by Mary McBride
Sam swallowed so loud he didn’t hear whatever else Nurse Ratchet was saying. Laura’s pretty face blurred for a moment. Then Cindy suddenly appeared, grinning like a jack-o-lantern, holding a little plastic bag with seventeen miles of tubing attached to it. Somewhere in there, Sam was certain, there was a foot long needle.
He was going to pass out.
“You people are sadists,” he groaned.
“I need your left arm, Sam,” Norma said sternly. Her voice sounded like it was coming from deep inside a cave. A witches’ cavern full of bats and lizards. “Sam, work with me now, okay? Just relax your arm, for heaven’s sake.”
He couldn’t, dammit.
“Hey.” Laura scooted toward him on her metal stool. Her face was level with his, so close that all she had to do was whisper. “I’ve been wondering, Sam. Do you think it’s possible to fall in love in just a few days? I mean really, deeply, head over heelsy in love?”
“Do I…?” His focus narrowed on her blue, blue eyes and the tiny gold speckles in them. “Why do you ask?”
“Well…” She scooted closer so her nose was almost in contact with his and her breath warm on his lips when she continued. “I’m asking because I’m pretty sure I’ve fallen really, deeply, head over heelsy in love with you.”
“Yeah?” His mouth twitched in something comparable to a smile.
“Yeah,” she purred, her lips just brushing his. “I must be nuts, huh?”
“That would make two of us.”
“Yeah?” She leaned even closer, her soft mouth pressing against his for a long, sweet moment, her tongue teasing and tantalizing him. “So, you think maybe we’re both sharing the same sexy delusion?”
“Could be.” Sam was fairly certain he was delusional because of the lingering taste of Chocolate Ripple ice cream on his lips.
“What do you think we should do about it?” she whispered. “I mean other than spend at least twelve out of every twenty-four hours in bed, making incredible love for the next forty or fifty years?”
Sam could feel a dopey smile take possession of his mouth. That had to be the reason he couldn’t quite form the words to match the incredible images in his brain. His eyelids felt like freshly poured concrete, but he managed to blink once—for yes—hoping Laura would get the message.
“I love you, Sam.”
He sighed all the way to the soles of his feet.
Luther’s voice floated somewhere above him. “All right, mama. You go, girl.”
Then Laura. “He’s awfully relaxed.”
Then Norma, the sadist. “You did a nice job distracting him. Our good friend, Mr. Valium did the rest. I’ll be done here in just a few minutes. Oh, and by the way, I hope you meant what you said because this is one guy who really deserves to be loved. If you didn’t mean it, I hope you never show your face in my ER again.”
A few hours later, when they left the ER, Sam was looking a lot less like Superman than the Jolly Green Giant in the hospital scrubs that Norma had given him to replace his blood-stained clothes.
Laura jingled the truck keys in her hand as they walked across the parking lot, trying to stifle the yawns that kept creeping up on her. The eastern sky was already pale shades of pink and amethyst, promising a lovely day after their long, terrible night. She was exhausted. Sam, on the other hand, after his little Valium snooze, seemed bright-eyed and chock-full of ungodly energy. She swore she could hear him whistling as he trailed along behind.
One of the yawns suddenly overtook her. “Oh, Lord,” she sighed. “I can’t wait to get into bed.”
The next thing she knew, Sam overtook her, wrapping his arms around her from behind. “I can’t wait to get you there. Tell me you meant every word you said earlier in the ER, Laura. Tell me it wasn’t just a diversionary tactic.”
She leaned her head back on his shoulder. “You mean the part about making love for twelve out of every twenty-four hours?”
“That, too.” He chuckled, his breath warm at her ear. “But I was thinking more about the ‘I love you, Sam’ part. The ‘how is this possible in such a short time’ part.”
“Oh, that.”
In all honesty, Laura thought that Sam had either forgotten what she’d said to distract him from the dreaded hypodermic needle, or that her words had never actually registered on his woozy brain. She felt embarrassed now, and foolish for having spoken those words. It was nuts to believe that people fell in love that fast. Especially two people so determined not to do it.
