His kiss was as deep as the earth

And so hungry! Its insatiability poured comfort into her empty places, even as it drove her to a peak of wanting him. Mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, neighbor, she’d forced herself to focus on self-sacrifice, ignoring her innermost yearnings. Yet, incredibly, the rule-breaking teenager she’d been, the sensuous young woman who’d dared to accept his love despite her parents’ wishes, had lived on inside her, waiting to re-emerge.

I’m going to drown in him, Cate thought. Lose sight of what’s best for all the people I love. With a little shiver of apprehension, she realized Danny still fit into that category.…

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to Special Edition, where a month of spellbinding reading awaits you with a wonderful lineup of sophisticated, compelling August romances!

In bestselling author Jodi O’Donnell’s memorable THAT’S MY BABY! story, When Baby Was Born, a pregnant woman with amnesia meets a cowboy she’ll never forget! Beloved author Ginna Gray sweeps us away with another installment of her miniseries, A FAMILY BOND. In her emotional book In Search of Dreams, a woman with a scandalous past tries to say no to the man who vows to be in her future. Do you think a reunion that takes seventeen years to happen is worth waiting for? We’re sure you’ll say yes when you read When Love Walks In, Suzanne Carey’s poignant story about a long-ago teenage passion that is rekindled—then a secret is exposed. When the hero of Carole Halston’s Because of the Twins… needs help caring for his instant brood, the last thing he expects is a woman who turns his thoughts to matrimonial matters, too! Also this month is Jean Brashear’s Texas Royalty, in which a tough, once-burned P.I. seeks revenge on the society girl who had betrayed him—until she manages to rekindle his desires again! And finally, Patricia McLinn kicks off her compelling new miniseries, A PLACE CALLED HOME, with Lost-And-Found Groom, about a treacherous hurricane that brings two people together for one passionate live-or-die night—then that remembered passion threatens to storm their emotional fortresses once and for all.…

All the best,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

When Love Walks In
Suzanne Carey

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Books by Suzanne Carey

Silhouette Special Edition

When Love Walks In #1341

Silhouette Romance

A Most Convenient Marriage #633

Run, Isabella #682

Virgin Territory #736

The Baby Contract #777

Home for Thanksgiving #825

Navajo Wedding #855

Baby Swap #880

Dad Galahad #928

Marry Me Again #1001

The Male Animal #1025

The Daddy Project #1072

Father by Marriage #1120

The Bride Price #1247

Sweet Bride of Revenge #1300

Silhouette Books

Silhouette Summer Sizzlers 1993

“Steam Bath”

World’s Most Eligible Bachelors

The Greek Tycoon

Silhouette Desire

Kiss and Tell #4

Passion’s Portrait #69

Mountain Memory #92

Leave Me Never #126

Counterparts #176

Angel in His Arms #206

Confess to Apollo #268

Love Medicine #310

Any Pirate in a Storm #368

Silhouette Intimate Moments

Never Say Goodbye #330

Strangers When We Meet #392

True to the Fire #435

Eleanora’s Ghost #518

Whose Baby? #715

SUZANNE CAREY

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered local politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative and feature assignments, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

August, Seventeen Years Ago

It was the kind of cricket-dense night when the moon is full and the woods are replete with leafy undergrowth, when Danny Finn parked his beat-up Ford in some tall weeds near Ohio’s Brush Creek and came around to help seventeen-year-old Cate Mc-Donough from the passenger seat.

Her face upturned to his in the moonlight, she came into his embrace. After much longing and many discussions about the ethics of their situation, she’d agreed to let him make love to her. He was on fire with anticipation now as he caressed her back and shoulders, the sweetly rounded shape of her buttocks through the thin, flower-sprigged cotton fabric of her dress.

A former star on Beckwith High School’s varsity basketball team who’d “dated” a number of other girls before Cate, Danny hadn’t understood the true nature of desire until his had focused on her. As he claimed her now, mutely acknowledging his need and the deep love he felt, she radiated a corresponding heat, the firm conviction that whatever they’d do together would be right and beautiful.

Since becoming interested in boys in the seventh grade, she’d been crazy wild in love with him. Yet for three and a half years, he hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It had made her ache to watch him drape a possessive arm around some undeserving girl’s shoulders, oblivious to the way that same girl mocked his eccentric grandmother and combat-traumatized uncle behind his back and flirted with other boys when he wasn’t available.

Then, one gray December afternoon, he’d literally bumped into Cate, almost knocking her off her feet on the salt-pocked but still-slippery sidewalk outside her father’s hardware store. The temperature had been twenty-three degrees and plummeting, her cheeks apple-red with cold, her naturally curly brown hair thickly encrusted with snowflakes.

When he’d offered to buy her a hot chocolate at Rudy’s, she’d accepted. From that moment on, they’d been inseparable, despite her parents’ strong disapproval of him. “The Finns are trash,” her father had raged when he’d found out that they were dating. Danny had been in trouble with the law. His family was eccentric. He wasn’t worthy of her.

Though she couldn’t deny Danny had been fined for underage drinking on one occasion and received several speeding tickets during his junior year, Cate had argued that the infringements were minor ones. He’d settled down since then. As a senior, he’d earned good grades, worked hard at a variety of after-school jobs and stayed out of trouble.

Nothing she’d said had changed Jack McDonough’s opinion of him. When her parents had ordered her not to see him again, she’d pretended to go along with their wishes while stubbornly following her heart.

Her best friend, Brenda Hale, who “lacked supervision” according to Cate’s mother, had covered for Cate whenever she and Danny could arrange to be together. Remaining a good girl in the sense that she was still a virgin, Cate had flirted on numerous occasions with going all the way. Each time, she’d pulled back from the brink, denying herself and Danny the intimacy they craved.

Now he was a man—nineteen going on twenty, lean and dark-haired, with the kind of smile that could melt all but the hardest of hearts, and eyes the deep-blue color of bachelor buttons. Not even Cate’s father could call him a slacker. Since graduating, he’d worked full-time, pumping gas and repairing cars at Miller’s Garage. In his off hours, he continued to make himself available for the kind of manual labor that was usually reserved for young teenagers, mowing lawns and shoveling snow, chopping and hauling firewood.

Though they’d never discussed the reason for his industry in so many words, Cate knew Danny was trying to amass enough money to bankroll their independence. Secure in his love, she’d become a woman. Or almost. She would graduate from high school seven months hence and turn eighteen a week later. Employed part-time in the hardware store by her father since she was in the eighth grade, she’d managed to save a modest nest egg of her own, in the process acquiring retail skills that would come in handy when she worked her way through college.

For most of her life, it seemed, she’d wanted to be an English teacher. Unable to count on her parents’ financial help if she married Danny, and unwilling to let him pay the freight for both of them while she continued her education, she was determined to come up with her own tuition money and contribute to their living expenses.

The previous week he’d formally asked her to be his wife. And she’d said yes. They’d agreed to leave Beckwith, the small town surrounded by farms where they’d both grown up, on her eighteenth birthday—head for Cincinnati or some other big city where she could attend college and he could find better paying employment. With the commitment, there didn’t seem to be any reason to postpone expressing their love.

At Cate’s suggestion, their first lovemaking would take place on Serpent Mound, a grassy, undulating, ceremonial earthwork that had been built on the crest of a bluff overlooking Brush Creek by a little-known Indian tribe nearly a thousand years earlier. Familiar with it since childhood, thanks to a series of school field trips and lectures about the indigenous residents of Adams County, she’d always considered the scenic promontory, crowned by the effigy of a partially uncoiled snake about to swallow a frog’s egg, to be a holy place.

Serene, enigmatic, a point of contact with the distant past, the mound wasn’t a burial site; archaeologists had long since determined otherwise. Aware the serpent’s head was aligned with the setting sun on the evening of the summer solstice, they’d speculated it had been built as a kind of earthwork calendar to keep track of the planting cycle. Or as a site for religious ceremonies.

Releasing her, he helped her up a steep, thickly wooded slope that offered a secluded, if somewhat more difficult to negotiate, approach to their destination. They caught sight of the park’s metal observation tower first. A moment later the mound itself came into view. Moonlight washed its verdant twists and coils like milk. The aroma of freshly mowed grass assailed their nostrils.

Lightly Danny rested his cheek against Cate’s hair. “Any special spot you’d prefer?’ he asked.

“Up by the serpent’s head,” she answered without hesitation, having pictured making love to him there a thousand times. “The depression in the middle of the egg can shelter us.”

It was his favorite spot, too—the most spiritually charged and welcoming, in his opinion. Thanks to the curve of the serpent’s body, it was also one of the most difficult to see from the gate.

“Suits me, darlin’,” he whispered.

If somebody caught them, it would be all over between them until her eighteenth birthday. Her parents would keep them apart if they had to follow her around with a shotgun. Or send her off to a religious boarding school. They’d probably try to have Danny arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Shivers of excitement and anticipation prickled Cate’s skin as they reached the serpent’s jaw and the frog’s egg, a much smaller, circular mound with a depression at its center, almost like a hole in a doughnut. Inside it, two sapling trees had sprung up. Despite them, there would be more than enough room for them to lie down and get comfortable together. The lights of scattered farmhouses and outbuildings in the valley below glittered like diamonds against a swath of velvet as Danny led her into its embrace.

They lay down together on the sweet-smelling grass. Though she might have been deluding herself, she thought she could feel the earth turning as she came into his arms. A deep sense of connectedness to all of creation swelled in her imagination.

