by JoAnn Ross
“Please, Shiloh?” He was looking at her with big brown eyes that reminded her of a whipped cocker spaniel.
“If I lose Matt because of this, you’re going to have to marry me so my babies have a father,” she warned. Then, taking another deep breath, she ran out the door and up onto the wooden stage. There was a moment of shocked silence. Then applause from everyone in the saloon. Shiloh had no choice but start belting out the lyrics to “Honky-Tonk Angel.”
Matt couldn’t believe it! Who the hell did Shiloh think she was, belting out the raucous country song like Patsy Cline? Every time she took a breath, her breasts practically popped out of that ridiculous dress, and although she’d had to give up the high heels for ballet slippers, her wraparound legs still gave a man wicked ideas as she strutted across the stage, her red petticoats swishing. Although Matt was all too aware that tongues were hanging out all over the saloon, he managed to tamp down his knee-jerk jealousy and enjoy the show with the rest of the crowd. After all, he reminded himself, he was the man she was going to go home with.
He didn’t know how many songs she sang, but when she perched on the tall stool that had suddenly appeared on the stage, crossed her legs and, bathed in a soft blue light, crooned a bittersweet ballad about a man and a woman trying to make conversation after a one-night stand, he realized how she’d been suffering that morning.
His ego may have been pricked, but her heart had been wounded. And he was the one responsible for that. She was a sweet, warmhearted, incredibly hardworking, independent, generous woman, and although he certainly hadn’t meant to, he’d ended up treating her like some woman purchased for a night on Sunset Boulevard.
Marveling that fate had given them a second chance, Matt vowed to make that morning up to her. If it took the rest of their lives.
The thunderous applause, like cannon fire, jerked him from his thoughts. She was sitting there on her stool, the microphone in her hand, looking straight at him. He viewed the naked worry in her eyes and knew he’d been the one responsible for putting it there.
He weaved his way through the tables and jumped onto the stage, took the microphone and handed it to the keyboard player.
“I can explain,” she began in a faltering little voice that pulled at a thousand unnamed chords inside him. He liked it better, he realized, when she was arguing with him.
“You don’t have to.” He pulled her gently off the stool and into his arms. “You were magnificent.”
“I was out of tune.”
“I didn’t notice.” He brushed a tendril of hair away from her frowning face. “No one noticed. We were all too caught up in the songs. They’re really good.”
A smile shone on her face, like a rainbow after a summer storm. “You really think so?”
“You bet. And even more important, the guy in the Western-cut suede suit sitting at the table in the back of the room seemed to think so, too.” Not caring that they were bathed in a spotlight, he bent his head and brushed his smiling lips against hers. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
“Really?” Her heart suddenly felt so light, Shiloh feared it would float away. “What?”
“Hey, Shiloh,” Kevin said, breaking into the conversation. “Guess what!”
Neither Shiloh nor Matt looked at him. “Go away,” they said in unison.
“But we got the contract, Shiloh. The guy loved your songs. He loved us.”
“Kevin Brown,” Dorothy’s voice called out from the back of the room, “would you please leave those two lovebirds alone?”
The room burst into laughter. Everyone but Shiloh and Matt, who were in their own little world.
“You were saying?” she asked breathlessly as she twined her fingers around his neck.
“I love you, Shiloh. I think I’ve always loved you, probably even that first night, but I was too stupid or scared to realize it. So, if you’ll have me, after the fool I’ve made of myself taking this long to propose, I want to marry you.”
“I told you,” Catherine murmured to her husband, who’d arrived with his mother during Shiloh’s second number.
“So you did,” he agreed with an answering smile.
“It’s high time,” Augusta said, nodding her satisfaction.
Shiloh smiled at Matt. “I think I’ve loved you forever, Matt. Of course I’ll marry you.”
The wedding was held two weeks later in the Silver Nugget. Savannah had flown in from Monte Carlo to serve as maid of honor, and Shiloh had been amused—and hopeful—at the immediate attraction between her sister and Fletcher Brown.
