Read Online ''I Do''...Take Two! by Merline Lovelace - Free Book Online Page A

executive who runs his test-and-evaluation division is retiring and asked if I knew anyone with my kind of expertise and number of hours in the cockpit to replace him. I don’t know who was more shocked—him, Carlo or me—when I said I might be interested in the job.”
    Travis had heard the words come out of his mouth and been as stunned as the two men he’d come to know so well in recent weeks. Yet as soon as his brain had processed the audio signals, he’d recognized their unshakable truth. If trading his air force flight suit for one with an EAS patch on it would win Kate back, he’d make the change today.
    â€œSo what do you think?” he asked her. “Again, your first, no-frills, no-holds-barred gut reaction?”
    â€œI won’t lie,” she admitted slowly, reluctantly. “My head, my heart, my gut all leaped for joy.”
    He started for her, elation pumping through his veins. The hand she slapped against his chest to stop him made only a tiny dent in his fierce joy.
    â€œWait, Trav! This is too big a decision to make without talking it over. Let’s...let’s use this time together to make sure it’s what you really want.”
    â€œI’m sure. Now.”
    â€œWell, I’m not.” Her brown eyes showed an agony of doubt. “The military’s been your whole life up to now.”
    â€œWrong.” He laid his hand over hers, felt the warmth of her palm against his sternum. “You came first, Katydid. Before the uniform, before the wings, before the head rush and stomach-twisting responsibilities of being part of a crew. I let those get in the way the past few years. That won’t happen again.”
    The doubt was still there in her eyes, swimming in a pool of indecision. He needed to back off, Travis conceded. Give her a few days to accept what was now a done deal in his mind.
    â€œOkay,” he said with a sense of rightness he hadn’t felt in longer than he could remember, “we’ll head up to Venice. Let Ellis’s proposal percolate for a day or two.”
    And then, he vowed, they would conduct a virtual burning of the divorce decree before he took his wife to bed.
    * * *
    They left the Ferrari in a patrolled section of the parking garage on Tronchetto Island and took a water taxi across the broad, slate-gray waters of the bay. The wind whipped Kate’s hair free of both her clip and colorful head scarf. She didn’t even notice as the vaporetto skimmed the choppy waters.
    The driver throttled back to enter the Grand Canal. Venice’s busy central waterway hummed with water taxis, gondolas filled with tourists snapping picture after picture, and the flat-bottomed scows that transported goods throughout the city. Kate stood braced against the vaporetto’s deck, her upper body exposed by its open hatch, her face alive with the delight of viewing one of the world’s great treasures for the first time.
    Travis had driven up and back from Aviano often enough to take the distinctive fusion of Byzantine, Moorish and Roman architecture in stride. Viewing it through his wife’s eyes, though, gave him a renewed appreciation of the arched bridges, domed churches and tall, narrow houses with laundry strung across their windows.
    As they curved past the Grand Canal’s first bend and headed for the Rialto Bridge, the houses became wider, grander...including the one the vaporetto driver nosed up to. Painted a deep terra-cotta red, it boasted a colonnade of white marble pillars topped by three stories of intricately arched windows.
    â€œThis is our hotel?” Kate asked, her eyes wide as Travis helped her out of the boat and onto a marble landing slick with water that lapped from the canal.
    â€œIt is.”
    â€œTravis!” Her gaze roamed the fifteenth-century exterior. “This has got to cost a fortune!”
    â€œNot as much as it would have if Carlo didn’t have an in with the owner.