Serendipity

by Fern Michaels

  “I think you should leave, Ross, and take that with you,” Jory said, pointing a trembling hand at the envelope on the coffee table.

  Ross shook his head. “It belongs to you. I’m sorry you won’t have dinner with me. I think if we set our differences aside, we could have a pleasant evening. Who knows, we might even come to like each other.”

  “You’re five years too late, Ross.” Was that admiration or approval she was seeing in his eyes? She felt like crying. There had been a time when she would have kissed his feet to see such a look. She would have prostituted herself for a smile or a friendly pat on the head.

  Too much, too little, too late. . . .

  Books by Fern Michaels:

  A Family Affair

  Forget Me Not

  The Blossom Sisters

  Balancing Act

  Tuesday’s Child

  Betrayal

  Southern Comfort

  To Taste the Wine

  Sins of the Flesh

  Sins of Omission

  Return to Sender

  Mr. and Miss Anonymous

  Up Close and Personal

  Fool Me Once

  Picture Perfect

  About Face

  The Future Scrolls

  Kentucky Sunrise

  Kentucky Heat

  Kentucky Rich

  Plain Jane

  Charming Lily

  What You Wish For

  The Guest List

  Listen to Your Heart

  Celebration

  Yesterday

  Finders Keepers

  Annie’s Rainbow

  Sara’s Song

  Vegas Sunrise

  Vegas Heat

  Vegas Rich

  Whitefire

  Wish List

  Dear Emily

  Christmas at Timberwoods

  The Sisterhood Novels:

  Blindsided

  Gotcha!

  Home Free

  Déjà Vu

  Cross Roads

  Game Over

  Deadly Deals

  Vanishing Act

  Razor Sharp

  Under the Radar

  Final Justice

  Collateral Damage

  Fast Track

  Hokus Pokus

  Hide and Seek

  Free Fall

  Lethal Justice

  Sweet Revenge

  The Jury

  Vendetta

  Payback

  Weekend Warriors

  The Godmothers Series:

  Classfied

  Breaking News

  Deadline

  Late Edition

  Exclusive

  The Scoop

  E-Book Exclusives:

  Captive Secrets

  Captive Splendors

  Captive Embraces

  Captive Passions

  Cinders to Satin

  For All Their Lives

  Fancy Dancer

  Texas Heat

  Texas Rich

  Texas Fury

  Texas Sunrise

  Anthologies:

  Secret Santa

  A Winter Wonderland

  I’ll Be Home for Christmas

  Making Spirits Bright

  Holiday Magic

  Snow angels

  Silver Bells

  Comfort and Joy

  Sugar and Spice

  Let it Snow

  A Gift of Joy

  Five Golden Rings

  Deck the Halls

  Jingle All the Way

  FERN MICHAELS

  SERENDIPITY

  eKensington

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Books by Fern Michaels:

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  FOR ALL THEIR LIVES

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jory Ryan—that’s how she thought of herself now—finally gave in to the tremors she’d been holding in check during the past hour, but still fought her tears back. The front she’d managed to put up for Ross when he’d asked for a divorce was the hardest thing she’d ever done, harder than going through the miscarriage, harder than going off alone, harder than living alone, working and going to night school. Harder than getting through her estranged father’s funeral. But she’d done it, she thought. She’d not only persevered, but had prevailed, even when he’d tried to ease his own conscience by buying her off.

  A day didn’t go by that she didn’t think of Ross Landers and the mistakes she’d made back in the beginning. Would she really have cried rape? Back then, she’d threatened Ross with it, but to this day she couldn’t say yes or no with certainty. Back then she’d been a wild, incorrigible teenager, without a mother, whose father was away from home so much, she’d had all the latitude and freedom she wanted.

  How badly she’d needed a mother; but her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, who also died—one year later, when she was seven. Since then, it seemed, she’d gotten into one scrape after another.

  As a teenager she’d been a tease and a flirt. But she’d only gone all the way with one other boy, and only once, before she’d done it with Ross Landers, a dozen times. She would never forget the look on Ross’s face when she told him she was pregnant. He’d said something so hateful, so vitriolic, she’d run from him, wanting to hide her shame. Afterward, Woo, Ross’s best friend, had tried to console her, saying she should be patient, that Ross would do the right thing.

  For three months she waited for Ross to do the right thing. She’d called Woo again, but he’d gone back to Lancaster; so instead she showed up on Ross’s doorstep and told him she intended to have the baby, and if anyone asked why she wasn’t married, she’d say he’d raped her. She’d gone back to her father’s house then, and sat on the swing on the front porch, freezing. Ross arrived an hour later and, without emotion, told her to get in the car. They drove to Maryland and were married by a justice of the peace at eleven o’clock at night.