“It’s not serious,” Savannah insisted. “My God, it can’t be. He’s a small-town cop.”
“He’s also like no one else you’ve ever met,” Shiloh pointed out. Like Matt, Fletch possessed that rare combination of strength and tenderness.
“That’s true,” Savannah admitted with a rippling sigh as she fussed with Shiloh’s diaphanous white veil. “Who would have thought it was contagious?”
“What?”
“Love, dammit.”
Shiloh grinned, enjoying the idea of her sister living in Paradise with her. The smile gave way to a grimace as another cramp gripped her abdomen.
“What’s wrong?” Savannah asked quickly. Before Shiloh could answer, realization kicked in. “Oh, my God. How long have you been having pains?”
“Since this morning.” Exactly eight hours and twenty minutes ago. Shiloh had been keeping track.
“This morning?” The General had arrived at the suite. Soon, he’d walk her down the aisle. Shiloh watched in amazement as this man who’d marched bravely into battles all over the world turned chalk pale. “You’re not even due for nearly three weeks.”
“Try telling that to the babies,” she suggested dryly. “Obviously they’re impatient to be born.”
“Why aren’t you in the hospital?” the General demanded.
“Because it took me months to get Matt to the altar. And I’m not going to risk him changing his mind.”
“He won’t, if he knows what’s good for him.”
Since Shiloh understood her father’s threat was spoken out of love for her, she didn’t argue. “There’s one more reason. I want to be married before I become a mother. So please,” she implored them both, “don’t say anything. I promise, as soon as the ceremony’s over, I’ll go straight to the hospital.”
Father and sister exchanged a frustrated look. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re damn stubborn, Shiloh Belle Beauregard?” the General said finally.
Shiloh laughed. “I think I’ve heard it mentioned before.”
Moments later, as Matt stood beside Fletch, watching his bride walking toward him, he couldn’t believe his luck. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Men all over the world fantasized about Shiloh Beauregard. And she was his!
When Savannah whispered something in the minister’s ear, he cast a quick, alarmed grin Shiloh’s way, then proceeded to whip through the ceremony in record time.
“And do you, Matthew McCandless, take Shiloh Beauregard to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love, honor and cherish for the rest of your lives?”
His smile was as warm as the August sun shining outside the Silver Nugget. “I do.”
As he witnessed Shiloh suddenly bite her lip, the minister went into overdrive. “And do you, Shiloh Beauregard, take Matthew McCandless to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love, honor and cherish for the rest of your lives?”
Her heart in her eyes, Shiloh answered, “I do.”
And then, as the minister proclaimed them husband and wife, Shiloh doubled over.
“I knew it,” Savannah said. “My niece and nephew are going to end up being born in a bar.”
In the end, the babies were born in the same hospital where Matt and his parents and grandparents before him were born. The mother remained absolutely calm throughout the births. The father was a basket case.
Matt survived the first birth, just barely, but as he watche
d his son come into the world, his legs folded beneath him and he landed, facedown, on the delivery room floor.
“I knew it,” Dr. Lucas muttered as the nurse knelt and waved the ampoule of ammonium carbonate beneath his nose.
Holding both her babies in her arms, Shiloh watched the man she loved struggling to his feet and laughed with wonder. She was truly the luckiest woman in the world.
EPILOGUE
It was New Year’s Eve in Paradise. Down at the Silver Nugget, the annual party was in full swing, but Matt and Shiloh had chosen to celebrate this special anniversary at home.
“I never believed in destiny,” Matt mused as they sipped champagne in front of a crackling fire. He turned toward Shiloh, his expression immeasurably solemn. “Until you.” He reached behind the sofa pillow, where he’d stashed the gift earlier in the evening.
Shiloh opened the gray velvet box and gasped at the dazzling pavé diamond heart. “Oh, Matt,” she breathed. “It’s stunning.”
