This Love Will Go On (19 page)

“Jade, you wouldn’t.”

“Don’t ever try me.”

“Jade, I love you with all my heart.  There will never be another man for me.”

He made a sound and came into her, their wrists still tied.  She helped him keep their wrists joined while she loved him with her body and soul.

Raine woke in the night with a throat that felt on fire. She groped around in the dark and found the robe she'd included in her packing. She went to the bathroom and got a drink of water, but it tasted of sulphur and did nothing to quench her thirst. Jade slept soundly and she didn’t want to disturb him.  Leaving the bathroom door open a tiny crack so she could see, she found her purse.  There was a soft drink machine in the lobby and she was dressed decently enough to go down, even if there was a stray desk clerk around.

She made it down the stairs without seeing anyone other than the sleepy young man in uniform who sat at the desk.  He looked up briefly but when he saw where she was headed, his gaze flickered away.

She had just put money in the machine and heard the clunk of a can slipping into the tray when a fire bell began to ring. The sound was ear-splitting. Was it a real fire? She smelled no smoke. Surely it must be a false alarm. Whatever it was, she had to get back to Jade.

She turned to race up the stairs. Instantly, the desk clerk materialized at her side and grabbed her arm.  “Where are you going?”

“I have to go back up. My husband…”

“Sorry,” he said unsympathetically. “You've got to go outside.  Your husband will come down without your help.”

“No,” she said, panicking, “you don’t understand.  He’ll think I’m up there somewhere.  I have to go to him.”

The loathsome man caught her arm.  “No way, lady.  You'll be in the way of people coming down. I must insist that you go outside."

In despair, Raine looked up the stairway. A mother was shepherding her three small children down, urging them forward in an agitated tone every step of the way.  She knew the young man was right.  She couldn't risk the possibility of harming a child.  Jade would have to come down with the others.

Raine went out into the chilly night air and turned back so she could see who came out the door.  But when the people in nightwear stopped pouring out of the motel, Jade was not among them.

“Is it a false alarm?” a worried female voice asked.

“We think so, but we can't be sure. Is everyone out?” the harried young man asked the group.

An older man, balding and with a paunch that prevented his robe from closing over his pajamas in front, shook his head.  “There's some guy up there looking for his wife.”

“Didn't you tell him to come down?”

“Hey.” The older man shrugged.  “That guy is twenty years younger, four inches taller, and in a hell of a lot better shape than I am.

“It's Jade,” she cried and before anyone could stop her, she raced past the crowd back into the building.

Raine pounded up the stairs two at a time and jerked at the fire door.  It was heavy but she got it open. She screamed his name, “Jade!”

“Raine!” He had evidently been opening doors, going through the rooms one by one. Now he strode to her, his hair disheveled, his dark brown robe barely covering his hard thighs. “I thought…” He gathered her into his arms, almost crushing her in his fierce embrace.  In a voice strangely thick and muffled, he said, “I thought I'd lost you.”

“I went downstairs to get a soft drink.  They wouldn’t let me come back up.”  She pushed away to look into his face. “Why didn't you come down?'”

“I wasn't leaving until I found you.”

She’d known that.  There, in those dark, husky words, Jade had declared his love for her as surely as if he had carved them in stone.

She went up on tiptoe to kiss him. She was a whisper away from his mouth when he said in a rough tone that still contained a trace of his worry for her, “If the building's burning, don't you think we should go outside?”

She contented herself with covering his face with kisses. She touched her mouth to his lean cheeks, his amber eyelashes, the hard bone of his jaw, the firmness of his throat. As far as she was concerned the whole building could collapse around her and she didn't care.  Jade loved her.  “They think it's a false alarm.”

As if to confirm her words, the mother with her three children burst through the door. The woman stopped in mid-sentence, cast an embarrassed look over their embracing figures and said brightly, “The management says it's perfectly all right for us to go back to bed.” Her fractious children tugged at the skirt of her robe. “Daddy's waiting for us in Rapid City and he won't want to see us all tired and blearyeyed now, will he? Everybody jump in bed and tomorrow…”

The door closed behind her.  “You heard her,” Jade murmured.  “She said we should all jump in bed.”

“She’s not my mother,” Raine said cheekily.

He turned Raine in his arms and guided her into their room.  “Still, it does seem like a good idea.”

“After the excitement and all?”

“Exactly.”  Inside, he pulled her around to face him.

She looped her arms around his neck.  “I don't feel very tired.”

“Then,” he said, his voice silky, “we'll have to think of something else to do.”

“I could go back down to the lobby and get my soft drink…”

“You’re not going anywhere,” his hands going to the tie at her waist.  “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”  With an easy expertise, he slid the tie loose and pushed the robe from her shoulders.  Of course, it was easier for him because she helped.

A month later, on a very hot day in May, the printer who had bought the Linotype machine came and took it away. Raine hadn't been there for the actual loading, but now she stood with Jade and looked around the empty print shop.  “Why did you buy this place?”

“I bought it to give you a choice.  I wanted you to have another option beside some crazy scheme that would put you in debt.”

“Then I should say thank you.”  He had been thinking of only of her and she had misjudged him badly.

He perched on the corner of the desk, his booted foot swinging, a look in his green eyes that she had come to know.  It was an arrogant male look….combined with a possessive pride.  It was the way he looked at Tate, and now it was the way he looked at her. “I had the printer make a souvenir before he disconnected everything.”

“You did?” Her curiosity was aroused. She hadn’t thought Jade understood how sentimental she was about that silly Linotype machine.

He levered himself away from the desk and went round to open a drawer and pull out a slug of type. His eyes dark, he handed it to her.

