Not Another New Year's (Holiday Duet Book 2)

by Christie Ridgway

  Today she was going to unearth Caroline and demand some answers and accountability.

  Who would blame Hannah? Wasn't it natural to want to see how she stacked up against the blonde who'd taken her fiancé away? It was instinct, right? From the first birthday bash a little girl attended in a frou-frou party dress, she automatically cataloged the competition. Who had the cutest face, who had the prettiest hair bow, who was best at prancing up to the little boys—particularly the ones with slicked-back blond hair, blue eyes, and three older brothers?

  She shoved Tanner out of her thoughts as she tried deciding what to do next. Today was about Caroline. And Duncan.

  His betrayal had been when things had started to go wrong for her.

  Why had his head been turned by the other woman?

  She must be something special in bed, Hannah decided.

  Maybe I should have read Cosmo more often. Or rented XXX-rated porn movies.

  But Tanner hadn't had any complaints.

  Him again. "Unh!" she said out loud, smacking her sole against the sidewalk in frustration.

  A woman walking past started, almost losing her hold on her coffee cup and her folded newspaper.

  "Sorry," Hannah mumbled, then watched as the woman gave her a cautious sidelong glance and hurried off in the direction of...

  The park on Orange.

  That's where she needed to go next. It was the last place she'd found a definite Caroline lead. Sure, it had turned into a dead end on Amstead Avenue, but it was the only other clue she had.

  Tightening her grip on her lightweight duffel bag, Hannah stepped into the flow of morning foot traffic.

  It was the earliest hour yet that she'd visited the popular park. As she waited once again to cross the street, she didn't see sign of either raindrops or sharkish sedan, but when she got the green light she ran to the other side anyway, her duffel bag banging against her hip. Then she stood at the park entrance, breathing harder than the short sprint warranted, and took in the people on the close-cropped, emerald grass. This time she would meet with success.

  Except once again no platinum blonde caught her eye.

  There was the tai chi crowd, the newspaper-reading, coffee-sipping group, the dog walkers with their yet empty doggy-do bags waving like white flags out of their jacket pockets. In the playground on the other end a few mothers and strollers were already in evidence.

  But no platinum blonde, engagement-wrecking, happiness-harpooning future stealer.

  Hannah stalked around the perimeter of the grassy area, ticking off each visitor who didn't meet her criteria. She'd dismissed yet another of the geriatric set when a voice behind her made her turn.

  "Young lady?"

  A few feet away a little old man clutched a skinny leash attached to a skinny creature that had the size and bright, protruding eyeballs of a squirrel. As its master drew closer to Hannah, the furred animal darted forward to sniff her shoes.

  "Were you...were you talking to me?" she asked, eyeing the curious squirrel-thing and hoping it wouldn't decide to run up her pants leg (a fear left over from an unscheduled visit by Pamster the hamster from Room 3 at Mott Elementary).

  "I wondered if you'd caught up with Caroline."

  Hannah's gaze jolted back to the senior citizen. His pet had distracted her, but now she recognized him as Caroline's former neighbor—and the man she'd met the day Desirée had driven her to Taft Street.

  "No," Hannah replied. "As a matter of fact, I haven't run across her yet."

  "Oh, that's too bad. Did she leave already?" Hannah frowned. "Leave? Leave already?"

  He made a vague gesture. "I saw her a few minutes ago."

  "You did?" Her spine snapped straighter and she looked over his gray-and-liver-spotted head.

  "Where?"

  The Pamster the hamster wannabe bristled, then started to yap. Straining at its kite-string leash, it caused its owner to be dragged a foot to the right.

  "Got to go," the old man wheezed out as the squirrel thing took off, its beady gaze focused on the stubby tail of a passing rottweiler.

  "But where?" Hannah called.

  "That way!" He made another vague gesture and was gone.

  Hannah turned a circle on the grass. She was here, she repeated to herself. Caroline was here. Any minute now she would confront the woman and show her the face, the person, the real human, hurting emotions behind the engagement ring Hannah had still been wearing when the couple exchanged their I do's. She would demand...demand...