“I wanted you to remember, while you’re in Oklahoma, that you’ve taken my heart with you.”
The producer she’d met at the film festival had called. And when she’d been offered the starring role in his movie, Shiloh had hesitated. But Matt had insisted, pointing out it was the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I’ll only be gone four weeks,” she reminded him.
Four weeks—that would seem a lifetime. Matt reminded himself that after having paid her dues in all those B-movies, she deserved to reap the rewards.
“I know.” He rubbed at the worry lines in her forehead with a tender finger. “And your husband and children will be home, waiting for you.”
Her husband. And children. Shiloh had never heard sweeter words. She lifted the heart from its bed of white satin and held it out to him. “Would you put it on me, please?”
He fastened the clasp, then sat back, gazing at the sight of her, dressed in the white satin nightgown, with his gift nestled between her breasts.
“I want to make love to you. Here, in front of the fire, with you wearing only that diamond heart.”
Reading the desire in his eyes, Shiloh was infused with a heat that had nothing to do with the crackling orange flames. “Right after we check the babies.”
He ran his hand down her cheek, thinking he’d never met a more natural mother. “It’s a date.”
As they stood beside the matching cribs, Shiloh gazed down at these beautiful children she and Matt had made together and felt her heart swell.
“They’re like tiny miracles,” she whispered.
He brushed a kiss against her temple. “That’s because we’re a match made in heaven.”
She smiled up at him. “Or Paradise.”
As they left the nursery, closing the door behind them, the babies turned toward one another. And smiled.
* * * * *
Can’t get enough JoAnne Ross? Preorder your copy of Snowfall on Lighthouse Lane wherever you buy your books!
Lose yourself in the magic, charm and romance of the Pacific Northwest, as imagined in New York Times bestselling author JoAnn Ross’s heartwarming Honeymoon Harbor series! Don’t miss the second book, Snowfall on Lighthouse Lane, coming November 2018!
CHAPTER 1
October
Washington State coast
Aiden Mannion watched the fishing boats chug along beneath a gray quilted sky from the deck of his family’s vacation house. Out on the horizon a storm was brewing, bringing to mind all the ships that had sunk into the sea off this wild, rugged Washington coast. Including ancestors from the Harper side of his family.
Life, as he knew firsthand, could be dangerous. Anything could happen. You could be hit by a taxi while sightseeing in Times Square. Run into a tree headfirst while shushing down a diamond run pretending you were Bode Miller. Or you could be a cop who got up one morning, headed off to work on the joint police/Homeland Security Department detail you’d been assigned to and, out-of-the-blue, end up in the ER getting a slug dug out of your thigh while your partner was being wheeled off to the morgue.
He took a long drink of coffee. It was black and thick and sweet. It was his thirtieth day waking up without a hangover. “Which has to be an improvement, right?”
“Too bad no one’s around to give you your one month chip.” The dry response had him realizing he’d spoken out loud. It also made him laugh for the first time in a very long while.
“You always were a smart ass.”
“Takes one to know one, dude,” his former partner shot back with that flash of grin that was the last thing Aiden remembered seeing before all hell broke loose. When Bodhi Warfield’s ghost had first appeared on the ferry headed to Honeymoon Harbor, Aiden had thought he was a hallucination. That was weird because, after attending Bodhi’s funeral—with all the pomp and ceremony that occurred when a police department lost one of their own—he’d purposefully waited until he’d gotten here to the coast house to start drinking. Having witnessed too many drunk driving deaths during his LAPD patrol days, no way was he going to risk causing another.
But after drinking himself to oblivion for the first several weeks and, waking up with a hangover the size of Mt. Olympus, he’d come to the conclusion that being a drunk was getting boring. So, he’d just stopped. Cold turkey. The same way he’d quit the cops. But Bodhi had continued to hang around.
“Don’t ghosts get cold?” Aiden asked.
