“He knows you, Mom,” Emma insisted. “Knows how you are. He’d have to figure if you found out what he’d done, you’d never forgive him.”
“I suppose that’s true. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Somehow that just makes it all the worse.”
“Mom, think. He was willing to give up you loving him, to keep you and me safe, the only way he knew how. If that’s not real love, what is?”
Deirdre peered down into her daughter’s face, knowing Emma was forever changed by what she’d learned tonight, and fearing how that knowledge might haunt her tomorrow.
But even more certain than that was one thing more. Somehow, through all the craziness, all the uncertainty, all of the flat-out mistakes Deirdre had made as a mother when she herself was just a kid, Deirdre had raised one hell of a daughter. Emma was wiser, more together than Deirdre had ever even hoped to be at her daughter’s age. Somehow Emma would be able to take what she’d learned tonight and figure things out.
Fear nudged Deirdre. She’d always been a little scared, thinking of her Emma on her own in a big city like New York. But no matter what happened to Emma’s dreams of the stage, Deirdre’s little girl was going to be all right.
Deirdre had made certain her baby knew the one thing Deirdre had never been sure of.
Emma knew her mother loved her.
“Now, why don’t you get out of here and write a better ending than the one I’m gonna have to perform onstage?” Emma challenged. “I mean really. ‘And they all died.’ It completely sucks. What’s so romantic about that?”
“I…I guess romance was never my strong point. I was more of a…a murder and mayhem, ghosts and deadly Lady MacBeth kind of kid.”
“Whoa!” Emma cried. “Don’t even be saying that name a few weeks before I step onstage. How many times have I told you, actors are superstitious? We call it The Scottish Play.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“Good thing Trula’s going to be in the family. She’ll straighten you out.”
“Don’t count on…well, anything,” Deirdre cautioned. “I just don’t know if Jake and I can…well, fix things.”
Deirdre slid out of bed, slipped on her shoes.
“Mom,” Emma said as Deirdre glanced toward the door, her hand reaching up to smooth her hair. “Don’t even bother with a comb. You look like road kill, but Jake won’t care. He’ll be so glad to see you. Get out of here, already.”
Deirdre turned back to the bed and hugged Emma tight, drank in the feel of her, the smell of her, rejoiced in the solid way love settled into the deepest reaches of her mother-heart.
She cupped her daughter’s face in her hands and let her own tears rain down her cheeks, unashamed. “Take this with you, wherever you go. To New York, to the stage, or to a little house with Drew Lawson to love you. Emma, you were the making of me.”
Tears trembled in Emma’s eyes. She shrugged. Her voice quavered. “Well, Mom. Just don’t forget you are a work in progress. I’m expecting Stone to take over from now on.”
Deirdre gave a watery laugh and headed for the door.
THE BUNGALOW WAS DARK, but she knew Jake was awake, trying to remember how to live alone. Deirdre pulled out a credit card and fiddled with the lock, thanking God for the one useful talent a boyfriend from her nightclub days had taught her.
She didn’t want to risk Jake ignoring the knock on the door. She knew he’d never suspect it was her. He’d been sure she’d stop loving him the instant he smashed his fist into Adam Farrington’s face.
The lock gave and Deirdre slipped inside, even Ellie May not realizing anyone had broken in. No wonder the dog had washed out of the police force. She was useless for anything except adoring Jake Stone. Maybe Deirdre and the dog had something in common after all.
Deirdre padded to Stone’s bedroom, but he wasn’t there. She wandered the house, a dull panic knotting in her throat at the notion that he was gone. Where on God’s Earth could he be?
Ellie May nosed her way out of Stone’s office, the room where Deirdre had first seen him. And from the mournful expression on the dog’s face, Deirdre knew he was nowhere to be found.
Where would he go? Jake, with his heart in pieces and his dreams shards of glass? To Trula’s? To the Rizzos’? No, from the start that’s how Jake and Deirdre had been alike. Two loners, too proud to let anyone see where the fault lines lay in their hearts. Too fiercely independent to need anyone…Until they’d dared to need each other.
“I’ll find him, Ellie,” Deirdre promised, wandering back out into the night.
