Secretly Married

by ALLISON LEIGH,

They’d be right back in that familiar cycle.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “He’s had a few strokes this past year.”

  “A few.” She adored her father but Randall Townsend pretty much ignored her, far as Sam was concerned. He’d been so busy mourning his son, he’d forgotten that his daughter was alive and well. “What’s his condition?”

  “Diminished mobility and speech.” She dashed her hand over her tied-back hair, her gaze bouncing from the painting over the rest of the interior, landing on him, then skipping away. “He’s pretty frustrated,” she added after a moment.

  “I’ll bet. Your dad wouldn’t like being thwarted by anything, particularly his own body.”

  “Yes.” She smoothed her hair again. “Doesn’t help that he refuses his meds.”

  She was nervous.

  Too much of him wanted to ease that for her. Too much of him enjoyed seeing her rattled.

  He was a head case. How suitable that he was still married to a psychiatrist.

  He stood and headed toward her, perfectly aware of the little start she gave. “Come on.”

  “Where?” Suspicion glinted.

  “You wanted to go to Castillo House, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” She moistened her lips, leaving a faint glisten behind that he looked at longer than was good for him.

  Reach for the door, Vega.

  But he just stood there, looking down at her. The air was suddenly thick and it didn’t have squat to do with the past. It was real, and it was right now.

  A pool of color rode her sculpted cheekbones, and her blue eyes went dark. He heard her breath. Soft. Unsteady.

  His body tightened. He could reach for the door. Just put out his arm. Flip the lock.

  “Sam.”

  Had he imagined the way she sighed his name? Probably. There were enough nights his sleep was haunted with it.

  Her slender, lovely throat worked in a swallow. He knew how the hollow at the base would taste. How he’d feel the flutter of her heartbeat there.

  She moistened her lips again. Her eyes widened a little, as if she’d divined his thoughts.

  He lifted his hand.

  The door right beside them rattled. The blinds swayed.

  He stifled an oath, and Delaney jumped two feet back, her gaze skittering away from his.

  Then the door opened, and his grandmother stood there.

  “Well,” she snapped, thumping her cane on the ground, her bright brown eyes taking in the pair of them. “Is this her?”

  Chapter 6

  Sam let out a long breath. “Etta, what are you doing here?”

  “I’d think that was obvious, Samson.” She strode into the office, pushing him out of the way. “Since you won’t bring your wife to meet me, I have to track you down to meet her. Have to hear from Sophie that you’re parading her through town, even.” She stopped in front of Delaney, looking her up and down.

  But Delaney was no slouch in that department and she eyed Etta right back, apparently recovering her equilibrium easily enough. Or else she was covering it over with that particular skill she’d developed as the child of a society princess and an autocratic cop.

  “New York, hmm?” Etta’s voice was sharp.

  Delaney raised her eyebrow. “Southern California?”

  Sam nearly laughed, the surprise on Etta’s face was so clear. “Don’t get yourself riled up, Etta, or I’ll have to call Dr. Hugo over to check your blood pressure.”

  Etta’s head turned away from him, her steel-gray hair wound in a braid atop her head like some sort of crown. “He thinks he’s being smart,” she said to Delaney.

  “He often does,” she agreed mildly.

  “Men.” Etta thumped her cane on the tile floor for emphasis. “They all need a decent woman to keep them on the straight and narrow. Are you a decent woman?”

  Now it was Delaney’s turn to look surprised. Although if he didn’t know her expressions as well as he did, he would have missed it. “I try to be,” she murmured. “But Sam hardly needs—”

  “Bah.” Etta stepped forward until her braid was inches from knocking into Delaney’s chin. She studied her closely. “At least you’re old enough to know your own mind. Not some young thing still wet behind the ears.”

  “Mmm. Thank you?” Delaney’s voice was a little faint.