“Well?” Sam asked.
“Well, what?”
“Did you mean it? Or were you just making emergency room conversation?”
Laura swallowed hard. The words that had come to her so easily an hour ago seemed impossible to express. She’d meant them with all her heart, but right now she wished she hadn’t said them. “What I said was it’s crazy to think that it…love…you know…could happen so fast.”
With his arms still around her, Sam rested his chin on the top of her head. “Fast. Slow. What’s the difference, Laura, as long as it happens?”
The sun was visible now, a brilliant orange ball climbing over the tree line miles away to the east. A brand new day. So full of promise. If only she could believe…
“Are you saying you love me, Sam?”
“I was working up to it.” He laughed softly. “Yeah. I’m saying I love you, Laura. Probably from the minute you walked into my office.”
He sounded so certain. He felt so warm, so solid, so permanent. Oh, God. It was going to tear her heart right out of her chest when he left her.
Because, all of her shining hopes and happy dreams and heartfelt wishes aside, that was the one thing Laura knew she could count on. Men leaving.
Sam was glad to see the kitchen window had been boarded up. He led Laura through the back door and across the kitchen where their feet scrunched on broken glass.
“I’m too beat to clean this up right now,” he said, continuing into the hallway and toward the stairs.
“I’ll help you,” Laura said. “Aw, Sam. First the mirror in the living room, and now the window. It’s all my fault, too. I must be a jinx. All this broken stuff.”
“Hey.”
She was on the first step, so when he turned her around their faces were level. He cradled her face in both hands, smoothing his thumbs over her cheeks. “I think it was time for a few things to get broken around here. Time for me to break with the past and start looking toward the future. And if that’s all your fault, sweetheart, then I’m very grateful.”
Leaning to kiss the tip of her nose, Sam could see a warm shimmer of tears in Laura’s eyes.
“I’m going to love loving you, Sam,” she whispered. “No matter how long it lasts, I’m going to love every minute of it.”
A tear broke loose from the corner of her eye, and Sam thumbed it away, wishing there were some way to reassure her of his constancy, knowing that only time would do that.
“Know what I’m going to say to you on our fiftieth wedding anniversary?” he asked.
A surprised little laugh broke from her throat. “I can’t imagine.”
“I’m going to say ‘I told you so.”’
Her smile warmed his heart even though it con tained a hint of wariness. Sam knew she didn’t believe him. He decided he’d have to do something else to convince her. Fifty years was far too long to wait for the security she deserved.
Chapter 15
When they awoke together in the late afternoon after the Janey and Artie debacle, the first thing Sam muttered was a mournful, “We need a bigger bed.”
Laura snuggled closer to him, careful not to disrupt the gauze dressing taped to his side, pressing her knees into the backs of his, while stifling a giggle. “A bigger bed? Oh, I don’t know, Sam. I kind of like sleeping in the bottom bunk. It reminds me of summer camp.”
“You went to summer camp?” he asked.
“Yes. Twice as a matter of fact. Why do you sound so surprised?”
S
am chuckled. “Outside?”
“Very funny.” Her foot connected solidly with his calf. “There weren’t any wolf spiders on the premises. Or coyotes.”
He was quiet a moment. “You know, we don’t have to stay here if you don’t want, Laura.”
“Are you kidding me? I adore this place!” she exclaimed. “Well, the inside, anyway. Besides, you’ve lived here all your life, Sam. I wouldn’t change that.”
She levered up on an elbow and gazed over Sam’s shoulder, taking in the details of his time-warped room—the faded felt pennants on the walls, the dusty trophies and tattered textbooks, all the old memories. One old memory in particular caught her eye—Jenny Sayles, smiling out from her shiny silver frame.
