by Lucy Score
“Beckett Pierce! You and your hulking bodyguard can release me right now because I’m going to murder you both!”
Beckett kissed Gia on the cheek and handed her over. “Good luck, Sheriff.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Eva watched Niko waving from the curb as Donovan pulled out of the driveway with the three Merill sisters in the backseat. Emma flicked off her husband despite her bound wrists. Immediately they exploded as one. They were loud and angry and half Italian. Donovan did the only thing he could. He turned the stereo up.
“Where are you taking us?” Eva demanded. If Donovan Cardona thought that he could just arrest her and take her to jail, he had another thing coming.
“Your boyfriend is going to be in so much trouble when these cuffs come off,” Emma snarled.
“He’s clearly lost his damn mind,” Gia muttered. “Maybe we should wave something out the window so everyone will know we’re in distress.”
“Good idea,” Eva rolled into Emma’s lap and tried to raise her foot up to the crack in the window.
Donovan, smiling to himself, closed the windows. The yelling in the backseat increased.
“Who’s got a cell phone on them?” Eva asked. “Maybe we can call someone?”
“Who can we call? Donovan is the law. Who’s going to rescue us from an insane sheriff?” Emma groaned.
“You can’t arrest us,” Eva tried again, leaning up against the divider between the front and back seats. “We didn’t do anything illegal.”
“You all are behaving in a manner so stupid it should be illegal,” he argued, heading toward the western edge of town.
“Oh, my God. You’re not taking us to…” Gia trailed off, her words filled with dread.
“Oh, hell. He’s taking us to Dad,” Eva whispered.
Emma slumped against the seat. “I’d rather go to jail.”
“Donovan, I’m starting to get legitimately pissed at you,” Eva warned him.
“Back at ya, baby,” he said cheerfully.
He pulled into the parking lot of Villa Harvest, Franklin’s charming Italian bistro and parked right outside the front door. “Now don’t go anywhere, ladies,” Donovan said with a wink and a grin at Eva in the rearview mirror.
“I hate your boyfriend,” Emma muttered when he slammed the door and sauntered into the restaurant.
“Is it wrong that I’m the tiniest bit turned on?” Eva wondered out loud.
“Yes!” Emma said.
“Not at all,” Gia disagreed. “A hot law enforcement officer handcuffed you and manhandled you into the backseat of a car.”
“Fine. You can be mad and turned on,” Emma decided. “Just be more mad.”
Five minutes passed before Donovan reappeared. He had a large to-go lemonade in one hand and a breadstick in the other. Franklin bustled out behind him.
“They’re all yours, Franklin,” Donovan said, juggling the breadstick over to his other hand so he could open the back door.
“Girls, I expected this out of you when you were in high school. Not now that you’re all adults,” Franklin said, looking more amused than upset.
One by one, Donovan removed their restraints. Eva rubbed her sore wrists. Between her wrists and her knuckles, she was going to be typing with a limp.
And then she remembered she no longer had a laptop because her own mother had stolen it.
She was mentally overwrought, she decided. It was the only explanation for why she burst into tears. She hated heroines that cried at the drop of a hat. She wrote women with steel spines and big balls. Not the quivering, whimpering victim type.
Strong hands cupped her face.
“Everything is going to be just fine, Eva. I promise you,” Donovan said, staring down at her. His blue eyes were serious. “Now be a good girl and tell your dad why you made so many boneheaded decisions.”
He kissed her lightly on the nose and turned her toward Franklin.
His radio squawked. “Sheriff, you anywhere near the liquor store? We got an unsub riding a tricycle through the aisles.”
Donovan swore. “If you need any help with these three hellions, you call me,” he told Franklin and climbed back into his car.
Eva watched him leave.
“So, who wants to explain to me why my daughters got arrested today?”
--------
It appeared that Phoebe was taking the news harder than Franklin. “Back up a minute,” she demanded, pointing a pink-polished nail in Eva’s face. “Your mother has been taking money from you for years, following you around the country, and when you said no, she broke into your home and stole from you… and you told no one?”
Franklin had given them all a ride to his house so they could yell it out Merill style without witnesses.
Mr. Snuffles waddled out from under the dining room table, gave everyone a good glare, and sneezed his way upstairs away from the noise.
“That pretty much sums it up,” Eva admitted with a nod. There was no use hiding or lying now.
“Phoebe, my dear,” Franklin said, reaching for his wife’s arm as she paced behind his chair. “Why don’t you make it clear who you’re angry at before Eva gets the wrong idea.”
“Your mother.” Phoebe spat out the words. “If I could just get five minutes alone with her and a pitchfork, I’d feel much better about all of this. But you’re not off the hook either, Eva. You have a responsibility to your family. So I’m mad at Agnes and disappointed in you.”
Ouch. That stung just a bit.
“And the rest of you? Thinking you could hide this from your father? I’m very disappointed. He is a wonderful, understanding man. But he also has quite the spine in case you didn’t notice when he was raising the three of you! Conspiring to hide something from him that affects the entire family is not just disappointing, it’s disrespectful.”
