by Snow, Nicole
Me telling him about the time I spilled hot chocolate fondue down the front of a Congolese war leader’s crotch and had to pretend I’d done that on purpose to seduce him back to my room to clean it with my tongue.
Instead of dispatching him with a poisoned dart to the neck.
But there’s a smoldering look at that mention of my tongue. A growl half interested, half possessive, as if I’m still his after all these years and he doesn’t like the idea of me even pretending to use my tongue on another man.
A tongue I flick at him mockingly, rolling that glistening bit of candy to the tip and catching it with my teeth, inviting him to take it—if he can.
A challenge he accepts.
His mouth crashes against mine, the bit of candy caught between us in hot little sugar-sweet, passion-wild tastes.
Then suddenly we’re on the floor, tearing at each other on the rug in front of the fireplace.
“Fuchsia!” he snarls my name with hunger.
Every wicked, long dormant bit of me tingles.
It’s just as magical as the first time.
Spontaneous. Insane. Frantic.
Pinning each other against the hard surface, rolling, grappling, then gasping, thrusting, writhing.
Oliver’s no slower for that prosthetic, no less keen with only one eye to rake over my bare skin. He watches me with an intensity that makes me bite my lip, devouring every reaction.
He makes me writhe for him even more than he did years ago, makes me impatient, draws it out until I get so angry I take what I want like I always do.
While he wakes up a passion inside me I thought had died out forever.
I blaze so bright, so free, under his touch.
My need, my hunger, my longing, my love all painted in magnetic, vivid colors.
It sounds ridiculous, but yes, I bloom for Oliver Major again.
Spreading, panting, hissing my pleasure in every kiss and seeing new shades of life.
They’re pink and hot and wild.
His tongue dips inside me and tastes me like candy.
I scream so loud I think I must scare every living creature in the forest surrounding this cozy little hideaway.
And I wrap my thighs around his hips, pulling him into me and crashing down on him, losing myself in the idea that just maybe...
This could be forever.
This could be us now.
For real this time.
Because one way or another, Oliver kept his promise.
We’re going to be together.
We’re going to be okay.
We’re going to reconnect with Mandolin.
Though we have to take a short vacation from our secluded pseudo-honeymoon.
When the time comes, we need to relocate to another cabin buried in the snow, even farther north outside Fairbanks, Alaska.
Only this time we’re taking an even longer detour to get there.
And this time, we’ve got help.
Look.
I didn’t want to drag Gray and Leo and the rest of the so-called Heroes of Heart’s Edge into this—but they’ve brought their entire freaking caravan along to act as our cover.
Blake, Warren, and all their wives and kids. We make one hell of a picture in our pale-green bus with flowers painted down the sides like some kind of hippie nightmare.
All of us in thrift shop clothes that could either be recycled from the seventies or pose as part of the latest fashion craze that is, for some godforsaken reason, bringing high-waisted mom jeans back into style.
Either way, we don’t look like what we really are.
A mess of former military and corporate espionage specialists, smuggling two fugitives and former spies up north.
And that’s the whole point.
Part of this cockamamie scheme was making sure we didn’t take an obvious route or look like anything other than a grossly happy and very eccentric singing missionary group.
Alberta to Heart’s Edge is pretty roundabout, and then Heart’s Edge up through Vancouver, hugging the coast to Alaska in this old tank of a bus. We pretend we’re working our way from town to town doing charity work for room and board, making our journey even longer.
I’m going to stab someone if I have to listen to Ember and Peace with their permanent smiles singing one more time. I’m certain I would have by now, if I didn’t have Oliver here every time with a chuckle and a reassuring squeeze.
But one thing I’m glad for, I think, is that I get to see that little town one more time.
It’s got a special place in my heart—all stupid puns about Heart’s Edge aside.
I can’t even explain why.
So much tragedy happened there.
So much hell I had a hand in.
But it’s become a place for new beginnings.
All those broken boys found a fresh start there. A new life. A second chance at happiness, despite everything gone wrong in their lives—some of it my fault.
And even if my new beginning happened somewhere else, there’s a connection.
It feels like the roots of it grew in that messy, flower-strewn little town.
Gray was right, even if I hadn’t known it at the time.
We started this together.
And we’re finishing it together now.
Tonight, we’re camped a few miles outside Edmonton, living out of the bus that’s secretly retrofitted with several modern conveniences that’d be the envy of most RV nomads.
We’d spent the day doing soup kitchen work, filling our roles, playing at the missionaries even while Warren slipped away to talk to an old contact from his bounty hunting days—with a significant chunk of mine and Oliver’s disposable cash in his pocket.
As the darkness descended, we built a campfire against the cold and put the children to bed in the tiered bunks lining the walls of the bus. I can’t believe I found myself helping and liking it, but God...is forty-three really too old to conceive again?
Could Oliver and I try one more time?
Maybe when Mandolin comes to meet us, we could introduce her to her little brother or sister.