BY THE TIME SHE RETURNED to March Winds, alone and dejected, the river was shrouded in darkness so deep Deirdre’s hands began to shake. She eased her car up the driveway, wondering how she could have been so wrong. She’d gone everywhere she’d thought he might be, but his car hadn’t been at any of them. It was as if he’d dropped off the earth.
Maybe she should head back to the bungalow and sit on his steps until he came home from wherever he’d gone to lick the wounds she’d dealt him.
He had to come back home to feed Ellie May. A bump in the gravel jarred Deirdre. She blinked in surprise, glimpsed a white truck parked in the shadows. She barely remembered to put the van in Park before she leapt out of it.
Was Jake inside the house? Where…
No. She knew in an instant where he’d be. Where the magic lived—where wounded hearts healed. Where love was reborn and vows were spoken from hearts too full for words. And where new lives began. The gazebo Cade had built more out of love than from simple boards and nails.
She ran through the shadowy garden. Her heart leapt as she recognized the lone figure just visible in the gazebo, his silhouette illuminated by the glow of dock lights from the river beyond.
Jake. Hands on hips, head arched back, he stared out into the river’s treacherous currents. But Deirdre knew no matter how badly she’d hurt him, jumping in was the last thing on his mind. He had too many other people he had to look out for—Trula and the Rizzos. And God knew how many other people he’d helped over the years, people like Deirdre, desperate for answers only he cared enough to find.
She slowed as she saw him stiffen, knew he’d heard her. His intuition was too keen not to know who she was.
“Jake?” She laid a hand on his shoulder, felt how rigid his muscles were.
He didn’t look at her. She moved, where she could see the dock lights spilling down his face, exposing him without mercy. The hard planes and angles of Stone’s cheeks were wet with tears.
“You know the first time I saw you here, in this garden?” Stone asked softly, as if he were still a thousand miles beyond her reach. “It was the night Cade and Finn got married.”
“You were at March Winds that night?”
“I read about how they were going to have a Civil War–style wedding in the papers. And I just…suddenly I was here, you know? Parked out on the main road, walking through the darkness, watching you. I knew what you thought of me, Deirdre. You’d made that plain enough. And yet…there was something about you I couldn’t forget. As if…I already loved you somewhere back in time. I just had to be reminded.”
His voice cracked. He braced his hands on the gazebo’s white gingerbread trimmed rail, his face so wistful it broke her heart. Jake…on the outside, in the dark, looking at love he thought he could never have because he’d sacrificed any chance of complete honesty when he saved his best friend’s wife and children. And, Deirdre thought sadly, because she’d despised him.
“Oh, Jake,” she breathed, aching.
“You were all so damned happy that night, setting those little lights off to float down the river.”
Deirdre sighed at the memory. Back then she’d felt so alone. With nine months of abandonment to make up to her little girl. Her father and brother fighting their anger toward her. Anger Deirdre knew she’d deserved.
But Cade and the Captain had worked their way through it. Helped her make a good life here in the town she’d once hate
d.
“Emma said the lights were wishes carried off so they’d come true. Everyone was supposed to make one. But I was too…too scared to make any wishes of my own.”
“Want to know what I wished that night?” Jake grated out. “That I could love you. But you hated me then. Probably felt about the same way you do now.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t love me anymore, either. Hell, I don’t blame you. I had no right to do what I did to Farrington.” He turned blazing eyes on her. “But I’m glad I did it. You hear me? Glad. I’d do it again to make sure that sonofabitch never gets near you or Emma. But I—God, Deirdre, I just wish I could forget everything I’m going to miss. Emma playing Juliet, and walking her through the garden to marry a man she loves, the way I wanted to marry you. Here, in this gazebo where you claim magic lives. I’m going to miss it all now. Your face when I put my ring on your finger and the way your eyes shine when I’m inside you. And those babies we were gonna have. They’re so damned real to me.”
“They’re real to me, too, Jake. My dad made me see that…and Emma…they made everything we were going to have together so real I had to find you to say…I’m sorry.”
It broke her heart that even her tentative apology couldn’t make him hope. “I’m sorry, too,” Jake said. “I blew it. I know. I can’t take it back. I wouldn’t if I could. But if I could…could give you back the night he raped you…make love to you the first time, the way it should have been…I’d sell my soul, Dee, for that chance.”
