Never a Bride

by JoAnn Ross

  “You’re the detective,” she pointed out. “Do what you have to do.”

  “It could be expensive. I’ll have to fly to Florida.”

  He’d piqued her interest. Blythe consulted her own watch, thought of her appointment with the florist in thirty minutes, then made her decision.

  “How about Le Chardonnay?” she suggested. The art deco Restaurant on Melrose Avenue was an unabashed copy of a Left Bank bistro, circa 1920. The booths were cozy and comfortable, reminding Blythe of the kind of Provençal atmosphere Alexandra might have favored. “I suddenly have a craving for their roast duckling Mirabelle.”

  Despite a high noise level, Gage knew the restaurant to be a perfect spot for romantic afternoon rendezvous. Reminding himself that this lunch date was strictly business, he said, “I’ve always believed in satisfying cravings.”

  * * *

  CAIT’S DEBRIEFING proved to be as routine as promised. Her automatic suspension was immediately rescinded, although the captain did suggest she take a few days of personal leave, an offer she accepted. Perhaps, she considered, after Blythe’s wedding, she and Sloan could spend the weekend at her mother’s beach cottage in Avalon, on Catalina Island.

  There were times, Cait admitted, when it was rather nice to have rich parents. She certainly couldn’t have afforded the remote getaway on a patrolman’s salary.

  Not that she was going to be a patrolman for long. To her amazement, she’d been informed that her superior was recommending a battlefield promotion to detective. Along with her promised transfer to the Sex Crimes Unit.

  “I’ve never made love to a detective before,” Sloan murmured, as they drove up the Pacific Coast Highway. The sanitarium was in Malibu, just north of Pepperdine University.

  They’d stopped by the apartment after the debriefing, only long enough for Cait to change into a colorful silk tunic and knife-pleated skirt that reminded Sloan of a brilliant summer sunset.

  “Play your cards right, and you may get lucky tonight,” Cait advised. The gleam in her eyes seconded the sensual promise.

  Sloan reached out between them, took her hand in his and hoped that she’d still be in his life tonight.

  There was something definitely wrong with Sloan. The tension simmering beneath the surface Cait had felt this morning had escalated to a barely restrained anxiety that made every nerve in her body feel as if it were standing on end.

  The uncomfortable silence hovered over them, like a storm threatening on the horizon until Cait felt ready to scream. She was tempted to beg him to at least give her some clue as to where they were going, and why, but managed to hold her tongue. It was obvious that Sloan intended to tell his story his own way. In his own time.

  She recognized the white gates immediately, having visited various friends—and a stepmother and various stepsiblings—at the facility over the years. The sanitarium’s substance abuse program was second only in popularity among the movie crowd to Camp Betty.

  She watched as Sloan was greeted by the guard at the gate like an old friend. Similar greetings were also offered by both staff and patients as they made their way across the emerald green lawn.

  Sloan stopped suddenly, took her hand and turned her toward him. Although his expression remained unreadable, his icy hand betrayed his uncharacteristic nervousness.

  “Will you do me one favor?”

  “Anything.” It was the truth.

  “Whatever happens, will you not mention you’re a police officer?”

  “Of course,” she said promptly, still puzzled. “If that’s what you want.”

  He dragged his free hand down his face. “It’s not what I’d prefer. But sometimes we don’t get what we want.”

  With that inexplicable statement, he started walking again. Cait saw they were headed toward a woman seated on a bench, looking out at the sunset-gilded sea.

  When she turned toward them, Cait realized that she was beautiful. Her complexion, tinged to a pale golden hue from the sun, was nearly flawless, her jaw still firm. Her honey blond hair had been cut in a sleek, chin-length bob that swung gracefully when she turned her head. As she took off her sunglasses, Cait also realized where Sloan had gotten his whiskey-colored eyes.

  A realization that was confirmed when Sloan bent down, kissed the woman’s cheek, then said, “Mom, I’d like you to meet Caitlin Carrigan. The woman I love.” He turned to Cait. “Cait, this is my mother. Laura Wyndham Riley.”

