“It’ll happen,” Hawk declared with a surety that none of the adults thought to question. “This is Paradise, after all… and everybody gets their happy ending here.”
~~~***~~~
Present Day
As Orla leaned back against Jethro’s chest and looked around the decorated barn, she sighed as she spied her youngest niece, Honor, being held in the arms of her brand-new husband, Sheriff Ezekiel Monroe. Feeling Jethro’s hand tighten around hers supportively, she couldn’t help but recall those prophetic words Hawthorne McKinnon had spoken to them on their long ago wedding night. Jethro’s brother had done everything he’d said he’d do…right down to marrying Harriet and producing those much loved four beautiful daughters he’d wanted.
Yes, Harmony, Faith, Patience and Honor McKinnon had indeed grown up to be the beauties that their daddy had claimed they’d be, and she and Jethro – while sadly never having their own children – had been lucky enough to be blessed in playing pivotal roles in each of their nieces’ lives.
Now, each girl had found her own amazingly strong man to hold her hand through life’s trials and tribulations in much the same way her own Farmer Man had been holding her hand for just over the last fifty years.
She only wished they could have fifty more.
THE END
Now enjoy a bonus book...and read Cain’s Salvation, the first book in the Passion in Paradise series! You’ll enjoy meeting those four nieces that are mentioned in Wed by Wednesday!
Cain’s Salvation
by Sarah O’Rourke
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2014 by Sarah O’Rourke
All rights reserved. No part of this publication or cover design artwork may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods in current use or to be developed in the future, without the prior express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law (US. Copyright Act of 1976).
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious, and are the sole property of Sarah O’Rourke. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any real setting is used in a fictitious manner with literary license.
This work of fiction is intended for mature audiences.
Dedicated to our husbands.....
and to all the warriors who have come home from combat missing a part of their souls
Reach out to Sarah O’Rourke!
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Cain’s Salvation - Chapter One
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Six Months Ago
Running a tired hand over his face as he walked over the rutted path that led from the combat hospital to his temporary barracks, Dr. Cain Turner glared at the cracked brown earth. He missed grass. Hell, he missed anything green at all. A tree… a bush… a plain shrub. In this ugly brown, burned wasteland, color was a dwindling commodity.
Afghanistan looked exactly like the shithole he always imagined it would.
Six months into his deployment, he still hated the tiny, backward country as much now as he had on the day he arrived.
Only his reasons had changed.
When he’d landed in this godforsaken dirty hellhole, he’d simply missed his life. As an emergency room doctor in Paradise, Tennessee, he’d seen his fair share of tragedy. People died. It was a consequence of living. It was also part of being a doctor – dealing with mortality. You couldn’t save every patient. At home, however, those deaths had been somewhat expected. He watched his patients succumb to ailments like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. He witnessed elderly patients dying of natural causes on almost a weekly basis. Other than the occasional car wreck or freak accident, the carnage and devastation he’d seen was minimal.
Here, in this hell on Earth, it was a whole different story. Good men and women died every day. Sometimes it was his own men, but even more often, it was their Afghani allies. Men like the translator that had just flatlined on his table. Ahmad Marhat’s greatest sin had been that he’d wanted to keep his family safe. He’d taken the job as translator for the United States Armed Forces in order to guarantee those he loved would be kept free of harm, protected from the Taliban forces that ran rampant in his small village. He’d been blown up for his effort.
And that was just the latest casualty that had landed in his operating room.
There’d been scores of others, and Cain didn’t see any bright light shining at the end of the long and winding tunnel that he’d been living in for months.
The whole war was fucked.
Dusting the dirt from his Army Combat Uniform before he walked into his sparse barracks room, he coughed, wincing as he tasted the grit that seemed to forever be clogging his throat. Fucking sand! There was no escaping it. It got into everything. His ears, his eyes…his goddamn mouth. It was the first thing he tasted in the morning and the last thing he tasted at night.
Slamming the door to his room with more force than necessary, he rolled his head on his shoulders, and tried to relieve some of the tension in his shoulders. He knew it was useless. His tight muscles were a side effect of his job, hours spent hunched over the open body cavity of a patient he’d known was doomed before he touched his scalpel.
He’d stood over Ahmad for six damn hours, working to stem the bleeding, shocking the dying man’s heart back to life three times before he’d been forced to call a time of death. That part… pronouncing a comrade dead… was a part of the job he’d become all too familiar with - way too fucking familiar.
Shaking his head, Cain knew the man would be yet another nightmare that woke him up, shaking and sweaty, in the wee hours of the morning. If he was lucky, he’d get a couple of solid, uninterrupted hours of sleep before the almost-nightly terrors drove him back to consciousness. He’d long forgotten what it felt like to sleep an entire night. If some emergency at the hospital didn’t wake him first, the fucking nightmares would.
Screams and blood and the gory agony of too many gruesome deaths.
That’s what his dreams consisted of these days. Though tired to the marrow of his bones, he dreaded closing his eyes.
