by Raina Lynn
“Would you prefer me to sleep in the spare room?”
Letter to Reader
Title Page
RAINA LYNN
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Copyright
“Would you prefer me to sleep in the spare room?”
Maggie was unable to look at Garrett as she voiced the question.
Garrett laughed bitterly. “Here I’ve been worried about whether or not we should make love, and you’re not even interested in sharing bed space.”
“That’s not true!” she snapped back. “I just thought—”
“Sorry. I assumed we’d sleep together. After thirteen years, separate beds seemed foolish to me. I guess it doesn’t to you.”
Maggie snatched her pajamas from the hook and stormed out the door, her back ramrod straight.
Furious with Maggie, with himself and with the world at large, Garrett whipped back the blankets, took one look at the sheets and groaned. They had faded a little, but he remembered them well. More to the point, he remembered Maggie’s creamy skin in sensuous contrast against the royal blue satin.
It was going to be a very long night.
Dear Reader,
It’s summer. The days are long...hot...just right for romance. And we’ve got six great romances right here, just waiting for you to settle back and enjoy them. Linda Turner has long been one of your favorite authors. Now, in I’m Having Your Baby?! she begins a great new miniseries, THE LONE STAR SOCIAL CLUB. Seems you may rent an apartment in this building single, but you’ll be part of a couple before too long. It certainly works that way for Annie and Joe, anyway!
Actually, this is a really great month for miniseries. Ruth Wind continues THE LAST ROUNDUP with Her ldeal Man, all about a ranching single dad who’s not looking for love but somehow ends up with a pregnant bride. In the next installment of THE WEDDING RING, Marrying Jake, Beverly Bird matches a tough cop with a gentle rural woman—and four irresistible kids.
Then there’s multi-award-winning Kathleen Creighton’s newest, Never Trust a Lady. Who would have thought small-town mom Jane Carlysle would end up involved in high-level intrigue—and in love with one very sexy Interpol agent? Maura Seger’s back with Heaven in His Arms, about how one of life’s unluckiest moments—a car crash—somehow got turned into one of life’s best, and all because of the gorgeous guy driving the other car. Finally, welcome debut author Raina Lynn. In A Marriage To Fight For, she creates a wonderful second-chance story that will leave you hungry for more of this fine new writer’s work.
Enjoy them all, and come back next month for more terrific romance—right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.
Leslie J. Wainger
Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator
* * *
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* * *
A MARRIAGE TO FIGHT FOR
RAINA LYNN
RAINA LYNN
is married, the mother of three, mother-in-law of one and grandmother of two. She lives in a peaceful, secluded corner of paradise in the Sierra Nevada. To her unending joy, not even the U.S. Postal Service comes out there. Her favorite way of unwinding at the end of a long day is to disappear into the forest on her horse for a couple of hours, then curl up with a good romance novel.
I would like to thank my husband, John,
and my mother, Bee, for their support,
my daughter Cheryl for giving me a swift kick whenever
I need one, and my younger children, Matthew and
Angela, for their patience with boring meals and
postponed vacations so their mom could pursue a dream.
I would also like to thank Antoinette Bronson,
Mildred Lubke and Phylis Ann Warady for their
invaluable expertise and friendship.
Prologue
The captain’s Texas drawl crackled over Flight 1251’s PA system, and Garrett Hughes tensed, waiting for the next lie.
“Sorry for the continued delay, ladies and gentlemen, but the computer difficulties we’re experiencing are being downright stubborn.”
A collective groan from the nearly three hundred passengers filtered into the air.
“We’ve got lots of fuel, so we’re just gonna keep circlin’ San Francisco till we get the problem straightened out.” He sounded bored, half-irritated.
Garrett hadn’t bought the other two announcements, and he wasn’t buying this one. Beneath the good-ol’-boy facade, that man was scared. Moreover, for the past hour, Garrett had watched the banked terror in the flight attendants’ eyes deepen, and seventeen years of law enforcement wouldn’t let him ignore it.
“For now, ya’ll sit back, relax, and we’ll be servin’ complimentary cocktails in just a moment.” Captain Perkins cracked a bad joke that sent scattered chuckles throughout the cabin. Then he broke the connection.
Garrett shared a skeptical glance with Tom White, a friend and fellow DEA agent. The sour expression on the smaller man’s face had to be an exact match to the one on his own.
“A hijacking?” Tom murmured low.
“I doubt it.” Garrett shook his head. “Hijackers thrive on passenger panic. We’d all know about it.”
“True, but if it’s really a mechanical failure, with all the backup systems these crates have, they should be able to land anyway, then fix the problem later.”
A blond, very young flight attendant walked past them and into the forward galley, her overly bright smile so fractured it looked like a jigsaw puzzle a child had carelessly dropped. Garrett maneuvered his tall, square frame into the aisle.
“Where are you going?” Tom asked, frowning.
Garrett braced an arm on the seat back and leaned toward him. “Thought I’d flash my ID at a pilot or two.”
