And so hungry! Its insatiability poured comfort into her empty places, even as it drove her to a peak of wanting him. Mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, neighbor, she’d forced herself to focus on self-sacrifice, ignoring her innermost yearnings. Yet, incredibly, the rule-breaking teenager she’d been, the sensuous young woman who’d dared to accept his love despite her parents’ wishes, had lived on inside her, waiting to re-emerge.
I’m going to drown in him, Cate thought. Lose sight of what’s best for all the people I love. With a little shiver of apprehension, she realized Danny still fit into that category.…
Dear Reader,
Welcome back to Special Edition, where a month of spellbinding reading awaits you with a wonderful lineup of sophisticated, compelling August romances!
In bestselling author Jodi O’Donnell’s memorable THAT’S MY BABY! story, When Baby Was Born, a pregnant woman with amnesia meets a cowboy she’ll never forget! Beloved author Ginna Gray sweeps us away with another installment of her miniseries, A FAMILY BOND. In her emotional book In Search of Dreams, a woman with a scandalous past tries to say no to the man who vows to be in her future. Do you think a reunion that takes seventeen years to happen is worth waiting for? We’re sure you’ll say yes when you read When Love Walks In, Suzanne Carey’s poignant story about a long-ago teenage passion that is rekindled—then a secret is exposed. When the hero of Carole Halston’s Because of the Twins… needs help caring for his instant brood, the last thing he expects is a woman who turns his thoughts to matrimonial matters, too! Also this month is Jean Brashear’s Texas Royalty, in which a tough, once-burned P.I. seeks revenge on the society girl who had betrayed him—until she manages to rekindle his desires again! And finally, Patricia McLinn kicks off her compelling new miniseries, A PLACE CALLED HOME, with Lost-And-Found Groom, about a treacherous hurricane that brings two people together for one passionate live-or-die night—then that remembered passion threatens to storm their emotional fortresses once and for all.…
All the best,
Karen Taylor Richman
Senior Editor
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A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered local politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative and feature assignments, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
August, Seventeen Years Ago
It was the kind of cricket-dense night when the moon is full and the woods are replete with leafy undergrowth, when Danny Finn parked his beat-up Ford in some tall weeds near Ohio’s Brush Creek and came around to help seventeen-year-old Cate Mc-Donough from the passenger seat.
Her face upturned to his in the moonlight, she came into his embrace. After much longing and many discussions about the ethics of their situation, she’d agreed to let him make love to her. He was on fire with anticipation now as he caressed her back and shoulders, the sweetly rounded shape of her buttocks through the thin, flower-sprigged cotton fabric of her dress.
A former star on Beckwith High School’s varsity basketball team who’d “dated” a number of other girls before Cate, Danny hadn’t understood the true nature of desire until his had focused on her. As he claimed her now, mutely acknowledging his need and the deep love he felt, she radiated a corresponding heat, the firm conviction that whatever they’d do together would be right and beautiful.
Since becoming interested in boys in the seventh grade, she’d been crazy wild in love with him. Yet for three and a half years, he hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It had made her ache to watch him drape a possessive arm around some undeserving girl’s shoulders, oblivious to the way that same girl mocked his eccentric grandmother and combat-traumatized uncle behind his back and flirted with other boys when he wasn’t available.
Then, one gray December afternoon, he’d literally bumped into Cate, almost knocking her off her feet on the salt-pocked but still-slippery sidewalk outside her father’s hardware store. The temperature had been twenty-three degrees and plummeting, her cheeks apple-red with cold, her naturally curly brown hair thickly encrusted with snowflakes.
When he’d offered to buy her a hot chocolate at Rudy’s, she’d accepted. From that moment on, they’d been inseparable, despite her parents’ strong disapproval of him. “The Finns are trash,” her father had raged when he’d found out that they were dating. Danny had been in trouble with the law. His family was eccentric. He wasn’t worthy of her.
Though she couldn’t deny Danny had been fined for underage drinking on one occasion and received several speeding tickets during his junior year, Cate had argued that the infringements were minor ones. He’d settled down since then. As a senior, he’d earned good grades, worked hard at a variety of after-school jobs and stayed out of trouble.
Nothing she’d said had changed Jack McDonough’s opinion of him. When her parents had ordered her not to see him again, she’d pretended to go along with their wishes while stubbornly following her heart.
Her best friend, Brenda Hale, who “lacked supervision” according to Cate’s mother, had covered for Cate whenever she and Danny could arrange to be together. Remaining a good girl in the sense that she was still a virgin, Cate had flirted on numerous occasions with going all the way. Each time, she’d pulled back from the brink, denying herself and Danny the intimacy they craved.
