Til Death Undo Us

Book 1: Open Window

by Morgan Q O'Reilly

Genres: Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Open Window, #1 She never imagined love could happen twice—until her husband returned from the dead. Cassidy thinks she's getting on with her life just fine after her husband's fall to cancer. Life is quiet, which is just the way she likes it, half a continent away from her overbearing Irish family. Niall doesn't want to scare the fragile Irish rose, but her husband, supposedly two years in the grave, has been caught on security tapes at a secret government laboratory. Together, they unearth evidence of industrial espionage and identity theft. . .and frightening connections to the Irish Mob that will put more than just their own lives at risk. Sex, bullets, more sex, intimate body piercings and a few red roses. What more could a girl want? 99,000 Words

Release date: July 18, 2011

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 142

Sample

 

Prologue

 

If pressed to name the hardest thing in life, most people would have a difficult time limiting their response to only one thing or incident. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and have determined it’s a definition that changes from year to year, situation to situation, crisis to crisis.

When I was thirteen, I thought filling my mother’s footsteps as woman of the house and caring for my father, three older and three younger brothers was the hardest thing I’d ever do.

At fifteen, I figured passing algebra was the hardest thing I’d ever do. The following year I breezed through geometry, against the logic of my teacher, who said men would always do better than women because it required logical thinking. Girls had the top five grades in the class. I was number three. He lost a touch of his smugness. Then again, so did I when faced with Algebra II.

When I was eighteen, getting a summer job seemed like the hardest thing I’d ever do. My younger brothers were excellent at household chores by then, so Dad had agreed a job outside the house would be good for me. A brief stint as a barista-in-training ended after two days. Luckily, I met my first love then, which eased the sting of failing at yet another attempt to improve my culinary skills.

Upon meeting Ryan Malone, the hardest thing in my life was learning I’d never be a great wife in the kitchen, but he didn’t care. The easiest thing in my life was loving him and being loved by him.

I was eighteen, he twenty-three, when we met. A year later, we married and moved away from the East Lansing neighborhood where I’d been raised. The marrying was easy, the moving I found difficult. But we had love and each other. Ryan made everything better with his easy charm and ready smile. Even getting a couple piercings was exciting and fun, despite my painful memories of getting my ears pierced at age ten. Okay, so the actual act of the piercing wasn’t fun, but after the healing, well, yeah, we had fun.

The three years we spent at Cornell in Ithaca while he got his PhD in physics were a grand honeymoon. I completed my bachelor’s degree in English at the same time. The hardest thing at that time was living on a tight budget with my poor cooking skills. We ate a lot of canned soups, packaged noodles, cereal, and scrambled eggs to survive. Occasionally we were lucky enough to get dinner invitations from his advisors and other students. Buying wine was easy if they did the cooking.

The next move took us clear across the country to a small town in California with a couple of National Laboratories. Ryan’s first real-world job. Important research. We bought a bungalow and, while he put his education to work, I fixed up our home and took a job with an accounting firm. Numbers and premeasured coffee packets I could handle. Learning to do bookkeeping and tax reports required little effort.

Life carried on blissfully for a year and we decided to start making babies. There was no hardship in trying. Not with Ryan. We loved well and very often, taking advantage of the romantic settings around us. Alas, to my growing sorrow, no babies.

Then came the day Ryan started turning yellow and complained of abdominal pains. It took a couple of days, but I finally got him to the doctor. After some tests, I discovered the new hardest thing in my life–sitting in the doctor’s office, holding Ryan’s hand while the doctor explained to us the facts of pancreatic cancer.

It didn’t did stay at the top long. It moved down the list to be replaced by holding Ryan while he suffered the effects of chemo and radiation. For twelve months I watched the disease eat away at my lovely boy. Pain, and the drugs to relieve it, stole the light from his emerald eyes, but they never stole his smile for long. At the very end, pale and emaciated, his lovely copper hair dull and clipped short, he held my hand as morphine eased his way from this world.