  Acknowledgment. Consideration. Respect.

  She would demand that Caroline see Hannah.

  And maybe Hannah would see why she was never enough.

  But reapplying herself to the search didn't produce the woman Hannah sought. Frustrated again, she looked around for the little old man, but he was gone too. With a shrug, she moved away from the grass to start checking over the visitors in the playground. Maybe Caroline was with a friend and the friend's children.

  The only blondes in the sand area were a pair of towheads on the swings and a sleeping infant in a stroller parked beside a mother who was reading on a park bench. When she looked at the woman's face, the woman glanced up, and Hannah noted she was the one who had brushed dirt from her clothes after she fell in the street a few days before. They exchanged little smiles, saluting the shared memory, then Hannah turned away.

  Only to remember the woman from that previous visit to the park who had known Caroline and passed along the Amstead Avenue tip. It was a long shot, but maybe this new mom was acquainted with Caroline too.

  Hannah turned back and pasted an apologetic smile on her face. "Excuse me?"

  The young woman looked up from her parenting magazine. "Yes?"

  "Would you happen to know a Caroline? Caroline Griffen?" "No." The stranger shook her head and laughed a little. Hannah laughed a little too. It had been a long shot.

  "I don't know Caroline Griffen," the young mom went on. "I am Caroline Griffen."

  Hannah's knees gave out. She stumbled to the park bench and managed to find a seat on the green-painted slats before her butt hit cement again.

  Finally. Caroline.

  Caroline and her baby. Duncan's baby. Oh, God.

  Not only had Duncan and Caroline married behind Hannah's back, but they'd made a child.

  Bending at the waist, she put her elbows on her knees and buried her face in her hands. Her lungs expanded on one long breath, followed by another. Then she turned her head and looked into the other woman's alarmed face.

  "Your hair isn't platinum. Or long. You're not wearing mascara."

  Caroline slid down the bench, closer to the stroller, and put her hand on her baby's blanket-covered legs. "Who are you?"

  Hannah took in the other woman's clipped nails, her ratty jeans, the ragged sweatshirt she wore and its raveled cuffs. She had nice skin, but it looked as if she hadn't yet learned how to style her new, shorter cut. Her lips were chapped.

  What of that had lured Duncan away?

  How was all that better than she?

  Her dry tongue ventured out to lick her own bottom lip. "I'm Hannah," she said, suddenly not sure if the other woman would know the name.

  Did "Hannah" mean anything to Caroline? Had she not even cared enough to learn the name of the fiancée left in the dust? Had Duncan never bothered to tell her the name?

  Months ago the shame and disillusionment over Duncan's behind-Hannah's-back marriage had joined with the shock and grief over his death to form a tight ball of anger inside of her. All this time it had lived there, pulsing like a black heart, waiting until the day it could break open and spit fire on the piranha-like predator named Caroline. It was supposed to then free Hannah from her pain.

  And yet here was the piranha, in old jeans and without mascara, who was staring at her as if she didn't recognize her name, let alone understand about that darkness Hannah had been harboring.

  "Who are you?" the woman asked again.

  "I'm Hannah Davis."
>
  Caroline pressed her back against the slats of the bench. "Hannah." Now it sounded as if she recognized it.

  The baby—Duncan's baby—started crying. Its mother instantly moved to lift the child into her arms. "Shh, shh," she said, patting the baby's back. "Shh, Davy."

  Davy. Hannah didn't want to hear it, but it was impossible to ignore. Caroline and Duncan's child was a boy named Davy.

  The boy named Davy should have been Hannah's baby.

  But that didn't seem real, just as this Caroline didn't seem like the Caroline she'd been outlining and then coloring in with her hurt and angry crayon set all these months.

  "Hannah." The short-haired, chapped-lipped stranger beside her looked over her quieting child's head. "I'm so sorry."

  Hannah's black, pulsing heart of anger beat harder. "Sorry? Sorry for what?"

  "That he didn't tell you. That you had to find out the way you did. That...oh, God, I'm sorry that he was killed before you had a chance to kick his ass."