Now he was a man—nineteen going on twenty, lean and dark-haired, with the kind of smile that could melt all but the hardest of hearts, and eyes the deep-blue color of bachelor buttons. Not even Cate’s father could call him a slacker. Since graduating, he’d worked full-time, pumping gas and repairing cars at Miller’s Garage. In his off hours, he continued to make himself available for the kind of manual labor that was usually reserved for young teenagers, mowing lawns and shoveling snow, chopping and hauling firewood.
Though they’d never discussed the reason for his industry in so many words, Cate knew Danny was trying to amass enough money to bankroll their independence. Secure in his love, she’d become a woman. Or almost. She would graduate from high school seven months hence and turn eighteen a week later. Employed part-time in the hardware store by her father since she was in the eighth grade, she’d managed to save a modest nest egg of her own, in the process acquiring retail skills that would come in handy when she worked her way through college.
For most of her life, it seemed, she’d wanted to be an English teacher. Unable to count on her parents’ financial help if she married Danny, and unwilling to let him pay the freight for both of them while she continued her education, she was determined to come up with her own tuition money and contribute to their living expenses.
The previous week he’d formally asked her to be his wife. And she’d said yes. They’d agreed to leave Beckwith, the small town surrounded by farms where they’d both grown up, on her eighteenth birthday—head for Cincinnati or some other big city where she could attend college and he could find better paying employment. With the commitment, there didn’t seem to be any reason to postpone expressing their love.
At Cate’s suggestion, their first lovemaking would take place on Serpent Mound, a grassy, undulating, ceremonial earthwork that had been built on the crest of a bluff overlooking Brush Creek by a little-known Indian tribe nearly a thousand years earlier. Familiar with it since childhood, thanks to a series of school field trips and lectures about the indigenous residents of Adams County, she’d always considered the scenic promontory, crowned by the effigy of a partially uncoiled snake about to swallow a frog’s egg, to be a holy place.
Serene, enigmatic, a point of contact with the distant past, the mound wasn’t a burial site; archaeologists had long since determined otherwise. Aware the serpent’s head was aligned with the setting sun on the evening of the summer solstice, they’d speculated it had been built as a kind of earthwork calendar to keep track of the planting cycle. Or as a site for religious ceremonies.
Releasing her, he helped her up a steep, thickly wooded slope that offered a secluded, if somewhat more difficult to negotiate, approach to their destination. They caught sight of the park’s metal observation tower first. A moment later the mound itself came into view. Moonlight washed its verdant twists and coils like milk. The aroma of freshly mowed grass assailed their nostrils.
Lightly Danny rested his cheek against Cate’s hair. “Any special spot you’d prefer?’ he asked.
“Up by the serpent’s head,” she answered without hesitation, having pictured making love to him there a thousand times. “The depression in the middle of the egg can shelter us.”
It was his favorite spot, too—the most spiritually charged and welcoming, in his opinion. Thanks to the curve of the serpent’s body, it was also one of the most difficult to see from the gate.
“Suits me, darlin’,” he whispered.
If somebody caught them, it would be all over between them until her eighteenth birthday. Her parents would keep them apart if they had to follow her around with a shotgun. Or send her off to a religious boarding school. They’d probably try to have Danny arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Shivers of excitement and anticipation prickled Cate’s skin as they reached the serpent’s jaw and the frog’s egg, a much smaller, circular mound with a depression at its center, almost like a hole in a doughnut. Inside it, two sapling trees had sprung up. Despite them, there would be more than enough room for them to lie down and get comfortable together. The lights of scattered farmhouses and outbuildings in the valley below glittered like diamonds against a swath of velvet as Danny led her into its embrace.
They lay down together on the sweet-smelling grass. Though she might have been deluding herself, she thought she could feel the earth turning as she came into his arms. A deep sense of connectedness to all of creation swelled in her imagination.
For a moment the only sounds that disturbed the night’s insect chorus and the rustling of leaves overhead were the rasp of Danny’s zipper and their hushed breathing as he helped her take off her panties. I wish we could take off all our clothes instead of remaining partly dressed, Cate thought. That we could share a bed and covers. Fall asleep afterward and wake with the morning light. I wish we didn’t have to worry about somebody catching us.
His touch gentle in its suggestiveness, Danny unbuttoned the bodice of her dress and reached inside it to stroke her nipples with his calloused fingertips. As they rose to meet his caress, stabs of arousal sped to her deepest places.
