Free Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2) by Barbara Bretton Page A

as they pledged their love, but the one thing they couldn’t do was guarantee they’d have a second chance. The slow contemplative world she’d grown up in was gone, vanished as surely as the hoop skirt. She had nothing and no one to call her own. Nobody who cared, really cared, if she was lonely or sad or frightened that life was passing her by.
    If she let Mac Weaver sail away tomorrow afternoon alone, she’d be losing the best thing that had ever happened to her. The world didn’t hold still simply because you wanted it to. Magic happened once in a lifetime, but it required proximity to take root. Long-distance magic didn’t stand much of a chance, not even in this age of speed.
    Jane understood the way life really was; good intentions and pretty promises weren’t enough to ensure a happy ending. Sometimes you had to close your eyes and jump right in and pray you remembered how to swim against the tide.
    “Yes,” she said. The word shimmered in the air before them like a silver rocket.
    Mac’s blood pounded in his ear. “Say it again.”
    She turned slightly and touched his cheek with her hand. “Yes.”
    His mind went blank. No words. No thoughts. Nothing but a rush of pure happiness so intense he felt as if the fireworks were going off inside his chest.
    “You’ll marry me?”
    “If you still want me.”
    “We leave tomorrow.”
    “I know.”
    “Your job... your flat... your family.”
    “I’ll call Leo... I live in a boarding house... you know I have no other family save Nigel.”
    “You’re sure?”
    She took his hand and placed it against her chest. He marveled at the calm and steady beat of her heart. “Never more so, Mac.”
    “It’ll work,” he said, above the thunder of fireworks illuminating the darkness. “We’ll make it work.”
    And although a wiser woman might have questioned how, Jane Townsend only nodded and gave herself over to her future husband’s kiss.

Chapter Four
    Maybe if they’d had time to think about it, Mac and Jane might not have gone ahead with the wedding. Maybe if they’d had just one moment to catch their collective breath, they might have realized what a crazy, impetuous, downright foolhardy venture they were about to embark upon, and have parted friends. Anything at all would have done it: trouble at the registry office; a problem with the rail passage from London to Southampton; even an objection from the complacent Uncle Nigel or the vociferous Leo Donnelly might have been enough to stop the forward motion of their plans. But, as fate would have it, everything fell into place without so much as a fare-thee-well, and at a few minutes before eleven on the morning of June 4, 1953, Jane Margaret Townsend and MacKenzie Weaver became man and wife in St. Julian’s Church on Winkle Street.
    “Go with God,” said the priest with his incongruous French accent. “May you have many years and many children.”
    Jane stared down at her left hand. Mac’s school ring, Columbia University 1939, dwarfed her middle finger up to the knuckle. The cold metal was a strange sensation against her skin, and she knew she would have to take care her makeshift wedding band didn’t slip off.
    The priest nudged Mac with a smile. “Kiss the bride, lad. She’s a pretty one.”
    The word “children” had done something to Mac, something words like “forever” and “in sickness and in health” hadn’t. This was his wife, not his girlfriend. This was a step into the future, not an easy way to keep the past at bay. He looked at the tiny dark-haired woman he’d taken to wife and felt stark terror. She looked so delicate in her pale blue suit with the white orchid pinned to her left shoulder. They’d had time to race to Covent Garden at dawn before they caught their train and, for a price, he’d gotten a Cockney flower vendor to hand over the choicest bloom.
    Jane had blushed the color of a pale pink tea rose, and he’d been flooded with the desire to sweep her into his arms