The Wedding Assignment

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Cathryn Clare

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Copyright

  Finally, Rae-Anne got a good look at the limo driver’s face.

  And without warning, her whole world split apart around her.

  He turned around only briefly, after negotiating a steep turn and easing the limo into another long stretch of road. The countryside was getting less and less familiar, and Rae-Anne was certain now that they were nowhere near the church, and that something was going on that she didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

  But all of those mysteries faded away as the driver met her eyes and she found herself caught and held in the darkly suggestive glare of the man she had loved and mourned as dead a decade ago.

  Dear Reader,

  Once again, we’ve got an irresistible month of reading coming your way. One look at our lead title will be all you need to know what I’m talking about. Of course I’m referring to The Heart of Devin MacKade, by awardwinning, New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts. This is the third installment of her family-oriented miniseries, “The MacKade Brothers,” which moves back and forth between Silhouette Intimate Moments and Silhouette Special Edition. Enjoy every word of it!

  Next up, begin a new miniseries from another award winner, Justine Davis. “Trinity Street West” leads off with the story of Quisto Romero in Lover Under Cover. You’ll remember Quisto from One Last Chance, and you’ll be glad to know that not only does he find a love of his own this time around, he introduces you to a whole cast of characters to follow through the rest of this terrific series. Two more miniseries are represented this month, as well: The Quiet One is the latest in Alicia Scott’s “The Guiness Gang,” while Cathryn Clare’s “Assignment: Romance” begins with The Wedding Assignment. And don’t forget Lee Magner’s Dangerous and Sally Tyler Hayes’ Homecoming, which round out the month with more of the compellingly emotional stories you’ve come to expect from us.

  Enjoy them all—and come back next month for more excitingly romantic reading, here at Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  The Wedding Assignment

  Cathryn Clare

  Books by Cathryn Clare

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Chasing Destiny #503

  Sun and Shadow #558

  The Angel and the Renegade #599

  Gunslinger’s Child #629

  *The Wedding Assignment #702

  *Assignment: Romance

  Silhouette Desire

  To the Highest Bidder #399

  Blind Justice #508

  Lock, Stock and Barrel #550

  Five by Ten #591

  The Midas Touch #663

  Hot Stuff #688

  CATHRYN CLARE

  is a transplanted Canadian who followed true love south of the border when she married an American ten years ago. She says, “I was one of those annoying children who always knew exactly what they were going to be when they grew up,” and she has proved herself right with a full-time career as a writer since 1987.

  “Being a writer has its hazards. So many things that I see—a car at the side of the road, two people having an argument, a hat someone left in a restaurant—make me want to sit down and finish the stories suggested to me. It can be very hard to concentrate on real life sometimes! But the good part of being a writer is that every story, no matter how it starts out, can be a way to show the incredible power that love has in our lives.”

  For L. D. Huff—

  college buddy

  Texan tour guide

  fellow teller of tales

  and an awful good old boy.

  Prologue

  It was his least favorite dream.

  He was always standing on the shore of a lake, looking across the water. It wasn’t anyplace he’d ever been in his waking life, although he’d dreamed about it enough over the years that he’d started to think, Not this damn place again, whenever it turned up in his dreams.

  There was a small child—sometimes an infant, sometimes older—playing on a beach on the other side of the lake. Sometimes Wiley could see a pail and a shovel and a tall sand castle. Sometimes the sand castle even had little flags waving bravely from its turrets.

  Sometimes he couldn’t tell what the child was doing. But he knew beyond any doubt that he was supposed to be over there, too, looking after the kid, keeping an eye on things.

  And he couldn’t get there. The shore was overhung with trees in both directions, and even though he could see the child in such detail, for some reason it seemed to be too far to swim.

  So he always ended up just standing there, cursing his own uselessness and kicking at the water that lapped at his feet. He didn’t know who the child was. He didn’t know why he was so sure he was supposed to be there. He just was, and the knowledge of it built up in him like a head of steam, threatening to blow him apart.

  That was it. That was the whole dream, just standing around on the shore of a lake feeling frustrated beyond his limits.

  He’d been having it since he was a kid himself. And he’d long since given up trying to figure out what the hell it meant.

  Chapter 1

  If he squinted hard, Wiley Cotter could just make out two pairs of broad shoulders in the dense clouds of smoke from the oil drum.

  “Hey, Wiley.” That was his youngest brother, Sam. “What if that old lady two houses over calls the fire department again?”

  “We’ll just offer them a plateful, same as we did last time.”

  Wiley heard his brother Jack’s soft chuckle. “Doesn’t Austin have laws about bribing fire department officials?” he asked.

  “Good barbecue is above the law. You ought to know that.” Wiley dipped his brush into the bowl of sauce he’d spent an hour making last night. Some of it mixed with the grease dripping off the ribs on the grill, making the flames in the drum barbecue sizzle and jump a little higher. The cloud of smoke darkened and grew.

