This Fierce Splendor

by Iris Johansen

  Kate groans as she raises her head from Paul’s lap.

  “Where’re you going, Ms. Moran?” Paul asks, his fingers closing around her wrist.

  “Get more tea.”

  “Ya gotta kiss me first.”

  “It’s too hot,” she moans, but they all know she doesn’t mean it.

  Both boys watch Kate’s walk to the front door. Her cutoffs are short and her legs are long. Mike silently sings the praises of summer. The screen door slaps closed behind her and, for a few seconds, the relentless drone of the cicadas is silenced.

  Mike feels a rivulet of sweat trickle down the nape of his neck. He looks over at his best friend. “How’d you get so lucky?” he asks.

  Paul slouches lower in the porch swing, setting off a gentle rocking motion. “It’s that Armstrong charm.”

  Mike snorts and shifts in the wicker armchair.

  “Hey, we both had an equal shot at her.” Paul’s voice holds the hint of a shrug. “She picked me.”

  Mike remembers it differently, but says, “Yeah. I guess she’s not as smart as she looks.”

  “I heard that, Michael Fitzgerald,” Kate states, pushing open the screen door.

  “Heard what?” Mike asks innocently.

  Kate perches on the porch railing and rolls the cool glass across her forehead.

  “You know I love you both. Just different.”

  “Please don’t give me that ‘I love you like a brother’ routine. It wounds me,” Mike says in what he hopes passes for mock pain.

  The glass at her lips, Kate rolls her eyes at him then closes them and tilts her head back to take a long drink.

  Her thick auburn hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, but a few heat-damp strands cling to her neck. Mike wants to lift them, blow on her hot skin. He wants to put his mouth there and taste her. The thought brings on the beginning of an erection and he guiltily glances at Paul.

  When Mike sees those amused hazel eyes looking back at him he knows he’s been caught.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The initial assault on his body knocked the wind out of him. Gasping for air, he was swept along in the tumult of the newly born river in the Arizona desert. Rocks pummeled him. One particularly jagged stone hit his leg with such force that it slashed his jeans and cut open his thigh. He could feel the warm blood swirling around him, contrasting sharply with the cold water. A small manzanita tree swept past him, caught his left arm, and pulled it back. He could hear the snap as a bone broke. The pain made him scream, and then there was nothing but numbness.

  The thoughts that flashed through his mind were quicksilver and, in some ways, senseless. There goes the season. Followed by, Kate’s gonna be so pissed when she sees me. And then, I’m gonna have to buy Stu a new Jeep.

  A lethargy had come over him and the idea of sleep floated around his mind like a pleasant daydream. But there was something he needed to do. What was it? God, he couldn’t think anymore.

  Paul could hear something over the thunderous crashing of the water around him. It must’ve been Mitch. Mitch is gonna be late. I’ll have to explain it all to his wife … Opening his eyes, Paul caught sight of the Jeep and remembered the most important thing. The thing he’d forgotten.

  It took all the concentration he had left for him to reach out his right hand and grasp the side mirror. His legs—his whole body—were whipped backward by the oncoming water, and he screamed again when something hit his lacerated leg with the force of a twenty-pound hammer.

  There it was! He could see his wallet wedged between the dashboard and the windscreen. If he could just reach his wallet, open it up, look at that photograph—he’d be able to find the strength to get through this. The decision he’d made earlier was too important to be sidetracked by a few cuts and bruises, or a broken arm.

  He was only thirty-four years old. He was healthy and strong. Dying was not on his agenda. Not for a very long time. All his intensity—all the life he had left—went into pulling himself up to the open window.

  But he never heard Mitchell’s terrified shout. He never saw the boulder that crashed through the flimsy canvas roof of the Jeep, shattering the windshield, and his skull. He never got to hold the photograph hidden in the recesses of his wallet.

  The search for Paul Armstrong and Mitchell Browder began at one P.M., immediately after the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department received the call from Kate Armstrong. Kate made the call immediately after Browder’s wife phoned from the airport, complaining that her husband had failed to pick her up, and “I’m standing here with a cranky four-year-old and every damn toy she’s got and five suitcases.”

