“See, I need you as a teacher, Em.”
She needed him period. But…
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said, his gaze warm as he studied her face. “My Aunt Marta and Jim. They’re not blood relatives, but they’re family, and I know, the second I mention you, they’ll be clearing out a space for you in their home, too.”
“You think I should live with them?”
Chris laughed. “I just think they’ll cling to you—especially Aunt Marta. She needs a daughter-in-law.”
Emma smiled. She was overwhelmed, too.
“And there’s something else.” Chris’s voice was serious.
“What?”
“I wasn’t ever going to mention this, but, well, I can’t bring you into my life without telling you.…”
Her heart pounded with fear. Dread. “What?”
“Aunt Marta and Jim knew your father.”
She shrugged. “He was a biological fact,” she told him. “He was not my father in any true sense.”
“I know that.” Chris sounded completely certain of that fact. And when he finished telling her what Marta and Jim had told him about her dad, Emma had tears in her eyes. But not for herself.
“My poor mother…” she said, feeling a huge rush of love for the woman who’d sacrificed so much—and lost more. “All she ever wanted was to love and be loved,” she said. The age-old desire….
“I just didn’t want you to hear something about him and think that it bore any reflection on you.”
Emma shook her head. “I already know he has no reflection on me,” she said. “I wonder if Mom knew about Kennedy? About what happened to him?”
“Maybe someday she’ll be at a point where you can ask her.”
“You never know.” She smiled sadly. “There might come a day when she asks you.”
Chris reached for her hand and Emma let him take it. Knowing that they were crossing over into a life that was going to burn all the bridges behind them.
“This isn’t just because you think I’m pregnant, is it?” She always had to look on the negative side of things.
“No. At this point, I wouldn’t mind if you were, if it meant you’d marry me. I wouldn’t know what to do with a journal—except maybe feed it to the fish—but I’ve spent some long nights on the ocean lately. And had a talk or two with Marta about things I assumed, but never let myself think about. Until you. You made me ask questions of myself, Em. Even when I didn’t want the answers.”
“If I hadn’t come looking for you after our first night together, and you hadn’t assumed that I was pregnant, would you have ever looked me up?”
The shadow on his face was her answer. And her heart sank.
“I’m not sure what I would have done in the end,” he said, looking her straight in the eye. “But I know that that night changed me. I couldn’t keep my mind on the job. All I kept seeing were your glorious legs and your long dark hair fanned across my pillow.”
“So the sex was good.”
“It was far more than that. I went to see Aunt Marta before I had any idea that you might be pregnant.”
Emma wasn’t sure about the significance of that, but she knew he’d just told her something big.
“I might not be as quick as you, Em, but I fought my way through a lifetime of scars to admit to myself that I love you. That the reason everything about me was changing, the reason I needed to ask questions and face the answers, was because I was in love with you, and that love would not let me run from the truth.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. Happy tears.
“The reason I wanted to have my say first tonight was so that, if you are pregnant, you won’t just think I’m just saying all of this because I have to. I knew when I docked this morning that I was going to ask you to marry me.”
“You spent the night on the ocean?”
“I intend it to be the last night I ever spend out there alone.”
“You said goodbye.” Not to fishing. She knew he’d never leave that—but it sounded as if he’d let go of the idea that life as a fisherman had to be a solitary one.
“Maybe.”
“I didn’t expect this.”
“I know. But I also knew that if I waited to find out if you were pregnant, and you were, and then I asked you to marry me, you’d turn me down for sure.”
“Wise man.”
“I just understand the woman I love,” he said, and then added, “I don’t think my father ever did.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that statement, but she had a feeling that he’d tell her. When he was ready.
“You never answered my question. You aren’t going to make me ask again.”
She reached in the drawer beside him, pulled out the journal and handed it to him opened to the first page.
“‘I want to be loved by a man who loves me so much that that love changes him,’” he read out loud and then looked up at her. “Wow, you hit that dead on.”
“I know what I want and I know I can’t settle for less than that.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
Shrugging, she nodded toward the book.
“‘I want to be brave enough to live life to the fullest,’” he read. “Oh, God, Emma, you’re the most courageous human being I’ve ever met.”
“I quake inside just getting up in the morning,” she told him because he had to see the bad to really love the good. “Read.”
“‘I need other women in my life—and their presence is not disloyal to my mother or Claire,’” he read, and looked up again.
Putting her wineglass down, Emma wrapped her arms around her middle. “Growing up, I never had a best friend, or even a particularly close friend. It was always just Mom and me, on our mission, apart from the rest of the world.”