Who the hell could blame him? They were calling him the fucking Soul Reaper in the surgical ward, for Christ’s sake. In the last month, he’d lost half his damn patients. Injuries had been extreme and extensive lately. IEDs had been blowing with scary regularity, rendering victims all but dead before they ever made it to him. Hell, their own base had taken more than its fair share of indirect fire over the past week. Tensions ran high and tempers burned hot among his brethren.
At first, he’d tried to tell himself that this God-awful feeling he held in the pit of his stomach wasn’t going to last forever. Called up from the National Guard, his tour of duty was slated to be only fifteen months long. As one day had bled into another, however, he realized that time moved at a different pace in this pit. Nine months into his deployment, he’d learned a hard lesson.
One day could feel a thousand hours long when you were surrounded by the violence of war.
He now understood why his dad, a Korean War vet, had said that war was, indeed, hell. Those pitying looks he’d received from the old man when he’d gotten his orders to report to Kandahar made a lot more sense to him now.
Allowing his eyes to drift toward the stack of letters on his makeshift desk in the corner, his heart sank. He knew he owed the people that loved him some kind of communication. A letter, a phone call … some kind of reassurance that this fucking place hadn’t broken him. He just felt so damned disconnected from life at home. Phoning home and making small talk with his brother and dad while he’d spent the past month losing at least a patient each day just felt wrong. He’d always been a shitty actor
and his relatives would see right past his lies anyway. So, he’d maintained radio silence.
He knew he owed them far better than that, but dumping his own worries and fears on their heads didn’t seem fair, either.
Then, there was Faith.
Even thinking her name was enough to constrict his heart.
His memories of Faith McKinnon were the only thing on the planet that kept him sane most days. Beautiful and pure, she was his beginning and end, his alpha and omega, the one constant his heart could depend on during the darkest hours of the night. Closing his eyes, he could imagine the feel of her long, silky blonde hair wrapped around his hand as he had plundered her soft mouth on the day he’d left for Afghanistan.
She’d promised to wait for him, and he’d vowed that he’d give her forever when he returned to her.
At thirty-four, he’d had nearly a decade on her, but that age difference had never worried either of them. What they’d felt for each other was tangible in way he’d never experienced with anyone else. They’d been together for a year and dated for a couple of months prior to that before becoming exclusive. Hell, the Turner and McKinnon families had been friends for years, farming together and sharing a church for as far back as he could remember.
They’d fallen naturally into a relationship when she’d graduated from college and come back home to Paradise to work in her family’s business, the I Don’t Care Café. Part restaurant and part bar, it was the only place in their small community-oriented town to sit down and get a decent meal and have a beer. Run by Faith and her three sisters, the small enterprise thrived.
After Faith’s mother and father had died a few years ago, the girls had decided to sell the farm, but kept the popular mom-and-pop diner and bar. The third of four sisters, Faith had been happy to join with her siblings and keep her Momma and Daddy’s longtime dream alive. Patience, Faith, Harmony, and Honor were without a doubt the closest siblings he’d ever known. Almost identical in looks, their long blonde hair and beautiful features well-known in their small community, the four ladies were tied together by blood and by love. They’d do anything for each other. Working together came naturally for them.
His wonderful fiancé had already lived through enough tragedy and pain to last a lifetime. First, there’d been the unexpected deaths of both her wonderful parents at the hands of a drunk driver. That horrible disaster had happened the summer she’d turned sixteen. He’d been finishing up his residency at the time at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, but he’d taken time off and traveled home for the funeral. He could still remember holding her at the funeral home as she cried her eyes out against his shirt. Even then, there’d been a connection between them, although it had never been inappropriate.
He’d held her again two years later when her youngest sister, Honor, had been abducted after a local high school football game. A county-wide search had immediately commenced and as a young doctor, he’d immediately volunteered for the search party. His little squad had consisted of himself, his brother Abel, his father Seth, and Ezekiel Monroe. Zeke, now the sheriff of their tiny town, had been the first to spot the sinkhole where Honor’s kidnappers had thrown her then unconscious body into the ground. As the only trained medical professional among their search party, however, Cain had been the first one to go down into that pit with her.
What he’d seen had changed his life.
It had changed the life of every man out there that night.
A peaceful town at the base of the Smoky Mountains in the Appalachians of Tennessee, Paradise and its residents had never seen evil up close until that terrible dark night. Crimes in their small hamlet were rare, and when they did happen, mild in nature. What they found… the memory still turned his stomach.
Badly beaten, Honor had been barely aware of her surroundings. It had been instantly obvious that the youngest – and tiniest – McKinnon girl had been violated in the worst possible ways. He’d covered her with a blanket and done what triage he could in the limited space they’d had while they’d waited for an extraction team. Mostly, though he’d just stroked her hair and begged her not to die while he prayed to God that He’d allow her to live.
By the time they’d gotten her body raised back to the surface, all three of Honor’s sisters had joined them, and it had been Faith’s tearful gaze that he’d met first after he’d climbed out of that hole. He’d held her while the paramedics had loaded her sister into a waiting ambulance, and she’d clutched his hand all the way to the hospital as they’d followed in the back of Zeke’s squad car.
