Long, Lean, and Lethal
Page 31
Conar came riding up. He rode very well, and he was big and tall in the saddle. When he dismounted, she smiled.
“What?”
“You should do a western.”
He grinned. “Maybe one day. I still want to own a dive shop.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“And I was thinking of a different type of movie at the moment. Actually.”
“What?”
“Splendor in the Grass,” he told her.
And she started to laugh. Montana was very big, with soft grass and wide spaces. It was chilly, but …
They made love in the grass. And he warmed her up.
As they lay together after, he” told her, “You know I love you—sis.”
“Ah, well,” she murmured, “anything can happen. ‘Only on Valentine Valley,’ of course.” She rolled into his arms and told him very seriously, “I love you, too.”
“Well, I thought so, I hoped so. I was just waiting for you to say it. What should we do about it?”
“Fool around some more. Spend lots of time together. Make sure that it really is the ride-off-into-the-sunset kind of forever type love.”
“I like that,” he said. “I like it a lot. Although …”
“Yeah?”
“I think I can already tell you, I’m into the sunset thing.”
She smiled.
“The fool-around part. Now, that sounds good to me. I think the sunset is even coming. The smell of the grass is great.”
“It is a bit chilly.”
“Hey! I’ll heat things up, I promise.”
He did. He rolled with her again, and once again they made love in the grass. Splendor, he told her, was one of his all-time favorite movies.
Epilogue
THE DAY OF ABBY’S surgery, Jennifer was a nervous wreck. Conar had expected it. She moved constantly, prowling the waiting room. She ordered lunch with him but didn’t take a bite. She jumped at him, then apologized. She cried, and he held her.
It was a long operation, but Abby pulled through with flying colors. It was because she had such wonderful strength of will, the doctor told them.
The first night, Conar stayed at a motel. Jennifer was sleeping in a chair in her mother’s room. She stayed for several days, until Abby chased her out. They’d gone back to work again, and Abby wanted her to go home.
Despite what had happened, Abby was determined that the house wasn’t evil. Conar agreed. Maybe the term evil wasn’t even right, but it had been Edgar who had made a point of telling him that houses weren’t evil—people were. Granger House was beautiful. Abby was going to keep it. Conar and Jennifer would stay awhile, letting go of her apartment while they looked for a place of their own. Even so, Jennifer’s bath was being demolished and rebuilt. They found all the old plans to the place, and had serious work done on the secret entries, and Jennifer and Conar remained together in the Granger Room while they stayed at the house. Abby intended to open the house one day a week to tourists and donate the proceeds to medical research. Jennifer liked the idea; so did Conar.
Three months after the surgery, Conar and Jennifer drove home from work together. Abby was out by the pool, resting, reading some of the scripts that had been sent to her.
She looked up as Jennifer came out to the patio, taking a seat beside her.
“Guess what, Mom? Conar and I are getting married.”
Abby slowly lifted an eyebrow. “On the show?”
Jennifer smiled. “No. In real life.”
“Wow!” Abby told her after a moment. Then she rose and cupped her face and kissed her, and when Conar arrived, she kissed him, too.
“Both my children!” she said. “Oh, dear, that sounds so …”
“Incestuous,” Conar teased.
They were married one month later. Drew gave Jennifer away. Serena and Kelly were bridesmaids, Liam was best man, and Doug acted as Kelly’s escort.
Abby fussed and said she was going to have to try to sit on both sides of the church, and she joked so to the press representatives who showed up. She wasn’t really sitting in a traditional place at all. She had decided that her first return to performing would be at their wedding. She sat by the organ. During the mass that followed the vows, she sang “Ave Maria.” Her voice was beautiful and rich, and Jennifer couldn’t help the tears that poured down her cheeks at her own wedding.
They’d tried to keep the wedding quiet, but Abby had suggested they not be rude. “A wedding is a really big photo op,” she told them.
And so it was. It was a beautiful wedding, a fairytale wedding.
On a day two months later, Conar and Jennifer drove home from work together and found Abby out on the patio, reading scripts. She had accepted a role in a local theatrical production of Cats. “I’ve always felt a bit like Grizabella, the old glamour cat,” she told them.
Her glasses were on, and she was deep in thought. Jennifer cleared her throat as she sat down beside her. “Mom, guess what?”
Abby set her glasses down. “What, dear?”
“We’re going to have a baby.”
“On the show? You’ve already been pregnant forever, dear, remember?”
“No, Mom, in real life.”
“Wow!” Abby said softly after a moment. “Wow!”
She hugged Jennifer. “And I’ll be able to hold my granddaughter, dangle her on my knee,” she said with awe.
Conar, who had reached the patio, cleared his throat.
“Abby, we just might have a boy.”
Abby looked him up and down proudly.
“That will be fine,” she said. “That will be just fine.”
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.
Graham (seated center) with her local Romance Writers of America group in Broward County, Florida, 2011.
Graham (second from left) with fellow authors Stephen Jay Schwartz, F. Paul Wilson, and Barry Eisler participating in a panel at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, Los Angeles, 2011.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2000 by Heather Graham Pozzessere
cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4532-3404-4
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY HEATHER GRAHAM
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