Harlequin Heartwarming May 2016 Box Set: Through the StormHome for KeepsThe Firefighter's RefrainTo Catch a Wife

by Rula Sinara

  Jack had no trouble believing in coincidences. He’d experienced one today, coming to town on the very day Emily discovered she was having his baby. But for Rose Daniels, who also had a mother named Scarlett, to appear in Riverton, a town she apparently had no previous ties to, with a plan to stay at a B & B that was the former home of Scarlett Finnegan and now run by the woman’s oldest daughter? Coincidences like that were harder to swallow. Make that impossible.

  First thing in the morning, he intended to see Emily before he returned to the city, and nothing was going to derail that plan. He needed to reassure her he wouldn’t disappear, not this time. Maybe he would take her out for breakfast. Or, better idea, he could take breakfast to her.

  He had also agreed to swing by the station and have coffee with Chief Fenwick, who had probably invited him so he could keep urging him to accept the job offer. Then, on his way out of town, he would stop at the Finnegan farm. Dropping in to see his best friend’s widow and her son was a perfectly natural thing to do, and the impromptu visit would give him a chance to check up on Rose, remind her he was keeping an eye on her. And if she did have ulterior motives for hanging around the Finnegan family home, well, she would know he’d be keeping tabs on that, too.

  Jack angled his head and ran a hand over his face while he checked his reflection in the mirror. Emily didn’t seem to mind the scruff, but this should satisfy his mother.

  As soon as he was back in Chicago, he’d dig into Scarlett Daniels’s past. If Emily’s mother and Rose’s mother turned out to be the same woman...

  He squeezed toothpaste onto his toothbrush.

  If it turned out that Emily and Rose had the same mother—and although that was a big if, it was entirely possible—then someone would need to break the news to Emily and the rest of her family. After everything she’d told him today—how she doubted her ability to be a good mother in the absence of a role model, how she secretly dreamed about the day when her mother would come home, that she’d been keeping journals most of her life so she could share them with her mom when that day finally arrived—he worried about her reaction.

  Oh, man. He’d sure hate to be the one to burst that bubble. Emily clearly didn’t trust him, and he could hardly blame her for that. So far, he hadn’t done much to earn that trust. With her here in Riverton and him in Chicago, closing the gap between them would be tough enough. Telling her about her mother—if indeed Scarlett Daniels was her mother—would not endear him to her. It could even widen the rift between them.

  He rinsed his toothbrush and then gargled a mouthful of some nasty-tasting mouthwash he found in the medicine cabinet.

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  For as long as he’d been friends with Annie and Eric, he had known that the Finnegan sisters’ mother had left when the girls were young, but that was all he knew. Tomorrow, he could ask his mother about Scarlett Finnegan, find out if she remembered anything about the woman. That would seem kind of random, though. He had promised Emily to keep quiet about the two of them and the baby until she had talked to her sisters. Until she did, it was best not to arouse his mother’s suspicion. She would insist on an explanation, and she had a knack for knowing when he was being evasive.

  Safer to put those questions on hold till he was back in Chicago and could take a closer look at Scarlett Daniels’s file, maybe call social services to see if they could shed more light on her background. Someone would have the answers he was looking for. He just hoped he was going to like what he heard.

  * * *

  ALONE IN HER APARTMENT, Emily slipped off her jacket and tossed it onto the back of a chair, set her purse on her desk next to the box with the new hamster wheel. It was an unusual gift, and yet strangely intimate at the same time. The morning after their one night together, he had commented that for a small animal, the hamster made a lot of racket. She wondered if the new wheel meant to say that if he did spend the night again, he didn’t want Tad to keep him awake. Thinking about it meant tonight would be a sleepless night for her.

  She prowled around the apartment, unable to settle her nerves. Finally, she decided on a cup of the tea her sister had given her. Chamomile was supposed to have a soporific effect, wasn’t it? As she waited for the kettle to boil, her phone buzzed with an incoming text message.