  “You’ll come to Sunday dinner today,” she announced. “We all eat together on Sundays, though Samson’s got some idea he’s going to miss it. And you can meet my son, Danté. Samson’s father. His wife wasn’t the decent sort. If she had been, he wouldn’t have been so unfortunate—”

  “Etta.” Sam wrapped his hand firmly, gently, around his grandmother’s arm. “Enough.”

  Her eyes flashed at him. “Enough, you say? What do you know about what’s enough? You, who keeps your marriage a secret from your very own family. If I could reach them, I’d box your ears the way I used to when you were a misbehaving pup.”

  She turned back to Delaney. “You’ll come to dinner and you’ll tell us all about the wedding. Was it a church wedding, at least? I never thought I’d thank the day that Danté and that good-for-nothing had Sam on the mainland, but I do now. Otherwise we’d have to contend with the curse, too.”

  Through her veneer of composure, he thought Delaney was starting to look a little shell-shocked. “Curse?” Her gaze met his over Etta’s head.

  “The Turnabout curse, of course. Sam, haven’t you told this poor girl anything?”

  There was no answer he could give without hurting Etta’s feelings more than they already were. “The Turnabout curse says that anyone born on the island will only find happiness with someone else born on the island.”

  “But why?”

  “Because the Castillo family always was trouble,” Etta said firmly. “Good riddance to them, I say. I’m glad they’re all gone now, though Caroline—the last one—wasn’t so bad. But the Castillo people started the trouble more than a century ago, and it’s been so ever since. Turns, which is what the natives are called, don’t mix. Not well. Why, look at your poor father, Samson. He—”

  “Made his own choices, Etta.” He didn’t want to get into this discussion. Not now. Not ever.

  “—married a girl from the Midwest.” Etta didn’t miss a beat. “She never fit in. Led him a merry chase. If it hadn’t been for her, Danté never would have gotten involved with the Castillo family.”

  “Delaney isn’t interested in all that,” Sam warned.

  Etta’s lips narrowed into a thin, displeased line. “Fine, then. Ignore your family. Pretend we don’t exist. You think that’s going to change anything? You’ll still know we’re here, same as always.”

  She deliberately turned back to Delaney. “I don’t suppose you have wedding pictures do you? No, probably not. I heard you arrived with only one small suitcase when you brought that boy with the odd name to Annie and Logan. Now why on earth they couldn’t name their little program something more suitable than Castillo House I’ll never know. They’re not from the Castillo family, after all. Not at all. Logan is a Drake, and the Drakes go back nearly as long on the island as the Fieldings and our own Vega family does. Just seems strange to me. Did ever since I heard that they’d managed to buy up that property and restore the house. It was nearly a ruin, you know. But they worked hard, and look at all they’ve done in such a short time. That’s because Logan has a decent woman by his side now. Annie. Well, there’s some talk about her past, but everyone knows she’s a good person.”

  Sam looked to the ceiling as his grandmother rattled on. And on.

  Wedding pictures? Not likely. There had been a photographer at the Moonlight Chapel of Love all right. All set to shoot whatever package the happy couple selected from the laminated sign hanging on the wall inside the entrance. But Delaney had waved off the idea of any photographs, and he’d been more anxious to get to the honeymoon than to stand there and smile for the skinny, balding guy wearing a checked suit and an enormous c
amera.

  Anxious for the honeymoon part because it was only when he had Delaney naked against him that he wasn’t braced for her to change her mind about what they were doing. Convincing her to marry him at all had taken more fast, persuasive talking than he’d known he possessed.

  “Etta.” His voice was abrupt, brooking no argument. “We were on our way to Castillo House.”

  Etta’s nonstop words trailed off. At last. She lifted her chin. “All right, then. Stubborn cuss. Was born that way and never changed. Well—” she held out her arms to Delaney “—give an old woman a hug, and you can be on your way.”

  He half expected Delaney to finagle her way out of that one. Her small smile was ragged around the fringes, but she leaned down and hugged Etta.

  As she left, her cane thumping, even though he knew good and well she didn’t really need the thing to walk, Etta did not demand a hug from Sam. Just one more method of expressing her displeasure where he was concerned.

