Laurie Campbell - Home At Last

Kirsten gulped, wiping the back of her wrist against her eyes. “I can’t lean on you.”

“You damn well can.” J.D. was right behind her, resting his arm around her shoulders, and she wrenched herself away.

“Not for long,” Kirsten protested. He obviously had no problem offering her a shoulder to cry on, but she couldn’t let herself take refuge in his arms. “I can’t go through that again.”

“What?”

“You leaving,” she whispered, not even caring about hiding the old wound.

“Kirsten—”

“I…I thought we had a…a future together,” she blurted out before realizing how idiotic that must sound. “I know it was stupid,” she continued. “You’d never said you wanted me—”

“My God,” J.D. interrupted, staring at her in disbelief. “I never wanted anybody like I wanted you.”

Dear Reader,

While every romance holds the promise of sweeping readers away with a rugged alpha male or a charismatic cowboy, this month we want to take a closer look at the women who fall in love with our favorite heroes.

“Heroines need to be strong,” says Sherryl Woods, author of more than fifty novels. “Readers look for a woman who can stand up to the hero—and stand up to life.” Sherryl’s book A Love Beyond Words features a special heroine who lost her hearing but became stronger because of it. “A heroine needs to triumph over fear or adversity.”

Kate Stockwell faces the fear of knowing she cannot bear her own child in Allison Leigh’s Her Unforgettable Fiancé, the next installment in the STOCKWELLS OF TEXAS miniseries. And an accident forces Josie Scott, Susan Mallery’s LONE STAR CANYON heroine in Wife in Disguise, to take stock of her life and find a second chance….

In Peggy Webb’s Standing Bear’s Surrender, Sarah Sloan must choose between loyalty and true love! In Separate Bedrooms…? by Carole Halston, Cara LaCroix is faced with fulfilling her grandmother’s final wish—marriage! And Kirsten Laurence needs the help of the man who broke her heart years ago in Laurie Campbell’s Home at Last.

“A heroine is a real role model,” Sherryl says. And in Special Edition, we aim for every heroine to be a woman we can all admire. Here’s to strong women and many more emotionally satisfying reads from Silhouette Special Edition!

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my sister, Lisa,

who’s shared a lifetime of creating characters we love

spends her weekdays writing brochures, videos and commercial scripts for an advertising agency. At five o’clock she turns off her computer, waits thirty seconds, turns it on again and starts writing romance. Her other favorite activities include playing with her husband and son, teaching catechism class, counseling at a Phoenix mental health clinic and working with other writers. “People ask me how I find the time to do all that,” Laurie says, “and I tell them it’s easy. I never clean my house!”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

“Where are my children?”

“I don’t know,” the airport clerk repeated, and Kirsten Laurence fought back a flare of panic. “All I know is, they’re not on this flight. If they were, we’d have the Un-accompanied Minor paperwork.”

But what if Brad had forgotten to fill it out? Or the airline had lost it someplace? Maybe she was grasping at straws, but the possibility of not seeing Lindsay, Adam and Eric as soon as the plane arrived was making her stomach twist with horror.

“Unless they look older than their ages,” the clerk offered, evidently seeing her stricken expression. “Once in a while, we’ll get a teenager who can pass for—”

“My daughter is seven,” Kirsten interrupted, clenching her fists in the folds of her flowered shirt—Lindsay’s favorite, which was why she’d worn it today. “And the twins are five. They’ve been visiting their dad for two weeks, and I’m picking them up this morning!”

“Well, we have another Seattle-to-Tucson flight coming in at three-fifteen, and the first one landed two hours ago….”

Dear God, could she possibly have missed them? It was impossible, but she couldn’t find any better explanation.

Worse ones, yes. Like Brad forgetting the date. Or losing track of time, except that surely by now he would have called her. Maybe a car accident on the way to the airport. A trip to the emergency room. Brad knocked unconscious, her children not knowing the phone number of their brand-new house….

No, she was being silly. Overprotective. It was probably something simple, like a flat tire. Or Brad deciding right before they boarded that another airline had better first-class seats. She could easily imagine him buying new tickets on the spot, discarding the original ones without a thought for the cost.

That had to be it, Kirsten told herself, trying to steady her breathing while she headed toward the cluster of pay phones to call Seattle. That would be typical of her ex-husband.

All she needed to do was phone and ask him which plane to meet.

She couldn’t stop her fingers from shaking, though, while she punched in her calling-card number. There had to be someone on hand to answer. Her daughter and sons were somewhere out there, and she had no idea where—there had to be an answer.

There was. As soon as she heard the phone being picked up, Kirsten felt a wave of relief crest over the apprehension rising inside her. Then, when Brad’s recorded message began, the fear circled higher.

“Hey, sorry I missed you,” came his cheerful voice. He sounded as carefree and friendly as ever, confirming her long-held belief that Brad Laurence was a terrific person as long as you weren’t married to him. “You know the routine, right? Leave your name, I’ll call your machine, you call mine again, and one of these days we’ll get it together. Okay?” Then a beep.