They’d agreed they couldn’t afford to linger. “Come into me, Danny,” she begged, her words blunted against the warmth of his neck as she pressed against him. “I want to feel you there…”
He didn’t need a second invitation. Cradling him with her knees as he assumed protection, she marveled at how beautifully made he was.
With a flash of pain that was quickly over, Cate’s virginity was lost. Joined to Danny and in a way she couldn’t have put into words, to all the lovers who’d gone before them in the history of the world, she abandoned rational thought. Like a leaf caught up in a stream that was approaching full flood, she immersed herself in the moment as they made fumbling, imperfect, ultimately satisfying love.
As they lay together afterward, deep in each other’s arms, she vowed he’d be her only lover, her only husband.
Life and unloving parents had conspired to arrange a different outcome.
It was approaching the dinner hour on a Friday evening in October as thirty-four-year-old Cate Anderson, now an English teacher at Beckwith Consolidated High School, ran off a stack of fliers on the school’s balky, outdated copy machine. A widow since the death of her husband, Larry, from complications of leukemia three years earlier, she wore a charcoal-gray sweater set, a Pendleton plain wool shirt she’d bought in a Minneapolis thrift shop when her teenage son, Brian, was still a toddler, and recently resoled penny loafers. The second pair she’d managed to ruin that week, her panty hose had a run in them.
Designed and produced with the principal’s blessing on behalf of a recently organized Save Our Jobs, Save Our Town committee, the fliers represented an effort to boost attendance at a rally that would take place in the town library on Monday evening. According to recent news stories, Mercator, the new corporate parent of Beckwith’s only industry, Beckwith Tool and Die, was in the process of deciding whether to expand the plant or close it.
Without it, this town will dry up and blow away, Cate thought. She was trying to imagine what her father, her mother-in-law, Beverly Anderson, and her best friend, Brenda Lawler, all of whom worked at Beckwith Tool and Die, would do for a living if the plant closed when Brenda abruptly knocked on the media room’s glass door.
Cate motioned for her to enter. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to think of it, how’d you get into the building? By now the outside doors are usually locked.”
Brenda’s expertly made-up hazel eyes glittered with excitement. “Hank Whittaker was mopping up in the front hall,” she answered. “I pounded on the glass…told him I had to talk to you right away.”
“From the look on your face, maybe I ought to sit down,” Cate suggested, trying to suppress the sudden apprehension she felt.
For once Brenda didn’t laugh or tell her she was exaggerating. “Actually,” she agreed, “that might be a good idea.”
Incredibly, her friend was serious. What on earth could she possibly say that might cause me to lose my balance? Cate wondered apprehensively, pulling up a stool.
“Is this about you and Dean?” she asked. “Please don’t tell me the two of you are getting back together! When I think of the black eye he gave you last month…”
Dean was Brenda’s soon-to-be ex-husband. Brenda shook her head. “It’s like I told you…I’m not going to take any more of his bullying. When he stopped by day before yesterday to pick up some of his things and suggested we fool around, I ordered him out of the house.”
“Then what’s this about?”
Brenda bit her lip. “Danny Finn’s back in town. I thought you’d rather hear it from me instead of some busybody gossip.”
Astonishment pierced Cate to the quick as a thousand images competed in her head—Danny pelting her with snowballs. Handing her a bouquet of wild flowers he’d picked in the woods. Kissing her senseless. Unaware of the gesture, she hugged herself as she thought about the way he’d held her during the homecoming dance her senior year while her classmates had whispered about them. The way they’d made love, in his car and at the mound, settling all the questions of the universe.…
It isn’t possible he’s back after so many years, she told herself. I must be dreaming this.
As always, whenever she imagined coming face-to-face with Danny again, she remembered the look he’d given her on the night they’d tried to elope, as her parents had ushered her out of the Clermont County Jail, past the interrogation room where one of the deputies was still questioning him. The prospect of seeing him again and cringing afresh at his unwarranted judgment of her was almost more than she could take.
No matter how many times he told me he loved me, he hated me that night, she thought, flinching as if from the misery of a scab being picked from a wound. Does he still? Or has what happened ceased to matter to him? What will he say or do if we run into each other?
Daunting as the prospect was, it was even more demoralizing to imagine how their lives might change if Danny met Brian and guessed the boy was his. The resemblance was striking if you looked for it. Maybe he wouldn’t. She could only hope. She groaned inwardly at the prospect of Danny making demands. Brian’s confusion and hostility. Her son’s custody becoming a war zone. The battle that could result would spread through Beckwith like a forest fire if one of the town gossips made the connection.
“It’s been seventeen years. What’s Danny doing here now?” she croaked.
