Molly O'Keefe - Family at Stake

The Mac Edwards Rachel knew would have become a great father. He would have loved and supported his child. He would have kept her safe from harm. He wouldn’t have become the man portrayed in the Child Services case file before her.

With shaking hands that betrayed her lack of emotional detachment, Rachel dived deeper into the case file.

Amanda is an angry young girl, and it is my opinion that there is probably some underlying abuse between Mr. Edwards and his daughter. In light of this and Amanda’s growing criminal record, she needs to be removed from the home.

Rachel had to read the words five times before they sank in. There was no way her former best friend could be abusing his daughter!

Rachel knew she should not take this case. It was a conflict of interest if there ever was one. What she should have done was march up to her boss and say, “I know this guy. Loved him, actually. I definitely broke his heart. So I shouldn’t be their social worker.”

She should have done that.

But she didn’t.

Dear Reader,

I am so thrilled about my Harlequin Superromance debut, Family at Stake! Superromance novels started my love affair with romance, so I am tickled to be a part of such an enduring facet of romance fiction. I actually had a box of Harlequin Superromance novels under my bed at a very early age (I am sure most of you did, too). And many of those books—having been packed up and moved dozens of times over the years—are still on my keeper shelf at home. The things we do for good books!

With Family at Stake I tried my own twist on some of my favorite romantic themes—reunited lovers, at-risk children, single fathers, betrayal and, of course, forgiveness. Mac is easily my favorite hero to date—I love a man who struggles to keep his world together even as it unravels around him. And cracking Rachel’s icy protective shell was one of the most challenging conflicts I’ve tried to solve. Even as I tried to change her—or compromise with her character—she wouldn’t let me.

I hope you enjoy my take on Harlequin Superromance books. Please feel free to drop me a line and tell me what you think at www.molly-okeefe.com.

Happy reading!

Molly O’Keefe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Molly O’Keefe grew up in a small town outside Chicago. How she ended up in Toronto, Canada, she’s not quite sure. She sold her first romance to Harlequin at age twenty-five and hasn’t looked back! She lives in Toronto with her husband, son, cat and the largest heap of dirty laundry in North America.

For Mick and his Old Man—I love you.

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

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

May 20, 1992

“GOODBYE, NEW SPRINGS!” Rachel Filmore ripped off her purple nylon graduation gown and tossed it up in the air. It unfurled in the breeze and drifted into the rock quarry like a shadow against the twilight sky.

“Goodbye, Mom!” She ripped off the cap, ignoring the pull of the bobby pins that tore at her curly hair and flung that into the air, too.

“And last but not least, goodbye, Dad, may you rot in hell.” She dug her fake high school diploma—which said her real diploma would be mailed to her—out of her backpack and sent it sailing into the abyss at her feet.

It had been handed to her a few hours ago at the graduation ceremony.

“Your name is on that,” Rachel’s best friend, Mac Edwards, pointed out with a laugh. “Someone might find it.”

“Like anyone is going to care.” She looked over the edge, but in the darkness she couldn’t see the bottom of the quarry, much less her graduation gown spread out among the rocks. “Maybe they’ll think I jumped,” she muttered, feeling the gravitational pull of all that space between her and the bottom. Sometimes when she stood really still on the ledge like this it seemed like the ground reached up for her.

“They’ll think I jumped just to get out of this dumb town. I swear, Mac. New Springs is like a noose around our necks.”

“That’s not funny,” Mac murmured, and Rachel turned to face him. He sat on the hard-packed earth, his own graduation gown in a heap beside him. He still wore the cap, though. He had tilted it at what he called a “rakish angle.” He was always trying to be like Humphrey Bogart or some other old actor. Mac said they had class. Rachel didn’t know one way or another; she never stayed awake during those boring old movies.

But Mac looked cute with his hat like that.

Something weird was going on with Mac these days. Weirder than normal. His face was changing. He suddenly had cheekbones and a jawline and his eyes…well. Rachel found herself unable to look too long into those eyes.

He seemed older, like a man.

His body had changed last year. Almost overnight, it’d gotten bigger. Where he’d been skinny he’d developed muscle. He must have grown five inches in the span of two months.

The coaches had tried to get him to go out for the football and basketball teams. He didn’t do it, but she knew he was flattered that they’d asked. She also knew that Margaret McCormick had been coming to his locker between classes, tossing her hair around and bending over to pick things up from the floor in front of him. Rachel had caught him looking at Margaret’s butt.

Margaret had joined the Science Club and had even asked him to tutor her, since everyone knew that he was a science genius. He’d helped Margaret one night, but Mac wouldn’t tell Rachel what had happened. He said they’d just studied, but he’d blushed when he said it.

Maybe that was what was weird, Rachel thought as she studied her friend. Mac is a little mysterious.

Her belly did that long slow roll it’d been doing whenever Mac was around. That was weird, too. She had known Mac since freshman year and now she was hot for her best friend. Seriously hot—as in “let’s make out and get naked” hot. She didn’t know what to do about it, except of course ignore it, which she had been trying for a few months now, and that just made her more crazy.

She wanted to do whatever he and Margaret had done.

But she didn’t know how to get from best friend to naked all in one night. And one night was all they had left.

“You gonna toss your gown in, too?” she asked, sitting next to him. She flipped her skirt up over her knees and thought about grabbing her sweatshirt from the bag, but it was still hot out and the tank top she wore was fine.

“Nah.” He reclined against the smooth, round rock at their backs. “Thought I’d burn it. Someone said you can get high off the fumes.”

She chuckled and leaned back with him. She brushed his shoulder with hers—totally on purpose—and her breath caught at the zing that raced along her skin.

Touch me. Touch me. Touch me.

If she opened her mouth, she was sure those words would come pouring out like sand.

“Look what your brother gave me today” Mac dug into his own bag and pulled out a small piece of wood.

Her vision blurred with hot tears.

She wished she could pretend there was no Jesse, no little brother she was being forced to leave behind. Maybe then it wouldn’t feel as if she was drowning all the time.

She picked up the piece of avocado wood that Jesse had whittled into a four-inch-high tree with branches and roots using his twenty-year-old Swiss Army knife.