The Gift of Happiness

by Amanda Carpenter

  “But how,” she asked when she had her composure back, “did you manage to get here so fast if Mike didn’t let you know what was going on?”

  “Deduction,” he answered succinctly, “and an unexpected visit at the office from a very ruffled Marian and an apparently incoherent sister. I was literally fuming at the gates when Mike came out and turned off the electricity to let me in.”

  Her eyes met Mike’s in comprehension. “Checking to see if the gates were secure!” she exclaimed. She looked back at Luke. “Then you were outside the window nearly the whole time.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, playing with her fingers absently, “but as the windows were closed I couldn’t hear what was said. I can only hope that James had enough time to spill enough evidence for Mike to testify against him.”

  “Spill enough!” Mike exclaimed. “He confessed to just about everything in connection with you, Luke, apart from kidnapping charges. I’m sure that the ‘illegal items’ he was going to have planted in your warehouses are the drugs we’ve been trying to find, and I’ll bet you that they’re hidden somewhere in the stables. He mentioned something of that sort to me this afternoon. He’s hanged himself with what he told me and Katherine. When the police question her—”

  The warning glance Luke shot him was too late to have effect, and Mike stopped in the middle of the declaration to look in dismay from one to the other. “What did I say wrong?”

  Katherine had not missed the exchange of glances, and she answered stiffly, “Nothing, Mike. Luke, don’t look at him like that! It’s quite all right. I mean to testify against James.” At this calm declaration, she put her head in her hands for the second time that evening and started to cry, not, as she tried to tell Luke through her tears, for the father she was losing, but for the father she’d never had.

  After she had managed to calm herself and had the chance to splash water on her face, a hesitant approach from a police sergeant had her readily answering his questions. This went on for quite some time, she sitting on the bottom stair while the police officer jotted down her replies to his questions and found that her story was confirming Mike Carradine’s exactly, and was broken only by the exit of her father. He was handcuffed and escorted by two policemen, and he stopped in the hall to stand for a minute very still, looking at her with those empty eyes. She stared back for a long-drawn-out moment and took in his attitude of coldness, the absence of any remorse or affection in his eyes. Then, with complete composure and deliberation, she turned back to answer one of the officer’s questions. She did not watch him leave his home.

  Finally, with a close look at her too-brilliant eyes and tense attitude after a long period of questioning, Luke entered quietly into the conversation and put an end to the sergeant’s questions, saying politely that he would be glad to come to the police station in the morning with Miss Farlough for further questioning, and to sign a written statement, but that she was too tired for any more that night. The burly officer took one look at Katherine’s over-excited tenseness, and silently agreed. He bowed himself out.

  Soon, she was bundled into Jana’s car and Luke was driving home. When he would have gotten out of the car after they had arrived, she stopped him with a quick hand on his arm.

  “Please,” she murmured. He subsided back into his seat and regarded her with a question in his eyes. She watched him carefully. The question she wanted to ask had been bothering her for some time, and she found that she could no longer wait to ask it. She dropped her eyes. “You once told me,” she said with some difficulty, “that you would always answer any question I asked you. Would you answer one for me now?”

  “You know I will,” was his grave response.

  She stared ahead of her and took a deep breath. The question came out in a terrific rush, “Are you having second thoughts about marrying me?”

  In comparison, his reply seemed ages in coming. When it finally did, she closed her eyes with the pain of it. “Yes, I am.”

  She clenched her hands into tight fists to bear the coming blows, and said jerkily, “I—thought as much. You’ve been acting with such reserve lately that I…” She turned and looked at him, surprising a look of such deep pain on his face that she reached out and quickly squeezed his hand, continuing with some difficulty, “It’s all right. Tell me truthfully, would you—have you found that you’d prefer not getting married after all?”

  “It’s not what I want,” he said and paused, so that she completely misunderstood what he was trying to say. The pain was so bad that she bent forward for a moment, with her hands holding on to the dashboard.

  “I see.” In spite of her efforts, her voice wobbled horribly. “Do you want your ring back?”

  “I hadn’t finished,” he said, and she heard the strain in his voice. A silence, and then, “You seem—eager to give it back. Could it be that you’ve changed your mind?”

  “No!” she burst out. She strove to get herself in control. “But if you have, then I won’t, I mean I don’t want to stand in your way, if you no longer want to get married. I—I want you to be happy, and you haven’t seemed very happy lately, and I was just wondering if you didn’t want…oh, hell.” Her voice trailed away miserably.

  Her hand was taken in one of his hard grips and squeezed until she opened her eyes to look at him. His head was leaning back against the headrest, and he was staring up at the car’s roof, smiling. “I love you, Katie-bug,” he said tenderly. She sagged in her seat, immeasurably relieved.

  She whispered to him, “I love you,” and felt his hand tighten.

  “You see,” he said quietly, “I was beginning to worry that perhaps we were rushing things a bit, and I was starting to doubt whether it was such a good thing for us to marry so quickly. You know, I’m not really a knight in shining armor, Katie-love, although you make a very beautiful damsel in distress. I’m human and I have faults and I especially have weaknesses. One of my worries was that because I was the first male that ever showed any interest in you for yourself that you would fancy yourself in love with me, later on realizing your mistake. By then it might have been too late. I wanted to give you the chance to get away before either of us got too hurt. It’s not what I want, but what you want.”

