Joe Silver smiled. “No, you’re the big strong G-man. You can beat me. Or you can catch me. But to do either, you let your precious Julie’s life slip away. Tick, tick, tick. The seconds slip by. I didn’t give her any air at all. I couldn’t.” He smiled, then swung the shovel again. McCoy ducked just in time, then bounded up.
This time, he caught Joe in a giant bear grip that brought them both crashing down into the trees. He didn’t waste a second’s time. He looked into the ordinary features of the man, into the face that housed the charming smile.
The man was sick.
He didn’t care. Julie was dying. He slugged Joe as hard as he could with a solid right fist. He heard a sickening sound from Silver’s jaw. The eyes went glazed as Joe Silver lost consciousness.
Julie …
“Lieutenant McCoy!”
It was Timothy Riker at last with Patty on his heels. They were both carrying shovels. McCoy grabbed a shovel from Timothy and started digging again.
Patty and Timothy were on their knees. Dirt flew.
Hope flared in McCoy’s heart. Joe hadn’t managed to bury Julie as deeply as he had buried Tracy and Tammy. The earth wasn’t packed. Within minutes his shovel slammed against the wood of one of Joe’s makeshift coffins.
“Grab it up!” he commanded Timothy. Between them, they brought the coffin to the surface. With the end of the shovel; he wrenched open the lid.
She was there. His Julie. Her eyes were closed. Her face was as pale as snow. Beautiful, ethereal, surrounded by a mist of gold and platinum hair. Her hands were folded over her chest.
“Julie!” he screamed her name. Screamed it loud enough to wake the dead. Screamed it to the heavens. Not again, dear God, not again …
He reached for her. He would give her life. He would give her air from his lungs, and life from his soul. “Julie, please …”
His arms encircled her as he lifted her from the coffin to start CPR.
His lips lowered to hers.
And then …
Her eyes flew open. She inhaled on a ragged gasp and began to cough and choke. He held her up, whispering her name.
“McCoy!” she wheezed it out.
“Julie.” He enfolded her against him. He held her there, rocking her with him, smoothing her hair. “It’s over, Julie, you’re safe.” He looked at Timothy. “Get Silver. Cuff him, even if he is unconscious. Bring him to the car.”
Timothy nodded. McCoy stood, staggering somewhat with her in his arms. He started walking to the car. Her golden eyes were on his. Her lips were curled into a beautiful smile. Her cheeks were becoming a beautiful blush rose once again.
Thank you, God, thank you, God.
“You were wonderful, McCoy. Just like in the fairy tales. A kiss from a knight in shining armor.”
He was choking. “Julie, if I hadn’t found you—”
“But you did find me. I was calling to you and calling to you. And you heard me.”
“Julie, I didn’t hear you.”
“In your heart, McCoy. You heard me in your heart. You believed in me.”
“Julie, I knew you were near water—”
“McCoy, face it. You have powers of your own.”
“Julie,” he groaned.
“You loved me. You believed in me. And you believed in yourself. And you found me.”
“Rusty found you—” he began. His face clouded over. Julie’s arms clutched more tightly around him. “Silver shot Rusty.” He turned back. “Timothy, get a move on back there! I want my dog taken to a vet. Maybe there’s hope for him.”
“Your dog?” Julie said.
He looked at her again. “Our dog.”
There were sirens shrilling in the night. An ambulance came shooting in beside the Lincoln, then a patrol car. Petty leaped out, nearly ripped Julie from McCoy’s arms, then began a barrage of questions.
“Patty’s bringing Silver to the car,” McCoy began, but then he frowned, watching as Patty came walking up to them, shaking her head.
“What happened?”
“I—I’m not sure,” she murmured. “Silver’s dead.”
“What?” McCoy demanded.
“No, you didn’t kill him, lieutenant. He must have come to. And he raced for the water. But he didn’t find a level entry. He threw himself from high ground. He struck a patch of rapids. He’s dead.”
