A Bride For Abel Greene

by Cindy Gerard

  “Is this going to be another lecture on how I can have that, too, if I just give it a chance?”

  She smiled. “We’ve been working you over pretty good, huh?”

  He grunted.

  “It’s because we care about you. And after today, it’s because we care about Mackenzie and Mark.”

  He turned his back to her, fighting to maintain his resolve.

  “I’m not going to push, Abel. I’m just going to ask you to think about the possibilities. I never thought I’d find what I have with Blue. Now I can’t imagine life without him.”

  She walked up behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

  Then she left him alone.

  “All in all, Mackenzie Kincaid,” she told herself brightly, “it’s been quite a day.”

  Hah! That was like saying the Concord was just a plane. “Or that Abel Greene is just a man,” she murmured, looking out the kitchen window, watching for his snowmobile with him and Mark on board to come back home.

  Home. She closed her eyes and backed away from the window. She’d have to be careful about that. She’d been here less than twenty-four hours—an eventful twenty-four hours, granted—and she was already thinking of this cabin as home.

  “You’ve got a ways to go before you’ll be solid on that count,” she reminded herself, as she slipped through the living room and climbed the loft steps to check on Nashata and the pups.

  “How’s it going, girl?” she whispered, as the new mother nuzzled her babes protectively, then laid her head back down in a gesture of trust.

  The sun was low on the horizon now. Almost two hours had passed since the Hazzards had loaded up Hershey and headed for their cabin, which she now knew was just a few miles up the shoreline of the lake. Almost two hours since Abel, with Mark on board—pretending he wasn’t excited—left on Abel’s big, black machine to accompany Scarlett and Casey back to the hotel nestled deep in the north woods.

  “We’re going to ride with them back to the hotel,” Abel had said, then paused and added gruffly, “so I don’t have to worry about them running into trouble.” Then he and Mark had headed out the door.

  “I figure he went with them so he could get away from me for a while. What do you think, Nashata?”

  Nashata. She’d heard Abel tell Mark it meant little chief. He’d named her that because he’d found her beside the body of her mother who’d been killed by a poacher’s bullet. As hungry and as frightened as she’d been, she’d still scrapped and snarled when Abel had picked her up and brought her home.

  “Like a little chief,” he’d said.

  “He’s taken good care of you, huh, girl?” She stroked Nashata’s coarse gray coat. “Think we can convince him he can take good care of me, too?”

  The thought came unbidden. She’d always taken care of herself, always stood on her own two feet. But, oh, just once, it would be nice to know that if she stumbled, if she had a need, that someone like Abel would be there to lighten the load.

  She stopped that train of thought abruptly. Self-pity was a luxury she couldn’t afford. It was a place she didn’t let herself go very often. And she had no time for crybabies.

  It was almost dark when she slipped down the stairs to make some hot chocolate. She’d just set it off the burner when she heard the roar of the snowmobile.

  Mark burst into the cabin in a flurry of crisp, winter-cold air and red cheeks.

  “Man, oh, man. Talk about a trip. That snowmobile is one bitchin’ machine! The sucker flat-out flies.”

  “And hello to you, too.” She grinned as she reached for mugs from the cupboard.

  “Yeah, hi,” he said quickly, and then went on, unaware that he was prattling with excitement as he shrugged out of his coat and the cap and gloves Abel had loaned him for the trip.

  “You ought to see that old hotel where Casey and her mom live. It’s like, way cool. It must be a hundred years old. The floors are all wavy and there are all these neat old pictures everywhere. It even has a ghost. Honest to God,” he added when she shot him a skeptical frown. “I’m going to go check on Nashata.”

  And just that fast he jogged out of the kitchen and raced up the stairs.

  He didn’t see the tears crowding her eyes. Didn’t know that in the past twenty-four hours she’d seen more glimpses of the little boy she loved than she had in the past two years. Couldn’t possibly be aware that her happiness over this rebirth of innocence had brought tears that just would not remain unshed.

  And Abel, when he found her like that in the kitchen a few minutes later, couldn’t possibly know that she felt she owed him much more than her thanks for giving her back her brother.

  Six

  Abel didn’t want to know what had prompted her tears, though he figured it had to do with Mark. He didn’t want to know any more about her, either, though he suspected there was a lot more to learn.

  What he wanted was to untie this unfamiliar knot of awareness in his gut when he looked at her—and put to rest the ridiculous notion that there could possibly be a future for him with Mackenzie Kincaid.

  What he wanted was to get them gone before he got in any deeper.

  He’d have accomplished it, too, if it hadn’t been for the impromptu gathering his friends had arranged that afternoon. It was too late to plow the drive now. That meant he was stuck with her for another night. It didn’t mean he had to like it.

  The unsavory truth, however, was that if he let himself, he could like it. He could like it far too much. Just as the possibilities his friends had encouraged him to think about appealed too much.

  She settled across from him by the fire and handed him a mug of hot chocolate.

  “Maggie tells me you built the cabin.”

  He responded with silence.

  “She said that’s what you do. For a living, I mean. You build houses.”

