Loree Lough: Suddenly Home

For the next five minutes, Alex sat in one of Taylor’s kitchen chairs as she swabbed his cuts with antiseptic. His own mother hadn’t fussed over him this gently when he’d skinned his knees as a boy.

What made Taylor’s attentions seem so…different? Maybe the way her hands shook, ever so slightly, as she touched the swabs to his cuts. Maybe it was the way her voice trembled just a little when she asked, “Does that hurt?”

And maybe, just maybe, it was the look in her eyes that said even something as insignificant as cat scratches were important…because he was important.

If only—

A full-time writer for more than a dozen years, Loree Lough has produced more than 2,000 published articles, dozens of short stories—appearing in magazines here and abroad—and novels for the young (and young at heart). The author of twenty-nine romances (including the award-winning Pocketful of Love, Emma’s Orphans and bestsellers like Reluctant Valentine, Miracle on Kismet Hill and Just One Christmas Wish) Loree also writes as Cara McCormack and Aleesha Carter.

A comedic teacher and conference speaker, Loree loves sharing in classrooms what she’s learned the hard way. She lives in Maryland with her husband of nearly (gasp, sputter, choke!) thirty years.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Come home with me, and refresh thyself,

and I will give thee a reward.

—I Kings 13:7

To Elice and Valerie, my daughters,

my friends…may the romance of true love

care for you all the days of your lives.

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Letter to Reader

Date: December 17

Time: 1600

Coordinates: 17º 22.3 minutes north

66º 45.6 minutes west

Altitude 500 feet

Like blue-green tentacles, lightning snaked along the F-16’s wingtips, brightening the Puerto Rican sky and blacking out the entire control panel. Lieutenant Alex Van Buren had mere seconds to decide: Eject…

Or go down with the fighter.

He jerked back on the throttle, but it was no use. He couldn’t bring the aircraft out of its nosedive. If he abandoned the plane, there’d be no time for his chute to open. Not while flying over the choppy waters at an altitude of five hundred feet.

He hoped for a miracle. There’d been times when, under similar conditions, other pilots’ parachutes had released…right…?

Who was he kidding? He’d been a test pilot a long time. More than long enough to know a guy didn’t bullet through the sky at nearly six hundred miles an hour and survive a crash. But even if he didn’t die, he’d be so broken and battered he’d be lucky to see a cockpit again, let alone manipulate its controls.

Death didn’t scare him. Living—if it meant he couldn’t fly—now, that terrified him. As a much younger man he’d entertained the idea of pastoring a little church in the boonies. But every Van Buren before him had been a naval officer. Who was he to break tradition, especially for something as meaningless as a boyhood dream?

So many thoughts, so many questions racing through his mind….

As the sparkling surface of the water hurtled closer, closer, Van Buren held his breath and closed his eyes, steeling himself for the rib-racking effects of ejection, and did something he hadn’t done in ages.

He prayed.

Prayed he’d pass out, so he wouldn’t hear his bones breaking, his muscles tearing. Prayed that God, in His infinite mercy and wisdom, would let him drown quickly in the warm island waters; better that than go home as something other than the man he’d worked so long and hard to become.

Van Buren felt his body catapult from the cockpit.

And as he became one with the sky, he wondered if he’d survive the impact.

Date: December 17

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Supra-Air Flight 550

In the skies above Puerto Rico

If she spoke, even to order coffee, she’d break down. And so when the flight attendant stopped the drink cart beside her seat, Taylor pretended to be asleep…

And remembered the last time she’d talked to her mother.

Back then, Taylor had been working at a small pub in Houston. As usual, her mom ended the telephone conversation with a warning about what becomes of folks who live in the fast lane. In her mother’s opinion, Taylor—who’d traded her physical therapist smock for a microphone—had spent the past five years doing exactly that.

Taylor wasted no time pointing out that, in her opinion, it was the other way around. Because six months before, her mother had taken up with a has-been race-car driver who, frustrated by a dead-end career, had begun hurtling through life at maximum overdrive….

These past twelve hours had been a crazy, hazy blur: the phone call to her uncle Dave, then booking a last-minute flight from Puerto Rico to Baltimore, packing, hailing a taxi…. Through it all, Taylor fought tears, asking herself why she hadn’t called her mom more often, why she hadn’t visited home more frequently. Because if she’d been there, she could have steered her mother around the hazard signs in the road ahead.

It hardly seemed possible that just the night before, Taylor had been sitting on a tall padded stool at San Juan’s Posada Felicidad, strumming her Yamaha and singing “In Your Arms” when her boss had waved an arm to get her attention, then pointed at the phone, letting Taylor know the call was for her.

A slight frown, a small head shake had made clear what she’d mouthed between verses: “Take a message.”

Later, alone in her hotel room, Taylor had returned her uncle’s call. “For a while there,” he’d said, “your mama seemed to be holdin’ her own. That’s when she asked me to get hold of you.” He went on to explain how, despite the best efforts of the emergency-room team, her mother had died of complications suffered in a fiery car crash.

Would there have been time for a final goodbye, one last “I love you” if Taylor had put down her guitar long enough to accept her uncle’s call? She’d never know. Because now, every chance she had at being a better daughter was dead.

And so was her mother.

Looking out the airliner’s thick window, she watched as lightning sliced through the Puerto Rican sky. Shielding her eyes with the palm of one hand, she steeled herself against the if onlys and what ifs, remembering one of her mother’s favorite sayings: “The road to nowhere is paved with regrets.”

Small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

In a few hours, when this overcrowded 747 landed at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Taylor would head for the funeral home to view her mother’s body.

Would she survive the impact of that?

Eighteen months later

BWI Airport

Baltimore, Maryland

From start to finish, the red-eye flight from Ireland had been a nightmare, complete with keep-your-seat-belts-fastened turbulence, crying babies and a grumpy crew. She’d barely cracked the spine of her novel when an over-weight gent tromped on her foot climbing into his window seat. If Taylor had known his first words would be the kickoff to an eight-hour gabfest, she’d have kept reading the scene that began, “His dark-lashed eyes bored into hers with an alarming intensity….” Something told her she’d have to wait until she got home to find out how the heroine reacted to the hero’s scrutiny.