Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
Dear Reader
Title Page
Dedication
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
Copyright
How much more did she need to know?
“Greg, I have a million questions.”
“We’ll get to your questions…later,” he promised. His voice threaded through the blackness, entwining them in intimacy. Gently he pulled her toward him.
“But—”
“Hush.” His hand brushed her cheek, drawing her mouth closer to his. “Your skin is so soft, ‘Kella,” Greg murmured against her lips. “Soft.” He nipped the lower lip ever so lightly. “Sweet.” And then his lips were there, demanding a response she was anxious to give.
McKella moaned, twisting slightly in an effort to get closer. Her hands roamed over his back, and her breasts pressed against the thin material that separated her from the hard wall of his chest. “What are you doing to me?” she whispered when his lips drew back. “Who are you, really?”
“You know me.” His words hung in the darkness. “I’m the man who’s falling in love with you.”
Dear Reader,
Thirty-one years ago this month, my husband and I flew to the island of Bermuda for our honeymoon. We’ve never forgotten the beauty of the island, the friendliness of the people or the incredible blue shades of the water and the sky.
The rescue scene on the beach actually happened much as I depicted. It was the first and only time I’ve ever been part of a human chain in a rescue situation. Very scary, but with a thankfully happy ending.
After all these years. Bermuda has changed greatly, so I took some minor liberties in my story. As far as I know, there are no outdoor cafés in St. George like I describe. Nor do the honeymoon cottages exist, though I understand there is something similar nearby.
Still, when I think of a honeymoon, I think of Bermuda. The island holds a magical appeal for me that made it the perfect setting for this story. I hope you’ll agree.
Happy Reading!
Dani Sinclair
Married in Haste
Dani Sinclair
For Mary and John LaFond, whose precious gift of friendship has spanned more than twenty-four years of wonderful memories so far Also for Natashya Wilson. Your enthusiasm for this story meant a great deal. And always, for Roger, Chip, Dan and Barbara.
Special thanks to Don Black who was willing to share his piloting knowledge with a stranger.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
McKella Patterson…Dinsmore?—Is she a suspect for murder, or the next intended victim?
Greg Wyman—The mystery man arrived just in time to save McKella’s life—what isn’t he telling her?
Paul Dinsmore—The disappearing bridegroom left a trail of bodies in his wake.
Betty Jane Dinsmore—She used newspaper ads to find her husband—and got all kinds of unwelcome responses.
Eleanor Miller Dinsmore Beauchamp—She wanted to talk to McKella. Now she won’t talk to anyone ever again.
Larry Patterson—McKella’s uncle will inherit the family business—should anything happen to McKella.
Henry Patterson—McKella’s father is in a coma after an accidental fall—or was it?
Eric Henning—The detective gave McKella some strange news about her husband—and suddenly is nowhere to be found.
Ben Kestler—His revolutionary contact lens process will make a fortune for Patterson Opticals—unless someone else gets it first.
Constable Freer—He strongly objects to the sudden crime wave sweeping the island of Bermuda.
Prologue
August 5, 1987
The stench of his own sweaty fear assaulted his nostrils. His breathing made a harsh raspy sound even in the noisy bar. It had taken surprising courage to approach the man after the other people had left. Especially since he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer to his question spoken out loud. Didn’t he already know the answer in his heart?
The badly scarred table sat between them. He fingered his glass of beer. This was more difficult than he’d anticipated, but he’d walked and hitchhiked for the past two days. He wasn’t about to let a scowl chase him off.
Slowly, he withdrew the battered cloth wallet from his coat pocket and laid it on the table. His body tightened in anticipation as those blue eyes looked from the wallet to his face.
“How did you find me?”
He sensed fear behind that question. The fear surprised him, so his shrug was quick. “I asked some questions. The trial made the local papers, you know. When I found your wallet in my brother’s dresser, I thought you might want it back.”
“Yeah? Why are you really here?”
“I want the truth about my father,” he stated quietly.
His companion’s lips drew back in a snarl of anger that distorted the handsome face so strangely like his own.
“Go home.”
“I don’t have a home anymore.” His voice deepened, betraying the need behind his question. “Who killed my father?”
Weary eyes closed for a moment, then opened. “You’re crazy. He fell into Miller’s pond and drowned.”
His fist smashed against the tabletop, sending the beer sloshing onto the dirty wood surface and startling both of them. The beers he’d already drunk had begun to make him feel light-headed. He wasn’t used to drinking.
“They fought earlier that night,” he said, striving for better control.
Resignation replaced surprise on the face across from him. “So what? They always fought. Your father was a drunk. A child abuser.”
That single truth serrated him with white hot pain. Memory of all the wicked beatings stirred his anger. But he held it in check, noting the other man hadn’t questioned who “they” were.
