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

by Rula Sinara

  “It’s been good to see you, Thomas. Isaac.”

  “Good to see you, son. Stop by again,” Thomas said.

  “Thanks, I will.”

  Isaac waved the arm of a transformer robot at him, making him smile.

  “And thank you for coffee and strudel, Annie. Delicious as always.”

  “I’m glad you dropped by.” She gave him a quick hug. “It’s comforting to know Eric’s friends haven’t forgotten about us,” she said quietly.

  “Never going to happen. You need anything, anything at all, you call me, okay?”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  He waved at CJ, who was still talking excitedly to Rose about her work. The youngest Finnegan sister was a live wire. And a knockout. It was both hard to believe and no surprise at all that some lucky guy hadn’t put a ring on her finger.

  Rose kept her head averted, but he knew she was watching him from the corner of her eye. Good, he thought. I’m keeping an eye on you, too.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t get to see Emily while you were here,” Annie said. “She has...um...some stuff going on right now.”

  Annie’s out-of-the-blue comment startled him, and it took him a second to recover. Poker face, he told himself. He knew Annie knew about the baby, and he also knew she didn’t know it was his. “Maybe next time.”

  “Come on.” Annie linked her arm with his. “I’ll walk you out. Maybe next time you can stay long enough to join us for Sunday dinner.”

  They hadn’t left the kitchen when he heard the front door open and bang shut again.

  “Hello! It’s me!”

  Emily.

  Busted.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ASTONISHMENT AND DISBELIEF didn’t come close to describing the emotions Emily had experienced when she’d pulled into the driveway and spotted Jack’s Jeep. Then to go inside and find him and Annie engaged in what was obviously a conspiratorial conversation. What was he up to? What were they up to? She looked from one to the other, several times, telling herself not to panic and knowing full well she looked as though she had something to hide.

  Annie cocked her head, puzzled. “Look who’s here. It was such a nice surprise to have Jack stop by for coffee this morning, and I was just saying it’s too bad he hadn’t had a chance to see you. Now here you are.”

  Jack stared hard at Emily and she returned the scrutiny, each wondering what the other was doing here. Annie glanced from one to the other, and then she grinned.

  Her sister’s smug cat-that-got-the-cream expression implied she knew more than she should. Had she talked to Fred? Had Jack told her the baby was his? Did anyone mind their own business anymore? Well, technically this was Fred’s business because she had dragged him into it, and of course it was Jack’s business, too, but they had both agreed to let her handle this on her terms. They had promised.

  Annie pulled her into a hug, whispering in her ear as she did. “It’s okay. I just figured it out. No one else knows.”

  Emily met Jack’s cool blue gaze over her sister’s shoulder. He narrowed his eyes questioningly, which darkened them to navy. Mesmerizing. But she gave her head a tiny shake. Don’t ask, she mouthed. His nod was almost imperceptible. And those thick, dark, wickedly long eyelashes...

  Honestly, no man had the right to be this gorgeous.

  Annie let her go and hugged Jack, then stepped away and looked from one to the other. “I’ll head back to the kitchen and leave the two of you to...” She had the most foolish-looking grin.

  Emily waved her off, pushed the screen door open and pulled Jack onto the veranda. “What are you doing here?”

  “I dropped by to see Annie and Isaac on my way out of town. Eric was one of my best friends. There’s no crime in wanting to make sure his family is doing okay.”

  Emily studied him closely. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Why else would I come here?”

  “I don’t know, but you don’t look like you’re telling the truth.”

  “Emily, be reasonable. Why would I lie about this?”

  “Maybe because you wanted Annie to find out about...” She glanced sideways and over her shoulder, lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “About the baby, and to get her to try to convince me to go along with your plan for a shotgun wedding.”

  Jack’s laugh was unexpectedly annoying.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I never said I felt pressured. I said we should get married. No shotguns needed.”

  “Maybe I’m the one who feels pressured.”

  Jack gave her a long, thoughtful look, then smiled. He pulled her into his arms, not roughly, but not exactly gently, either, and kissed her. Not passionately, but not exactly chastely, either.

  “No pressure.” He kissed her again. “I really do have to get going, though. Long drive. I’ll see you next weekend. Annie invited me to Sunday dinner.”

  Of course she did, Emily thought, watching the screen door swing shut behind him. He slid behind the steering wheel of his Jeep, started the engine and flashed the high beams at her before he turned around and drove down the driveway to the main road.

  She stood there even after he was out of sight, gazing at the wide expanse of paddock, the two grazing horses, then turned her attention to the gazebo by the river. Growing up, she’d spent many happy hours there, reading library books and scribbling in her journals, and now she felt the pull of solitude. She had a notebook and her laptop in her bag. She never went anywhere without them. She could sit in the gazebo, pour her heart onto the page, lose herself in a story for the blog or the paper.

  Not today, though. She turned away from the view and realized Jack had kissed her right in front of one of the living room windows.