For a moment the only sounds that disturbed the night’s insect chorus and the rustling of leaves overhead were the rasp of Danny’s zipper and their hushed breathing as he helped her take off her panties. I wish we could take off all our clothes instead of remaining partly dressed, Cate thought. That we could share a bed and covers. Fall asleep afterward and wake with the morning light. I wish we didn’t have to worry about somebody catching us.

His touch gentle in its suggestiveness, Danny unbuttoned the bodice of her dress and reached inside it to stroke her nipples with his calloused fingertips. As they rose to meet his caress, stabs of arousal sped to her deepest places.

They’d agreed they couldn’t afford to linger. “Come into me, Danny,” she begged, her words blunted against the warmth of his neck as she pressed against him. “I want to feel you there…”

He didn’t need a second invitation. Cradling him with her knees as he assumed protection, she marveled at how beautifully made he was.

With a flash of pain that was quickly over, Cate’s virginity was lost. Joined to Danny and in a way she couldn’t have put into words, to all the lovers who’d gone before them in the history of the world, she abandoned rational thought. Like a leaf caught up in a stream that was approaching full flood, she immersed herself in the moment as they made fumbling, imperfect, ultimately satisfying love.

As they lay together afterward, deep in each other’s arms, she vowed he’d be her only lover, her only husband.

Chapter One

Life and unloving parents had conspired to arrange a different outcome.

It was approaching the dinner hour on a Friday evening in October as thirty-four-year-old Cate Anderson, now an English teacher at Beckwith Consolidated High School, ran off a stack of fliers on the school’s balky, outdated copy machine. A widow since the death of her husband, Larry, from complications of leukemia three years earlier, she wore a charcoal-gray sweater set, a Pendleton plain wool shirt she’d bought in a Minneapolis thrift shop when her teenage son, Brian, was still a toddler, and recently resoled penny loafers. The second pair she’d managed to ruin that week, her panty hose had a run in them.

Designed and produced with the principal’s blessing on behalf of a recently organized Save Our Jobs, Save Our Town committee, the fliers represented an effort to boost attendance at a rally that would take place in the town library on Monday evening. According to recent news stories, Mercator, the new corporate parent of Beckwith’s only industry, Beckwith Tool and Die, was in the process of deciding whether to expand the plant or close it.

Without it, this town will dry up and blow away, Cate thought. She was trying to imagine what her father, her mother-in-law, Beverly Anderson, and her best friend, Brenda Lawler, all of whom worked at Beckwith Tool and Die, would do for a living if the plant closed when Brenda abruptly knocked on the media room’s glass door.

Cate motioned for her to enter. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to think of it, how’d you get into the building? By now the outside doors are usually locked.”

Brenda’s expertly made-up hazel eyes glittered with excitement. “Hank Whittaker was mopping up in the front hall,” she answered. “I pounded on the glass…told him I had to talk to you right away.”

“From the look on your face, maybe I ought to sit down,” Cate suggested, trying to suppress the sudden apprehension she felt.

For once Brenda didn’t laugh or tell her she was exaggerating. “Actually,” she agreed, “that might be a good idea.”

Incredibly, her friend was serious. What on earth could she possibly say that might cause me to lose my balance? Cate wondered apprehensively, pulling up a stool.

“Is this about you and Dean?” she asked. “Please don’t tell me the two of you are getting back together! When I think of the black eye he gave you last month…”

Dean was Brenda’s soon-to-be ex-husband. Brenda shook her head. “It’s like I told you…I’m not going to take any more of his bullying. When he stopped by day before yesterday to pick up some of his things and suggested we fool around, I ordered him out of the house.”

“Then what’s this about?”

Brenda bit her lip. “Danny Finn’s back in town. I thought you’d rather hear it from me instead of some busybody gossip.”

Astonishment pierced Cate to the quick as a thousand images competed in her head—Danny pelting her with snowballs. Handing her a bouquet of wild flowers he’d picked in the woods. Kissing her senseless. Unaware of the gesture, she hugged herself as she thought about the way he’d held her during the homecoming dance her senior year while her classmates had whispered about them. The way they’d made love, in his car and at the mound, settling all the questions of the universe.…

It isn’t possible he’s back after so many years, she told herself. I must be dreaming this.

As always, whenever she imagined coming face-to-face with Danny again, she remembered the look he’d given her on the night they’d tried to elope, as her parents had ushered her out of the Clermont County Jail, past the interrogation room where one of the deputies was still questioning him. The prospect of seeing him again and cringing afresh at his unwarranted judgment of her was almost more than she could take.

No matter how many times he told me he loved me, he hated me that night, she thought, flinching as if from the misery of a scab being picked from a wound. Does he still? Or has what happened ceased to matter to him? What will he say or do if we run into each other?

Daunting as the prospect was, it was even more demoralizing to imagine how their lives might change if Danny met Brian and guessed the boy was his. The resemblance was striking if you looked for it. Maybe he wouldn’t. She could only hope. She groaned inwardly at the prospect of Danny making demands. Brian’s confusion and hostility. Her son’s custody becoming a war zone. The battle that could result would spread through Beckwith like a forest fire if one of the town gossips made the connection.

“It’s been seventeen years. What’s Danny doing here now?” she croaked.

“He’s the Mercator executive assigned to evaluate Beckwith Tool and Die,” Brenda answered, a world of sympathy in her voice. “Carl Fosse announced it at the plant this afternoon. There was a storm of talk over it, I can tell you. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that most of Beckwith looked down on the Finns. Now here’s Danny, returning as a corporate executive with the power to put everyone out on the street.” She paused. “When we heard the news, your dad looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

Maybe he will, Cate thought, hunching over on her stool. He’s never stopped hating Danny or condemning me for loving him. If he has to be polite, take orders from the man he believes led his daughter astray, it might actually kill him. The explosion that would occur if Danny fired him was almost beyond imagining.

She knew that, whatever form her father’s outrage took, he’d make her pay. So would her mother. They always did. Meanwhile Brian and her in-laws stood to get hurt.

Her forehead lined with sympathy, Brenda put her arms around Cate. “Sorry I had to be the one to tell you,” she apologized. “But you were bound to hear about it from somebody. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility of meeting him. At least with me you don’t have to pretend…put on an act about your feelings.”

Cate nodded in agreement. “Where’s he staying?” she asked. “In one of the motels out on Route 32?”

Brenda shook her head. “According to his old boss, Zeb Miller, who pumped gas for him this evening, he plans to stay at his grandmother’s place. One of the part-time checkers at Clingers’ Market said she saw his fancy car in the driveway out there on her way in to work. Apparently, he phoned ahead and had the electricity turned on, because there were lights in some of the windows. Funny, isn’t it, considering he’s been gone so long and the way he always felt about that wreck of a place, that he’d go straight home to roost?”

Cate had to admit it was. Meanwhile, it seemed that the news about Danny’s return was getting around. Imagining him at his grandmother’s farmhouse, thinking about the past and listening to the crickets, made her want to weep. He was so achingly close. Part of her wanted to run to him, let him absorb the pain his absence in her life had produced.

She wouldn’t do it, of course. They were strangers now, as foreign to each other as if they’d grown up on opposite sides of the planet. Her knowledge of him was seventeen years out of date.

“Do you think he’s come back to punish Beckwith for the way it treated him and his family?” she asked. “That he’ll close the plant without listening to a word anyone might say in its defense?”

Brenda shrugged. “I don’t know. I overheard people asking each other that question. And you have to admit Danny’s got plenty of reason to be less than charitable to the folks around here. Yet somehow I can’t picture…”

Cate knew what she meant. The Danny she’d known and loved would have based his decision on concern for the ordinary people whose lives would be affected, not just his employer’s bottom line, though naturally that would be an important factor. He wouldn’t have been inclined to seek retribution for retribution’s sake. Still, a lot of water had passed under Brush Creek Bridge since they’d been close. She couldn’t be sure how he’d react.

He might be very changed, hardened by the circumstances of his departure and the rigors of climbing the corporate ladder. It struck her that maybe she hadn’t really known him. She would have bet her life, the night they’d run away to Clermont County to get married, that he would never have walked out on her. Yet, in the days following her forced return home with her parents, no letter had come. He hadn’t phoned. The man she’d loved and trusted so deeply had vanished without a trace.

A painful question surfaced. “Have you heard…whether or not Danny’s married?” she asked in a small voice, forcing herself to face the likelihood that he had a wife and children. “I realize his personal life is none of my affair. I’d, um, just like to know the lay of the land before we run into each other.”

Brenda’s sympathy was clear. “If he is no one’s said anything to me about it,” she avowed.

A widowed, working mom who supported herself and her son on a modest teacher’s salary, Cate realized she couldn’t hold a candle to Danny’s achievements, at least insofar as the world would value them. If he was happily married, the father of several children who just happened to be Brian’s half-sisters and brothers in addition to his corporate success, the disparity between their lives would break her heart.

She felt as if it had been broken already. Aching to see Danny, yet dreading it, she struggled to pull herself together. And succeeded to a point. It was only then that she noticed the bruise on Brenda’s cheek, shadowy beneath her makeup.

“Dean did that…didn’t he?” she exclaimed, demanding a closer look.

Brenda’s take-charge expression crumpled. “He didn’t just go, the other night,” she confessed. “He hit me first.”