The little stitch of jealousy that pulled tight inside her wasn’t something Laura was proud of. She thought of her mother suddenly, ripping up individual photographs of her father and snipping him out of every family group. Sam and Jenny Sayles had been together for a long, long time. Laura supposed she could make peace with the portrait, given ample time.
“I love being here with you, Sam, and I know that losing Jenny was very painful for you,” she said, reaching up and combing her fingers through his hair, letting her fingertips play over the creases at the corners of his eye and the soft whiskers on his cheeks.
“I forgot the damned picture,” he snapped. He wrenched upright and reached for the bottom half of the hospital scrubs he’d taken off several hours before, cursing softly as he put them on. “Sorry, honey. I meant to get rid of it as soon as we got home this morning.”
Laura’s first inclination was to lie and to cheerfully reassure him that the photograph didn’t bother her at all. Not one bit. Why, she hardly even noticed it. Her second inclination, which she followed, was to say nothing. She watched Sam practically stalk across the room, pick up the frame and pull the photo roughly from beneath the glass.
“Don’t rip it!” The words came out before Laura even realized they were on her tongue.
He looked at her, startled. “What?”
“I said don’t rip it. Please.” Laura sat up, bunching the bed covers around herself. “Just put it away someplace, Sam. She meant so much to you for such a long time. It just wouldn’t be right, tearing it up.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he murmured, looking down at the picture in his hands, then folding it crisply and jamming it in a drawer before looking back at Laura. The expression on his face wavered momentarily between sadness and profound relief.
The same emotions played in his voice when he said, “I didn’t really have a chance to tell you last night, but Janey said some things that… Well, hell, basically what she said was that I’d been a total jerk most of my life because Jenny never cared. Not about me, anyway.”
He lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug while a mournful little grin flickered across his lips. “I haven’t decided yet which is worse—being a jerk or wasting a quarter of a century’s worth of affection on a woman who never had any intention of making a life with me.”
“Oh, Sam, honey.”
Laura almost wished Jenny Sayles were still alive so she could have the exquisite pleasure of strangling her with her own tiara. She hated the woman. Worse, she hated seeing Sam so deeply hurt. She reached out her arms to him, hoping somehow to soften the blow he’d taken. “You shouldn’t believe any of that. I mean, considering Janey’s condition and all. She was probably just making it all up.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Janey was finally telling the truth for once in her life. The funny thing is, I think on some level I knew it all along.”
He lowered himself onto the bunk beside her, sighing as Laura’s arms folded around his chest. He bent his head against hers and said, “Hell of a thing for a man to have to admit about himself—that what he always considered loyalty and faithfulness was nothing more than sheer stupidity and stubbornness.”
“How could she not have loved you?” Laura whispered, her lips pressing against his shoulder. “You’re everything good, Sam. Jenny was a fool for not seeing that.”
Sam laughed softly. “Ah, well, kiddo, it looks as if you and I are in nearly the same boat now. We’ve got a lot more in common than either one of us realized.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re both starting from scratch, in a way. Look at us. You lost all your worldly goods in a fire, and I’ve just been burnt out of about twenty-five years worth of memories.”
“So, we’ll make new ones, Sam,” Laura said, tightening her embrace. “Better ones. I promise you.”
Sam never actually proposed. Not in the traditional bended knee, diamond-ring-in-the-blue-velvet-box sort of way. Not in so many words.
He didn’t know how to put the words together right, and somewhere deep inside, he was afraid—coward that he was—that if he actually asked her, Laura’s answer would be no. But during the next few weeks, he made it absolutely clear that he intended to marry her.
He bought a bigger bed. Not a total coward, he surprised Laura with one he saw in the window of an antique store a few blocks from his office. A big, sexy brass bed and a rose-colored mattress that guaranteed a decade of perfect sleep.
“See that,” he told her, pointing out the printed tag stitched to the underside of the mattress. “That’s a ten year commitment. Just for starters. If you want, I’ll sign my name right there in indelible ink.”
