Because a Husband Is Forever

“You’ll be both when I come back. Promise you’ll wait for me,” he repeated.

She clutched his hand, ignoring her mother’s reproving looks. Her mother had never liked Will. His family didn’t have enough money to suit her. As if money could ever be the measure of a man’s worth.

“You know I will. From the first moment I saw you until the last moment I’ll draw breath, there’s only you, my darling,” she whispered to him.

Will kissed her hand in the tradition of the times. And then, because he was young and in love and this would be the last time that they would be together, he drew her into his arms and kissed the woman he’d loved since he was a small boy.

He kissed her long and hard, fashioning a moment and a memory that would last him through however many days and weeks and months he would have to be away. He had to fight a war he had never asked for. A war that his young honor demanded he fight. He hadn’t bought his way out the way some others of his class had. They had sent in paid substitutes to fight in their places. To die in their stead if that was the way of it.

The son of a very small plantation owner, Will’s honor forbade him to allow others to brave danger in his place. But, oh, his heart felt as if it was breaking as he stood there, the April wind ruffling his hair, kissing the woman he would rather have died for than leave.

“I believe it is time to take your leave, Lieutenant,” Belinda Deveaux told him sharply.

He took a step back and looked at Amanda, sealing her image in his mind. “Wait for me,” he begged her again.

“Forever if I have to.”

Clutching the cameo to her, Amanda waved as Will mounted his horse and then rode away. She waved until the horse and rider had long disappeared from view.

Amanda ignored the disparaging sound her mother made. It faded into the background, muted by the sound of her breaking heart.

“Forever,” she repeated in a fierce whisper.

Chapter One

Present Day

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

The voice, soft, unobtrusive, felt as if it had slipped into her consciousness via her mind rather than registering the regular way, by way of her ears.

Surprised, Dakota Delany glanced up from the see-through counter with its collection of estate jewelry and one-of-a-kind pieces to see a motherly woman, who watched her with eyes that were incredibly blue. And incredibly kind.

Dakota would have sworn that she was alone in the small showroom area of the upstate New York antique store, with its creaking floorboards and not quite airtight windows. When she’d entered fifteen minutes ago, there hadn’t been a salesperson to be seen. It took her a moment to process the sudden appearance of another person within the rather small area, without so much as a telltale squeak from the floorboards.

If she were being honest with herself, Dakota really didn’t know what she was even doing here. She’d never had much of a penchant for antiques nor a desire to haunt the small shops along the street that hosted them. But an unshakable restlessness had put her behind the wheel of her blazing-red BMW this morning. Dawn had seen her driving away from New York City, making her way upstate, her path marked by a parade of trees whose leaves were turning all the festive colors of fall.

She didn’t feel very festive.

Dakota wasn’t really sure why she kept on driving or where she was going. It wasn’t as if she could just allow herself to get lost for an unlimited amount of time. She had a live show to tape as of two o’clock this afternoon, the way she did every afternoon, Monday through Friday. That meant she had to return by noon or risk having her production assistant, who was, as well, her best friend, succumb to the heart attack MacKenzie Ryan always threatened her with if things weren’t progressing according to schedule.

Schedule.

Hell, if things had been progressing according to schedule, she and Dr. John Jackson would be standing side by side, maybe even here in this little, out-of-theway antique store, picking out their wedding rings. She’d thought her relationship with John was heading down the aisle. To a wedding. To the altar. For a brief, shining moment she’d actually believed that she’d finally found a man who didn’t want anything from her except her. She’d found a man with whom she could share forever, have the kind of life her parents had.

John Jackson didn’t need her name or her fame, not to mention her money, to try to get ahead. The good doctor was a celebrity of sorts in his own right. He was the head of a very lucrative private practice and was currently one of the most sought-after plastic surgeons on the East Coast.

Trouble was, on occasion the good doctor also liked to throw himself into his work—after the fact. Dakota had heard the rumors, but once her mind was made up that this was the man she was going to marry, she had refused to believe them. Having been raised in the entertainment business—thanks to a newscaster father and a mother and grandfather who between them had been in almost every B-grade movie ever written—and having spent the last four years as the star of her own daytime talk show, And Now a Word from Dakota, she knew very well how baseless rumors could be.

