“Can I have a big hug?” Jack asked, grinning at Betsy.
She held her arms out to him, and he took her from me.
“Can I have one?” I said to Greg.
He leaned down and wrapped his arms around me, his face finding my shoulder. I felt wetness, and I rocked him from side to side.
I touched Jack’s elbow and leaned toward him, not letting go of Greg. “Thank you, Jack. For making this possible.”
He smiled at me and bounced Betsy into the air.
A ripping sensation tore through my heart. That. That pain was why I couldn’t stay, no matter that Jack gave me a house or that Greg couldn’t go with me to Dallas. No matter how badly I wanted to, I couldn’t hurt this much all the time, could I? This kind of pain did terrible things to a person. Terrible, terrible things. The room started spinning. My legs felt like they were about to buckle. “I have to go,” I said to no one in particular, almost as if I was in a dream.
“What?” Jack asked.
“I have to go.” A bright light shone from the doors, drawing me toward it. The ground seemed foggy, and my feet were no longer a part of my body. They turned me toward the gallery. I didn’t want to, but I released a wide-eyed Greg, following the light through the swinging doors.
***
Whap! The gavel rapped so hard against the surface in front of Judge Herring that it sounded like a rifle shot, startling me. I found myself in the aisle between either side of the gallery. Whap! Whap! Whap! “Ms. Bernal, I haven’t dismissed anyone. Where do you think you’re going?”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. But it seemed I’d peeved off the toughest judge in Potter County, wherever it was. I had to make it better, even if it meant humiliating myself in a total breakdown in front of him. I rotated back toward him, slowly, and curtsied. “I’m sorry, Your Honor.”
“Return to your position and don’t move again until I say you can. You’ve been in here enough times to know I don’t take contempt of court lightly.”
I literally stumbled back through the gate and back to my spot in front of him, stepping inside my prairie skirt with my boots as I did and jerking the elastic waistband below my leather hip belt and halfway to my knees in front. Mother Mary Magdalene. I was wearing nothing but a pink satin thong under my skirt. Mortified, I snatched the skirt back up, and looked at a point on the floor halfway between the bench and me. The heat in my cheeks burned. I closed my eyes and licked my lips, adjusting the lace sleeves of my satin vested top. No one in the back saw a thing. Only the judge. And he could barely see anyway, if his glasses were any indication.
I glanced up. He was grinning ear-to-ear and winked at me. I cut my eyes back to the floor. How could this be the best and the worst day of my life all at once?
“Now, for the last unusual thing of the day. Bailiff, you can let our guests in now.”
My eyes followed the bailiff as she strolled to the courtroom doors, although I cut them back and forth between her and the judge a few times, just to make sure I wasn’t in trouble with him again. Jack set Betsy down, and she stood between us, as did Greg. I took Betsy’s hand and hoped she’d help me stay upright. She reached for Greg’s, and Jack took his other one.
I leaned in front of Betsy and Greg and whispered to Jack. “What’s going on?”
The bailiff threw open the door. Jack ignored me, but the left side of his face slid up as his sexy dimple sunk into his cheek. His eyebrow rose toward his hairline, and my stomach flipped.
Katie Kovacs floated in wearing a really horrible peach taffeta dress several inches too short. My dress. My senior year prom dress. In front of her she held an enormous bouquet of daisies. I laughed aloud. Nick followed her, a little girl on each hip and a little boy holding on to his pants leg. Mickey came next, in a suit and a bolo. Laura and Farrah walked behind him, Farrah dragging Stella along by the hand. The procession seemed endless. My parents. Jack’s parents. Ava, Rashidi, Collin, Michele. Clyde’s nurse, Betty, who waggled her fingers at me, her smile sad. Wallace and Ethan fell in with them, as did Nadine and Judith. Everyone in the gallery was standing, smiling with all their teeth.
Jack finally leaned behind the kids to answer me. “You’ll see. Hey, you’re crying again.”
My hands flew to my face and found the tears. “Yeah,” I said, and I laughed and wiped them with the back of my hand.
Katie came through the gate to stand beside me. She handed me the flowers and I hugged her.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I choked out.
She just smiled and didn’t say a word while she peeled Betsy away and behind us, Greg attached to the little girl by the hand.
Dad slipped in between Jack and me, and Mickey came to stand on the other side of Jack.
“Did you tell her?” Mickey asked Jack, handing Betsy a pillow with a ring on it.
That got her to let go of Greg. She touched the ring with her index finger, her eyes aglow. The gate swung shut behind Mickey, and the rest of our friends and family scooched into the gallery seats.
Jack shook his head at Mickey then took a deep breath. Without taking his eyes away from the judge he said, “I only want to marry you because I love you. No other reason.”
I stared at his chiseled profile, then my mouth got the better of me before my brain could catch up. “You loved your wife. You didn’t stop loving her because she died.”
He faced me, and I saw the tears in his eyes to match mine. “No, but she’s been gone a long time, and I love you.”
“But why?”