Bodhi glanced down his California beach-tanned chest at the Hawaiian print board shorts he was wearing instead of the leather biker dude duds he’d been wearing when killed. “Surfers are too chill to get cold,” he said.
They’d been an odd couple. The laid-back surfer—who’d changed his name from Broderick to that of Patrick’s Swayze’s surfer bank robber character from Point Break, then had joined the cops mostly to piss off his liberal psychologist professor parents—and the Marine turned vice cop who still carried an edge from his bad boy days. But that difference had made them a great team. Like Starsky and Hutch. Men in Black’s Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Lethal Weapon’s Murtaugh and Riggs, and Miami Vice’s Crocket and Tubbs, who even Bodhi had reluctantly admitted would win on the chill factor.
“But hey,” his partner would say, whenever the topic would come up, “they were just actors playing roles. We’re the real deal, Mannion.”
And they had been. Until they weren’t.
“Someone’s coming,” Bodhi said.
Apparently death gave you preternatural senses, because it was another few seconds before Aiden heard the car rumbling across the bridge over the creek, fed by glacier waters that would soon be icing up for the winter.
The house had been built on the cliff where the mighty Pacific—ill named, Aiden always thought, since there was nothing peaceful about it—constantly warred with the land. The towering sea stacks offshore, many with trees still growing atop from when they’d been part of the mainland, were proof that wind and water would always eventually win.
Built for a whaling captain nearly a hundred years ago, the house was two stories with a widow’s walk around the top. Seth Harper, who’d taken over his family’s construction company (which had originally built the house) and was engaged to Aiden’s sister, Brianna, was the only person, other than his immediate family, who knew what had gone down the night Bodhi had lost his life. The night Aiden had lost his way.
The driveway was long and lined with towering, shaggy Douglas fir trees. He walked around to the front of the wraparound deck and watched the familiar SUV come into view.
“It’s your dad,” his partner said, without even bothering to look up.
Seems to be.” He knew his parents worried, but he’d reminded them that he was no longer that wild ass boy who’d gone off to war. All he needed was a little time to adjust. Something he could do better on his own. During their twice a week check-in phone calls, he hadn’t shared the fact that he wasn’t exactly alone.
“He’s bringing change.”
“And you
know that how? What, is my life written down on some big Life and Times of Aiden Mannion board somewhere?”
Aiden had been raised Catholic, but life had turned him a hard core agnostic. Had it not been for his former partner’s ghost showing up, he would’ve gone full-out atheist, but maybe there was something to the life after death thing, after all.
Unfortunately, every time he tried to pry some details about the afterlife from Bodhi, he’d only get a shrug and the response that it wasn’t his place to tell, but not to worry, it wasn’t boringly pastoral and the music was a helluva lot cooler than just harp players.
That was encouraging. Not that Aiden was in any hurry to find out for himself. He’d assured his mom that yeah, he might have issues. But she didn’t have to worry about him being suicidal. Part of him wondered if his imagination had recreated his partner to help him overcome the gut wrenching guilt that in the beginning, had hung over him like a cold, wet shroud. If that was the case, it seemed to be working, so he wasn’t going to dig too deeply into the question.
He watched his father park the SUV and climb out with a cooler that Aiden knew was filled with meals his mom had cooked. She’d sent John Mannion out with a similar cooler last week. And every week since Aiden had arrived back in Washington.
“You don’t have to keep coming all the way out here,” he greeted his dad. “The freezer has enough food for any army.”
“You know your mother. She believes in the food pyramid. Which is why she sneaks green stuff into her dishes. I also picked up a pizza at Luca’s.”
“Loaded?”
“Is there any other kind?” John carried the cooler past Aiden and Bodhi and into the kitchen. “If you moved back to town, you could have all the pizza you wanted. And Luca won’t make you put vegetables on it.”
“I’m happy where I am.”
Sure, he was drifting, okay, maybe stalled, but what was wrong with that? Wasn’t a guy entitled? He had, after all, been shot. Maybe not that badly, but it should give him a pass.