Love Inspired February 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: The Cowboy's Reunited FamilyThe Forest Ranger's ReturnMommy Wanted

by Brenda Minton

  Lainey giggled. “Me, too!”

  With Chad and Jessica nearby, Kate spent an entire hour talking with her little girl and feeding the ducks at the pond. Lainey loved to talk, and she told Kate all about their vacation, how they’d spent a few days at a beach and then some days camping in the mountains and then they’d gone to a big amusement park and ridden all of the rides. She was so excited, so happy, and Kate thanked God for that. And she thanked Him for giving her this hour with her little girl.

  When the time was over and Chad and Jessica got ready to leave, Kate prepared to tell her little girl goodbye, but she couldn’t make herself say the word. So she stood and watched the family pack their things to go, with Lainey smiling at her before she headed to the car.

  Jessica stopped her before she climbed in, and then Lainey, still smiling, ran back to Kate. “’Bye, Miss Kate,” she said, and she stretched her arms wide for a hug.

  Kate lifted her in her arms. She’d held Lainey as a baby, and she’d hated it, had thought she must not have a single motherly bone in her body, because she’d felt nothing.

  But Kate’s heart had opened since then, and now she was filled with a warmth and a love so all-consuming that she never wanted to let the little girl go. “Oh, Lainey, I so enjoyed meeting you.”

  Lainey laughed. “Me, too!”

  Kate squeezed her once more, focused on remembering everything about this hug and then put her little girl down and watched her leave.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I brought my insurance payment for ya,” Chad said, entering Mitch’s office and plopping into his guest chair without the anger he’d had a few days ago. He tossed the envelope toward Mitch and then looked at the empty desk on the other side of the room, giving Mitch an indication of the real reason for this visit.

  Mitch had been staring at that desk all morning, when he wasn’t calling Kate’s number and leaving her messages or texting her and asking if she was okay...while wishing he hadn’t been an idiot and that she was here, with him, where he believed she belonged.

  “Your payment isn’t due for two weeks and you always mail it in,” Mitch said. “Why don’t we talk about why you’re really here?”

  Chad frowned, glancing at the desk again. “You heard from her?”

  “No. Like I told you at church yesterday, according to Mr. and Mrs. Tingle, Kate was gone when they woke up Saturday morning. I’ve been calling, but she hasn’t returned any of my calls.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, well, I figured if she had wanted you to know about Saturday morning, she’d have told you, so I didn’t say anything to you yesterday. But Jess and I were talking last night, and we both think we made a mistake in trying to keep her from Lainey. And after seeing them together on Saturday, we realized that Kate wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize our relationship with Lainey and that she honestly just wants to have some part in her life.” He shrugged. “But I’ve texted Kate, too, and she doesn’t answer.”

  Mitch leaned forward in his chair and asked, “What do you mean ‘after seeing them together on Saturday’? Kate saw Lainey?”

  Chad nodded. “She called us early Saturday morning and offered us a compromise. She said if we’d let her see Lainey, just meet her once, then she’d leave town for good and wouldn’t interfere in our lives anymore.” He frowned. “I didn’t even want to give her that, but Jess said it was the right thing to do, so we did. Met her at the park and let her spend some time with Lainey, feeding the ducks.”

  Mitch could only imagine how much that meant to Kate, and he wished he could have witnessed the moment when she was reunited with her little girl. “And then she left?”

  “Yeah, and promised we wouldn’t hear from her again.” He shook his head as he looked at Kate’s desk. “Now I’m thinking I may have acted too harshly, and now no one can get in touch with her. Jess thought maybe you could ask her to give us a call when you hear from her, and we can work something out about her seeing Lainey some.” He lifted his shoulders. “Jess said she believes it’s the right thing to do. She reminded me of when she left town when she was pregnant with Nathan and then told me how badly it would have hurt her if I hadn’t forgiven her when she came back.” Chad looked back to Mitch. “I’m a little slow on the forgiving thing. I tend to hold a grudge for a while first. I did that with Jess, and now I’m doing it again with Kate. But with Kate, I may have lost the opportunity to tell her. So if you talk to her, ask her to call us, okay?”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to me, either,” Mitch said, feeling sick. For all he knew, Kate had changed her number to keep from hearing from any of them. And he had no idea where she’d gone.