He looked upward. “Sometimes I don’t know.” Then he grinned at me, completely lopsided, which made a tear roll down his cheek. “Because you leap before you look and shoot better than me and can rope a man while he’s running and hold live rattlesnakes in your bare hands.” He shook his head. “And because you’re all I think about when you’re not around, and when you left the other day, all the air left with you.”
My heart pounded in my ears as I kept my gaze deep in his, so deep I could see his own heart beating inside, true and strong. A smile came to my lips, and I swear I saw a halo circling Jack’s head like the rings of Jupiter. Either that or I’d lost my mind, but suddenly I was so completely sure that Jack was the one that my heart nearly exploded out of my chest.
“There it is.”
“There what is?”
“That little thing I love.” He pointed at my teeth.
I rewarded him with an even bigger smile. Then I frowned. “But why couldn’t you just tell me before?”
Jack froze, mute.
Mickey saved him, his voice gentle. “Because if he spoke it out, he was afraid the universe would take you away from him, Emily.”
Not Standing Hair this time. The tears rained down my cheeks. I wiped them away and couldn’t help but check my bangs.
“You look perfect,” Jack said.
I shook my head, smiling. “How’d you pull this off?”
That lopsided grin and dimple nearly distracted me from his answer. “A cell phone in a hospital bed, with a lot of really eager people who wanted to make this happen no matter how difficult.”
Katie nudged me in the side with her elbow. I ignored her, but she did it again, so I looked at her, then back at the judge. His lips were moving but all I could hear was the blood against my eardrums.
“I’m sorry, what, Your Honor?” I said.
“I asked whether we had a wedding to perform here or not.”
“Well, what will it be?” Jack said, but in his eyes I could see he already knew.
“I do,” I said, and the sounds of the laughter of my friends and family wrapped around me for a tight squeeze.
“Order in the court. We haven’t gotten to that part yet,” Herring protested.
“And I haven’t decided whether I’m giving her away.” But Dad kissed me on the cheek and put my hand in Jack’s, then stole away to sit by Mother.
“I do, too.” Jack pulled me to him.
I batted my eyes and he la
ughed.
“Contempt of court.” Herring sighed. “You may kiss the woman who will soon be your bride.”
And so he did, in front of God, half the population of Amarillo, and everyone we loved most.
The End
###
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Excerpt from Saving Grace (What Doesn’t Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery
Chapter One
Last year sucked, and this one was already worse.
Last year, when my parents died in an “accident” on their Caribbean vacation, I’d been working too hard to listen to my instincts, which were screaming “bullshit” so loud I almost went deaf in my third ear. I was preparing for the biggest case of my career, so I sort of had an excuse that worked for me as long as I showed up for happy hour, but the truth was, I was obsessed with the private investigator assigned to my case.
Nick. Almost-divorced Nick. My new co-worker Nick who sometimes sent out vibes that he wanted to rip my Ann Taylor blouse off with his teeth, when he wasn’t busy ignoring me.
But things had changed.
I’d just gotten the verdict back in my mega-trial, the Burnside wrongful termination case. My firm rarely took plaintiff cases, so I’d taken a big risk with this one—and won Mr. Burnside three million dollars, of which the firm got a third. That was the total opposite of suck.
After my coup at the Dallas courthouse, my paralegal Emily and I headed straight down I-20 to the hotel where our firm was on retreat in Shreveport, Louisiana. Shreveport is not on the top ten list for most company getaways, but our senior partner fancied himself a poker player, and loved Cajun food, jazz, and riverboat casinos. The retreat was a great excuse for Gino to indulge in a little Texas Hold ’Em between teambuilding and sensitivity sessions and still come off looking like a helluva guy, but it meant a three and a half hour drive each way. This wasn’t a problem for Emily and me. We bridged both the paralegal-to-attorney gap and the co-worker-to-friend gap with ease, largely because neither of us did Dallas-fancy very well. Or at all.
Emily and I hustled inside for check-in at the Eldorado.
“Do you want a map of the ghost tours?” the front desk clerk asked us, her polyglot Texan-Cajun-Southern accent making tours sound like “turs.”
“Why, thank you kindly, but no thanks,” Emily drawled. In the ten years since she’d left, she still hadn’t shaken Amarillo from her voice or given up barrel-racing horses.
I didn’t believe in hocus pocus, either, but I wasn’t a fan of casinos, which reeked of cigarette smoke and desperation. “Do y’all have karaoke or anything else but casinos onsite?”
“Yes, ma’am, we have a rooftop bar with karaoke, pool tables, and that kind of thing.” The girl swiped at her bangs, then swung her head to put them back in the same place they’d been.
“That sounds more like it,” I said to Emily.
“Karaoke,” she said. “Again.” She rolled her eyes. “Only if we can do tradesies halfway. I want to play blackjack.”
After we deposited our bags in our rooms and freshened up, talking to each other on our cell phones the whole time we were apart, we joined our group. All of our co-workers broke into applause as we entered the conference room. News of our victory had preceded us. We curtsied, and I used both arms to do a Vanna White toward Emily. She returned the favor.
“Where’s Nick?” I called out. “Come on up here.”
