Found: One Son

by Judith Arnold

  “We’re connected, Emmie.

  Letter to Reader

  Books by Judith Arnold

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Copyright

  “We’re connected, Emmie.

  “I’m not convinced we’re history,” Michael went on. “We made promises to each other five years ago—”

  “And you broke your promises.”

  “I told you why.”

  “You said you wanted my forgiveness. All right. Fair enough. If I forgive you, will you go away?”

  Michael shook his head. “I changed my mind. I want more than your forgiveness. We had something five years ago. Something important.”

  “Five years ago it was important. Now it’s dead.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, reaching across the table and taking her hand. Not to say grace this time, but to force her to acknowledge him physically. If he couldn’t persuade her with his words, perhaps he could persuade her with his touch....

  Dear Reader,

  In my book Found: One Wife I created a detective agency called Finders, Keepers, which specializes in helping clients reconnect with their long-lost lovers. Found: One Wife told the story of Maggie Tyrell, the skilled detective and incurable romantic who started Finders, Keepers.

  By the end of that book, Maggie had found her own true love. Now she’s eager to reunite other separated lovers. But as she warns all her clients, finding a lost lover doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Occasionally those lovers don’t want to be found. Occasionally the reappearance of a love from their past is enough to destroy their present.

  Maggie gives client Michael Molina that warning, but he hires her to find his old sweetheart anyway. In Found: One Son, he learns that sometimes it’s as difficult to build a future with a woman you love as it is to let go of the past.

  Judith Arnold

  Books by Judith Arnold

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  634—CRY UNCLE

  684—MARRIED TO THE MAN

  715—BAREFOOT IN THE GRASS

  763—FATHER FOUND

  767—FATHER CHRISTMAS

  771—FATHER OF TWO

  809—FOUND: ONE WIFE

  830—THE WRONG BRIDE

  Don’t miss any of our special offers. Write to us at the following address for information on our newest release.

  Harlequin Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269 Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  FOUND: ONE SON

  Judith Arnold

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  This book is dedicated to my GEnie sisters.

  PROLOGUE

  THIS WASN’T GOING to be easy.

  Thinking five years back into his past was never easy for Michael. Talking about it was worse. He had formed scars and figured out how to live again—but going back there, getting sucked into the memories as if they were a whirlpool, spinning him around and dragging him down...

  It was hard.

  He wasn’t in the past anymore. He was in the pleasant, sun-filled office of Maggie Tyrell, the founder and president of Finders, Keepers, a detective agency that specialized in locating lost lovers. He had come to see her because once he’d summoned the courage to start thinking about that long-ago time in San Pablo, he’d realized that most of his thoughts centered on Emmie Kenyon.

  He missed her.

  He worried about her.

  He wanted to tell her he was sorry for what had happened, what he’d done, the way he’d disappeared on her. He wanted to hear her say she could forgive him. He wanted to know she was all right.

  Discussing the situation with the detective seated across the desk from him, her computer humming and a pencil wedged between her thumb and forefinger, was a trial, though. The only way he could do it was by reminding himself that seeing Emmie again would be his reward.

  “Her name was Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon,” he began. “Everyone called her ‘Emmie.’ Those were her initials—M.E.” He sounded strange to himself, his voice gruff, the words struggling to emerge.

  Maggie Tyrell smiled and nodded in encouragement. One wall was adorned with a framed poster of two ballet dancers in an elegant clinch, but Maggie herself seemed anything but elegant. Her hair was frizzy and wild, her apparel utilitarian, her build stocky, utterly lacking the ethereal grace of the ballerina.

  She seemed all business, which Michael liked. He didn’t think he could bear being pitied or fussed over, having either his stupidity or his heartache commented upon.

  “We met five years ago,” he said when Maggie remained silent, her gaze expectant. “In San Pablo, down in Central America.”

  That tweaked her interest. She stopped fiddling with her pencil and leaned forward. “An international search isn’t as simple as a domestic one, Mr. Molina,” she warned.

  “I doubt Emmie’s still down there. She was working with a church group, teaching school.”

  Maggie jotted that detail onto the notepad before her. “Elementary? High school?”

  “Back then, she was working with younger kids. Elementary, I guess.”

  Maggie nodded. “What else can you tell me about her?”

  He could tell her that the moment he’d noticed Emmie standing near a booth at the open-air market, her windswept blond hair and pale-blue eyes startling in a land where everyone had dark coloring, her lightweight linen skirt pressed against her long legs by the breeze and her cheeks pink from the sun, he’d become enchanted, eager to know who she was. He could tell the detective that he’d been seduced by Emmie’s lilting Southern drawl and her gentle hands, and the way laughter bubbled up from deep inside her like an underground spring of crystalline water. He could tell Maggie Tyrell that making love with Emmie was like discovering heaven did exist after all, and you didn’t have to die to reach it as long as you were in Emmie’s arms.