  “Seriously?” What if someone had seen them together? She peered through the glass but the lace curtain prevented her from getting a good look inside. “I just can’t catch a break.” Some alone time in the gazebo had more appeal than ever. She cast one last longing glance over her shoulder but instead of yielding to temptation, she walked to the front door and went inside, prepared to face the music.

  * * *

  JACK SAT AT his desk that evening and swiped a hand over tired eyes. In spite of sleeping well the night before, it had been a long day. And he had a lot on his mind. Discovering he was going to become a father, having Emily turn down his offer to marry her, the unexpected job offer with the Riverton police—it all made his head spin. Add to that the interview with Rose Daniels, and not getting to the bottom of why the young woman was in Riverton and staying at Annie’s B & B. On top of everything, the long drive back to Chicago.

  He was beat, and he’d like nothing more than to head across town to his apartment, microwave a frozen dinner and grab a shower and some shut-eye. But he also knew he wouldn’t get any rest until he solved the puzzle of why Rose was in Riverton and whether he was dealing with two women named Scarlett...or one.

  He crossed the office to the coffeemaker, popped in a pod and brewed himself a cup while his computer booted up. Then he sat at his desk, gulped the dark, strong brew and slowly scrolled through Scarlett Daniels’s lengthy police record. There’d been numerous arrests for drug possession. Two counts of theft under five hundred—shoplifting, no doubt. One assault charge. Four complaints filed against others at various times—three of them men, one a woman—for assaulting her. On all four occasions, charges had been dropped.

  Please, don’t let this be Emily’s mother, he thought. She obviously idolized a woman she had never known, and she had lived her whole life believing her mother would come home some day.

  There was still a lot he didn’t know about Scarlett Daniels. Was Daniels her maiden name? An ex-husband’s name? He rifled through Rose’s file and found the documents from social serv
ices, which included a copy of her birth certificate. Born in Chicago. Mother was listed as Scarlett Daniels. Father unknown. That may or may not have been the truth, but that was one secret Rose’s mother had taken to her grave. Now Jack wondered how many others she had taken with her.

  Using his computer, he pulled up the autopsy report on Scarlett Daniels. Female, fifty-one years old. He skimmed the introductory stuff. Hair color: brown. Eye color: brown. Like Emily. Like millions of other people, he reminded himself.

  He skipped the detailed descriptions and photos of the lacerations and knife wounds. Those he’d already committed to memory.

  Overall condition: emaciated.

  A series of black-and-white photographs showed track marks up and down both arms. The tox report indicated she’d been high on heroin, Vicodin and Adderall, with a blood-alcohol reading of point-one-nine—a toxic slurry that could have easily finished her off if Jason Caruthers hadn’t shown up with a chip on his shoulder and a butcher knife in hand.

  None of this revealed anything about Scarlett’s past, though, so he kept reading.

  The black tar in her lungs indicated she was a smoker. According to her stomach contents, she’d eaten McDonald’s earlier that night. Reproductive organs had been removed. Medical records stated she had undergone a hysterectomy ten years earlier.

  Jack had been looking for anything that might indicate Scarlett had given birth to more than one child, but there was no mention of it. The medical records from the hysterectomy would likely reveal how many children she’d had, but that had no relevance to this case. Unless...

  What if the police had reason to believe there were more next of kin? He turned that option over in his mind, then ruled it out. If there were other children, then their names would become part of the permanent police record, maybe even the court proceedings when Caruthers went to trial. If this was Emily’s mother, Emily would be shattered. And there were also her sisters and father to think about. Not to mention the small-town gossip that would be stirred up when this went public, as it surely would.

  No, there had to be another way to dig into Scarlett Daniels’s past. He simply had to find it, and he worried he wouldn’t like what he found.

  * * *

  DRESSED FOR BED in comfy pajama bottoms and an oversize T-shirt, Emily studied her reflection in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. It had been an interesting day and, especially for a Sunday, an eventful one. She gargled, rinsed her toothbrush and tossed it into the holder.

  In her bedroom, she pulled her journal and a pen from the drawer in her bedside table, fluffed her pillows and slid beneath the celadon-green duvet cover. Some people couldn’t wait to roll out of bed in the morning and find out what the new day had in store for them, but just before bed was her favorite time. Emily had long ago learned she had very little control over how the day unfolded, but reflecting on it after the fact usually helped her to make sense of it.

  Dear Heart,

  I ate doughnuts for breakfast. Jack brought them. I, Emily Finnegan, ate doughnuts for breakfast that Jack Evans brought especially for me. Doughnuts. For breakfast.

  Maybe if she said it, wrote it, often enough, she would believe it instead of feeling as though it had been a dream.

  And then he kissed me. Kissing Jack is so much better than anything I could ever imagine or dream on my own. Kissing Jack is pure magic.

