A Soft Place to Fall (Shelter Rock Cove)

by Barbara Bretton

  "Annie!" He stepped out of the Rover and waved to her.

  If she saw him, she gave no indication. She floated past him and drifted across the parking lot in the direction of the main street and Annie's Flowers.

  He grabbed the sheaf of papers on the passenger seat then locked the car. His source in New York had come through with more information than he had anticipated, none of which cast Sam Butler in a good light. If any of the allegations mentioned in the notes were true, there was a good chance Butler would be serving some serious jail time very soon.

  "'Afternoon, Doctor Talbot." Janna favored him with a friendly smile. "Your three-fifteen called. She'll be a few minutes late."

  He nodded and headed back toward his office, the image of a radiantly glowing Annie Galloway still in the forefront of his mind. He couldn't ask Ellen. There was nothing professional about his concern and they both knew it. Nobody would stop him if he plucked Annie's chart from the mix and browsed through it but he wasn't sure he would like the man who did such a thing. Then again he had done a lot of things these last few weeks that he wasn't sure he liked. Digging into Sam Butler's background, for one.

  He flipped the lights on in his office and was shrugging out of his jacket when Ellen popped out of her office across the hall.

  "You're late," she said with mock disapproval. "Forget to set the alarm?"

  "Twins," he said, tossing his packet of papers down on his desk.

  "Newborn or age of consent?"

  He couldn't help but laugh. "The Pelletiers delivered early."

  "Healthy?"

  He rapped his knuckles on the side of his credenza. "So far, so good. They'll need a little hospital time until they build up their weight, but it all seems routine."

  "Great." The furrow between her brows seemed to deepen despite the good news. "After all they went through trying to conceive those babies, they deserve a happy ending."

  "Don't we all," he said, settling down his desk. "I saw Annie Galloway on her way out."

  Was he crazy or was Markowitz glowing now too?

  "Did she say anything?"

  "No," he said, "I don't think she even knew I was there."

  Ellen nodded but said nothing.

  "Is she okay?"

  "She's fine," Ellen said as a smile broke across her narrow face. "She's just fine."

  And that was how he learned that the woman he had loved and lost was going to have a baby by a man who might be welcoming in the New Year behind bars.

  #

  Annie hurried past the window of Annie's Flowers, past the book shop and DeeDee's Donuts and ran straight for her truck. She turned the key and slammed it into reverse without giving it even a second to warm up. She would make it up to the Trooper one day but the need to be with Sam was too strong to deny.

  A baby . . . I'm going to have a baby!

  She repeated the words out loud and she still couldn't quite believe they were true. Seven months for now, on a warm day in June according to Ellen, she would give birth to a baby whose ribbon of DNA would link her and Sam together forever. A baby whose very existence was proof of their love.

  "Any questions?" Ellen had asked her before Annie left the office.

  "Yes," said Annie. "How on earth did this happen?"

  Ellen, bless her heart, bypassed the easy joke for an honest answer. "I don't know," she said. "All I know is that there couldn't be a luckier baby in the world."

  A baby . . . a tiny, helpless, demanding infant whose needs and desires would take precedence over everything for a long time to come . . . .

  "A miracle," she whispered. A one-in-a-million kind of miracle sent to two people who had believed their chance at real happiness had passed them by.

  That's how you feel, Galloway, but are you so sure it's how Sam feels?

  They had only talked about children once, when Annie told him she couldn't get pregnant. He had looked at her with deep understanding and never broached the topic again. She had interpreted his reaction as one of compassion and acceptance but now she wondered if she had only seen what she wanted to see. He had spent part of his teens and his entire adult life raising his brothers and sisters. He had more hands-on parenting experience than most parents his age. Maybe what she had been looking at was sheer relief. Been there, done that, and he was glad he wouldn't be doing it again with her.

  But babies weren't just by invitation only. Sometimes they appeared on the wings of a miracle and left it to you to figure out how to fit your lives around them.

  How romantic, Galloway. What if the thought of a baby just makes him feel trapped? Your miracle could send him looking for the exit.

  Well, it was too late to worry about that now. It had been too late from the moment sperm met egg two months ago. The sooner she told Sam, the better. That was the one thing she knew for certain. Oh, there were probably better ways to handle a situation like this. Sweeney would no doubt have a dozen strategies all designed to break it to a man gently. But Annie had never been one for strategies when it came to love. If she had been, she never would have stayed with Kevin right up until the bitter end. All she knew, all she cared about, was getting to Sam and telling him that she was pregnant with his child.

  Would he be happy about it? Please, God, please . . . . Would he feel burdened with more responsibility? Not Sam . . . he'll understand. Would he swing her up into his arms and kiss her senseless or would he tell her that she was on her own? She couldn't imagine such a thing. He was as honorable a man as she had ever known, the kind of man a smart woman dreamed about.

  He would be shocked, of course. So was she. In truth, the reality still hadn't sunk in, only the need to share the news with the one man on earth who would care as much as she did. They had never discussed a family, not in so many words. What they had together felt like forever but neither one of them ever talked about tomorrow.

