Marisa Carroll - Last-Minute Marriage

#942 LAST-MINUTE MARRIAGE

Riverbend

Marisa Carroll

#943 BECCA’S BABY

Shelter Valley Stories

Tara Taylor Quinn

#944 THE DAUGHTER MERGER

Janice Kay Johnson

#945 OBSESSION

Kay David

#946 THE HOUSE AT

BRIAR LAKE

Roxanne Rustand

#947 THE MAN BEHIND

THE BADGE

Count on a Cop

Dawn Stewardson

“Not on a school night,” Mitch said. “Now, why don’t you go show Granddad your drawing, then get to your homework?”

Sam grumbled something unintelligible and went inside with his head hanging. By the time he’d greeted their yellow Lab and shown his grandfather his drawing, he was in a better mood.

Mitch watched the two most important people in his world for a moment. But a part of his brain refused to focus on the scene. Instead, it kept pestering him to check out the car in the lot near the park’s rose bed. Unless he missed his guess, it was a red compact. And as far as he knew, there had only been one red car there today.

But Tessa Masterson was supposed to be safely ensconced in her room at the River View, not sitting in a dark parking lot on a wet October night.

“I’m going out for a quick run,” he informed Sam and his grandfather.

“It’s raining,” Sam observed.

“Your dad’s losing his marbles, going out for a run on a night like this,” Caleb said, drawing circles on his temple with his index finger.

Maybe he was crazy, Mitch thought. Crazy enough to have to see for himself if the car in the parking lot had California plates and a pregnant, sad-eyed woman inside.

*

Dear Reader,

Over the past year and a half, Riverbend, Indiana, has become very real to us. It has come to life in a manner we would have never thought possible when we were first asked to help create this wonderful little town and the people who inhabit it. And along the way, we’ve gained new friends of our own—the other authors in the series.

We’ve come together from across the country to find that even though none of us has ever been to Riverbend, our visions of what we wanted it to be were very much alike. No matter where we grew up, north or south, city or country, we all hold a place much like it in our hearts.

We hope you enjoy reading Tessa and Mitch’s story as much as we enjoyed writing it, and that all the Riverbend stories will find a permanent place in your hearts.

Sincerely,

Carol and Marian (writing as Marisa Carroll)

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Mitch Sterling: Single father, owner/operator of Sterling Hardware and River Rat

Tessa Masterson: Unmarried, seven months pregnant, stranded in Riverbend

Sam Sterling: Mitch’s ten-year-old son

Caleb Sterling: Mitch’s grandfather, lifelong Riverbend resident

Brian Delaney: Father of Tessa’s child

Tom Baines: Prize-winning journalist, estranged father and River Rat

Lynn Kendall: Minister and newcomer to Riverbend

Ruth and Rachel Steele: Tom’s twin maiden aunts, operators of Steele’s Books

Kate McMann: Manager of Steele’s Books and Lynn’s best friend

Charlie Callahan: Contractor, temporary guardian and River Rat

Beth Pennington: Physician’s assistant, athletic trainer and Charlie’s ex-wife

Aaron Mazerik: Former bad boy, current basketball coach and counselor at Riverbend High

Lily Bennett Holden: Golden Girl, widow, artist and River Rat

Abraham Steele: Town patriarch and bank president, recently deceased

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

SHE WAS LOST.

There was no getting around it. She was thoroughly lost on the back-country roads of rural Indiana. Lost, almost out of gas, and totally shaken by her near miss with a gargantuan piece of farm machinery at the last crossroads.

Tessa Masterson got out of the car and took a couple of deep breaths. It wouldn’t help her baby if she went into a fit of hysterics. And even if she allowed herself to give in to the urge, what good would hysterics do in the middle of nowhere?

And she was in the middle of nowhere. She looked around. Cornstalks nine feet high lined both sides of the narrow road. They stretched away, ahead and behind her, like a long golden tunnel, blocking the view of the tree-studded, nearly flat landscape. Overhead the sky was a bright autumn blue, not a cloud in sight. But she knew the blue sky and the warmth of the October afternoon were an illusion. The air would grow cold when the sun went down, and storm clouds were gathering along the western horizon. She’d watched them piling up in her rearview window for the past couple of hours.

Grasshoppers whirred around her, leaping in the dry brown grasses growing along the banks of the shallow ditch that paralleled the road. It was a much smaller ditch than the one she’d nearly driven into trying to avoid the huge green combine with its wicked-looking, spear-tipped attachment that took up almost the entire road.

The wizened farmer in the cab of the machine probably hadn’t even seen her predicament. If he had, he didn’t bother to stop and help. By the time she’d righted the car and stopped shaking enough to drive on, she’d lost track of the directions the highway patrolman had given her as he’d waved her off the main highway to detour around a jackknifed eighteen wheeler. She reached into the back seat, took a map out of her backpack and spread it open on the hood of the car.

Was she supposed to go left at County Road SW-6 or stay on this county road until she came to E-7? She should have written the instructions down, but there’d been cars behind her, their drivers impatient and obviously more familiar with the area than she was. She knew she needed to keep heading east, and she was doing that, but in this part of the state, major highways were few and far between. As was just about everything else but cornfields and silos.

Tessa pushed a strand of her shoulder-length, honey-blond hair behind her ear and looked around. No landmarks of any kind could be seen, dwarfed as she was by cornstalks. A large brown grasshopper landed on a fringed circle of Queen Anne’s lace by her foot. He swayed there for a minute, surveying the world from an even more limited viewpoint than Tessa’s, and then hopped away, leaving the flower swinging in his wake.

No help there.

She had to find a town, or at least a gas station, or she and her temperamental car would be stranded out here in the boondocks for the night. The Wabash River ought to be somewhere to the south. If nothing else, she could head in that direction until she ran into it, and then turn east. But she didn’t know how far south the river was.

She’d caught a glimpse of a blue water tower just before the incident with the combine, but it had disappeared behind the distant line of trees by the time she reached the next open field. If she was reading her map correctly, the water tower belonged to a small dot on the map called Riverbend.