tremont, middle-class boy from small-town America, found himself remarried to the love of his life.

T
he last thing Sheriff Brody Carlton expected to find when he wheeled his state-issued white-and-black Crown Victoria patrol cruiser past the
WELCOME TO VALENTINE, TEXAS, ROMANCE CAPITAL OF THE USA
billboard was a woman in a sequined wedding dress dangling from the town’s mascot—a pair of the most garish, oversized, scarlet puckered-up-for-a-kiss lips ever poured in fiberglass.

She swayed forty feet off the ground in the early Sunday morning summer breeze, one arm wrapped around the sensuous curve of the full bottom lip, her other arm wielding a paintbrush dipped in black paint, her white satin ballet-slippered toes skimming the billboard’s weathered wooden platform.

The billboard had been vandalized before, but never, to Brody’s knowledge, by a disgruntled bride. He contemplated hitting the siren to warn her off, but feared she’d startle and end up breaking her silly neck. Instead, he whipped over onto the shoulder of the road, rolled down the passenger-side window, slid his Maui Jim sunglasses to the end of his nose, and craned his neck for a better look.

The delinquent bride had her bottom lip tucked up between her teeth. She was concentrating on desecrating the billboard. It had been a staple in Valentine’s history for as long as Brody could remember. Her blonde hair, done up in one of those twisty braided hairdos, was partially obscured by the intricate lace of a floor-length wedding veil. When the sunlight hit the veil’s lace just right it shimmered a phosphorescent pattern of white butterflies that looked as if they were about to rise up and flutter away.