  “You crazy nut,” was all she could get out for a minute. Then, in a stronger voice, she continued, “You’ve always told me to trust you. Well, trust is a two-way street in a relationship. I thank you for your trust in my judgment of my own feelings! I’ve met plenty of men, I’ll have you know, even if I am a lot younger than you! I know what I want all right, and as soon as you realize that I want you, then I’m sure that we’ll get along very amicably. But,” and she tugged her hand out of his suddenly, “until you just put yourself out on a limb, then I guess we won’t ever know, will we? Excuse me, I’m going inside.” She jumped out of the car and started running for the house.

  A car door slammed and footsteps ran after her. She increased her pace, loping for the house as fast as she could, one part of her registering with satisfaction that he was coming after her very fast and about to overtake her. That was good. She hoped that her little outburst of pseudo-anger would shake him up enough to realize that he had to trust her as much as she trusted him to make the relationship work. Two hands on her waist jerked her round, and she was hauled into his arms roughly. With her head pushed down on his chest, she could feel his pulse racing with deep throbs.

  He heaved a huge sigh and tightened his arms, putting his face down to bury it in her hair. That also was good. It was the best feeling she’d ever experienced, to have the man she loved show her evidence of his need for her. She put her arms around his waist. It would be all right now, she knew. He had reached a point where he loved her so much that he would just have to take her on faith. Time, and a lot of demonstrative loving would show him that what she felt would last.

  “I’m sorry, Katie-bug,” he murmured, moving his face in her thick soft hair as if he loved to feel it on his face. “It’s just that you had be
en so unsure of what you wanted out of life until just recently, and I wanted to make sure you weren’t making a mistake.”

  “I’m an adult, Luke.” Her voice was muffled in his shoulder as she spoke. Hidden from his eyes, she smiled.

  “I know, sweet.”

  “I like to think that I’ve been making the right decisions since I left home,” she continued, enjoying herself hugely.

  “You have. You’ve grown so much, and I’m so proud of you. Kate, turn your face to me,” he commanded, a thread of unsteadiness running in his tone. No longer smiling, she complied instantly and his mouth came down fiercely to crush hers. Soon her pulse was racing as hard and as unsteadily as his. “I need you so much, my love,” he whispered, “that I was just afraid.”

  “Hush, you silly man. I need you, too.”

  Some time later, a very long time later, as Jana was putting the last batch of chocolate chip cookies into the oven to bake, in the cozy kitchen the huge calico cat that had been napping just under the warm stove looked up and blinked sleepily. She had just registered this when a deep, amused voice spoke behind her and made her shriek. She whirled and looked at Luke standing just behind her with his arm possessively around a flushed and radiantly lovely Katherine. Both were grinning with what she felt to be a ridiculous amount of enjoyment from her reaction. She snapped, “Lucas Trevor Dalton, you’ve been sneaking up behind me for years and scaring the living daylights out of me! I put my foot down at this! If you don’t stop that detestable habit, I don’t care how big you are, I’ll take a fly swatter to your bottom, like I used to!” Her irate expression began to fade, and a twinkle showed in the blue of her eyes. She held out a plate to Katherine. “Have a cookie, love. He doesn’t get any.”

  “Well, Katie-bug,” he said with deep satisfaction, snatching a cookie before Jana could jerk the plate away. “It looks like we’re home.” Disturbed from her nap, Matilda the Monster swished her tail and slunk disdainfully away.

  About the Author

  Thea Harrison started writing when she was nineteen. In the 1980s and 1990s, she wrote for Harlequin Mills & Boon under the name Amanda Carpenter. The Amanda Carpenter romances have been published in over ten languages, and sold over a million and a half copies worldwide, and are now being reprinted digitally by Samhain Publishing for their Retro Romance line.

  For more information, please visit her at: www.theaharrison.com. You can also find her on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/TheaHarrison and on Twitter at: @TheaHarrison.

  Look for these titles by Amanda Carpenter

  Now Available:

  Reckless

  Rose-Coloured Love

  A Deeper Dimension

  The Wall

  A Damaged Trust

  The Great Escape

  Flashback

  Rage

  Waking Up

  Writing as Thea Harrison

  Novellas of the Elder Races

  True Colors

  Natural Evil

  Devil’s Gate

  Hunter’s Season

  The Wicked

  Coming Soon:

  Caprice

  Passage of the Night

  Cry Wolf

  A Solitary Heart

  The Winter King

  She’ll risk her safety to save lives, but can she risk her heart to find love?

  Reckless

  © 2014 Amanda Carpenter

  As a foreign correspondent working in dangerous, far-flung locales, Leslie considers herself a tough, capable woman. And that is put to the test, when her plane is hijacked. Placing her life at risk, she manages to sacrifice her safety to allow the other hostages to escape.