Tom’s large eyes widened to owlish proportions. “We’re not FBI. You go in there, and they’ll throw you out.”
Garrett’s lips thinned into an inflexible line, an expression that had frightened more than one suspect into settling down. “That’s not my biggest worry at the moment.”
“Garrett, I’ve never been to San Francisco before. I plan to enjoy myself. For the next two weeks, the words crime and suspects don’t exist. One of these days, you need to add the word vacation to your vocabulary.” With a resigned shrug, Tom went back to looking out the window at the boats in the ocean below.
Garrett stepped to the door leading into the flight deck and reached into his breast pocket for his ID. As he did, his fingers brushed against a black velvet jeweler’s box. His life rested in that box and in the woman he hoped would wear the ring inside. But an unknown danger jeopardized his plans to win back his ex-wife, and assorted legal jurisdictions weren’t about to keep him from finding out what it was.
The little flight attendant appeared at his side. Her fingers were locked together so tightly that the skin was white. The pieces of her smile barely held together at all. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Federal agent.” Deliberately, he flipped his ID open and shut far too quickly for her to identify which law enforcement agency he was with.
Hope blazed across her face. “FBI?”
Something heavy was definitely going down, and Garrett sidestepped her question. “Is there someone on board who shouldn’t be?”
It took a moment for her to comprehend the implication. “No.”
“Good.”
At his brisk knock, a member of the flight crew opened the door from the inside. Before the man had the chance to protest, Garrett took the little blonde by the elbow and pushed her through the doorway ahead of him. An angry chorus of four men greeted him, demanding that he leave, men with unbuttoned collars, sweat-drenched faces and damp white shirts. Perkins even had his sleeves rolled up. The flight crew definitely wasn’t dressed for success. Garrett calmly shut the door and scanned the endless rows of indicator lights and dials on black instrument panels in the cramped compartment.
“Sir, it’s against FAA regulations for—”
Garrett focused beyond Perkins’s words. The man’s outrage seemed more of a pressure release than genuine anger over the blatant intrusion. Rather than answer, Garrett flipped open his ID again and continued his visual sweep, looking for something wrong, a tough task when he didn’t know what looked right.
Then he spotted it. A computer panel had been slid partially from its frame. Bolted to the inside was a thin, rectangular, metal box with a high-tech sensor display. The digital readout glowed a menacing green. Wires, like infinite tentacles, stretched from the box deep into the recesses of the jumbo jet’s circuitry.
Odd that death should come in so small a package. He felt no fear, just a dark sense of annoyance that settled over him like a familiar cloak.
For three years, he and Tom had worked deep cover. In the month since the operation had fallen apart, he’d struggled hard to detach from the cynical, cold-blooded persona that he’d adopted while living like a high-class animal with the cocaine import ring they’d infiltrated. Now, as he stared at the sophisticated bomb, he was sure he’d been less than successful. Where was the fear-pumped adrenaline?
So close. So damnably close. San Francisco was home, and Maggie and their son were the reasons he’d returned. Not a day had passed during that whole stinking operation that he hadn’t dreamed of getting his family back.
Acid-hot anger boiled from deep within him. He’d survived the most complex case of his career, survived having his cover blown and the resulting attempt on his life. Now he was within minutes of seeing Maggie and Rick again, but some nameless, faceless terrorist threatened it all.
Garrett lifted his gaze to Perkins, who sat closest to the bomb. He successfully swallowed back. the rising fury but was unable to do anything about the sarcasm. “I take it since jet jockies aren’t known for their prowess in bomb disposal, you’re communicating with someone on the ground who is?”
The four men shared a look of frozen panic, and Garrett nearly swore. “Look. If you want to keep up your fiction that life’s wonderful, you’d better do something about the employees dealing with the passengers.” He jerked his dark head toward the flight attendant, now sobbing quietly.
The wiry man closest to Garrett was twitchy as hell and came half out of his seat. “Sir, the DEA has no jurisdiction—”
Garrett scowled him down.
Captain Perkins looked back at the box, then cautiously at Garrett. “You have experience with this sort of thing?”
“Some.” But not enough, he amended silently. Not nearly enough. “I took a course in basic design and general disposal techniques, but I’ve never touched one. Not my specialty.”
Perkins’s breath hissed out from between his teeth. “Well, sir,” he drawled, “that’s more than we all got.” He gestured for the first officer to vacate his chair in favor of Garrett. Then he stuck out his hand. “Welcome to the party. It’s rigged so when we land, it’ll be Lockerbie, Scotland, all over again.”
“Wonderful,” Garrett muttered and shook the man’s clammy hand. He sat down and took the proffered headset.
As he identified himself to the experts below, part of his mind drifted to Maggie, her laughing green eyes and quick smile, the satin softness of her thick auburn hair as she lay in the hollow of his shoulder after they’d made love. And he thought of their son. Rick was sixteen now, and work had allowed Garrett precious little time with him during the past four years. Could they pick up where they’d left off? Or would his only child be a stranger?