  The following months, when she and Ross lived in a small house, were the most miserable of Jory’s life. One night in particular stood out. She’d been three months pregnant, and feeling sick and out of sorts all day. She hadn’t gone down to dinner, and at ten o’clock, when she was almost asleep, Ross came to her room and tried to make love to her. She’d done her best to help him, but he was incapable of sustaining an erection. He’d stared down at her, said she repulsed him, that she was nothing but a slut he’d had the misfortune to marry. He stormed from the room, and returned only after she’d miscarried.

  Sick with humiliation, Jory packed her bags in the sixth month of her marriage and left. She hadn’t said good-bye to Ross, and saw him only three times afterward. The last time was at her father’s funeral, eighteen months ago. He’d been among the city employees who turned out to pay their final respects. He hadn’t tried to speak to her then, nor had she tried to speak to him. Jory couldn’t help but wonder what people thought about her and Ross. Did they think they were divorced, separated, strangers? She came to the conclusion they simply di
dn’t care. She didn’t care either.

  “Driver, I changed my mind,” Jory said now. “Turn around. I want to go to Chestnut Hill. Gravers Lane, number sixteen.” Going back to the house she’d grown up in couldn’t be any more traumatic than what she’d just gone through with Ross.

  Forty minutes later Jory paid the driver and got out of the taxi. The house was a Tudor, the yard overgrown, the trim on the windows in need of paint. She’d painted the front door a bright red as an act of defiance when she was sixteen, but she couldn’t remember why now. She did recall her father telling her to strip off the paint and varnish the door. She told him to do it himself, and took his slap high on her cheekbone. She still carried the scar his college ring made with the fierce blow. Her hand moved to her cheek to touch the thin line her skillfully applied makeup covered.

  Maybe it wasn’t an act of defiance after all. Maybe she’d painted the door to bring some color into her life. At Christmastime the red door always seemed particularly festive. Now it was simply a red door with peeling paint. She felt like crying as she fit her old house key into the lock.

  It was cool inside, the blinds drawn, the furniture covered with dusty white sheets. The rugs were rolled up against the wall, the floors gritty and dusty.

  Tears rolled down Jory’s cheeks as she walked from room to room, peeking under the dust covers. If there had just been one person in the whole world to love her, to care about her, she wouldn’t be here right now.

  She should sell the house, she thought, take the money and invest it in something that would give her a small income. The ten thousand dollars she’d received from her father’s insurance was still sitting in the Mellon Bank, along with the three thousand he had always kept in his checking account. The same perverse streak that wouldn’t allow her to spend Ross’s money wouldn’t allow her to spend her father’s money either. She knew her father’s car was in the garage. When she sold the house, she’d sell the car too.

  She could live here if she wanted to, Jory thought. The two hundred dollars rent she was paying in Florida could go toward the taxes on this house. She could ask her boss to help her get a job at the Philadelphia Democrat. If she wanted to, that is. She could do a lot of things if she wanted to. But did she want to risk running into Ross and his family? She might have guts, but did she have enough to put herself through more heartache?

  Jory was in her old room now, staring at the four-poster with the draped sheets. She thought of harems, jewels, and silk veils. This room should have been a sanctuary, but it wasn’t. She’d really only slept and changed her clothes here. She couldn’t remember what she did in this room when she was little. Did she play with blocks, have a rocking horse, dolls? She couldn’t remember. She lifted the dust sheet on the bed. The mattress was pale blue and quilted, the tag at the bottom wilted and wrinkled. She smiled at the slight dip in the middle. She still slept in the middle of the bed. She let the sheet fall back. It was just a bed she used to sleep in.

  Tears burned Jory’s eyes when she opened dresser drawers, looked in the two closets. There should be treasures here, things she left behind. But there had been no treasures—except one. Damn, where was it? She yanked and pulled at the drawers, distinctly remembered thumb-tacking it to the back of one of them. God, let it be here, she prayed. Please, let it be here. And it was, a length of satin tied in knots, the binding from her childhood blanket. She literally swooned with feeling when she brought it up to her cheek. The one and only thing in the world that had ever given her comfort. So many times it had been drenched with tears. She couldn’t count the times she woke up in the morning with the treasure pressed into her cheek. Now, her fingers worked the knots the way a nun would her rosary. How good it felt, how wonderfully comforting. She remembered each knot, big and small. She thought of each knot as a milestone in her life. Her eyes dry, her mouth grim, Jory added a last knot to the end of the satin.

  “For my pending divorce,” she said sadly.

  Jory removed the dust cover from an oak rocking chair with a faded orange cushion and sat down.