He brushed at the dampness beneath her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. I heard tonight that Rob was just with me because he’d been on the lookout for a potential lawsuit that would give him a life on easy street, and I fit the bill. He didn’t know anything about what happened to Claire. He just stole the evidence box, or rather, he had one of his bimbos do it, so he could plant evidence that would gain him a win in the lawsuit he was going to force Mom and me to file.”
“He’ll get his justice, Em. I have no doubt about that. Fate has a way of evening those scores.”
Shuddering, she said, “I’m just glad that I had the sense to kick him out before I married him. And that he’s in jail.”
“But it means you’re no closer to finding answers about your sister.”
She nodded. “I know. But I’m accepting the fact that we might never know. I lost twenty-five years to Claire’s memory. I can’t lose any more.”
Leaning over, Chris kissed her. Long and slow. Then he sat back, looking down at the leather-bound book he held.
“‘I want to have great—’” he broke off, coughed, glanced at her and continued “‘—sex with the man I marry. I want to have children.’” He ran number five right in with number four.
And…
“‘I want to marry Chris Talbot.’” He read her sixth and final entry—written that evening.
He stared at her and she said, “As soon as possible, please.”
“You’re pregnant, then?”
“No, sir, I am most definitely not pregnant. I just want to be and I’d like to do it right this time.”
He took a sip of wine
. “You aren’t?” How could he feel so high and so low at the same time?
“No. I heard it from my doctor this afternoon. And I started my period tonight.”
“Which gives us about three weeks, give or take your irregular cycle, to get married.”
“You think we can wait that long to make love?”
Pulling Emma up against him, Chris picked up her phone from where she’d left it on the table.
“What are you doing?” She let her head rest against his chest as she watched.
“Calling your mother,” he said, scrolling through her speed-dial contacts. “If she’s going to hate me as much as you say she will, she’ll keep you away from me until we can make it legal.”
Laughing, Emma let him make the call.
Rose was going to have to get used to having a son-in-law with a mind of his own.
And a daughter who, while she loved her mother dearly, had to live her own life.
She had a feeling her mother wasn’t going to put up much of a fight.
Especially after she met Chris.
After a lifetime of searching, Emma had found her joy.
EPILOGUE
“RAMSEY?”
“Yeah, Luce.” Blinking, Ramsey Miller leaned on one elbow in bed, glancing at the laptop computer on the pillow next to him to catch the time.
“They got him, Ramsey!”
He shot up, the cool air hitting his naked chest as he ran a hand through his hair. No need to ask what she was talking about. Not at three in the morning. Lucy had been hot on the tail of her mother’s rapist. Her sister’s kidnapper.
“They’re sure it’s him?”
“Yeah. They picked him up tonight on a broken taillight.” Ramsey didn’t ask how the taillight got broken. He didn’t need to know.
Lucy could have done it. He would have.
“We did a DNA swab and it was a positive match with the sample from Mom’s rape kit.”
It hadn’t been called a rape kit twenty-seven years before, but thank God they’d saved the emergency-room evidence.
Pulling a suit out of his closet, Ramsey grabbed a shirt and tie and headed toward the shower. “Have you talked to him yet?”
“No. I was hoping we could let him stew a few hours and—”
“Maybe we should question him together.” He couldn’t be an official part of any investigation in Aurora. But detectives could sit in on cases outside of their jurisdiction if they were invited to be a guest participant.
He wanted this lowlife almost as badly as Lucy Hayes did. Because they knew for sure he’d taken Allison Hayes.
“I was hoping you’d be able to get here,” Lucy said.
“Call the airport and get me on a flight while I jump in the shower.”
“Done.”
He turned on the shower, grabbed his towel off the rack and slung it over the door for easy access. “Does your mother know yet?”
He thought of Rose Sanderson. Of how she’d spiraled downward before his eyes when she’d heard about Emma’s being in danger—even with Emma standing right there.
“No, and I’m not telling her. I need her sober. She’s the only witness we have and she might remember something based on what he says.”
“Agreed.”
The water was hot. Ready for him. But there was one more question. “Has he said anything about your sister?”
“No. He hasn’t said a word about anything. He still thinks he’s in on resisting arrest for a traffic violation.”
“Who’s handling the case?” It couldn’t be Lucy. Not with her relationship to the victim.
“My captain gave it to Amber Lockengren.” Lucy’s mentor.
“You okay with that?”
“Yeah.”
“You think she’ll agree to hold off interrogating him until I can get there to watch?” This was why he lived. To bring down the slime in the world.
“I already asked and she will.”
“Good.”
“So, I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah, text me my flight info.”
“You got it.” She disconnected.