  The search ended at 2:48 P.M. because Paul Armstrong and Mitchell Browder were just where they said they’d be.

  The four-wheel-drive vehicle carrying a deputy and a member of the rescue squad sped along the dirt road. When they saw the unfamiliar sight of a river running through the desert, the deputy reverently whispered, “Flash flood,” and immediately put in a call for an emergency vehicle. The two men breathed a sigh of relief when they spotted a man sitting on a large boulder. Their relief would be short-lived.

  He fit the description of Mitchell Browder, and the deputy was about to cancel the call for emergency services when the stillness of the figure struck him. The two men got out of the car, not bothering to close the doors, and walked toward the lone man. He didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge their presence. When the deputy called out his name, he didn’t hear. He simply sat, staring at a point somewhere in the distance. When the man from the rescue squad drew closer he could see the mud caked on the man’s clothing. When he stepped in front of him and repeated his name, Mitchell Browder slowly moved his head upward, revealing a face streaked with dirt and tears.

  “Mr. Browder, where is Paul Armstrong?”

  “He’s gone,” Mitchell answered in a hollow voice.

  “Gone where, Mr. Browder?” the deputy asked in a patient voice. “Which way did he go? My partner will go find him and I’ll stay with you.”

  Mitchell shifted his eyes away from whatever he had been staring at and turned them on the man who stood before him. They seemed to burn with pain and fear, and the deputy took a step backward.

  And then Mitchell Browder said the words that stunned first the men standing in front of him, and then the entire nation.

  “He’s not far away. I watched Paul Armstrong die right over there.”

  Mitchell lifted a hand that felt heavy with the weight of his words, pointing to the nearly unrecognizable Jeep that sat buried in the muddy rubble of the flash flood, and then silent tears coursed down his face once again.

  “He didn’t stand a chance,” stated the sheriff, thinking she was out of earshot.

  “It was over very quickly,” said a friend, who was also a doctor on call at the hospital, afterward.

  “He didn’t feel any pain,” the coroner had pronounced, taking her hand.

  Over and over again, the same meaningless phrases blew across her consciousness until she simply stopped hearing them. How the hell did they know? Although she had been spared the sight of his once beautiful now unrecognizable face, she had been forced to look at his battered body. A body that had been untouched by a surgeon’s knife, despite thirteen years in baseball. It seemed to her that he had hurt very much.

  Paul had tried to convince her to go with them that morning. But Kate was sick to death of everything to do with Arizona. She’d been married to Paul Armstrong, and consequently baseball, for thirteen years. It wasn’t fun anymore. The constant moving, the road trips, the hundreds of hours spent alone, the limelight that Paul lived in as the Giants’ phenomenal second baseman—all these things had worn her down. She’d almost not come to spring training this year. Almost. But at the last moment she’d changed her mind, knowing that separation from Paul would be even more devastating to their marriage. This was his last chance to make it better. Kate had done all she could. She didn’t think she could live without him, but knew something had
to give. And that “something” wasn’t going to be her any longer.

  And as she sat, dry-eyed, on the couch in the living room of her parents’ Tempe home that night, surrounded by people who whispered and murmured and hovered, that was the one thought that assaulted her mind.

  How am I supposed to go on without you?

  It wasn’t until the next day that she cried.

  Mitchell Browder stood in front of her while she sat on that same couch. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked at her forlornly—helplessly. He held a small plastic bag that he continually passed from one hand to the other. When he finally began speaking, his words came out in torrents of pain.

  “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m so sorry! I don’t know what else …” He stopped and swallowed hard. “God, he was my best friend on the team. They just let me out of the hospital, and I wanted to come by and tell you how sorry … I don’t know what else to say. It doesn’t seem like enough. If there’s anything I can do to help you … anything.”

  Kneeling in front of her, he held the bag out with both hands. When she didn’t take it from him, he gently placed it on her lap.

