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“I’m your son.”
She blinked. The young man stood still, as if frozen, while his words replayed themselves in her mind. He’d just said he was her son. He couldn’t be.
Sara clutched the door with both hands and leaned against it, her gaze never wavering from the young man standing just outside.
Who was this boy claiming to be the child she’d given away so long ago? This child she’d worried for, grieved over and daydreamed about ever since. This young man named Ryan.
“Should I go?” he asked.
“No!”
“You’re shocked. How could you not be?” His voice was filled with strength, compassion and a tremble of fear.
Years of training drove her to respond. She held out her hand.
“Nice to meet you, Ryan.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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, plus another two RITA® Award nominations. A prolific writer, she has more than forty novels as well as three novellas published. To reach Tara, write to her at PO Box 133584, Mesa, Arizona 85216, USA or through her website, www.tarataylorquinn.com.
Dear Reader,
Most of us will never face Sara’s challenges, but almost all of us have to make the same choices she does. The choice to play it safe, to exist – or to take the big risks, to reach for everything, to live fully. We have to be willing to not only face our fears, but to walk right into them if required, so we can get through them to whatever awaits us on the other side.
I’m often asked where I get the ideas for my stories. Sometimes I have specific answers. I have no idea where this story came from. It doesn’t quite fit the usual boundaries or genres. But it wouldn’t go away. I spoke to my editor about this story. She didn’t seem shocked or even hesitant as she told me she thought it would work and asked me to write it. I didn’t question her acceptance any more than I questioned myself about the original creation.
And then, halfway through the book, I questioned everything – mostly myself. What had I done? How was I going to get a romance out of this? How was I going to get anywhere?
I was scared. I’d taken a risk and felt I was about to fail. I considered calling my editor and telling her we’d made a terrible mistake. And then Sara spoke to me. Was I going to work my way through the fears and let her find her happily ever after? I cared about her. And for her, I sat down every day and I wrote.
I didn’t take Sara to her happily ever after. She took me. I hope you’ll join us on this journey.
Tara Taylor Quinn
TARA TAYLOR QUINN
For my father, Walter Wright Gumser.
Because he always did his best.
I love you, Daddy!
CHAPTER ONE
May 24
1:00—Lunch
2:00—Interview (It’s the retired cop. Credentials in folder.)
2:20—Meeting with Rodney Pace. (Presentation schedule included in red folder on desk.)
6:30—Dinner with partners from Mr. Calhoun’s firm. Hanrahan’s.
Note: Proof Sheriff Lindsay’s book. Sign checks and contracts before leaving. (In blue folder.)
Further note: Don’t forget to eat.
SARA CALHOUN SMILED as she read the final line Donna had jotted on the daily agenda, which sat atop a newly readied pile of folders on her desk at the National Organization for Internet Safety and Education early Thursday morning. The redeye she’d taken from a PTA conference in Anaheim had just landed at Port Columbus International Airport half an hour before. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.
If she’d gone straight home to shower without stopping at the office first to review the day’s materials, she could have had breakfast with Brent.
Glancing at the plain gold watch on her wrist—a college graduation present from her parents—Sara sat, pulled the pile of folders onto her lap and started to read.
THE DOORBELL RANG just as she was finishing her makeup. Stroking a couple of coats of mascara onto her lashes, Sara quickly dropped the tube in the sectioned container on her dressing table and raced to the stairs. Maybe it was just a salesperson, but she couldn’t stand to not answer.
She never let the phone ring, either.
It was five to nine. She’d spent so long at the office already that she was now late for work. But the sun was shining, May flowers were in bloom and an entire lovely summer stretched ahead.
Sara slowed at the bottom of the stairs, taking a deep breath to compose herself as she smoothed a hand down her slim brown skirt and brushed the pockets of her jacket. Dignity and class were her mantras. Always.
Brent expected this from her.
“Can I help—” The ready smile froze on her lips. A cop was standing on her doorstep.
Something had happened to her dad. Or Brent.
The young man’s mouth moved, but at this moment Sara couldn’t concentrate sufficiently to make out his words. “What?” she asked, willing herself to hear what he was saying. “What happened?”
“Are you Mrs. Sara Calhoun?”
“Yes.” She wished she weren’t. Law enforcement officials never came to deliver good news. She ought to know. She’d grown up with one.
“You are.” The young man’s gaze deepened, studying her.
“Yes,” she managed to say, bracing herself.
And nothing happened. Officer Mercedes, according to the thin nameplate above his left pocket, just stood there, apparently at a loss for words.
“Can I help you?” she finally prompted, mystified. She was the one getting the bad news—wasn’t she?
“I…uh…I’ve been planning this moment for a long time and I thought I was completely prepared. But now I have no idea what to say.”
Planning this moment? One didn’t usually plan to deliver bad news.