“He’s the Mercator executive assigned to evaluate Beckwith Tool and Die,” Brenda answered, a world of sympathy in her voice. “Carl Fosse announced it at the plant this afternoon. There was a storm of talk over it, I can tell you. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that most of Beckwith looked down on the Finns. Now here’s Danny, returning as a corporate executive with the power to put everyone out on the street.” She paused. “When we heard the news, your dad looked like he was going to have a stroke.”
Maybe he will, Cate thought, hunching over on her stool. He’s never stopped hating Danny or condemning me for loving him. If he has to be polite, take orders from the man he believes led his daughter astray, it might actually kill him. The explosion that would occur if Danny fired him was almost beyond imagining.
She knew that, whatever form her father’s outrage took, he’d make her pay. So would her mother. They always did. Meanwhile Brian and her in-laws stood to get hurt.
Her forehead lined with sympathy, Brenda put her arms around Cate. “Sorry I had to be the one to tell you,” she apologized. “But you were bound to hear about it from somebody. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility of meeting him. At least with me you don’t have to pretend…put on an act about your feelings.”
Cate nodded in agreement. “Where’s he staying?” she asked. “In one of the motels out on Route 32?”
Brenda shook her head. “According to his old boss, Zeb Miller, who pumped gas for him this evening, he plans to stay at his grandmother’s place. One of the part-time checkers at Clingers’ Market said she saw his fancy car in the driveway out there on her way in to work. Apparently, he phoned ahead and had the electricity turned on, because there were lights in some of the windows. Funny, isn’t it, considering he’s been gone so long and the way he always felt about that wreck of a place, that he’d go straight home to roost?”
Cate had to admit it was. Meanwhile, it seemed that the news about Danny’s return was getting around. Imagining him at his grandmother’s farmhouse, thinking about the past and listening to the crickets, made her want to weep. He was so achingly close. Part of her wanted to run to him, let him absorb the pain his absence in her life had produced.
She wouldn’t do it, of course. They were strangers now, as foreign to each other as if they’d grown up on opposite sides of the planet. Her knowledge of him was seventeen years out of date.
“Do you think he’s come back to punish Beckwith for the way it treated him and his family?” she asked. “That he’ll close the plant without listening to a word anyone might say in its defense?”
Brenda shrugged. “I don’t know. I overheard people asking each other that question. And you have to admit Danny’s got plenty of reason to be less than charitable to the folks around here. Yet somehow I can’t picture…”
Cate knew what she meant. The Danny she’d known and loved would have based his decision on concern for the ordinary people whose lives would be affected, not just his employer’s bottom line, though naturally that would be an important factor. He wouldn’t have been inclined to seek retribution for retribution’s sake. Still, a lot of water had passed under Brush Creek Bridge since they’d been close. She couldn’t be sure how he’d react.
He might be very changed, hardened by the circumstances of his departure and the rigors of climbing the corporate ladder. It struck her that maybe she hadn’t really known him. She would have bet her life, the night they’d run away to Clermont County to get married, that he would never have walked out on her. Yet, in the days following her forced return home with her parents, no letter had come. He hadn’t phoned. The man she’d loved and trusted so deeply had vanished without a trace.
A painful question surfaced. “Have you heard…whether or not Danny’s married?” she asked in a small voice, forcing herself to face the likelihood that he had a wife and children. “I realize his personal life is none of my affair. I’d, um, just like to know the lay of the land before we run into each other.”
Brenda’s sympathy was clear. “If he is no one’s said anything to me about it,” she avowed.
A widowed, working mom who supported herself and her son on a modest teacher’s salary, Cate realized she couldn’t hold a candle to Danny’s achievements, at least insofar as the world would value them. If he was happily married, the father of several children who just happened to be Brian’s half-sisters and brothers in addition to his corporate success, the disparity between their lives would break her heart.
She felt as if it had been broken already. Aching to see Danny, yet dreading it, she struggled to pull herself together. And succeeded to a point. It was only then that she noticed the bruise on Brenda’s cheek, shadowy beneath her makeup.
“Dean did that…didn’t he?” she exclaimed, demanding a closer look.
Brenda’s take-charge expression crumpled. “He didn’t just go, the other night,” she confessed. “He hit me first.”
By now, dusk was falling, causing the exterior windows at the far end of the office to blacken and reflect the room. Putting aside her own tangle of emotions, Cate focused on her friend’s safety and well-being.
“If he threatens you again, I want you to call me,” she insisted. “I’ll come over, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. If necessary, call the police. I’m not afraid of Dean and his threats. And I’m not intimidated by the fact that he’s a sheriff’s deputy. In my opinion, he’s the kind of coward who’ll back off if there’s a witness present.”