For a moment, the backward letters made no sense. When they did, tears sprang to her eyes. In her hand she held the mirror image of the words,
I love you.

He shrugged, but she knew him well enough by now to know that his apparent unconcern held a deep vulnerability.  “You can use it as a paperweight…or as a weapon if we ever need to chase a calf around again.”

“I will treasure this always.  It will take pride of place in the china closet Julia is giving me as a housewarming present.”  She set the line of type down on the desk and threw herself into Jade’s arms.  “I love you so much, Jade.”  Her voice trembled with her intensity.  “And I will always love you.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”  The unsteadiness of his tone made a little spur of excitement shiver through her and when he folded her in his arms and pressed his mouth on hers in a deeply satisfying kiss, she knew that Jade had given her his three little words engraved in print to show her those words were engraved in his heart…forever.

Below is an excerpt ofTate’s story, soon to be published and as yet untitled

THE VISIONS POURED OVER ME like storms rising up out on the ocean.  The roiled sea lay far in the distance at first, utterly quiet.  Then, there would be a trickling, a loosening of my control until, with an inevitability I could feel, the waves rolled toward me until they engulfed me.  I could see everything, feel everything.  I would feel afraid.  Then the waves subsided and brought me Tate, what he was doing, what he was feeling.  I saw him wherever he was, a movie unreeling inside my head.

When I was four, I stood at mother’s bedside, wishing desperately she would get well, but because of that terrible sixth sense I didn’t realize I had, I knew she would leave me soon.  One afternoon as she lay there looking at me, her red hair darkened with her illness, the color washed out of her face, she took hold of my hand.  “I’m so sorry,” she said.  “I’m so sorry I have to leave you.  There’s something you must know.  Don’t tell.  Don’t ever tell anyone about…seeing things.”

“What do you mean, Mama?”  I gripped her hand, wanting to keep her with me.  It hurt to look at her face.  I could see the pain there.

“Your visions will be both a boon and a bane to you.”

“I don’t know what those words mean.”

“They mean that, like everything in the world, this thing that you are blessed with can be both good and bad.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.  When your heart loves, you will.”

Mama died three days after that. 

When I was five, the visions began.  I thought I felt dizzy because I ate too many chocolate covered peanuts.  But after I started going to kindergarten and became best friends with Tate, I sat at my kitchen table one Saturday, and a picture flashed into my head. I could see Tate sitting at his kitchen table.  His sadness permeated through me like I was swimming in a too-cold pond.  I could see his father looking down at him, and I could feel his father’s sadness, too.  He was telling Tate that his mother was going to live in the city and she wasn’t coming back.  At first I thought it was because my mother died when I was four that I understood Tate’s feelings.  But when Tate sat there holding back the tears, and I could feel them gather behind my own eyes, I knew it was more than that. 

I don’t know how much longer it was before I saw in my mind Tate walking on the path that led to my house.  His dad’s ranch was next to ours.  He had a stick in his hand and he was swiping at the goldenrods that grew beside the trail, whacking their heads off as if he was really mad at them for growing there.  Whack, whack.  Then I saw him throw the stick down and come running pell-mell over the rest of the path toward my house. 

He banged at my door and, with a heart that pounded in rhythm with those bangs, I went and let him in.  He had this kind of mad look on his face, but he didn’t sound mad when he said, “I came to see you because I…just because.  I knew you’d be here.”

Even with his blond hair mussed and his face wreathed in sadness, Tate was beautiful.  I wanted to hug him, but he didn’t look like he wanted a hug.  So I offered him the only other antidote I had. “Do you want some ice cream?  It’s mint chocolate chip.”

Tate nodded solemnly.  I had on my ever present overalls, so it was no problem for me to pull a chair over so I could stand on it to reach the cupboard where the bowls were.  There were four bowls there, two aqua and two orange.  I took down the one that wasn’t chipped.  That one was for Tate.  “Do you want to get the ice cream out of the freezer?”

Tate nodded.  He brought the ice cream box over to me.  I sorted through the drawer of tangled silverware and picked out two spoons, the ones that had the least black on them.

When we were seated on the floor in the living room, our backs against the threadbare couch, and our ice cream bowls in our laps, Tate said, “My mother’s gone.”

“I know.

Thanks go to the printers who answered endless question: Charles Edwards of Edward Press in Rochester, NY, Larry and Norma Jean Ellis of Cornerstone Printing in Rochester, NY, Avis Hair, the author’s cousin and Linotype operator for the
Ayrshire Chronicle
, and Bob Marcum, Linotype operator and printer for the
Appeal Tribune
in Silverton, Oregon. 

This book was originally dedicated to Georgia and Susan, with love.

Special thanks go to Patricia Smith who encouraged me to write this book.

The author thanks you for reading her book and hopes you will take the time to write a review. 

Books available by Shirley Larson both in Kindle and at Amazon.com

In The Cameron Family Saga

The Man Who Would Be Dad

Wooing Justin

Winning Alex

A Cowboy For Lynne

The Medieval Knight
(a time-travel romance)

That Wild Stallion

A Cowboy is Forever

The Summer of Jamie’s Secret

Smokin’ Hot Cowboy

Branded by Passion

Historical romance

Deception at Midnight

Forbidden Love, Forever Love

If you wish you can write to the author at [email protected]  You can also like her page on Facebook.

About the author:

Shirley Larson (also known as Shirley Hart) read her first romance several years ago.  She fell in love with the romance genre.  Now she has written over thirty romances.  She loves every minute of spinning her tales of romance (well, almost every minute) and she hopes her readers enjoy reading them as much as she enjoys writing them