Tara Quinn - Merry Christmas, Babies

“Uh-uh.” Elise shook her head, still watching him. “I think the baby just moved.”

“It’s probably indigestion,” he said. “You’re only four months along. That’s too soon, isn’t it?”

“Not with quads. Look at my stomach, Joe! I’m already showing, and that doesn’t usually happen at four months, either.”

Elise felt herself blushing when he did exactly as she asked, staring at her stomach.

“There it is again!” she cried out, grinning, feeling idiotically close to tears. “I’m sure that’s the baby moving. I’ve never felt anything like it before!”

“Let me feel.”

She’d barely registered the words before Joe’s larger, warmer hand was pushing hers aside and flattening against her stomach. She wanted to tell him it was too soon to feel anything on the outside, but his hand felt so good. So right.

She was so in trouble.

Dear Reader,

Happy holidays! Have you ever wanted something so badly that you can’t stop thinking about it? So badly that you’re compelled to do whatever it takes to make it happen? That’s kind of how things went with this book. When I met Elise she was going to have quadruplets. That’s all I knew about her. I’d seen this quad stroller while I was out shopping one day last fall and when the questions started coming, I knew I was going to have to write a story about a multiple birth. That was when Elise appeared.

And then, as usually happens in my world, emotions started to appear from nowhere and take over my story. I fought them a bit. Tried to tell them who was really boss. But once I conceded that I wasn’t the one in charge here, a story unfolded that I think will touch your heart. It has certainly touched mine.

In each of us is a drive to achieve something, whether that be financial, emotional, career based, relationship based, or something else entirely. We all have needs. This is the story of someone just like us–a woman whose heart cries out for more. For love and belonging. But with Elise, it doesn’t stop with the wanting. She steps outside the normal boundaries of societal expectations to provide her life with the fullness she craves. Her journey is lonely. It isn’t easy, by any stretch. And in the end, being true to herself and the dictates of her heart–she is successful. Beyond her dreams.

I learned an important lesson from Elise Richardson. I don’t have to settle. This holiday season, my gift to you is the challenge to ask yourself for more. And then to make it happen… Next Christmas, we can check back with each other to see what we’ve accomplished!

Tara Taylor Quinn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Tara’s first book, Yesterday’s Secrets, published in October 1993, was a finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA ®Award. Her subsequent work has earned her finalist status for the National Readers’ Choice Award and the Holt Medallion, plus another two RITA ®Award nominations. A prolific writer, she has forty-two novels and three novellas published. To reach Tara write to her at P.O. Box 133584, Mesa, Arizona 85216 or through her Web site, www.tarataylorquinn.com.

For Rachel—my dearest gift. If you only ever learn one thing from me, please let it be always to listen to your heart and act as it directs.

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

“ANYONE HEAR FROM ELISE?” Joe Bennett walked into the lunchroom at the back of the suite of offices he and his partner—and the bank—now owned. Eating meals ranging from fruit and yogurt to homemade burgers, the employees Elise Richardson supervised sat at the long, elegant wooden table.

“Not a word.” Twenty-five-year-old Angela Parks glanced over her shoulder at him from the granite-topped island marking the center of the full kitchen on one end of the room. She was making a salad.

It was Thursday. On Fridays Elise cooked lunch for their nine-member staff. Maybe she was out grocery shopping for the next day’s offering.

But it would be the first time in the ten years they’d been in business that she’d done so during the workday. At night, while Joe left the job and lived a life, Elise worked at home—or shopped for the office.

“She didn’t say where she was going?”

“I think she had a dentist appointment,” Ruth Gregory said, straightening a stem in the silk flower centerpiece in front of her. At fifty, she was the oldest B&R employee.

“No.” Thirty-five-year-old Mark Oppenheimer popped the last of his usual peanut butter sandwich in his mouth and stood. “That was last month. Today she didn’t say what kind of appointment, only that she shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.”

“What time was that?”

“Nine.” As their chief financial officer, the skinny, bespectacled man was Elise’s second in command and the source most likely to be up to date.

Glancing at his multi-dialed designer watch—which his then-wife had bought him for Christmas a few years ago and which Joe wore because it would be a waste not to, even though he preferred the simple large-faced cheap number he’d worn in college—he frowned.

“That was almost four hours ago.”

Mark wiped the crumbs he’d left on the table onto the floor—a man after his own heart. “I know,” he said.

“And she hasn’t called?”

“No.”

After another few seconds of standing there blankly, Joe started to leave. And then turned back.

“Anyone think to call the hospitals to make sure she wasn’t in an accident?” He was only half joking, but their chuckles followed him down the hallway.

“I’ve got lunch with Anderson, Anderson and Bailey,” he told his secretary on his way out. The law firm was the biggest in the state of Michigan—a six-million-dollar account—and B&R had been courting them for a couple of years. “Text message me the second Elise gets in, will you?”

Bennett and Richardson Professional Employee Organization, or B&R PEO, offered companies a comprehensive package that included payroll, workers’ compensation, tax compliance and group insurance, all at a rate lower than they could arrange for themselves. Joe Bennett was in charge of sales, and Elise Richardson, his best friend from college, oversaw virtually everything else.

Normally his cell phone was in the Off position when he was in meetings—commonly disguised as social gatherings now that he had two salesmen who made the office calls to sit with managers and work out logistics. Today he turned his cell on to Vibrate instead, so he’d know if and when a message came through. He didn’t have an urgent need to speak to his business partner. He just wanted to assure himself that she was going to be around at some point to nag him about something.

THE LONG, FAMILIAR private road across the front of the cemetery was potholed and narrow, barely wide enough to fit the Corvette. Elise passed several lanes that sectioned off areas filled with headstones of varying sizes, many with urns bearing colorful floral arrangements planted on Memorial Day two and a half weeks before. As she rounded the back border of the carefully tended green acreage, she slowed to a stop, then climbed out of the car, wrapping her short, three-quarter-sleeved white sweater more closely around her.