By now, dusk was falling, causing the exterior windows at the far end of the office to blacken and reflect the room. Putting aside her own tangle of emotions, Cate focused on her friend’s safety and well-being.

“If he threatens you again, I want you to call me,” she insisted. “I’ll come over, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. If necessary, call the police. I’m not afraid of Dean and his threats. And I’m not intimidated by the fact that he’s a sheriff’s deputy. In my opinion, he’s the kind of coward who’ll back off if there’s a witness present.”

At the same time as Cate was locking up the school office and walking Brenda to her car, Danny was seated on the front porch of his grandmother’s house, stirring its dilapidated wooden swing with one desultory foot. He hadn’t been “home,” if he could call it that, for almost seventeen years. Ignoring the emblem of his most recent promotion, a shiny black Infiniti he’d parked in the weed-choked drive, he sipped at a beer, turned his gaze inward and tried to deal with his ghosts.

The only one who still mattered to him was Cate. In truth, he’d volunteered for the Beckwith Tool and Die assignment out of a gnawing wish to see her again. As he’d driven down from Chicago via Interstates 65 and 74, exiting onto Ohio Route 32 at Mount Carmel, just east of Cincinnati, he’d let memories he’d tried to bury for years resurface and catch him by the throat.

Accepting the pain they’d brought, he’d allowed himself to remember the sound of her laughter. Her inherent kindness. The delicious warmth of her as she’d nestled close. She’d been the best thing in his life. In point of fact, the only thing. Losing her as they’d stood poised on the brink of having a life together had scooped the heart right out of him.

Why’d she leave the Clermont County Jail that night without even glancing in my direction, he asked himself for perhaps the thousandth time as the swing creaked softly with his movements. Sure…her parents had her by the scruff of the neck. She was their prisoner, in effect. And we were in a very humiliating situation. Yet she could have looked at me. Let me know without saying a word that the setback to our plans was only temporary.

The way things had turned out, it hadn’t been, of course. They hadn’t set eyes on each other again.

As the moon rose, gilding the saplings and weeds that choked the overgrown property he’d inherited, he found himself asking the same old questions. First and foremost, he wanted to know why Cate hadn’t answered his letters. Clearly, she’d gotten them. Signed in her familiar handwriting, the annulment papers had reached him at his new address.

Painful as her silence had been, neither it nor the arrival of the annulment notice had overthrown his hopes. She was underage and her parents were calling the shots. He would simply wait them out—return to Beckwith for her on her eighteenth birthday.

A phone conversation with his grandmother two months after his departure had changed his plans. When he’d asked about Cate, the old woman had responded that she’d married Larry Anderson, a Beckwith High School graduate several years Danny’s senior, who’d worked full-time in her father’s store. Following the ceremony, she’d added, Cate and her new husband had left for Minneapolis.

“You mean they’re—” he’d choked off the words “on their honeymoon.”

“Supposedly the Anderson boy got himself a job up there,” Geraldine Finn had answered sourly.

For Danny the news had been like a kick in the stomach. Initially his mind had refused to register it. Cate…married…to Larry? he’d thought in disbelief. It’s only been a few months since we spoke our marriage vows!

True, the towheaded former basketball player for Beckwith High had always had a thing for Cate. Secure in her love, Danny hadn’t minded. He doubted if she’d even realized it. For one thing she’d hardly ever talked to him—just murmured the kind of pleasantries people do when their only connection is the fact that one of them works for the other’s parents.

She can’t possibly love him, he’d told himself. Not so soon after me. There has to be some mistake. The thought of another man touching her had made him want to go ballistic.

A mean-spirited comment from his grandmother had only made matters worse. “Good riddance if you ask me,” she’d observed when he didn’t speak. “You’ll find somebody else. The girl’s like her parents…thinks she’s too fine for the likes of us.”

If so, he’d never seen any sign of it.

Cutting the call short, he’d punched a fist through one of the flimsy walls in his shabby Chicago apartment as he’d sought an explanation. And failed to come up with one. Cate was still underage, still a senior in high school. He couldn’t imagine her parents letting her drop out to marry anyone, not even Larry with his sterling reputation. They’d wanted her to attend college, be somebody.

Unless…unless…

What if she’s pregnant, he’d thought suddenly, and doesn’t know how to find me? That she accepted Larry’s proposal out of desperation?

They’d been so careful…only slipped up once. Somehow he’d forced himself to calm down and phone Terry Pobanz, one of his high school buddies.

The affable Terry had sounded as puzzled as he felt. “Nobody around here gets it,” he’d admitted. “They never dated. Then suddenly they’re married and headed for Minneapolis. I always thought you guys…”

“Yeah,” Danny had replied gruffly. “So did I. They didn’t…have to, did they? Get married, I mean.”

Terry’s surprise at the question had echoed in his voice. “Not that I know of,” he’d answered. “I haven’t heard anything like that.”

Bidding Terry goodbye before his friend could ask too many painful questions, Danny had buried his face in his hands. The following day he’d grimly set about making a separate life for himself.

To his surprise he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, at least in a business sense. He had a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive now, though no one permanent to share it with him. Stocks, bonds and an amazing sum of money in the bank. A top-notch salary complete with profit sharing. Already the promotion that had occasioned his purchase of the Infiniti was ancient history. Shortly before he’d left for Beckwith, Mercator’s CEO had invited him into the company’s inner sanctum and offered him an even juicier plum. When he returned to Chicago, he would put his penthouse up for sale and head for Northern California, to plan, build and take control of a stunning new Mercator complex. It was slated to become the company’s headquarters west of the Mississippi. And he’d be in charge of it. Henceforth, he’d be a Mercator vice president.

There’d been women in his life, of course. But no one he’d wanted to marry. The truth was, he’d never met anyone who could take Cate’s place in his heart. Maybe seeing her again will set me free, he thought, bending his empty beer can double. Maybe she’ll seem ordinary to me now. I’ll be able to get on with things. Marry and father a couple of fresh-faced kids. Have the kind of happy, close-knit family you see in TV commercials.

He couldn’t make himself believe it, though. For one thing, he’d learned from a former classmate he’d run into last month in the men’s department at Marshall Field’s that Cate had been a widow for several years. She and her fifteen-year-old son were living in Beckwith. The most elementary of calculations had told him the boy wasn’t his.

The practical man in him knew that attempting to take up where he’d left off with her could mean setting himself up for a fall. For one thing, she might have a new man in her life. For another, her son might object to him. It was anybody’s guess what, if anything, he’d been told about his mother’s past. It went without saying that her parents would be against it.

He hadn’t volunteered for the assignment in Beckwith just to worry about what the McDonoughs might prefer. He wanted to see her, dammit. Find out if there were any embers. Ask why she hadn’t written to him. If he didn’t avail himself of the chance, the kind of personal life he wanted would continue to elude him. He would just keep asking the same old questions. Once and for all, something had to be resolved with Cate.

I wonder if I should call her, he thought. Or let fate decide whether or not we bump into each other. Phoning didn’t seem like a viable option. For one thing, he might get the boy.

And if she said hello? What would he say then? It would kill him if she hung up on him.

Bidding Brenda goodbye in the school parking lot, Cate dropped off the fliers at the home of the Save Our Town Committee chairman and ran by her in-laws’ place with some secondhand paperback novels she’d collected for Larry’s father. A once-robust man who was now a shadow of his former self, Russ Anderson spent most of his time these days in a wheelchair in front of the television set. The family breadwinner, his wife, Beverly, wasn’t home yet. According to Russ, she’d gone to the bank to cash her paycheck and on to Clingers’ for the week’s groceries.

His welcoming hug and usual question, “How’s that grandson of ours?” swam guiltily in Cate’s thoughts alongside fevered imaginings of what it would be like to see Danny again as she drove home.

Dressed in his newest baggy jeans and favorite leather jacket, Brian was waiting for her when she walked in the door.

“Hi, Mom,” he greeted her with his most appealing grin. “I was wondering if, um, you could let me have a couple of bucks. Shawn and Bill want me to go with them to Ryersville for pizza.”

Even before she’d learned he was back in town, Cate had begun to see Danny in Brian every time she looked at her son. They had the same blue eyes, identical heart-tugging grins. The baggy, in-style clothes, the modest earring Brian had started sporting in one ear and the longish, bleached-blond thatch that sat atop his neatly cropped, naturally dark hair like an overturned bowl did little to hide his resemblance to the man who—without knowing it—had cooperated in giving life to him.

Neither Brian nor his natural father knew of the other’s existence. For her son, Cate realized, the word Dad conjured up the memory of quiet, sweet-natured Larry Anderson, who’d worked full-time in her father’s store at the time of his conception. Friendly but diffident whenever she’d come in, Larry hadn’t given any sign he might be interested in her. At least, none that she’d noticed. Of course, he’d told her later that she hadn’t been paying attention. Whatever the case, she’d been amazed when he’d stepped forward, offering himself as a substitute husband and father after overhearing her parents discuss the “fix” she was in.

“Don’t you have any homework?” she asked, her thoughts split between Brian’s request and the dark-haired man from her past who, at that very moment, was somewhere in Beckwith.

Brian rolled his eyes. “It’s Friday night, Mom. Get real. I’ve got all weekend to do that stuff.”

She decided not to call him on a response that felt a tad disrespectful to her. “Well, what happened to your allowance?” she asked instead. “I gave it to you early…on Wednesday. Remember?”

He had the grace to squirm a little. “I guess you could say I spent it.”