  “These are some of Paul’s things. They forgot to give them to you at the hospital. They were going to send over some stranger to give them to you, but I wouldn’t let them.”

  She tried to smile, but the effort it took was too great.

  “He saved my life, Kate.” Mitchell’s voice broke. “He saved me and then he died. I’ll never be able to repay him. I don’t know what to do …”

  And then this man, who had been through too many injuries to count, who was as tough as nails when it came to the vagaries of his career, began sobbing like a small child. His tears widened the crack in her heart, and she reached out for him.

  They held each other for long minutes, and then she sent him away.

  He was wiping his face with the back of his hand, standing in the archway that led to the hall, when he suddenly said, “The rose was for you. He wanted you to have it.” Kate’s grief-stricken eyes stared at him blankly, but he didn’t want to have to explain any more and he walked away.

  The bag he’d given her had fallen to the floor. As she reached for it, she saw where his teardrops had landed on the tiles. Tangible evidence of pain. Her fingers closed around the bag and she stood, knowing she’d never look inside.

  Kate’s mother found her in the guest room. There was a phone call for her. It was Mike Fitzgerald. Did she want to take it?

  She hadn’t even heard the telephone ring, but, yes, she wanted to talk to Mike. She always wanted to talk to Mike. He was the best friend she’d ever had.

  And when she picked up the receiver and heard him say “Katie? Darlin’?” her loss hit her fully, and the tears finally came.

  Read on for an excerpt from Juliana Garnett’s The Vow

  Prologue

  May, 1067

  IF YOU ARE too cowardly to defy the Normans, I will go to fight in your place.”

  The words hung in the suddenly still air like drawn swords: a challenge. All motion and conversation ceased; eyes turned toward the slender blond woman standing in the center of the hall. She stood steadfast, chin firm, ice-blue gaze steady beneath a sweep of insolently long brown lashes. No errant thrum of lute or lyre by careless minstrel, no casual comment, could be heard in the hall awash with light from lamp and torch. Those perched on benches or leaning against stone walls seemed to hold their collective breath. Ceara, daughter to the Saxon lord of Wulfridge, waited with nervous defiance for her father’s reply.

  Some would like to see her fall, she knew well enough. Fah, she did not care what they thought. Their anticipation was as pungent as the sharp scents of burning pine knots and oil lamps. But all that mattered to her now was vengeance and pride—for ’twas all she had left.

  Wulfric is dead, and with him have gone laughter and hope.…

  She saw rage in the pinpoint flames that lit Lord Balfour’s bright blue eyes. She did not look away. Their gazes were almost level, for she was as tall as most men—even the Norman foes who raped their lands.

  Ceara lifted her chin and her long, loose hair drifted over a bared shoulder, cool and soft against her skin. The gunna and kirtle she wore were her own style—pagan some said, though not usually the men who eyed her shortened attire with sly appreciation. Lecherous fools. Around her waist, instead of a gold-linked or woven girdle, she wore a sword; no mere eating dagger, but a lethal Roman gladius—taken, the tale went, by a long-dead Celtic ancestor from a legionnaire. The weapon had been handed down through her family for hundreds of years. And she could use it most agilely, so that no man dared approach her without good reason.

  A sword clinked against stone. Someone coughed, and a slight mutter was quickly silenced. Drifts of smoke lazed across the hall, carried by an errant breeze that stirred flame and bright woven wall hangings indiscriminately. Light from a flickering torch gilded her father’s hair with silver and played across his craggy features. Had he always had such deep creases in his face?

  “I swore an oath to William.” Lord Balfour’s aged voice had the hoarse sound of a grindstone. “I do not forswear my oaths.”

  “Oaths given under duress are not meant to be kept.”

  “And what would a woman know of fealty?” His mouth twisted in an ironic smile that brought heat to Ceara’s cheeks.

  “More than most men, I daresay, though ’tis not a woman’s lot to decide her own fate.” She dragged in a deep breath that tasted of smoke and incense and the residue of a thousand evening meals, her cold gaze riveted on her father though her heart had begun to thump against her ribs. “Must it always come to this with us? Can you not listen to my counsel as you did to Wulfric’s?”