  Through the narrow blinds, he watched her cross the sidewalk and climb—nimbly, since she figured she wasn’t being observed—into her blinding-white golf cart that Leo had fixed up for her the year before.

  “I ought to write her a speeding ticket,” he said when she shot down the street like a bat out of hell. He’d have to talk to Leo about toning down the cart’s power. And maybe her interference was annoying, but it had kept him from doing something stupid.

  Like trying to seduce the woman who didn’t want to still be his wife.

  “I liked her.”

  “You also like manic depressives, schizophrenics and general crazies.”

  “She clearly loves you.”

  Sam grunted and held open the door. “So do the mosquitoes when the humidity is high.”

  “I never knew my grandparents.”

  He locked the door and headed for the truck. “I remember.”

  Her eyes were pensive, a small line forming between her eyebrows. “You should go to dinner, Sam. You don’t need to miss it on my account.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why?”

  “Is that still one of your favorite questions, Delaney? Why? Why do you think you feel this way, patient X? Why do you think you chose to do this, or that, or the other? Why did you try to jump out of a moving car? Why is that particular dream bothering you?”

  “You’re avoiding the answer.”

  “Yeah, and I didn’t even need a medical degree to figure that out.”

  The line between her eyes deepened as her expression tightened. “Was there ever anything about me that you actually liked, Sam? You hated my practice, my patients, and the hours that I put in.”

  “I didn’t hate your practice or your patients.” Do-Wright? That might be another story.

  “Your actions said otherwise.”

  “My actions?” He didn’t care that they were standing right there in the middle of town for anyone and their brother to see or hear. “What actions would those be, Delaney? Wanting you to scale back your hours to a simple full-time week? Forty hours instead of seventy. And seventy was a good week, because sometimes it was more.”

  “You worked long hours, too, Sam.”

  He’d thought he’d dealt with it. But the emotion came up from somewhere deep inside. “I wasn’t the one who was pregnant.”

  She whitened and her eyes looked like bruised sapphires. “Too bad you weren’t,” she said huskily. “Not only would you be a medical marvel, but you probably wouldn’t have lost the baby, either.”

  And there it was.

  The thing that neither one of them had openly acknowledged in twenty-one long months.

  “You’ve blamed me all along for what happened, Sam. I know that. But trust me. You can’t blame me more than I blame myself.”

  “Blame.” The word tasted vile. “You don’t know the meaning of blame. And you brought Alonso here. That’s a helluva note, Delaney. What did you want to do? Really stick it to me? Rub it in my face every time I might happen to see the kid? Is that your payback?”

  “Payback for what?” Her voice rose. “Alonso was no more responsible for the car accident that night than you were.”

  Right. “It was three o’clock in the damned morning, Delaney. If the kid was out of his house at that time it was his mother’s responsibility, not yours.”

  “Maria had no way to get to him. I had a car—”

  “Which you drove about twice a year.”

  “—and I knew if I called the police for help, Alonso would probably get taken into custody again simply because of the people he was with!”

  In other words, she hadn’t asked him because he’d have done just what she suspected. “Why was he with them, Delaney? Because he was just like them.” He had to believe it or his own actions would be even more intolerable.

  “No.” She shook her head. “He wasn’t. But you never took the time to find that out. All you saw him as was a tool—a means to help you nail his father’s killer. You said yourself that Anton was a sleaze, but even a sleaze didn’t deserve to be murdered. Well, Alonso was just a boy. He wasn’t Anton. He was only eleven years old when all that happened. And in those two years before I…we…before we became personally involved, you never stopped seeing him as anything but a lead in your very cold case. Even after we got married. Until the accident.” Her voice strangled to a halt.

  He never had nailed Anton’s killer. Killers, as he’d deduced in the end. A trio of individuals who’d managed to get out of the country well before his life blew up in his face. He’d failed there, too.

  He yanked open the passenger door. “Get in.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you have to say.”