  But none of that would help Maggie to locate Emmie. “She would be about thirty now, maybe thirty-one,” he said. “She grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I think her parents were well-off.”

  Tyrell scribbled notes on her pad.

  “I left San Pablo kind of abruptly.” Understatement of the century, he thought grimly. “I didn’t have time to say goodbye or let her know where I was going. I had to... well, leave.”

  The detective nodded.

  “I need to find Emmie, to explain to her why I had to leave her like that.” No, he needed to find Emmie to tell her that when he’d said he loved her, he’d meant it. He didn’t love her now—too much time had passed, and they would practically be strangers if they saw each other—but he wanted her to know he hadn’t lied to her then, not about love.

  Maggie put down her pencil and leaned back in her chair. “Mr. Molina, I’ve got to tell you, before I take your case, that things might not work out.”

  He nodded. “I know it’s going to be hard to find her.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure I’ll find her. Finders, Keepers has been in business for a year and I haven’t struck out yet. But sometimes the person I find isn’t the person my client is looking for. Peop
le change. Ms. Kenyon could be married, for instance.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” he muttered. How could a woman like Emmie remain single these past few years? Michael surely hadn’t been the first man to fall for her, and he wouldn’t have been the last.

  “She might be settled, with a family of her own. A man from her past might be the last person she’d want showing up on her doorstep.”

  “I understand.”

  “I started Finders, Keepers because I wanted to bring separated lovers together,” she told him. “My brothers are detectives, too—I share this office suite with them. But they specialize in digging up dirt for their clients, working for divorce lawyers, that kind of thing. I’m the family optimist, and I believe happy endings are possible.”

  Michael waited, knowing she had more to say.

  “I’ve done a good job of bringing long-lost lovers together, but I’m afraid I haven’t always made them happy,” she warned.

  He nodded. She wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t told himself a million times, ever since he’d begun his own unprofessional, ultimately fruitless search.

  “So. I’ll take your case, but I want you going into it with your eyes open.”

  He thought of the months after he’d returned to the States, when he couldn’t close his eyes at all because closing them would bring on the nightmares. Now whenever he closed his eyes he saw Emmie. “My eyes are wide open,” he assured Maggie Tyrell.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s find Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  IT WAS THE TRICYCLE that brought him up short.

  He remembered everything Maggie Tyrell had warned him about how people changed, about how what a client was looking for and what he found weren’t always the same thing, about how she couldn’t guarantee happiness. And he remembered the more basic warning that the woman she’d located might not be the same Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon he had known five years ago. “Kenyon isn’t that unusual a name,” she’d reminded him when she’d phoned him a week after he’d signed a contract with her. “Your Mary-Elizabeth might have gotten married and changed her name. Or there could be other Mary-Elizabeth Kenyons.”

  “Then why did you call?” he’d asked Maggie. “If you don’t think this is the same woman as Emmie—”

  “You’re paying me to find things out. I did a search of the database of the two big teachers’ unions, and I found a woman named Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon living in Wilborough, Massachusetts, and currently working as a third-grade teacher at the Oak Hill School in the Wilborough School District. According to her employment records, she’s thirty years old and she was born in Richmond, Virginia. Now, I don’t know if—”

  “It’s her,” Michael had declared. If the woman Maggie Tyrell had found wasn’t his Emmie, his heart wouldn’t be pounding like a stampede in his chest. His hands wouldn’t be clinging so tightly to the receiver that his knuckles ached.

  “As I said, Mr. Molina, there could be other Mary-Elizabeth Kenyons.”

  “And all of them are thirty-year-old elementary schoolteachers?”

  “I’ll dig deeper if you’d like. I can try to find out if she was ever in San Pablo.”

  “No,” Michael said. “It’s her. I know it.”

  It wasn’t until after he’d gotten off the phone that he’d allowed himself to consider that maybe the woman Maggie had found wasn’t the woman he’d lost. The Emmie Kenyon he’d known wouldn’t have wound up in Massachusetts. He couldn’t imagine her in some white-clapboard town with snow and sleigh bells and winter apples, a town populated by lobstermen and flinty villagers who misplaced their R’s when they talked. The Emmie he’d known five years ago had taken great pride in her Virginia ancestry. She wouldn’t have chosen to make her home amid all those Yankees.

