And Then Came You

by Maureen Child

  “And don’t come back.” Mike walked down the steps, too, flanking the other side of Sam.

  The sisters were more different than alike; the only feature they shared were the pale blue eyes they’d inherited from their father. Yet no one seeing them now could ever doubt their connection. The three of them stood there, not even touching, yet linked together into a single unit to stand against all invaders. And even though it frustrated the hell out of him to be facing it, a part of him wondered what solidarity like that felt like.

  “Good advice,” Jo pointed out.

  “Okay, look.” Deliberately ignoring the other two women, Jeff stared only at Sam. “I’m staying at the Coast Inn. When you’re ready to talk, call me.”

  “Yeah,” Jo snorted. “That’ll happen.”

  “Get out of town, weasel-dog.”

  He shot a glance at Sam’s sisters. “Really good to know the Marconi girls haven’t changed any.”

  Jo and Mike looked ready to rumble, but it was Sam who answered him. “No, we haven’t. But you haven’t changed, either, Jeff. Still giving orders, expecting them to be followed.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Mike’s right. Go away.”

  Frustration simmered inside him, but there was no help for it. He wasn’t going to get anywhere with her now, and besides, he had to get back to the inn anyway. He’d already been gone longer than he’d planned. Nodding, he turned and headed for his car, parked at the curb. With every step, he felt the icy stares of three sets of eyes boring into his back—and he was grateful the Marconis weren’t armed with more than a hammer.

  Two hours later, the Marconi sisters were still arguing in circles.

  “It’s a good thing Papa’s not here,” Mike grumbled. “He’d have a stroke.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said. “That’s helpful.”

  Mike jumped up off the overstuffed sofa and stalked around the living room. “You want helpful? How about I go over to the Coast Inn and hit him with a hammer until he doesn’t move anymore?”

  “For God’s sake, Mike, sit down.” Jo sounded more resigned than angry and Sam thought that, at least, was a step in the right direction.

  “How can you and Jo both be so calm?”

  “This is not calm,” Sam told her younger sister. She didn’t feel calm. She felt . . . as if she were standing between two boats, with a foot in each, while trying to keep her balance during storm surf. Sooner or later, she was going to get wet. The question was, would she drown? “This is . . . hell, I don’t know what it is.” She lifted her gaze to Jo. “Can you believe this?”

  “No.” Jo scowled thoughtfully into her Diet Coke. “What’s he want from you, anyway?”

  “A divorce, apparently.” Sam shook her head and leaned back into the sofa cushion. Snatching up a pale pink throw pillow, she clutched it to her middle like a shield. “But Mike started swinging her hammer before he could tell me.”

  “Should have hit him with it,” Mike said, still radiating fury.

  “Not until we know what’s going on.” Jo’s voice was calm, cool, but her eyes flashed with indignation. “I’m guessing he’s got more divorce papers for you to sign.”

  “More divorce papers. For God’s sake, I’m married.” Sam still couldn’t believe it. For nine years, she’d lived her life as a divorcée. The very first divorced woman in the history of the Marconi family—as Nana had continually reminded her for the first year or so of her humiliation. The taunts had finally stopped when Sam had offered to sew a big red D on her clothes.

  But now what? She’d dated. She’d had sex. Okay, not a lot of sex, but some. Did that make her an adulterer? Great. So now the scarlet letter on her clothes would have to be the real scarlet letter? “This is great,” she said, “just perfect. It’s a wonder women aren’t lining up outside the house just to take their turn at having my life. It’s just so damned entertaining.”

  “So long as you’ve got your sense of humor,” Jo said.

  Sam sneered at her.

  “So what’re you gonna do?” Mike stopped pacing and dropped onto the sofa, sinking into the old, faded cushions. She propped her booted feet on the battered coffee table, scattering magazines to the floor.

  “Go talk to him, I guess.”

  “I vote a big no to that,” Mike said hotly.

  “You don’t get a vote.” Sam threw the pillow at her.

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” Jo said.