He looked so lost, so young, Sara’s heart caught. “You’re sure it’s me you want to see? I’m Sara Calhoun, formerly Sara Lindsay. I’m married to Brent Calhoun. He’s an attorney….”
Relief made her talkative.
“Antitrust. Yes, I know,” the tall, well-built officer said with a rueful grin. And a nervous twitch at the left corner of his mouth.
He ran his hand through his short sandy-colored hair, his raised arm drawing her attention to the belt at his waist—and all the defensive paraphernalia strapped there. That gun looked heavy.
“And, yes, you’re the one I’m looking for.”
The kid was young, his green eyes switching back and forth between innocent and knowing as he stood there, shifting his weight. He couldn’t be much more than twenty-one, which made her thirty-seven seem ancient.
“What’d I do? Forget to signal a turn? I have a habit of doing that, though I’m working on it,” she said, brushing a strand of hair back over her shoulder. This had to be his first house call.
He frowned and then, glancing down, his face cleared. “Oh, the uniform,” he said. “I’m not here on official business. I work the night shift in Westerville—just got off duty and finished my paperwork.”
Westerville, a north Columbus suburb a bit west of the New Albany home she and Brent had purchased six years before. There was a park within walking distance of every home in their area. Barely thirty when they bought it, she’d still believed that her workaholic husband was going to agree to have the children they’d always said they were going to have.
“Speaking of work, I’m late,” Sara said now, suddenly anxious to be on her way.
“I can come back another time.”
“No.” She shook her head. What could a young cop possibly have to do with her that would justify a second trip out? Or any trip? “I’m listening.”
“And I’m finding that there’s just no way to say this except outright.”
She waited.
“I’m your son.”
She blinked.
The young man stood still, as if frozen in stone, while his words replayed themselves in her mind.
He’d just said he was her son.
Her son.
He couldn’t be.
Twenty-one years of fighting for dignity and grace served her well enough to keep her standing. Sara clutched the door with both hands, leaned against it, her gaze never wavering from the young man standing just outside it.
He shifted, his hands folded together as if in military or pallbearer stance. Had he ever been in the military, this boy who was standing there claiming to be the child she’d given away so long ago? The child she’d worried for, grieved over and daydreamed about ever since.
Had he, too, suffered the pain of losing one he loved?
“Should I go?”
“No!”
“You’re shocked. How could you not be?”
His voice was deep, not at all that of the little boy she’d imagined so often that he seemed completely real to her.
This voice was filled with strength. Compassion. And a tremble of fear.
Or was she only losing her mind? After all these years, all the determination and trying, the counseling, all the self-flagellation, was the past finally going to undo her, anyway?
“I’m… I’m sorry,” she finally managed, straightening. “I just…”
“I know,” he interrupted, his hands still folded together. “I tried to come up with some easier way to do this, but I guess there isn’t one.”
No. Not easy. Nothing about Sara’s life had been easy since the morning after this boy—if he was her son—had been conceived. Nothing had been quite real. She’d lost things then that she’d been too young to even know she’d prized.
“I… What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. It’s Ryan—Ryan Mercedes.”
Ah. Yes. Officer Mercedes. Seemed like years ago that she’d read that name tag.
He was staring at her openly now. Counting the lines on her face? Finding her wanting? Wondering what kind of woman she was who would give away her newborn son?
Years of training drove her to respond. She held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Ryan.”
Was she insane? Nice to meet you? With a handshake?
He glanced at her hand, looked up to her face. She thought he was going to refuse her offering. And then he reached out, took her hand and held on.
Sara started to cry.
AFTER A QUICK GLANCE behind him, Ryan reached with his free hand to wipe the tears from his mother’s face—and his own. He’d imagined this moment, of course. Many times.
He’d just never thought she’d be such a beautiful woman. Or that she’d look so young. He’d known she was thirty-seven, but he’d pictured someone more like his mom. Harriet Mercedes. Fifty-one. Graying. Twenty pounds heavier than she’d been when he was little.
Brent Calhoun was a first-class fool.
Shoulders tensing as a car passed behind him, Ryan said, “May I come in?”
He didn’t want her neighbors talking, asking her awkward questions. Didn’t want to make life harder for her than he already knew it was going to be.
“Um, of course.”
She turned and backed up, breaking eye contact with him. He was shocked at the loss he immediately felt. Of course, he’d expected to have some feelings for this woman—she’d given him life—but he’d imagined his reaction would be protective, rather than deeply emotional.
He had a mother and father whom he adored. They’d raised him, provided for him, loved him. They’d given him all the support and encouragement any kid could ever hope for.
He didn’t need Sara Calhoun. At least not emotionally.
She led him through a formal living room with carpet so plush that the sides of his black regulation shoes sank into oblivion—the maroon-trimmed cream silk furniture was obviously not used much—past a shining, stainless-and-granite kitchen to a large, more comfortable room at the back of the sprawling custom home.
