This Time For Keeps

“Such a sweetheart,” Lori said, and Meg had to wonder if her friend even realized the way she drew her hands to her stomach. But Meg noticed…and Meg knew. Lori and Trey had been trying for a baby for over five years. Recently they’d begun tests to figure out why they’d been unsuccessful.

“How’s Trey?” she asked.

“Fine,” Lori said with an odd briskness. Once, she would have smiled and launched straight into her latest Trey story. Now she again changed the subject. “I’m so glad you found someone to watch Char at your place.”

Meg saw no point in pushing. The pace was Lori’s to set. “Rosemary’s a godsend,” she agreed. A friend of her mother’s, the former schoolteacher was itching for grandkids—and happy to practice with Charlotte.

“Oh.” Lori put a dainty little mug with a Pisces sign on it into the sink. “That guy called for you again.”

Meg looked up from the sugar packet she’d just opened. “The same one from yesterday? Did he say what he wanted?”

“Nope.” Lori frowned. “Wouldn’t leave a message or a name—but he had a great voice.”

“Did you get his number?” Julia asked.

“Came in as Out-of-Area.”

Julia’s eyes took on a rare twinkle. “You hiding something, cuz?”

Meg dumped the sugar into her coffee. “I wish.” It had been a long time since there had been anything worth keeping to herself, certainly nothing in the man department.

With sobering speed, Julia became all business again, reaching into her blazer pocket. “Then here,” she said, handing Meg a square, pink sheet of message paper.

“What’s this?”

Julia’s eyes, all steely and serious, met hers. “His number.”

Meg stilled. Her throat burned. Something in her gut jumped. She didn’t need to see the number to know that the subject of their conversation had shifted. Whereas Meg preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, Julia was all about meeting them head-on.

“I called the bureau,” she said. “He’s in Venezuela.”

Against the thin paper, Meg’s thumb and forefinger tightened.

“They said he’s out on assignment, but they expect him back—”

“No.” But Meg glanced at the string of fifteen numbers anyway. A phone number, such a simple thing really. Dial the numbers, hear the voice.

His voice.

I’m here…with you, he’d promised.

“Meg, you can’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”

He’d said something almost identical right before he walked out the door: I can’t stay here anymore, can’t pretend.

Why didn’t anyone understand there was a difference between prevention and pretending?

“I told you to leave it alone,” Meg said, looking up.

But Julia wouldn’t back down. She’d been on Meg about this for almost two months, since shortly after the car accident that changed so many lives. “Russ was her brother.”

Meg told herself to walk away. To wad up the paper and toss it in the garbage, go back to her office and prepare the agenda for the staff meeting or read Henry’s report. Review plans for the silent auction, which she was in charge of.

But something inside her just broke.

“A lot of good that did her!” she snapped in a rare display of emotion. “He didn’t even come for her funeral!” Didn’t call to check on arrangements for her child, didn’t acknowledge in any way, shape or form that the little sister who’d picked up her life in Scotland and traveled all the way to Texas, to be with her big brother, had died, here in a country so far removed from her family. Alone. Except for Meg—and Charlotte.

“Maybe he didn’t find out in time.” Lori’s words were quiet, hopeful. A romantic down to the bone, she couldn’t give up her belief in happy endings. Russell’s rich brogue didn’t help matters. In her book, just because he talked like a poet, he walked on water. “Maybe he couldn’t.”

“Of course he couldn’t.” Meg saw Lori wince, but it didn’t change the truth. “Because that would have required him to come…” Back. Home. “Here.” It still stunned Meg that someone Ainsley’s age had actually made out a will. And that a nineteen-year-old from a small town in Scotland would choose to have her final resting place here in small-town America. Among strangers.

Of course, from what Meg knew of Ainsley’s relationship with her parents, they, too, had become little more than strangers.

“Meg.” Lori’s voice was soft, pleading. “He’s Charlotte’s uncle, your—”

“Past.” Meg swallowed hard, didn’t want to hear the word. “He’s my past, that’s all.”

Julia snatched the paper from Meg’s fingers. “If you don’t call him, I will.”

The glare was automatic. Meg hated confrontation, but this wasn’t a game or contest. It was real and it was absolutely none of Julia’s business. “Don’t.”