Julie, held in Petty’s fatherly embrace, exhaled on a long, jagged sigh. “It really is over then,” she whispered softly.
“Amen,” Petty said. “Young lady! Let’s get you into this ambulance—”
“No, Julie is coming with me,” McCoy said. “Rusty goes in the ambulance. He needs the best vet in town. I’ll get Julie to the hospital—Riker, will you please go with my dog?”
“My dog,” Julie said.
“Our dog,” McCoy reminded her.
A second ambulance had pulled up, and another police car.
Others were there now. Others to deal with the remains of Joe Silver.
Perhaps he had been the most tortured soul, Julie thought. She was still too shaken to know. He had found his peace now, and she wasn’t sure that she could help but be glad.
For her, it was over. Resting her head on McCoy’s lap, she could only be grateful for life.
She told McCoy that she didn’t need to go to the hospital—but he insisted. And once she was there, it was decided that she should stay a night, too. And so she was bathed and poked and tested, and dressed in a clean gown. And a bewildered Brenda came in to see her, and then returned to her daughter. Then McCoy was back, just holding her hand by her bedside.
Within an hour, the phone rang. McCoy took it, and she watched as a boyishly delighted grin appeared on his face as he listened.
He hung up.
“Rusty’s going to make it. He’ll be in something like a doggy cast for a long while, but he’s going to make it. My dog is going to be fine.”
“My dog.”
“Our dog.”
“But he lives with me—”
“Julie, we’re going to be married. That means we live together.”
She smiled. She wasn’t in the mood to argue with him. “Oh.” Then she sat up and threw her arms around him. “Oh, McCoy, I love you so much. I didn’t mind the idea that I was going to die. I just minded the idea that I was going to die now that you were in my life. But you found me. Oh, McCoy, you had that wonderful power, and you found me.”
“Julie, it was logic. I saw the picture—”
“It was instinct.”
“Logic.”
“Instinct.”
“Julie—” McCoy began. Then he smiled slowly. And he looked into her beautiful hazel eyes. “All right, Miss Hatfield. Let’s end this feud right now. It was instinct, and it was logic. And …” He kissed her lips gently. “It was love.”
“Oh, yes!” she whispered agreeably. “Above all, McCoy, it was love!”
And she kissed him in return.
The feud was, indeed, over.
Epilogue
The dream had become her life.
And there was no mistaking the man in the flesh for the haunting lover who had teased her senses for so long.
She knew him, knew him so well. She knew the very handsome curves and contours of his face, knew the silver sizzle of his eyes, the curve of his lips.
And she knew when he came behind her.
Every time …
Because of a subtle, masculine scent. She would know because she would feel him there.
And the warmth would fill her, the tenderness. Yes, she knew him, knew the man, and knew things about him that made her love him.
She knew all the hues within his heart and soul and mind, and those colors were all beautiful, and part of the warmth that touched her.
Tonight …
He stood behind her, and he swept the fall of her hair from her neck, and she felt the wet, hot caress of his lips against her nape.
He held her hair, and his kiss skimmed over her
shoulder. She wore something soft and slinky. Something silk. Something that fell from her body, rippling against it, touching her hips and his thighs, then drifting down to a pool on the floor. The fabric was so cool …
And that touch of his lips against her flesh was so very, very hot …
His arms encircled her. She could feel the strength of his naked chest as he pulled her against him. He still wore jeans. She could feel the roughness of the fabric against her tender skin. Even that touch was sensual.
She felt his kiss.
Felt the hungry pressure of his lips forming over her own, firmly, demandingly, causing them to part for the exotic presence of his tongue. Teasing her lips, dancing against them … taunting them, forcing them apart to a new, abandoned pleasure.