  “You wanted to go to Castillo House. Get in.”

  She looked ready to argue. But after a moment, she climbed up on the seat, the lure of an opportunity to speak to Do-Wright evidently too great to deny.

  They didn’t speak as he drove out to the southern tip of the island where the big house sat like the lord of the manor. Majestic, white stuccoed walls, pitch-black wood beams and windows at every turn, the enormous house was by far the largest, finest structure on the island. The gates at the end of the driveway were open as usual. Even though the kids there came from all manner of troubled backgrounds, Castillo House wasn’t a detention facility. The gravel crunched under his tires as he stopped. Thin rays of sunlight slanted across the tiled roof of the house that had become the unlikely home to an unlikely mix of people.

  Delaney barely cast him a look before she slid from the vehicle and nearly ran up the wide steps and disappeared through the front door.

  Then he drove away.

  But the memories drove right alongside him.

  Sam had never met a hospital that he liked. And this one was definitely no exception.

  He stopped, his hand pressed flat against the hospital door. He could see the foot of the bed and the barely there bump where her feet were covered by the rigidly tucked bedding.

  The hard edges of the door dug into his palm.

  Once her feet were warm enough, Delaney always worked the toes of one foot from beneath the bedding after she was asleep. Her unconscious thermostat. Before then, her feet were always chilly.

  “You can go on in.” A young nurse—all smiles and bouncy brown hair—nodded at him as she rolled a clear-sided bassinet down the hall. “Your wife’s been waiting for you.”

  Waiting.

  The nurse smiled again, oblivious that her cheerful encouragement was a damning indictment.

  He widened the opening and stepped past the door.

  She was lying on her side, facing away from him. Her hair lay limp against the thin white pillow beneath her head.

  He walked into the small room and rounded the foot of the bed. Her eyes were open, pools of pale blue that followed his progress as he dragged the side chair close to the bed.

  He sat. Looked into those blue eyes of hers. “Are you all right?” Stupid question. The damage went far deeper
than the cut on her forehead.

  “I’m being released tomorrow.” Her voice was quiet. Calm. Too calm. He’d have felt better if she’d raged. But she wasn’t one to rage.

  “Good.”

  Her hand lay atop the thin blue blanket. Fingers barely curving downward against the mattress. He started to reach for it. But her fingers curled tighter. Barely noticeable, but still a retreat from him. He continued lifting his hand and shoved it, instead, through his hair.

  He looked around the antiseptic hospital room. “Are you in pain?” He looked back in time to see the faint movements at the corner of her lips. A frown.

  “No.”

  Not anymore. When he’d been called to the hospital the night the accident happened, she’d been curled in a ball of agony. Too tightly coiled to accept comfort of any type. Not from the doctor who’d wanted to sedate her; not from him, who’d wanted to hold her.

  She wasn’t the only one who’d lost something two days ago in the accident that had torn her rarely driven sedan into scrap metal. Given the severity of the collision, he’d been grateful her injuries hadn’t been considerably worse.

  She could have died.

  His stomach was still in a knot.

  “My doctor said he called you.”

  He nodded, though her words were more statement than question. “He told me.” His throat ached. He focused on her hand with its protectively curled fingers.

  Her eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them, her gaze didn’t meet his. “I thought you’d be here earlier.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her distant expression rejected the apology. He closed his mind yet again to the thoughts of the accident. The reason she’d been out at all at that time of night, in that area of town. “Internal Affairs called me in this morning.”

  That, at least, caused her gaze to slide his way. “Why?”

  He should have kept his mouth shut. Waited to tell her. There’d been a lot of things he’d done wrong. This was just one more.

  “Samson?” her soft voice prompted.

  He exhaled slowly. Deliberately letting go of the fury that still shook him. Instead of being by his wife’s side when she’d heard the final news that her pregnancy couldn’t be saved, he’d been defending his professional integrity. “Some evidence has gone missing from one of my cases. They wanted to know if I had something to do with it.”