Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  “Don’t run now, Adam,”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Beverly Bird

  BEVERLY BIRD

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright

  “Don’t run now, Adam,”

  Mariah said breathlessly. “You’re not that cruel, that unfair. You had your say. Now give me mine.”

  “You can’t change my mind,” Adam bit out.

  “I wouldn’t presume to. I know you’re not going to stay,” she went on, her voice shaking. “But at least leave me some memories to keep when you’re gone.”

  “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?” he growled.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “And a few you didn’t. You don’t want to hurt me. You’re concerned because you can’t live up to my morals. We shouldn’t run around because you can’t marry me.” She took a deep breath. “And I’m saying I don’t care.”

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome back to another month of great reading here at Silhouette Intimate Moments. Favorite author Marie Ferrarella gets things off to a rousing start with The Amnesiac Bride. Imagine waking up in a beautiful bridal suite, a ring on your finger and a gorgeous guy by your side—and no memory at all of who he is or how you got there! That’s Whitney Bradshaw’s dilemma in a nutshell, and wait ’til you see where things go from there.

  Maggie Shayne brings you the next installment in her exciting miniseries, THE TEXAS BRAND, with The Baddest Virgin in Texas. If ever a title said it all, that’s the one. I guarantee you’re going to love this book. Nikki Benjamin’s Daddy by Default is a lesson in what can happen when you hang on to a secret from your past. Luckily, what happens in this case ends up being very, very good. Beverly Bird begins a new miniseries, THE WEDDING RING, with Loving Mariah. It takes a missing child to bring Adam Wallace and Mariah Fisher together, but nothing will tear them apart. Kate Hathaway’s back with Bad For Each Other, a secret-baby story that’s chock-full of emotion. And finally, welcome new author Stephanie Doyle, whose Undiscovered Hero will have you eagerly turning the pages.

  This month and every month, if you’re looking for romantic reading at its best, come to Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Enjoy!

  Leslie Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

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  * * *

  LOVING MARIAH

  BEVERLY BIRD

  Books by Beverly Bird

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Emeralds In the Dark #3

  The Fires of Winter #23

  Ride the Wind #139

  A Solitary Man #172

  *A Man Without Love #630

  *A Man Without a Haven #641

  *A Man Without a Wife #652

  Undercover Cowboy #711

  The Marrying Kind #732

  Compromising Positions #777

  †Loving Mariah #790

  Silhouette Desire

  The Best Reasons #190

  Fool’s Gold #209

  All the Marbles #227

  To Love a Stranger #411

  *Wounded Warriors

  †The Wedding Ring

  BEVERLY BIRD

  has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began, on an island in New Jersey Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.

  For Ho-Ho Bear and his very best friend.

  I sure do love you!

  Prologue

  “You know, if this one doesn’t pan out, maybe you ought to think about shelving it.”

  Adam Wallace’s gaze swiveled around to his brother. He folded one more sweater and placed it neatly in the open suitcase on the bed.

  “You want to run that by me one more time?” he said, his voice too quiet.

  “You heard me.” Jake Wallace answered neutrally.

  “Just trying to convince myself that I didn’t.”

  Adam slapped the suitcase closed and crossed his arms over his chest. He was the shorter of the two. but he was broader, more solid, and he looked stronger, though that was misleading. They had had more than enough skirmishes over the years to prove that they were evenly matched in any fight. Even now, in their thirties, they could go at it like junkyard dogs when the situation warranted it.

  Adam was starting to think this might be one of those times.

  “He’s my kid.” His voice dropped another notch with warning.

  “He’s been gone for four years.”

  “Was there a statute of limitations on this? Did I miss something?”

  “Yeah. You’ve been missing whole chunks of life for a while now.”

  Adam’s eyes narrowed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It ought to.”

  Adam swung.

  Jake had agility on his side. He danced out of the bedroom door with a quick step to the left. “You done now?” he asked.

  “No.” Adam grabbed the front of Jake’s flannel shirt, fisting it in one big hand, cocking back with the other. It only irritated him more that Jake showed no reaction.

  “Are you telling me to give up?” he demanded. “To forget him? Yeah, that’s your style.”

  Jake ignored the personal slight. “Listen to me, bro. We can wrestle over it later if that’s what you want, but just hear me out first. All I’m saying is you’ve been obsessed with finding Bo for a long time now. Hey, I would have done the same thing in your shoes. And I’ve been right there with you most steps of the way, haven’t I? But it’s one thing to devote yourself to a war you’ve got a prayer of winning, and it’s something else again to keep on butting your head against something you can’t change.” He let those words hang between them a moment. “Adam, he’s gone. Maybe you can’t find him. Maybe there’s not a damned thing you can do about this any longer.”