I’m still thinking about that as the entire gaggle of our bizarre extended “family” settles in folding chairs around the fire, little clusters of conversation sometimes turning into larger group chatter while beer cans pass around.
I’ve declined. I may know how to rough it, but I’m still a lady. Clearly, I’m not getting a proper wine until we’re settled again.
It’s nice out, though.
The scent of woodsmoke, the scent of snow, and Oliver’s chair a little closer to mine than the others. He settles in deep with a beer propped against his thigh, watching the sparks rise with a wonderfully content expression on his face.
But as Warren cracks a fresh beer in a snap and hiss of releasing pressure, he pulls two slim leather folders out from inside his thick coat and leans across the fire. He offers them to us, the firelight reflecting gold from blue eyes and an easy grin.
“Welcome to your new lives as Laura and Alan Wellburton,” he says. “My contact worked up an entire new background for you both. You’ve been married ten years, retired early due to some smart stock investments. Very reclusive, as most odd rich people are. You get a little eccentric and doddering with being bored and idle all the time. We imagine you’ll be adopting cats.”
“Not Baxter,” Gray interjects sharply. “Our daughter would be devastated to give her up.”
I wrinkle my nose at them both, sticking my tongue out, but accept the folders and pass one to Oliver, while I flick the other open, scanning the details.
“I hardly look like a Laura,” I say with a skeptical laugh. “You couldn’t come up with something more original?”
“Not if you want to keep low to the ground. Besides...” Warren smirks. “Awful hard to top Fuchsia.”
Oliver gives me a dry sidelong look. “It doesn’t matter what anyone calls you. You’ll always be you.”
“You say that like an insul
t,” I fire back.
Gray gives me a flat stare across the flames, his mouth twitching. “At home, we called you a black cat. We were afraid to say your name lest it summon you like some sort of demon and bring more bad luck.”
“Hey!” I scowl at them. “I wasn’t that bad—all right, I was that bad, but I—”
I break off as it hits me. I have to fight not to blush.
Everyone is smiling.
At me.
And trying not to laugh.
Oh, hell.
They’re teasing me.
After the torture I dragged them through while I was hell-bent on my own ends, after the way I used them, after the pain I helped bring to their town...
They’re here, helping me, teasing me.
Forgiving me.
I have to look away.
I almost can’t—I—it’s too much.
Think I’d rather face down a firing squad—which I have multiple times in the past—than look at those smiling faces and figure out what to do with these emotions building hot and bright in my chest.
Primly, I clear my throat, snapping the folder shut. “I suppose I’ll learn to be Laura. At least it’s an ordinary name no one will notice.”
Not quite as ordinary as Patty Brin, I guess.
But I’ve reinvented myself before.
I can do it again.
This time, I think I know what I want to be.
Someone with the capacity to be happy.
With gentle laughter, the conversation rolls on. I glance over at Oliver and find him watching me, golden flames making sparks against the bourbon of his eye. He holds his hand out to me.
I’m a little uncertain, still, showing affection in front of the others. But after a brief hesitation, I slip my fingers into his palm.
And find something cool and smooth and round resting there.
With a startled sound, I jerk my hand back, staring.
Holy...there’s a ring.
My throat closes. I stare at him, my heart hammering roughly. Everyone around the fire has gone quiet, watching intently.
“Oliver?”
He grins, one-sided and roguish. “Don’t just stare at me. Take it. I had to go through hell to get the damned thing back. Tracked it through almost sixty different pawn shops in eight states after those Galentron bastards ‘robbed’ me. Guess it’s a good thing I love you.”
My breaths catch when I realize what he means.
He bought that ring fifteen years ago.
And he’d meant to—he’d wanted to—
He wanted to marry me. Before dagger fate and conspiring cruelty cut that short and took him out of my life for far too long.
Now we’ve come full circle.
And here he is, looking at me with that devil-may-care smile and the absolute certainty that always made me have so much faith in him.
Even when I didn’t have faith in myself.
Still, I hesitate, biting my lip, even if it smudges my lipstick.
Dear God.
I don’t...I don’t know how to do this. All my life, I’ve been programmed for everything but appropriate emotional responses, and after a long, awkward pause I remember how to speak.
“You...you know we really can’t be—” I stammer out.
“We can be, Fuchsia, if we say we are. It was the same issue we faced years ago,” he murmurs, his wily, strong face so soft with promise. “It’s just a piece of paper. Don’t need that to make it real. I don’t need a fake identity and a fake marriage to make any of this exist. To make us real. As far as I’m concerned...”
He leans in. My face goes so cherry-red hot I’m about to self-combust.
“Patty Brin, Fuchsia Delaney, Laura Wellburton...whatever name you choose, you’ve always been mine. And you always will be, if you’ll have me, wildcat.”
I don’t know what to say.
I don’t know how to say yes.
So I show him.
Tumbling into his chair, practically leaping into his lap, I kiss him with the force of a hydrogen bomb.