She hated the way her voice broke on the word.

“Meg…” The lines of Julia’s face softened. “It’s not fair that you have to do this alone. Maybe he can help.”

He. Him. Meg couldn’t remember the last time any of them had spoken his name aloud. They didn’t need to. They all knew. “He left, Jules.” Packed up, walked away. If she’d come home that night a little later, she still wondered if he would have said goodbye.

Just for a few weeks, a month at the most.

“You were going through a hard time,” Julia reminded her. “You yourself said it was probably for the best.”

She had. She’d said that in the immediate aftermath, when she’d found herself able to breathe for the first time in months.

But then the days piled onto one another, one after the other. And the nights…

“He didn’t come back,” she whispered. It was still almost unfathomable to her that the man she’d loved so dearly had turned his back on her so completely. He’d never called, sent only the occasional e-mail.

E-mail.

That’s what their marriage had been reduced to.

“It’s what he does.” She still didn’t understand how she’d been so blind. “What he always does.” The pattern was clear now, time after time after time. He’d left his family the day he turned eighteen. He’d left the country of his birth. He’d left the news bureau, the university. “When the going gets tough…” Russell Montgomery walked.

But Julia wouldn’t leave the subject alone. “Then why aren’t you divorced?” Her tone made it sound like the answer was obvious.

“Just a technicality.”

She lifted a perfectly sculpted brow. “That’s a pretty big technicality.”

Meg drew the mug to her mouth and took a sip of now-cool coffee. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then why haven’t you been with anyone else? Two years is a long time.”

A strangled noise broke from Meg’s throat. “What is this? Let’s Ambush Meg Day?” Simply because Russell’s parents had been calling and she hadn’t called them back yet? She was going to. She had to. She knew that. So long as she was raising their granddaughter she couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist.

But not yet.

Done with it all, she snatched the paper from Julia and strode toward the door. “Editorial in ten,” she called over her shoulder. Then, at the door, she turned. “And anyway,” she tossed with a wicked little smile. “Who says I haven’t?”

THE LATE-AFTERNOON SUN poured down, creating a stark contrast between the field and the impossible blue of the horizon. As far as the eye could see, red and yellow and blue swayed with the warm breeze.

“We’re nearing peak,” Ray Blunt said. The longtime Pecan Creek photographer slung his camera strap over his shoulder and reached into his pickup for his tripod. “Barring rain, we should be about perfect.”

It was April in East Texas. Going without rain was about as likely as going without allergies.

“A little sprinkle won’t hurt anyone,” Meg said. It was the lightning she worried about, hail the size of tennis balls. One round of that and the carefully tended flower fields would be pulverized, destroying one of the big draws of the Wildflower Festival: photographs.

“Thanks for coming out with me,” Ray said, taking a swig from his water bottle. He and her mother had been friends for as long as Meg could remember. Twisting for the baby, Meg grinned. Lately, she was pretty sure her mother and Ray’s friendship involved some new…benefits.

“Just want to do one last dry run,” he said. “Your mama thought your little girl would make a perfect guinea pig, if’n you don’t mind me usin’ that expression.”

Your little girl…

Briskly Meg unfastened Charlotte from the car seat and shifted her onto her hip. She’d found the perfect frilly white dress.

“Here she is,” she cooed, and with one three-toothed smile, Charlotte innocently chased Meg’s worries away.

The three of them made their way from the gravel parking area as another car turned off the narrow highway. Meg pushed Charlotte in her new jogging stroller, navigating the winding trail as they went. Every year the town seeded the big field, making sure that with spring a colorful parade of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush and poppies stood ready for the festival. Three years before they’d added irrigation to compensate for increasingly dry winters.

It was a photographer’s paradise. Russell had once said—

Russell had said a lot of things.

“Just over yonder,” Ray said, leading them down a small trail toward a monstrous patch of eager bluebonnets, dotted by the occasional red of a poppy. In the center, a small indentation marked the spot.

“Lighting is almost perfect,” Ray observed while Meg lifted Charlotte from the stroller. They had the field all to themselves, except for the tall man in the distance. Against the Western sky the sun cast him in silhouette, but did nothing to hide the slight limp. “I’ve gotten some of my best shots this time of day. Just put her right…there.”