Though they weren’t millionaires, the Calhouns’ yearly income more than doubled that of Ryan’s parents. He’d never been inside such a nice house.
Or expected her to have such long, dark hair. Was the color natural?
“Have a seat.” His birth mother was standing in front of a sliding-glass door that revealed an acre or more of freshly manicured green grass out back.
Ryan chose one end of the couch, not wanting to risk choosing Brent Calhoun’s chair out of the three in the room. Assuming the man had a special chair. There was only one chair in the family room at his folks’ house—his dad’s recliner. His mom used the couch, as did the two Labs. That left him the floor or the love seat when he visited. He used both, depending on his mood.
His perusal of the room complete, he turned back to the woman who’d seated herself at the other end of the couch—and was leaning heavily on the arm. He almost wondered if she was afraid of him.
Kids were, sometimes. When he was in uniform. He didn’t like it then and he didn’t like it now.
He didn’t want Sara Calhoun to fear him. He wanted her to like him, to approve of him.
And that’s when he knew he’d been kidding himself.
Pathetic as it was, what he needed was for her to love him.
“I ALWAYS THOUGHT I’d recognize you if I ever saw you.” Sara was completely out of her element. Every moment in her life was carefully planned, scripted. Often rehearsed. How did you do “tragedy from the past catching up with you” with dignity and class and the peculiar level of withholding yourself that dignity and class required?
“I think I have your chin. At least, that’s what my parents say.”
“They know me?”
He shook his head. “I showed them the pictures that I found of you.”
This was becoming completely surreal.
“What pictures?”
“Some I found in a newspaper article on the Internet. You’d just won the Ohio State alumni woman-of-the-year award.”
A miracle was happening. Or a catastrophe. And they were talking about the Internet.
“What makes you think I’m your mother?” She should have asked sooner. Would have, if she hadn’t been afraid she’d find out she wasn’t.
“You gave permission for your name to be made known, if I ever sought you out.”
She nodded. “I gave up hoping that would happen years ago.” She’d never given up the grieving, though. Not one day between then and now had passed without an awareness of the weight inside her.
He slid his hands along his thighs, to his knees. “So you don’t mind?”
“Mind?” Her face stiff, Sara smiled. Until her lips started to tremble. “I’ve mourned not knowing you every day of your life!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! For what? You were a helpless baby!”
“You were mourning and I’ve known about you for seven years.”
He’d have been fourteen then. He’d known about her since he was barely a teenager. From the time she was thirty. Before she bought this house—when she’d still been counting on having another child.
“And you owed me nothing,” she told the son she’d had when she’d still been a child herself. “Don’t you ever feel sorry for your part in any of this. Not ever.” She carried around enough shame, anger and grief for all of them.
He nodded and she sat back, studying him further, finding every aspect of his face fascinating. And the way he held his hands, as if he was always aware of them, always in control of them.
“What do you think?” His question startled her, embarrassed her.
“That you’re everything I’ve imagined you to be. And more.”
“You don’t even know me yet.”
“Based on what I’ve already seen, I know that you can be kind. Compassionate. Gentle. You’re working in an admirable profession and obviously have lived your life in such a way that allowed you to pass the rigorous background checks necessary to be a law enforcement officer.”
“Just like your father was.”
She drew back, frowning. “Just how much do you know about me?” It was disconcerting, having this perfect stranger, this flesh of her flesh, aware of facts of her life—while she, who’d been yearning for even one word of him for more than twenty years, knew nothing.
He glanced down, his cheeks turning red, and when he sought her gaze again, his expression was pleading. “Can we start over? Or at least go back a little bit? I honestly had this whole thing planned and… I don’t know…” He shrugged. “Being here, meeting you. It’s not at all like I thought it would be.”
He was a planner. Just like she was. Except that she hadn’t been—until that awful night so many years ago.
“How did you think it would be?”
He made a face. “Businesslike.”
Her heart dropped. “Is that what you’d like it to be?”
“No!” Ryan sat forward, his hands on his knees, as if ready to push off. She expected him to stand, but he turned to look at her instead.
“I… Can I start at the beginning?”
Pleased by his strong need to stay, Sara smiled. “Of course. Especially if you’re going to tell me about you. It’s strange having you know things about me, when I don’t know anything about you beyond the fact that you made me sick to my stomach for three months straight, kicked like a soccer player and were so eager to be born I barely got to the hospital in time.”
And she also knew that he’d been a perfect baby boy. That he’d weighed seven pounds even. Been born at 3:58 a.m. And had a full head of sandy-colored hair.
“Really?” He grinned. Sat back. “I never knew that.”
“How could you?” Not even her parents knew that. They’d been out of town for the weekend, leaving Sara home alone with a neighbor on call next door. She hadn’t been due for another three weeks.