  You never discussed the future? Not even once? Doesn't that seem a little strange, Galloway?

  How would she know what was strange? She had married the first boy she ever dated and she had stayed married to him for almost twenty years. She was still stuck back in the land of senior proms and going steady while the rest of the world had long since moved on.

  Maybe you didn't do things like talk about a future together once you were past the first flutter of youthful longing. Maybe you were meant to be sophisticated and mature enough to just let the future take care of itself -- or not, as the case may be -- and not worry and wonder like a teenager in love for the first time.

  Unfortunately, Annie felt like that teenager when she was with Sam. Once upon a time her capacity for joy had been boundless but time and circumstance had taken that gift away from her. But now she could feel herself growing more lighthearted, more joyful with every day she spent in his company, more like the woman she used to be, the one she had all but forgotten. He delighted her, thrilled her, made her believe that the second time around could be even more wonderful than the first – maybe because this time she knew how precious and fragile it all was.

  And she would tell him all of that and more right now, this very afternoon.

  It was almost three o'clock. He was probably still in the old barn behind Warren's house, working on one of the canoes but just in case he'd come home early, she decided to drive up their road and see if his truck was in the driveway.

  She slowed as she approached the top of Bancroft Road and a flicker of alarm began in the pit of her belly. A pair of dark cars were angled across her driveway. She gripped the wheel more tightly to stop her hands from trembling. This couldn't be happening, not now, not when she finally thought she had broken free from the death grip of Kevin's gambling debts. Not now when she was on the verge of a new and wonderful life. She peered farther up the road and saw another pair of dark cars angled across the foot of Sam's driveway and bile rose up into her throat and it took every ounce of self-control at her command to keep the contents of her stomach where they belonged.

  She had believe
d every sleazy bookie and loan shark in New England had found his way to her door in the weeks following Kevin's death, all of them demanding payment. She had known Kevin was in trouble but the scope of it was worse than she had imagined.

  And now it looked like Kevin's mistakes were going to put Sam in jeopardy too. It was bad enough that she had paid for her late husband's sins. She couldn't allow Sam to pay for them as well.

  She had to get to him before anyone else did, warn him while there was still time. She would tell him everything, the whole ugly story from beginning to end, sparing no one this time around. The gambling, the racketeers, the threats, the long climb back from the abyss, the sickening realization that it wasn't over, might never be over no matter what she did or how hard she tried. If they knew how much Sam mattered to her, they would use him against her in ways that would haunt her the rest of her life. The father of her child deserved better than that.

  She had to love him enough to let him go.

  #

  The long red cedar planks had to be steamed until they were pliable enough for Sam to urge them into the curved line of the canoe's hull. It took patience and a lot of pressure to ease a straight piece of wood into the unnatural shape and once he managed to convince the planks to conform to the basic design, he had to nail them down before they changed their minds.

  He was in the process of hammering down the third plank on the second of four canoes when he heard a familiar vehicle crunching its way up the driveway. Max heard it too and he leaped up from his spot in the sunlight and started running circles by the door. Sometimes Sam felt the same way when he saw Annie, like doing handsprings and cartwheels and writing her name in the sky with shooting stars.

  Did she know he loved her? He hadn't told her in words. He hadn't the right, not before he knew what his future held. There were no guarantees that things would work out according to plan. What he felt for her ran too deep. He'd put through a call this morning to his contact in Washington. He needed answers, a time frame, something he could hang his future on. They reminded him that his future hung on getting it right; the success of the sting operation against Mason, Marx, and Daniels would help prove his innocence.

  Last night he had dreamed their future. Five years from now, ten years – the two of them together in a house filled with sunlight and dreams and more joy than he would have imagined possible this side of heaven. He had dreamed a family for them too, big healthy babies born of their love. There wouldn't be babies for them. Annie had told him about the years of trying for a miracle. He told her that she was miracle enough for him. She was his home, his family, his soft place to fall when the world was too much with him. Now that he had found her, he couldn't imagine living a life without her there at the center of it.

  "Sam!" She burst into the barn like a beautiful tornado. Her hair whipped around her face in a froth of curls and she looked slightly manic, slightly wild, juicy and sexy. The woman he loved.

  Max was practically doing back flips for her attention but she didn't seem to notice.

  He tossed down his hammer and wiped his hands on the sides of his jeans. "Don't tell me," he said. "You're ditching the flower shop and we're heading for Tahiti."

  He meant it as a joke, something to make her smile at the absurdity of the statement, but the look she gave him was filled with so much pain and downright misery that he couldn't pull air into his lungs.

  "There's something you don't know," she said, ducking away from his outstretched arms.

  "There's probably a lot I don't know," he said, trying to will himself into something approaching calm. "We've both lived a full life before we met."

  She dismissed his words with a wave of her hand. "You don't understand. Nobody knows what I need to tell you, not Susan or Claudia or Warren. Nobody in this entire town, Sam, only me."

