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Warrior's Second Chance
Nancy Gideon
Thirty years ago, war claimed the only man Barbara Calvin ever loved. And for her family's honor, for the child Taggart McGee never knew she carried, she married his best friend and abandoned her dreams of a future with Tag.Now, as the killer knew it would, the murder of Barbara's husband brought Tag out of hiding. To bury forever a secret only Tag and he shared, the villain struck once more. With Barbara and their daughter as the lure, Tag's warrior instincts came roaring back to life. Tag was determined to keep this second chance at love from slipping through his fingers….
“The last clear memory I have is of you,” Tag said.
She looked up then, her soft gaze warm with care and optimism, and the words just burst out from the unguarded heart of him.
“I never stopped thinking about you, dreaming about you. Loving you,” he added.
For a moment she didn’t react and he experienced a terrible anguished panic. He was too late.
Then she rose from her cross-legged position and came to him without a word. He stood there, frozen in place, afraid to hope, afraid to breathe. Her palms skimmed up either side of his immobile face, cradling him in that gentle V while she spoke the answer that fed his soul.
“Neither did I.”
Warrior’s Second Chance
Nancy Gideon
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
NANCY GIDEON
Portage, Michigan, author Nancy Gideon has a writing career that is as versatile as the romance market itself. Her books include many genres such as historicals, Regency contemporary and paranormal. She has won a Romantic Times BOOKreviews Career Achievement in Historical Adventure award, is a Holt Medallion winner and a Top Ten Waldenbooks series bestseller. When not working on her latest plot twist at 4:00 a.m. or setting depositions at her full-time job as a legal assistant, she’s cheerleading her sons’ interests in filmmaking and R/C flying, traveling (for research purposes, of course!) and rediscovering the joys of single life. Visit her at: www.TLT.com.
For my friends at MMRWA as proof that perseverance pays off.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Prologue
“Don’t go.”
Her soft plea held the strength to still his breathing as he reached for his jeans.
“I have to. I have to report in tomorrow. I’ve got to pack. Besides,” he cast a quick glance over his shoulder, “we’ve already risked enough by you staying out here so long.”
Fingertips grazed his ribs, effectively stopping his heart, as well. Her voice became softer still. So sweet, but an enticement nonetheless.
“I meant, don’t leave me. Not tonight. Not tomorrow.”
He gulped for air to get his pulse and thought process going again while devouring her with a hungry gaze. The offer was unbelievably tempting. Canada was so close, as close as this, his heart’s desire. And just as impossible to reach. He stood, pulling up his pants in the same strong motion. Those determined movements didn’t give away the wealth of frantic emotions beating him up on the inside. He couldn’t let her know how weak he was when it came to her request. When it came to her, period.
She lay on the swing, his letter sweater hugged to her smooth, silky skin, skin still moist from his hurried kisses. She lifted up on one elbow to watch him readying to leave her. Not for just this night, but for countless nights to come. The tousled spill of her fair hair created an angelic frame for her even paler face. Light from the back porch gleamed along the trail of her tears. He reached out to soothe away one of those glittering tracks. His reply conveyed an unyielding regret.
“Sorry, Barbara. Same answer to both things.”
A heart-savaging smile tried to strengthen the tremble of her lips, making them all the more alluring. Then she spoke with all the honesty in her soul. “I know. But it doesn’t change how I feel. Not about you. Not about us. You can’t blame me for wanting to hold on to you just a little bit longer. What time does your bus leave?” Her words snagged at the end of that question.
“Six o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.”
It was no easier for him to say than it was for her to hear.
“I don’t want you to be.”
Hurt and confusion flooded her eyes, making them into great salty seas in which a man could drown if not careful. He was already treading dangerously deep waters and knew he should just go. To linger only prolonged the inevitable. And hurting her was the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. Especially not tonight.
“Let’s say our goodbyes here,” he urged, eager to restore the tenderness of moments before. “It’ll be better just between the two of us.”
Her smile took a bittersweet twist, catching his meaning with a maturity far beyond her almost seventeen years. “Better than in front of half the town. I don’t care about that.”
“Better than in front of your parents. And I do care.”
“People will think it’s strange if I’m not there to see the three of you off.”
“I don’t care what people think.”
As long as it wasn’t the truth. The truth that a McGee from the wrong side of the justice system and Judge Calvin’s pristine, not-yet-of-legal-age daughter were romantically…and physically involved. If that truth were known, he wouldn’t live long enough to get on that bus to shake off this town and the stigma his family hung around his neck like a heavy, damning albatross. A reputation he could only live down if he got away, now, right now, before this beautiful, innocent woman-child suffered for its stain. That made him a hero in her eyes, a coward in his own.
She didn’t argue the point. That always surprised him, her willingness to just let things go considering that arbitration and critical examination were part of her family tradition. The Calvins loved to sink their teeth into any situation…and bite down hard until they won that point, whether they were right in the first place or not. Blind justice and closed minds. A dangerous combination when it came to courting a rich man’s daughter. Courting in the shadows because the honorable front door had always been locked tight for security’s sake where he was concerned.
But then he’d gone and stolen their most valuable possession anyway, despite their precautions. Like a thief in the night. That’s how he felt at this fragile moment. And he hated it, along with the name that made him so unacceptable.