Looking away from the stranger, Meg carried Charlotte through the flowers, trying not to crush any as she went. At the clearing, she smoothed Charlotte’s fancy dress and lowered her toward the ground.

Charlotte started to cry.

“Oh, baby,” Meg murmured, pulling back to look down at Charlotte’s sweet little face—now red and splotchy. “No, no, no,” she said, trying again.

But Charlotte wrapped her pudgy little arms around Meg’s neck and clung on for dear life. “Mama-mama…”

At a loss, Meg glanced back to the photographer who’d once taken similar pictures of her, when she was a child. To this day, they lined the hallway of the small ranch-style house in which she’d grown up. “This might take a while.”

With a hand to his graying beard, her mother’s friend shrugged. “Not a problem.”

“Here now,” she said to the baby. “Let Ma—” She broke off, tried again. “We can sit together,” she said, rubbing her hand along Charlotte’s back as she lowered her into the small clearing.

Honeybees buzzed up—and Charlotte’s wails turned into shrieks.

“Tell you what,” Ray said. “You take your time and I’m going to go get a picture of them poppies over there. When I come back, I’ll get the two of you.”

“No—I—” But he was already shuffling down the path. And anyway, Meg knew it was no use. She could tell the photographer she didn’t want to be in any pictures, but he would take them anyway.

“That’s my girl,” she said, holding Charlotte close to her heart and rocking with the breeze. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The baby nestled closer, much as she did during the stillness of the night. Sometimes they’d sit in the rocking chair with lullabies drifting through the room until the first rays of dawn filtered through the blinds. Sometimes Meg would fall asleep holding her. Lately, she’d begun carrying Charlotte back to her bed and snuggling up with her. Sleeping with a baby still worried her a little, but she was pretty sure Char was big enough and strong enough to scoot away if she needed to.

“See, it’s all okay,” she soothed, as she’d done for the past two months. She’d been there the morning Charlotte was born. She’d made a promise before God the day Charlotte was baptized. She’d held her and loved her, bathed her, dressed her, spoiled her madly.

But she’d never imagined that one day she would hold a sleeping angel, while Father O’Sullivan read Charlotte’s mother her last rites.

Meg closed her eyes and held her niece tight. The warmth of the sun felt good, the whisper of the breeze. The softness of the baby in her arms. For so long she’d wanted to share her life with a child.

But not like this.

Gradually Charlotte quit squirming, her body relaxing into the heaviness of sleep. Meg smiled, realizing once again that best-laid plans were the stuff of Lori’s fairy tales.

Opening her eyes, she squinted against the glare of the late-afternoon sun and looked for Ray. She’d need to tell him—

At the edge of the clearing a lone man stood in the shade of a tall, gnarled post oak. The play of shadows stole detail, but still she knew. Two years could change a lot. Give, and take. Create, and devastate.

But they’d done nothing to mute the low quickening, the visceral reaction she’d first experienced one crisp fall day in New York a lifetime ago. He’d come into the lecture hall as a guest lecturer for her News Editorial class.

He’d walked out with her heart.

Now he stood not fifty feet away, the man who’d pulled into the parking lot as she and Charlotte had walked away, the man she’d seen at the edge of the clearing, watching. The low-slung jeans and wrinkled button-down were just as she remembered.

The limp was new.

CHAPTER TWO

Two and a half years before

“MEG, YOU READY?”

She looked up from the well-worn parenting magazine and grinned. Instinctively her hand slid to her tummy. “Absolutely.”

Dr. Brennan’s smile was warm. A tall, slender woman nearing sixty, she’d taken care of Meg since her first ob-gyn appointment over a decade before. “I thought Russell would be here.”

Meg refused to let the frown form. Not today. “So did I,” she admitted with a quick glance at her watch. She’d been leaving messages for half an hour. He’d yet to call her back. “He must have gotten hung up at a meeting.”

It wasn’t the first time, and, she figured, it wouldn’t be the last. Russell was like that, always losing himself in one project or another. His mother called it escape, but Meg thought that was overly harsh. Russell was an intensely intense man. He did nothing halfway. He was all in, or all out.