Deirdre felt enchantment close around her, so strong in Cade’s white gingerbread rails. The power of love in this place, so real. She reached for healing, knew that once again this brave, honorable, infuriating man had shown her the way.
She took his hand in hers, held it to her cheek and looked up into Jake Stone’s eyes. “I know everyone at school thinks I’m wild,” she said, her cheeks burning with shyness, “but I…want the first time to be special. With a boy who loves me.”
Jake frowned in confusion and pain. “Deirdre, don’t—”
“Do you, Jake?” she asked, her heart in her eyes. “Love me?”
“Yes. I love you, damn it!” He swore. “I…” Realization dawned in his eyes, disbelief giving way to wonder. A shy, earnest gentleness softened his rugged face. His voice dropped low, so tender Deirdre’s heart leapt. “You really…really want me to…”
He touched her face, his eyes smoke, his hand so warm. She nodded shyly against his hand, repeating the words she’d said to him before. “Don’t…make me say it.”
“I won’t…won’t hurt you,” Jake said thickly. “I promise. I’ll stop if you—”
“No. Don’t stop. Never stop loving me, Jake. Promise?”
Jake took her in his arms, lowered her gently to the floor of the gazebo. Moonlight danced through the white painted rails, illuminating the riverbank where Emma’s wishes had floated free six years before. The sweet night air gleamed with a thousand dreams the gazebo had sheltered for other lovers, as Deirdre and Jake spun new magic of their very own. Jake kissed Deirdre with all of his heart.
He loved her as though it was her first time.
The first night of forever.
EPILOGUE
THE HEAD NURSE of the maternity ward peered at the motley crew invading her waiting room, the myriad of laugh lines in her crinkly face reminding Emma of one of her cousin Amy’s little dried apple dolls.
“What is it about you McDaniels that you always have to do the unexpected?” Mrs. Haskins demanded, peering over the top rim of her glasses at Emma and the twins. “Tonight it looks like my maternity ward is being invaded by creatures from the Black Lagoon.”
“It’s Halloween, Mrs. Haskins,” Amy McDaniel explained earnestly.
Her twin, Will’s, eight moveable spider legs drooped, a little dejected. “Yeah. We’re s’posed to be having a party, with this real cool Frankenstein piñata Uncle Jake hung up in the gazebo. You know, that one where everybody’s always kissing in?”
“Like you kissed Lisa Allison?” Amy inquired sweetly. Will howled and slugged his sister, but Amy didn’t miss a beat. “Daddy saw it an’ said Will had better wait awhile before he kissed anyone else, ’cause there’s something about that place that gets people babies. Uncle Jake told Mommy she was right about it being lucky. That’s where they got this baby from.”
“A new baby. That’s good, right, Emma?” Amy said, determined to look on the bright side.
“And I was home when it came.” Emma glowed with pleasure, knowing that even her beloved drama school wouldn’t make up for missing this event. She was a real New Yorker now, from the top of her curls to the tips of her toes, but that didn’t change the fact that she was a hundred percent McDaniel, and hated to miss a surprise.
“What kind of baby is it?” Will asked. “That’s what matters most. S’pose you better tell us what it is, Mrs. Haskins.” Emma grinned as he squared his shoulders, looking as if the nurse might just spray him with a giant can of bug spray.
Mrs. Haskins smiled. “It’s a girl.”
The news swirled through Emma, delighting her almost as much as the reactions of the family around her.
“Aw, cripes!” Will wailed. “Not another girl! I’m drownin’ in ’em! Can’t we pick a different one?”
Cade scooped his son into his arms and winked at Emma. “Sorry, partner. It doesn’t work that way.”
“You’ve got to cherish the ladies,” Captain Martin McDaniel warned his grandson. “Looks like you’d better come over to my apartment so I can teach you some manners, young man.”
Emma’s heart warmed, thinking of the rooms her uncle had built on to the cabin so the Captain could be independent and yet close at hand to raise up all of those grandbabies.
“Yeah,” Amy shook her finger under her twin’s nose. “And you’d better not be insulting us girls, either, right, Emma? Remember what Daddy said when we got the last girl? That he named her after the strongest woman he ever knew. Maybe she’ll beat you up when she grows a little.”