“Brad,” she choked. “Listen, I need to know where the kids are! Because the airline says they’re not on this flight, and—”

“Hello?” another voice interrupted. “Mrs. Laurence? This is Rena, the cleaning lady. I just heard you on the machine, so I thought I’d pick up.”

“Oh, thank you.” The cleaning lady would be fine as long as she knew where to reach him. “I’m so glad you’re there. Brad is sending the children home this morning, and I need to know what plane they’re on.”

There was a pause. Then Rena cleared her throat.

“Uh, Mrs. Laurence? I think maybe there was a mistake. Because last I heard, they were taking off on vacation.”

On vacation? No.

“They’re coming home today,” Kirsten protested, but already her chest felt tight. As if she needed to brace her entire body against a jolt. Which the cleaning lady delivered.

“Mr. Laurence said yesterday he was keeping the kids. He said you needed a break.”

A break? After two weeks without Lindsay and Adam and Eric? “He said what?”

“Well, that’s what the boys told me. That you were moving? Anyway, he asked me to get the house closed up today.”

Kirsten felt a clutch of panic flaring higher inside her. Brad must have planned this in advance, but why hadn’t he called her if he wanted more time with the children? And how could he have told them she wanted a break from them? “Rena, did he say where they were going?”

“Colorado, maybe? I’m not sure.”

His condo in Telluride. That had to be it. He’d taken the kids there for Christmas six months ago, and they had described a penthouse atop a luxurious resort, which sounded like Brad’s kind of place. “If he calls again,” she asked shakily, “would you have him get hold of me? And tell him to use the new number I gave him, because the forwarding system is messed up. Thanks.”

All she needed to do was phone Telluride, but for some reason it was hard to make her fingers punch in the calling-card number again. There was nothing to worry about, Kirsten assured herself, gazing blindly around the airport’s bustling concourse as she waited to be connected with the resort concierge. But the reassurance was wearing thin…and when she learned that Mr. Laurence hadn’t used his suite since Christmas, she felt a chilling wave of disbelief mingled with stark, raw terror.

Her children were gone.

This wasn’t Brad’s typical carelessness. This was deliberate, and she had no idea how to react. Leave word with everyone he might contact? Alert the police that her ex-husband had failed to return the children? Call the FBI? While he deserved the worst kind of punishment and then some, she hated the idea of Lindsay and the boys seeing Brad arrested for kidnapping…because her children needed to think well of their father.

But he couldn’t keep them. He couldn’t! Not with Adam and Eric starting kindergarten next month, not when Lindsay had already gone two weeks without her bedtime story. Not when he’d never wanted the children for any length of time before.

This didn’t make sense, Kirsten thought again as she headed out to the short-term parking garage where she’d left her car. Brad had never enjoyed the routine of parenthood, the everyday pleasures of being a father. After his parents had died in a plane crash last December, he’d shown a little more enthusiasm than usual for pampering the children—but nothing that indicated he wanted them beyond the usual week around the holidays and two weeks in June or July. Why was he suddenly holding onto them?

And what was she supposed to do about it? Call the police? Her parents? But they had left only yesterday for their thirtieth-anniversary cruise….

She drove home with shivers chilling her body, which under any other circumstances would have been a welcome relief from the heat of a Tucson summer. Yet now she wished the cold numbness would recede faster, wished she could think faster, wished that by the time she reached the new house she could have a plan of action completely formed in her mind.

The logical first step was calling the police, but that proved to be no help at all. “Custody violation by itself isn’t a criminal offense,” an officer explained, “so we can’t do anything right now. If they’re not back in three weeks, call again.”

Three weeks? Three more weeks without Lindsay, without Adam, without Eric? Without the only treasures in her life?

Brad had to be somewhere, she thought, hanging up the phone and pacing the Saltillo-tile floor of her newly furnished kitchen. He might have only been joking with the cleaning lady, might have decided to return the children to Tucson himself—but even if he hadn’t, someone must know where he was. He had friends, surely, people he kept in touch with. Someone had to know where to find the chairman of the Laurence Foundation, even if he rarely set foot in the place.

Who would Brad talk to, anyway? Maybe Steve and Amy in their hometown of Tubac, or John Harris, or Mike and Ellen. Or J.D. Ryder—

No, not J.D. There were plenty of other people she could ask.

She wasn’t calling J.D. Ryder.

But after half an hour of phoning everyone she could think of, only to receive useless reassurances that “Brad must’ve just decided to show the kids an extra good time this summer,” Kirsten found herself frantically scrambling through the battered phone list she’d started during the early days of their marriage. The names, even then, were mostly in his handwriting—Brad had always made friends easily, effortlessly—and seven years later, there were still dozens of people he must have stayed in touch with.