“The sheriff wrote Pop’s death up as an accident.”
There was no softening of the features staring so intently at him. A lock of the other man’s black hair fell forward to cover his forehead. He pushed at his own dark hair with a hand that still wasn’t steady.
“Leave it alone. It’s over. There’s nothing you can do. Your father’s dead.”
“The sheriff thinks you killed him.”
Fury lit his companion’s features. “Me? Or your brother?”
“Either of you. Both of you. You’re the one with the temper.”
Blood drained from those features. Both hands became fists.
“I can prove where I was that night.”
“With Eleanor?”
“Shut up.”
“Guess who she’s been dating since you left? Think she’d give both of you an alibi?”
He watched as his companion reached for his beer and drained the glass, setting it back down with careful precision. The man’s hand was rock steady, but his expression looked hunted. What was he afraid of?
“I don’t have any answers for you.” The man’s chair scraped the floor as he stood abruptly and swayed. His words were just the tiniest bit slurred. “Go back to Tweaksburg.”
“Hey, wait! You can’t just leave.”
“Watch me.”
He pushed back his own chair in panic, but the intensity of that gaze kept him in his seat. “Take me with you.”
The words hung in the smoker’s haze that surrounded them.
“You can get to hell without my help. There’re people looking for me. If yo
u found me, they won’t be far behind. You’re smart. You’ve got a future…”
“I’ve got nothing,” he argued. “You think a fancy grade-point average is going to make me somebody? Not likely. Take me with you.”
“No.” The man turned and walked away.
He scrambled to his feet and watched in helpless dread as the hot, summer night swallowed the closest thing he’d ever had to a friend.
It took a moment for him to notice the wallet, still sitting open on the table. Part of it lay in a puddle of beer. He knew there was no money or credit card inside, but there was a driver’s license and a social security card—and a picture of Eleanor.
He picked up the wallet and studied the picture. He, too, wanted good things. Rich things. Things he couldn’t have back in Tweaksburg, Kentucky. Did it really matter how his father had died? Hadn’t he been sure of the truth before he even came searching for answers?
He drained his glass and followed the other man out the door. The beers had gone straight to his head, but they’d also given him courage. He wasn’t going back to Tweaksburg. If his old friend wouldn’t take him along, he’d demand a ride as far as the next town. After all, he had nothing to go home to.
Drunk or not, his father hadn’t drowned in Miller’s pond without help.
Chapter One
“Repeat after me. I, McKella Patterson, take you, Paul Dinsmore…”
She stared at Paul’s too-handsome face through the veil of her gown and felt a sudden chill. Yet, this was the right thing to do. She’d thought it all out so carefully.
Love was a fantasy. This was reality.
“McKella?”
Her eyes flicked to the minister, a friend of her father’s for many years. Her father sat in the front pew behind them, dying by the minute. He wanted this union with every breath he took.
She wanted it, too.
Didn’t she?
Of course she did. This was the right thing to do.
“I, McKella Patterson, take you…”
Satisfaction gleamed in Paul’s blue eyes. The heavy weight in her stomach didn’t lessen. For just a moment, she thought she’d be ill.
DANCERS SWIRLED AROUND HER, but McKella felt blessedly isolated. The reception was running without a hitch, even if her grin was etched in place. She wished desperately that she could leave this crowded, noisy room.
“There you are, my dear.” Her uncle appeared at her side. Larry Patterson was an aggressively lean, fit man in his early fifties and her father’s only other living relative. “I got your father back to the house. He’s completely exhausted, but the nurse is there.”
She gave him a weak smile. “I’m anxious to be away, too,” she told him honestly.
“Your groom doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.”
Her gaze followed his across the room to where Paul danced with a slender, attractive brunette whose casual clothing seemed terribly out of place at this fancy reception. The woman didn’t look to be having a lot of fun, either. Her features were grim as she listened to something Paul said.
“McKella! Shouldn’t you be thinking about changing?”
McKella turned to face her maid of honor, but her stomach muscles tightened and she couldn’t respond. Why was she feeling so apprehensive?
“I’ll let Paul know you went to the suite,” her uncle promised with a smile.
McKella turned back in Paul’s direction, only to find both he and the woman had disappeared. Her gaze landed instead on a man leaning negligently against the far doorway. An inexplicable tension gripped her. His dark curly hair reminded her of Paul’s, but there was a raw energy about this man, as though his lazy pose was just that.
She wished that her contact lens hadn’t ripped that morning. Or that she at least had her glasses with her. She couldn’t make out his features, and for some reason she wanted a clear view of this man. The irony didn’t escape her. She, the new owner of Patterson Opticals, didn’t have a spare pair of contacts with her.