Garrett’s grim resolve to survive blocked out everything but the business at hand. To come this close yet fail was unthinkable.
Chapter 1
The skin on the back of Maggie Hughes’s neck crawled. She leaned back in her chair and let the report slide from her fingers onto the mountain of papers on her desk. How long had this feeling of impending disaster plagued her? Thirty minutes? An hour?
One thing was certain. Her monthly reports were due today, and the Rutherford-Petrie Institute for Spinal and Head Injuries—like every other medical facility—ran on paperwork. Given her position as assistant director of physical therapy, the big boss jumped on her first if it didn’t get done, and staring at the wallpaper accomplished nothing.
Besides, what reason did she have to be apprehensive? Life was surprisingly smooth, considering her status as a single parent of a teenager. Determined to quell the gut feeling that her world was about to fall apart, she left her office and headed down to the patients’ rooms on the first floor. A smiling walkthrough was as good an excuse as any to clear her head.
The physician investors who had built Rutherford-Petrie had planned everything with the patients’ emotional well-being in mind, not just the health of their bodies. Equipment was state of the art. Each room featured a large picture window looking out onto the street or onto an inner courtyard or atrium. Most of RPI’s patients’ rehabilitative care required months of therapy. Depressing cubicles simply didn’t exist here.
As she strolled past the nurses’ station, Carl Sapperstein, her top therapist as well as her best friend, flagged her down. The man was built like an anorexic basketball player. He and a group of staffers were crowded around the staff’s TV set. “Hey, Maggie. Come look at this. They defused the bomb! They’re going to make it.”
“Who? What bomb?” Maggie followed his gaze to the grainy, jerking image of a descending 747. Cheers and shouts nearly drowned out the reporter’s jubilant voice.
“—Flight 1251 from Washington, D.C., is making its final approach. One can only imagine the euphoria felt by the heroic flight crew and the unnamed law enforcement officer who—”
Maggie’s attention locked onto the aircraft, the sensation of crawling skin returning with a vengeance. Her pulse raced.
Only three times in her life had she felt like this. Each time, a police officer arrived afterward to tell her that Garrett had been injured in the line of duty. For thirteen years, she had lived through the hell of being a cop’s wife.
Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “This is foolishness,” she muttered under her breath.
“What is?” a nurse asked distractedly, her attention still on the TV.
Maggie clamped her mouth shut and forced herself to stare at the screen. The chances against her ex-husband being on that plane were astronomical. So why did a sudden knot in her stomach threaten to drop her to her knees?
On the screen, the camera showed the 747 coming in with smooth, textbook precision, its landing gear poised like talons beneath the wings. Then, fifty feet above the runway, a brilliant flash shot out from the base of the right wing. Pieces of wing, engine and landing gear ripped through the air and showered the ground. The jet crumpled like a dying bird. Overbalanced, its left wing dug into the ground, throwing the plane into surreal cartwheels. A roiling ball of red-orange flame danced with opaque black smoke as both swirled from the tumbling wreckage. The fuselage corkscrewed on its nose, landed hard on its belly, then mercifully came to rest.
An involuntary scream tore from Maggie’s throat and, with an agony too deep for words, her heart cried out Garrett’s name.
Time and reality congealed into
a muted mass around her, solid, unmoving, insulating her from the pain. As if from a distance, she heard muffled voices calling her name. Strong hands gripped her arms, and she looked dazedly into Sapperstein’s worried eyes.
“Maggie, what’s wrong?” he demanded. “Are you all right?” He gave her a restrained shake. From him, that meant it was only mildly bone jarring.
Reality eased into its usual forward momentum and, with a humiliated groan, Maggie remembered screaming. Abjectly, she wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt up over her head. More embarrassing questions pelted her from all directions.
“Sorry.” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat. She was their supervisor, for crying out loud, and they didn’t need to see her falling apart. She glanced sheepishly at the TV. Emergency vehicles swarmed around the flaming wreckage, and billowing white foam covered it like grotesque whipped cream. “That accident really got to me for some reason. I’m fine.”
Relieved murmuring followed, but she didn’t miss the appraising glances a few of the staffers shared. They thought she was nuts. Frankly, she was tempted to agree.
“Why don’t you go home early?” Sapperstein urged. “With the overtime you put in, I know you need it.”
Maggie’s face burned. She attempted a scowl, but from everyone’s unimpressed expressions, she knew the effort failed miserably. So she rolled her eyes, instead. “Get back to work, people. Other than royally humiliating myself, I’m fine.”
After few more protests, her scowl became real. “Go.”
The reactions varied as much as the personalities, ranging from amusement to skepticism to annoyance, but everyone did, in fact, return to what they should have been doing before the TV had distracted them. For a moment, silence surrounded her. Then the reporter’s strained voice broke through, the horror of what he’d witnessed evidenced in his broken sentences and wordless pauses. Worse, though, was that despite all, Maggie’s deep-seated knowing didn’t fade. Garrett was on that plane!