SEALed Forever Read online

  “Don’t be silly.” Bronwyn’s eyes went hot with unshed tears—she was that happy to see JJ. This was the first time they’d been together since Troy’s funeral. They had phoned and emailed, but it was not the same as being able to touch. “I would have come no matter what.”

  And she would have. When Bronwyn’s fiancé died, her parents and brother had sent flowers and called to express their sympathy, but they hadn’t been able to get away on such short notice. JJ was as busy as anyone since she was CEO of a large car dealership, but she had dropped everything to be at Bronwyn’s side.

  JJ had stayed with Bronwyn through the funeral and for several days afterward, putting food in front of her and telling her to eat it. Holding her through the nights.

  “Oh, JJ.” Bronwyn pulled away a little to look her friend full in the face. “You do look beautiful.” She fingered the demure, white georgette with lace inserts on the old-fashioned wedding gown. “This dress is exquisite. Where did it come from? I thought you were going to wear a suit.”

  “You’ve heard me mention Mary Cole Sessoms?” JJ waved over a slender, sixtyish woman in a silvery dress. “Mary Cole, this is Bronwyn Whitescarver, my BFF and my maid of honor.” JJ turned back to Bronwyn.

  “Mary Cole convinced me that I couldn’t let the wedding look furtive—like I was ashamed of marrying a man no one’s ever heard of. I’m not. I’m doing what’s in the best interests of the most people. She wore this dress in 1967 at her own wedding. It’s my ‘something borrowed.’”

  That explained the about-face on the subject of decorating the house as well as the dress, which was exquisite—even though it was not JJ’s taste. It was the first demure thing Bronwyn had ever seen JJ wear. It worked, though. On JJ’s voluptuous curves, the innocent sensuality of a long-sleeved, high-necked dress that covered the arms and the dress’s underlying décolleté with see-through georgette made restraint look regal.

  “You look lovely in it. But my pantsuit…” Bronwyn indicated her gray slacks and jacket, the slacks rain-darkened from the knee down where her raincoat’s protection had ended. “This is all I have to wear.”

  Mary Cole held out a hand. “Come upstairs with me. I’ve brought several of my daughter Pickett’s dresses. She’s petite like you. Now that I look at your beautiful dark red hair and white skin, I think I have the perfect dress for you.”

  Judging by the dress JJ was wearing, Bronwyn doubted it. Large, wide-set eyes the reddish-brown color of fine cognac dominated her face and made people assume she was much younger than her years. But even when one took time to look closely, her straight little nose and sweetly shaped lips that hooked upward at the corners made her look heartbreakingly innocent and benign. She despised being described as waif-like, but with the weight she’d lost in the last several months, her eyes seemed even huger, her pale skin looked even more colorless. The small bones stuck out at her elbows and wrists. The truth was, these days waif-like fit her. If Mary Cole wanted her to wear a dress like JJ’s, she would look about twelve. At least in the gray pantsuit she looked like a grown-up.

  JJ caught her in another quick hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.” She used the hug to put her lips against Bronwyn’s ear. “Trust Mary Cole. You can talk to her,” she whispered. “She knows everything.

  Chapter 2

  It pays to be a winner.

  —SEAL saying

  “You arrived in the nick of time,” Mary Cole said over her shoulder as she led Bronwyn up the stairs. “The best man—he’s a SEAL, too—he’s already given up part of his leave to go home to see his family. He has a plane to catch—being the holiday and all, it was the only flight he could get when he changed his tickets—and we were wondering if we’d have to start the ceremony without you. JJ asked me if I’d fill in, but I’m so pleased you arrived—I know she really wanted you.”

  Mary Cole’s tide of social patter floated Bronwyn up the stairs and into the guest bedroom that had been set up as a changing room, smoothing Bronwyn’s awkwardness at being the last to arrive while gently and skillfully filling her in on all she needed to know.

  “I didn’t expect to need a bridesmaid dress,” she told Mary Cole as soon as the guest room door closed. “Being out of touch for the last forty-eight hours seems to have put me completely out of the loop. What’s the game plan?”