  How was your date? FM

  Emily rolled her eyes and replied to Fred.

  It wasn’t a date. Em

  He walked you to your door & kissed you g’night.

  How on earth did he know that?

  Are you spying on me?

  Nope. Grabbing a bite to eat at the café.

  For heaven’s sake. She poured boiling water over the tea bag in her cup. This was why she shouldn’t have let Jack kiss her in public. What if someone else had seen them?

  Who else is there?

  No one. Slow night. I’m the only one sitting by the window. :)

  She pulled the tea bag out of her mug, dropped it into the sink by its string and stirred in a little sugar. She carried her phone and the steaming mug of disgustingly yellow liquid into the living room and looked out the front window. Fred waved from the window of the Riverton Bar & Grill. She set the mug on the sill.

  Good night Fred.

  Sweet dreams Em. ;)

  The winky face bugged her more than it should have, and she was tempted to try having the last word. Then again, considering the lie she’d told her sisters, she owed it to him to back down gracefully. Besides, he was having far too much fun with this, and he would gleefully persist with this cyber-banter for as long as she let him. So she gave him a casual wave, then used the same hand to give her hair a dramatic flip as she grabbed her mug and twirled away from the window. Fred’s wide grin, which she caught out of the corner of her eye, took some of the fun out of her flounce.

  She busied herself by replacing the squeaky wheel in the hamster cage with the new one from Jack, laughing at the sleepy-eyed glare she received from Tadpole. The animal didn’t enjoy being woken up even though she had no compunction about disturbing the slumbers of others.

  Emily eyed her laptop, debated turning it on to check her blog and her email, and decided against it, finding herself drawn to the ancient oak filing cabinet she’d salvaged from the newspaper office after her boss had decided to spruce up the place.

  She opened the bottom drawer and surveyed the notebooks filling it. Some were hardbound with pretty pictures on the covers—a field of wildflowers, a cluster of unbearably cute kittens, majestic snow-capped mountains—impractical, but cherished gifts from friends and family. Most, though, were spiral-bound notebooks, which she preferred because they would lie flat when open. Much easier to write in.

  She pulled out several books at random and thumbed through them. She had first started keeping a diary when she was eleven. She had graduated to journaling story ideas while in college. She still recorded her private thoughts in a diary and had scribblers filled with rough notes and outlines for her Gazette articles. When she’d started keeping diaries, she had played around with the idea of addressing the entries to her mother, only Emily had never been able to figure out what to call her. She was pretty sure that before her mother left she had called her Mommy, although she couldn’t be absolutely certain. Dear Mommy had sounded hopelessly juvenile to her preteen sensibilities. But Dear Mom didn’t sound right, either. Dear Mother was too formal, and Dear Scarlett was too impersonal. In the end, Emily had elected to address the entries to herself. When her mother came back—and in those days, it had still been when and not if—Emily could share the journals with her because, of course, her mother would want to get to know her, to read all the hopes and dreams and secrets Emily would have shared with her mother if she had stayed.

  Digging a little deeper into the drawer, she selected one of the fancier notebooks, one that had been a gift for her fourteenth birt
hday from Annie. That summer, Emily had saved the book and started writing it on the first day of high school. The sepia-tone cover featured a vintage typewriter superimposed over a background of canceled postage stamps from exotic locales. At the time, the image was meant to represent Emily’s lofty dream of someday being a foreign correspondent. Now, she flipped it open and was transported back to her first day of high school.

  Dear Heart,

  High school freaks me out. There’s so much stuff going on, so many kids I don’t know—and that doesn’t really make sense because Riverton’s not that big and I thought I knew everyone. But as Fred pointed out (Fred’s my best friend, BTW, not my boyfriend), Riverton has two elementary schools, but only one high school. So all those kids from the school on the other side of town who we never got to know are now our classmates.