Yes, I even freaking kiss him in front of every slack-jawed Heart’s Edge gawker, okay?
Even while he’s fumbling that ring from his palm onto my finger while he clutches me tight.
Everyone around us laughs, murmurs, so warm, as bright and cozy as this strange, strange feeling inside me. I suppose they’ve earned their show.
Hell, I don’t care.
I’m happy.
It feels like for the first time in my life, other people are happy for me, and I almost hate wondering.
Is this what it feels like to have a family?
I think I understand it better now. Why it was wise to leave Mandolin where she is, to wait for someday, when we can ease her into our lives.
Blood doesn’t always make family.
Sometimes, all it takes is love.
She has love for now. Someone else’s.
And there’ll be a time when it’s right to give her ours.
It’s a quiet night, after our hearts fall out on the messy ground in front of everyone. It’s a good thing this is the last time I’m sure I’ll see these people again, or I know I’d never live it down.
I hardly notice anyone else, anyway. I’m just too wrapped up in Oliver, in feeling like I’ve catapulted back in time fifteen years to when I first fell in love with him and it—and I—are fresh and new again.
We’re the last ones in.
And I feel like this could be my forever, as I fall asleep curled up with him in a flower-painted bus under the stars.
* * *
We’re on the road again the next day.
And it’s our last stop in Alberta before the cozy cottage waiting for us and our new lives.
And also our last goodbyes.
It still floors me. Not just that these people are willing to help at all, but that they actually look sad when it’s time for me to go. Half of them should want me torn limb from limb for what I did in my darker years, for the ways I could’ve done more, even after I’d seen the light and sworn to dismember Galentron.
What comes next is a total surprise.
I don’t expect the hugs.
I don’t expect the well-wishes or Clarissa thrusting a box of her custom-made hot-pink candy into my hands like I didn’t used to creep that poor child out when she was just a baby herself.
Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t turn her off candy for life, every time I used to ask her if she’d want a piece during those long, strange meetings at her father’s house. I singled her out because I had a soft spot for her, even if I’ll never admit it to her face.
Maybe a small part of me saw young Clarissa Bell as the girl who could’ve been my own lost daughter.
I also get sticky kisses galore from little baby mouths, and claps on the shoulder from big hands, and just...
More than I know how to deal with.
It’s almost a comical relief to settle in alone with Oliver and work on recentering myself.
But it’s also strange as we realize we’re right back in a place that’s not too different from our little sojourn in his Alberta cabin.
Only, this is forever.
This is us now.
The start of our new lives, and that ring heavy proof on my finger.
We look at each other wide-eyed and starry for a tense moment as the bus pulls away. It leaves just us and the snow and the little grey-roofed house with the pretty scalloped edges on the eaves.
He starts to say something.
So do I.
Then we both stop, bursting into laughter.
And suddenly, it’s easy again.
I give him a grin. He gives me a sillier one back, and I marvel at just how easy it is being free.
It stays easy, too, as we settle into the routine of our first few days. We finally get a chance to figure out what it means to live together, be together, find quiet ways to fill the time with books and gardening and just talking to each other as if we’ll
never tire of each other, no matter what we say, no matter how long the brilliant Alaskan nights stretch on.
We wonder if it ever stops snowing in Alaska, but it does. A few months in, the harsh winter chill gives way to a mellow spring and a summer that’s brief, but glorious.
He starts a new collection of fine wine in our underground cellar.
Yes, there’s even a couple bottles of Delaney which he only breaks out on special date nights when he wants to torture me.
I don’t hang up my designer clothes, but I develop an obsession with kitschy costume jewelry from a little secondhand shop in town, and start trying to make it me.
Roughing it out in small-town Alaska isn’t the kind of life I’d ever have imagined for myself.
But it’s the perfect life I wouldn’t trade for anything.
...except for one nagging thing.
A silent question, always waiting. An unfinished chapter. An unmade call.
Until the day when the phone finally rings, sitting on the charger in its little study nook off the kitchen.
It takes me a heavy, slow-motion second to realize what I’m hearing.
Then I lift my head sharply from stirring my coffee, forgetting how to breathe as that old tension knifes through me. An instinctive response to the adrenaline rush, awakening those killer instincts that hone in on that phone like it’s a gun held to my face.
Only, I think I’m more scared of that phone than I’ve ever been of any weapon.
I’m scared to answer it, scared she’ll say never contact me again.
The terror makes me selfish enough to let it keep ringing and ringing until it’s almost too late.
No!
Fuck that.
I’m Fuchsia Delaney. Since when do I fear anything?
I told you before, I’m no hero.
But one way or another...
I won.
This is my story, and it’s still being written.
And for the first time in my life?
I’m the one who gets to tell it.
And I hope I can help my daughter tell her own story, too.
I’m smiling as I snatch up that phone on the very last ring, click the connect button, and breathlessly answer, “Hello?”
Epilogue: Big Day (Oliver)