  “Whoa.” Jack stepped back a pace or two. “’Come on over for a couple of beers, some barbecue, relax for a while,’ you said. I distinctly remember the word relax. There was nothing about natural disasters when you invited us.”

  “This barbecue thing is getting to be an obsession,” Sam put in. “Ever since you heard about the joint across from the office going out of business—”

  “’Obsession’ is a mite strong.” Wiley gave the ribs one more pass with his brush, then closed the hinged lid of the drum. “I’d settle for ‘quest.’”

  “I’d settle for a big bucket of water and some breathable air,” Jack said. “I’ve been in the hot seat all week long, big brother. I don’t need it on my days off, too.”

  As the smoke slowly thinned, Wiley looked at his two brothers. Like himself, they were dark-haired and broad-shouldered, with skin that tanned easily and eyes that were accustomed to looking at the wor
ld with a certain amount of suspicion.

  All three brothers, too, tended to layer their speech with mockery, which Wiley knew was a way of keeping their distance from most of the rest of the world. Given the way the three of them had grown up, it wasn’t surprising.

  He always knew, though, when Jack or Sam was being serious about something. And there had been a bitter edge to Jack’s voice just now that caught Wiley’s ear.

  “Who’s got you in the hot seat?” he asked, as the three of them moved away from the barbecue to the small deck Wiley had built onto the back of his house.

  “A big wheel out of San Antonio named Rodney Dietrich.” Jack accepted the beer Wiley offered from the ice chest on the deck. “Heard of him?”

  “Yeah. He used to own a development company that was on the sidelines of that last DEA investigation I did.”

  Wiley didn’t go into details. He’d never really confided in either of his brothers about the final case he’d worked for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency.

  Hell, he still didn’t like to think about it himself, even though it had been serious enough to sour him on his job and prompt him to go to work as an independent investigator. He wouldn’t have minded sharing that with Jack and Sam, but there was no way to tell the whole story without mentioning the woman he’d had to walk away from in the process. Wiley had never even come close to forgiving himself for that, and it had kept him silent on the subject for almost ten years now.

  “So what’s Rodney Dietrich up to these days, now that real estate didn’t work out for him?” he asked, reaching for a beer from the cooler.

  “Well, according to Rodney, he’s running his family’s hotel chain and doing just fine at it.” Jack took a sip of his beer. “In reality, though, he’s operating a money-laundering network that processes most of the illegal gambling proceeds in this great state of ours. The FBI’s trying to shut down the gambling end of things. And I’m supposed to shut down Rodney, if I can.”

  “Why are you sounding so glum about it?” Sam wanted to know. All three Cotters had gravitated toward law enforcement, Jack as an FBI agent and Wiley and Sam as private investigators. After the helpless uncertainty of their childhoods, they seemed to have developed a shared taste for unraveling mysteries, clearing up chaos, righting wrongs.

  “Because I’ve nearly got him where I want him, except that clear out of the blue he’s decided to take some time off to get married, for Pete’s sake.”

  Wiley grinned at the look on Jack’s face. Another thing the Cotter brothers shared was a baffled wariness about the state of matrimony and everything that went with it.

  “So you’re stuck waiting for him to get back to work,” he guessed.

  “Right.” Jack’s expression got more serious. “And I’m stuck looking for another inside source in his operation, too. The last one we had just met with a sudden ‘accident’ on a fishing pier down in the Gulf.”

  “Heck of a coincidence,” Wiley said.

  “It’s not the only one. There’s a certain amount of evidence to suggest that the guy even rigged the accident that killed his first wife. Seems the lady had been asking some inconvenient questions about his business.”

  “Sounds like a nice guy,” Sam commented.

  This was interesting, Wiley thought, but hardly earthshaking. In fact, his mind had started to drift slightly, lulled by barbecue smoke and sunshine and concern that maybe he hadn’t basted those ribs quite liberally enough. And then Jack dropped his bombshell.

  “Why any sane woman would want to hook up with a man like that is beyond me,” he said. “I wonder if Ms. RaeAnne Blackburn has any idea what she’s getting herself into.”

  Wiley had just popped the top off his beer bottle and was raising it to his lips. At Jack’s words he went stock-still.

  “Rae-Anne Blackburn?” He repeated the name slowly. He must have misheard it, he thought. He’d just been thinking about Rae-Anne, that was why. The memories of his last DEA case had brought her to mind, and now he was imagining that Jack had said her name.

  But Jack was nodding matter-of-factly. “You sound as if you know her,” he said.

  Wiley wasn’t aware of getting to his feet. But suddenly he was standing up, pacing to the other side of the deck, peering into the blue pall of barbecue smoke as though he was looking back through time.

  “I used to know her.” His voice grated over the words.

