Kiss the Bride (32 page)

Fear spun her head. Her heart slammed her blood through her veins as rapidly as a six-piston pump.

“This bastard’s crazy!” The driver accelerated. “Hang on, I’m gonna cut across the freeway, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

The van swerved dramatically. Car horns blared. Tires squealed. Delaney shrieked before the van ever slammed the concrete median separating the southbound lane from the northbound lane.

The impact jarred her teeth as they bumped over the barrier. Her heart stilled suddenly and her chest felt tense and cold. She was going to die like this. Handcuffed.
Wearing an outrageously overpriced wedding dress that she’d chosen for her wedding to a man she didn’t love in the right way, while she secretly longed for another man. A different man.

Her heart stirred restlessly. The very man who was risking his life to come after her. Closing her eyes, she prayed Nick would have sense enough not to follow them over the median.

“He’s still coming after us.”

No, Nick, no,
she thought, but could not contain her elation. He was coming after her. No concrete median or big-city traffic was going to stop her brave, daring cop.

“Holy shit!”

“What, what?” Delaney’s eyes flew open. She struggled toward the back window again, desperate to see what was happening. An eighteen-wheeler’s horn blared. Brakes screamed.

“Your boyfriend in the red pickup… holy shit…”

“What is it, what is it?” she cried.

But the loud noise of metal smacking metal said it all.

“He just wiped out.”

A
fter an SUV sideswiped his bumper, Nick battled physics to keep the pickup truck on the road. He squeezed the steering wheel in a death grip and his right leg quivered from the adrenaline rush and quick tromping from the brake to the gas pedal.

Cars swerved, drivers flipped him off. He spied a couple of people with shocked expressions on their faces, grabbing their cell phones, no doubt phoning 911.

Good. He could use all the help he could get.

In the meantime, he was hell-bent on catching up with the bastard in the white van who’d taken off with Delaney before the vehicle disappeared from Nick’s sight. His heart was willing; his pickup truck, however, was made of weaker stuff. The tires shimmied as he turned on his blinker and guided the clattering vehicle into the middle lane. His muffler had been knocked loose in the impact, but he had no time to worry about it.

Delaney needed him.

His pulse pumped hard and fast. Who had taken her hostage and why?

Why? Well, her father was one of the richest men in Houston. That was motive enough.

Nick’s cop mind wasn’t buying it. The kidnapping was too much of a coincidence, what with Delaney already hiring her own abductor. There had to be another connection, something important that he was missing.

But he couldn’t think. His emotions were strangling him, pushing him forward, stamping out caution and common sense. He was ready to fight. To battle anyone who got in his way. He was getting Delaney back.

He tromped on the accelerator, anxious to close the widening gap between him and the white van. In the distance, he heard the sound of sirens. He didn’t slow down. Nothing was going to keep him from his woman.

His woman?

What the hell was that?

Nick’s chest tightened. Okay, he was ready to admit it. He felt possessive of Delaney.

Up ahead, the van took the exit ramp. Nick tried to coax more power from the pickup, pushing the gas pedal to the floor, but nothing doing. The engine rumbled ominously. Nick swore.

He changed lanes, swerving around a slow-moving Caddy, and followed the van off the freeway.

There was a traffic signal up ahead turning from yellow to red. The van never slowed, just sailed right through the intersection, accompanied by a cacophony of honking horns.

“Dammit, Delaney,” he muttered, cursing because he knew no other way to deal with the intensity of his feelings. “Hang in there, babe, I’m coming, I’m coming.”

But just as he declared it, the pickup sputtered and died right in the middle of the crossroads.

Honey made James Robert take her home before she would tell him the truth. But even once they were there, she realized it was the hardest thing she would ever have to admit. She had no idea how to explain to her husband that the woman he’d been sleeping beside for thirty-four years had never really existed. That she’d been living a lie, that their marriage was a sham.

They’d sent the maid home and turned off the ringer on the phone. The neon numbers on the answering machine blinked wildly. Twenty-seven messages. Everyone wanting to know what had happened to Delaney. Honey wondered if any of the calls were from Evan, but she didn’t have the energy to think about him. She had enough problems on her hands. Evan and the Van Zandts would just have to wait.

James Robert sat on the leather sofa in the living room while Honey paced in front of him, still wearing her stiff, uncomfortable mother-of-the-bride dress and high heels.
Tap, tap, tap,
went her shoes as she moved back and forth, top teeth sunk into her bottom lip as she tried to decide how to begin.

“Just tell me,” James Robert said. “Why are you being blackmailed?”

Honey cleared her throat and glanced over at him. He looked at her with haunted eyes, pleading for her to deny everything. But her past had finally caught up with her. It was time for the truth. He deserved the truth. Even if afterward he told her he wanted a divorce. That he never wanted to see her again.

Her heart cleaved. This was a mess of her own making and she knew it. The rubber had smacked up against the road. Time for the truth.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she said at last.

James Robert blinked. “I don’t get it.”

“I’m not Honey Montgomery.”

“What are you talking about?”

Fear of losing everything in the world she loved cemented her throat. She shook her head. “I… I…”

“If you’re not Honey Montgomery, who are you?”

She took a deep breath and spoke the name she hadn’t said aloud in over thirty years. “My real name is Fayrene Doggett.”

“I don’t understand. How? Why?”

Honey sat down across from him, hands clasped in her lap, shoulders razor-straight the way she’d taught herself to sit. She wanted to duck her head to look away, but that wasn’t her style. She might be a liar and a fraud, but she wasn’t a coward.

James Robert’s eyes searched hers. He looked bewildered, confused, but not judgmental or angry. That would change. When he learned how she had deceived him, discovered who she really was deep inside.

“Let me get this straight. You’re not in the social registry? You’re not a Philadelphia blue blood?”