Tossing his phone on the counter, Ramsey got in the shower—as pleased with life as he got.
* * * * *
Look for the third installment in this series and find out what really happened in Comfort Cove! THE TRUTH ABOUT COMFORT COVE is available in January 2013.
Keep reading for an excerpt of The Road to Bayou Bridge by Liz Talley!
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CHAPTER ONE
August 2012
Naval Station, Rota, Spain
THE PAPER ACTUALLY SHOOK in Darby Dufrene’s hand—that’s how shocked he was by the document he’d discovered in a box of old papers. He’d been looking for the grief book he’d made as a small child and instead had found something that made his gut lurch against his ribs.
“Dude, come on. The driver needs to go.” Hal Severson’s voice echoed in the half-full moving truck parked below the flat Darby had shared with the rotund navy chaplain for the past several years. His roommate had waited semi-good-naturedly while Darby climbed inside to grab the book before it was shipped to Seattle, but good humor had limits.
“Just a sec,” Darby called, his eyes refusing to leave the elaborate font of the certificate he’d pulled from a clasped envelope trapped in the back of his Bayou Bridge Reveille yearbook. How in the hell had this escaped his attention? Albeit it had been buried in with some old school papers he’d tossed aside over ten years ago and vowed never to look at again, surely the state of Louisiana seal would have permeated his brain and screamed, Open me!
Yet, back then he’d been in a funk—a childish, rebellious huff of craptastic proportions. He probably hadn’t thought about much else except the pity party he’d been throwing himself.
The moving truck’s engine fired and a loud roar rumbled through the trailer, vibrating the wood floor. The driver was eager to pick up the rest of his load, presumably a navy family heading back to the States, and his patience with Darby climbing up and digging through boxes already packed was also at an end. Darby slid the certificate back into its manila envelope, tucked it into his jacket and emerged from the back end of the truck.
Hal’s red hair glinted in the sunlight spilling over the tiled roof, and his expression had evoled to exasperation. The man was hungry. Had been hungry for hours while the movers slowly packed up Darby’s personal effects and scant pieces of furniture, and no one stood between Hal and his last chance to dine in El Puerto de Santa Maria, the city near the Rota Naval Base, with his best comrade. “Let’s go already. Saucy Terese and her crustacean friends await us.”
“Not Il Caffe di Roma, Hal. I don’t want to look into that woman’s eyes and wonder if she might greet me with a filet knife.”
“You ain’t that good, brother,” Hal said in a slow Oklahoma drawl. “She’ll find someone else on wh
ich to ply her wiles when the new guy arrives.”
“You mean the new guy whose name is Angela Dillard?”
“The new JAG officer’s a girl?”
Darby smiled. “Actually she’s a woman.”
Hal jingled his keys. “Entendido.”
“Your Spanish sucks.”
“Whatever. Now get your butt in gear. There are some crabs and sherry with my name on them.”
Darby tried to ignore the heat of the document pressing against his chest. Of course, it wasn’t actually hot. Just burning a hole in his stomach with horrible dread. He was an attorney and the document he carried wasn’t a prank, but he couldn’t figure out how the license had been filed. His father had virtually screamed the implausibility at him nearly eleven years ago—the day he’d shipped Darby off to Virginia—so this didn’t make sense. “Fine, but if Terese comes toward me with a blade, you must sacrifice yourself. If not, Picou will ply the sacrificial purifications of the Chickamauga on you. She’s been waiting for five years to get me back home to Beau Soleil.”
Hal rubbed his belly. “Did they perform human sacrifices?”
“Who? The Native Americans or Picou?”
“Either.”
Darby grinned. “I don’t know about the Chickamauga, but my mom will go psycho if I don’t climb off that plane.”
“Consider it done. No way I’m left to deal with your mother. She makes mine look like that woman from Leave It to Beaver.”
“Your mom is June Cleaver all the way down to the apron and heels.” Darby knew firsthand. Her weekly chocolate chips cookies had caused him to pack on a few pounds.
“I know. All women pale in comparison.” Hal opened the door of his white convertible BMW, his one prideful sin, and slid in. He perched a pair of Ray-Bans on his nose and fired the engine.
“Except our housekeeper, Lucille. Can’t wait to get my hands on her pecan pie.” Darby took one last look at his beachfront flat before sliding onto the hot leather seats of Hal’s car. He’d already shipped his motorcycle to the States weeks ago. He wanted it available when he got to Seattle and went in search of apartments, though he knew he’d likely have to sell it in favor of a respectable sedan. With all that Northwest rain, he’d have little chance to take as many mind-clearing drives as he had along the coast of Spain. Plus, Shelby hated it.
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