She’d laughed at that, but there was something in her eyes that said she still didn’t believe their relationship would outlast the warranty. Men left her. That was what was printed indelibly on her heart. There was nothing Sam could say to convince her otherwise. He knew he’d have to show her. Soon.
If he’d learned one thing from Jenny, it was that life was too short and love was too precious to waste. Just as he needed to give one hundred percent of his love and loyalty to Laura, he required the same from her in return. And, by God, he wasn’t going to wait fifty years for that ‘I told you so.’
On the day Sam planned to file for the sheriff’s election, Laura edged delicately out of the big brass bed and slinked down to the kitchen, determined to prepare a fabulous breakfast for him. Well, semi-fabulous. As in freshly thawed orange juice, plain everyday scrambled eggs, easy-to-brown link sausages, and unburnt—she hoped!—whole wheat toast.
Sam, bless his heart, went back for seconds, then thirds.
“You’re sweet, Sam, but you really don’t have to make yourself sick just to prove it’s edible,” Laura said as she was sopping up the last runny bit of egg with a corner of very dark—okay, burnt—toast.
“If I weren’t due at the courthouse in half an hour,” he said, glancing at the clock on the wall, “I’d be tempted to go back for fourths.”
Laura stared at the yellow and black morsel in her fingertips for a moment, then dropped it back onto her plate.
“Okay. Okay. I’ll take cooking lessons.” She flung her hands up in surrender. “There. I’ve said it. I’ll sign up for a class or something this week.”
Sam arched a wicked eyebrow. “That sounds perilously close to optimism to me, Miss McNeal. As if you’re actually beginning to believe you’ll have people to cook for in the coming years.” He grinned. “Me. A couple of rug rats, maybe. Even, heaven help you, grandkids.”
“Don’t press your luck, my love. It’s just that you’ll be working longer hours after the election and I don’t want to go to jail for poisoning the sheriff.”
“Speaking of the election,” he said, “how about coming to the courthouse with me? I thought maybe we could get a marriage license…you know…just in case.”
“Sam,” she said softly.
Oh, God. He was the sweetest, most generous, strongest and sexiest man in the entire world. He had even risked salmonella and God knows what else this morning in order to please her. She was the luckiest woman alive. Why couldn’t she just relax and accept his gift of love? Why couldn’t she just say yes?
He was sitting there, hi
s empty plate on the table before him, his gaze fastened so intently on her face, his expression so…so, worried. No. More than that. Scared! So damned scared.
It nearly broke her heart.
“Okay,” she said, almost breezily, as if there’d never been a single doubt or any hesitation whatsoever in her mind. As if she naturally assumed he’d stick around forever.
“Let’s get the license. Just in case.”
His handsome features kind of melted with relief. “Great. We’ll drop by the clerk’s office and get it, then.”
“Fine.” Laura gave a tiny shrug, more to ease the sudden, terrible tension in her shoulders than to communicate indifference. “Let’s do it. Besides, there’s no law that says once we’ve got the license that we have to use it, right?”
“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “At least, none that I know of. And I’m pretty familiar with all the laws in the county.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
Laura cleared her throat. “Just in case.”
“Right. No big deal. Just in case.”
The big deal, as it turned out, wasn’t getting the marriage license or even when Sam fainted during the subsequent blood test. The big deal—the mother of all big deals, in fact—was the following week when Laura made a sudden and unprecedented trip to the grocery store and came home with a gallon of milk, a roll of mints, and a do-it-yourself pregnancy test.
Sam stared at the items as she took them from the paper bag. Then he swallowed, much too audibly he thought for a guy who was six three, weighed in at over two hundred pounds, and was about to resume wearing a badge and a .357 Magnum on a daily basis. Then he grinned.
“What were these?” he asked, laughing as he pointed to the plastic milk jug and the candy on the kitchen table. “A diversionary tactic for the checkout lady?”
“Not funny,” she said, aiming a glare right between his eyes. “I think we’re in big trouble, Sam. This could well be the case we were talking about when we said ‘Just in case.”’