  “You love her,” Chad said, stating a fact rather than asking a question.

  “Yeah, I do, but I hurt her Friday, too. Basically I told her I couldn’t risk loving someone who might be taken from me again, taken from the girls again.” Mitch had mentally kicked himself repeatedly for his fear and for the fact that he hadn’t told Kate that he loved her.

  Chad winced. “Hey, I can see that. After everything you went through with Jana, watching her suffer and then losing her...you’ve gotta be scared of that happening again. But if you love her, would you rather go without having her your entire life than having the chance to love her even if it’s only for a little while? Plus she’s in remission. She could be cancer-free from now on.”

  Mitch heaved a sigh. He’d been thinking the same thing all weekend. He only wished he’d have thought that through before she left town. “I was stupid.”

  Chad started to say something but stopped when the office phone rang.

  Mitch picked up the receiver. “Gillespie Insurance Agency.”

  “Oh, yes, hello. This is Patricia Owen with the Winship Institute in Atlanta. I’m trying to reach Kate Wydell. The first contact number seems to be a cell phone that isn’t working or is disconnected, and this was her second point of contact. Would she happen to be there?”

  “No, she isn’t here,” Mitch said.

  “Dr. Ayers asked me to call and find out if she is running late or if we need to reschedule her treatment. Do you happen to know if she is on her way? She was due in at six o’clock this morning, four hours ago.”

  “She was supposed to be there at six o’clock?” Mitch asked, his mind rattled from the surplus of information he’d received...and everything else he wanted to know.

  “Yes, and Dr. Ayers wants to get her in as soon as possible, so please let her know that we’ll put her down for the same time Wednesday morning, and I will continue trying to reach her at the other number she provided.”

  “I’ll...let her know,” Mitch said, hanging up the phone and immediately bringing up a search engine on his computer while Chad looked at the screen to see what he was typing.

  “What’s up?” Chad asked.

  “That was a doctor’s office in Atlanta,” Mitch said, watching the results of his internet search for Winship Institute fill the screen. He clicked on the main website and saw exactly what he feared. “A cancer institute.”

  “Aw, man,” Chad said.

  “Her cancer is back,” Mitch said. “She had her appointment last week, and she’d hoped it’d come back clear. She told me so the other night. They wouldn’t have her come back in unless something was wrong.” Mitch stared at the screen, scanning the information about the institute’s ability to treat all cancer types. “I let her go because I thought I couldn’t deal with the possibility of her cancer coming back. And now it has.” He wanted to throw something, kick something. Mainly himself. “But...”

  “But what?” Chad asked.

  “But now all I can do is think about her, dealing with this alone, and I want to be with her. That’s what I should have told her, that if something like that happened, I’d help her through. But I didn’t. And now I can’t get her to return my calls.�
�

  “She isn’t returning mine, either. And apparently, she isn’t taking calls from the cancer center,” Chad said.

  Mitch got a sick feeling about that. “Why would she have missed her first appointment?” He remembered how important those appointments were from when he went with Jana. Radiation to shrink the cancer, followed by chemo. The quicker Kate started getting treatments, the better chance for the doctors to remove all of the cancer.

  Chad frowned, and Mitch thought he knew why.

  “You think she decided not to get treated, don’t you?” Mitch asked.

  “I don’t know. The old Kate would fight tooth and nail to live. She loved life too much to give up.”

  “But the new Kate?” Mitch asked, knowing the answer.

  Chad shrugged as if he didn’t want to say it, so Mitch did.