Emma and Gia hung their heads.
Franklin kissed Phoebe’s hand. “Thank you, my beautiful wife. Now how about you take these two into the kitchen and open a few bottles of wine?”
Phoebe nodded curtly. “Let’s go, ladies. You can start practicing your apologies.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they murmured, rising from the table.
“I could go for some wine,” Eva said hopefully.
“You have other business to attend to first,” her father said, patting her hand. “Come on.”
He led her into his study, a cozy room at the front of the house with all the trappings of both an office and a man cave. It was a chaotic sketch of disorganization with piles of papers, books, and knickknacks jostling for space on every flat surface. Franklin closed the glass doors behind him and gestured for her to take a seat in a chair in front of his desk.
He scooted his desk chair out of the way and fiddled with the combination on the floor safe behind it. He got the combination right on the second try, mumbling the entire time, and triumphantly pulled four envelopes, creased with age from the depths.
Franklin sat down behind the desk, envelopes in hand. “Now, I promised myself that I would never show you what was in these envelopes. And I’m not saying that I regret that decision. But today seems to have made the promise void.”
“What’s in them? Love letters? Is Agnes not our mom? Do you have other kids somewhere?” The questions spilled out of her mouth, each faster than the last.
Franklin laughed, a big, booming chuckle. “You always did have an excellent imagination. I’m very proud that you’re doing something wonderful with it.”
“Thank you, Dad. You haven’t read any of them, have you?” She wasn’t sure she was mentally prepared to hear about her father reading her sex scenes.
“Four so far. I’m waiting for Phoebe to finish the fifth.” He grinned.
“Dad you don’t have to—”
He raised his hands. “I read the first one to be supportive. I read the next three because you’re damn good at what you do, Eva.”
“I’m flattered… and a little disturbed.”
He chuckled and then sighed. “Enough small talk. I owe you an apology. Possibly more than one.”
“Dad, I’m the one who kept this—”
He held up his hands. “I met your mother in the early eighties. She was somewhat of a free spirit. She’d made a few, let’s say questionable, life choices, including what I thought were recreational drugs.” Eva leaned forward.
“So, she was—”
“Dabbling well before you or I were in the picture.”
Eva sat back in her chair to absorb the information. “I had no idea.”
“At first, I felt like it was her choice, that she’d grow out of it eventually. But as I got more involved in the restaurant industry, started saving for my own place, she seemed to be clinging to the party lifestyle. So I asked her to make a decision. And she chose me.”
Franklin pushed an empty coffee mug around the calendar on his desk that still claimed it was May.
“Things were good for a while. She was clean, working. I was manager at a place in New Haven. And along came Emmaline, and Gianna, and you.
“I was working sixty-hour weeks trying to get my restaurant off the ground. Your mother was left with the rest of our life to manage. Even then I knew that wasn’t fair to her. But we had decided together. I didn’t see it. I didn’t notice the signs.”
“Dad, you were providing for us,” Eva cut in.
He nodded. “I was. But being a father requires more than bringing home a paycheck. I leaned too heavily on your mother. And I didn’t see that she’d returned to familiar coping mechanisms. You knew. At five years old you knew.”
“I didn’t know exactly what it was. I just knew that when she saw certain ‘friends’ or took certain pills, she was different,” Eva admitted. “I didn’t want to tell on her or to make you guys fight.”
Her father’s shoulders slumped a little lower. “We were fighting a lot towards the end. I know it. I wasn’t home enough. She wasn’t present enough. It doesn’t make me feel good to know that’s the kind of home we had created for you. I’m ashamed to admit that when she left, I was relieved.”
“That makes two of us,” Eva admitted.
Franklin sighed. “I’m sorry for not seeing. I would have fixed it, ended it. I wouldn’t have let things go on the way they did.”
“I know, Dad. And you have nothing to apologize for. You did the best you could. And for the record, your best is pretty amazing.”
He tapped the envelopes on the desk. “There’s one more thing. Agnes didn’t just disappear.”
He turned the envelopes over, fanned them out. And Eva saw the names of her sisters and her father scrawled across them.
“She left notes?”
Franklin nodded. “They’re not pleasant. She didn’t write them to comfort anyone in her absence. She wrote them to hurt and point fingers. I never gave them to you.”
“Can I read them?” Eva asked.
Wordlessly, he pushed them across the desk to her.
Eva opened the one addressed to Franklin.
Frank,
Well, you win. You got your way. Since I can’t do anything right in your eyes, I’m leaving. I deserve to have a life, too. One that doesn’t revolve around taking care of ungrateful, demanding kids who never see their absent father.
You don’t like the way I’m raising them? They’re your responsibility now. Have fun with that. Let’s see what kind of a father you’ll be now that you don’t have a choice.
You never were the man I thought you’d be. You’re weak and boring. No therapy or counseling is going to fix that. I deserve better. I’m going to have better now that I’m done wasting my time. Don’t try to find me. I’m done with you and this joke of a life.
Agnes
Eva blew out a breath and stuffed the paper back in the envelope. “I don’t think I need to read the others.”