  My sister Annie is a junior this year, and it turns out she’s pretty cool and popular at school. I had no idea. She’s always just been Annie, the sister who’s always looked out for me. Even though she’s only two years older, she’s been kind of like a surrogate mom, making sure my little sister, CJ, and I brush our teeth before we go to bed and stuff like that. Last year, she took me bra shopping when I finally started to grow what some might say pass for boobs. And she made sure I knew where she kept the pads and tampons when I started my first period.

  But I digress. Today’s journal entry isn’t about that stuff. It’s about me and high school and the cutest boy in Riverton. Probably the world. He’s a friend of Annie’s, but not that kind of friend. Annie has a thing for this boy named Eric, and the boy I like is Eric’s best friend. After school today, I sneaked into Annie’s bedroom and found his picture in last year’s yearbook. His name is Jack Evans.

  If Jack and I get married, do you know what that means? My name will be Emily Evans.

  Emily closed her eyes and let the memories of that afternoon roll through her mind like a movie. It had been a typical late summer day in the Midwest. Her bedroom window had been open, a cool breeze fluttering the curtains. But she’d felt all warm and tingly. She’d been awash with hormonally fueled emotions, and hadn’t known why, not understanding that puberty and a first crush had lit a fire in her.

  She had studied herself in the mirror that afternoon, all those years ago, wishing for long blond hair, a bigger bra size and the kind of easygoing personality that let a girl giggle at anything a guy said.

  “Face it, Emily. You wanted to be an airhead,” she chided herself now, standing in front of a different mirror. Instead, reality had persisted. According to Fred, she still had the annoying tendency to tell a guy exactly what she thought, which was usually the polar opposite of how cool he considered himself to be.

  She continued reading the sappy words she’d poured onto the pages all those years ago. She hadn’t had a clue what love was, but she had certainly perfected infatuation. She paged ahead, smiled when she found the heart she’d drawn with red pen. Inside, “E. F. luvs J. E.” At that point, they’d yet to have a conversation, and if he had known she even existed, it was only as his friend Eric’s girlfriend’s dorky little sister.

  She flipped through more pages and was relieved to see her journal included other details about school and home. Fred had tried to talk her into joining the chess club, but she had joined the school newspaper and yearbook club instead. She had written about CJ, already a budding equestrian, and the blue ribbon she’d won for show jumping at the fall fair. Annie had been on student council and busily organizing bake sales and car washes to raise money for the year’s activities at school.

  Emily turned a few more pages. Ah, yes. Her first-ever school dance. Fred had gone, too, but not with her. He had all but ignored her and hung out with the boys from the chess club instead. Emily hadn’t had a clue what to wear or how to do her hair, so Annie had helped. Taped to the page was the photograph their father had taken of them before he’d driven them to the school that night. Annie looked totally preppy and all grown up in a slim black skirt and a robin’s-egg-blue sweater that set off her natural blond hair and vibrant blue eyes. Emily had worn a coral-colored baby-doll dress, white slouch socks and...she squinted at the picture...white sneakers? Her hair had been crimped and pulled into a side ponytail.

  “Oh, Emily. Seriously, what were you thinking?” She stared a moment longer, transfixed by her utter lack of fashion sense. She had to have been at least three or four years out of style. If that train wreck of an outfit had ever been in style.

  Pressing on, she read the entry she scrawled into her journal after the dance. A few of the words were blurred by watermarks—tears, she remembered—but she had no trouble reading them.

  Dear Heart,

  The dance was a complete, total, unmitigated disaster, and I am a dismal failure of a human being.

  Not one boy asked me to dance. Not one, not even Fred. He didn’t ask anyone else, either, which is lucky for him, otherwise our friendship would be o-v-e-r. Done. Finished.

  Jack was there, of course, and he still doesn’t know I exist. His girlfriend, Belinda, was there, too, of course. I think I hate her more than anything on the planet. Seriously, I like the leeches in our pond here at the farm better than her. Jack danced with her all night and they totally broke the school rule about slow dancing and how much space there’s supposed to be between the guy and the girl. I thought the rule was completely gross until I saw them together, but now I know why there has to be a rule. What I’d like to know is why no one was enforcing it.

