Wed by Wednesday (Passion in Paradise #4.5)

  Wed by Wednesday

  by Sarah O’Rourke

  Wed by Wednesday by Sarah O’Rourke

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah O’Rourke

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication or cover design artwork may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods in current use or to be developed in the future, without the prior express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law (US. Copyright Act of 1976).

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious, and are the sole property of Sarah O’Rourke. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any real setting, person, or situation is used in a fictitious manner with literary license.

  This work of fiction is intended for mature audiences.

  If you steal our work, we’ll sic our Mommas on you. Crazy One’s Momma will hunt you down and make you pay in blood. Crazy Two’s Momma will pray “for” your eternal soul (which is obviously in great peril if you resorted to stealing some poor little indie author’s romance story...really??? Really???) And trust us...you won’t win when she goes to the Almighty. And if that doesn’t scare you, please be advised that we have an attorney on retainer who will sue you to Kingdom Come. Don’t risk it. This is us, being there for you.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Playlist for Wed by Wednesday

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter One

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Two

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Three

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Four

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Five

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Six

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Seven

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Eight

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Nine

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Ten

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Eleven

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Twelve

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Thirteen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Fourteen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Fifteen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Sixteen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Seventeen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Eighteen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Nineteen

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Twenty

  Cain’s Salvation - Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  As always, both Crazy One and Crazy Two (the two crazies who make up Sarah O’Rourke) want to thank our wonderful husbands. They have put up with late nights, interrupted sleep when our characters were begging to chat, crazy schedules, meltdowns, and screeches when our characters were being stubborn and refusing to talk. They have held our hands, force-fed us chocolate, and kept our straightjackets at the ready. Just like Orla, we hope we have fifty years or more with our men, too. And our little darlings are pretty special, too.

  Thank you to all of our fabulous friends in the blogging world who have always been so gracious to share about our books. We appreciate you very much!

  We have the absolute best Beta Team! Thank you, Mila, Jane, and Danielle for all of your comments and ideas along the way.

  Thank you, Crazy Crew! Our street team is amazing, and we appreciate each and every one of you! And our admin in the Crazy Crew, Shay Lich, is the best thing that ever happened to us!

  And...thank you to Crazy One’s Momma, who keeps us on track with edits. Momma is amazing. Momma is our hero.

  Without the WordSprint Sisters (Mayra Statham, Brynne Asher, Layla Frost, Sarah Curstis, Winter Travers, and CA Harms...and if we missed anybody, we’re sooooo sorry!) this book would have never gotten finished. Their support and encouragement was just what we needed at the right moment to make it happen!

  Dedication

  Dedicated to our grandparents...who must have had some fun between the sheets in order to create our parents. But let’s not dwell on that fact too long, ‘kay? That’s our sweet little old grandparents we’re thinking about, people!

  Playlist for Wed by Wednesday

  I Met a Girl by William Michael Morgan

  Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland

  Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered by Frank Sinatra

  Crazy by Patsy Cline

  Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash

  I Fall to Pieces by Patsy Cline

  Are You Lonesome Tonight by Elvis Presley

  I Can't Stop Loving You by Ray Charles

  It's Now or Never by Elvis Presley

  Be My Baby by The Ronettes

  How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You by Marvin Gaye

  Die A Happy Man by Thomas Rhett

  Chapter One

  Present Day

  Orla

  Looking around at the sea of excited faces surrounding her, all of them gathered to celebrate her youngest niece’s long-awaited wedding, Orla McKinnon never imagined that this is what life would look like for herself. Even during some of the wild fantasies she’d concocted while she’d been an orphan growing up in a state home in Atlanta, she never ever believed she’d ever be this happy, this well-satisfied with the way things had turned out for herself. From a girl without a family of her own to a woman that had everything a human heart could ever need or desire, Orla knew she’d been one of the lucky few that had made it out of that orphanage and escaped poverty to make a success of her life.

  Back then, though, nobody could have made her believe that there was something better waiting just around the corner.

  In fact, if somebody had asked her to predict the future back when she’d been a fresh-faced young girl of just twenty years old, stepping off of a crowded bus into a strange town, with only the vaguest promise of marriage written by her would-be bridegroom in a wrinkled letter that she’d held clutched in her hand, she’d probably have bet her last nickel that she’d be dead by the time middle-age hit too awfully hard. Judging by the worn faces of the folks she had seen milling around the bus depot that day, she most assuredly would have surmised that demise would have come a whole lot sooner than her current seventy-five years. Orla certainly never imagined it possible that she’d be sitting here today beside her husband of over fifty years, watching as the last of their four quasi-daughters celebrated her own nuptials.

  “I can hear you thinking over there, Orla Jane Pearson McKinnon,” a voice she was very well acquainted with drawled dryly from her right, the chair creaking beside her as the man seated there shifted around to get more comfortable. “You know, even after just over half a century of holy matrimony, it still scares the stuffing out of me when you go all quiet and still-like. It’s enough to give an old man the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Is that so, Farmer Man?”