  The name rang an instantaneous bell. As Cait wondered how in the world Sloan had managed to keep such a secret in a town that thrived on gossip, the woman held out her hand with a gracious dignity that bespoke her patrician roots.

  “Hello, Caitlin. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Her smile was soft and charming. It also did not quite reach her vague brown eyes. She turned to Sloan. “Your father will be so happy to know you’ve found someone to love.” She turned back to Cait. “He’s always wanted to be a grandfather,” she confided.

  Cait smiled even as her eyes misted. For this poor, damaged woman. But more for Sloan. “So has my father,” she lied deftly.

  As she looked at him, Sloan knew that he would never love her more than he did at that moment.

  For the next hour, Laura chattered gaily about her youthful days as Philadelphia’s most sought-after debutante, about the way she’d fallen in love with Sloan’s father. About the happiness they shared.

  And even as Cait smiled and nodded and smiled some more, she felt as if her heart were breaking.

  “How long has she been that way?” she asked quietly, as they walked back to his Porsche after the nurse had taken Laura in to dinner.

  “Actually, you’re seeing her on one of her good days. There are times she can’t talk at all. Times I don’t even know if she hears me.” He sighed as he opened the passenger door. “And she’s been that way since my father died.”

  “But that’s been...” Her voice trailed off as she attempted to remember.

  “Fifteen years.”

  She did some quick mental arithmetic. “When you were sixteen.” Formative years for a young boy and a tender time to lose his father, Cait considered. But to lose him in such a brutal, public way...

  “We woke up one morning to find the house surrounded by federal agents and Portland cops.” Sloan was looking out over the cliff, but she suspected it was not the Pacific Ocean he was seeing. “Mom begged Dad to turn himself in, to just finally end things, so we could have some semblance of a normal life, but he’d thought of himself as a renegade for too long. Kind of like Billy the Kid, still fighting the establishment.”

  The story of Buck Riley’s violent death, after years of hiding in the anti-Vietnam war underground, was the stuff legends—and movies—were made of. In fact, Cait realized, a movie had been made about his father’s illegal ac-tivities. That same documentary had catapulted Sloan to stardom.

  “That’s why your Arlington Seven was so emotionally riveting,” she said when he’d joined her in the close confines of the sports car. The story of the man who’d robbed banks, plotted to bomb the Pentagon and driven the getaway car during a holdup that had resulted in a bank guard being killed, had been about Sloan’s father.

  Just as the subplot about the debutante who’d turned her back on wealth and privilege for a life on the run with an ex-convict had obviously been written about that lovely, fragile woman she’d just met. “Because you wrote it from firsthand experience.”

  “My father’s trial was before I was born.” Sloan sighed. “I was conceived while he was in custody.”

  Cait, more than most people, knew the idea was not as impossible as it sounded. “A guard sneaked your mother into the jail,” she guessed.

  “For a hefty price.” His smile was grim, suggesting that sometimes it was difficult to tell the supposed good guys from the bad guys. “I was born after his escape.”

  She shook her head as she took the amazing thought in. “You must have spent your life on the run.”

  “Most of
it,” he concurred. “Until the entire thing blew up in our faces. I ended up in foster care, but I ran away the first year. Mom was put in a state mental hospital in Salem, Oregon. As soon as I started making money, I bailed her out and brought her here.”

  Cait, who’d always bemoaned her own unstable life, couldn’t begin to imagine what Sloan’s must have been like. “What about her parents? Why didn’t they take you in? Why didn’t they pay her hospital bills?”

  His expression was grim. “The Wyndhams disowned Mom when she took up with my father. Nothing that happened afterward changed their minds.”

  Although Cait knew her mother deplored her chosen career, she also knew, deep down, that Natalie was proud of her. She also knew that there was nothing she could ever do—including turning urban terrorist and robbing banks—that could make her mother stop loving her. “How did you go to school?”