Nick had left the courtroom when the jury went out to deliberate, so he’d beaten us here. He stood up from a table on the far side of the room, but didn’t join us in front. I gave him a long distance Vanna White anyway.
The applause died down and some of my partners motioned for me to sit with them at a table near the entrance. I joined them and we all got to work writing a mission statement for the firm for the next fifteen minutes. Emily and I had arrived just in time for the first day’s sessions to end.
When we broke, the group stampeded from the hotel to the docked barge that housed the casino. In Louisiana, gambling is only legal “on the water” or on tribal land. On impulse, I walked to the elevator instead of the casino. Just before the doors closed, a hand jammed between them and they bounced apart, and I found myself headed up to the hotel rooms with none other than Nick Kovacs.
“So, Helen, you’re not a gambler either,” he said as the elevator doors closed.
My stomach flipped. Cheesy, yes, but when he was in a good mood, Nick called me Helen—as in Helen of Troy.
I had promised to meet Emily for early blackjack before late karaoke, but he didn’t need to know that. “I have the luck of the Irish,” I said. “Gambling is dangerous for me.”
He responded with dead silence. Each of us looked up, down, sideways, and anywhere but at each other, which was hard, since the elevator was mirrored above a gold handrail and wood paneling. There was a wee bit of tension in the air.
“I heard there’s a pool table at the hotel bar, though, and I’d be up for that,” I offered, throwing myself headlong into the void and holding my breath on the way down.
Dead silence again. Long, dead silence. The ground was going to hurt when I hit it.
Without making eye contact, Nick said, “OK, I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Did he really say he’d meet me there? Just the two of us? Out together? Oh my God, Katie, what have you done?
The elevator doors dinged, and we headed in opposite directions to our rooms. It was too late to back out now.
I moved in a daze. Hyperventilating. Pits sweating. Heart pounding. My outfit was all wrong, so I ditched the Ann Taylor for some jeans, a structured white blouse, and, yes, I admit it, a multi-colored Jessica Simpson handbag and her coordinating orange platform sandals. White works well against my long, wavy red hair, which I unclipped and finger-combed over my shoulders. Not very attorney-like, but that was the point. Besides, I didn’t even like being an attorney, so why would I want to look like one now?
Normally I am Katie Clean, but I settled on a quick brush of my teeth, a French shower, and lipstick. I considered calling Emily to tell her I was no-showing, but I knew she would understand when I explained later. I race-walked to the elevators and cursed them as they stopped on every other floor before the Rooftop Grotto.
Ding. Finally. I stopped to catch my breath. I counted to ten, took one last gulp for courage, and stepped under the dim lights above the stone-topped bar. I stood near a man whose masculinity I could feel pulsing from several feet away. Heat flamed in my cheeks. My engine raced. Just the man I’d come to see.
Nick was of Hungarian descent, and he had his gypsy ancestors to thank for his all-over darkness—eyes, hair, and skin—and sharp cheekbones. He had a muscular ranginess that I loved, but he wasn’t traditionally handsome. His nose was large-ish and crooked from being broken too many times. He’d once told me that a surfboard to the mouth had given him his snaggled front tooth. But he was gorgeous in an undefined way, and I often saw from the quick glances of other women that I wasn’t the only one in the room who noticed.
Now he noticed me. “Hi, Helen.”
“Hi, Paris,” I replied.
He snorted. “Oh, I am definitely not your Paris. Paris was a wimp.”
“Hmmmmm. Menelaus,
then?”
“Um, beer.”
“I’m pretty sure there was no one named Beer in the story of Helen of Troy,” I said, sniffing in a faux-superior way.
Nick spoke to the bartender. “St. Pauli Girl.” He finally gave me the Nick grin, and the tension left over from our elevator ride disappeared. “Want one?”
I needed to gulp more than air for courage. “Amstel Light.”
Nick placed the order. The bartender handed Nick two beers beaded with moisture, then shook water from his hands. Nick handed mine to me and I wrapped a napkin around it, lining up the edges with the military precision I adored. Nick sang under his breath, his head bobbing side to side. Honky-tonk Woman.
“I think I like you better in Shreveport than Dallas,” I said.
“Thanks, I think. And I like seeing you happy. I guess it’s been a tough year for you, losing your parents and all. Here’s to that smile,” he said, holding his beer aloft toward me.
The toast almost stopped my heart. He was spot-on about the tough part, but I did better when I kept the subject of my parents buried with them. I clinked his bottle but couldn’t look at him while I did it. “Thanks, Nick, very much.”
“Want to play pool?” he asked.
“Let’s do it.”
I was giddy, the sophomore girl out with the senior quarterback. We both loved music, so we talked about genres, bands (his old band, Stingray, and “real” bands), my minor in music at Baylor, and LSD, AKA lead-singer disease. Over a bucket of beers, we swapped stories about high school, and he told me he’d once rescued an injured booby.
“An injured booby?” I asked. “Implants or natural? Eight ball in corner pocket.” I sank it.
He gathered the balls out of the pockets and positioned them in the rack while I ground my cue tip in blue chalk and blew off the excess. “You’re so land-locked. A booby is a bird, Katie.”
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