Grace Green - The Wedding Promise

‘Get out,’ she screeched, ‘you nasty, disgusting old pervert—’ She scooped up the giant-sized cake of Heavenly Gardenia soap from the edge of the bath and rocketed it at his face. Her aim was atrocious, but he dodged, and the hard oval bar met his brow with a crack that made him wince.

‘Ouch!’ He staggered back a step. ‘Cut it out.’

To her dismay, she noticed that the bath bubbles had started to deflate. Frantically she threshed the dying suds with the flat of her hands in an attempt to revive them, but in vain. The water had cooled, and the bubbles only grew smaller and smaller, concealed her less and less...

With a quavering moan, she slid down as far as she could go without submerging herself fully, and prayed that the few remaining bubbles would continue to act as a veil.

‘I’ll drown myself!’ she moaned, splaying her hands over her breasts and almost throwing out her back as she twisted her crossed legs away from him. ‘I’ll drown myself, I swear, rather than give in to you and your wicked—’

‘Give in to me?’ His curse turned the air blue. ‘Lady, you’re out of your mind. I saw the boat leave and I merely came down to see what Zach Grant had left behind. What I certainly didn’t expect to find was...you.’ He crossed to the mirror above the sink, swiped a hand over the glass to clear the steam, and leaned forward to inspect his brow. ‘You just missed my eye,’ he accused. ‘Lucky for you—’ he turned ‘—or I’d have sued the pants off you...’

His gaze trailed from her face to her body, and he raised a cynical brow. ‘But I guess,’ he added mockingly, ‘they’re already off.’

Sara felt a sheet of heat skim from her neck to the tips of her toes. She had no idea how much of her was visible through the scanty remaining foam—but she’d have walked barefoot over white-hot coals rather than give this man the satisfaction of seeing her peek to check.

‘All right.’ She tilted her chin regally. ‘Please leave now. Your explanation and apology are accepted—’

‘Apology?’ he sputtered. ‘What apology? You’re the one who should be doing the apologising—’

A loud hammering on the front door stopped him short.

‘Hello?’ The voice was high-pitched, nervous, young. ‘Anyone in there? Is everything OK?’

Sara saw him roll his eyes.

‘My daughter!’ He raked a hand through his already mussed black hair, his expression that of an animal caught in a leghold trap. ‘Where angels fear to tread, she just barges in—’

‘Like father, like daughter!’ Sara’s courage had swelled up again, but too late to give her any feeling of pride or pleasure.

‘I guess.’ The faintest twinkle gleamed in his eyes.

Green eyes. Sara had noticed that when she’d first met him. Then, and moments ago, they’d been cold and hostile. Now, for the first time, she saw a glimmer of warmth, and it kindled an odd spark of excitement deep inside her.

‘For God’s sake—’ his voice was hoarse ‘—don’t tell her about this. I’ll never hear the end of it.’

Without waiting for an answer, he wheeled away, slamming the bathroom door behind him.

Sara slumped, boneless as a drunken jellyfish. Her body trembled; her heart trembled. If that confrontation was a portent of the kind of holiday that lay ahead, perhaps it would indeed have been better if Zach had rented her a de luxe condo in a busy holiday resort...

‘What happened, Dad?’ The girl’s voice drifted into the bathroom through the open window as father and daughter walked along the side of the cottage. ‘I heard the scream and I ran to your room to see if you had too, but you weren’t there, so I guessed you must have come down to investigate.’

Sara held her breath, curious to hear Logan’s answer.

‘It was nothing, sweetie. Zach Grant’s gone—his girlfriend’s here on her own, and apparently when she was in the bathroom she saw a... mouse.’

The voices faded, and once again Sara relaxed.

A mouse. No, Mr Logan, she disdainfully corrected him, what I saw in my bathroom was certainly not a mouse.

It looked much more like a rat.

‘After we finish breakfast, I’m going to start clearing out your mother’s things from the master bedroom.’ Logan watched his daughter carefully from across the verandah table, alert to any sign of distress. ‘Care to help?’

Andy’s huge brown eyes gave nothing away as they met his. ‘No, that’s OK, Dad. You should probably do it on your own. I’ll start packing up the books in the den. Where are the boxes?’

‘Should be a bunch up in the attic. We’ll get them later.’

Andy nodded and, bending her head over her bowl, dug her spoon into her cereal.

Logan felt a wave of weariness wash over him. Andy was a real trooper and he was so proud of her he sometimes could hardly contain it...but he wished new, as he so often did, that she weren’t so adept at keeping her emotions under control. Apart from an outburst of hysterical sobbing when her mother had died, she’d never let go. Not once. At least, not in front of him. If she cried, she cried alone.

In the beginning, he’d tried to talk to her about her Mom, but in the end had given up. She was as closed as a clam. It would have helped her, he felt sure, if they could have shared their sorrow. And it would have helped him too.

Another problem was that everybody they knew avoided talking about Bethany. They probably thought they were being kind, but it would have been more natural to remember her aloud, to recall all the wonderful things about her.

Sometimes it seemed to him as if his beloved wife had never existed...except in his own life.

‘That was a big sigh, Dad,’ Andy murmured. ‘What’s up?’

‘Oh...it’s...’ he searched his brain for an answer that would satisfy her ‘...um...just that woman in the cottage, sweetie—I want you to keep away from her.’

He got up from the table and, shoving his hands into his pockets, looked down at his daughter. Her hair was damp from her shower, and the sun caught copper highlights in the ragged strands. His heart ached as he remembered how Bethany’s long brown hair had glinted in just such a way...

‘Why, Dad?’

‘Why what?’

Andy uttered a sound of exasperation. ‘Why must I keep away from “that woman”?’

She said ‘that woman’ in a tone of dark melodrama, which Logan chose to ignore. ‘Because, daughter mine, rightly or wrongly, society judges people by the company they keep. I want you to stick with people whose values are the same as your own. A good reputation’s worth its weight in gold—and it’s something you can lose only once.’

‘Kind of like virginity, right, Dad?’

Logan cleared his throat, and busied himself with gathering up his dishes. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Darned right.’

A feeling of helplessness and inadequacy almost swamped him. He was no good at this; he was clumsy, awkward—or, to use Andy’s latest expression of derision, ‘pathetic’.

She needed a mother, especially at this stage in her life, where she was herself on the threshold of womanhood. And he did intend to take himself another wife...but only because of his promise to Bethany.

Just the memory of it broke his heart.

‘Darling,’ she’d whispered as she’d lain dying in the stark white hospital bed, ‘promise me you’ll marry again.’ Her voice had caught. ‘I couldn’t bear it if I thought you’d go through the rest of your life grieving...’

He’d have promised her the moon if he’d thought it would give her a moment’s respite from her suffering.

‘I promise—’ the lump in his throat had almost choked him ‘—if that’s what you want, I’ll marry again...’

And the promise had been worth it, to see the quick shine of relief in her dulled eyes, to feel the tiny surge of strength in the fragile fingers clutching his.