  Left alone in captivity, Leslie begins to despair, but when a fellow journalist with whom she’s had a brief fling appears, Leslie realizes their relationship was more than skin deep. And together, they can face both her captors as well as their feelings for each other.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Reckless:

  Leslie noticed her fresh drink at her empty seat when she and Jarred returned to the table. “Mm, thanks, Wayne,” she murmured, picking up the glass and drinking thankfully. It was gin and tonic, her usual.

  “Can’t take the credit, babe,” she was told cheerfully. Her eyebrows rose in surprise, and she looked at Scott for a moment, silently questioning. He inclined his head, smiling crookedly.

  “You’re welcome,” was his deep, easy reply to her repeated thanks. Her eyes, which had lit on him in an impersonal and friendly way, became arrested on the man’s face. At first glance, Jarred was perhaps the more attractive of the two, but the other man certainly bore up well under scrutiny. Though shorter than Jarred, he was definitely the more powerfully built, with long, sensitive fingers on large, capable looking hands and wide, heavily muscled shoulders over lean, trim hips. His hair was nearly white from being bleached in the sun and in contrast his skin was nearly mahogany in colour, and his eyes were a dark, velvet brown, unusual with the skin and blond hair. Just now those eyes were holding an unmistakable, but subtle message as he smiled into her eyes. At least she thought that he’d smiled, but his facial expression had never shifted. Very subtle, she thought, and after the first arrested moment, her own dark blue eyes became amused. She held his glance a moment as she smiled slowly at him, and then she drank delicately from her glass.

  It was convenient, she thought, that he should be sitting right by her. It took barely an effort for him to start a low voiced conversation with her, with that heavy, loud music in the background. They were quite effectively in their own little world, with the noise and the crowd of chattering, vivacious people. He leaned both arms on the table, bringing his head very close to hers, and he asked her quietly as he caressed her with his eyes, “You’re back from a hard stint of work yourself, aren’t you?”

  They talked a while, getting to know each other somewhat better. She was in a conversational mood and murmured the right things at the right time, meanwhile smiling at him with her eyes, fully aware of what he was doing.

  He asked her, “What was your last assignment like?”

  “I talked to villagers whose homes had been destroyed in El Salvador. We’ve an article and some photos on one of the families. The mother is a widow and her two sons have been shot. Her daughter is eleven years old and suffering from malnutrition. The village is rubble.” Leslie spoke emotionlessly. Her bitterness and rage had gone into the succinctly biting article she had written. It had been taut with the suppressed fury and energy she had held in all those weeks, afraid to display it, intent on keeping a low profile. It was, she knew, very good. And her emotions were back in rein after what she’d seen. Her eyes bounced sharply off the thoughtful man beside her, taking in with a lightning swiftness his irregular features, the tough, once-broken nose, the lean muscled jaw, the forceful forehead. Time to change the subject. “I like your work,” she told him candidly, letting her simple admiration show through for a moment to add sincerity to her words. “You’ve been in the business for some time now, haven’t you?”

  “Around eight years, I’d say,” he replied offhandedly, taking a quick drink from the beer he held cradled in his two large hands. She noted the clean, well kept fingernails and approved silently. You can tell a lot from a man’s hands. “Before that I was a business executive.” His eyes went to hers mockingly.

  She didn’t let him see the surprise that she was sure he’d expected. She had heard something of the like at work. “Makes for a diversified life,” she returned laconically, tilting her head and examining the archway adorned by two plants. They were fake. Scott must be around thirty-six or eight then, she mused silently. Without looking at him again, she stared at the tiled floor beneath the archway and thought that he was in very good shape for someone beginning to see the approach of the forty year mark. Very good shape indeed.

  Her thoughts halted right there, and she took a deep breath as she felt the tightness in her chest, her mind. Control it, she told herself. The music pounded through her
veins and the room was hot. The room was very hot and too crowded, and she didn’t like all those people anymore. She smiled at Scott warmly just for the sheer hell of it, just to throw him off, and then she said quite pleasantly, “Good night.”

  She turned and said goodbye to the other two men who’d been talking animatedly at the other side of the table. Wayne nodded, knowing her too well to say anything or be surprised at her abrupt departure, and Jarred said a polite farewell also, not knowing her well enough to be surprised.

  She stood, nodded at Scott silently, noting his lazily raised eyebrow, and knowing that the wheels were clicking away in his head over her strange departure. She turned and walked lightly to the exit, swinging the shoulder length hair off her neck and feeling the slight dampness at the nape, under the heavy mass. Outside she paused at the front door, seeing the black of night and the glare of bright lights. Chicago was hot this summer, she thought, lifting the hair off the back of her neck and thinking without pleasure of her uncomfortable, empty apartment. No air conditioning in ninety degree weather, cooped up in that small living space, torture. Heat.

  As she paused on the pavement, undecided, she heard a footfall behind her. Across the parking lot, a car tooted its horn. Traffic was heavy on a Friday night, in this part of the city.

  Scott’s deep, lazy voice said behind her, “And what are you planning to do now?”

  Leslie stood still for a split second and then she stretched deliberately while she held the heavy weight of the hair off her neck, fully aware that Scott was watching her body and slightly appalled at her own recklessness tonight. She smiled. “Probably go home and take a long, cold shower,” she sighed. “Then get out, dry off, and do it again.”