Texas! Lucky (35 page)

"He looks completely shattered, Lucky. Will he be all right?"

Lucky glanced at Devon, who had been standing quietly at his side. "I doubt it. But there's not a damn thing I can do about it."

"Nothing you're not already doing. I'm sure it's a comfort to him just knowing that he's got your support."

"Maybe. I hope so. He needs to find comfort where he can."

Hungry for the sight of her, he unapologetically stared. Her hair looked a darker, deeper shade of auburn against her black dress and pale face. In the cold glare of fluorescent lighting, her eyes appeared exceptionally green. They were bright with tears.

"It was good of you to come, Devon," he said thickly.

"I wanted to."

"How did you know where to find us?"

"I went to the house first. Sage said that I had just missed you, and that you and Chase were on your way here."

He nodded toward the bank of elevators. "Since Chase took the car, can I bum a ride home?"

"Of course."

They boarded the next available elevator and rode it down in silence. Lucky couldn't take his eyes off her. It seemed like a million years since he'd held her, made fervent love to her, yet it had been only yesterday.

Yesterday. Twenty-four hours. In that amount of time lives had been irrevocably altered, dreams shattered, loves lost. Life was tenuous.

He came to a sudden stop on the plant-lined path that wound through a courtyard connecting the hospital complex with the parking lot.

"Devon." He took her shoulders between his hands and turned her to face him. "I'm going to fight whatever or whoever I must to be with you for the rest of my life, even if it means fighting you first. Life's too damn short and too precious to waste a single day on misery and unhappiness.

"Listen to me. I love you," he vowed, his hands tensing, gripping her tighter. To his consternation, his surging emotions manifested themselves in tears again. Grief over losing Tanya, pain for his brother's suffering, sadness over the Tyler heir who would never know life, love for Devon, all overwhelmed him. He couldn't breathe for the tightness surrounding his swelling heart.

She sighed when she saw his distress, then placed her arms around his waist and laid her head on his chest. "I need you," she whispered earnestly. "I love you."

They came together in a fierce embrace. And after they kissed, they wept.

Epilogue

L
ucky entered the house by the front door.

"Hello? Anybody home?" He received no answer. His mother was out. Sage was only home on holidays and an occasional weekend, since she was now in Austin at the university. But Devon's red compact was in the driveway, so she should be at home.

Then he heard the familiar click-clack of her word-processor keyboard. Smiling, he followed the sound past the stairway to the rear of the house. Laurie's sewing room had been converted into an office for Devon. The conversion had taken place while Lucky and she were away on their honeymoon; Laurie had surprised them with it upon their return.

"I can't sew much anymore because of my arthritis," Laurie had told Devon when she protested the generosity. "The space was being wasted."

Over the last several months Devon had made it her room, filling it with periodicals and books, both fiction and nonfiction, which she used for reference material or pure reading pleasure. Sage's contribution had been a wall calendar featuring a seminude hunk-a-month. When Lucky had threatened to take down "the perverted eyesore", Devon had launched into a tirade decrying the double standards and Sage had threatened to cut off his hand if he tried.

The tragedy of Tanya's death, and Sage's impending move to Austin, had precluded Lucky from even suggesting that Devon and he make their home elsewhere. Following their quiet, private wedding, they moved into the large house with Laurie. Lucky was pleased with the arrangement and, apparently, so was Devon.

The three women in his life got along very well. Devon loved having a younger sister, and Laurie showered on Devon the warmth and affection that her inattentive mother never had.

Lucky knocked on the door to the office, but when he got no answer, he pushed the door open anyway. As he had suspected, she was engrossed in the green letters she was typing onto the black terminal monitor.

Headphones bridged her head, blasting her eardrums with music. Her taste was eclectic; she liked everything from Mozart to Madonna. He thought it was nutty, using music to drown out distracting noise, but that was just one of his wife's idiosyncrasies that intrigued him. Her contradictions had attracted him from the beginning.

He waved his hand, so his sudden appearance wouldn't startle her. When she noticed him in her peripheral vision, she turned her head, smiled, and removed the earphones.

"Hi. How long have you been standing there?"

He crossed to her and dropped a kiss on her forehead. "Almost long enough for the rose to wilt." From behind his back he withdrew a single yellow rose. Her eyes lighted up with pleasure as she accepted it and rolled the soft, cool petals over her lips.

"You remembered."

"Six months ago today you became Mrs. Lucky Tyler."

"Only twelve hours after I ceased being Mrs. Greg Shelby."

"Shh! Mother frowns on foul language being spoken in this house."

