Colton by Marriage. Marie Ferrarella

annoyed huff to escape her lips. She marched over to him, plucked the cigar out of his mouth and made a dramatic show of dropping it into the uncovered trash basket in the corner. It was an ongoing tug of war between them. Donald Kelley seemed to possess an endless supply of cigars and Bonnie Gene apparently possessed an endless supply of patience as she removed and threw away each one she saw him put into his mouth.

      Susan had long since stopped thinking that her father actually intended to smoke any of these cigars. In her opinion, he just enjoyed baiting her mother.

      But today Susan didn’t care about the game or whether her father actually smoked the “wretched things” as her mother called them. All of that had been rendered meaningless, at least for now. Her friend was dead and she was never going to see Miranda again. Her heart hurt.

      “Miranda’s gone,” Susan said in small, quiet voice, answering her father’s question.

      “Gone?” he echoed. “Gone where?” When his wife gave him a sharp look, a light seemed to go on in his head and Donald realized what Susan had just told him. “Oh. Gone.” A chagrined expression washed over his face as he came over to his youngest child. “Susan, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” he told her. The squat, burly man embraced her, a feat that had been a great deal easier in the days before his gut had grown to the size that it had.

      Coming between them, Bonnie gently removed Susan from Donald’s grasp, turned the girl toward her and hugged her daughter closely.

      For a moment, nothing was said. The other people in the kitchen, employees who had helped make the original restaurant the success that it was, went about their business, deliberately giving their employers and their daughter privacy until such time as they were invited to take part in whatever it was that was happening.

      Still holding Susan to her chest and stroking her hair, the way she used to when she had been a little girl, Bonnie Gene said gently, “Susan, you knew this day was coming.”

      She had. Deep down, she had, but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t still hoped—fervently prayed—that it wouldn’t. That a miracle would intervene.

      “I know,” Susan said, struggling again to regain control over her emotions, “it’s just that it came too soon.”

      “It always comes too soon,” Bonnie Gene told her daughter with the voice of experience. “No matter how long it takes to get here.”

      Bonnie Gene had no doubt that if Donald were to die before she did it wouldn’t matter whether they’d been together for the past hundred years. It would still be too soon and she would still be bargaining with God to give her “just a little more time” with the man she loved.

      “She’s in a better place now, kiddo,” Susan’s father told her, giving her back a comforting, albeit awkward pat. “She’s not hurting anymore.”

      Bonnie Gene looked at her husband, a flicker of impatience in her light-brown eyes. She tossed her head, sending her dark-brown hair over her shoulder. “Everyone always says that,” she said dismissively.

      “Don’t make it any less true,” Donald told her stubbornly, pausing to fish the cigar out of the trash. He brushed it off with his fingers, as if the cursory action would send any germs scattering.

      Bonnie Gene’s eyes narrowed as she looked at her husband over her daughter’s shoulder. “You put that in your mouth, Donald Kelley,” she hissed, “and you’re a dead man.”

      Donald weighed his options. He knew his wife was passionate about him not smoking, and she seemed to be on a personal crusade these days against his beloved cigars. With a loud sigh, Donald allowed the cigar to fall from his fingers, landing back in the trash. There were plenty more cigars in the house—and a few of them stashed in various out-of-the-way places. Places that Bonnie Gene hadn’t been able to find yet. He could wait.

      The rear door opened and closed for a second time. All three Kelleys turned to see Linc walk in. He was accompanied by a blast of hot July air. It was like an oven outside. A hot, sticky, moist oven.

      “I must have caught every red light from the hospital to the restaurant,” Linc complained, addressing his words to the world at large.

      Bonnie Gene felt her daughter stiffen the moment she heard Linc’s voice. The reaction was not wasted on her. Her mother’s instincts instantly kicked in.

      Releasing Susan, she approached her daughter’s self-appointed shadow. “Linc, I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

      It was no secret that Linc was eager to score any brownie points with the senior Kelleys that he could. “Anything, Mrs. Kelley.”

      “The linen service forgot to send over five of our tablecloths. Be a dear and run over to Albert’s Linens and get them.” Taking the latest receipt and a note she’d hastily jotted down less than an hour ago, she handed both to Lincoln. “Nita at the service is already waiting for someone to come for them. Just show her these,” she instructed.

      Lincoln glanced at the receipt and the note, looking somewhat torn about the assignment he’d been given. It was obvious that he’d hoped that whatever it was that Susan’s mother wanted done could be done on the premises and near Susan.

      But then he nodded and promised, “I’ll be right back.” He looked at Susan, possibly hoping that she would offer to come with him, but she didn’t. With a suppressed sigh and a forced smile, he turned on his heel and walked out of the kitchen through the same door he’d come in.

      Susan looked at her mother. It completely amazed her how the woman who could drive her so absolutely crazy when the subject of marriage and babies came up could still somehow be so very intuitive.

      She flashed her mother a relieved smile. “Thanks, Mom.”

      Bonnie Gene’s eyes crinkled as she smiled with pleasure. “That’s what I’m here for, honey. That’s what I’m here for.”

      “Here for what?” Mystified, Donald looked first at his wife then at his daughter, trying to understand what had just happened. “And thanks for what?”

      But rather than answer him, his wife and his daughter had gone off in completely opposite directions, leaving him to ponder his own questions as he scratched the thick, short white hair on his head. The action unintentionally drew his attention to the fact that his haircut, courtesy of his wife whom he insisted be the only one to cut his hair, was sadly lopsided. Again.

      Though she’d been cutting his hair ever since they had gotten married all those years ago—originally out of necessity, now out of his need for a sense of tradition—Bonnie Gene had never managed to get the hang of cutting it evenly.

      Donald didn’t mind. He rather liked the way the uneven haircut made him look. He thought it made him appear rakish. Like the bad boy he’d never had time to be. And because he was who he was, the owner of a national chain of restaurants, no one ever attempted to tell him any differently.

      Glancing over his shoulder in the direction that his wife had gone—to the front of the restaurant, undoubtedly to rub elbows with the customers—Donald quickly dipped into the trash basket and retrieved his cigar for a second time. This time, he didn’t bother going through the motions of dusting it off. Instead, he just slipped it into his pants pocket.

      With a satisfied smile, Donald assumed a deliberately innocent expression. Hands shoved into his pockets—his left protectively covering the cigar—he began to whistle as he walked toward the swinging double doors that led into the dining hall.

      Life was good, he thought.

       Chapter 3

      The moment he’d realized that this time Boyd Arnold’s discovery wasn’t just a figment of his imagination, Wes had firmly sworn Boyd to secrecy. Knowing that Boyd had a tendency to run off at the mouth, words flowing as freely as the creek did in the winter after the first big snowstorm, he’d been forced to threaten