“On what?”

“CDs, if you must know.”

“No more heavy metal, I hope.”

If so, he didn’t own up to it. “I’ve been using my earphones the way you asked me to,” he pointed out. “Can I have the money?”

Danny’s proximity kept whispering in her ear. “How much do you need?” she asked.

“Eight dollars ought to be enough.”

Cate supposed it wouldn’t break the family bank. At age sixteen—fifteen according to what he believed and what the doctored copy of the birth certificate in his official school records proclaimed—Brian was three-quarters grown and getting restless with maternal constraints. Still, he was basically a good kid. To date, unlike some of his classmates, he’d managed to keep out of trouble.

“Who’s driving?” she asked.

“Billy. Shawn’s mother needed the car this evening. The guys are gonna leave without me if I don’t get a move on. Say yes.”

Billy Burnett and Shawn Randazzo were both seniors, whereas Brian was a lowly sophomore. They’d begun to include him in their extra-curricular activities when he was picked for the varsity football team. Of the two boys, Billy was the most conscientious, not to mention the better driver.

About to lecture him about the need to do a few odd jobs if he wanted spending money over and above his allowance, Cate held her tongue. Won over by his patience and her strong love for him, she dug in her purse. The five and three crumpled ones she handed him would have to be deducted from the grocery money. “Behave yourself, okay?” she said. “You’re a varsity athlete now. A model for younger kids, with a reputation to uphold.”

The admonition was a compliment in disguise and Brian seemed to sense it. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, shoving the money into his pocket. His buddies hadn’t arrived yet and, abruptly, awkwardly, he planted a kiss on her cheek.

Thoughts of Danny, his calloused but exquisitely sensuous fingertips caressing her skin, his heated kisses, swarmed like bees around Cate’s head as she made her way into the kitchen and heated a can of tomato soup. Part of me can’t help but hope against hope that he’s carrying a torch for me, she thought as she ate it, even if it might set off a chain reaction that could spiral out of control. Yet she guessed the likelihood of that happening was practically nonexistent. He’d have phoned after Larry died if he still had feelings for me, she thought. I’ll bet any given time he has dozens of women swooning over him. Meanwhile, she’d been like Rapunzel in the old-fashioned fairy tale, waiting to let down her hair for the only man she’d ever wanted.

She was upstairs an hour or so later, putting on her nightgown with the idea of getting into bed and trying to focus on a novel until Brian came home when she was electrified by the rattle of pebbles against her bedroom window. Goose bumps of disbelief washed over her. During their courtship, it had been Danny’s way of letting her know he’d come to call without using the doorbell. Could it be that he’d come over without phoning his first night back in town—and used the same calling card for old times’ sake? Or was she the victim of pranksters, a disgruntled student? Her hands shook slightly as she fastened her robe firmly about her waist and drew back the curtains.

He was standing in shadow, well beyond the trapezoid of light that spilled from her window. Yet she recognized him immediately. His power and maturity drew her like a magnet. Thank God I gave Brian the money to go to Ryersville, she thought. I wouldn’t want him to watch me go through this.

Below, Danny motioned for her to open the window. She obliged with mixed emotions, Pandora lifting the lid on a box of troubles, a banished angel hungry for a glimpse of paradise.

“I’m back, Cate,” he announced in the rough-edged, faintly mocking voice she still heard sometimes in her dreams. “Come down and say hello.”

She couldn’t deny how much she longed to see him again. Needed to, if only to get him out of her system. Both her heart and her mind were begging for it. Instead of inhabiting a featureless plain, a gouache rendered in shades of gray, she might learn to live again, with the enthusiasm of authentic emotions.

Ill-considered words flew from her mouth. “I will…if you promise to keep your hands to yourself.” Seconds later, her cheeks were burning at the assumption that he planned to do otherwise.

Agreeing to her terms, he waited for her to follow through. It seemed she’d committed herself. If she didn’t go down to meet with him, he might create a ruckus, bang on her front door. Or insist in a loud voice that she keep her word. Her neighbors would get an earful.

Meanwhile, what would he think of her? Would he decide their years apart had been kind to her? Or taken their toll? She didn’t have time to speculate. Or put on fresh makeup. Turning away from the window, she raced downstairs in her robe and slippers, frantically finger-combing her hair as she went.

A moment later she emerged from the side door of her house, which led, via half flights of stairs, up to the kitchen and down to the basement. Danny hadn’t moved from the spot where he’d been standing. Advancing toward him, she paused a few feet beyond his reach. Fortunately, they were partly hidden from the street by some overgrown lilac bushes that were in the process of losing their leaves, now that the autumn nights had brought cooler temperatures.

At close range, he was as good-looking as she remembered—lean, powerful, unimpressed by his own allure. His beautiful eyes blazed into hers, overflowing with questions. To her surprise, he didn’t pose any of them immediately. Instead, he seemed to be waiting for her to speak.

“Brenda told me you were back,” she murmured, desperate to break the silence that unnerved her so. “That you were staying at your grandmother’s house…”

He nodded. “Somehow it felt like the right thing to do. Brenda probably told you…I work for Mercator now. I’m here to decide the future of the tool-and-die plant.”

He was giving her the space she’d asked for—keeping his promise to the letter. And perversely, she didn’t want him to. If he didn’t touch her, she believed, her heart would break. Can we actually stand here and talk this way, like strangers after everything we once meant to each other? she asked herself. If so, I don’t think I can bear it. It would be as if we never loved each other desperately and ran away to get married, that all our hopes and dreams weren’t invested in each other.

“Is that your only reason for coming?” she blurted, only to realize the seemingly innocent question bore a heavy freight of meaning, as well. For some reason her tongue seemed bent on exposing all the vulnerabilities she hoped to keep from him.

If he considered the question a leading one, he didn’t say so. Instead, he took a tentative step in her direction. “It’s hard to see you in this light,” he explained. “You’re standing almost completely in shadow. As for your question, no, it isn’t. For quite some time I’ve wanted to return to Beckwith…get reacquainted with the place where I grew up.”

So it was the town, not the thought of seeing her again, that had drawn him there. Well, she’d wanted the truth, hadn’t she? When another silence lengthened between them she felt compelled to shatter it, if only to ease her heartbreak.

“How long do you plan to stay?” she asked, realizing too late that even such a simple query could unmask feelings better kept to herself.

Danny lifted one brow. “The answer depends on a number of things. What would you say to releasing me from my promise?”

In an instant he’d turned the tables. Her eyes huge, Cate shook her head.

“No hands, then,” he whispered.

When she didn’t protest, he took several steps in her direction. Her thoughts in turmoil, she retreated, until her back rested against the side of the house. Goose bumps of anticipation raced over her skin when he stopped just short of enfolding her and leaned forward with widespread arms to brace his palms against the wooden siding. The hard, sweet warmth of his body matched hers lightly from chest to thighs.

“Danny…please…we shouldn’t,” she protested, arguing against what the jilted seventeen-year-old in her was begging for.

His eyes gleamed at her in the chiaroscuro of shadow and moonlight. “Why not?” he asked. “Are you afraid your son will catch us?”

So he knows about Brian, Cate thought. But not the whole story. With Larry gone, only three people—my parents and myself—know who Brian’s natural father is. She shook her head. “He’s gone…to Ryersville with some friends for the evening. But the neighbors might see us. You know what Beckwith’s like. People talk.”

“Since when did you give a damn about gossip?” The deceptive calm in his low-pitched voice pierced her to the quick. “From what I’ve heard, you’re not involved in a long-term commitment,” he added. “Neither am I. Except for us, nobody stands to get hurt. We’re free to do whatever we wish.”

Danny wasn’t married! Or seriously involved with anyone! Cate’s heart soared even as she shrank from the perils of letting herself care for him again. It wasn’t true what he’d said, of course. Getting involved meant risking injury to Brian and the Andersons, not just to herself. If he walked out on her again, after stealing her heart a second time, the resulting pain might be unbearable. Even so, she ceased all struggle as—keeping the letter of his promise while thoroughly violating its spirit—he positioned himself more intimately against her body, effectively pinning her in place.

After so many years of struggling to feel something more than gratitude and friendship for Larry and later, sleepwalking through the suspended animation of widowhood, Cate came fully alive in an instant, so keenly that the sensation pierced her to the quick. She gloried in his touch, drank in the remembered aroma of his skin scent. She was profoundly amazed that he was actually there with her, in the little Ohio town where they’d met and fell in love. And she wanted to drown in the wonder of him, to open herself to the hard shaft of his desire that had made its seeking known against her body.

Tell me I’m not dreaming this, she begged the Fates that held sway in such moments. That I won’t wake up with empty arms and tears streaming down my face.

Her capitulation was like a goad to him. Incredibly, a door had opened, where for years there’d been a wall. The only woman he’d ever loved was pressed tightly against him and gave every indication that the arrangement suited her. With a little groan, he claimed her mouth. Imagined so many times—as he’d changed planes or flopped on his living-room couch to stare at the lights on Lake Shore Drive—the incredible sweetness of kissing her again blew him away. It was as if an integral part of himself, long missing, was suddenly back in place.

Don’t overwhelm her with too much, too soon, he warned himself, even as the urge to share the ultimate mysteries with her arose like an ache in his gut. Some questions have to be answered first.