And when his lips left her mouth, they touched her throat. Touched the length of it. The soft, slow, sensual stroke of his tongue brushing her flesh. With ripples of silken, liquid fire. She could see his hands, broad, so darkly tanned, upon the paleness of her own skin. His fingers were long, handsomely tapered, calloused, but with neatly clipped nails. Masculine hands. Hands that touched with an exciting expertise. Fingers that stroked with confidence and pleasure.
She allowed her head to fall back, her eyes to close. The sensations to surround her.
The breeze … it was so cool against her naked body. So soft. So unerringly sensual. Perhaps because her body was so hot. Growing fevered. But the air … It touched her where his kiss left off, and both fire and ice seemed to come to her, and dance through her.
She spun in his arms. It was no longer daytime. Shadows were falling, and the breeze was growing cooler.
And his kiss, the tip of his tongue, stroked a slow, searing pattern down the length of her spine. It touched her nape, and the building tempest within her suddenly seemed to engulf her.
And his kiss went lower.
And where his lips touched her, she burned.
And where his lips had lingered earlier, the cool air stroked her with a sensuality all its own.
His kiss lowered. And lowered until he teased the base of her spine. And his hand caressed her naked buttocks and hips, and she was turning in his arms.
She was touching him then. Touching him, knowing the living warmth and fire of him. Feeling the ripple of muscle in his chest. Feeling his hands. Feeling the pulse of his body. Feeling … him.
And he was with her. Her lover, her husband. A part of her. And when he touched her so, when the rhythm of his love brought her soaring so high, the night could seem to be lit with sunlight, and the air was eternally charged with magic.
As always …
When he touched her, the world spun, and split, and lightning seemed to sizzle. And then it came, the moment when the stars burst and the sky seemed to go a glorious gold, and then to blacken again.
As always …
There was the desperate scramble to breathe again, the sheen of perspiration that bathed them both like a lover’s dew …
As always …
His arms came around her, warm, tender, inviting. She kissed his hand and lay still, savoring their love, and their life together.
No words came to either of them for the longest time. It was too beautiful. It was spring. They were nearing their first wedding anniversary, and both of them were content to hold one another.
But then McCoy shifted at last. He ran his hand over the growing contour of her stomach.
“You’re sure our little McCoy is okay?”
She smiled. “Quite sure.”
“Are you sure you don’t know what it is?”
“Yes, I do. It’s a baby,” Julie said solemnly.
He made a face in the darkness. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She did know. She was convinced it was a boy. But she wasn’t going to tell McCoy. He was going to have to be there with her in the delivery room and find out for himself.
“Have you thought more about names?” he asked.
“Yes. If it’s a boy, we should call him Hatfield. After all, he’ll have McCoy for a last name. He can be Hatfield McCoy.”
“Do you really want him growing up with that name?” McCoy rolled to his stomach and stared at her very seriously, as if warning her that their child could fight his way through school because of it. “And what if the baby is a girl?”
“Well, we’ll just call her Hatfield, too,” Julie told him, very seriously.
“Julie—”
“Then again, I’m fond of Robert. Not a Junior. I like Bobby. When he grows up, he can be a Robert if he wants. Or a McCoy.”
He smiled, and kissed her. “Mrs. McCoy, you do know how to flatter your man.”
“I try,” she said serenely.
“Well, we do have about two months left to decide,” he said, and then he sighed. “But we’ve got to get going now. Brenda expects us there by eight.”
“And we really have to be there on time?” Julie asked. She didn’t like being late, but it was so nice here tonight. They were living in the town house in Washington most of the time—it was necessary for McCoy’s work. And Julie loved roaming the various libraries and archives to find years-old scandals and murder cases for her stories.
But both of them loved to come home. Rusty could run around the mountains. They could both breathe again, really breathe.
They could go anywhere, she thought. Anywhere in the world. This would always be home to them both.
They didn’t need to say it. They knew it.
“We can’t be late. Brenda is having a surprise anniversary party for us, and if I know it, I’m sure that you do. Petty will be there, and Patty, and Timothy—and from what Brenda said, I think that those two are going to have an announcement of their own.”