  But that was the point Maggie had repeatedly emphasized: even if she found the right Emmie Kenyon, it might not be the Emmie Michael was looking for. She might be the same person genetically. But five years was a long time. Emmie could have changed.

  He stared at her house through the open window of his rental car. It sat on a tidy, tree-lined block of modest, well-kept houses. The lawn was neatly cut and edged, the azaleas were splashed with bright-pink blossoms and the house’s white shingles and pine-green shutters looked recently painted. The one-car garage was open, but no car was inside; the interior of the garage appeared uncluttered, although he couldn’t see much from his vantage across the street. No lights appeared to be on inside the house, although given the bright late-afternoon sunshine, there was probably no need for indoor lighting. The mailbox on a post at the foot of the driveway bore the number of the house but no last name.

  And there, parked on the grass alongside the driveway, was a tricycle.

  Michael cursed.

  Despite every warning Maggie Tyrell had given him, and every warning he’d given himself, he’d had...hope. Hope that so many years after fate had sent him to hell and home again, he could stroll back into Emmie’s life, bringing apologies and explanations as if they were generous gifts she couldn’t help but accept. Hope that he could somehow convince her the past was truly behind him, and everything he’d felt for her that long-ago spring in San Pablo had been true and real, and now that he’d put his world back together again, maybe he would feel those feelings again. He’d been persuasive then; surely he could be persuasive now.

  Maggie Tyrell, detective to the lovelorn, the curious and the foolishly optimistic, could have cautioned Michael from here to Sunday that Emmie would likely have gone on to live her own life, and if he had half a brain he would have recognized the truth in Maggie’s words. Of course Emmie had gotten on with it, left San Pablo and forged a new life for herself—in Massachusetts, of all places. He could accept that. But he’d never let himself consider that she might have gotten married and kept her own last name. She hadn’t struck him as the sort who’d do that.

  The hell with her last name—it was the tricycle that really had him scared.

  If she was a wife and mother, Michael would disappear. He’d go back to California and figure out a new strategy for surviving the rest of his life. He wouldn’t screw up whatever she’d created for herself.

  But still...hope. Hope that the tricycle—one of those vibrant-colored plastic low-riders with fat wheels—belonged to a neighbor’s child. Hope that Emmie was still single, still gentle, still possessed of the most mesmerizing blue eyes he’d ever seen, the most honest smile he’d ever felt warming his soul. Hope that her eyes would sparkle and her smile would shine when she saw him.

  He climbed out of the car. That no one seemed to be home was actually a good thing. Before he actually saw her, he wanted to orient himself to this part of the world where she’d set down roots. Any reunion was bound to be awkward. He wanted to accustom himself to her new environment first It might make him feel a little more comfortable when he finally saw her.

  The air smelled of spring, of afternoon warmth. When he shut the car door, two startled swallows bolted from the foliage of the maple tree near where he’d parked. A minivan cruised down the street, and he waited until it had passed before crossing the road to her driveway.

  His gaze swerved inexorably to the tricycle. The front wheel was the color of a ripe banana, and large enough to seem aggressive. Red streamers hung from the molded plastic handlebars. The seat was green.

  Birds called to one onother. A flat white petal floated down from a blossoming dogwood in her front yard, swirling and gliding like a scrap of paper caught in a breeze. He wondered if she tended the property all by herself, or if she hired a landscaping service. Or if she had a husband to mow her lawn and prune her shrubs.

  More birds sang out, and then he detected the sound of young laughter in the distance, drifting from behind the house. He didn’t dare to march up her driveway and around the side to see if the laughter was coming from her backyard—and then he didn’t have to. Two young boys scampered into view, veering past the bloss
oming rhododendron at the front corner of the house, shrieking playfully as they fled from someone. They were moving so quickly Michael could make out little more than logo-emblazoned T-shirts, grass-stained blue jeans and faded Red Sox baseball caps.

  Kindergarteners, he’d guess. Five years old, at least. Which meant they couldn’t belong to Emmie, because five years ago she’d been in San Pablo with him. Maybe she’d adopted the boys, or they were her nephews. Maybe they were stepsons, her hunsband’s from a former marriage.

  Or else maybe Michael had come to the wrong house. Maybe this Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon wasn’t his Emmie after all.

  That possibility was reinforced when a robust woman chasing the boys appeared. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore soccer shorts, a sweatshirt and running shoes. Definitely not his Emmie.

  He was disappointed, but also relieved.

  “Get back here, you two!” she shouted at the boys. Apparently she was unaware of the stranger lurking near her driveway, observing her. “Right now! You guys are in so much trouble...” But she was laughing nearly as hard as they were. Her threats were obviously part of the game.