A Time To Come Home

Tyler saw what he thought was a mirage.

Walking towards him was a grown-up version of Diana Smith, the girl who’d broken his teenage heart. He blinked, expecting the woman to disappear, but she kept coming.

Her figure was curvier, the glossy brown hair she’d once worn parted in the middle feathered around her face and her features overall were more mature, but there was no mistake about it. It was Diana, who’d left Bentonsville – and him – ten years ago.

Her step didn’t falter, her slight smile didn’t waver, as though seeing him again hadn’t affected her. “Hello, Tyler,” she said, her voice still low, still smoky.

“Hello, Diana.” He knew he was staring, but couldn’t help it. Although her oval-shaped face appeared virtually the same, her eyes seemed different, as if they’d seen more than she’d bargained for.

“This is quite a surprise,” he said. “I hadn’t realised you were in town visiting.”

“I’m not visiting, Tyler. I’ve come home…”

For my son Brian and my daughter Paige,

because writing this book drove home for me

how precious our children are. And for my

husband, Kurt, for giving them to me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darlene Gardner has worked as a features reporter and then a sports writer for daily newspapers in South Carolina and Florida before deciding she’d rather make up quotes than solicit them. Darlene, a Penn State graduate, lives in Virginia with her journalist husband and two children.

Dear Reader,

Have you ever done the wrong thing for the right reasons? Does trying to do what’s right lessen the gravity of our mistakes? These are two of the questions that inspired A Time To Come Home, the sequel to A Time To Forgive.

Diana Smith is far from the perfect heroine, which is obvious from the opening pages when she abandons her much-loved daughter at her brother’s home. It’s the latest in a long line of Diana’s mis-steps, for which she’s trying to redeem herself.

Which brings up some more interesting questions. Can we expect others to forgive us when we can’t forgive ourselves? And can love survive the sins of our past? Please read on as Diana and Tyler re-create their special bond.

All my best,

Darlene

PS You can visit me on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.

DARLENE GARDNER

MILLS & BOON

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PROLOGUE

WITH ONLY THE DIM GLOW of the bathroom night-light to guide her, Diana Smith moved silently through the upstairs hall of her older brother’s pricey town house. The low heels of her boots sank into the plush carpeting, muffling her footsteps.

Shifting the weight of her backpack more comfortably on her shoulder, she stopped in front of the bedroom where her nine-year-old daughter Jaye slept and carefully eased open the door. The hinges groaned in protest, the sound gunshot-loud in the quiet house. Diana froze, her breath catching in her throat.

She glanced down the darkened hall to her brother’s bedroom door, waiting for Connor to emerge and find her awake and fully dressed. But the door remained closed.

She exhaled, her breath coming out ragged. Careful not to nudge the door, she peered around the crack into the room.

Jaye was still asleep but stirred restlessly, turning over onto her side. Diana stood perfectly still until the girl settled into position and her chest expanded and contracted in a rhythmic motion. Weak moonlight filtered through a crack in the blinds, bathing Jaye in soft light.

Her face was relaxed, her cheeks rosy and her full lips slightly pursed as she slept. Her long, blond hair spilled over the pillow like a halo.

A wave of love hit Diana hard. Three days ago, she’d decided on the course of action she must take. Gazing upon her daughter now, however, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to carry through.

She was reminded too vividly of another place, another time and a man whose features she glimpsed in the sleeping child. She’d done right by Tyler Benton, too, but the doing had shattered her heart.

From necessity and long practice, she shoved Tyler from her mind and concentrated on the moment. Before she could muster the will to retreat, she broke into a cold sweat, her muscles and her very bones aching. She fought off a bout of nausea as her stomach pitched and rolled.

If she needed a sign that leaving Jaye was the right thing to do, her physical condition couldn’t have provided a better one.

Since losing control on a slick stretch of road and slamming her car into a towering oak tree, she’d felt ill, but not due to injuries sustained in the crash. She’d walked away from the one-car accident remarkably unscathed, considering she might have died if she’d struck the tree a few inches left of impact.