  “Sends a shiver from my tip to toe, Tidbit,” the elderly man seated beside her said as he stared at her with his familiar twinkling blue eyes and a faint smile on his wrinkled, worn face.

  Hearing the pet name that he’d been calling her for the last fifty or so years, a whole different kind of shiver ran through Orla’s body. Even in his l
ate eighties, her husband could still crank her engine on a regular basis. It was a fact that constantly horrified their four nieces, but she’d never – even when they’d been young, new and unsure of each other – been able to deny the chemistry between her and her husband. True, these days it took a little blue pill to jumpstart his aging motor, but once he got warmed up under the hood, her old man could still ride all night and make her motor purr, she thought with a small smirk of satisfaction.

  “You keep smilin’ like that, and you and me are gonna have to go find us an empty corner and talk about the first thing that comes up between us,” Jethro McKinnon chided her with dancing eyes as he lifted a hand to stroke his fingers against his wife’s aging cheek.

  “You, sir, are a nasty old man, and I’ll thank you to keep those improper thoughts to yourself,” she informed him sternly, though her sparkling eyes belied her sour tone.

  “Ha! Orla Jane, you’ve loved every single dirty thing this nasty old man has ever thought up and done to you, and you know it,” Jethro countered with a wicked smile and a wink.

  There was no denying that, Orla thought with a silent chuckle. Wisely, she chose to remain quiet rather than feed the old codger’s ego.

  “Now, are you gonna tell me what you were thinkin’ so all-fired hard about or are we gonna go take a leisurely stroll outside where I’d be happy to take the time to coax those secret thoughts right on out of you. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with that, Orla,” he remarked, a low warning note in his words.

  Nope, he surely hadn’t, she thought with a smile as she remembered all the times her big bully of a brute had backed her into a corner or against a wall or into a horse stall, and then gone about convincing her to share her thoughts with him. Even now she felt her cheeks flush as she remembered the heat they could generate while he was ‘coaxing’ her into sharing – often, right out here in this very barn where Honor had just minutes ago gotten hitched to her lawman.

  “I was just ruminatin’ on how we got here, Jethro,” Orla answered truthfully with a gentle smile.

  “How we got here?” Jethro frowned. “Well, we opened our front door, walked down the porch steps, cut across the yard and moseyed right through that there barn door,” he replied, waving a hand toward the opened wooden barn doors. “It ain’t ‘xactly rocket science, Tidbit. You fall and hit your head while I was out takin’ my walk along the fence line this mornin’ and not tell me?”

  Orla rolled her eyes at her irascible husband’s question. “My head’s just fine, you old coot. A fall couldn’t crack this hard noggin of mine, anyway,” she informed him pertly. “What I meant was I was thinking on how we got to this place in our life together, Farmer Man. Honestly, when you drove me up the lane to our house over fifty years ago, did you ever think that this would be how things turned out for us?” she asked as she looked around the barn at their huge, boisterously happy family.

  Jethro chuckled. “You mean the day I saw an angel sent from Heaven staring at me across the seat of my old pickup truck?”

  “Angel from Heaven?” Orla scoffed. “I surely don’t remember you calling me that on that long ago afternoon, you old fool. In fact, I’m pretty sure that you thought I’d been sent from the opposite direction.”

  “I was young,” Jethro said dismissively, as if that justified everything.

  “You weren’t that young,” Orla countered with a sniff, her hazel eyes narrowing on the man she’d loved for over three quarters of her life.

  “Maybe not,” he admitted, his lips twitching as he fought a smile. “But I was that stupid,” he added on a low rumble. “Besides, my foolishness didn’t last all that long, and while I might not have been exactly happy to see you tromping your way into my life, we both know it didn’t take you very long to get me hot and bothered.”

  “That’s true,” Orla admitted with a grin. “Of course, that wasn’t very hard to do at all, considering I was seriously debating setting you on fire with your own matches.”

  And as she felt Jethro slide his arm around her shoulders and pull her against his chest, his laughter ringing in her ears, Orla recalled just how she’d managed to tame the redneck ruffian that had been Jethro Ellison McKinnon.

  Chapter Two

  December, 1965

  Orla

  Shooting the grouchy looking bus driver sitting behind the wheel in his disheveled uniform a contrite smile as she grabbed the silver handrail and disembarked from the smelly interior of the Blanton Bus line, she apologized again as the sour smell of her earlier sickness still hung heavily in the air. “Again, I’m just so sorry, sir. I never once imagined I’d be ill for the entire ride here. If I had…”

  “Please, lady,” the harried man interrupted, “I’m already a whole day behind schedule because I had to stop at every gas station between here to Atlanta. As it stands, I have no idea if I’ll even have a job tomorrow. So, could you kindly just grab your gear and go? I’d truly appreciate it,” the out-of-sorts driver beseeched her in a tone approaching a whine from behind the big wheel he’d been steering for the past couple of hundred miles.