Neither of them spoke a single word to each other during that entire ride, but that’s the moment he’d realized just how deeply he cared for the younger woman with whom he’d been doomed to fall deeply in love.
He’d watched as Faith had gone off to college and rejoiced when she’d come home all grown up, all long legs and soulful eyes. She’d been a knockout and he hadn’t been the only man who’d noticed. He’d just been the lucky son of a bitch that had gotten to her first. It was after a night spent watching half the male population of Paradise flirt with her during one of her shifts at the bar that he’d made his move, inviting her out to a dinner that had led to a movie that had somehow ended with his tongue halfway down her throat, kissing her like she was the last woman on Earth. Despite their volatile sexual chemistry together, he’d kept things casual between them for as long as he could, offering her the opportunity to look around the town and see what other options she had available to her. He’d even ground his teeth and watched while she’d dated other men.
Finally, when he’d been convinced that she was ready for a deeper commitment, he’d suggested that she limit her adventures to him alone. He smiled as he remembered how happy she’d been when she’d laughed in his face, a secretive smile affixed to her lips. Cain had wasted no time asking her what that sneaky grin was about and was shocked when he learned that his darling woman had merely been humoring him with the pretext of dating other guys. She’d taken great delight in sharing the truth with him. Those assholes that he’d worried himself nearly into early heart failure about had all been friends of hers, and she’d always been clear with each of them about one thing. Her heart was already taken.
By him.
Cain Turner.
He’d been the man that had taken her innocence that night that they’d decided they belonged to each other. In the bed of his dimly-lit bedroom, he’d peeled off her clothes and worshipped her body with his. He could still feel the tight clasp of her pussy gripping his cock that night when he’d irrevocably linked their lives together and made her his. Clamping his jaw as he remembered the hot feel of her soft lips beneath his, he felt his dick harden behind the pants of his uniform.
She’d been liquid fire around him, her wet pussy greedily sucking at him, drawing him inside and casting an unbreakable spell that he hadn’t wanted to fight. There’d been pain for her, but it hadn’t slowed his sweet angel down at all. When Faith wanted something, nothing stopped her. And she’d wanted him.
“Christ!” he bit out, sweating as he ripped off his soft cap and drove his fingers against his scalp, his present surroundings invading the sweet memory of his past. Hurling his cap at the wall and stomping toward the small john attached to his room, he started the shower and stripped out of his dirty clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor.
He needed to decompress to think clearly. Just a few minutes to get his head on straight and then he’d be able to do what needed to be done, he promised himself as he rubbed the heels of his hands against his forehead.
Stepping underneath the lukewarm spray, he turned his face up toward the water and palmed his dick. Working it in his hard grip, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the image of Faith’s naked body the last night they were together.
And as the water slowly rinsed the dirt from his body, he remembered their tender goodbye.
~***~
Cain moaned as Faith’s velvety lips slowly teased the head of
his cock, her tongue flicking the flared head with a torturously slow twist of her tongue. Tightening his fingers in her hair, he almost shuddered as the strands wrapped around his fist as her reddened lips slowly parted to encase him in the slick, wet heat of her mouth. Throwing back his head on the couch in his apartment, he made a rough sound in the back of his throat as she took him deep, almost to the back of her throat. “Fuck, baby,” he rasped as her sweet lips slowly slid back up his stem until only the bulbous head of his aching dick remained in her mouth. “You’re killing me,” he whispered hoarsely.
Smiling around his tip, Faith lifted her eyes to meet his aroused gaze. Releasing him, she grinned wider. “You said the only parting gift you wanted before you left tomorrow was one of my amazing blow jobs,” she informed him impishly. Shrugging her shoulders, her pink-tipped nipples pebbled under the weight of his heavy-lidded stare. “I’m just trying to oblige my future husband and give him a memory to hang his hat on,” she added, smoothing her hand over his rigid abdomen, the engagement ring he’d given her an hour ago glittering in the pale light.
“I like the sound of that,” Cain whispered as her hot breath cascaded over his hard member. “Say it again. Slowly.”
“My. Future. Husband.” She punctuated each word with a slow lick to the underside of his cock, her soft blue eyes never leaving his.
“Jesus, Faith,” he breathed as her fiery mouth engulfed him once again. Bucking his hips against the sofa and into the sweet haven that existed between her lips, he fucked her mouth with slow steady thrusts of his hips, careful never to stroke too deeply. “God, yes, baby,” he praised in a voice raw with unspoken emotion. “So good. So fucking perfect, my sweet baby!”
He shuddered as she swallowed around his length, the back of her throat caressing the head of his cock. Hissing through his teeth at that exquisite torture, he growled low in his throat. “Don’t you dare make me cum,” he demanded gruffly. “My cock has an important date to keep with that pretty pussy of yours.” Eyeing the smooth plump lips of her cunt glistening with her juices where she knelt between his splayed legs, he licked his lips hungrily. Torn between letting her continue the amazing blow job and wanting to devour her pussy, he groaned, tightening his fingers in her hair.
Wed by Wednesday (Passion in Paradise #4.5) Page 16