“No.”

He didn’t say a word—just studied her intently, as if she were some alien pod person who’d kidnapped his wife. In a way, she was. Honey wished he’d yell at her or curse or slam his fist into the expensive coffee table imported from Germany. But he did not.

The lie, her admission, his shock, her betrayal, cohered into a thick, dark wall of emotion and tension, vibrated the bleak air between them.

Honey spied the slightest quiver in his hands and her own body quaked in response.

The long moment of silence stretched between them. Sweat beaded on Honey’s upper lip in spite of the air-conditioning cooling their vast home to a balmy seventy-five degrees. She noticed how the lines around her husband’s eyes had deepened with the years. How the loss of their daughter had etched pain into his face. She wanted to reach out to stroke his cheek, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t deserve to touch him. Not after what she’d done.

“Well?” James Robert prompted. “Just who the fuck are you, Fayrene Doggett?”

His rough language made her cringe, but she reveled in it. Ah, there it was. The anger. The emotion that meant he still cared, that he hadn’t given up on her completely. “I was born the daughter of carnival workers,” she began, and it hurt so much to say those words she thought her lips must have cracked.

“Carnies?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

James Robert snorted and dragged a palm down his face. “That explains your violent hatred of carnivals. I always wondered about it.”

His response seemed so incongruous to Honey that she almost laughed. Except nothing was funny.

“So how did you get from there to here?” he asked, anger growing in his eyes. A chill chased over her, raised goose bumps on her arms.

“We moved in caravans from town to town. It was a rough life. My parents were essentially grifters, con artists. I was forced to pickpocket and beg for money. From the time I was very small, I dreamed of a better world. I would cut pictures from magazines and paste them in a scrapbook. I promised myself one day I would escape. I would become a great lady. I would live in a beautiful
house and have a loving family and lots and lots of money. Everything would be perfect and then I could finally be happy,” she said.

Tears pressed at the back of her eyelids, but she blinked them back. After so many years of disciplined self-control, she had no idea how to just let them fall. How to show her vulnerability to the man she loved more than life, but had never been able to share her true self with.

Her mind scalded with the thought of all she’d hidden from him. She felt strangled, weighted down, burdened by her lies. A great hopelessness washed over her. How could she ever expect him to forgive her? How could she ever forgive herself for cheating them of the closeness they could have had?

But if he’d known you were from carny stock, you’d never have had a chance with him at all.

Her husband stared at her, unmoving, hands clenched atop his thighs. She could see him processing what she had told him, trying to understand. But he could never really understand. His life had been blessed from the beginning. Charmed. James Robert had no idea what it took to crawl up from the gutter.

Nervously, she cleared her throat. This was a good sign, right? That he was even hearing her out. That he hadn’t already thrown her from the house?

“I never even finished high school,” Honey admitted. “My parents never stayed in one place long enough. But wherever we went, I found the local library and I read and read and read. Reading was my escape from reality. The safe haven I ran to when things got ugly. I took the GED when I turned seventeen and scored one hundred percent on the test.”

Her hands trembled. She was afraid to look him in the
eyes, but she couldn’t stand not knowing what was in his eyes. The look on James Robert’s face was empty, unmoving. Honey’s soul ached. He hadn’t thrown her out yet, but the potential was there.

“My father had a heart attack that same year.” She smoothed her fingers over the skirt of her dress, ironing out wrinkles that weren’t there. “We were in Philadelphia then and my mother couldn’t handle it. Her drinking spiraled, she started dating a really rough character and dabbled with drugs. They fought all the time.” Honey swallowed. She had blocked the details from her mind so long ago. It was difficult to call them up again. “It was ugly. I tried to get my mother to leave him, but she was too deep into alcoholism to drag herself out, and I was terrified her boyfriend was going to turn his violent temper on me if I stayed. So I ran away.”

Guilt and shame suffused her as the truth spilled out of her. She told him all the things she should have told him years and years ago. She talked and talked and talked and when she was done, she sank back against her expensive leather couch, drained and exhausted.

She peeked over at James Robert, who hadn’t moved a muscle during her recitation. She wanted him to take her in his arms, kiss her gently, and tell her it was all right. The past was over, and he loved her no matter who she was. But she couldn’t hope for that. She didn’t deserve his forgiveness.

“I’m sorry you suffered,” James Robert said, but his tone was devoid of emotion. He sounded flat, dead inside.

Honey lifted her chin. Always the fighter, always the survivor. Never give up, never surrender. He didn’t ask her what happened next, but she told him anyway. “I survived. I went to a homeless shelter and they got me a job as a
live-in companion taking care of a wealthy elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, who’d been a recluse for years.”

“Abigail Montgomery,” James Robert said.

“Yes. She had no immediate family left. Her only child, a daughter named Honey, had died years before in a skiing accident in the Alps.”

“So when did you decide to assume the daughter’s identity?” He spit out the words. His jaw muscles clenched tight.

“It was never a conscious decision. She’d call me by her daughter’s name and when I tried to correct her, she’d get upset. It was easier to humor her and let her call me Honey. In the beginning Abigail had her days where she was more lucid than others, and even when she wasn’t lucid about the present, she still remembered her debutante days. She taught me the ways of high society. How to speak. How to act. Proper etiquette. The right way to do things. She was lonely and enjoyed my company.”

Honey stared off into the distance, remembering who she used to be and the path she’d taken to become who she was now. “As Abigail’s condition worsened, she started calling me Honey all the time. She’d kept her daughter’s clothes and gave them to me to wear. It was easy to pretend I was her daughter, who’d been living abroad for some years and had returned home to care for my ailing mother. It took little effort to fool the boy who delivered the groceries or the mailman or the local pharmacist. Remember, by this time, I was walking the walk and talking the talk of a woman raised in the lap of luxury.”