The police had attributed her accident to bad luck, but Diana feared the pain pills she’d popped after leaving her job at a Nashville clothing warehouse had been the true cause.

She’d been using the drug since straining her back six months before, devising new and clever ways to secure the tablets long after her prescription ran out.

Horrified that Jaye could have been in the car with her, she’d faced the fact that she was addicted. Then she’d flushed the rest of the Vicodin down the toilet, only to find a new stockpile a few days later in one of her hiding places.

Since then, she’d lost her job after failing a random drug test at work and confronted some more harsh truths. She needed help to kick her habit and she wasn’t fit to be around her daughter.

After much thought, she’d packed up Jaye and the child’s meager belongings and boarded a bus for the two-day trip from Tennessee to Connor’s town house. They’d arrived in Silver Spring, Maryland, not even six hours ago, surprising a brother she hadn’t seen in years.

Jaye made a sweet, snuffling sound in her sleep and hugged the soft, stuffed teddy bear that Diana had bought her when she was a toddler. Diana longed to rush over to the bed and kiss her one last time, but couldn’t risk waking her.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered.

Tears fell down her cheeks like rain as she memorized the planes and angles of the sleeping child’s face before moving away from the door. She left it ajar, unwilling to risk making another sound.

She crept down the hall and descended the stairs as silently as a ghost. When she reached Connor’s state-of-the-art kitchen, she turned on the dim light over the stove, dug Jaye’s school transcripts and birth certificate out of her backpack and set them on the counter.

After locating a pad and pen, she thought for long moments before she wrote:

Connor, I need to work some things out and get my head on straight. Here’s everything you need to enroll Jaye in school. Please take good care of her until I come back. I don’t know when that will be, but I’ll be in touch.

She put down the note, read it over, then bent down and scribbled two more words: I’m sorry.

A fat teardrop rolled from her face onto the notepaper, blurring the ink of the apology.

Wiping away the rest of the tears, she headed for the front door. Her chest ached. Whether it was from being without Vicodin or from the hardest decision she’d ever had to make, she couldn’t be sure.

Within moments, she was trudging down the sidewalk by the glow of the street lamps toward the very bus station where she and Jaye had arrived.

She knew that abandoning her child was unforgivable, just as what she’d done to Tyler Benton ten years ago had been unforgivable.

But it couldn’t be helped.

She’d been barely seventeen when Jaye was born, no more than a child herself, grossed out by breast-feeding, impatient with crying and resentful of her new responsibilities.

A tidal wave of love for her daughter, which gathered strength with each passing day, had helped Diana grow up fast. She tried her best, but harbored no illusion that love alone would make her a good mother.

Diana waited for the sparse early-morning traffic to pass before crossing a main street, placing one foot in front of the other when all she wanted was to turn back. But she couldn’t. Not only did she lack the courage to confess to her brother that she had a drug problem, she couldn’t risk having him say Jaye couldn’t stay with him.

Despite his bachelor status, Connor represented her best hope. Her parents, to whom she hadn’t spoken to in years, were out. She had no doubt that her brother would take good care of Jaye. Until Diana kicked her habit and put her life back on track, Jaye was better off with him. And without Diana.

She blinked rapidly until her tears dried, then turned her mind to her uncertain future. Once she spent a portion of her dwindling cash on a return bus ticket to Nashville, she’d need to find a cheaper apartment, search for a job that paid a decent wage and somehow figure out how to get into drug treatment.

Even now she craved a pill. She reached into the front pocket of her blue jeans, her fingertips encountering the reassuring presence of the three little white Vicodin tablets left from her stash.

Despite her desire to do right by her much-loved daughter, she couldn’t say for sure whether the pills would still be in her pocket when she reached Nashville.

