"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
Lucky 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?"