  Guilt swamped her as she heard the worried irritation in the driver’s voice and she nodded promptly. Hurrying down the remaining steps with her scuffed black suitcases held tightly in her hands, Orla jumped, barely clearing the last step off the bus as the driver swiftly swung the sliding glass door closed behind her. Desperately trying to ignore the not-so-muffled sound of grateful applause from the remaining passengers aboard the bus, she straightened her spine and lifted her chin. Bracing herself against the chilly wind as she shifted one of her bags under her arm to tighten the belt of her thin sweater around her waist, she sighed heavily and reminded herself that she couldn’t blame her fellow passengers for their happiness at her departure. Being forced to inhale the stench of someone else’s illness for hours couldn’t be a pleasant way to travel, but honestly, it hadn’t really been all her fault. Had it really been necessary for their driver to take every curve on two wheels? She’d paid for a ticket for a bus ride, not a race. In retrospect, however, perhaps she shouldn’t have indulged in that greasy breakfast of sausage and eggs this morning before a several hours’ long journey.

  Pressing a hand to her flat belly as it lurched again, she bit her lip as she looked down at the rumpled skirt of her floral print dress. She’d looked so neat and tidy when the bus had pulled away from the station earlier this morning. Now, she was sure she looked like a wrinkled, wrung-out mess, and that just would not do. She couldn’t meet the man she was supposed to marry for the first time looking like something out of a scary horror picture! Chewing her lower lip, she looked around the small station for a sign for a public restroom. Seeing nothing, she headed toward the ticket window, shivering as the cold December wind cut through her. Why hadn’t she expected the mountains to be this cold? “Sir,” she called to the man behind the window, tapping her knuckle against the glass to get his attention as her teeth chattered. “C-could you please direct me to the nearest restroom?”

  “Across the street inside the diner,” the man called back through the window without looking up from the book he was reading.

  Between the howling wind and the thick glass, his voice was barely audible and Orla strained to hear him. “What?” she yelled back, cupping a hand over her ear as she pressed it to the window.

  Looking up, the man behind the window scowled at her. “I said, it’s across the street inside the diner! But, you’ll have to order a coffee or Coca Cola or something. Nellie Winslow don’t hand out no freebies to strangers.”

  Smiling tightly at the grouchy man, Orla nodded and turned to gaze across the street at the restaurant the man had mentioned. It appeared to be situated between the bank and a barber shop, but both were closed since it was already late on Monday afternoon. Squinting, she could see only a few people sitting and eating inside the diner through the window at the front of the building. Quickly tallying the remaining funds she carried inside her pocketbook, she
adjusted the shoulder strap of her secondhand black patent leather handbag. Luckily, money wasn’t a huge problem since she’d been saving every cent she could get her hands on since she started waitressing at fourteen years old. Unlike many young girls her age that spent their wages frivolously, she had a good chunk of savings, and thankfully, her future husband had purchased her bus ticket to Paradise for her so she hadn’t had to dip into her funds at all. Even so, however, she knew she couldn’t afford to be loose with her hard earned savings.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to do silly things like all the other girls her age had done, but life had taught her early on that anything could happen unexpectedly at any time and wipe out the little safety net she had for herself. Losing her parents at twelve years old had clearly demonstrated that a happy home with a warm bed and clean, well-fitting clothes wasn’t a guarantee in life. So, from the time she was old enough to understand the value of a dollar, she began squirreling away every cent she got her hands on – just in case things took another turn for the uglier side of life again.

  Being frugal, however, didn’t mean she needed to starve, she reminded herself firmly. A quick bite to eat might be just what she needed to settle her nervous tummy. It would also give her a few minutes to untangle her frayed nerves before she figured out a way to get to the home of her betrothed. If she was lucky, she might even be able to gather a little more information about the man she was supposed to marry from some of the town locals eating inside the diner.

  Tucking her hair behind her ears before reaching for the handle of her bag, Orla quickly crossed the deserted street, silently noting the paved road had quickly emptied after the bus had unloaded. Pushing open the glass door to the simple restaurant a few seconds later, she winced as the bell above her loudly announced her arrival. Flushing as she felt multiple sets of eyeballs swing her direction, she again forced a bright smile to her lips as she headed toward an empty booth. She was a brave, independent woman, by goodness, and she could sit through a meal on her own, she silently told herself. Sitting down, she saw an older woman with steely gray hair and a flat no nonsense expression on her face come around the counter toward her table. Even though the waitress was wearing a faded blue uniform that looked like it had seen better days, Orla was relieved to see that while the lady initially looked hostile, she had soft, kind eyes and a polite, albeit tired, smile on her face.