  “I build log cabins,” Abel clarifies. He heard the gruffness in his voice and felt compelled to soften his tone when he continued. “And yes, it’s a source of income.”

  But not his only source.

  A greater source was the interest he drew from bounties he’d collected during his years as a mercenary fighting the dark world of drug trafficking.

  He wondered what little Mackenzie Kincaid would think if she knew about the ugliness of his past. For a moment he even considered telling her enough to scare her off. In the next moment he reconsidered, afraid it would do just that.

  He damned himself for a fool. Indecision was not a word in his vocabulary. Neither was waffling. Yet he’d been doing plenty of both ever since he’d found this pretty little bird in the snow.

  “You don’t have a lot to say, do you?”

  Her soft query brought his head up. There was no bite in her words. Frustration added teeth to his response. “Seems to me that with you around, I don’t have much need.”

  She smiled, a soft, good-natured concession, ignoring his barb. “You’re not the first person to imply that sometimes I talk too much.”

  Not for the first time her smile caught him off guard.

  Not for the first time he did something foolish because of it. “As long as you’re talking, why don’t you level with me?”

  He had no idea why he’d opened up that door. Didn’t like much the thought of hearing something he might not want to deal with. But the words were out, and suddenly he needed to know. “Why did you come here? I don’t understand. You’re a young, attractive woman. You didn’t have to resort to a personal ad to get a man. So why? Why did you leave everything that’s familiar for nothing but unknowns?”

  Caution darkened her eyes—as if she were weighing the consequences of confiding in him. He called her on it. “Don’t wimp out on me now, green eyes. And don’t give me any bull about being a free, California spirit following your karma or any other crap. Level with me. You’re here because you’re running from something, aren’t you?” The look on her face told him he’d nailed it. “I hav
e a right to know what it is.”

  She looked away. Looking guilty. Then looking determined.

  “You’re right. You do have a right to know.”

  She drew in a bracing breath, sent him a considering look and without preamble started talking. “My parents aren’t exactly parent-of-the-year material,” she began, looking away to watch the inane activity of her hands as she ran her thumb along the lip of the mug.

  “I was the reason they got married,” she said. “Mark was the reason they stayed together. In between they either fought like dogs over a bone or treated each other to long, empty silences.”

  A pensive moment followed, and he suspected she was reliving some of those scenes in her mind.

  “I handled it better than Mark,” she finally said. “I don’t know why. And I don’t know why they stayed together as long as they did.”

  He didn’t prompt. He just sat, neither looking at her or away. Just listening and knowing that in the process, damn her, she was going to make him care a little more about her and her brother.

  “I’d already moved out by the time they split up five years ago. I was twenty-one and making it...barely,” she amended with a tight, grim smile, “on my own. Mark was only ten. The divorce hit him hard. He was still young enough to believe that things weren’t as bad as they seemed...and that maybe if he was good enough, it would get better.”

  She smiled again, sadly this time. “It’s awful, isn’t it, what little kids take on when the adults in their lives let them down?” She shook her head, looking into space. “Oh, I know. What happened to Mark isn’t anything new, nothing that hasn’t happened to thousands of other kids when their parents divorce. But there was just one little twist that made it tougher for him to take.

  “Most parents fight over who gets custody. Not mine.” Again, a bitter smile. “With their divorce came liberation. They decided it was time to dip their toes in that wild singles pool they’d left behind. Neither one of them wanted Mark around slowing them down.”

  She let her anger really show then. In the clipped edge to her voice. In the grim set of her mouth. “No kid deserves what they did to him. It was bad enough that they didn’t want him around. But they had to let him know it. Two years ago, when I realized how badly it was affecting him, I brought him to live with me. Except, I’d waited too long.”

  Only his silence prompted her to continue.

  “He fell in with the worst crowd possible. He started getting into trouble with the law. Minor scrapes at first, but still dangerous, considering what he might soon do—or what he might already be doing but just wasn’t getting caught at.”

  Again her gaze dropped to her mug. Again she ran her thumb along the rim of it, regret showing in the droop of her small shoulders. “I should have taken him with me sooner. I should have gotten him out of that situation where Mom and Dad passed him back and forth, each change of custody destroying more of his self-esteem. Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so far off track.”

  Exhaling deeply, she let her head fall back against the sofa and stared at the ceiling. He could almost feel the guilt and regret she had taken on, pressing down on her like lead. When her eyes—old, wise, weary—sought his again, he didn’t look away.

  “One night he came home wearing gang colors. I knew then that I’d lost him. The gangs and the guns and the gutter had sucked him in. And when, soon after that, he came home bloody and beaten and crowing that he’d come of age because a rival gang had made a death threat against him, I knew I had to get him out of there. He was marked in L.A. And it was just a matter of time before they killed him.

  “That’s when I ran across your ad,” she said, holding his gaze levelly. “I was on break at work and someone was giggling over the extreme measures a person would take just to get a little—” she cut herself off with a delicate smile “—company.”

  Growing increasingly more uncomfortable, with both her candor and the magnetic pull of her eyes, he rose and added more wood to the fire.