“Should we wait a little bit?” Dr. Brennan asked. “I can probably spot you another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

It was the right thing to do. Over the years he’d been by her side at so many appointments and procedures. Rarely did he miss. But today…

“Nah,” Meg said, standing. There was no telling how much longer Russell would be, and as it was, she’d been waiting just about her whole life for this. She could tell him the news herself. She could surprise him. She already had the pink and blue booties purchased.

After the sonogram, she’d know which pair to wrap.

“Let’s do this,” she said, reaching for her satchel.

Dr. Brennan nodded. “If you’re sure,” she said, escorting Meg toward the exam room. “Do you have any feelings, one way or the other?”

“Russell thinks girl.”

“And you?”

“Healthy,” Meg replied as a little flutter quaked through her. “I’m just thinking healthy.”

Present Day

TWO YEARS WAS A LONG TIME.

Russell Montgomery stood on the edge of the field of blue, as much an outsider as the night he’d walked out the front door of the house that had quit being a home. He’d told himself not to look back. It wasn’t healthy. Life was ahead of you, not behind.

His eyes had shifted to the rearview mirror anyway, for one last look. Of the cheery blue century-old house. Of the yard that sloped down to the lazy creek, the row of willows, weeping. Of her.

Instead, he’d found clay pots with wilted flowers, a swing in need of repair, an empty porch and the truth.

There was nothing to look back at.

But forward… Forward had taken him far, given him much. In the primitive villages of Mozambique, the tight, poisonous coil inside him had loosened. There, he’d been able to breathe. With the passing of each day, all those dark, festering emotions that had chased him from Pecan Creek faded a little more, until all that remained was the clinical realization that the life he and Meg had been creating had been an illusion.

He’d never planned to come back.

Hell, who was he kidding? He’d never planned anything that had happened since the day Meg first walked into his world.

Africa was a continent of extremes, breathtaking beauty and mind-numbing depravity, lush jungles and barren deserts, kindness and cruelty.

Innocence.

Savagery.

Being back in America…in Pecan Creek…

It was like stepping back into an old, faded dream, familiar but fuzzy, fleeting but somehow ever seductive. You knew you were going to wake up, but for that briefest of moments, you wanted to just…linger.

She sat there among the army of bluebonnets, the warm April wind whipping wheat-colored hair against an oval face that had once dominated his dreams. The angles were the same, the wide cheekbones and tilted eyes. The mouth that had once been so quick to—

She wasn’t smiling now. Her hair was longer than before, looser. The shield of flowers hid her clothes, but he could make out a trace of something dark—and a whole lot of skin.

And the baby…

Something hard and sharp sliced through him. He’d seen a lot during his time away. He’d seen mothers and children, birth and death. But the sight of that chubby-cheeked little girl in Meg’s lap, the frilly white dress and shot of bright red hair…

His bad leg throbbed. And for one brutal moment, everything between them fell away, the flowers and the years, the tears and the broken promises, leaving only him and Meg…and the baby they’d lost.

With eyes of blue like her mum’s, he’d predicted.

Even now, the urge to pound his fist into something hard and unmovable ripped through him.

Slowly she rose from the bed of bluebonnets, easing the child to her chest. Sleeping, he realized. His sister’s baby was sleeping.

Ainsley.

He still couldn’t believe she was gone.

And that he was here.

And Meg was walking toward him. Meg of the pretty floral dresses, now wearing camouflage cargo pants and a black top that left little to his imagination.

Or his memory.

The urge to reach for his camera was pure instinct, the desire to capture the vivid contrast between innocence and—

He didn’t know what. Typical Meg, she kept that all shuttered away, locked deep, deep inside, where no one could reach her.

No one could touch her.

Especially not him.

He didn’t have his camera, but knew he didn’t need it. Some images had a way of lasting all by themselves.

In the distance, old man Ray Blunt shuffled back into view. He paused and lifted a hand to his brow, watched.

The automatic wave surprised Russell. He’d always liked Ray, had learned a lot about the world from a man who’d never left Texas.

Ray returned the gesture, even though Russell was pretty sure the old man had no idea who he was.