  There was a sharp, sudden pain in the area of Adam’s chest, quickly replaced by a dull ache. He no longer felt like fighting.

  “I can’t accept that.” he said flatly. He dropped his fist.

  Jake smoothed his shirt against his chest with a quick frown. “Man, sooner or later you’ve got to.”

  “No. I’ll find him.”

  Stubbornness was a Wallace trait, Jake reasoned. “Maybe you won’t,” he repeated just as obstinately. “Maybe Jannel took him and left the country.”

  Adam rounded on him again. “He’s out there, damn it. It’s like misplacing something in your own home. There’s only so many places it could be.”

  “The world’s a hell of a lot bigger than a home, bro.”

  “If I keep throwing out bait, somebody’s got to bite.”

  “Man, we’ve looked and looked. We’ve chased down every lead, every hint every long shot, for four
years now. What are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life dashing around the country every week, every two weeks, looking into some godforsaken town, finding nothing? You’ve put every dime you ever had into this!”

  “Not quite.”

  Luckily, there had been some significant dimes to start with, Adam thought. They’d both been athletic kids. Jake’s love had been football. Adam’s had been baseball. Adam, at least, had gone on to play professionally. He’d spent some twelve seasons catching for the Houston Astros and loving every minute of it before he’d come home from a road trip one August to find his wife and son gone.

  He’d never seen it coming, and that had turned him into a bitter man with a painful awareness of just how much of a fool he could be.

  He’d retired from baseball with two years left on his contract. He’d moved out of his home in Dallas, though that and his vacation home in Galveston remained empty with mortgages still in his name because they were both places Bo might manage to find his way back to. He’d moved into this three-room apartment above a storefront on Story Road, between Dallas and Fort Worth. It was cramped and it was old, but it was reasonably close to the airport. And Adam spent a lot of time moving through the airport He’d finally established priorities, and he attacked them single-mindedly.

  The storefront housed the unimpressive offices of ChildSearch, a national network of mostly unpaid computer buffs who could hack their way into anything. There were a few investigators on staff as well—Jake was one of them, though he had always donated his time. But most of the company’s queries and searches—both legal and those that fell into a gray area—centered on the mind-boggling network of data bases a minor child might fall into. The legwork didn’t start until the computer guys got a hit.

  In the four years since the company’s inception, ChildSearch had found roughly twenty percent of the children they had looked for, a pretty good record. But his son hadn’t been among them. The company hadn’t yet turned a profit, either, and even Adam admitted it probably never would. Those parents who couldn’t pay staggering sums to find their child were never charged.

  He jerked the suitcase upright and placed it on the floor. Ready to go again, he thought. He wouldn’t eat and he’d barely sleep and he wouldn’t come home until he had long since exhausted this latest lead.

  “It hurts,” Jake said quietly. “Hell, it hurts me, too, Adam. He’s my nephew. He’s a Wallace. But you’ve got to come up for air here, bro.”

  Adam’s blue-gray eyes slashed in his direction again.

  “Look what it’s doing to you. All I’m saying is, you’re going to have to make a choice soon. You can go on tearing yourself up like this, day after day. Letting it drive you. If this lifetime’s all we get, then that’s going to make for one miserable existence. Or when—when—it becomes clear that there’s no more hope, you can try to put it behind you. Like a death in the family. You can’t bring somebody back who’s died. either. You’ve got to start over, Adam.”

  “You’re treading on thin ice.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to keep up until I crash through.”

  “You’re close.”

  “I’m finished.” Jake finally crossed the room to stand beside him. In a symbolic gesture, he began packing stacks of Bo’s pictures into a briefcase that sat on the small scarred desk. “So what did I miss?” he asked. “Where are you headed off to this time? Did Berry or Philip come up with something?”

  Adam shook his head. Bill Berry worked the computers out of Los Angeles. Philip Rycroft was an investigator based in Manhattan. They were two of the best resources ChildSearch had, and they were on the payroll.

  “Milk-carton call.” he answered.

  “Oh, man.” Jake tried not to swear. The milk-carton tips were wrong a good ninety percent of the time. Maybe some kid looked a little like the picture, but it was usually someone else. In a few spare cases, someone was merely trying to play hell and havoc with an enemy, tipping off the authorities that the kid they claimed as their own was actually stolen.

  The cartons and mailers were especially iffy in Bo’s case. He’d been three when Jannel had taken him. He’d be seven now. That made for a lot of changes. Bo’s milk carton was one of the deluxe models, with a photograph on one side as he’d looked when he’d been taken, and an artist’s rendering on the other of what he might look like today. But still...

  “Just Bo?” Jake asked, looking for a trace of hope. “Or did they see Jannel. too?”

  “She’s not on the carton.” Adam rarely spoke her name.

  “Yeah, well, I thought whoever took the call might have asked.”

