A New Beginning ~ Part Five
by: Karen

It was the middle of the afternoon. Since both Jax and Brenda had been too nervous to eat breakfast, and they had been otherwise occupied during lunch, they were now starving. "Brenda, come on," Jax pleaded, as he leaned against the door of the suite. "I need something to replace all that energy we expended earlier."

Brenda was hopping around the bedroom with one shoe on and one bare foot. "I'm coming, sweetheart. I just can't find my other shoe."

Jax rolled his eyes in amusement.

"I think I saw it during the pillow fight..." Brenda continued, her voice becoming muffled.

Jax returned to the bedroom to see if he could speed up the search process, and grinned at the sight before him. Brenda was on her knees with her head under the bed and her rear end sticking up. He couldn't resist the temptation to swat it.

"Hey!" Brenda's head reappeared and she glared at him. "All right, just for that, you have to retrieve my shoe. It's under there, but it's way in the middle."

"Yes, milady," Jax said as he laid flat on the floor and reached under the bed. "Your glass slipper, Cinderella," he proclaimed, as he gently placed the shoe on her foot.

"Thank you. Now, Prince Charming, let's go eat before we both faint from hunger!"

Jax led her to a little Italian restaurant which was nearly deserted at this hour of the day. They ate fettucini with pesto sauce until Brenda declared she would explode if she ate another bite. She shook her head and waved a despairing hand when the waitress asked if they would like some dessert. Jax however, ordered some gelato.

"Jax!" Brenda exclaimed in disbelief. "How can you possibly have room for dessert?"

"Loving you requires a great deal of energy," he responded, arching a seductive eyebrow.

"Oh really? Well now that you mention it, I am rather hungry," Brenda said with a sultry look.  

Jax's eyebrow raised even higher as he felt a stockinged foot slide up his leg. "I think I just changed my mind about what I want for dessert," he decided. Hurriedly they paid the check and raced each other back to the hotel.

Two hours later, their hunger appeased, Jax and Brenda wandered hand in hand through Central Park. Jax flagged down a horse drawn carriage, and swept Brenda inside before vaulting up to join her. They laughed and teased each other and gazed into one another's eyes. When they came to a stop, the driver gave them a knowing look and said, "Newlyweds?"

"Well, actually, we've been married almost a year," Jax replied.

"Yes, from our first wedding," Brenda agreed. "Except that wasn't really legal. And it's been almost six months since our second wedding..."

"Which never really happened," Jax added.

"So actually we're not even really married," Brenda explained.

"But she just proposed to me, so we're going to try it again," Jax finished. He looked at Brenda and she nodded and they both smiled. They turned back to the driver, who looked thoroughly bewildered. Jax and Brenda began to laugh.

Even more perplexed, the driver said, "Yes, well, I'm sure you'll be very happy," and hurried off to his next fare, leaving Jax and Brenda laughing so hard the tears streamed down their faces.

As they began to regain some semblance of composure, Brenda said, "Remind me not to try to explain our marital status to complete strangers, okay?"

Jax mimed taking out a pad and jotting something down. "So noted."

Brenda giggled again, and then tilted her head as the romantic strains of "Somewhere My Love" drifted toward them from a concert in the park.

Jax bowed low before her. "May I have this dance?"

"I thought you'd never ask," Brenda replied as he took her hand and she placed her other hand on his shoulder.

They floated over the grass as one, staring deeply into each other's eyes, and letting the music carry them to a world all their own. When the last note faded away, Brenda eyed Jax coquettishly over an imaginary fan, and curtsied low. "Thank you ever so much," she said in her best Scarlett O'Hara imitation.

"The pleasure was all mine," Jax returned in an accent which somehow seemed more southern Australian than southern Georgian.

As she brushed back her hair, Brenda's hand flew to her ear. "Oh, my earring! I felt it fall, but now I don't see where it went. Jax, we have to find it! It's the pearl teardrop you gave me."

"Don't panic. If it's not right here at our feet, it must have bounced, but it can't have gone too far. You look from here over to those bushes, and I will look from here over to the path. We'll find it, Brenda," he said reassuringly.

They both turned and began to carefully inspect the grass in the gathering dusk. Near the bushes, the ground began to dip, and Brenda thought perhaps her earring had bounced and rolled beneath the bushes. As she bent to move a branch aside, she heard angry voices coming from the other side of the hedge. Curious, she stepped into a slight opening in the hedge so she could see what was going on. There were two men, one with jet black hair and a Mediterranean look about him, and the other had medium brown hair shot with gray.   "I said I refuse your offer. Or should I say command'?" The brown-haired man said.

"Very well, then," the other man replied, and turned as if to go. Suddenly he spun, and Brenda caught the flash of a hypodermic needle just before it sank into the brown-haired man's neck. The man crumpled immediately. Brenda opened her mouth to scream just as a hand clamped over her lips.