The stranger stared in her direction, head tipped slightly to one side. Dressed in dark slacks and a casual shirt open at the collar, he obviously wasn’t one of the two hundred fifty invited guests. There was something sensual, almost predatory in the way he stood there. Her breath seemed to catch in her throat.
Disturbed, she nodded in the direction of the stranger. “Who’s that man?”
“What man?” her uncle asked.
Even as she would have pointed him out, the stranger took a step back through the doorway and was gone.
“What man, honey?”
Her maid of honor took her arm. “Come on, McKella. I’ll help you get out of that dress.”
“Never mind,” McKella said, “he’s gone.” And she let her friend lead her away.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, McKella was reaching up to unfasten the small crystal-and-pearl earrings, when her maid of honor entered, her round face lined with concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Paul. Oh, McKella, he’s drunk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your uncle Larry is bringing him to the room, but Paul is really drunk.”
“Not a chance.” Paul was a social drinker. He could nurse a beer all evening. Tonight, as far as she knew, he’d only had two beers and some wine for the toasts. A shiver traced its way up her spine as she watched Paul and her uncle stagger into the room.
Paul could barely hold his head erect.
An hour later, he lay sprawled on the bed, his tuxedo jacket bunched across his back and under his armpits. His tie dangled in a loose knot beneath the open buttons on his shirt. His handsome face lay in repose, looking childishly innocent despite the gut-wrenching heaving of a few minutes earlier.
McKella knew Paul could not be drunk, even if he did display most of the symptoms. More than likely, he was coming down with the flu or something, and the alcohol had simply reacted more strongly than usual. She looked up and met her own worried expression in the mirror across the room.
Paul had fought her when she’d tried to remove his clothing. His refusal to call a doctor had left her feeling oddly intimidated. McKella wasn’t used to being intimidated. She could hold her own in a board meeting filled with aggressive men. Why, then, couldn’t she handle the man who was now her husband?
McKella walked to the other side of the bed and lifted the telephone, then hesitated. Paul had furiously insisted that he only needed sleep—and now he did look a little better. She rubbed her upper arm where his fingers had bitten into her skin. Maybe he was right. Maybe a doctor wasn’t needed.
The dial tone hummed from the receiver in her hands. Automatically, her fingers tapped out the number for her townhouse. She hadn’t checked her messages in three days. At least this would give her something to do on her wedding night.
She listened to two well-wishers before the automated voice alerted her that she also had a deleted message.
The telephone company’s answering service held deleted messages for twenty-four hours before erasing them. This had proved a blessing once before when she’d deleted a message by mistake and then needed the person’s phone number.
But she hadn’t deleted any messages in the last twenty-four hours.
With a sense of foreboding, she depressed the numbers that would let her listen to the replay.
“McKella, this is Eric Henning again. I’ve tried to reach you several times and since you haven’t returned my calls I may be too late, but you should definitely postpone your wedding.”
A cold wash of fear flooded her insides as she looked down at her groom.
Eric Henning was a private investigator she’d hired before the wedding to run a background check on Paul. His investigation had turned up nothing unexpected.
“I was talking to some people in Lexington on another matter completely when Paul Dinsmore’s name came up,” the voice continued in her ear. “As a result of that conversation, I did a little probing. I think you’ll be willing to pay some ad
ditional expenses when I tell you that not one of his references has ever met the guy.”
“What?”
The recorded message droned on. “On paper, and even in their computer files, Paul Dinsmore exists. Only, it looks like he never worked for the Zuckerman Company. There are lots of possible explanations, but you ought to let me explore this further.”
Eric had never been satisfied with his initial background check on Paul. When the strapping detective first suggested she postpone the wedding until he delved a little deeper, she’d disagreed, knowing her father’s time was limited. Her father trusted Paul enough to groom him as the next CEO. More than that, he liked Paul. She liked Paul. A quick marriage had seemed like the right thing to do.
“Something is fishy here,” Eric’s voice persisted. “There are lots of possible explanations, but you ought to postpone your wedding until we can get at the facts.”
“Now you tell me.” Regret tasted bitter in her mouth. If she had waited even an hour longer to check her machine, she never would have known this message existed. And only one other person had her telephone codes.
Paul.
Anxiety squeezed the air from her lungs. She looked away from her sleeping husband to stare at the generic print hanging on the wall over the bed.
“This has to be a mistake.”
She punched in the number Eric had left for her, but the phone rang, unanswered. She tried his office number, which rolled over to his answering service. As she stared at the stranger who was now her husband, she left an urgent message for Eric to call her at the hotel immediately.
PAUL HALTED IN THE MIDDLE of the crowded Bermuda terminal just outside customs. “McKella, sweetheart, I told you it’s a misunderstanding. When your detective calls back, you’ll find out he made a mistake.”
Married In Haste Page 1