Lucky didn't have any charitable thoughts toward Devon's first husband. True to his word, the day he learned that Greg Shelby was out on parole, he had driven to Dallas and, following a hunch, located him at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, covertly about to board an international flight. Lucky engaged him in a fistfight. He had even maneuvered it so that Greg threw the first punch. He hadn't inflicted nearly as much physical damage as he could have or wanted to, but the ruckus had alerted airport security. When they were told Shelby was a parolee about to leave the country, the police were notified, thwarting Greg's plans to retire to Switzerland with the illegally obtained fortune he had banked there.

In the resultant confusion Lucky managed to slip away unidentified. He never told anybody that he'd been instrumental in Greg's second arrest, not even Devon, though he would have liked for her to know he had avenged her. He had to be content with the personal satisfaction he'd derived from drawing Shelby's blood.

Now he pulled Devon from her chair, sat down in it himself, then drew her onto his lap. She asked, "Do you think I'm a brazen hussy for getting a quickie annulment one day and marrying another man the next?"

"Shameful," he growled into her neck.

"Stop that. I'm officially still working."

"What's this column about?" He had encouraged her to continue writing for the newspaper, so she had made arrangements with her editor to work outside the office and mail her columns in on a weekly basis. Lucky squinted into the screen, but the green symbols always looked like Greek to him.

"Bereavement."

Her softly spoken answer brought his eyes back to her. "Well, you've certainly got firsthand experience to base your theories on, don't you?"

"Did you see him today?"

Lucky nodded. They were all preoccupied with Chase and his steady emotional decline since Tanya's death. "He put in an appearance at the office this morning."

"And?"

"He was drunk again."

"Eight months, and he hasn't even made a start at healing," Devon remarked sadly as she studied the petals of her rose. "Do you think he'll ever get over it?"

"No," Lucky said candidly. "I think the best we can hope for is that he can learn to cope with his grief and lead a productive life again."

Her sad expression reflected the regard she had come to have for her brother-in-law. Lucky loved that about her, too. She had absorbed all the concerns of his family. Their sorrows and joys had become her own. She took them to heart. Family life, with all its blessings and drawbacks, was new to her, but she had blossomed within that environment.

Often she cried with Laurie over the loss of her first grandchild. Sage confided secrets to Devon that she kept from the rest of the family.

Devon celebrated with him the day he temporarily staved off the bank by scraping together a loan payment and lent moral support because business was still dismal despite the replacement of the equipment they had lost in the fire. Tyler Drilling Company hadn't had any new contracts since the one in Louisiana.

Chase was useless, immobilized by his grief. Lucky had been left with the responsibility of trying to save a sinking ship. Devon's faith that he could do it boosted his confidence when it flagged.

"It's awful for him to be so unhappy, to waste his life like this," she murmured now.

"Awful."

"He's never even been inside that house he had me buy for him. It just stands there empty. He wallows in filth and misery in that apartment he shared with Tanya."

"What can we do to help him?"

"I wish to hell I knew. Criticism and lectures only make him nasty and defensive. Sympathy makes him furious. And he's going to get killed riding those damn bulls. He's too old to rodeo."

"Maybe that's what he wants," Devon said sorrowfully. "To die. Bull riding is just a chancy form of suicide."

"God." Lucky wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled her breasts. "I can understand how devastating it must be for him. If I ever lost you—"

"But you won't."

"I lost you after our first night together. I nearly went berserk until I found you again. And that was only for a week."

She leaned back and gave him a quizzical look. "You nearly went berserk? You never told me that."

In spite of his brother's bereavement and the sorry state of their business, Lucky was still a newlywed, and frequently behaved like a groom. That included teasing his bride.

"There's a lot I haven't told you," he drawled.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Like what?" she asked.

"Like how damn sexy you look when you're wearing your glasses."

She crossed her eyes behind the lenses.

"'Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses.'"

"I make passes at all the girls."

"So I've heard."

He drew her closer and kissed her with increasing fervency, parting her pliant lips with his tongue. The buttons on her blouse were no match for his nimble fingers. As her breasts filled his gently reshaping hands, she reached between his thighs and caressed him. Freeing him from his jeans, she put the petals of the rose to prurient use.

"Thank you for my flower," she purred as she delicately twirled the stem.

"I taught you too well," he hissed, sucking in a quick breath at the tickling sensation.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, I don't think we're going to make it upstairs to the bedroom this time."

Leaving his lap, she lay down on the rug and pulled him down on top of her. Moments later they lay panting together amid hopelessly wrinkled clothing, crushed rose petals, and dewy, naked limbs.

Propping himself up on his elbows, he smiled down at her. "Beats writing all to hell, doesn't it?"

Devon took one of his hands, kissed the palm, and laid it against her throbbing left breast. "Feel that? I love you with every beat of my heart, and I don't know what I would do without you in my life."