But Meg did. She moved toward him, her stride strong and confident, her chin high, allowing the breeze to keep playing with the tangled strands of her hair. The longer length made her look younger than the last time he’d seen her.

Or maybe that was the baby sprawled all over her chest.

He was a man used to watching, to standing on the sidelines and documenting. Never get involved. That was how you stayed intact. But he started toward her anyway, acutely aware that he was not in Pecan Creek as a journalist.

Narrow trails of mutilated bluebonnets wound through the flowers. Once he’d chosen his steps carefully. Now he let instinct guide him—and kept his eyes trained forward.

On the woman he left behind.

IN THE BEGINNING, she’d imagined this. During those first few weeks and months, she’d closed her eyes and seen him walking toward her, that pure, undiluted focus in the bottomless green of his eyes, the…longing. Sometimes he would walk in through the back door. Sometimes he would find her sitting by the young willow they’d planted near the creek bed.

Once she’d seen him at the edge of the cemetery.

It was always the same. She would stand. He would approach. Arms were opened. She stepped in. Words weren’t spoken.

Words weren’t needed.

Only Russell.

Now…God…now. Her chest tightened. Her throat burned. Beyond him she saw her car, but knew there was no way to reach the Lexus without getting by him.

Russell Montgomery was back in Pecan Creek.

“Meggie,” he said as the distance between them narrowed, and something inside her screamed. The last fringes of the dream shattered, even as the whisper of a different dream echoed through her.

Two years. Two years since she’d heard the rolling lilt of her own husband’s voice.

“And this must be little Charlotte,” he commented with the polite formality of a complete stranger. “She looks—”

“Don’t.” The word burned on the way out. Meg stopped and looked up at him, could do nothing about the hot boil moving through her. “You don’t get to say that.”

Russell stopped moving. “Meggie, look, I understand—”

“You don’t understand a thing.” Meg barely recognized the rasp to her own voice. It had been almost ten weeks since the insanely clear February day when they’d buried this man’s sister…ten weeks during which he’d been conspicuously silent. No way could he just stroll back into town and say hello, make some kind of inane remark about who Charlotte looked like. “She was your sister, Russell. She deserved better.”

So had Meg.

The lines of his face went tight. “You know that’s not how I meant it,” he said, and she made herself swallow. “I just… Christ, Meg, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

Hadn’t that always been the problem?

“This isn’t about me,” she said automatically. It wasn’t about them. “It’s about Ainsley. She worshipped you, Russell. Thought you hung the moon. And yet you couldn’t even be bothered to come say goodbye.”

“I didn’t know.”

That stopped her. She shifted the baby, careful to keep one hand against the back of Charlotte’s head. “Didn’t know what? That Ainsley loved you? Why else would she have left Scotland to come live with us?”

Only a few clouds drifted across the blue sky, but the shadows about Russell deepened. “That she died.”

The quiet stillness to his voice went through Meg like broken glass.

“I didn’t know that she died until two weeks ago.”

“I called your parents.” Had called him first, from the hospital moments after Dr. Harrison had given her the horrible news. Instinctively she’d reached for her phone and called Russell, held her breath while the phone rang.

Froze when she got his voice mail.

She’d stood there in the starkly lit Emergency Room in the hour before dawn, listening. To his voice. His warm, casual message. But the beep had brought everything back into cruel, sharp focus, and she’d ended the call and swallowed hard, annoyed that after all this time, despite the divorce papers she’d had drawn up the month before, he’d been the first one she’d thought of.

Because Ainsley was his sister, she’d realized. Meg had loved her dearly, but in the end, it was Russell’s blood that flowed through Ainsley’s veins.

And Charlotte’s.

He stood there now, a tall man with a body that promised strength, even as an unmistakable mist clouded his eyes.

“I was on assignment,” he said in a voice so stripped down Meg had to concentrate to hear him. “My parents decided to wait until I was back before telling me.”

She couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “Because they didn’t want to inconvenience you? She was their child. She deserved…” The words trailed off as the memories edged closer. The knock at the door. The race to the hospital. Ainsley on the bed, the tubes and machines, the punishing sense of urgency as everyone seemed to move in slow motion.