From Cate’s perspective, his kiss was as deep as the earth. And so hungry! Its insatiability poured comfort into her empty places, even as it drove her to a peak of wanting him. Her recklessness soared as her nipples tightened. Mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, neighbor, she’d forced herself to focus on self-sacrifice, ignoring her innermost yearnings. Yet, incredibly, the rule-breaking teenager she’d been, the sensuous young woman who’d dared to accept his love despite her parents’ wishes, had lived on inside her, waiting to reemerge.

Danny, Danny, she confessed silently as she parted her lips to admit his tongue. If only you knew how much I’ve ached for this moment. I’ve been sleepwalking through my life without you. Even the joy of Brian’s birth, the pleasure of raising him, have been full of empty places. Just to taste Danny again, to feel his strong, lean body pressed against her, was like knocking on the gates of paradise.

Danny was thinking similar thoughts, though to his knowledge no child had sprung from their lovemaking. Hungering for a family, a woman to love, he’d wanted only her, their babies. She’d been completely out of reach. Yet, with every breath he’d taken, he’d wanted to reconnect. Now Larry wasn’t a factor. Though he still had questions about Cate’s reasons for marrying so soon after her parents had forced them apart, he was willing to ask them in good time, without any preconceived notions about the answers.

Meanwhile, he couldn’t get enough of her.

I’m going to drown in him, Cate thought. Lose sight of what’s best for all the people I love. With a little shiver of apprehension, she realized Danny still fit into that category.

Just then a car went by, slowing as it passed her house. About to release her grip on every hand hold and plunge into whatever Danny suggested, she caught the shape of lights mounted on its roof. Oh, no! she thought. Dean Lawler. If he saw us, he’ll be back to check out the situation. He’s just that kind of person!

“You have to leave…now,” she told Danny, struggling to free herself. “I’m a schoolteacher. And this is still a small town. My reputation…”

“Not until you kiss me again.”

So lovingly that she wanted to weep, his mouth covered hers.

For several seconds she melted into him. Just to touch him again was like food and rest to a starving, weary person. Yet she was terrified of the gossip Dean could start. If Brenda’s soon-to-be ex turned around, came back and tried to hassle them, he and Danny might get into a fight. Dean would radio for backup and they’d end up at the police station. It would be like her worst memory all over again.

Wrenching free for both their sakes, she turned and ran into the house. By the time she’d caught her breath and begun to have second thoughts, Danny was nowhere to be seen. What have I done? she agonized. Chased him away for good? I don’t want that!

Everything in her ached to call him and try to explain. But she didn’t know what to say. Or if he’d had the phone turned on at his grandmother’s place. Like most executives, he probably carried a cell phone. Besides, even if he’d had the regular phone reconnected, its number wouldn’t be the one she remembered.

Somehow she managed to make her way upstairs, take off her robe and slip between the bedcovers. Once there, she couldn’t seem to stop thinking of him. God help me, but I’m still crazy about him, she thought. His kiss still imprinted on her mouth and their son still out with his friends, she shut her eyes and let her memories take her.…

Chapter Two

On the chilly December night she and Danny had chosen to elope, Cate’s father had driven her to Brenda’s house for a sleep-over. As usual, he’d ordered her to keep out of trouble. Meekly agreeing to behave herself, she’d blown him a kiss as he’d driven off down the snow-dusted street—an unaccustomed gesture she would later regret.

Taking Cate’s overnight case and setting it to one side in her living room, Brenda had rolled her eyes in silent exclamation over its weight. For its modest size, the case had been fairly heavy. Convinced that she wouldn’t be able to return to her parents’ house for any personal belongings after eloping with Danny, Cate had stuffed the modest little case full, cramming in extra socks, underwear and a change of clothing, along with as many personal mementos as possible.

She’d also withdrawn a hundred dollars from her savings account, afraid that, if she asked for more, the bank teller would tell her father about it. In a town like Beckwith, everyone knew each other’s business. Adults gossiped about their children as a matter of course. Thinking ahead, she’d decided that, if her father learned of the withdrawal anyway and demanded to know why she needed the money, she’d explain it as cash to buy Christmas presents.

I wish things hadn’t been so complicated, so fraught with difficulty, she thought now, punching her pillow into a more accommodating shape. That my parents had liked Danny—made him welcome at our house. Instead of sneaking around to see each other, we could have dated openly. We’d probably have waited to get married until after I graduated. I might not have gotten pregnant when I did.

Even if they’d made a baby under those circumstances, she believed things would have worked out for them. Of course, Brian, as she knew him, might not have made it into the world. They might have had a different child instead. Though she’d have loved that child just as much, Brian had turned out to be worth every bit of the anguish his conception had produced. Despite his teenage foibles, which she regarded as a passing phase, he was smart, affectionate and loyal, an amazing, wonderful kid.

Meanwhile her what-ifs came down to a single question. She still wanted to know why Danny had abandoned her seventeen years earlier, leaving her alone in such a predicament. Would he have dumped me eventually, anyway, even if our elopement had succeeded? she asked herself. Or would we have been happy together? Why did he fail to come back for me, as I believed and hoped he would?

When she’d gone downstairs to meet him in her side yard earlier that evening, neither of them had broached the topic of how they’d parted. She only knew that he’d seemed to feel the hunger, the unmitigated urgency to reconnect that she still felt. Of course, the heated kisses they’d exchanged might not have meant as much to him as they had to her. Maybe they’d simply connoted the appeasement of long-denied curiosity, a romantic interlude undertaken to add zest to his sojourn in Beckwith.

As she lay there with empty arms and a thousand questions competing in her head, Cate couldn’t keep her thoughts from returning to the past as if they were drawn there by a magnet. Surely it holds some answers, she told herself. Yet she’d gone over the events of the night they’d eloped and then parted a million times, without coming up with an adequate explanation for Danny’s subsequent behavior. Powerless to resist with him so near, just a few miles away at his grandmother’s house, she dove back into the well of remembering.

Jittery over the agitation their elopement would cause and worried that they might not be able to pull it off, Cate had settled with Brenda in front of the Hales’ TV set. The latter had gotten out her Monopoly game to pass the time, and they’d begun to play somewhat distractedly while Brenda’s mother had dressed for her Friday night bingo game.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think the two of you were up to something,” Miriam Hale had observed with an indulgent smile as she’d put on her coat. “You both seem fairly wired tonight.”

According to Cate’s parents, Mrs. Hale, a widow, had been an indulgent, irresponsible parent who gave Brenda far too much leeway.

Guilty as charged, Cate had blushed. With less at stake, Brenda had kept a cooler head. “How can you say that, Mom?” she’d demanded with her usual insouciance. “The worst thing we could do around here would be to cheat at this game. And if we agreed to cheat, that wouldn’t really be cheating, would it?”

Miriam Hale had laughed heartily and shaken her head as she’d picked up her purse. “You think like an attorney,” she’d told her daughter affectionately. “A real Philadelphia lawyer. Too bad I don’t have the money to put you through law school.”

As soon as she’d gone, Cate had leaped to her feet. “I should call Danny,” she’d blurted with a churning sensation in her stomach.

Sudden tears had welled in Brenda’s eyes. “You know I want you to be happy,” she’d whispered. “But the truth is, Cate, I don’t want you to go. We’ll never get to see each other. Can’t you wait until you’re eighteen? You and Danny could stay here in Beckwith.”

“I’d give anything if we didn’t have to leave,” Cate had answered. “But it’s getting too difficult for us to see each other. My parents are watching me like a pair of hawks. Besides, Danny and I each want to get an education. Good jobs. Things that just aren’t available here. We won’t be apart forever, Brenda…I promise. Next summer you can come and visit us. In the meantime, we can write each other.”

It had sounded good. But they’d both had misgivings. Several years might pass before they saw each other.

Meanwhile Cate had made up her mind. She’d been tired of sneaking around, of lying to her parents. She’d wanted to be with Danny openly. Let the whole world know about their relationship. “I’d better call him,” she’d repeated, a little more firmly. “We should leave as soon as possible…before my parents get a hunch something’s wrong and decide to come over and check on me. We’ll be in really big trouble if they catch us.”

It had been a gross understatement. Her mouth still warm from Danny’s kisses as she waited for their son to come home, Cate recalled his light tap on the horn as he’d pulled up at the curb outside Brenda’s house that night…the hurried squeeze she’d given her friend before snatching up her bag and running down the steps. Ensconced in the old-fashioned double bed where she’d slept alone since Larry’s death, she relived Danny’s embrace and his deep-pitched growl, “Maybe we’d better get going, sweetheart…”

Nestled in the curve of his arm as he drove, Cate had kept glancing over her shoulder to make certain they weren’t being followed. For his part, Danny had tried not to be too obvious as he’d checked the rearview mirror. “The coast is clear,” he’d reassured her at one point. “Everything’s going to work out. You’ll see…as soon as we find a place, you can register and finish high school. Or take your GED. Either way, you’ll start college in the fall. I’ll work days, sign up for a couple of night classes if possible. We’ll get in touch with your parents on your eighteenth birthday. When they realize how hardworking and happy we are, they’ll come around.”

Cate had strongly doubted it. In her opinion, they would never forgive her, let alone make their peace with him. The product of a poor, somewhat eccentric family, he struck them as the antithesis of everything they’d hoped for her.

Ironically, the farther they’d driven from Beckwith, the more convinced Cate had become that her mother and father were nipping at their heels. Oh, she and Danny had found a justice of the peace willing to hear their vows without much trouble—a funny, rumpled man already wearing his bathrobe who’d gone through the motions.

