LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      She sat up on the leather love seat, drenched in a sweat of panic. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows of the enclosed porch where, after another restless night, she’d fallen, exhausted, to sleep. She forced a constricted breath. Then another. The threat was gone, now behind bars awaiting justice. She was here, safe in her home, not at her husband’s office at the mercy of his killer.

      The only thing that didn’t change upon waking was the fact that her husband was dead.

      Vestiges of fear beaded coldly upon her skin. She scrubbed her hands over her face. Only then did she reach for the insistent phone. In another few weeks it would be turned off, the number disconnected as she removed herself forever from this place, from this life. She would be moving on, leaving the past and its ugly scars behind. None too soon.

      She lifted the receiver and spoke with what she hoped was coherent civility.

      “D’Angelo residence.”

      An amiable greeting sounded on the other end of the line. It wasn’t a solicitor trying to coerce her into opening her checkbook for some worthy cause. It wasn’t a friend requesting a long overdue lunch. It wasn’t her realtor wondering if the house was ready for the market. It was a voice from the past. One that still echoed, horribly, impossibly, from her nightmare of moments before.

      The voice of her husband’s murderer.

      “Hello, Barbie. Did you think I’d forgotten you?”

      For a moment she couldn’t respond. Her entire system shriveled into a tiny knot of disbelieving panic. How could it be? How could it be him?

      “Babs? You still there? Cat got your tongue?” His chuckle was warm and jovial, making it all the more terrifying. “Nothing to say to me after all we’ve shared? That’s okay. You can just listen. Guess where I am?”

      Finally, her shocked stupor ended upon a snap of outrage. “You should be burning in hell, but a life behind bars will have to do.”

      “I’ve been to hell, Babs. It was hot and green. But no, I’m not going back there, not for a long while. And right

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