“As if!” Will howled. “The Deester can’t even walk yet. Let alone punch someone big as me!”
Finn swept in, her two-year-old daughter wriggling in her arms. “We give this child a perfectly lovely name, and what do they call her?” she asked Emma, rolling her eyes. “The Deester. What’s wrong with Deirdre Skye?”
“She’s a girl. That’s what’s wrong,” Will complained, looking to Emma for sympathy. But for once she forgot comforting her cousin’s small woes.
The double doors to the waiting room opened, and Emma’s heart leapt as a tousled, exhausted, ecstatic Jake Stone entered the room.
Will looked to his uncle for sympathy. “Uncle Jake, aren’t girls nothin’ but trouble?”
“Not this little angel,” Jake said, and Emma’s heart squeezed as she saw how tenderly he cradled his newborn daughter. “She’s going to be just like her mama.”
“Lock the doors, hide the keys!” Cade laughed.
“Batten down the hatches,” the Captain howled.
“Hey, watch it, you two clowns!” Emma elbowed her way between them. “That’s my sister!” Emma crossed over to her stepfather, and he held the baby out for her to see.
A miracle. So brand-new. Emma touched her tiny hand in wonder. The baby curled her fingers into a fist, bopped Emma square on the nose.
“Ow!” Emma laughed in protest, pressing her hand to her nose.
“That baby’s a McDaniel all right,” the Captain predicted with pardonable pride.
“She’s a Stone,” Trula insisted. “Mix that kind of blood together and you’ll get a Thoroughbred, through and through—isn’t that right, Emma?”
Emma glowed as Trula hugged her, the grandmother Emma had never had.
“A Thoroughbred or a great idea for a new Stephen King novel,” Cade teased. “Deirdre would pick Halloween to have a baby.”
“Oh, yeah. That Halloween thing,” Jake said. Emma saw hi
m shake his head as if to clear it. “She made me promise to tell Will and Amy she’ll buy them all the candy they want as soon as she gets back on her feet.”
“Can I see Mom?” Emma asked, glancing toward a small package on one of the waiting room’s veneer end tables, the tissue wrapped around it so old and fragile it crumbled at the edges.
“She was asking for you,” Jake said, loving Emma every bit as much as the little bundle in his arms.
They slipped into the hospital room, found Deirdre, sitting up in a rocking chair, her face tired, but aglow with a peace still rare in Jake’s restless wife. Draped in the robe he’d bought her, her hair a wild tangle, she’d never been more beautiful in Jake’s eyes.
“I’ve got a present for you,” Emma said shyly, crossing the room to give her mom a kiss. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Deirdre smiled up at her oldest child. “Why on earth would I mind, sweetheart?”
“Because I—” Emma made a nervous little face “—I looked inside the hope chest just to see if maybe…there was something there.”
Deirdre tried not to show a sudden flutter of unease. “I’m surprised you even thought of it.”
“I just…if I had a daughter and knew I was dying like Grandma Emmaline did, knew I’d never see my grandbabies, I would want to leave something behind so that when the time came, they’d know I loved them. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. I would.” Deirdre’s eyes misted, touched by Emma’s intuition, her love. The knowledge Emma was growing up. Deirdre prayed that whatever Emma’s future held, someday her little girl would know happiness as sweet as Deirdre knew right now.
Emma laid the tissue-wrapped bundle in her mother’s lap. Deirdre’s fingers trembled as she touched the crumpled white bow. “It’s silly, I know. But I’m almost scared to open it,” Deirdre said softly. “I’m afraid to ruin today.”
Emma squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Mom. I checked it for explosives before I brought it in the hospital.”
Deirdre chuckled and untied the bow, folded back the tissue. Her breath caught, folds of hand-crocheted lace and yards of thin white batiste tumbling over her hands. It was a hand-stitched christening gown, Deirdre realized, the garment more exquisite than any Deirdre had ever seen. Emmaline McDaniel’s precise stitches made rows of narrow little tucks down the front, the bodice fastened by tiny pearl buttons. The lace was delicate as a fairy’s wings. Deirdre ran her fingers over it, reverently, feeling as if she could almost touch her mother’s face. Jake picked up the exquisite matching bonnet, his big masculine hand making it look too tiny to be real.