A short time later Danny had slowed the car as they approached the Heart’s Desire Motel—a shabby, inexpensive-looking place some twenty miles east of the Cincinnati city limit. Its Vacancy sign had been lit as if in invitation.

Cate hadn’t wanted to stop. She’d begged Danny to keep driving across the state line into Kentucky or Indiana if possible, wrongly convinced they’d be safer in another state. Eager to make love to her, he’d argued that her parents had probably retired for the night. Insofar as they were concerned, he’d insisted, she was safely ensconced at the Hale residence, chatting away with Brenda. Meanwhile, the two of them were about to make love for the first time in a real bed.

“I’ll park around the side, behind that Dumpster,” he’d ordered in an attempt to quell her fears. “If your parents are right behind us, they won’t spot it there.”

Telling herself that if her mother and father were nipping at their heels, they were likely to slow down, scan the handful of cars in the parking lot and drive on without seeing Danny’s rundown Ford in the shadows, Cate had acquiesced. They’d been at the crux of their lovemaking, crying out and clutching each other in the throes of completion, when they’d been electrified by the sound of someone attempting to turn a key in the lock of their motel-room door.

A moment later the securely bolted door had come crashing in. Like modern-day bounty hunters, her parents and an armed sheriff’s deputy had burst into the room, followed by the cringing motel clerk. Only then, with her mother weeping and her father yelling profanities at the top of his lungs as she and Danny had scrambled to cover themselves, had she realized that they’d forgotten to use protection. It had been the one time in their history together that they’d been so careless.

Crisp and authoritative, the deputy had ordered them to get dressed. Wrapping the bedspread around herself for modesty’s sake, Cate had gathered up her clothes and put them on in the motel room’s cramped bathroom while her mother had wept and browbeaten her. She’d emerged to find Danny wearing handcuffs.

“No…please! Take those things off him!” she’d begged the deputy, tears running down her cheeks. “He didn’t do anything wrong! We’re married! You can’t arrest him!”

The scowl on Danny’s face had ordered her not to beg on his behalf.

Taking his cue from her parents, the deputy had declined to relent. “Sorry, miss,” he’d answered. “But you’re underage. I’m afraid you, your parents and your boyfriend will have to accompany me back to headquarters.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my husband,” she’d whispered, her steady flow of tears undermining her stubbornness.

Huddled miserably in the rear of her parents’ Oldsmobile, while Danny rode with the deputy in the caged back seat of his squad car, Cate had begun to realize the seriousness of their situation. Given her age, she’d guessed, Danny could be charged with statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, maybe even kidnapping. He could be subject to a jail sentence. Maybe even a prison term. With either on his record, the successful future he hoped to attain would be compromised. Somehow, she had to keep that from happening.

She hadn’t been worried on her own account, though she’d realized at once that her parents would separate them. For as long as they held sway over her, Jack and Susan McDonough would see to it that Danny Finn didn’t come within a thousand feet of the daughter who had so disappointed them.

On their arrival at the Clermont County Jail, Cate and her parents had been ushered into one interview room, Danny into another. The break between them had been complete. Her stomach in knots, Cate had wanted to charge down the hall and defend his honor to the stern, uniformed deputy, make him see that the young man he’d taken into custody wasn’t a criminal. Maybe if she took the blame…

Her father’s looming, wrathful presence had barred the way. As she’d huddled without speaking in a battered wooden chair, he and her mother had taken turns berating her.

“How could you have done this to us?” Susan McDonough had wailed, her words harsh with self-pity and condemnation. “Everyone’s sure to find out. We’ll be the town laughing stock. Your reputation…not to mention ours…will never recover from this!”

“Do you think she cares?” Jack McDonough’s mouth had contorted with fury and disgust. “All the little bi—” In response to the expression on his wife’s face, he’d checked himself before the slur could completely pass his lips. “All she cares about is her trashy, so-called husband,” he’d added instead. “Not the parents who raised her.” He’d turned to Cate. “To think a daughter of mine would give her virginity to someone like Danny Finn, a young man of questionable family with no prospects! Well, I promise you, girl…your mother and I are going to press charges to the fullest. Danny Finn’s going to jail for his part in this. And he’ll be there awhile.”

Hearing her father describe what would happen in so many words had made it seem even more threatening. The stories she’d heard about what befell young, good-looking men in jail or prison settings had made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t allow her parents to place Danny in that kind of jeopardy, no matter how much they hated him. I’ve got to make them relent, she’d realized. Promise whatever it takes to make them drop the charges. Unbending as he seems, that deputy was a teenager once. I can’t believe he’ll charge Danny with a crime if my parents don’t insist on it.

Brian came home, humming a song that was popular among teenagers at the moment and noisily burping pizza. His occasional, deliberate rudeness was part of the differentiation process, Cate guessed. A moment later her son turned on his stereo and her ears protested.

“Brian?” she called out, raising her voice so that it could be heard over what he euphemistically referred to as his “music.”

A moment later he materialized in her partly open doorway. “Yeah, Mom?” he asked with studied nonchalance, clearly aware that the volume at which he’d been playing his stereo would have awakened the dead, let alone a sleeping parent.

Though he wasn’t as forthcoming as the youngster he’d been just a year or two earlier, Brian still liked checking in with her. He just didn’t want it to be his idea.

“Did you have fun?” she asked.

He nodded. Grinned. “We met a couple of girls. One of them gave me her phone number. The pizza was pretty good. Yours is better, though.”

She smiled, too, despite her welter of conflicting emotions. “Thanks for the compliment,” she answered. “Sleep well. Don’t forget to use those earphones we talked about.”

On the night she’d eloped with Danny, Cate had been six months shy of her eighteenth birthday. Yet the short amount of time that had remained until they could marry legally had seemed like an eternity to her. She hadn’t wanted to be parted from the man she loved for a single moment. Yet, unable to consult him, she’d decided that their honeymoon would have to wait.

She’d thrust out her chin, unconsciously mimicking her father’s pugnacious attitude. “If you press charges against Danny, and he goes to jail, I’ll run away again, just as soon as I get the chance,” she’d threatened. “I don’t need Danny to leave. I can do it on my own. You and Mom can’t keep an eye on me every second.”

“You little ingrate!” The veins standing out against his temples, Jack McDonough had raised a hand as if to knock her off her feet.

“No, Jack!” Susan McDonough had exclaimed, clutching at his sleeve. “The police will arrest you, too, if you start hitting her! Everyone in Beckwith will find out if you’re charged with battery. We won’t be able to hold our heads up.”

She doesn’t care about me, Cate had thought. Just Dad, and what people will think of them. My feelings don’t count. “On the other hand,” she’d added, as if her father hadn’t spoken, “if you tell the deputy you don’t want Danny arrested, I’ll do whatever you want. Give him up. Stay home and finish high school. Go to college. Or work full-time in the hardware store. You won’t even have to pay me…”

Glancing at each other, neither of her parents had said anything for a moment. Then, “I’ll be damned if we’ll stake you to college, miss, after the way you’ve behaved,” Cate’s father had snapped. “Henceforth, you’re on your own where higher education’s concerned.”

“I’m not asking any favors for myself,” she’d answered. “Just that you let Danny off the hook.”

His mouth closing in a thin, hard line, he hadn’t responded.

“She’s shamed me beyond what I thought was my capacity to be shamed,” Susan McDonough had interceded. “But she’s our daughter, Jack. We’re responsible for her welfare. We’ll never be able to live it down if she runs away again and people say we pushed her into it.”

Once again it had seemed to Cate that her mother was concerned only for herself and Cate’s father. All that had appeared to matter to her was their standing in the community.

Meanwhile, Jack McDonough hadn’t moved a muscle. “All right,” he’d conceded tightly at last. “If that’s what you want, Susan. I’ll go and talk to the officer. You—” he’d pointed at Cate “—keep your damn mouth shut!”

During his absence, she’d all but held her breath.

He’d returned with an even deeper scowl on his face. “It’s done,” he’d told his wife with an air of disgust. “The deputy has agreed to drop the charges against the Finn boy. I asked him to throw a good scare into him before letting him go…order him to stay away from Cate. As for you, miss—” he’d transfixed Cate with a baleful stare “—you’re not to say a word to Danny Finn as we go out, do you hear? Or even glance in his direction. If you so much as look at him, the deal’s off. I’ll see to it that he’s prosecuted to the fullest.”

He’d left her with little choice. Her heart aching, she’d assented, allowing her parents to lead her past the open door of the interview room where the young man she loved was being questioned by the deputy. She’d felt Danny staring at her, demanding that she meet his gaze. Keeping her part of the agreement, though it had almost killed her, she hadn’t turned her head. I’ve got to trust him, trust his belief in me, she’d thought. Surely he knows I wouldn’t leave without a glance at him if I had any choice.

With her peripheral vision, she’d read his shock and disillusionment. His wordless plea that she say or do something to reassure him had cut her to the quick. She’d wept disconsolately in the back of her parents’ car as they’d burned up the highway back to Beckwith.

Her eyes and nasal passages had been all but swollen shut by the time they’d reached the brick neo-Tudor bungalow on Sycamore Street where she’d lived since babyhood. It’ll be my prison now, she’d thought, until Danny comes back to rescue me.

“What tipped you off…made you come after us?” she’d asked in a low voice, stumbling slightly over the doorsill as they’d entered the house.

She hadn’t really expected her father to answer.

