The Bride And The Mercenary. Harper Allen

Ainslie’s mock slap with a giggle. She sobered again. “But you do love him, right? Like Uncle Sully loves Bailey?”

      She’d never lied to Tara, Ainslie thought regretfully, but there was no way she could answer that particular question with the truth. She fudged, telling herself it was in a good cause.

      “O’Connell women only fall in love once, and that’s it for the whole of their lives,” she said. “Do you think I’d be marrying Pearson if he wasn’t the one?”

      “I guess not,” Tara said slowly. She kept her gaze fixed on Ainslie’s for a second longer, as if looking for reassurance. Whatever she saw there seemed to satisfy her, and she straightened in her seat. “We’re almost there, Aunt Lee. Are you nervous?”

      “I’d ten times rather be going into the ring to face Holy-field. Does that answer your question?” Ainslie put her hands gingerly to the headpiece to make sure it was straight, and managed to pull her veil sideways just as St. Margaret’s hove into view.

      “Great,” she muttered. “By the time we drop you off at the side entrance I’ll be looking like a—” She blanched. “Oh, my God, it’s worse than I thought it would be. Look at all those people! Don’t they have lives?”

      Oblivious to the fact that the limo windows were heavily tinted, Tara regally tilted a palm back and forth until they turned the corner and left the crowd behind. “Wow, this might actually be fun. There’s that cute usher getting off his motorcycle in the parking lot.”

      “Don’t even think about it. Motorcycles are dangerous—why do you think I stopped riding them?” Ainslie said distractedly. “Okay, pumpkin, this is where you get out.”

      Tires crunching over the gravelled parking lot, the limousine rolled to a stop, and almost instantly the uniformed driver was at their door. As he opened it Tara threw her arms around Ainslie impulsively, hugging her tight.

      “I love you, Aunt Lee. If you’re happy, then I’m happy.”

      How many times had she held this precious gift of a daughter close? Ainslie wondered, her own eyes tearing as she fiercely hugged Tara back. When her cousin Babs had died of leukemia, leaving the seven-year-old daughter she’d had out of wedlock in Ainslie’s care, she’d already been head over heels in love with the little girl. All the O’Connell clan had adored the child, and even Ainslie’s half brother Terry Sullivan had taken one look at her and handed her his heart. Tara had never wanted for love, and she had given it back in return.

      But she hadn’t ever known the permanent presence of a father, and sometimes Ainslie had worried about that. Pearson would fill that void, she thought, giving Tara one last too tight squeeze.

      “I’ll see you in there, pumpkin,” she said, clearing her throat and blinking rapidly. “I guess I’d better go run the gauntlet now. If your uncle Sully isn’t waiting for me on that darn red carpet, I’m going to have his hide.”

      “He’ll be there.” Tara stepped out of the car, and then popped a thoughtful face back in. “Unless Megan Angelique picked today to be born. Bailey said she’s been feeling like the Goodyear Blimp these last few days.”

      With a quick wave she turned and ran to the side entrance of the church, where Ainslie could see a knot of females already waiting for her. The O’Connell women, she thought fondly, catching a glimpse of her aunts Cissie and Jackie before her view was cut off by the driver closing the car door. A moment later the limo pulled sedately out of the parking lot and onto the street.

      Ainslie folded her hands in the creamy satin and lace of her lap and chewed nervously at her bottom lip, wishing the day was over.

      Immediately she felt a pang of contrition. Pearson had meant well when he’d arranged their wedding. He came from a different strata of society than she did—not to mention a different generation, she admitted honestly to herself—and this was the way things were done in his circle.

      So how come when he finally decided to marry he picked a single mom twenty years his junior and an ex-boxer to boot? she wondered as she’d so often done before. But she knew the answer to that—at least, she knew the answer he’d given her.

      “Don’t sell yourself short, Ainslie.” He never called her Lee, which was just one more instance, she supposed, of the stuffiness that Tara had referred to. “You’ve got a lot going for you. You’ve built up that derelict gymnasium of your aunt’s into a going concern, you’ve raised Tara as if she were your own child, and you even mended the relationship with your half brother, Terrence, despite the way his father left you and your mother in the lurch when you were a child. I look at you and I see strength. I admire that.”

      “As long as it’s out of the boxing ring,” Ainslie hadn’t been able to resist adding, and his handsome features had relaxed into a rare smile.

      “You can’t blame a man for not wanting to see the woman he loves take a beating in front of a crowd of lowlifes and riffraff, can you?”

      “I prefer to think of them as paying customers, not riffraff,” she’d answered with a touch of tartness. “And I didn’t exactly stand around and take a beating, as you put it. I retired a champ, Pearson. Now I coach future champs. Boxing is an empowering sport for a lot of women.”

      And it helped save my sanity two years ago, when I didn’t know if I could go on, she might have said, but didn’t. Pearson didn’t know about that part of her past. There was no reason for him to know. The girl she’d been then was dead, and the man that girl had loved was dead, too.

      She hadn’t lied to Tara. The O’Connell females were one-man women. He’d been her first love, her last love, and her only love. She’d been twenty-five years old when she’d seen Malone’s coffin lowered into the cold, black earth, and she’d known that her own life had ended with his.

      For a while she’d gone a little crazy, she realized now. Paul Cosgrove had been his partner, and although the government agency they both worked for was so security-conscious that it didn’t even have a name, he’d bent the rules enough to tell her that Malone had been shot in front of his very eyes. Although Paul had gotten him to a hospital, Malone hadn’t survived the head wound he’d sustained—a head wound so horrific that there had been no question of having an open coffin at the funeral.

      But even hearing the terrible details of his death from the man who’d witnessed it hadn’t helped her to accept the reality of his passing.

      For three whole days after his funeral she’d sat in her darkened apartment all alone, not bothering to change out of the somber black suit she’d been wearing. Only when Paul had actually pounded on her door, demanding to know if she was all right, had she roused herself enough to tell him to go away before returning to her vigil.

      Because that had been what it was. For three days and three nights she’d sat, her hands folded quietly on her lap, her eyes open wide in the shadowy gloom, waiting for Seamus Malone to come back to her. Not from the dead. She just hadn’t accepted that he’d been killed. She’d been convinced it had all been some kind of insane trick.

      And then on the third day she’d finally fallen into a state of semi-consciousness—not sleep, not true wakefulness, but a limbo halfway between the two. In it she’d relived every moment she’d ever had with him, from the moment they’d first met only a few weeks before, to the last time he’d left her arms. Measured in days, their time together had been cruelly short. But time was an irrelevant yardstick for what they’d had.

      In two weeks they’d made a lifetime of memories.

      They’d so nearly missed knowing each other at all. On a rare impulse she’d dropped by Sully’s house one night after seeing Tara off with a schoolfriend at Logan Airport. The month-long trip to Arizona had been planned for ages and Ainslie knew that the Cartwells would look after Tara as if she were their own daughter.

      That night Sully had casually introduced her to his guest.

      She’d stared into a pair of brilliant green eyes, and that had