  “Sometimes Mom taught me at home. Other times, if the administration wasn’t too picky about records, I’d get to attend regular classes for a while. By the time I was in the fifth grade, I’d been to twelve different grammar schools under twelve different names.”

  She thought about all Sloan had missed, thought about how such an existence would have precluded having friends, thought about moving from place to place, always one step ahead of the law....

  “Oh, my God,” she groaned. “I just realized what you meant about the irony of me being a cop.”

  He managed a crooked smile and ran his palm down her hair. “I was brought up to have a fairly unflattering view of your profession.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She remembered all too vividly the newsreel footage Sloan had spliced into his documentary, recalled the sight of Buck Riley’s body on his front lawn, riddled with bullets.

  “I’m amazed that you didn’t turn out to be some kind of cold-blooded, antisocial murderer,” she murmured.

  “You know what they say.” He shrugged. “What doesn’t kill you makes you strong.” He glanced back the way they’d come. “I just wish....” His voice drifted off and he dragged his hands through his hair. “Hell.”

  “Your mother, in her own way, is a very lucky woman,” Cait said softly. “I doubt many women have sons who love them so unconditionally.”

  She felt her eyes filling with hot moisture again.

  Sloan watched the tear trailing down her cheek and brushed it away with the pad of his thumb. “I was worried you might not want to be with me anymore. When you learned who I really was.”

  “I know who you are.” She caught his hand in hers and pressed her lips against his palm, her eyes earnest as they met his in the slanting glow of the setting sun. “The man I love.”

  He closed his eyes and breathed a soft sigh of relief. “You are incredible.”

  “Not half as incredible as you,” she said and meant it.

  “Well.” He took another deep breath and seemed to shake off the sadness that had settled over them. “You’ll obviously have more questions, but I promised you dinner. You name it, sweetheart. Tonight the sky’s the limit.”

  Cait didn’t want to go out to some trendy Hollywood hot spot. She didn’t want to share Sloan with anyone. What she wanted was so show him exactly how much she loved him.

  “How hungry are you?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Not terribly. Why?”

  “Because I’d rather go home. And send out for Chinese later.” She leaned across the console separating them and pressed her lips against his. “Much, much later.”

  When the long heartfelt kiss finally ended, Sloan twisted the key in the ignition. “I love Chinese.”

  The minute they entered her bedroom, Cait turned and gave him a slow, wet kiss.

  She desperately needed to make love to Sloan, to prove to him how very much she loved him. More than ever, after the intimate secret he’d shared with her. Also, after yesterday’s traumatic experience, she needed to prove to herself that she was truly alive and safe.

  Her hands trembled as she unbuttoned his shirt, slipping it off his shoulders and down his arms, forgetting at first to unfasten the cuff buttons. Having undressed more than a few women in his life, Sloan knew the awkwardness of wrestling with unfamiliar fasteners and felt it immensely touching that Cait was so willing to do so now. The shirt finally fluttered to the floor, like a snowy bird.

  When her palms skimmed down his torso, Sloan closed his eyes and sucked in his stomach, waiting for her to move on to his jeans. But she surprised him by kneeling on the flowered needlepoint rug to attack the laces of his running shoes.

  After dispensing with his shoes and socks, she slowed the pace again, running her hands over his chest, his shoulders, his back. Sloan wondered why he’d ever believed that men should take off their own clothing. Why he’d believed that shedding clothes faster made things better. More efficient.

  The care Cait was taking in undressing him made him feel immensely special. Like a package worth savoring. And even as he told himself that after all she’d suffered last night, he should be the one pleasuring her, not the other way around, he found himself surrendering to her sweet torment.

  Finally, when his heart was beginning to pound and his skin had grown moist, she managed, with increasing skill, to finesse the jeans over his hips. Then his white cotton briefs.

  Naked and needy, he reached for her, but she seemed determined to maintain the ritual. Backing away, just out of reach, she began shedding her own clothes with a slowly seductive air the head stripper at Paris’s Folies Bergère would have envied.