  “I’m sorry you were caught unawares. Blame it on me. I persuaded JJ that her plan to be married with no frills at all was a mistake. People are going to talk about anything she does. She needs to set the stage for them to say what she wants them to. That being the case, there wasn’t time to arrange a big, important wedding, so we’re going for intimate, elegant simplicity. With the emphasis on family, rather than social relationships.”

  “All right. And what is the official story?”

  “JJ and Davy felt an instant attraction when they met a year ago—at my daughter’s wedding—but their careers came between them. When they accidentally met again—this time at my daughter’s best friend’s wedding—they realized their feelings hadn’t changed. Davy’s injury has taught them that life is short. They shouldn’t put off being together any longer.

  “But his mother recently died, and he’s still recovering from his wounds—a great, big weeklong affair with an unending succession of parties isn’t something he’s physically or emotionally up to. They only want to be married in the company of their loved ones.”

  “Wow. That’s really romantic! And touching.” But it didn’t sound like JJ. “Who came up with that?”

  “I did.”

  “From what JJ’s told me about you—what a clear-eyed businesswoman you are and how much she values your opinion—I wouldn’t have figured you for a romantic.”

  Mary Cole accepted the implied compliment with an inclination of her skillfully tinted blonde head. “Mentoring JJ has been incredibly rewarding—she has the right instincts, and she’s had good training. She doesn’t need someone to teach her how to succeed in business. The main help I can offer her is that I see the big picture.”

  “Okay. Just so I don’t get tripped up, who knows the other story?”

  Mary Cole’s eyebrows rose in polite puzzlement. “There is no other story. You are not surprised because you, being JJ’s closest friend, thought all along that they were perfect for each other.”

  Mary Cole’s revisionist history was a little hard to swallow. In point of fact, Bronwyn had advised JJ not to marry anyone and instead to tell her grandfather—the one pushing the marriage—to shove it. “Oh. Then you think she’s doing the right thing—to get married just to save the business?”

  “A mentor guides. She doesn’t choose the path.”

  Having a mentor was one of the few things about JJ that Bronwyn had ever envied. Her own path would have entailed less floundering and fewer costly mistakes if she had had a guide. Bronwyn had become a doctor in spite of all the advice she had received.

  Bronwyn jerked her thoughts from contemplating the difference a mentor, rather than naysayers, could have made for her. She and Mary Cole both had roles to play in supporting JJ, and there was a wedding to get under way. “What do you need me to do?”

  Mary Cole went to the closet. She came back with a slim, empire-waist, evening dress of deep forest-green. “I brought several dresses. Do you want to try them all on, or in the interest of time, will you trust me?”

  “I’ll put myself in your hands.” Bronwyn tossed her raincoat on the bed and began to shuck her suit jacket. “I don’t have much fashion sense. In college, JJ took me in hand, but I’m afraid I have backslid. I wear scrubs at work and jeans the rest of the time.”

  Mary Cole managed to frown in disapproval and keep a pleasant smile going at the same time—a trick Bronwyn would love to master. “A professional woman needs to know how to dress. Times have changed, but women still need every edge to get ahead. I thought JJ told me both your parents were
doctors. Didn’t your mother teach you?”

  “She didn’t have a lot of time. She had a personal shopper who came to the house with preselected clothes for both of us.” Bronwyn had already been on such thin ice with her mother that, rather than demanding the chance to express her own taste, she had accepted whatever the shopper chose. And for a person who had as much trouble fitting in as Bronwyn did, clothes that expressed little individuality were probably for the best.

  Mary Cole forbore to comment on what she obviously thought was parental neglect. (Bronwyn guessed that Mary Cole’s daughters had felt her guiding hand in everything.) Instead, she changed the subject. “JJ tells me you’ve almost finished your residency. When you’re done, do you plan to stay in the Baltimore area?”

  “I don’t know yet. I have a provisional offer from one of the busiest inner-city hospital ERs. The experience I would gain there would look great on my curriculum vitae.”