  He felt a sharp pain in the center of his gut. She stood not three feet away from him but she was suddenly beyond his reach. "And you want to tell me."

  "No," she said with almost brutal honesty, "I don't want to tell you at all but I have to. They're back and they know about you and –" She lowered her head and turned away so he wouldn't see her tears fall.

  So proud, he thought. Strong and tough and honorable, yet it was her loneliness that had reached out and touched his heart.

  "Who's back?" he prodded. "More Galloways on a mission from God?"

  The afternoon was so quiet. Not even bird song cut into the silence. Then in the distance he heard the sound of a car moving closer and in that moment he realized she was trembling.

  "You don't know what they're like," she said as he began to wonder if she was talking about little green men in space suits. "You can't hide from them. They'll find you no matter where you go and they'll keep finding you until they get what they want."

  He grabbed her by the arms. "You're scaring the shit out of me," he said, hoping to shock her back into coherence. "Who's after you, Annie? What the hell is going on?" She couldn't know about him. There was no way she could have found out.

  A car turned into the driveway. A second car followed right behind.

  "Take Max and go," she said, trying to push him away. "It's me they want. I did everything I could after Kevin died . . . I sold the house and the car . . . I worked three jobs . . . I paid off everything, every single dime but you can't break free of them . . . "

  It was beginning to make sense. The cottage by the water. The beat up old car. The lack of furniture. The sense that maybe her marriage hadn't been quite as easy as everyone else wanted him to believe.

  A car door slammed shut, then another, then two more.

  "Oh Jesus!" It was almost a keening cry. "Please go, Sam. This is my problem, not yours. You don't deserve to –"

  Four men in dark suits stepped from bright sunlight into the shadowy barn. Annie broke free of him and stepped forward. She was Amazonian in her defense of him and he had never loved her more than he did in that moment.

  "Let him go, " she said in a voice far stronger than he had ever heard before. "He's nothing to you. I'm the one you're looking for."

  The four men exchanged puzzled glances and Sam knew it was all over. His idyll in Shelter Rock Cove had come to an end. He took her gently by the shoulders and moved her back into the shadows.

  "I'm the one you want," he said, wishing with all his heart there had been a way to make this easy for her.

  "Sam Butler?" One of the men stepped forward from the pack.

  "I thought you'd call first," he said. "That's what I was told." First a phone call, then an agent would arrive to bring him back to New York under protective custody. That was the way it had been explained.

  "Check your cell phone," the man said. "We tried but you never picked up."

  A warning bell went off deep inside his gut.

  He pulled his phone from the back pocket of his jeans and pressed the power switch., then cupped his hand over the display so they wouldn't see the glowing green numbers. He quickly touched the button again to shut it off.

  "Dead as a doornail," he said.

  "See?" asked the man. "Couldn't get through."

  What the hell was going on? He'd had enough dealings with the feds over the last year to know when something didn't feel right. Only one explanation made any sense: Mason, Marx, and Daniels had gotten wind of the sting and Sam's place in it. They weren't big enough to stop the government but they sure as hell were big enough to stop Sam Butler.

  Annie's eyes were wide with fear. He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her everything, walk her through his days and his decisions, shoulder the guilt that belonged to him and even some that didn't, if only it could take them back to where they had been just an hour ago before the real world came calling.

  But the less she knew, the better. All that mattered to him now was keeping her safe from harm.

  He tossed the phone onto the work bench. "So where do we go from here?"

  "Sam Butler, we have a warrant for your arrest on charges of emb
ezzlement. You have the right to remain silent . . . "

  Annie cried out and for a moment Sam wanted to pull her into his arms and lie to her. But he couldn't do it. He couldn't do one goddamn thing but hold out his arms for the cuffs and let the silence between them say everything and nothing at all.

  Max growled as the men approached his master. Sam met Annie's eyes and the look of anguish in them almost dropped him to the ground. This is what you did to her, Butler. This is how she'll remember you. Can you live with it?

  He wanted to fight the bastards. He wanted to slam his fist into their smug faces then grab Annie and run as far away as they could. He'd never been one to give up in the face of trouble but this time there was no choice, not if he loved her.

  Annie wrapped her arms around Max's neck and held him by the collar. Poor old Max whimpered a little but she couldn't help the tears that streamed down her cheeks and darkened the dog's yellow ruff. The men weren't there for her. They had nothing to do with Kevin's gambling debts. For the first time in years, she wasn't the one running scared from strangers who showed up on her doorstep and turned her life inside out.

  The funny thing was, Sam hadn't seemed surprised. Startled, maybe, but not surprised. All of that talk about phone calls – it was almost as if he had been expecting this.

  Good going, Galloway. You really know how to pick them. Bad enough the first one was a compulsive gambler, now you've snagged yourself a criminal.

  She refused to believe that. Sam was a good man. She knew it deep inside her soul.

  Kevin was a good man, too, but that didn't stop him from almost ruining your life.