  Balfour leaned forward. “Nay. I cannot. You are not Wulfric. He is dead, and I am left with a daughter who is more willful than obedient. You have barely sixteen winters to you, Ceara. Surely, you did not think you could replace Wulfric’s wise counsel.”

  The softly spoken words fell on her like harsh blows. As she answered, her own voice shook slightly, but she steadied it with fierce resolve, her nails digging deeply into the palms of her hands. “Nay, of course I cannot. Wulfric is—was—a man, while I am only a witless female, meant to sit at cooking pots and looms instead of war councils.”

  “Aye, but you seem to have forgotten that.”

  “Nay, not for a moment have I forgotten how you wish to keep me in a corner, unnoticed and unheard. Yet in days of old, women’s voices were heeded as well as the men’s. Now, the Normans have done more damage than the Romans or even the Vikings. They have laid waste to the entire country and made us into curs groveling at their heels, yet you prate of fealty to their bastard king as if it is a matter of honor to lay down our arms and do his bidding like tamelings!”

  When she paused, anger making her tremble as if with a chill, her father lifted a hand to beckon two of his thralls forward. They flanked her swiftly. Her chin lifted at this insult, but she made no move to flee.

  “You will be escorted to your chamber until you have reconsidered your hasty words,” Balfour said coolly, but flames lit his eyes with the heat of a hundred torches.

  Ceara met his gaze steadily. Cowards. All of them. Including Balfour, though he was her father and lord of their lands. Wulfric would never have yielded.… Yea, but Wulfric was gone, she reminded herself. And by all that was sacred, no man would force her to swear a loyalty she did not feel.

  Raking the two thralls with a scathing glance, Ceara crossed her arms over her chest. Her mocking smile stretched into a taut grimace. “I shall grow old and withered in my chamber before I will consider yielding to the bastard duke of Normandy.”

  Fine white lines etched Balfour’s eyes as he glowered at her; he turned suddenly on his heel and moved away. He wore the tunic and fur-lined robes of a baron—a Saxon lord—though since the coming of the Normans, the fur was not as thick, the robes increasingly threadbare. Balfour crossed the beautiful tiled floor slowly
, the once vibrant pattern of moon and stars beneath his feet now faded. He stepped onto the dais to take his customary seat in the high-backed stone chair made comfortable with bolsters of stuffed feathers and fur.

  “You are insolent, my daughter.”

  Ceara allowed a faint smile to touch her mouth. “Yea, my lord, I learned insolence at your knee. But you know I am right as well as insolent.”

  Balfour studied her narrowly. “You would have me flee to Malcolm for succor? I am to yield to the king of the Scots what the Norman king has not yet taken? What, then, is the difference, I ask you?”

  “The difference is couched in your own words—’tis better to give freely than to be taken from.”

  Balfour leaned forward, his words a soft hiss between tight lips. “To use your own words—never.”

  “Then you doom us to—”

  “Nay! If I deal fairly with King William, he will deal fairly with me. Wulfridge needs a man who is as fierce as a wolf to hold it against invaders, not a she-wolf who snaps and snarls at every wind. Now go. Think of all that could be lost with hasty action just to further foolish vengeance.”

  Balfour dismissed her with a slight jerk of his head. Stinging from his sharp words, Ceara whirled about on a sandaled foot. Her loose hair swung around her shoulders and against her waist as she paused a few feet from the dais and snapped her fingers. “Sheba, to me.”

  Lying in a half crouch nearby, a huge white wolf-bitch rose in a lithe movement, the gold-brown eyes watchful. No one moved as Ceara quit the hall, the white wolf at her heels and her escorts trailing behind.

  Ceara felt their eyes on her as she walked the length of the hall with measured tread, continuing through the colonnaded Roman archways to the long corridor that led to her chamber. Ivy climbed the outside walls of the corridor, poking spiny green fingers inside open windows. As she passed, she plucked a three-lobed leaf for good luck and tucked it into the leather sword belt circling her waist.