Except that these rumors had turned out to be not so baseless. These rumors had turned out to be true. She’d come home early from a taping one afternoon, seeking a respite after working with a particularly difficult starlet, and wound up catching John, also home early, trying on one of his remodeled patients for size.

Her heart and confidence had been shattered in one lightning-swift blow.

Now the engagement was off, John had moved out to some Park Avenue address, and she was single again.

And hating it.

But at twenty-nine, she had also become resigned to the fact that she was probably going to remain that way for a very long time, if not forever. Men just weren’t worth the trouble, she’d decided during her drive up this morning. Besides, she had a full life. Between work and the occasional visits to her family, she didn’t have time to focus on the fact that there were no one else’s dishes in the sink but hers, that the only clothes strewn around the apartment were hers.

“Would you like me to take the necklace out to show you?”

Even as the woman asked the question, she was removing the cameo that had caught Dakota’s eye.

It was a lovely piece, but not extraordinary by any stretch of the imagination. A small profile of a woman set against a field of Wedgwood blue and threaded onto a black velvet ribbon—new by the looks of it. There was nothing unusual about the small piece of jewelry to set it apart from the rest. And yet, as she’d walked through the store, browsing but not really seeing, Dakota found her eyes inexplicably drawn to the cameo.

Still, she wasn’t really here to buy anything, only to kill time. She shook her head. “No, I—”

The protest came a beat too late. The woman with the fluffy gray hair and compelling smile already had the cameo out. She held it up for Dakota’s approval.

For a moment the face of the woman in the cameo was trapped in a sunbeam.

“It has a legend behind it, you know,” the woman told Dakota softly.

“A legend?”

She was too much of her parents’ daughter not to be drawn in by the promise of a story, a history. Dakota could feel her interest being aroused as if it was a physical thing.

The woman came around from behind the counter. Short, round, she had almost a cherubic appearance. If she were casting Mrs. Claus in a play, Dakota thought, the woman would have been perfect.

The woman’s blue eyes gleamed with vibrancy as she spoke. “Yes. It’s said to have once belonged to a Southern belle, given to her by her fiancé just before he rode off to war in 1861. Her name was Amanda Deveaux. His was William Slattery, a handsome young lieutenant in the Confederate Army. William put this around her neck and made her promise to wear the cameo until he could return to marry her.”

The sunbeam still held the woman in the cameo in its embrace. Dakota found she couldn’t draw her eyes away from it. Though injured by love, at bottom she was still a romantic. “And did he?”

Rather than answer directly, the older woman smiled enigmatically. Taking the cameo, she stood up on her toes and gently placed it around Dakota’s neck.

“Why don’t you try it on?” the woman coaxed softly as she tied the two ends of the velvet together at the nape of Dakota’s neck. Stepping back, she looked at Dakota and nodded her approval. “It suits you.”

The delicate oval dipped into the hollow of her throat. Dakota lightly slid her fingers over the necklace, touching it. “Does it?”

The woman nodded again, a wayward breeze that had sneaked in through the open casement playing with the ends of her hair. “They say that whoever wears it will have her own one true love come into her life. And once that happens, once she knows that this is the man she is to spend eternity with, she has to pass the cameo on to someone else so that the magic can continue.”

“Magic,” Dakota echoed. Did anyone still believe in magic? She certainly didn’t. The woman took out a small, sterling-silver-framed mirror and handed it to her. Dakota looked at herself. When she glanced back at the woman, her smile was ever-so-slightly self-deprecating. “I don’t feel any magic.”

The woman laughed to herself, shaking her head as if she’d just heard something very foolish uttered in innocence. “Magic doesn’t come riding on a bolt of lightning, my dear,” she assured Dakota gently as she stepped back behind the counter. “Real magic slips in without you noticing and unfolds its power very quietly. Before you know it, it’s taken a firm root inside your soul.”

Dakota sincerely had her doubts about that. She didn’t believe in magic or cameos that came equipped with magical powers. But there was no denying that the cameo was truly lovely.

And she deserved a pick-me-up, she decided.