  He watched, entranced, as she pulled her silk tunic over her head, revealing a flower-sprigged demi-bra trimmed in ivory lace that was worlds different from the white cotton underwear she’d worn to Maine. Through the sheer fabric he could see her taut, rosy nipples and the darker aureoles surrounding them.

  “I think this is where I tell you that I really, really like that,” he managed.

  She answered his with a sultry smile. “It’s just a little something I bought the day Blythe and I went shopping.” Her eyes on his, the smile still on her full lips, she leaned forward slightly, reaching behind her back to unfasten the skimpy bra.

  She held it against her chest with one hand for a long, suspended moment. Then she let it fall to the floor where it landed atop his shirt, revealing breasts he was literally dying to touch. To taste.

  With another siren’s smile, she stepped out of her shoes. Her skirt was next. Sloan decided that the whisper of silk being whisked over bare skin was the sexiest sound he’d ever heard.

  She was standing in front of him, clad only in a pair of skimpy flowered panties that made her legs look as if they went on forever.

  Leaving them on for now, she took his hand, drawing him down to the bed, where she continued her tender torment.

  Her lips plucked at a hard brown nipple and Sloan groaned. Her tongue took a long wet swathe at the inside of his thighs, causing an oath to explode from him.

  Having come to know his body well during these past nights, Cait touched Sloan where it would give the most pleasure. Tasted in a slow, seductive way that turned that pleasure to grinding ache.

  She slid sleekly, agilely down his body and as her hands and mouth moved over him, Sloan forgot control, surrendered his power. His pulse thundered beneath her lips. With every ragged breath he took, her scent slammed into him.

  The desire was as strong as always. But less urgent. Sloan had never known need could be so unbearably sweet. Or passion so exquisitely patient. Never had he been so aware of his body as he was now, as Cait explored it so slowly. So thoroughly.

  He belonged to her, Sloan realized as emotions coursed through him, every bit as much as he’d wanted her to belong to him.

  The softness of her mouth against his heated flesh was like a soft summer breeze. After she’d drawn out all his secrets, after she’d stripped him of all his defenses, Cait took his penis in her hands.

  Entranced, she traced the dark purple vein with first her fingernail
, and then her tongue. She felt power in the knowledge that she could create such hunger. Freedom in knowing that she could take as much as she wanted, could do whatever she wished, and he’d still want her. Still love her.

  “Look,” he managed to say on a ragged groan.

  Cait followed his gaze to the gilded mirror standing in the corner across the room and realized that the image was, at the same time, both the most exciting and beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Cait knew that the sight would stay with her for the rest of her life.

  Sloan was no less affected. The sight of her rosy wet lips embracing him in the most intimate kiss of all was almost more than he could bear. Gripping her hips, he tore her panties away, then drew her up so her knees were braced on either side of his thighs. As he looked at her in the mirror, poised above him, her flesh damp and glowing, her eyes gleaming with passion, her hair a glorious gleaming tangle, Sloan knew he’d remember Cait this way. Always.

  He lowered her down slowly, filling her inch by devastating inch. A perfect fit, they merged, male to female, their united rhythm ancient and beautiful.

  13

  TWO DAYS BEFORE Blythe’s wedding, she and Cait drove to the airport to meet Lily’s plane.

  It had been three years since either of them had seen their college friend. “Do you realize,” Cait said as they watched the passengers stream from the jetway, “that the last time we were all together was for Lily’s wedding?”

  “It seems like yesterday,” Blythe murmured, remembering the fateful day all too well.

  Lily, dressed in a billowy cloud of hand-beaded silk organza that had undoubtedly cost more than the Padgett family farm back in Iowa, had looked as if she’d stepped from the gilded pages of a fairy tale.

  “I’ll bet to Lily it’s seemed an eternity,” Cait muttered, glaring at one blue-suited passenger who’d slowed to take a longer, second interested look at her.

  “I wonder why she never said anything,” Blythe mused. Lily had looked so happy that day, Blythe considered sadly. So blissfully in love. “About her marriage being unhappy.”