  As always, Annie was amazing. How come she got all the cool genes in the family and I’m stuck with the nerdy ones? It’s totally not fair. She’s so pretty and popular and her boyfriend, Eric, is completely and madly in love with her. She told me that he’s even said the L-word. Can you imagine? And she said she said it back.

  On the bright side—and according to my dad there is always a bright side—nothing that happens in my life after this horrible night could possibly come close to being this desperately humiliating.

  She had been so naive. Just as well that her sweet and innocent—not to mention overly verbose—fourteen-year-old self had no idea what the future had in store for her.

  Not only did no one ask me to dance, but I overheard Belinda say to Jack how lame all the niners were, especially the girl geeks who have zero fashion sense. And she was looking right at me when she said it!!!!!

  The exclamation points had been blurred by tears, but Emily could still count all five of them. And she still remembered Jack’s lack of response to the insult.

  Seriously, I wanted to shrivel up and die right then and there. Jack laughed, but he didn’t notice me since he was too busy noticing Belinda. And believe me, there was a lot to notice! Her dress didn’t cover up much. If you ask me, if the school can have a rule about slow dancing, then there should be a rule about what people are allowed to wear while slow dancing. Let’s get real. There’s a dress code for school. There should be one for school dances, too.

  Emily groaned and shook her head, thinking back to the English essay she had written on that very topic. “You were so lame,” she said to herself. Lame, lame, lame.

  Fred had agreed, and then he had been annoyed she’d earned an A-plus on the paper. Apparently, their teacher had agreed with her. Fred’s essay had been about the chess club, and how more students would discover how cool it was if they were only willing to give it a chance. Like that wasn’t lame. He hadn’t understood why their teacher had given him a B-minus. He had been equally annoyed when Emily had pointed out that while he might be a whiz at chess, his spelling and grammar needed work.

  Emily smiled, thinking about fourteen-year-old Fred. He had also been a math genius, at least by her standards, and they had gradually fallen into a pattern of hanging out in the back room of his dad’s barbershop after school. In exchange for her help with outlining and proofreading his English and history assignments, h
e had patiently explained algebraic formulas to her.

  She continued reading the last paragraph of the school dance diary entry.

  A few girls from my class and I hung out. We danced together a few times, but none of the boys noticed us. Even Fred ignored me, so why would a guy like Jack Evans pay attention to me? I might as well have been invisible. And as long as there are girls like Belinda Bellows around, then girls like me always will be. And so, dear Heart, that’s it for me and school dances. I’m totally swearing off them. Good night.

  Love, Emily

  The entry was rife with teenage melodrama, but Emily found herself awash with the same emotions she’d experienced that night. If she’d had a mother, she would have curled up in her arms and cried her eyes out. Instead, she had crawled under the covers with her diary and her flashlight, and written her heart out.

  There had been other dances, though, and she had gone to them, mostly because there was a chance Jack might notice her. But by the end of her sophomore year, she was still invisible. None of the boys at school, not even the ones in her class, paid any attention to her, and no one ever asked her to dance, let alone go on a date. By the time Annie was preparing for her senior prom, Emily had been in a complete funk, and she had been shocked by her sister’s response when she finally confessed how she felt.

  “You’re always with Fred,” Annie said.

  “So? We’re friends.”

  “Sure you are, but that’s not how it looks to other boys. To them, the two of you look like a couple. If you want boys to notice you, you need to put yourself out there.”

  Thinking back on it now made Emily cringe. She had made up every excuse in the book to avoid hanging around with Fred and to “put herself out there.” It hadn’t worked, and after a week, she had decided to go back to being invisible because she missed her best friend.

  Emily closed the diary and put it back in the cabinet. She ran a hand over her belly. “I never want you to feel this way, okay? Even if no one asks you to dance, I’ll always be here to dry your tears and to tell you that things will get better.”