  Hannah blinked. "Wh-What?"

  The other woman smiled, but bright tears glistened in her eyes. "Maybe we could have done it together."

  Hannah stared. "Kick his ass?"

  "I didn't know about your engagement, you know. Not until after we were married did he tell me about you. Imagine how I felt."

  "Imagine," Hannah echoed. She'd been imagining for months that Caroline had felt empowered by the way she'd knowingly appropriated Hannah's man and Hannah's future. The idea of that had tortured her.

  "He promised he was going to tell you."

  "He didn't." Her voice held a note of the caustic anger she'd been holding back. "He didn't tell his parents either."

  Caroline swallowed. "I know that now."

  "And they didn't tell me Duncan had a child."

  The mother rested her cheek on the baby's downy head for a moment. His hair was the color of corn silk and glinted like polyester threads in the sunlight. When Duncan was a boy, he'd had hair like that, Hannah recalled.

  "He's Davy," Caroline said. "David Duncan Griffen."

  Hannah looked away from the child. This wasn't right! This was too hard. Putting Davy in the mix, looking at the reality of Caroline who wasn't the gorgeous, femme fatale Hannah had written into the story she'd told herself, the one titled "How Duncan Could Do This to Me," gave her no place to put all her anger.

  She'd thought Caroline had robbed her—not just of her fiancé, but of her future and her idea that if she made the approved, favored choices, she would have a charmed, favored life. Now, though, now looking at the young widow beside her, with shadows under her eyes and a fatherless baby in her arms,

  Hannah could only think that...that...

  Nothing had been stolen. Not really. It had just been lost.

  Still...

  "I don't understand," she said, the words bursting out of her mouth. "This isn't right."

  Who was she if she wasn't the victim?

  Duncan was dead, so who could she blame if it wasn't Caroline? Hannah, the good girl, the pleaser, the one who'd always gone along to get along, had nowhere to go with all that dark emotion inside of her.

  Caroline nestled her child closer to her chest. "I know. I've felt that exact same way since the day I heard that knock on my door."

  Hannah's belly clenched. She stood up, shaking her head, not knowing what to do. "Good-bye."

  "Wait."

  Despite her reluctance, Hannah turned back.

  "I really would like to kick his ass, you know."

  "He's dead," Hannah said. It was why she could never bring herself to blame him or hate him for how she'd been hurt.

  "I'd like to kick his ass for that most of all," Caroline admitted. "But you should know that he agonized over what he'd done to you."

  Hannah shrugged. "He could have told me the truth."

  "Duncan, for all his warrior aspirations, was still a softie at heart. He still found it so hard to tell something that he knew would hurt you, your parents, his parents. You know what I mean. You knew him."

  And, oh, God. Hannah did. She'd known him her whole life, and one of the reasons they'd been so compatible was that, like her, he'd often been eager (too eager?) to please. They'd both gone along with the engagement because so many people had told them it was their right next step.

  But that had been wrong, she saw now. The right next step for Duncan was this woman. This woman who had guts enough to want to kick his ass even when he was in the grave. This woman who had guts enough to raise their child alone.

  Hannah felt that dark ball of pain inside of her begin to break up, dissolving under the cathartic power of the truth. It wasn't that she hadn't been enough for Duncan, she realized. They...they hadn't been enough together.

  Tanner had hinted at it, but she'd refused to listen. She'd wanted to accept none of the blame. But the truth was, between Duncan and herself there had not been enough honesty or passion.

  There had not been enough of what she felt with, and for...Tanner.

  Oh, God. Tanner. Tanner.

  Saying good-bye to Caroline was like saying good bye to an anchor that had been chained to her ankle for the past eight months. She strolled away from the playground, lighter, yet now with another obligation to meet before she left Coronado forever.

  She owed Tanner an apology. Or maybe it was that she owed herself one, and she had to say it in front of him. All this time, as he'd pointed out, she hadn't been thinking enough of herself. But she could do that now. Not only because she understood what had happened between herself and Duncan, but because when she'd finally confronted Caroline to force the other woman to see her, what she'd finally seen was herself.