  “She wouldn’t see a reason to fight to live if she couldn’t have a life with Lainey,” Mitch said.

  “Or, I’m guessing, a life with you.”

  Mitch shut down the computer and grabbed his keys. “I’ve got to find her.”

  “Where are you going to look?”

  “I don’t know.” Mitch felt defeated.

  Chad stood and joined him to leave the office. “I’m pretty sure I know a way that you could find her without having to look. You can get her to come to you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  * * *

  Kate walked steadily along the shore, the sand comforting her feet with every step and gently pressing between her toes while the cool water lapped over her ankles. She thought of Lainey, excitedly describing her trip to the beach, and she prayed that her little girl would have many more happy trips to the beach in her life.

  The wind carried the salty scent of the ocean, and Kate thought that this might be what heaven felt like, smelled like.

  And then she recalled having Lainey in her arms, and sharing muffins with Dee and Emmie, and Kate knew that heaven, for her, would feel like that, smell like that.

  She blinked through another batch of tears, surprised that she still had any to shed. And then she silently scolded herself for being so sad. Over the past two weeks, God had given her so much. She’d learned how it felt to truly be in love, because she had no doubt that she loved Mitch, and she always would. And she’d learned the joy of being a mother.

  Maybe God let her have so much so quickly because He knew this was her last chance to experience it. She’d been angry at Him a few days ago, believed that He was giving her too much to bear. But she was wrong. She’d dealt with the truth, that the cancer had returned, and she’d found peace, thanks to her time with Mitch and his girls and then her morning with Lainey.

  She didn’t want to go through those horrid treatments alone, so she’d skip them entirely and enjoy her last days seeing the beauty of God’s world before she saw the astounding beauty of heaven.

  It would have been wonderful to have spent more time with Mitch, would’ve fulfilled her every dream to have been a permanent part of Lainey’s world. But she’d come to terms with her limitations, and instead of lamenting over what might have been, she decided to reflect on the sweet memories she’d made in the past two weeks.

  She picked up a seashell and tossed it into the ocean, then watched it slowly sink through the water to find its new resting place in the sand. Her father had brought her to this beach on Tybee Island when she was five, only a couple of years older than Lainey was now. He and her mother had divorced, her mom leaving with her boyfriend and content to let him have custody of Kate. Kate had been thrilled to stay with her dad. Her mother had never wanted her, and even a five-year-old could recognize the intense dislike she’d had toward Kate. But her father had loved Kate and wanted her to be happy, so when her mother left, they came here and walked the beach.

  Then six months later, he met her stepmom, and she had loathed the little girl who always seemed to be in the way. Her hatred for Kate was even more than that of Kate’s mother. And her daddy had wanted to please his new wife so desperately that he ignored his daughter completely.

  But this beach had created the happiest memory Kate had from growing up, and she wanted to experience that once more...before she saw her daddy again in heaven.

  By the time she’d walked the entire stretch of sand and then returned to her car, daylight had shifted to twilight, and a chilly breeze had her holding her arms around herself to stay warm. She opened her car door, sat in the driver’s seat and rubbed her feet together to remove the sand. Then she decided that she wouldn’t mind bringing a bit of this sand along to whatever destination she chose next, and she swiveled in the seat to put her sandy feet into the car.

  She stared at the ocean long enough that the sky deepened from blue to black and the moon peeked out from the clouds. She counted the waves one by one as they fought their way toward the shore, occasional white crests capturing the moonlight, and she became so relaxed, so content, that she closed her eyes. The wind whistled through the tall sea grass, and she almost allowed herself to go to sleep, but then she thought about Mitch, and she glanced at her cell phone in the center of the passenger seat.

  She’d turned it off because she knew the doctor’s office would call, and she’d left it off all day while she traveled because she didn’t want to be tempted to call him and see how he was handling the office without her help, or whether Dee and Emmie had asked about her, or if Chad had mentioned her visit with Lainey.