Julie started to bound up. It wasn’t easy with her stomach in the way. McCoy gave her a hand. “Patty and Timothy!” she exclaimed.
There was a teasing light in McCoy’s eyes. “You didn’t guess?”
“Not for a moment. How wonderful!”
“Yes, I guess so. Anyway, we’ve got to get going.” He pulled her to her feet. “Hop in that shower, ma’am. I’ll be right behind you.”
He was right behind her. She smiled as the water cascaded over her. Life was really so good. They still argued. Everyone argued.
But she was never afraid anymore. She knew that he was with her, and she knew how deeply he loved her.
Both of them had put to rest the ghosts of their pasts and found something precious and rare. Not many people were so blessed. She had never imagined the danger between them, but they had met it, and the reward had been more than life, it had been this wonderful love.
“Hurry,” McCoy warned her later, pulling on his jacket. “You know, I heard that it might get a little chilly tonight. I’ll throw our coats in the car, too.”
Julie patted powder on her nose. “No, bring the raincoats.”
“Julie, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky all day long—”
She turned around, smiling sweetly. “Please?”
And McCoy, watching his beautiful imp of a wife—who now, quite admittedly, did resemble a little blond blimp—had to smile.
And shrug.
And kiss her lightly on the lips.
“All right, my love, raincoats it is.”
And later that night, when the last of the guests were leaving Brenda’s, huddled against the drizzling raindrops, McCoy set his hand into the pitter-patter that was falling down. And he laughed.
His life was incredible. Wonderful, incredible.
And beyond that, it even had special advantages!
A Biography of Heather Graham
Heather Graham (b. 1953) is one of the country’s most prominent authors of romance, suspense, and historical fiction. She has been writing bestselling books for nearly three decades, publishing more than 150 novels and selling more than seventy-five million copies worldwide.
Born in Florida to an Irish mother and a Scottish father
, Graham attended college at the University of South Florida, where she majored in theater arts. She spent a few years making a living onstage as a back-up vocalist and dinner theater actor, but after the birth of her third child decided to seek work that would allow her to spend more time with her family.
After early efforts writing romance and horror stories, Graham sold her first novel, When Next We Love (1982). She went on to write nearly two dozen contemporary romance novels.
In 1989 Graham published Sweet Savage Eden, which initiated the Cameron family saga, an epic six-book series that sets romantic drama amid turbulent periods of American history, such as the Civil War. She revisited the nineteenth century in Runaway (1994), a story of passion, deception, and murder in Florida, which spawned five sequels of its own.
In the past decade, Graham has written romantic suspense novels such as Tall, Dark, and Deadly (1999), Long, Lean, and Lethal (2000), and Dying to Have Her (2001), as well as supernatural fiction. In 2003’s Haunted she created the Harrison Investigation service, a paranormal detective organization that she spun off into four Krewe of Hunters novels in 2011.
Graham lives in Florida, where she writes, scuba dives, and spends time with her husband and five children.
Graham (left) with her sister.
Graham with her family in New Orleans. Pictured left to right: Dennis Pozzessere; Zhenia Yeretskaya Pozzessere; Derek, Shayne, and Chynna Pozzessere; Heather Graham; Jason and Bryee-Annon Pozzessere; and Jeremy Gonzalez.
Graham at a photo shoot in Key West for the promotion of the Flynn Brothers trilogy.
Graham at the haunted Myrtles plantation, Francisville, Louisiana.
Graham and the Slushpile Band playing the Memnoch the Devil Ball at the Undead Con in New Orleans, 2010.
Graham with dear friend, actor Doug Jones.
Graham (third from left) with F. Paul Wilson, R. L. Stine, Jon Land, and other friends at the seventh annual ThrillerFest, held in New York City, 2011. The authors participated in the “Be Book Smart” campaign organized by Reading Is Fundamental, the nation’s oldest and largest children’s literacy organization.
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