  Now she knew. Hannah knew she was desirable and valuable and beautiful and independent.

  She could recognize things she wanted and go after them. Tanner had shown her that (Tanner had been that), and though he might not love her, he still deserved to know that she didn't believe he'd used her anymore. That, at least in her eyes, he'd always be a hero for helping her discover this new and improved vision of herself.

  Taking a shortcut through the parking area would get her back to Tanner's quicker. It was a rectangular lot, with a U-shaped travel lane, with the only entrance at the end of one of the legs of the U, and the exit on the other leg. She didn't pay much attention to the sedan cruising the lot until it stopped beside her. A window rolled down.

  "Desirée!" a voice called from the dim interior.

  Stifling a sigh, Hannah looked over. She was a damn fine person in her own right and she was more than slightly annoyed at again being taken for someone else.

  Then those last words sank in. As did the black car's damaged front bumper. As did the threatening demeanor of the swarthy, thick-necked man now climbing out of the backseat.

  He made a grab for her. "Let's go, Desirée."

  Chapter Thirty

  Days ago Tanner had told Hannah that a Secret Service agent was required to think on his feet. But as he cruised through the streets of Coronado, he couldn't seem to think at all. Panic tasted like copper on his tongue—until he realized he'd bit the inside of his cheek and the flavor in his mouth was his own blood.

  Thank God his blood, not Hannah's.

  The jangling anxiety was borrowing trouble, of course. Big trouble. But he'd been trained to imagine worst-case scenarios, and with Dezi having been the undisputed target of someone out to harm her, and with her "dead ringer," Hannah, wandering around the same vicinity all alone now...

  He wouldn't be able to breathe until he had her next to him. Always.

  That was a weird thought. He shook it away, but it came back, sitting primly like a schoolteacher at her desk in his brain, burrowing like a wanton lover under sheets in his heart.

  Like Hannah.

  Hannah for always.

  But it was the completely wrong time for him! He was hours away from returning to the Secret Service and getting his life back under his own control. Conceding anything to anyone els
e—God, giving his love away to Hannah—was just not what he was looking for at the moment.

  He caught a glimpse of a slim, dark-haired figure and his head snapped around. Was it her? No, too young.

  His pulse, ratcheted high in anticipation, didn't sink back down, instead staying at a fevered thrum. He'd considered calling the police, but what could he say? The girl in my bed walked out on me? There's outside odds she might be spotted by some foreign national or foreign-paid-for goons who'll mistake her for someone else?

  He didn't want to believe there was a reason to believe that might be true. His other option had been phoning Geoff Brooks. But Tanner couldn't think how sharing with Hannah's incapacitated uncle his own far-fetched fears—oh, God, he so hoped they were far-fetched—would do anyone good.

  Turning a corner, he scanned the sidewalks of the downtown area. Most likely he'd find her picking up souvenirs in a shop or sipping take-out coffee in the park.

  The park. He made the next right, retracing his route. The last time he'd gone looking for her, he'd found her at the park on Orange.

  Damn, but the place was crowded. The kids in Coronado were back in school, and people should be back at work after their holiday breaks, but there were enough retirees and mothers with strollers to make it hard to pick out a lone woman with a duffel bag, a killer bod, and maybe some tears in her eyes because of how she regretted leaving him rejected and dejected.

  Is that how he felt? Dejected? Rejected? Wasn't this the wrong time for that too?

  With a light foot on the gas, he circled the block to take another pass. If he didn't find her this time, he'd have to accept that she'd hailed a cab or called a shuttle and was already on her way to the airport and away from him.

  As he turned the corner, he had to brake for traffic, and he used the time to peer up ahead, looking beyond the parking lot since Hannah was on foot and not behind a wheel. Then an arc of movement caught his eye.

  There! In the parking lot that was still a dozen car lengths away. A dark sedan was stopped in the aisle, one door open, one man outside it trying to pull a woman toward him by her...

  Duffel bag.

  Trying to pull Hannah toward him and the yawning mouth of that car.