To her surprise, he did. “That kiss you blew me when I drove away from the Hale place,” he’d responded with cold hostility. “You haven’t done anything like that since you were a baby.”

Affectionate gestures have never been my family’s style, Cate thought now, switching off her bedside lamp and wriggling deeper beneath the covers. They still aren’t. Whenever I’m around Mom and Dad, I feel as if I have to maintain my emotional distance to keep from getting hurt. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever forgive me for what I did. With Danny back in town, they’ll be watching me, wondering if I’ll make a fool of myself over him.

On the night of her attempted elopement with Danny, Cate had built an emotional fortress around her heart that her parents couldn’t penetrate. Somehow Danny will manage to get in touch with me, she’d reassured herself, remaining in her room except to eat, go to school and crane her neck in an attempt to view the afternoon mail. At the moment he’s just biding his time. He’d never go off and leave me without an explanation. She’d tried hard not to think too much about the fact that she’d appeared to injure him that way.

Day after day she’d continued to wait for him. And day after day she’d been disappointed. Incredibly, he hadn’t contacted her. There’d been no letter, no hasty, surreptitious phone call so they could make new plans. Though she’d done her best to cling to them, gradually her hopes had faded. The fear that maybe he wouldn’t come back for her had crept into her imagination.

At first she’d tried to tell herself he was playing it cool, attempting to throw her parents off the scent. Yet, as the days had stretched into weeks, marking a bleak Christmas and a bereft New Year’s, a feeling of dread had invaded her gut. Maybe he hadn’t understood. Or decided she wasn’t worth the indignities he’d had to suffer. Maybe he’d simply abandoned her.

A short time later, she’d come down with what she’d initially regarded as a case of the flu, brought on by her disheartened emotional state. Against her wishes, her mother had insisted she see their family doctor. Shock waves had reverberated through Cate’s anguish when the kindly, gray-haired physician had informed her she was pregnant. Her need for Danny had escalated to critical mass in less than a single second.

Predictably, her parents had gone crazy at the news. Her father had stormed and raged, threatening variously to murder Cate, Danny and anyone even remotely related to him, the first person who dared to look at them sideways once the story got out. Susan McDonough had wept copious tears and accused Cate of breaking her heart.

For her part, painfully convinced at last that—for whatever reason—Danny wouldn’t come back for her, Cate had sunk into an anguish so deep daylight couldn’t penetrate it. Meanwhile her parents had circulated the story that she was suffering from mononucleosis and needed bed rest. Forbidden to attend classes or work in her father’s hardware store, she’d sunk into a helpless lethargy punctuated by fits of weeping. She’d spent most of her time in an upholstered chair beside her bedroom window. Staring down at the occasional passing car and the bare trees that framed Sycamore Street’s snowy ruts, she’d tried to imagine a future for herself and the child she was carrying.

It had been around that time that quiet, deferential Larry Anderson had overheard his employers anguishing over their daughter’s dilemma and astonished them by stepping forward with an offer to marry her. Cate’s parents had relayed his proposal to her that evening at the dinner table. “We won’t force you to accept,” Cate’s mother had told her with a quick, imploring glance at her husband. “But we think it would be for the best. The Finn boy isn’t coming back, and your baby needs a father. Larry may not mean anything to you, but he’s decent and hardworking. He promised us he’ll love and care for you and your baby if you’ll only let him.”

Flabbergasted, Cate had stared at her parents. “How did he find out…that I’m pregnant?” she’d demanded. “Did you tell him? Offer him money to take me off your hands?”

Susan McDonough had denied it with a violent shake of her head. “He overheard us talking about your…situation,” she’d insisted. “And volunteered. We were as surprised as you are. We’d never guessed he felt that way about you. It would resolve a lot of things.…”

Cate had cast a surreptitious glance at her father. “Better think it over, miss,” he’d warned. “The way I see it, you don’t have any other options.”

Stunned by Larry’s proposal and unable to imagine herself married to anyone but Danny, Cate had asked for a little time. To her astonishment her parents had granted it, provided she didn’t draw out the decision-making process too much. The following day, a Sunday, she’d borrowed her mother’s car without asking permission while her parents were at church and driven out to the Finn place, determined to find out whatever she could concerning Danny’s whereabouts. It had been then that Ned Finn had made his taunting remarks, then that Danny’s grandmother had snatched up a broom and chased her from the premises.

A few days later, at her parents’ urging, she’d accepted Larry’s proposal during an oddly formal meeting in the McDonough living room. Though she hadn’t known him well or even given him much thought, Larry had always seemed like a decent person to her—the kind of principled young man who would make some young woman a good husband. They’d been married shortly afterward, in a bare-bones ceremony at the Catholic rectory in Ryersville flanked by both sets of parents, and left immediately for Minneapolis.

Unaware of the true situation, their neighbors in the lower-middle-class neighborhood where they’d landed had befriended them. One of the men had helped Larry find a job and fix up their rental house. The women had rounded up baby clothes and dispensed advice on how to have a healthy pregnancy.

At its inception, Cate’s married life had been a quiet one. No one but she, Larry and her parents had known she was carrying another man’s baby. Or that their union hadn’t been consummated. Later, it had been, of course. Aware that eventually, intimacy would be part of the bargain, she’d submitted to Larry’s gentle lovemaking without complaint. And after a while it hadn’t felt so strange to her. To her surprise she’d even enjoyed the closeness it brought. But she’d never climaxed, never felt the sweet, self-annihilating pleasure Danny had taught her to crave.

The McDonoughs had insisted Cate and Larry mustn’t tell his parents they were expecting a child until a few months had passed. Similarly, they weren’t to send out birth notices until their baby was at least five or six months old. People could count and, if they wanted to move back to Beckwith someday without revealing their child’s true parentage, it was essential to falsify his or her age. That way, people wouldn’t talk. Should he ever return, it wouldn’t occur to Danny Finn to seek the child’s custody.

Larry had decided for the sake of keeping peace in the family, that they should comply with the McDonoughs’ wishes. And Cate had deferred to him, though she’d been uncomfortable about the subterfuge. For as long as she lived, she would never forget the embarrassment she’d felt over the Andersons’ exclamation about what a big boy Brian was for his age the first time they’d visited.

She and Larry had remained in the Minneapolis area until Brian was officially ten years old. At that juncture, recently diagnosed with leukemia, Larry had broached the subject of “going home.” He liked small-town life and wanted Brian to finish growing up near his parents, given the fact that he himself might not be around to help raise the boy to adulthood.

Loath to return to a place where memories of Danny might catch her by the throat, yet with a heart aching for her husband, Cate had allowed him to talk her into it. Though Brian’s height had caused some comment about a possible starring role on the local basketball team when he reached high school age, it wasn’t so far out of range that anyone guessed their secret.

By that time, Cate had long since finished high school and gone on to college, where she’d earned her baccalaureate degree in English and qualified for her teaching certificate. Beckwith High School had been only too happy to hire her. His health as yet only moderately compromised, Larry had taken a sedentary job as a police dispatcher.

No one had mentioned Danny to Cate. And Cate hadn’t asked about him. Pleased to be near Brenda again, she’d discouraged any mention of him in their private conversations. Settling back into a life she’d once hoped to escape, and doing her best to be a good wife to a man she liked a great deal but could never love the way she’d loved Danny, she’d focused on making a home for him and Brian. Helping him deal with his illness. The everyday routine of their life together.

I can’t start over with Danny now, even if I’m still wild about him and Larry’s gone, Cate told herself miserably for the second time that evening. If I did, Danny would have to know the truth about Brian. And that might be more than Brian and Larry’s parents could accept. Somehow she’d have to make Danny understand that the past was past—not to be tampered with.

If only she could make herself believe it. The sensations that flooded her body as she relived his kisses didn’t help.

Chapter Three

Cate was in her neat yellow-and-white kitchen by 9:00 a.m. the following morning, pouring out glasses of orange juice and making blueberry pancakes for Brian, who was upstairs showering. As she worked, turning the pancakes on an electric griddle and transferring them to a warm, covered plate, snatches of an erotic dream she’d had just before waking drifted through her head.

Try as she would to dismiss them, the dream fragments wouldn’t leave her alone. Ultimately she gave in and let them come flooding back. In the dream she’d been lying naked beneath a breeze-scented top sheet and soft, old quilt in the small upstairs bedroom at her parents’ bungalow where she’d slept as a teenager. Though in real life Danny had never set foot in that house, he’d walked into the room as if he owned it. Without a word, but with a brazen look that had touched off ripples of longing in her deepest places, he’d stripped off his clothes and turned back the bedcovers.

Like her, he’d appeared in his present-day incarnation, as the vibrant, thirty-five-year-old man who’d kept his promise of “no hands” the night before, yet managed to leave her quivering with arousal. To feel him stroking her sleep-warmed flesh, if only in the ephemeral pleasure of a dream sequence—to imagine him caressing her, relearning every curve and hollow of her body as he kissed her senseless—had been to inhabit a deeply missed paradise where she suddenly longed to dwell.

She hadn’t realized how much she’d continued to crave his touch, the soul-satisfying intimacy they’d once shared. I’ve been like a zombie without him, she thought. A virtual sleepwalker, just going through the motions. Without Larry’s quiet affection and support, all she had was Brian, and she didn’t want to lean on him too much. Meanwhile, the sensuous woman in her was hurting.