  “You sound lukewarm.”

  “It gets harder and harder to be enthusiastic. The more successful I am at getting patients in and out in a hurry, the less I’m the kind of doctor I want to be. If I had another way to pay back the money I borrowed to go to med school, I’d quit.”

  Bronwyn unbuttoned her blouse. When she was down to her panties and camisole, she thought of a possible snag. “Am I going to need a bra for that dress?”

  Bronwyn’s small, firm breasts rarely needed a bra, and she certainly didn’t have a strapless one with her.

  “No. The bra is built in.” Mary Cole held out the green dress. She discreetly averted her eyes while Bronwyn pulled the camisole over her head. “Hold up your arms. I’ll drop the dress over your head.”

  The cool silk of the dress slithered over Bronwyn’s torso and legs to the floor. She lifted the skirt. “This is beautiful. Please thank your daughter for letting me borrow it.”

  “I brought this, even though the deep olive green is difficult to wear, because it’s the least formfitting. You’re about the same height as my daughter Pickett but much more slender. She said if you liked it, you could have it. She’s pregnant and doubts if she’ll ever wear it again.”

  Mary Cole moved behind Bronwyn to do up the lacing of the bodice. “I’ve lost trust in medicine as it is commonly practiced, myself.” Expert tugs accompanied the older woman’s words. “My youngest daughter, the one who donated this dress, suffered—she essentially lost her teenage years—because no doctor listened to her or observed her long enough to get down to the cause of her symptoms. She had celiac disease. We spent thousands for tests that all came back negative until—despite the evidence in front of our eyes—even she believed nothing was really wrong, and if she’d just try harder she could be better. Doctors either told me not to worry or implied I caused her problems by expecting too much.”

  “How’s she doing now?”

  Mary Cole’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “I’m the one with the problem now. She says she’s fine, but after ten years of being anxious about her, of feeling like I was failing as a mother but not knowing what to do, I can’t stop worrying about her. I drive her crazy. She tries not to let it show, but I can tell she avoids me.”

  “And now she’s pregnant and you worry even more,” Bronwyn guessed. “That must be hard. I can tell you love her very much.”

  “I do.” Mary Cole’s eyes narrowed as if she was deep in thought. “And I’m beginning to understand what JJ has told me about you. If you could be the doctor you want to be—if you had a way to practice the medicine you want to and pay off your medical school debts, but it meant leaving Baltimore—would that tempt you?”

  Bronwyn’s knees nearly buckled. She rarely told anyone about the hundreds of thousands she owed. People assumed that because both her parents were well-known doctors, her tuition had been taken care of, and explaining that her parents had put her brother, Landreth, through med school but not her took too long and left her needing to explain more of her family dynamics than she cared to reveal in casual conversation.

  JJ knew everything, of course, and she must have told Mary Cole. Bronwyn appreciated Mary Cole’s interest, but trying to act like there was hope, when she had none, exhausted her. “No offense, but I don’t think there is a way. Any practice I join, it will be the same story—”

  “Don’t answer yet!” Mary Cole cut her off. “It’s just an idea, and we don’t have time to go into it now. We’ll talk later.” She stood back and looked Bronwyn up and down. Her eyes widened, and her lips rounded in surprise. “Oh, my.”

  “Can I come in?” JJ stuck her head around the door and caught sight of Bronwyn. She sucked in a breath. “Oh, my.”

  Bronwyn allowed herself to be turned to face the full-length mirror on the closet door. “Oh, my,” she said.

  The dress was one of those deceptively simple affairs, its only ornamentation the diamanté straps. It needed none, however. In some way Bronwyn couldn’t have defined, the dress made her into its ornamentation. Her figure, easily dismissed as unendowed, looked fairy-like, delicately made but in no sense fragile. Her skin gleamed satin-white, yet glowed with rosy warmth within.