She sat up, letting the sweater drop, exposing her creamy, perfect breasts without a trace of guile or manipulative intent. Between them, on a slender sterling chain, where it should have warded him off like a virgin-corrupting vampire, was the religious medallion her father had given her upon her confirmation. She slipped it over her head and then reached for one of his hands, turning it palm upward to make a cup into which she poured that trickle of silver. She curled his fingers over the St. Christopher’s medal and pressed them tight with both her hands. Her touch was cool, her hands trembling.
“I want you to take this.”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“God won’t care. I don’t care. I just want you to have a piece of me with you wherever you go.”
Silly girl. Didn’t she know she had already carved out a permanent niche within his soul?
“Okay.” His tone sounded brusque despite the shaky state of his own emotions. He couldn’t afford to let her know how much the gift meant to him. How much she meant to him at this very moment when parting was only hours away.
She released him so he could loop the chain about his neck. The medallion fell against his chest, next to the agitation of his heartbeats, the metal still warm from her skin. Burning there with the heat of their desperate passion. He knew he’d never take it off, that sacred symbol of their love.
“You’ll write?” Her question quivered slightly with intensity.
“I’d like to but—”
“I’ve got a post office box in Roseville so no one will know. Please.”
He tried to ignore an angry jab of unfairness at that necessity. So no one would guess what the two of them had become to one another. Loves. Lovers.
“Whenever I can,” he promised a bit tersely.
“It won’t be like this forever,” was the promise she gave him in return.
He’d heard it before. An empty promise made from a pure and painfully innocent soul. One not yet scarred by the ugliness of the society denying them approval and legitimacy in their relationship. Things a girl like Barbara Calvin needed. Deserved.
“They’ll change their minds. I’ll start working on them the minute you leave and will have them worn down by the time you come home a hero.”
Didn’t she realize it would take more than a chestful of medals to outshine the blackness of his past? But because she looked so hopeful, so damned gorgeous in her conviction, he only nodded.
She leaned forward to kiss him. Passion tasted wild and fierce in that long, wet exchange. And when she sat back, her expression was set with a strength that almost convinced him.
“I will marry you, Taggert McGee. You keep that promise close to your heart, too, and you come back for me. I’ll be waiting.”
So he took that promise with him on the bus the next day, along with a PO box number. He pretended he didn’t see her standing at the edge of the curb trying to hide her tears.
He carried that promise through the rigors of basic training while he sent off letters and waited anxiously for a reply. A reply that never came.
And the next time he heard anything about her, just before he shipped out, was that she now carried his best friend’s last name.
Even after thirty years, the pain of that discovery was still close to unbearable. Even as he stood in the cemetery glaring down at the name carved into pale marble. A stone as hard as his heart had become.
“You son of a bitch. You were supposed to take care of her. You’re the one she should be depending on, not me.”
Pride wouldn’t allow him to rejoice in his chance to take Robert D’Angelo’s place. That place promised to him one sultry evening a lifetime ago, and now offered again only because it was a matter of need, not love.
He crumpled the note that had pulled him back into the painful hell that was his past, letting it drop on a true hero’s grave. Walking away, because he wasn’t now, as he hadn’t been then, worthy of the woman they’d all loved.
Chapter 1
Death hung suspended at arm’s length.
She stared with hypnotic horror down the barrel of the gun, seeing no light at the end of that long black tunnel. Only darkness and death.
Hers and her daughter’s.
Lifting her gaze from the empty hole that held her demise, she looked into the eyes of her killer. What had she expected to find there? Sympathy? Regret? There was nothing, a flat void of expression as deadly and cold as the bore of the gun.
Was this what her husband had seen, this empty, soulless stare, in the last seconds of his life?
Would this be the last intimacy exchanged between man and wife, this shared precursor to their own end at the same indifferent, yet well-known, hand?
Robert D’Angelo was dead already, his life taken in this same room some months before by this same man. By this man who’d been his friend, his betrayer.
Her heart beat fast and frantically, pounding in her chest, hammering inside her head, the sound amplifying, intensifying like a desperate, unvoiced scream.
Please! I don’t want to die!
Tessa sat beside her, calm, fierce, her father’s daughter. Instead of begging for mercy, she argued with, even taunted, the man who held their futures in cruel hands. So brave, so confident. So precious. In the twenty-eight years they’d shared, had she told her how precious she was?
An anguished plea burned in her throat, twisting, tearing for release.
Don’t take my daughter.
If she jumped forward, if she grabbed the gun, using her body for a shield, perhaps Tessa could get away. There was a chance one of them might survive. Tessa. It should be Tessa, who had so much to live for.
Her breathing caught as an awful realization slammed through her. These could be the last moments of her life.
And then his words, with their terrible finality.
“Sorry, Babs. Nothing personal.”
Something moved in his fixed stare. Something so dark and unbelievably terrifying, her plan to save her daughter by sacrificing herself froze in timeless terror.
Pleasure. He was going to enjoy killing them.
An explosion of movement coincided with a shrill of sound. Her dream shattered like that remembered glass as Barbara D’Angelo woke to the ringing of her phone.
It took her a long moment to separate nightmare from reality.