She’d taken a cab to the hospital. And called them after her son had already been whisked away.
Having Ryan had been something she’d had to do on her own.
Right now, he looked as if he was waiting for her to elaborate. She wasn’t prepared to go back there. Not yet. She’d spent twenty-one years running in the opposite direction.
“You were going to start at the beginning.”
Ryan told her about the youthful rebellion that had ended with his parents encouraging him to pursue finding her, if that was what he needed in order to have a sense of identity.
“I was shocked,” he said, one knee up on the couch as he turned to face her. His arm stretched along the sofa back until he was almost touching her shoulder.
Sara relished the closeness, the warmth of his fingers nearby. She wished she had the right to hug him, to fill the emptiness she’d felt in her arms since the day he’d been born.
“I knew I was adopted. I’ve always known. But I never asked about my birth parents, figuring it would hurt my real parents’ feelings.”
He stopped. Sara raised her brow.
“I was going to apologize.”
“They’re your real parents, Ryan. Never doubt that. I played a biological role in your life, nothing more.” The words just came out.
“How can you say that?”
“It’s what I’ve been telling myself more than half my life.”
It was the only way she’d survived without him.
“Do you really believe that?”
They were traveling backward again—to places that hurt a great deal.
“I believe I want to hear the rest of your story.”
He studied her a moment longer and then, to her relief, he continued.
“My mom called the adoption agency for me and a couple of weeks later I came home from school to find a letter waiting. It told us your name, and that you lived in Maricopa.”
A town just outside Montgomery County, near Dayton. A little over an hour from Columbus. She’d grown up there.
Ryan had been born there.
He pulled a document out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “And there was this.” A copy of his birth certificate. The official one with her name on it, next to the words Baby Boy Lindsay. That piece of paper would only have been released to one person—her son.
“I came to Columbus to go to Ohio State, got married and never left,” she said inanely, so disoriented she couldn’t think straight.
He nodded. “I know.”
There it was again. That knowledge he had.
“You never wanted to contact me?” God, she sounded pathetic. And the question was completely unfair.
He grimaced, shrugged. “Sure I did—some of the time. But I knew you were married. I didn’t know if he knew about me, or if you’d welcome the idea of a potentially painful reminder from your past showing up on your doorstep.”
“I would have welcomed you. Instantly. Any time.”
She couldn’t speak for Brent. Wouldn’t speak for him. They didn’t share the same feelings about children.
Hers. Or anyone else’s.
Though, for years, she’d thought they had.
“I also didn’t want to hurt my folks,” Ryan admitted next. “They were completely open about finding you, but I could tell my mom was a little worried, too.”
Understandably. Sara had a strong urge to meet the woman who’d been such a good mother to the boy she’d birthed. To tell her thank you. And to tell her not to worry.
To find out if the woman could accept her—or if she hated her. To find out if some of the jealousy she’d avoided acknowledging all these years could be put to rest.
But what if it intensified?
“Do they know you’re contacting me now?”
She’d jumped ahead. There was so much in between.
“Yes.”
That was all. Nothing more.
“I was kind of geeky growing up,” Ryan said then, obviously sensing that they had to go back to go forward. “I played Little League and high school football….”
“Were you good at it?”
“Good enough.” He shook his head, as if his sports successes were inconsequential. “I enjoyed playing, and my father encouraged it, but what I loved most was reading. And surfing the Net.”
“AOL would have been in full swing by the time you were in high school.”
“I was a junkie on Genie,” he said, naming an Internet connection source that had been out of business for several years.
“I’m assuming you know what I do for a living?”
“You’re executive director for NOISE, a national nonprofit organization that teaches Internet safety to kids, which your father, Sheriff John Lindsay, founded after his first book on the subject was published. You’re not supported by taxpayers’ money, but you get more than half of your funding through state-paid programs that contract your services.”
“Is there anything about me you don’t know?”
He glanced away and, for the first time since he’d come into her house, Sara felt uneasy with him there.
She realized she hadn’t called the office.
CHAPTER TWO
“EVERYTHING OKAY?” Ryan asked when Sara came back into the room and sat. He was sitting on the couch, right where she’d left him when she went to phone Donna. “Do you have to leave? I can come back another time.”
She shook her head, wondering how she was going to answer the questions her executive assistant was sure to ask when she finally did make it in to work. “I had an early flight from California this morning, so my schedule is clear until one.”
Everyone who knew her at all would find it odd that she wasn’t in the office, anyway—she’d been gone for three days.
But at the moment, she didn’t really care. For the first time in many years, the office, her father, what people thought of her, didn’t matter.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“I’m good, thanks.” He shook his head.
“You were starting at the beginning.”
“Yeah.” Head bowed, he didn’t speak right away. Then, looking up at her, he said, “This is kind of strange, isn’t it?”