  The woman in the mirror in a flowing gown the dark, deep green of magnolia leaves wasn’t her. She crackled with power and authority as if her small stature concentrated all the qualities found in ordinary mortals. Every movement of the ethereal fabric, the color of woodland mysteries, excited whispers of secret wisdom. It spoke of the power of earth and water met in secret shady pools that had led people through the ages to worship in grottoes and seek healing in their waters.

  The woman in the mirror refuted Bronwyn’s every claim to ordinariness and denied her every hope that she would ever be the kind of doctor her family admired or respected.

  She shivered deep in her bones as if a gong had been struck.

  Outside in the hall, something fell with a heavy thud, releasing Bronwyn from this vision that had the power to destroy her.

  “What on earth was that?” JJ flung open the door. Bronwyn lifted her long skirts to follow her at the same time that heavy male footfalls could be heard pounding up the stairs.

  “Let’s let the others deal with it,” Mary Cole inserted a note of prosaic calm, catching Bronwyn’s shoulders and turning her toward the vanity, “while we put the finishing touches on you. Time is marching on.”

  While Mary Cole dabbed and brushed her cheeks with cosmetics, Bronwyn heard JJ, out in the hall say, “Did you hear that, David?”

  “The whole house heard it,” a dark, velvety masculine voice answered. “What happened? Are you all right, JJ?”

  “I’m fine. I don’t know what it was. Looking around, I don’t see any damage anywhere. It’s a good thing you came upstairs, though. Bronwyn will be ready in a minute. Since you’re here, I might as well introduce you. Where’s Garth? I can introduce him, too.”

  “Bringing up the rear,” another deeper, rougher male voice replied, “slowly. Running up stairs isn’t in my repertoire yet.”

  Behind Bronwyn in the mirror, JJ reappeared flanked by two well-built young men, starched, pressed, and polished with military exactitude, though they both wore civilian sport coats and slacks. One was tall and dark, but you wouldn’t call him handsome.

  The other man, of more medium height, Bronwyn recognized from cell phone pictures JJ had sent. He was David Graziano, JJ’s soon-to-be husband. Before the injury that had left one side of his face slashed with red scars, he had probably been very handsome.

  For one brief second, Bronwyn could visualize the structures that lay under the scars, the bones that had been shattered, the muscles torn, the brain bleeding from hundreds of pinpoint hemorrhages caused by violent shaking. It was almost like watching a movie of the explosion from the point of view of the tissues that had been injured and then following the story of how the body had worked and was still working to heal itself.

  It was a miracle
that he was alive and a double miracle that he hadn’t lost the sight in the injured eye. It was no wonder he was still in pain, with that much edema and inflammation at the points where the bone was still knitting. She knew better than to let herself feel the pain, but even shielded, she could trace its path over his face.

  She wondered if he was aware of just how close to death he had come—but what did it really matter? Experience in an ER had taught her how easily a perfectly healthy young person could die of nothing and how tenacious life could be in the face of massive trauma.

  He had undoubtedly been saved by very good care, possibly better than if the trauma had occurred in the States. The specialty of emergency medicine had been born during the Vietnam era when returning army doctors had realized that civilians were dying of injuries soldiers routinely recovered from. Today, once again, trauma care was taking a leap forward as technology and procedures developed for Iraq and Afghanistan came home.

  “Bronwyn,” JJ began, “I want you to meet—”

  “Don’t move!” Mary Cole tightened her grip on Bronwyn’s chin to prevent her from turning her head. “I don’t want to put out your eye with this mascara wand.”

  “This is David,” JJ told her.

  “Hi, David.”

  “And this is Lieutenant Garth Vale, his best man.”

  Bronwyn shifted her eyes to the reflected image of the taller man. She had an impression of a dark countenance tanned to the color of oak and so impassive that it looked carved.

  He wasn’t handsome. Composed of broad, hard planes and sharp angles, his face was more about masculine strength and indomitable will encased in an armor of cool control than about pleasing proportions. His thick, black hair was ruthlessly cropped to lie close to his skull. The only mobility his face showed was in his almond-shaped eyes that burned with a hard, blue flame.