  “It’s not like he’s some psycho stalker or something,” Sam argued.

  “Nope,” Mike muttered again, “just a bastard.”

  “You’re not helping,” Jo told her.

  “And you are?”

  While Jo and Mike argued without her, Sam’s brain raced with too many thoughts to keep track of. She’d been doing so well. She’d put Jeff and everything he represented into a small corner of her mind and only took it out three or four times a year to torture herself. She’d moved on. Built a life that had nothing to do with the girl she’d once been and her long-forgotten dreams. But now she was faced with him in the flesh. Right here in Chandler.

  The past was suddenly way too close.

  And Sam knew there’d be no letting go of it again until all the ts were crossed and all the is dotted.

  “I have to tell him.”

  “Are you insane?” Mike’s voice hitched high enough to crack glass.

  “That might not be a good idea,” Jo said.

  “Ya think?” Mike choked out a laugh as she jumped off the couch to stalk around the perimeter of the room.

  Sam shook her head. “He has a right to know. And I have to tell him.”

  Jo took a drink of her soda, then bent to set the glass on the table in front of her. “He didn’t want to know nine years ago, remember?”

  “Do you really think I could forget?” Sam jumped up from the couch and stared at her sisters. They’d been there for her through all of it. But they hadn’t actually lived any of it. They couldn’t know. Couldn’t possibly understand what it had been like to survive when you thought your heart was breaking.

  She did, though.

  Sam had made it through and now, nine years later, she had to do what she thought was best. Despite what her family thought. Despite the fact that Jeff wouldn’t want to hear it.

  “Yes, I remember,” she said, and heard the soft catch in her own voice but couldn’t do a thing to stop it. “I remember all of it.”

  Mike frowned and grabbed up a throw pillow, hugging it close to her chest. Jo stood up and, after shooting a glare at Mike, faced Sam. “It’s probably not a good idea.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “It won’t change anything.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “And you’re still determined to tell him?”

  Sam inhaled sharply, deeply, then let the air slide from her lungs. “Jo, the man’s got a right to know he has a daughter out there somewhere.”

  “Yeah?” Mike asked, stepping up to stand beside them. “And when you tell him you put your baby up for adoption? Then what?”

  A small ribbon of pain wrapped itself around Sam’s heart and gave a twist. “Then I’ll sign the divorce papers. Again. And we’ll go back to our own lives.”

  And right now, even the looming chore of having to deal with the summer of hell was looking pretty good to Sam. Anything, to get back on an even footing. To get back to the world as she knew it. A world where she and Jeff Hendricks were simply casual strangers who happened to have made a baby while sharing an all-too-brief marriage.

  “Sooner the better, you ask me,” Mike said, glowering at no one in particular.

  “Who asked you?” Jo challenged.

  “You should have,” Mike retorted, “but nobody listens to the youngest.”

  “Ask yourself why,” Sam said.

  “Jealousy, pure and simple.” Mike laughed and held out her right hand.

  “Whatever helps you sleep nights.” Jo slapped her right hand on top of Mike’s, then th
e two of them waited for Sam to complete the triad.

  When she did and the three of them stood joined together, as they had since they were children, Jo spoke softly. “Your call, Sam. But whatever you decide to do, we’re with you.”

  Chapter Three

  The Coast Inn had started out in life as a private home on a huge tract of land. Now, over a hundred years later, the stately Victorian stood on a narrow slice of land on the ocean side of Pacific Coast Highway.

  The constant whir of traffic roared in counterpoint to the ocean, which slammed into the rocky beach just below the inn’s gracefully sloping back yard.

  Sam drove into the inn’s wide parking lot, pulled into a diagonal slot, and turned off the engine. Her hands fisted on the steering wheel until she determinedly relaxed them. She took a deep, calming breath. But she wasn’t fooled.

  She wasn’t calm.

  She wasn’t peaceful. What she was, was furious.