  That sounded lame, but that was the beauty of her journal. No one else read the contents, so she could be as over the top as she liked. She indulged herself by rambling on about running into Jack at the farm, her sisters’ wildly enthusiastic reaction to finding out he was the baby’s father, and the strange girl who was staying at the B & B. Rose Daniels looked like a teenager, though she was probably older, maybe early twenties. She had a Goth vibe going on with hair dyed black and streaked purple, a black-on-black wardrobe and an attitude of disinterest bordering on disdain. Most of Annie’s guests were young families wanting their kids to experience country living, middle-aged couples celebrating a milestone birthday or anniversary, and the occasional traveler from abroad.

  Emily set her pen down and stared at the four framed prints on her bedroom wall. The Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower. She had always had such big dreams about the things she wanted to do, the places she wanted to go, the sights she wanted to see. She had never visited any of them.

  She shifted her gaze to the photo of her and her sisters with their father, all four of them on horseback. It had been taken not long after Emily graduated high school. CJ had started the therapeutic riding program at the farm during the summer, and the lift they’d installed in the stable had allowed their father to get back on a horse for the first time in years. It had taken him several weeks and a couple of falls before he had learned to maintain his balance and to train the horse to respond to commands that didn’t require the use of the rider’s legs. This photograph had been taken on their first trail ride together. To Emily, it represented family and home, and home had always been where her heart was.

  After Annie had started the B & B, Emily hadn’t minded having strangers in their home. She was seldom there, and when she was, the guests mostly kept to themselves except when Annie was serving breakfast in the dining room or CJ was taking them on a trail ride.

  Maybe that was why it bothered her to see this strange girl named Rose sitting in the kitchen with her family. She had only checked in the day before—Emily remembered her sister saying yesterday that she was expecting a woman from Chicago that afternoon. Rose had barely picked at Annie’s strudel. Instead, she had fidgeted with her paper napkin, nervously shredding the edges of it while gazing guardedly at everyone sitting around the table.

  Emily was used to dropping by and seeing guests lounging on the screened-in veranda reading books and newspapers, doing crossword puzzles and drinking cups of tea and coffee. She was comfortable encountering them over breakfast in the dining room, eating off the china Annie used for guests. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, finding Rose sitting in the kitchen with her family and eating off the everyday dishes had bothered her. A lot.

  She picked up her pen.

  Rose is weird. Very weird. I wanted her to stop staring at my family. I’ve been told I have an overactive imagination, and it’s true, I do, but I wanted to tell Annie to lock up the silverware and the butcher knives.

  An icy shiver slid down Emily’s spine. She tossed aside her pen and journal, grabbed her phone off the bedside table and called Annie.

  “Emily, hi. Is everything okay?” her sister asked.

  “Everything’s fine. Why?”

  “No reason, but you don’t usually call this late. I was worried when I saw it was you.”

  “I’m fine,” she repeated. “Actually, I was kind of worried about you.”

  “I’m okay. Losing Eric is devastating, but I shouldn’t need to have a nervous breakdown to prove to everyone I’m grieving.”

  “Whoa!” Her sister was almost never on the defensive. “Where is this coming from?”

  “Isn’t that why you’re calling?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe Jack had said something to you.”

  “No, he didn’t, and that’s kind of an over-the-top reaction for someone who claims to be okay.”

  Annie sighed. She sounded tired. “I’m sorry. Seeing Jack today was great, but he used to drop by to see Eric. This time, it was a special visit to check up on me and Isaac, and having him do that really hit home.”

  Like everyone in her family, Emily had been heartbroken when Eric died. “I’m so sorry, Annie. I’m here for whatever you need, whenever you need me. You know that.”

  “I know, honey. I’m sorry to be such a downer, and you said this isn’t why you called. What’s up?”

  Typical Annie. Change the sub
ject rather than meet the subject head-on.

  “I was thinking about your B & B guest.”

  A moment of silence. Then, “Really? Why?”

  “How many kids like her have stayed there on their own?”

  “I know she’s not your typical—”

  “How many?” Emily asked again.

  “Until now, none.”

  “It’s weird. She’s weird.”

  “Emily, she’s a kid, and she’s on her own. She’s from Chicago, and she told me she was working in a diner till her mother passed away. Now she has no family and she’s looking for a change. She thought a small town might be a better fit for her.”

  Emily couldn’t imagine having no family, but she was concerned about Annie’s desire to help this person. She didn’t like to think of anyone taking advantage of her sister, and she hated to think Annie was filling the void in her life by taking in strays.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “I have no doubt she could use a little mothering, and because of that she’s tugging on your heartstrings. I’m only saying you should be careful.”

  “Why are you so concerned?” Annie asked.

  “I can’t put my finger on it, exactly.” But she needed to be honest. “Like I said, she’s not your typical guest. I also thought it was odd you invited her to join us for family dinner. I mean, she’s not family, and apparently she doesn’t eat, either. She mostly pushed her food around on her plate.”

  “I feel sorry for her.”

  Emily sighed. Annie had enough people to take care of. Their father, Isaac, CJ. Not that CJ needed to be taken care of, but she was always more than happy to go along with Annie’s need to do it.

  “Did she say how long she’s planning to stay?”