CHAPTER ONE

Six months later

DIANA SMITH WIPED away the bead of moisture trickling down her forehead with the pad of her index finger. It felt warm against her skin, a marked difference from the drenching sweats that used to chill her body when she denied herself the Vicodin that held her in its grip.

It had been months since she’d stopped desiring the prescription pain pills, longer since she’d done an abbreviated stint in detox and then gone through the hell of withdrawal. And longer still since she’d crept from her brother’s town house in the dark of night while Connor and Jaye slept.

The air had been crisp then, cold enough that she could see her breath when she exhaled. Now it was stagnant and sultry, the kind of heat typical of Maryland in the waning days of August. But the heat wasn’t what had Diana sweating.

She sat in the driver’s seat of her secondhand Chevy with the driver’s-side window rolled down, a good half block from her brother’s brick town house. No lights shone inside as far as she could determine, suggesting nobody was home. She had no way of knowing if anyone would arrive soon, although it was past six o’clock on a Friday.

She waited, her entire body on alert whenever a car appeared. But it was never the silver Porsche her brother drove. She counted up the months since she’d last been here in Silver Spring, surprised that six of them had passed. It felt twice that long, because every day without her daughter seemed to drag to twice its normal length.

She hadn’t spoken to Jaye once in all that time. She’d picked up the phone countless times, but fear had paralyzed her. How could she expect a child to understand she’d done what she thought best when her own adult brother didn’t?

She’d left phone messages on Connor’s answering machine to let him know she was okay but had only spoken to him the one time, after he’d tracked her down through a private investigator.

Connor had kept his temper in check, even offering to put Jaye on the line. Diana had ached to hear her child’s voice and longed to promise her they’d be together soon. But she’d resisted the allure, unable to face the questions about why she’d gone or when she’d be back.

As she waited, she heard birds singing, the distant sound of a stereo playing and a quiet that made little sense. A neighborhood like this should be alive with activity late on a Friday afternoon, after businesses shut down for the day. Only holiday weekends followed a different pattern.

“Oh, no,” she said aloud, as the importance of today’s date sunk in. The last Friday in August. The start of the long Labor Day weekend.

Connor could have gotten off work early and headed somewhere with Jaye to enjoy the last gasp of summer. She might not glimpse her daughter today after all.

Her hopes rose when she heard the whoosh of approaching tires on pavement, but a blue compact car and not her brother’s Porsche came into view. Before discouragement could set in, the car pulled into Connor’s driveway.

Diana slouched down in her seat, her right hand tightening on her thigh. Both doors opened simultaneously. A woman with short, dark hair emerged from behind the wheel, something about her vaguely familiar. But Diana barely spared her a glance, her attention captured by the passenger. By Jaye.

The little girl reached inside the car and pulled out a number of plastic shopping bags. Her hands full, she bumped the door closed with her hip, then came fully into view. Her long gilded hair was the same, but her skin was tanned by the sun and she appeared a few inches taller. A growth spurt, common enough in a nine-year-old. But Diana had missed it.

The sun was low in the sky. It backlit Jaye so that she looked ephemeral, as out of reach to Diana as if she were an other-worldly creature.

Diana remembered the unexpected wave of love that swept over her the first time she held Jaye in the hospital. The love no longer surprised her. She braced herself for it, but it still hit her like a punch.

The dark-haired woman joined Jaye at the foot of the sidewalk and took a few of the bags from her. The woman said something, and Jaye giggled, the high-pitched girlish sound traveling on the breeze. Diana’s lips curved. She leaned closer to the open window, closer to Jaye, forgetting her notion to be inconspicuous.

The woman ruffled the top of Jaye’s blond head, and then Jaye skipped up the sidewalk to the front door of the town house.

The woman followed, a small object that could only be a house key in her free hand. Despair rolled over Diana, settling in the pit of her stomach. The woman unlocked the door. A cry of protest rose in Diana’s throat. Feeling as though she was choking, she watched helplessly as the woman opened the door.