“A wise choice,” her father said softly.
“She blamed you.”
He nodded. “Yes, she did.”
“But she’s been telling me all along that I’m the reason she left.”
Franklin waved Emma and Gia’s letters. “She blamed everyone except herself. Never took an ounce of responsibility. No, I wasn’t home enough. No, I didn’t help out enough around the house, and maybe I was boring, but that doesn’t mean that she was without blame.”
“Dad, you were never boring,” Eva smiled. “And you were a better father and mother than she could have ever hoped to be.”
“I wish I would have told you sooner. If you’d read the letters before she came after you for money—”
She waved a hand. “I probably still would have given it to her. She played me that first time. ‘Trying to get her life together. Therapy is expensive.’ She said she was entering a counseling program in Pennsylvania and needed money. I’d have fallen for that part of it no matter what. I wanted it to be true.”
“And now? What if she comes back to you sometime in the future?” Franklin pressed.
“Never again. I wish I wouldn’t have had to learn the lesson so painfully… or so publicly. But Agnes will never see another dime from me.”
“And you won’t feel the need to keep things from the rest of us?”
“I promise, Dad. And next time, it won’t take a ride in a cop car for me to come clean, okay?”
He beamed at her. The man who had loved her unconditionally since birth. The man who had made her favorite meal when she was sad, the one who had made emergency runs to the drug store for tampons and chocolate. The man who would someday walk her down the aisle. She saw a flash of the day. Of Donovan, steadfast and patient waiting for her. His blue eyes gleaming. The faces of her family and friends.
Her mother wouldn’t be there. But Eva didn’t need her. That spot had long since been filled by her sisters and Phoebe and by friends and neighbors.
“Dad, I’m in love with Donovan.” She admitted it in a rush.
His silvery eyebrows winged up. “Well,” he said. “What does he say about all this?”
“I haven’t told him yet. He thinks he’s head over heels for me.”
“Well, of course he is, Eva,” Franklin sighed.
“Don’t go all ‘of course he is.’ You’re biased,” she pointed out.
“With good reason,” he argued. “And you’re going to add a whole new layer of disappointment to how I’m feeling if you actually believe that you’re not worthy. It’s long past time you got your mother’s voice out of your head, Eva.”
Is that what it was? That doubt that Donovan might not really love her?
“I wouldn’t say she’s the voice in my head. But I’m willing to admit I might hear her whisper occasionally.”
“Do you doubt that you love him?”
She felt the smile, blindingly bright, spread across her face. She shook her head. “Nope. I think this is the real deal. We’ve been moving so fast. I’d like to slow it down a little bit.”
“Sometimes fast doesn’t mean wrong,” Franklin said with a wink. “Not when happiness is on the line.”
“My own father quoting my writing back to me,” Eva laughed.
“Maybe you should start listening to yourself. Or at least your characters,” he suggested.
Eva blew out a breath. “I feel like today was one really long, painful therapy session.”
“Then let’s go take our medicine.” Franklin pointed behind her. Eva turned. Phoebe was standing on the other side of the doors wiggling two empty glasses and a bottle of wine. They met her at the door. Phoebe poured, and Eva sipped as they headed back to the kitchen.
“Just to recap,” Phoebe said, gesturing with the bottle. “I’m a lot mad at Agnes and only a tiny bit mad at you, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love you.”
Eva wrapped an arm around Phoebe’s shoulders. “Thanks, Mom.” She gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek.
“Now, come on and help me figure out why Emma turned down a glass of wine.”
Eva’s gaze flew to her sister’s face. Emma, stylish as ever with her swing of red hair and designer clothes, was sipping ice water and laughing at a story about Aurora that Gia was telling.
“Holy. Shit. You’re glowing,” Eva gasped.
Emma flushed scarlet to the roots of her hair. “No. I’m not.”
“You’re glowing, and you’re drinking ice water instead of day drinking with the rest of us,” Eva pointed out.
“Oh, my God!” Gia squealed. “You’re—”
“Don’t you dare say it,” Emma shrieked, holding her hands up. “No one say the word.”
“What word?” Franklin asked, baffled.
“Okay, no one is saying the ‘p’ word. But are you?” Eva asked, bouncing on her toes.
“If I am, I want to tell Niko first.”
“Tell him what?” Franklin asked.
“That he’s going to be a daddy,” Emma said, promptly bursting into tears.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Eva juggled grocery bags and her overnight tote as she climbed the steps of Donovan’s porch. The sky was already going to dusk, and the lights were on inside, casting a soft glow through the windows. He wasn’t home. She’d seen him talking to a group of kids who were inexplicably painted blue in One Love Park. She’d made a mental note to get the story out of him or out of Evan.
But for now, she had important business. Food was love in the Merill family, and she was going to cook the hell out of some pasta for Donovan tonight. But first, she had to get past the gatekeeper. She took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.
Hazel Cardona answered the door in jeans, a crisp button down, and vest. Even retired, everything about her said “law enforcement.”
“Eva, this is a nice surprise. I hope you don’t think you have to ring the bell just because we’re here.”