At the same time as Cate was locking up the school office and walking Brenda to her car, Danny was seated on the front porch of his grandmother’s house, stirring its dilapidated wooden swing with one desultory foot. He hadn’t been “home,” if he could call it that, for almost seventeen years. Ignoring the emblem of his most recent promotion, a shiny black Infiniti he’d parked in the weed-choked drive, he sipped at a beer, turned his gaze inward and tried to deal with his ghosts.
The only one who still mattered to him was Cate. In truth, he’d volunteered for the Beckwith Tool and Die assignment out of a gnawing wish to see her again. As he’d driven down from Chicago via Interstates 65 and 74, exiting onto Ohio Route 32 at Mount Carmel, just east of Cincinnati, he’d let memories he’d tried to bury for years resurface and catch him by the throat.
Accepting the pain they’d brought, he’d allowed himself to remember the sound of her laughter. Her inherent kindness. The delicious warmth of her as she’d nestled close. She’d been the best thing in his life. In point of fact, the only thing. Losing her as they’d stood poised on the brink of having a life together had scooped the heart right out of him.
Why’d she leave the Clermont County Jail that night without even glancing in my direction, he asked himself for perhaps the thousandth time as the swing creaked softly with his movements. Sure…her parents had her by the scruff of the neck. She was their prisoner, in effect. And we were in a very humiliating situation. Yet she could have looked at me. Let me know without saying a word that the setback to our plans was only temporary.
The way things had turned out, it hadn’t been, of course. They hadn’t set eyes on each other again.
As the moon rose, gilding the saplings and weeds that choked the overgrown property he’d inherited, he found himself asking the same old questions. First and foremost, he wanted to know why Cate hadn’t answered his letters. Clearly, she’d gotten them. Signed in her familiar handwriting, the annulment papers had reached him at his new address.
Painful as her silence had been, neither it nor the arrival of the annulment notice had overthrown his hopes. She was underage and her parents were calling the shots. He would simply wait them out—return to Beckwith for her on her eighteenth birthday.
A phone conversation with his grandmother two months after his departure had changed his plans. When he’d asked about Cate, the old woman had responded that she’d married Larry Anderson, a Beckwith High School graduate several years Danny’s senior, who’d worked full-time in her father’s store. Following the ceremony, she’d added, Cate and her new husband had left for Minneapolis.
“You mean they’re—” he’d choked off the words “on their honeymoon.”
“Supposedly the Anderson boy got himself a job up there,” Geraldine Finn had answered sourly.
For Danny the news had been like a kick in the stomach. Initially his mind had refused to register it. Cate…married…to Larry? he’d thought in disbelief. It’s only been a few months since we spoke our marriage vows!
True, the towheaded former basketball player for Beckwith High had always had a thing for Cate. Secure in her love, Danny hadn’t minded. He doubted if she’d even realized it. For one thing she’d hardly ever talked to him—just murmured the kind of pleasantries people do when their only connection is the fact that one of them works for the other’s parents.
She can’t possibly love him, he’d told himself. Not so soon after me. There has to be some mistake. The thought of another man touching her had made him want to go ballistic.
A mean-spirited comment from his grandmother had only made matters worse. “Good riddance if you ask me,” she’d observed when he didn’t speak. “You’ll find somebody else. The girl’s like her parents…thinks she’s too fine for the likes of us.”
If so, he’d never seen any sign of it.
Cutting the call short, he’d punched a fist through one of the flimsy walls in his shabby Chicago apartment as he’d sought an explanation. And failed to come up with one. Cate was still underage, still a senior in high school. He couldn’t imagine her parents letting her drop out to marry anyone, not even Larry with his sterling reputation. They’d wanted her to attend college, be somebody.
Unless…unless…
What if she’s pregnant, he’d thought suddenly, and doesn’t know how to find me? That she accepted Larry’s proposal out of desperation?
They’d been so careful…only slipped up once. Somehow he’d forced himself to calm down and phone Terry Pobanz, one of his high school buddies.
The affable Terry had sounded as puzzled as he felt. “Nobody around here gets it,” he’d admitted. “They never dated. Then suddenly they’re married and headed for Minneapolis. I always thought you guys…”
“Yeah,” Danny had replied gruffly. “So did I. They didn’t…have to, did they? Get married, I mean.”
Terry’s surprise at the question had echoed in his voice. “Not that I know of,” he’d answered. “I haven’t heard anything like that.”
Bidding Terry goodbye before his friend could ask too many painful questions, Danny had buried his face in his hands. The following day he’d grimly set about making a separate life for himself.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.