Jaye scampered inside, out of sight. The woman closed the door behind them. This time it was a tear and not sweat that slid down Diana’s cheek.

A sharp tapping interrupted her thought. The knocking came again. Faster. Louder. Diana turned toward the sound—and saw her brother’s handsome, scowling face through the passenger window.

Her stomach pitched as she mentally called herself all kinds of a fool. Checking her rearview mirror, she spotted the silver Porsche parked behind her car. She’d been so absorbed in Jaye that she hadn’t heard Connor pull up.

He rapped sharply on the closed window again. “Diana, unlock the door,” he ordered.

The temptation to flee was so sharp that Diana’s foot moved to the gas pedal, but she suppressed it. Her brother deserved better. She reluctantly pressed the unlock button, and Connor opened the door and slid onto the worn fabric of the passenger seat, not bothering to close the door behind him.

He was dressed as though he’d come from the brokerage firm, in a navy silk tie, a long-sleeved blue dress shirt and dark, tailored slacks. But his resemblance to a cool, collected stockbroker ended there.

“I don’t know whether to hug you or yell at you,” he said in a low-throated, angry growl. “My P.I. told me you quit your job and moved out of your apartment. Where in the hell have you been?”

She tilted her head. “You’re still using that private eye?”

“Off and on. I need someone to tell me what you’re up to. You certainly won’t. Do you know how worried I’ve been about you?”

She gazed into her lap and fought tears. She’d been on her own for so long it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d worry. “I’m sorry,” she said without raising her head. “I should have let you know I was moving.”

“Hell, yeah, you should have. You should return my phone messages, too,” he said gruffly, his voice thickened by emotion. “You didn’t even call after I told you about Drew Galloway being denied parole.”

The date Galloway could have gained his freedom seared into her memory, Diana had discovered the outcome of the parole hearing before she received Connor’s message. But her throat had swelled at the mention of her brother’s killer, so she didn’t tell Connor that.

Connor heaved a sigh and ran a hand over his forehead. “It must be a hundred degrees in this car. Come into the house so we can talk where it’s cooler.”

“No.” She punctuated her comment with a firm shake of her head. “I can’t come in.”

“Want to tell me why not?”

In a softer voice, Diana said, “Jaye’s in there.”

“Isn’t Jaye the reason you’re here?”

She nodded. “Yes. But only to see her, not to talk to her.”

“What?” The word erupted from him, like lava from a volcano. “My God, Diana. I was planning to fly to Nashville next week to talk some sense into you. You haven’t had any contact with her since you discarded her.”

Guilt, her constant companion, slithered through Diana before she reminded herself of her reasons. “I didn’t discard her. I left her with you.”

He shifted in his seat, turning more fully toward her. “A bachelor with no experience taking care of a child.”

“The best man I know. And I was right to do it. I saw her just now. She looks happy, Connor. You’ve done a wonderful job.” She dug into her purse and removed an envelope containing cash she’d managed to set aside from her two jobs. “I was going to mail this to you. It’s not much, certainly not enough, but I’ll never be able to repay you for all you’ve done.”

His lips thinned, a manifestation of the stubborn streak he’d developed way back in childhood. “I’m not taking your money, Diana. If you really want to repay me, come inside and talk to your daughter. Spend the weekend with us. We’re driving to the Maryland shore tomorrow.”

“You don’t know how much I’d like to but I can’t.” She swallowed, then stared at him, silently pleading for understanding. “But I will talk to her. Just as soon as I get my life organized.”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the past six months?”

“It’s what I’ve been trying to do.” After a brief stay at a detox center, she’d run short of cash to pay for treatment and stayed off the pills through sheer strength of will. The withdrawal symptoms had lingered for months, but she’d managed to secure a secretarial position and then work a second job as a waitress. “But I can’t see Jaye. Not yet.”

“Why?” His eyes seemed to bore into her, where her secrets lay buried. “What is it that you’re not telling me? Are you sick? On drugs? Is that what this is all about?”