  Rae-Anne… dear God in heaven…

  “How well?”

  “Well enough.”

  Well enough to know she deserved better than to marry a slick operator like Rodney Dietrich. Well enough that the thought of her marrying anybody at all made Wiley half-crazy inside.

  “Think she’s honest?” Jack was asking.

  “I know she is.”

  Did he? He and Rae-Anne had once understood each other so instinctively, so quickly. Did he still have the right to claim he knew her that well?

  Suddenly he didn’t care. What Wiley already knew about Rodney Dietrich’s reputation wasn’t good. What Jack had just said made it a lot worse. Rae-Anne couldn’t marry a man like that, not without listening to the other side of the story first.

  “What’s up, Wiley?” Sam asked. “You look like you’re hatching a whopper of an idea.”

  It had taken Wiley a lot of years to find his brothers again. Most of the time it felt good to have them around, to be with people who knew him well.

  Occasionally, though, it could be a real pain. This was one of those times.

  “I might be,” he growled.

  “Well, if it’s about talking to Rae-Anne Blackburn, it’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” Jack said. “It turns out she actually works in Rodney’s hotel chain—she’s a bartender.”

  “She always was.” She’d said the tips weren’t as good as when she’d been waitressing, but the advantage of having a bar between her and the greedy hands of her customers had outweighed the financial angle. He could practically hear her saying it, could imagine the edge of laughter in her voice as she’d spoken.

  “So she could be a source of information, if she’s willing to talk to us,” Jack went on. “If you’ll have a shot at it—”

  Wiley didn’t answer. He was trying to stay calm, but it wasn’t working. Suddenly, after long years of holding them at bay, images of Rae-Anne were flooding his mind.

  That red-gold hair of hers, always looking as though it had just been kissed by the sun.

  Her blue eyes, trusting, alive with the emotion of the moment.

  Her skin, eggshell white, eggshell perfect.

  That gentle voice. That dazzlingly sexy smile.

  He couldn’t stop the memories that were washing over him. Rae-Anne leaning over the bar to tease him into laughter at the end of a long day. Rae-Anne in his arms, breathless, astonishing him with her openness and seeming just as astonished by it herself.

  Rae-Anne marrying a man who was crooked at best, dangerous at worst.

  “Damn it….”

  The vehemence in his voice surprised him. Both his brothers looked startled by his tone, and by the belligerent way he put his beer bottle down on the deck.

  “I do believe,” Sam said, “that Wiley’s forgotten all about his barbecue.”

  Wiley glared at him. “Think you can ride herd on the office for a while, little brother?” he asked abruptly.

  Sam’s smile vanished. “I’d rather not,” he said.

  Wiley knew the reasons for that. Sam had had his own disastrous experiences with love, and Wiley had always been considerate about not forcing his brother into daily contact with the woman he’d loved and then lost.

  But this was too urgent to let Sam’s old hurts stand in the way of it. “I know you’d rather not,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.” He turned to face Jack without waiting for Sam’s answer. “When exactly is Rodney Dietrich’s wedding?” he demanded.

  “Next Saturday afternoon. Am I hearing the possibility that you’ll
talk to Rodney’s bride and see if she knows anything we might be able to use?”

  Wiley took a long swallow of his beer, as though it could quench all the feelings that had begun to smolder inside him at the mention of Rae-Anne’s name. “You’re not hearing a damn thing,” he growled, “until you tell me everything you know about this case, starting right now.”

  It was eighty-five degrees out, and Rae-Anne Blackburn was freezing.

  Nearly everyone else had left the long, low ranch house by now. Renee, Rodney’s longtime housekeeper, was scurrying toward her car, her arms full of flowers. The photographer was packing up his gear, having taken Rae-Anne’s picture in the elegant oval foyer. It had seemed to take forever to get the shots set up, what with arranging her veil and touching up her makeup and swirling her train around her among the bouquets on the black-and-white marble floor.

  She’d felt cold then, too, although she hoped it wouldn’t show through the bright, artificial smile she’d managed to come up with for the photographer.

  Better not use up all those smiles too early, she told herself as she rearranged the big skirt and started toward the door. She had a feeling she was going to need a whole lot more of them to get through the rest of the day.

  “Oh, my dear, you look a little pale.” That was Rodney’s old aunt, Lindie, who claimed she hadn’t missed a family wedding in sixty-five years and had flown in from Phoenix at short notice for this one. Rae-Anne had lobbied for a quick ceremony at the registry office, but Rodney had a strong sense of family, and although the Dietrichs seemed to have spread themselves all over the country, a surprising number of them had responded to Rodney’s last-minute invitation.

  “Just because we planned the wedding in a hurry doesn’t mean you don’t get a proper welcome into the Dietrich clan,” he’d told her, and she’d given in because it was such a novelty to think of being welcomed into anyone’s family in such a permanent way.