  “I laughed, too,” she said, as he stabbed at the flames with the iron poker. ”At first But I hadn’t come up with a solution to Mark’s problem. Every day I lived in fear that he wouldn’t live to see the next one. I had to get him out of L.A., but we couldn’t just relocate. That took money. Money I didn’t have.

  “My parents weren’t an option. I couldn’t send him there. After all they’d done to him, he would have just run away. And I’d promised myself and Mark that I’d always be there for him.”

  He heard her shifting and settling deeper into his sofa, but he didn’t turn around.

  “I kept thinking about your ad. A part of me was appalled by the idea of answering it. But when nothing else presented itself, I began looking at it more and more as a viable option. You offered security. Safety. Seclusion.

  “And then something happened that made the decision for me.”

  The desolation in her voice had him turning to face her.

  “A boy was shot. A fourteen-year-old kid. In front of our apartment building. A boy who looked like Mark—by a bullet that was meant for him. I answered your ad the next day.”

  She closed her eyes, shook her head. Swallowed hard. Then met his gaze.

  “Was I scared? Yeah. I was scared. The thought of actually committing to this outrageous agreement scared the bejesuz out of me. The reality was, I was willing to make a life commitment to a stranger. The harsh reality was, if I didn’t, I was going to lose my brother. Either way, I was damn scared.”

  He couldn’t look away from her.

  “Ask me if I’m afraid now, Abel.”

  Her voice held him with the same strength as her gaze.

  “Ask me,” she repeated softly, “if after seeing you with my brother, after seeing you bring out a spark of the little boy behind those hoodlum eyes, after seeing him safe, if my desperation paid off.”

  He braced a palm on the mantel and made himself look away.

  “I’m not afraid anymore,” she said on a whisper. “I’m not feeling desperate anymore. I’m confident that there is a place here for Mark. That there’s a place here for me.

  “You’ve given me an option, Abel. The only one I have. And if you’ll give me the chance, I’ll put everything I have into making it work.”

  The conviction in her voice made his chest hurt.

  He needed to say something. He needed to warn her that she’d be running from one source of heartache to another if she hitched her hope to the likes of him.

  But he didn’t. He couldn’t. In truth, he didn’t want to. He wanted to think about what she’d told him. He wanted to accept the trust she’d invested in him.

  And underlying it all, he wanted to savor the sound of her voice saying his name. Like satin and softness it wove itself around him. Like sin and salvation it tempted him to let her stay.

  The cabin suddenly seemed cramped and suffocating. As big as it was, there wasn’t enough room to contain all the feelings that closed in on him.

  Without a word he walked away. Snagging his coat, he shrugged into it and stalked outside. He fed the horses. Stayed with them for a very long time. Thinking of her honesty. Humbled by her valor. Damning her candor—and damning his desire to do right by her.

  He felt cornered. Backed against the wall. She was asking too much. She was asking if she could put her trust in him. A trust he hadn’t earned. A trust he’d told himself was only for hire when there was money on the line.

  He almost wished she’d tried to lie to him—told him some whopping sob story about why she needed him to let her stay. Then he’d have had just cause and no problem to claim “no sale.” But he’d dealt with deception the better part of his life, and he knew the truth when he heard it.

  She hadn’t asked for herself. She’d asked for the boy’s sake. His motives for placing the ad paled in comparison to hers. His excuse had been too much whiskey and self pity. Hers had been a matter of life and death.

  He didn’t doubt for a second that the boy was
in danger in L.A. He’d seen enough of the streets in the years he’d worked undercover to know Mark was as good as dead if a gang had targeted him.

  This was no longer about what he needed. It was about life and death. Yet as he’d listened to Mackenzie and realized the seriousness of her situation, one selfish, forbidden thought kept hammering at him: Here’s your chance. Here’s your chance to have something good

  When he let himself in through the kitchen door an hour later, two voices raised in laughter rang down from the loft, one soft and feminine, the other young, but distinctly masculine.

  They were sounds that had been missing too long from this house—this house that he’d built big enough for a family, but had filled with nothing but silence.

  He looked around the kitchen, into the living area, thought of his big, empty bed, of a woman’s warmth. For the first time since all this started, he imagined himself coming home to these sounds each day. Imagined the nights filled with something other than empty darkness.

  Imagined, finally, with his heart pumping, the devastation Mackenzie could cause if he let her become a part of his life and then someday she decided to walk away.

  Sleepy-eyed, her hair tousled, her cheek still creased from a restless night on the sofa, Mackenzie gazed at Abel’s sullen face over her morning coffee.

  True to form he glared back.

  His hostile look shouldn’t have elicited a shudder of arousal in her. But arouse her, he did. And a shudder was the least of what she felt when she looked at him.

  He made her fantasize of feather beds and vibrant sunsets. Roaring fires and heated skin. Husky moans and sizzling passion.

  And he made her want to believe again, in the hopes and dreams she’d given up long ago as lost.

  Feeling herself redden, she turned away.

  Guilt nipped at her. This wasn’t about her. This was about Mark and what he needed.

  Abel knew all there was to know now. She’d told him the whole story last night. She only wished she knew what he was going to do about it.