Marisa Carroll - Little Girl Lost

He’d almost given himself away when he’d let his reaction to seeing Beth’s child for the first time get the better of him. Caitlin Carson was Beth’s child—he was convinced of it, although he couldn’t say how he knew.

But according to the law, Faith was Caitlin’s mother. He’d seen a copy of the birth certificate. Everything about it seemed to be in order. Still, he knew his hunch was right. Even though the accident that had killed Jamie and taken Beth’s memory had occurred a hundred miles away, he was sure his sister had been in this place. Here she’d given birth and for some reason, left her child behind.

It was the slightest of hunches that had brought him to Painted Lady Farm. A baby born to a woman alone, during a terrible ice storm. A woman who was a nurse and could have delivered a frightened teenager’s baby. A woman who was also a widow and had, perhaps, despaired of ever having a child of her own—and who might have been desperate enough to risk keeping another woman’s baby.

He didn’t know the details, but nothing he’d learned led him to believe that Faith Carson was a baby snatcher. He was determined to find the truth, but he had to proceed carefully. He wasn’t the only one searching for Beth’s baby.

Marisa Carroll is the pen name of the writing team of Carol Wagner and Marian Franz of Deshler, Ohio. The sisters have published over thirty romance novels in the past twenty years and have been the recipients of several industry awards, including Romantic Times Career Achievement Award and a B. Dalton Booksellers’ Award. They have also been finalists for the RWA RITA ®Awards and have appeared on numerous bestseller lists, including the USA TODAY list.

Carol and Marian were born and raised in northwestern Ohio. They pursued careers in nursing, X-ray technology and the business community before entering the writing field in 1982. Marian is employed at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Carol is writing full-time.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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

EPILOGUE

THE CALENDAR SAID it was November, but the scudding gray clouds and lowering sky made it seem as though winter had arrived in southern Ohio. The maples and slippery elms had long ago lost their leaves. The mottled trunks of the sycamores blended into the white and gray of the storm clouds. Only the oaks held stubbornly to their tattered brown leaves, the way she had been holding stubbornly to her grief.

No, not stubbornly, Faith Carson told herself as she trudged along the path that skirted a small lake and ended at a tiny, hidden roadside park bordering her farm. “Surely six months isn’t too long to mourn a dead husband?”

She wasn’t talking to herself, not really. She’d addressed the question to her two-year-old Shetland sheepdog, Addy, trotting at her heels. She’d found Addy at the local animal shelter a few weeks after she’d moved into the echoing old farmhouse that Mark had inherited from his grandparents, and which, until three weeks after his death, Faith had never set foot in. Addy was the only friend Faith had at the moment. The little dog pricked her ears at the question and gave a yip of sympathetic agreement.

Six months. Not nearly long enough when that sorrow was coupled with the aching loss of a child barely conceived. Surely six months was only a beginning. Faith blinked hard to hold back tears as icy raindrops touched her cheeks. She had nothing left in her but a sense of bereavement so deep and unrelenting she sometimes felt as though she had died, too, on that mountain road in Mexico.

They had been vacationing, their first real vacation since their marriage, looking for the remote area where thousands of monarch butterflies came to spend the winter. Mark was a computer programmer whose passion was butterflies. It was a trip he had wanted to take for as long as she had known him. But a washed-out section of road and a blown tire had caused their rented Jeep to roll over.

Somehow, for some reason, her heart had gone on beating when Mark’s had stopped as she held him in her arms and their baby’s life drained away between her legs. A loss like that scarred the heart so much the healing might take six years, or sixty—or never come.

She walked out of the trees just behind the rustic two-sided building that, along with a pair of old-fashioned outhouses and a rusty jungle gym, were the park’s only amenities. An expensive, sporty blue car was parked in the graveled lot at the edge of the small body of water the county had named Sylvan Lake, but that was still known to the locals of Bartonsville, Ohio, as Carson’s Pond. A young couple, the boy’s arms wrapped around the girl, her head resting on his shoulder, sat on one of the picnic tables near the blackened fieldstone fireplace that took up the entire north wall of the building. Faith halted, half-hidden by a huge pine whose low branches brushed the ground, and acted as a windbreak on one side of the small picnic shelter.

She hadn’t expected anyone to be in the park on a day like this, certainly not a pair of amorous teenagers. She took a quick step back, deeper into the shadow of the pine. They hadn’t seen her. She could melt back into the woods, retrace her steps through the frosty grass and be home before the raindrops that were now falling steadily changed to sleet. Addy growled low in her throat.

“Shh.” Faith knelt down to fasten the leash she carried in her pocket to the dog’s collar before Addy could begin barking in earnest. She scooped the small dog into her arms and prepared to depart. The teenagers were absorbed in each other and didn’t look in her direction, but some trick of sound brought their words to her ears.

“Beth, we can’t stay here. There must be a town close by. Maybe it’s big enough for a hospital.”

“If we go to a hospital they’ll call your parents.” The girl cried out, a moan of pain and fear. These weren’t just two moonstruck teenagers making out. Something far more serious than that was going on. Addy whined nervously and squirmed in Faith’s arms. The boy turned his head and stared directly into her eyes.

“Help us,” he said, his face as gray-white as the clouds and the sycamore trees. He was blond, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, seventeen or eighteen at most. A good-looking kid, or would be if he weren’t half-scared to death. “My girlfriend’s having a baby. And I don’t know what to do.”

Faith couldn’t believe her ears, didn’t want to. He couldn’t have said what she thought she had heard.

“Please,” he said, raising his voice so there could be no doubt as he repeated the words. “She’s having a baby. I don’t know what to do.”

Instinctively Faith shook her head. “I don’t, either,” she murmured, but he couldn’t hear her above the moaning of the wind in the trees. And she did know what to do. That was one of the things that made her own loss so hard to bear. She was a nurse. She had the skill and knowledge to help save lives. Once, she had even delivered a baby herself. But that had been five years ago in the hospital emergency room where she’d worked while Mark finished up his graduate studies. She had been young and fearless, then. Now she was not. She hadn’t even set foot in a hospital since three days after her miscarriage.