  “It was Rebecca. Yeah, she asked. But this kid was alone.”

  “Anonymous?” Most tips that come in on the hotline were. “Or do you actually have someone to interview this time?”

  “No. She wouldn’t leave her name.”

  Jake swore again. “Where?” he asked finally. “Where did she spot him?”

  “Pennsylvania,” Adam answered neutrally. The tension between them was all under the surface now. “Lancaster.”

  Jake nodded. He had been through that area once long ago, in a memorable summer spent traveling coast to coast after college. He briefly remembered his traveling companion, a leggy redhead whose name escaped him at the moment.

  “The city or the county?”

  “County.” Adam finally relented. The hell of it was, he really couldn’t remain angry at Jake all that long. The two of them were all they had left. “The caller said she saw a kid who looked like the picture in a farmer’s market in a place called Bird-in-Hand.”

  Jake sorted through his memory. “That’s a village. They’re sprinkled all through there. The county’s mostly rural. Farms. Lots of cows, corn and horse manure.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Low population.” That was good, Jake decided, thinking like a detective again. “Spread out over a whole lot of acres.” That was bad. “I can fly up on Wednesday, if you need a hand circulating the pictures.” It was grunt work, legwork, but it was mostly how things got done.

  Adam shot him a look that was almost a smile. “I’ll call, let you know.”

  Jake thought some more. “It’s Amish country.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Those folks can be a tough nut to crack. They don’t always talk. They don’t care for outsiders. In fact, they make it a religious point to keep to themselves.”

  Adam picked up the briefcase. “You’ve been watching too many movies. Kids are common ground. Most people put aside their differences to help find kids.”

  “Do we know anybody up that way? Someone who might get you an in?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, hold on to that famous Wallace temper, bro. Something tells me it won’t get you far in the Pennsylvania Dutch heartland. And you might want to try out a few manners, too.” Jake picked up the suitcase. “Need a ride to the airport?”

  “Yeah.” It would save on parking fees, Adam thought. Jake had had one good point: his money wasn’t gone, but was getting to the danger point of running low.

  As always, Jake read his mind. “You already live like a pauper,” he muttered. “Like a damned monk.”

  They went downstairs, onto the street, and walked half a block to Jake’s restored ’56 Thunderbird. The canary-yellow paint gleamed in the Texas sunshine.

  “A woman,” Jake went on, popping the trunk. “That’s what you need, bro. A woman. Someone to help get your mind off all this once in a while.” He heaved the suitcase inside.

  “Jake,” Adam said, going back to the passenger door.

  “Yeah?” He looked over the car at him.

  “A woman got me into this nightmare. Now shut up and drive.”

  Chapter 1

  Adam allowed himself to think about Jannel on the flight north. Maybe it was because of Jake’s lecture. It had started a panic inside him, like a scurrying animal in his gut that had just woken up and realized it was trapped. Not
that he believed Bo was forever gone—no. he would never accept that. But he considered the way he had searched for him to the exclusion of everything else these past four years, and he knew why he had.

  The closed goal-oriented life he had fallen into allowed him no time to be so foolish, so unutterably stupid, again.

  He didn’t trust himself. He just didn’t trust his perceptions anymore. He’d been caught up in a world that wasn’t real when he’d married Jannel, but he hadn’t understood that it wasn’t reat—that was the hell of it He’d been a grown man earning millions of dollars to do what sandlot sluggers were doing the country over, and he had reveled in it, considering it no less than his due. because he could hit that ball farther, he could throw that ball harder than nearly anyone else. Jannel had just popped up in the middle of it, and it had seemed right that he should have her, too.

  He’d met her at a black-tie dinner at the Astros’ owner’s country club. If there had been flaws and imperfections in that room, outside of a few busted knees and pulled hamstrings suffered by the players, they were hidden well The women were the crème de la crème, and Jannel had stood out even among that competition. She’d caught his gaze across that crowded room, held it and lifted one corner of her mouth into a smile. He’d fallen for her hook, line and sinker, then and there.

  She’d been the perfect baseball wife. Independent enough not to whine about all the road trips. Blond, trim, sexy, she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t even go out to get the newspaper in the morning without makeup. She’d gained a perfectly acceptable twenty-seven and a half pounds when she’d been pregnant with Bo. She gave parties, worked the team’s favored charities and spoke of nothing that was going on inside her.

  Adam hadn’t realized that until it was over, that he could not remember even one single conversation between them that had concerned what she felt, what she thought, what she wanted or liked. They spoke of Bo, of Adam’s schedule. They gossiped of teammates and debated current events. But she’d never easily given up any glimpses into what was inside her. There’d always been a certain aloofness about her. He’d thought at the time that it was just an independent streak. In retrospect, he knew she’d been cold.