Annie was in heaven.
She felt no sorrow at the situation. Instinct told her she’d passed without pain after a long and loving life. It also told her that the man who’d been her dearest partner in that life had gone on before her and that she would soon be reunited with him for eternity.
She looked around, suffused with a sense of warmth and wonderment. Everything was so lovely! The sky was a cloudless blue. The foliage a lushly verdant green. The air was scented with wildflowers and filled with the sounds of sweet chimes and silver laughter.
And then, suddenly, she saw him! Her soul leapt with a joy so potent it brought tears to her eyes.
Lord, he looked so young! Although she realized she had shed her aged shell of flesh and been renewed, he seemed almost...boyish...to her. Not the life-tempered man she’d expected to find.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. Nothing mattered but their being joined, once again.
“Matt!” she cried, waving. “Matt, over here!”
He didn’t seem to hear her calling. She hailed him a second time, louder.
And then he smiled and started to wave. And for one breathless, beautiful moment, Annie trembled on the brink of happiness everlasting.
Matt opened his mouth.
“Lisa!” he called, “Lisa, sweetheart!”
A slender young woman with sunshine blond hair dashed by Annie and flung herself into her youthful lover’s arms.
Stricken, Annie turned away.
Lisa, she thought, fighting back tears of rage and bitterness she knew had no place in this celestial setting. First and finally, it’s Lisa.
She tried to tell herself it was fair. That Matt had belonged to her for years and years only because Lisa’s life had been so unjustly cut short. But the hurt got worse and worse and the sense of loss grew deeper and deeper—
“Annie?”
“Leave me alone!” she sobbed, feeling her eyes puff and her nose go red and runny.
“I can’t do that, Hannah Elaine.”
If it were possible for it to do so, Annie’s heart surely stopped. A split second later, she spun around.
The sandy-haired man with the steady blue-gray eyes who was standing before her was as old as she. Older, by far, than the rangy youth who’d whirled the lovely Lisa into an embrace. He was...he was...
Her best buddy.
Her lover.
Her partner for life.
“Oh, Matt!”
His arms came around her. His mouth came down to meet hers.
“I love you,” he vowed.
“I love you—”
“Annie?” a disembodied voice said from a great distance. “Honey? It’s time to get up. It’s your wedding day!”
And with that, Hannah Elaine Martin awoke from the sweetest of dreams and realized she was still in heaven.
* * *
She took his breath away.
Gliding down the aisle of the church they’d attended all their lives, her slender body draped in a simple gown of cream white satin, her sable hair swept up in soft curls beneath a plain headband and drift of gossamer-fine veiling, her hands full of flowers, she stole his breath right out of his body.
“Annie,” Matt whispered. “Oh, Annie.”
Everything else was a blur. Impressions only. Smiles. Sobs. The flickering of candles. The heady perfume of fresh-cut blossoms. A swirl of familiar faces. His parents. Annie’s parents. Rick and Eden. Eden’s bird-of-paradise kid sister, Peachy Keene. Even Rudi, the waiter from Rio Bravo.
Annie arrived at his side.
She put her hand in his.
Together, they turned to face the husband of the woman who had taught them how to dance.
“Dearly Beloved,” the minister began....
* * *
“Kiss the bride! Kiss the bride!” some of the more exuberant reception guests chanted as Matt set down his half-filled champagne glass and rose from his seat at the head table.
“Well, if you insist,” he said with a grin, bending to brush Annie’s mouth with his own. As their lips met, he thought he heard the first five notes—duh-duh-duh...dah-duh—of the 2001 theme being played...by a kazoo. A sudden eruption of appreciative laughter from the gathered throng of friends and relatives and the oh-so-innocent look on his bride’s radiant face when he finished the kiss told him he had not suffered an auditory hallucination.
“You wanted it,” Annie reminded him, the silver heart-shaped locket at her throat glinting as she lifted her chin as though challenging him to dispute her assertion.
“And you certainly gave it to me,” he said with a chuckle. Then, growing serious, he straightened and gestured for silence.
It took a bit of time, but the reception hall finally quieted.
“Thank you,” Matt said. “Having spent most of the past three months studying those bridal magazines that seem to suggest that getting married—never mind what comes after—is a full-time career, I know it’s out of order for the groom to make a toast. However, I’ve got something I want very much to say. A lot of people believe that true love is like lightning. That if it hits you, you know it right away...and that it never strikes the same target twice.” Reaching down, he picked up his champagne glass from the table and turned toward Annie. “To the woman who helped me learn that what a lot of people believe about true love is wrong. She’s my best friend, my equal partner and my brand new wife. And that makes me one incredibly lucky guy.”
* * *
“I had a dream last night,” Annie confessed many hours later in the sweet lassitude of marital lovemaking.
“More eggplants?”
She shifted in the circle of her new husband’s arms, then levered herself up so she could look into his face. “No,” she answered, stroking his cheek. “It...it was about Lisa.”
The pattern of Matt’s breathing broke for an instant, then repaired itself. “Tell me, love.”
And so Annie did.
Simply.
Softly.
Steadily.
Matt’s eyes never left hers throughout the entire recitation, but when she finished, his lashes came down and he seemed to retreat into himself.
Annie felt a flash of the awful uncertainty she’d prayed she’d never experience again. Had she been wrong to speak? she asked herself.
Matt’s eyelids opened. “Oh, Annie,” he whispered, tracing the features of her face with his fingertips. His touch made her tremble. “I love you so much.”
“No more than I love you.”
“That was a beautiful dream you had. And I’d like to think that’s what Heaven will be like. Someday. A long, long, long time in the future. But right here, right now...” He paused, his voice thickening with emotion. “I think this is all the Heaven we need, don’t you?”
She needed a few seconds to summon the ability to speak. Then, for the second time in the first day of the rest of her life, Annie said, “I do.”
* * * * *
Which of the WEDDING BELLES will take a walk down the aisle next? Don’t miss PEACHY’S PROPOSAL, coming soon from Silhouette Desire.