“But I was so scared. What if you didn't feel the same way about me? I'd have been shattered.”
“Yet every time I made advances I felt like you couldn't stand me.”
“Clay, I told you that first night that my dad made me come to your house—marriage had to be for love only. Please, let's always be this way, like we are tonight. Let's be good to each other and promise all those things that we never really promised in that trumped-up marriage ceremony.”
Lying naked, with their limbs entwined, secure in each other's love, they sealed those vows at last.
“I promise them, Cat.”
“I do, too, Clay.”
On Christmas morning Melissa woke them up, babbling and thumping her heels on the crib. Clay came awake groggily, stretched and felt bare skin on the other side of the bed. He turned to study the woman who lay on her stomach, sleeping beneath a swirl of blond hair.
He started to creep from bed noiselessly.
“Where you going?” came a voice from under the hair.
“To get Melissa and bring her in with us, okay?”
“Okay, but don't be gone long, huh?”
They came back together, the one in aqua-blue footed pajamas, the other one in nothing. When Catherine rolled over, Clay plopped Melissa down beside her, then got in too.
“Hi, Lissy-girl. Got a kiss for Mommy?”
Melissa leaned over and sucked her mother's chin, her version of a kiss.
Clay watched with a glad expression on his face.
Catherine looked at his tousled blond hair, his smiling gray eyes and asked, “Hi, Clay-boy, got a kiss for Mommy?”
“More than one,” he said, smiling. “This is one child who's going to learn early the value of touching.”
He leaned across the baby then, to give his wife what she wanted.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31