The Bride Wore Blue by Cindy Gerard

smoky indigo, like a shimmering midnight sky as he held her gaze, mesmerizing, tantalizing, promising things she yearned to believe in, offering things she dared not indulge in.
    He was so close she could see the pulse beat at his throat, steady, strong, vital. He was so tempting, as the warmth of his callused hand caressed her face and he lowered his head to hers, that she couldn’t make herself pull away.
    She wanted more than life to give in to it all, to the pleasure he promised, to the safe harbor she’d been seeking her entire life. She tipped her head to the sheltering warmth of his palm, closed her eyes in anticipation of his kiss, then bolted like a deer in the sights of a hunter when lightning sizzled across the sky and a crack of thunder burst into the silence like a rifle shot of warning.
    Her eyes snapped open in tandem with a heartbeat that leaped to her throat. She shot off the sofa, eyes wide and wary, arms wrapped protectively around her waist. She swallowed hard, working, working at catching her breath, working, working at regaining her equilibrium.
    This couldn’t happen. She couldn’t let it. She didn’t need it. She couldn’t give in to the wants his kisses fostered. Couldn’t expose herself to that kind of dependence again.
    With a darting glance that she prayed wasn’t as wild as the rapid-fire beat of her heart, she turned away from him. Without a word to explain her action, she hurried to her bedroom, shooed a disgruntled Hershey out of her bed and shut the door soundly behind her.
    Hours passed before she slept. Hours of restless yearning that argued with common sense and made a shambles of her resolve. She lay in the dark and prayed he wouldn’t come to her door. Then she’d pray that he would. That he’d taken the responsibility out of her hands by taking her, without asking, without hesitation.
    Shamed, she buried her face in the pillow and hated herself for nearly succumbing again to the weakness that Rolfe had always used against her and that she seemed unable to control.
    All she’d ever wanted was for someone to love her. It didn’t seem so much to ask that someone felt a need toprotect her, to care for her. To drive away the inner voices that had jeered and sneered at her since she was a child, ravaging her sense of self-worth, convincing her she wasn’t worth the effort. At a very early age, experience had shown her she wasn’t worth loving, wasn’t worth cherishing, wasn’t worth anything as a person. Only as a personality. Only as an object.
    Blue Hazzard made her want to stand up to those voices that had taunted her forever. Blue Hazzard made her want to discount that her own mother hadn’t wanted her. That a series of well-intentioned foster parents hadn’t cared enough about her to make their arrangement permanent. He made her want to forget that Rolfe Sebastion, the man she’d thought loved her for what she was, had only been in love with her face and her body and the manipulative pleasure and profit he could gain from both.
    She rarely gave in to the pain. Rarely let herself indulge in the selfishness of self-pity. Tonight she had no choice. It overwhelmed her like the storm. It surrounded her like the darkness. And only her fear of yet another rejection kept her from running straight to the man who could, for tonight at least, subdue and slay the beast that prowled so close to the edge of her northwoods sanctuary.

Five
    T he storm had blown itself out by morning. J.D. awoke to sunshine on his face, the orange red embers of last night’s fire in the grate and Hershey crowding him off the sofa. Though Maggie was at the center of his thoughts, she was nowhere in sight.
    Last night she’d been a bewitching assemblage of soft, wistful sighs and slow, tentative gazes underscored by sexual awareness and faraway looks containing sadness and pain.
    He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared hard at the ceiling. Something was very wrong in her life. He was convinced of