  A neatly buried deep-down, fury nibbled at the corners of her heart despite her efforts to quash it. “I shouldn’t have to be doing this. Dealing with this. With him.” She should have been able to leave the past precisely where she’d left it. But even as that thought stumbled clumsily through her mind, she had to admit, if only to herself, that the past was never very far away.

  It walked beside her, shadowing her through holidays she couldn’t share with her child. It stopped and sneered at her every August 8, when she was forced to mark the passage of another year—and wonder what her daughter was doing. What she looked like. What she was feeling. If she was happy.

  All of those questions and more were a part of Sam’s life. They’d become the underlying thoughts that lived just beneath her consciousness. They were with her always. She tortured herself, wondering if her little girl was now taking ballet lessons or playing soccer. If she preferred dirty jeans to party dresses.

  If she ever wondered about her birth mother.

  The hard, cold knot of pain and loss stayed lodged in her chest every moment of every day.

  The past was a shadow that stayed just out of reach. Taunting Sam with memories that weren’t real—just imaginary home movies she’d made of the little girl she’d held briefly and then let go.

  Sighing, Sam stared out through the windshield at the sweep of ocean stretching out in front of her and squinted as the sunlight dazzled the surface of the water. Far enough out to avoid the slam of the waves against the shore, sailboats glided serenely under the cloud-dotted sky. Seagulls wheeled and danced in the wind. Closer to shore, surfers sat atop their boards, waiting for just the right wave. Sam knew exactly how they felt.

  Here she sat.

  Waiting for some unseen signal to tell her to get off her butt and go face Jeff.

  She leaned her forehead on the sun-warmed steering wheel and closed her eyes, seeing him again. Not just this morning, but nine long years ago. It was all so clear. Her last glimpse of him as he marched out of their apartment, a duffel bag stuffed full of his clothes in his right hand. He hadn’t stopped to look back at her. Hadn’t even lifted a hand in a good-bye wave. He’d just walked away.

  And now he was back.

  “But nothing’s changed, right?” Sam blew out a breath and straightened up. Shifting a glance at the inn to her right, she imagined Jeff in one of the plush suites. Rich men liked having the biggest hotel rooms, didn’t they? With hot and cold running room-service flunkies at their beck and call? She could practically see him, sitting at a table, poring over the Wall Street Journal and wishing he were anywhere but there.

  Then again, maybe he didn’t care.

  Maybe seeing her again didn’t affect him at all.

  Sam wasn’t sure which notion was more hurtful. If he hated seeing her again—or if it meant nothing.

  And as she stared out at the water stretching on forever, Sam’s mind drifted back, drawing up images that were all too clear.

  At eighteen, Sam thought she’d found her world. Every time Jeff touched her, skyrockets went off inside her. He’d been her first lover and the magic she’d found with him had never been repeated.

  That last night with him, heat surrounded them and dazzled every breath, every whispered word. They came together over and over again in the dark, bodies meshing, hands stroking, breath mingling.

  His body claimed hers and she gloried in the feel of him, sliding deep within. Climaxes rippled through her and still it wasn’t enough. She’d wanted more, always more. Of him. His kisses, his caresses, his voice, whispering in her ear how much he loved her. How much he would always love her.

  She’d held him close, trapping his body within hers, as if a part of her had realized, even then, that happiness that sharp, that sweet, couldn’t last.

  And it hadn’t.

  “Well, doesn’t really matter what he’s feeling now, does it?” she muttered and clambered out of the truck. Her knees were still a little weak, the force of that memory still quaking within her.

  Dusting her damp palms against her jeans, she shoved her car keys into her pocket, grabbed up her purse and slung it over her shoulder, then stepped back and, because she needed to hit something, slammed the truck’s door. Hard.

  The only way to insure that Jeff Hendricks got the hell out of Dodge was to go see him, and sign his stupid divorce papers, again. She didn’t owe him anything beyond her signature. But for her own sake, she would tell him about their daughter.

  Would he give a damn? she wondered. Would he be tormented by the same “what-ifs” that danced through her mind day and night?

  Would he even be interested to know that together they’d made a child and then lost it?

