Cara Colter - Wed By A Will

Dreams…of someone to love her.

Corrie, she told herself firmly, as the tears pushed harder at the back of her eyes, these two women look like you, and they’re your sisters. But that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean they will love you, or care about you, as if blood could automatically guarantee those things.

Still, when she dared to glance at them, at Abby and Brittany, she could see something in their eyes when they looked back at her. It was as if they hadn’t even noticed she was not dressed appropriately. That she had purposely worn her oldest clothes in defiant answer to the summons that had arrived from the law office on creamy linen paper.

Her sisters’ eyes held tenderness.

Welcome.

She wanted so badly to believe. And was terrified to believe at the same time. Her faded jeans had a hole in the knee, and she worked the frayed threads with her fingers, trying desperately to keep control of her world.

Far away she could hear the lawyer’s voice going on and on. About a stranger giving them gifts. Huge gifts. Abby got a house. Brittany a business. Another man came in and went out again, but she hardly noticed.

She heard her own name. And her gift. Five acres of land. And a cabin. Her sisters looked naively happy, but she could feel herself bracing, waiting for the catch.

There was always a catch.

Sure enough, there it was. There were conditions attached to the gifts. If they wanted to keep them they had to stay here, in this little ocean-bound town she had never seen before, for one year.

And they had to get married within that year.

Married. Yeah, right. She, who had mastered the art of freezing a man where he stood with just one glance from her ice-cold eyes.

But if she came and lived here, even for that year, she could be with them. Her sisters.

See? It was happening already. She was nearly weak with wanting what she saw in their eyes.

What if she came, rearranged her whole life to be with them, and they didn’t like her?

The fear was so intense it was like falling off a cliff, falling and falling and falling.

But suddenly, she wasn’t falling anymore.

Her sister Abby slid her hand across the small space between their chairs, and intertwined their fingers. It was as if she knew the terror Corrie was feeling, and knew, too, how to make it go away.

Abby’s hand was warm and soft and strong. She squeezed, and when Corrie looked up at her, what she saw in her sister’s eyes made her realize she would be moving to Miracle Harbor, no matter how scared she was now. Not right away, of course. Corrie had obligations that had to be looked after first. But as soon as it was possible, she would come.

Frightened and excited at the very same time, Corrine admitted the hardest thing of all. That she was powerless to stay away from these gifts that had been offered to her…the hope and the tenderness she saw shining in her sisters’ eyes.

Three months later…

Hers.

Corrine shoved her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, and rocked back on her heels, studying the cabin. It stood, small and solid, under the spreading wings of a giant red maple.

Hers.

It didn’t matter to her that the porch sagged, that the shingles on the roof had grown a thick layer of moss, that the windows were grimy and needed to be cleaned. It didn’t matter to her that the second step was broken, or that the caulking was crumbling and rocks had fallen away from the top of the stone chimney.

She sighed, and allowed herself to feel a little finger of happiness. Nothing had ever really been hers before.

Of course she had owned clothing, and her beloved, if ancient Jeep that still had patches of its original green color in a few places.

But she had always rented an apartment in Minneapolis, even long after her moderate success with the Brandy picture book, Brandy being a young orphan girl of her creation who took on the world with spunk and fire and who always won.

Why hadn’t she bought a house?

Maybe because it would be tempting fate to believe in good things, to commit to anything at all beyond a deadline.

Even feeling so good about this ramshackle cabin concerned her.

Nothing in her history allowed her to believe good things lasted.

“Well,” she said out loud, and smiled, “according to sister Brit, this place doesn’t qualify as a good thing. Not even close.”

Brit had been appalled by the tiny cabin, the tumbledown barn, the falling-down fences that surrounded pastures gone wild, grass and weeds and wildflowers much higher than the fences.

“You can come live with me and Mitch,” Brit had announced shortly after Corrie had finally arrived.

“You’re newlyweds!” Corrie had said. Her sister had been married for only a week. She and her husband, Mitch, had hardly been able to keep their hands off each other long enough to say their vows. Corrie didn’t want to live with that—evidence, cold hard evidence, that dreams came true, that miracles happened all the time.

Both her sisters were evidence of that, judging by the happiness they had found since coming to Miracle Harbor. The thought made terror claw in Corrie’s throat.

Never cry, had just been the first rule. But the second rule was just as strong: Don’t hold hope. Having hope could be the most dangerous thing of all.

“We’ll come help you clean it up,” Abby had declared bravely, staring at the cobwebs inside the little cabin, her face a ghastly shade of pale.

Corrie had been amazed that her sisters shared her terror of spiders, felt that funny warm spot around her frozen heart threaten to expand.

So, of course, she had refused their offers of help. But not just because she could not stand to owe anyone anything, and not just because she felt vulnerable in the face of her sisters’ enthusiasm for her when they did not know the first thing about her.

Somehow cleaning the caulking was like claiming it. Making it hers in a way no one could take away from her. She took a deep breath, and glanced around.

There was work everywhere. The barn was practically falling down. The yard was nonexistent. Maybe she should start out here—

“Corrie,” she told herself, “get in there. Or else you’ll be sleeping outside tonight.” She debated whether there would be more spiders inside or out.

She took a deep breath, skipped over the broken step, and gave the door a shove. It squeaked open.

The interior of the cabin was simplicity itself. One large room served as both the kitchen and the living room. The kitchen had a single row of cupboards, badly in need of paint, and a countertop badly in need of new Arborite. The rust-stained sink was the old porcelain variety. The fridge and stove, thankfully, looked new and spotless.

A doorway off the kitchen, with no door, led to a bedroom that looked like it had been added to the cabin as an afterthought. The tiny bathroom, too, must have been added later, since the cabin looked to be eighty or ninety years old, and the bathroom was modern, bright and clean.

A black potbellied stove in the center of the large room acted as a divider between the kitchen and living room. On the other side was her living room, empty as yet. She liked its rough-hewn gray log walls, and the window, french-paned and huge. Once the window was cleaned she knew the light would be spectacular in this room. She would unpack her easel first, and put it right here where she could glance out the window at the wild grass and flowers, and the grove of trees and the leaning barn and know that everything she was looking at was hers.

A single beam of sunshine had found its way through the grime in the uncurtained front window, and it danced across the floor.

She went and stood in that sunbeam, scraped a layer of dust from the floor with the toe of her sneaker, and saw that the wood beneath was golden and warm.