Shame billowed inside Diana, the same humiliation that had engulfed her when she’d attended the Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She hadn’t been able to own up to her addiction in a room full of strangers. Admitting to her problem was downright impossible in front of her strong, self-assured brother.

“I’m not on drugs,” she said. Not now. And hopefully not ever again. “But this isn’t about me. It’s about Jaye. It’s a lot to ask, but I need you to keep her a while longer.”

She read resistance on his face, and the enormity of what she’d done struck her. “Oh, my Lord. It didn’t even occur to me that you might not want her.”

“Not want her?” He made a harsh sound. “I love her like she’s my own daughter. Abby loves her, too.”

Relief caused Diana’s limbs to feel boneless. “Abby? Is she the woman I saw with Jaye?”

He nodded. “Yeah. She’s Jaye’s violin teacher. We’re also getting married in October. I would have told you about her if I could ever get you on the phone.”

“Congratulations,” Diana said in a small voice, ashamed she hadn’t known about this major development in her brother’s life. She sensed he was about to say something else about his fiancée, then heard herself speaking her next thought aloud. “I didn’t know Jaye played the violin.”

“That’s my point, Diana. You’ve missed too much of Jaye’s life already. Abby and I are happy to take care of her, but she’s your daughter. You need to be in her life.”

“I can’t,” Diana said miserably. “Not yet.”

“You still haven’t given me a good reason why not.” He practically spit out the words.

Because I’m afraid.

The words imprinted themselves on Diana’s mind, but she felt too raw to admit her fear to Connor. He’d always been the strong one in their family, the one who followed the straight and narrow path and never disappointed anyone. He’d never find himself in her situation.

“I want her back so much it hurts. You’ve got to believe that. And I have a plan to get her back. But I can’t face her until I know everything will work out. I’ll call her. I will. Just as soon as I settle in.”

“Settle in where? What’s this plan you’re talking about?”

“I enrolled in a career training program in Gaithersburg. I’m going to study business administration. I also lined up a waitressing job. And I have a lead on an apartment, too.”

She deliberately left out the most difficult part of the plan, the piece that involved Tyler Benton.

“In Gaithersburg?” His eyebrows drew together. “I can’t figure you out, Diana. That’s not even twenty miles from here and only thirty from Bentonsville.”

“Thirty miles can be a long way.”

“So you’re not planning to visit Mom?”

Unwilling to confide she had a more important visit to make, she dodged the question. “I’m not moving to Gaithersburg because it’s close to Bentonsville. I’m moving there because it’s close to Jaye.”

He was quiet for long moments, then said, “You’ll call and leave a number where I can reach you?”

“I will.” She sensed that he didn’t believe her. “I promise.”

“What am I supposed to tell your daughter in the meantime?”

Making a snap decision, Diana again reached into her purse, this time pulling out a sealed envelope she’d planned to mail when she got to Gaithersburg.

She extended the envelope to him, her fingers shaking slightly. “Could you give this to Jaye? But don’t tell her you saw me. It already has a stamp, so she’ll assume I mailed it.”

He took her offering, his expression grave. “Are you sure about this, Diana?”

The lump that hadn’t been far from her throat since she pulled into the neighborhood formed with a vengeance. “I’m not sure of anything.”

Least of all the portion of her plan that would enable her to set the rest in motion. Nobody knew better than Diana what a struggle raising a child alone could be, but there was no longer any reason for her to be solely responsible for Jaye.

She hadn’t returned to Bentonsville since she was a pregnant sixteen-year-old, but she needed to go back home now. Not to see her mother, but to tell Tyler Benton she’d lied ten years ago when she claimed she’d slept with half the guys at Bentonsville High.

In reality, she’d only had one lover—Tyler.

THE AIR-CONDITIONED COOL of the town house contrasted sharply with the oppressive heat inside Diana’s Chevy. So, too, did the cheerful chatter drifting into the foyer from the family room.