  If she did come back, she thought, and lived here in Chestnut Hill, she might be able to avoid Ross. Financially the move made sense. She would have a car, once she replaced the tires and got it tuned up. She could make the house into the home she never really had. She could probably take off from now till the end of the year and get the place cleaned up. She could take a sewing class and make new covers for the furniture; there was a night class for everything. There was an old treadle sewing machine somewhere in the house. She could make bright cushions, valances instead of drapes—those poofy kind she’d seen in magazines, which allowed for a lot of sunlight. She could shampoo the carpets herself, wax the floors, clean the windows. And if she decided to leave Florida, she would get severance pay, and maybe she could even collect unemployment insurance. She had eight hundred dollars in a savings account, and would get back her rental deposit and the deposits on her utilities. A thousand dollars might see her through the worst of things. And if she absolutely had to, she could dip into her father’s insurance money.

  Outside in the afternoon sunshine, Jory looked around. “I’m coming back,” she said aloud, saluting the bright red door before she started down the hill to Germantown Avenue to catch a cab.

  Three weeks later she moved into the house in Chestnut Hill.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “There is no way in hell I will allow you to turn this magazine into a sewer publication. I absolutely forbid it, Justine!”

  Justine Landers’s lips curled into a sneer, and when she replied, her voice was as contemptuous as her gaze. “Do I need to remind you that I am the publisher of this magazine? I even have a contract to prove it. It was my wedding present. Remember, Jasper dear?”

  “You might be the publisher, but I own this magazine, just as my father and his father before him owned it. One day Ross will own it. Until this moment it has been a publication to be proud of. The answer is no, Justine, an unequivocal no!”

  Ross Landers, watching his parents argue about TIF, appeared impassive, as if he were a spectator at a tennis match.

  “We’ve lost money six years in a row,” Justine said. “We are in the red up to our necks, Jasper. We publish a magazine no one wants to buy or read. People train their dogs or line their trash cans with our expensive magazine. Even I don’t read it, and I publish it. When was the last time you read it? When was the last time you even bothered to come down here to see how things were going? I can tell you—three years ago. Three years, Jasper. The employees of this magazine are almost as old as God. None of them has had an original idea in the last twenty years. Even this building is archaic. Everything looks like it came over on the ark.” To make her point, Justine grabbed a glass paperweight from a desk and threw it onto the cushion of a Morris chair. Dust spiraled upward. Her facial muscles stretched into a grimace.

  “The answer, Justine, is still no.”

  His wife threw her elegantly manicured hands in the air. “What do you think I’m going to do to this magazine, Jasper? TIF, Truth in Fiction . . . People will believe what we print, but it has to be interesting. I can make it interesting. Then, I thought I’d do a feature story on Judge Halvorsen, for instance. I’m sure all of Philadelphia will rush to buy next month’s issue if they can read about ‘Hizhonor’ and his charming wife Helen.

  “I can have this magazine in the black inside of six months,” Justine said. “In the black, Jasper. Give me a year, that’s all I ask. Ross will head the legal department. You trust your own son, don’t you?”

  Worms of fear skittered around inside Jasper’s stomach.

  Ross was Justine’s big gun; Justine knew it, and so did Ross. Should he hold out? Jasper wondered. He knew his wife was right, because she never dealt from anything but a position of strength. He also knew that TIF was the laughingstock of the publishing industry, but he hated change of any kind. He wondered, then, as he did every day, why he’d ever married Justine. And the answer
was always the same: Justine had opened her legs for him three times a day. Until the day she found out she was pregnant with Ross and closed them.

  Justine’s eyes narrowed. She had him, she could feel it. She pressed again, saying, “Deed TIF over to me. Ross will draw up the necessary papers. Surely you have no objection to that.”

  He had a thousand objections, but he said, “Eight months with eight hundred thousand in the black, then we’ll talk about ownership. Take it or leave it, Justine.” The expression on his son’s face changed then. To admiration? Jasper wondered. For him?

  “That’s blackmail!” Justine shrieked. “You’re blackmailing me, your own wife? Ross, do something.”

  “Not on your life,” Ross said quietly. “This is between you and Father.”

  “My wife?” Jasper’s laugh was so bitter, Ross cringed. “Do you want me to recite chapter and verse here in front of our son? Don’t ever refer to yourself as my wife again. You live in my house, live off my generosity, and you feed off your son. You’re a disgrace to this family, Justine.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that!” Justine sputtered.

  The look of approval was still on his son’s face. Jasper felt giddy. He didn’t ever want that look to go away. “I just did, Justine. Don’t even think about pushing me one inch further.” His voice turned thoughtful: “I see you sitting on an orange plastic chair. I can actually see it.” Obviously Ross could see it too, because he was grinning.

  “What does that mean?” Justine demanded.

  “What that means, Justine, is you’re no lady. You wear a lady’s clothes, you wear makeup like a lady, and at times you can converse like a lady, but don’t ever forget for a minute where I found you. You belong on an orange plastic chair. You’re a mongrel.”

  Abruptly, Jasper turned away from her and toward his son. “Ross, it was nice to see you. Perhaps we can have dinner at the club one of these days.”