  She reached for the phone and turned it on.

  It buzzed to life, text message after text message beeping through at record speed, as well as several voice mails. Kate had expected the doctor’s office to call, had known they would, but who were all of these messages from? She couldn’t deny that her heart hoped...

  Sure enough, Mitch’s name scrolled rapidly up her screen. And every now and then, in the midst of Mitch’s, would be one from Chad.

  She scanned the messages and saw that each one from Mitch was identical, the same sentence sent over and over.

  Dee and Emmie need you.

  And interspersed between Mitch’s messages were Chad’s, also identical and repetitious.

  Lainey needs you.

  Kate responded to one of Mitch’s texts.

  What’s wrong with Dee and Emmie?

  And then immediately responded to one of Chad’s.

  What’s wrong with Lainey?

  She gave them a full minute to respond, and when they didn’t, she dialed Mitch’s number.

  His voice mail picked up, and she left a message. “Mitch, what’s wrong with Dee and Emmie? Call me.”

  Then she hung up and dialed Chad. And after three rings, she got his voice mail, too. “Chad, this is Kate. What’s wrong with Lainey? Call me please.”

  Had all of the girls gotten sick? Or had something else happened? Was there an accident at the day care?

  She brought up the internet on her phone, searched for news stories on the Claremont Day Care.

  Nothing.

  She cranked the car and then sent another text, this one to both Mitch and Chad.

  I’m on my way.

  She’d been tired a moment ago, but her adrenaline had kicked in now. It was 9:00 p.m., and she was seven hours from Claremont. She could be there by morning.

  * * *

  Mitch’s eyes hurt from staring down Maple Street and watching for Kate’s car. He’d had more cups of coffee than he’d ever had in his life. Maybe that was why his hand trembled as he held the cup. Or maybe it was because he was scared.

  His phone rang, and he quickly pulled it from his pocket, saw Chad’s name and answered. “Hey.”

  “Well, how did it go?”

  “She isn’t here yet.”

  A pause sounded from the other end of the line. “She said she was on her way. I’m
sure she’ll show up soon.” But his tone said he wasn’t so sure.

  Neither was Mitch.

  “What if something happened? We don’t even know where she went or how far away she was when she finally got our messages.” He shook his head. “I should have answered her last night.”

  “Then she’d have asked what was wrong with the girls, and you’d have had to say nothing. And then she might not have come back at all,” Chad said.

  “She hasn’t come back at all,” Mitch reminded him.

  “She will,” Chad said, sounding a little more certain. “So, did Lainey do okay spending the night?”

  “Yeah, the girls are all still sleeping. Thanks for letting her stay over. I thought it’d be good for her to be here when Kate comes back, but I also thought she’d have gotten here by now.”

  “No worries. Nathan was already spending the night with Kaden, and Lainey was feeling a little left out, so this worked out fine. And give Kate time. She’ll get there,” Chad said. “Jess and I are on our way over. We’ll wait with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Mitch said.

  “Yeah, we do, because we’re part of why she left, and we want to make sure she knows we’ve had a change of heart,” Chad said. He continued, but with his mouth obviously away from the mouthpiece, “Isn’t that the way you put it, Jess?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “See,” Chad said, “that’s the way it is.”

  Mitch was thrilled that they’d finally seen the “new” Kate and had forgiven her; he only hoped she’d come back so they could tell her. “Okay, I’ll see you when you get here.” He disconnected and then saw L. E. and Annette Tingle walk out onto their front porch.

  “Kate make it back?” L.E. called.

  Mitch shook his head. “Not yet.” He could see Annette’s look of worry even from across the street, then she turned and darted back into her house with her husband following. Mitch had talked to the pair last night about what was going on and asked them to pray for Kate to make it back and to be healthy again. He knew they’d prayed and were probably still praying right now. Mitch had prayed all night, but he wouldn’t stop.