  Jeff gripped the phone a little tighter, but kept his voice even. Just a matter of control. And control was the one thing he’d been weaned on. In the Hendricks family, control was damn near a religion, without all the messy supplication—after all, genuflecting will ruin the crease in your trousers.

  The voice on the other end of the phone paused and he spoke into the breach. “It’s being taken care of. Should be wrapped up by tomorrow.”

  With any luck.

  Dammit, he had to get out of here.

  He hadn’t expected this mission to be as . . . treacherous as it was turning out to be. But then, he had a feeling that nothing was going to go as smoothly as he might have liked. Just seeing Sam again had been harder than he’d imagined. He hadn’t counted on that punch of awareness. The slam of something hot and needy that had damn near staggered him, despite the threatening stances taken by her sisters.

  Seemed that nine years wasn’t long enough to put out all the fires within.

  And just being here was already fanning those flames. He didn’t want the fires burning again. The last time he’d surrendered to the heat, he’d been reduced to a pile of ash. A hard lesson, but one he’d etched into his brain to keep him from ever giving in to his emotions again. Besides, the past—which he rarely allowed himself to revisit—was done. Over.

  The voice drifting through the phone receiver demanded his attention. “Right,” he said, forcing himself to concentrate on the conversation at hand. At least long enough to say good-bye. “Tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  He hung up, letting his fingertips rest on the receiver as if trying to keep the connection to his present as a safeguard against the past. But the thread was frayed and he couldn’t quite hang on. Jeff felt as though he were a particularly meaty bone being fought over by the dogs of his past and his future. And the jaws of each were sharp enough to tear him to pieces.

  “A damn mess,” he muttered. All because some miserable little county clerk had decided not to do his job. Jeff just wished he had the man’s scrawny neck between his hands for five minutes. But the minute he considered it, Jeff reminded himself that he was a reasonable, civilized man. And Hendricks men never lost their tempers. Never gave in to the urge for violence, no matter the temptation. “So maybe I’d just turn the little bastard over to Mike Marconi, then stand back and
watch.”

  Despite everything, he smiled to himself at the mental image. Hell, the Marconi women were nothing if not . . . exciting.

  Exciting. Sam’s face rose up in his mind, and once again he saw her pale blue eyes glare at him. Even in memory, she could shoot daggers at him like no one else ever had. Daggers, hell. She’d stabbed him through the heart. And he had the scars to prove it. Deliberately then, he turned his mind away from Sam and everything she represented and shifted a look toward the adjoining room. The low-pitched murmur of the television made him smile again, for different reasons. And he remembered just what was really important in his life.

  Soon enough, this would be over and he’d be back in San Francisco. Back where he belonged. Where his life waited. Until then, the old inn where he was staying was comfortable, furnished in a style that made him think of a family summer home. The walls were covered in softly striped wallpaper and the gleaming wood floors were polished to a high shine. A wide balcony overlooked the cliff and the raging ocean some thirty feet below. The sliding glass doors separating the balcony from the main sitting room were open and the white sheers fluttered in the cold breeze as if dancing in tune to the ocean’s beat.

  Jeff surrendered to the restlessness inside him, stepping out onto the wooden deck and letting the wind slap at him in fierce welcome. He dropped both hands onto the whitewashed railing, his fingers curling over the cold, damp wood as he stared out at the swells rising out at sea. Froth churned on the water’s surface and then danced skyward as the waves punched against the shore below the inn. A handful of surfers rode the breakers in toward the beach, then kicked free and paddled back out to wait for the next ride. Sameness.

  There was a comfort in that. One he appreciated even more today, now that the regularity of his life had been interrupted. Squinting into the afternoon sunlight, he spotted the storm clouds hovering on the horizon. Though it was summer, he thought it appropriate for how his day was going that black thunderheads were gathering for an assault. Why not? He’d already made it through a different sort of storm at the Marconi place. Why shouldn’t the heavens open up on him, as well? Hell, the way things were going, he should expect a hurricane. Class 12.