Numbness got me through the next few days. Cayden, my twin, returned on leave from whatever assignment he’d been on, and joined us. The funeral arrangements, the casseroles from friends who knew I’d starve otherwise, the flowers, the church, even the damn bagpiper Aidan, my eldest brother, had found to play at the graveside didn’t touch me. I sailed through all that with hardly a twitch. But watching Ryan’s casket sink into the ground on an unseasonably blustery, wet, gray day just about killed me. I didn’t want him there in that cold earth. I wanted him warm and alive beside me. Barring that, I wanted to fling myself into the grave and wait for the Judgment with him. Aidan and Cay got me home, and friends helped as best they could. But eventually, I had to stand on my own. And that is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.

 

 

Chapter 1

 

How sweet my man had been. Twenty-two months after his funeral, eight short years after we’d met, I touched the frame holding my favorite photograph of the two of us. My brother had taken the photo and I treasured it above all others. But I’m getting ahead of myself. As in all things, the story must start at the beginning.

My name is Cassidy Malone. About as Irish as one can get. My parents–Dad especially–were big on that. Probably why he enthusiastically welcomed Ryan Malone into the family when he asked for my hand in marriage.

Originally, I was born Casidhe Aghamora Shaughnessy. Of the Shaughnessys near Galway, according to family records. In any case, the name was a mighty mouthful for the wee thing I’ve been all my life. In fact, until I went to school, I’d thought my full name was Casidhe-You-Wee-Thing Shaughnessy. My twin, Cayden, shortened it to Cas. The first time his friends tried to shorten his name to Cay, they ended up with a few bruises. I had a few myself, but he’s gotten past that. At some point, the spelling of my name changed to Cassidy. The moment Ryan Malone said he wanted to marry me, I set about procuring the license and shedding the unwieldy Shaughnessy. I was barely nineteen when we married, and madly in love with the handsome man five years my senior.

Is there anything better than young love? The first kiss, the first mutually whispered terms of endearment, the first utterings of that all-important, I love you... I remember each moment of those with Ryan as if they happened yesterday.

Like a fairy tale, our life together was picture perfect. Too perfect, some had said in those very early days. Later, they said it was the perfection of our love that eventually doomed us and sent the sickness that killed Ryan.

I got my first glimpse of him when he came into the coffee shop where I was learning the fine art of working the espresso machine. My second day on the job, my very first job as a high school graduate, so far I’d learned to work the register, wipe tables, sweep, and empty trash. I’d had a little time on the espresso machine the day before with Mary, the manager, at my shoulder. Around eight on Friday, June the tenth, the morning rush had begun to slow when she handed me an extra large paper cup with the order marked on it. Vanilla latte. Medium foam. She turned away to take the next order and my heart went through a complicated little dance involving joy and terror in equal parts.

My first solo. Simple enough. Too worried about doing a good job, I took a quick peek to note the customer was tall, but then nearly everyone in the world is taller than I am. I did observe he was taller than Dad, not as broad in the shoulder, and maybe an inch shorter than Cayden. A bit like my brothers, he had auburn hair, darker than our varying shades of red, a little over-long so it brushed the collar of his whisky brown leather jacket. I didn’t catch the color of his eyes just then. I was too focused on the process. Grind the coffee, tamp it down just so. Lock it into the espresso machine, push the button. Very carefully I steamed the milk, watching the thermometer all the while until a noise made me look up for half a second. I quickly returned my focus to the job at hand, poured, stirred, dusted the top with powdered vanilla, and set the cup on the counter.

“Vanilla latte,” I said.

Anxious for feedback, I watched his long fingers wrap around the brown paper cup with the shop logo imprinted on it. We left it to the customer to find the tops and java jackets for themselves.

He paid little attention to me and lifted the cup. I had the impression this was his first cup of the day. He didn’t appear to be quite awake, despite the gleam of freshly shaved jaw and damp hair holding in a recently washed and combed position. Did he use hair gel to keep it that way, or would his hair ease into loose curls as it fully dried? Without stepping away from the counter, he lifted the cup and took a sip. A second later, his eyes flew open and speared me like green lasers.

Oh no. I did my best to hang onto my hopeful smile. I’d seen that same look in my father’s eyes the first time I’d made an apple pie and had mistaken salt for sugar. As I’d been standing there, hands twisting nervously, Dad ate a large bite of pie, exclaimed how wonderful it was and how I’d grow to be a fine cook. I was ten at the time and Mom was down w. . .