It had sounded good. But they’d both had misgivings. Several years might pass before they saw each other.
Meanwhile Cate had made up her mind. She’d been tired of sneaking around, of lying to her parents. She’d wanted to be with Danny openly. Let the whole world know about their relationship. “I’d better call him,” she’d repeated, a little more firmly. “We should leave as soon as possible…before my parents get a hunch something’s wrong and decide to come over and check on me. We’ll be in really big trouble if they catch us.”
It had been a gross understatement. Her mouth still warm from Danny’s kisses as she waited for their son to come home, Cate recalled his light tap on the horn as he’d pulled up at the curb outside Brenda’s house that night…the hurried squeeze she’d given her friend before snatching up her bag and running down the steps. Ensconced in the old-fashioned double bed where she’d slept alone since Larry’s death, she relived Danny’s embrace and his deep-pitched growl, “Maybe we’d better get going, sweetheart…”
Nestled in the curve of his arm as he drove, Cate had kept glancing over her shoulder to make certain they weren’t being followed. For his part, Danny had tried not to be too obvious as he’d checked the rearview mirror. “The coast is clear,” he’d reassured her at one point. “Everything’s going to work out. You’ll see…as soon as we find a place, you can register and finish high school. Or take your GED. Either way, you’ll start college in the fall. I’ll work days, sign up for a couple of night classes if possible. We’ll get in touch with your parents on your eighteenth birthday. When they realize how hardworking and happy we are, they’ll come around.”
Cate had strongly doubted it. In her opinion, they would never forgive her, let alone make their peace with him. The product of a poor, somewhat eccentric family, he struck them as the antithesis of everything they’d hoped for her.
Ironically, the farther they’d driven from Beckwith, the more convinced Cate had become that her mother and father were nipping at their heels. Oh, she and Danny had found a justice of the peace willing to hear their vows without much trouble—a funny, rumpled man already wearing his bathrobe who’d gone through the motions.
A short time later Danny had slowed the car as they approached the Heart’s Desire Motel—a shabby, inexpensive-looking place some twenty miles east of the Cincinnati city limit. Its Vacancy sign had been lit as if in invitation.
Cate hadn’t wanted to stop. She’d begged Danny to keep driving across the state line into Kentucky or Indiana if possible, wrongly convinced they’d be safer in another state. Eager to make love to her, he’d argued that her parents had probably retired for the night. Insofar as they were concerned, he’d insisted, she was safely ensconced at the Hale residence, chatting away with Brenda. Meanwhile, the two of them were about to make love for the first time in a real bed.
“I’ll park around the side, behind that Dumpster,” he’d ordered in an attempt to quell her fears. “If your parents are right behind us, they won’t spot it there.”
Telling herself that if her mother and father were nipping at their heels, they were likely to slow down, scan the handful of cars in the parking lot and drive on without seeing Danny’s rundown Ford in the shadows, Cate had acquiesced. They’d been at the crux of their lovemaking, crying out and clutching each other in the throes of completion, when they’d been electrified by the sound of someone attempting to turn a key in the lock of their motel-room door.
A moment later the securely bolted door had come crashing in. Like modern-day bounty hunters, her parents and an armed sheriff’s deputy had burst into the room, followed by the cringing motel clerk. Only then, with her mother weeping and her father yelling profanities at the top of his lungs as she and Danny had scrambled to cover themselves, had she realized that they’d forgotten to use protection. It had been the one time in their history together that they’d been so careless.
Crisp and authoritative, the deputy had ordered them to get dressed. Wrapping the bedspread around herself for modesty’s sake, Cate had gathered up her clothes and put them on in the motel room’s cramped bathroom while her mother had wept and browbeaten her. She’d emerged to find Danny wearing handcuffs.
“No…please! Take those things off him!” she’d begged the deputy, tears running down her cheeks. “He didn’t do anything wrong! We’re married! You can’t arrest him!”
The scowl on Danny’s face had ordered her not to beg on his behalf.
Taking his cue from her parents, the deputy had declined to relent. “Sorry, miss,” he’d answered. “But you’re underage. I’m afraid you, your parents and your boyfriend will have to accompany me back to headquarters.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my husband,” she’d whispered, her steady flow of tears undermining her stubbornness.
Huddled miserably in the rear of her parents’ Oldsmobile, while Danny rode with the deputy in the caged back seat of his squad car, Cate had begun to realize the seriousness of their situation. Given her age, she’d guessed, Danny could be charged with statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, maybe even kidnapping. He could be subject to a jail sentence. Maybe even a prison term. With either on his record, the successful future he hoped to attain would be compromised. Somehow, she had to keep that from happening.
She hadn’t been worried on her own account, though she’d realized at once that her parents would separate them. For as long as they held sway over her, Jack and Susan McDonough would see to it that Danny Finn didn’t come within a thousand feet of the daughter who had so disappointed them.
On their arrival at the Clermont County Jail, Cate and her parents had been ushered into one interview room, Danny into another. The break between them had been complete. Her stomach in knots, Cate had wanted to charge down the hall and defend his honor to the stern, uniformed deputy, make him see that the young man he’d taken into custody wasn’t a criminal. Maybe if she took the blame…
Her father’s looming, wrathful presence had barred the way. As she’d huddled without speaking in a battered wooden chair, he and her mother had taken turns berating her.
“How could you have done this to us?” Susan McDonough had wailed, her words harsh with self-pity and condemnation. “Everyone’s sure to find out. We’ll be the town laughing stock. Your reputation…not to mention ours…will never recover from this!”
“Do you think she cares?” Jack McDonough’s mouth had contorted with fury and disgust. “All the little bi—” In response to the expression on his wife’s face, he’d checked himself before the slur could completely pass his lips. “All she cares about is her trashy, so-called husband,” he’d added instead. “Not the parents who raised her.” He’d turned to Cate. “To think a daughter of mine would give her virginity to someone like Danny Finn, a young man of questionable family with no prospects! Well, I promise you, girl…your mother and I are going to press charges to the fullest. Danny Finn’s going to jail for his part in this. And he’ll be there awhile.”
Hearing her father describe what would happen in so many words had made it seem even more threatening. The stories she’d heard about what befell young, good-looking men in jail or prison settings had made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t allow her parents to place Danny in that kind of jeopardy, no matter how much they hated him. I’ve got to make them relent, she’d realized. Promise whatever it takes to make them drop the charges. Unbending as he seems, that deputy was a teenager once. I can’t believe he’ll charge Danny with a crime if my parents don’t insist on it.
Brian came home, humming a song that was popular among teenagers at the moment and noisily burping pizza. His occasional, deliberate rudeness was part of the differentiation process, Cate guessed. A moment later her son turned on his stereo and her ears protested.
“Brian?”