If only I dared to let Danny make love to me, she yearned. He seems to want that, too. As she removed several pancakes from the griddle that had scorched as a result of her inattention and put them down the garbage disposal, she could feel her nipples tighten beneath her sweatshirt. Loving Danny would be like wetting her face with rain after trudging through a scorching desert. It would be manna to her starvation.

In her real, everyday life, with its demands and obligations, nothing even remotely similar to what she was imagining could be allowed to take place. Though her attraction to Danny was as powerful as ever, it was effectively trumped by her concern for Brian’s welfare and her deep unwillingness to hurt the Andersons.

She tensed when the phone rang. Danny? she wondered, excitement and anticipation prickling her skin as she reached for the receiver. Would he call here and risk getting Brian? The answer, of course, was that he would if he wanted to—unless she forbade him the privilege. Not knowing what he might propose if he were on the other end of the line was tying her stomach in knots.

“Hello?” she said, picking up the receiver, her tentative greeting in the form of a question.

The unexpected rasp of her father’s voice in her ear almost made her jump.

“I suppose you’ve heard your ex-lover’s back in town,” he said without preamble. It didn’t take much imagination to picture the scornful twist of his mouth.

She forced herself to speak in a neutral tone. “As a matter of fact, I have,” she answered. “Brenda told me.”

He grunted, acknowledging the truthfulness of her reply by not challenging it. “That’s right. I forgot. She works in quality control. Has he contacted you yet?”

Cate didn’t like to lie. Yet she knew the truth would provoke a storm of accusations. “I haven’t seen him,” she answered, telling herself it was accurate in a sense. It had been dark in her side yard the previous night. She’d barely glimpsed Danny even as she’d surrendered to the heat of his kisses.

“And when you do,” her father demanded harshly, “I trust you won’t give him the key to the candy store again. You’re a grown woman now, a mother with a teenage son who looks to you as a model for his behavior.”

Brian was her Achilles heel. And her father knew it. She would never willingly do anything to hurt him. Or, for that matter, her in-laws.

“As for Larry’s parents,” Jack McDonough added, with his uncanny talent for drawing a bead on her vulnerabilities, “they’d be mortified if you tarnished their son’s memory by having an affair with the man who’s going to close down Beckwith’s only industry and put Beverly Anderson—not to mention your own father—out of a job. You know, don’t you, that if you let passion rule and allow him to have his way with you, he’ll just dump you again? Maybe not with a baby in your belly this time. But most certainly with egg on your face.”

Briefly, Cate’s wish to tell her father what she thought of him, knew no bounds. Yet by now she was expert at swallowing the invective he continued to hurl in her direction. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself, Dad?” she asked, her tone barely hinting at the sarcasm that had dripped in his. “I haven’t invited Danny to any sleepovers. Nor do I plan to do anything so rash. No one cares more about Brian’s welfare than I do. Not you, Mom or the Andersons, though they love him very much. I’d never do anything that could hurt him.”

“Are you insinuating we don’t love him?” he retorted.

Empty of talk, their telephone connection seemed to vibrate with hostility for a moment. With a sigh, Cate dismounted her high horse and did her best to placate her father. As always, eager to satisfy his morning hunger with a hearty breakfast, Brian would be breezing into the kitchen at any moment.

“Look, Dad,” she said. “I know this is a bad time for you. That if the plant shuts down, it’ll be like losing the hardware store all over again…”

“You’re damn right it will!” His voice broke, as if he’d abruptly found himself at the point of tears. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when Ben Overton called yesterday’s meeting and Danny Finn walked in, in the role of visiting executive from Mercator,” he added in a low voice.

“Did he say whether or not he’s going to keep the factory open?” Cate asked, hoping to steer the conversation toward the fate of Beckwith Tool and Die and away from Danny personally.

Her father grunted, recovering himself. “He mentioned something about taking stock. Seeing how the plant operates in its current incarnation.”

“That doesn’t sound as if he’s made his mind up yet.”

“Don’t you get it, girl?” Rage, gut-deep fear and a naked anguish poured from the receiver. “The Finn boy hates me,” her father said. “Maybe even more than I hate him. Whether or not he decides to keep the plant open, revamp and modernize it, he’ll fire me, sure. I’m just eight months short of the ten-year mark for receiving minimum retirement benefits. And I’m going to lose them. Thanks to the store going under ten years ago, through no fault of our own, your mother and I will have little more than a pittance to live on in our old age.…”

Cate got the impression that if she repelled any and all overtures from Danny, it would help him feel better somehow. She didn’t know how to answer him. Can this actually be happening? she wondered. Mom and Dad broke my heart when they pushed Danny out of my life, and now that deed has come back to haunt them. She tried to tell herself that surely the Danny she’d known wouldn’t have come back disposed to take his revenge out on them. Instead he’d be fair to them, despite past hurts.

Yet she was far from certain that would be the case. Danny’s treatment at her parents’ hands had been abominable, even in light of their rage at him for compromising their daughter. His abandonment of her—something she wouldn’t have thought possible until it had occurred—argued that, like Jack and Susan McDonough, he’d walked away from the Clermont County Sheriff’s Office that awful night in anger.

Brian chose that moment to saunter into the kitchen in impossibly baggy jeans, one of his oldest T-shirts and an oversize pullover sweater than had seen better days. His uncombed hair stood up in damp, dark-and-bleached-blond points. “Is breakfast ready?” he asked. “I wanna go over early and do some warm-ups.”

Cate pointed at the covered plate. “Help yourself, sweetheart. There’s warm syrup in that pan on the stove. And more orange juice in the pitcher. If you want, I can make you some hot chocolate.”

Her son shook his head. “Thanks. I don’t need it. Is that Gramps on the phone? Are he and Gram coming to the game?”

“Gramps” and “Gram” were Russ and Beverly Anderson. If he was feeling up to it, Bev brought Russ to Brian’s games in his wheelchair.

“No, it’s Grandpa Jack,” Cate said. “Want to talk to him?”

Brian shook his head. Grinned. “Not right now,” he said, digging into a stack of pancakes like a steam shovel. “I’m in a hurry.”

Her parents seldom attended school sporting events despite the fact that Brian had participated in them from the beginning of his freshman year. Cate’s mouth curved in a faint, ironic smile. It seemed Brian had their number, too. “Listen, Dad,” she said into the receiver. “I’ve got to go. I’m going to eat breakfast with Brian and take him over to school early so he can warm up. If you want, we can talk some more about this later. Try to come up with a way of handling it.”

Stony silence greeted her suggestion. Clearly, her father thought she was offering to intercede with Danny on his behalf and didn’t like the sound of it. “Don’t worry your head about us, miss,” he said brusquely after a moment. “Your mother and I will make it, even if he puts me out onto the street and ruins us financially. It’s you I’m worried about. He was trouble for you before, and he’ll be trouble for you again if you’re fool enough to let him get within a two-block radius.”

At the game Brian caught a twenty-five-yard pass and scored a crucial touchdown, putting Beckwith High in the lead with less than three minutes to go in the fourth quarter. The home crowd went crazy. Seated next to Brenda, Cate rocketed to her feet, screaming her approval. Her best friend did likewise. They were still waving pom-poms with Beckwith’s maroon-and-gold school colors and cheering for the lad who’d successfully kicked the extra point, when suddenly Cate spotted Danny.

He was standing below and to her right, near the sidelines, kibitzing with one of his former classmates who worked part-time for Beckwith High as an assistant coach. Tall, lean and dark-haired with an easy curve to his mouth, the kind of man movie cameras would love and any woman would adore, Danny was wearing faded jeans, running shoes and an expensive-looking tan parka. His hands were thrust into his pockets as if for warmth. Oh, my God, Cate thought, going hot and cold all over. When did he arrive? Has he seen me yet? I can’t bear to face him here, with the whole town watching!

As if he felt her gaze on him like a brush against his sleeve, Danny turned and glanced up, unerringly picking her out of the crowd. Briefly she thought she would lose her balance. He’s been watching me without my knowing it, she realized, steadying herself. Knowing this time, people will have noticed. And started to gossip. I’ve got to get out of here before I’m forced into a confrontation. Fortunately the game was almost over. Thanks to several bungled plays, Beckwith’s opponents didn’t have a chance.

“Brenda,” she told her friend hastily, breaking off visual contact with him, “I’ve got to leave. Now. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Hold on.” Clearly, the unaccustomed note of panic in Cate’s voice had caught Brenda’s attention. “Are you all right?” she asked, placing a hand on her friend’s arm.

Leaning closer, Cate whispered in Brenda’s ear. “It’s Danny. He’s here. Behind our team, standing next to Don Vandemore. I don’t want to run into him in front of all these people.”

To Cate’s chagrin, Brenda couldn’t stop herself from glancing in his direction. “You want me to drive Brian home?” she asked after a moment.

Cate shook her head. “Thanks. But no. He’s going out after the game with some of his teammates.…”

Just then, one of the opposing players fumbled, and everybody in the stands jumped to their feet. It looked as if Beckwith would get another chance at the ball in the closing seconds. Without another word to Brenda, Cate brushed past their neighbors as the officials conferred, and headed down the steps, keeping a perpendicular wall of bodies between her and Danny’s line of sight. By returning to the field early after dropping Brian off, she’d snagged a convenient parking place. In less than a minute she was behind the wheel of her hatchback, turning her key in the ignition.

She didn’t realize Danny had seen her leave until she was driving down the gravel track that led to the exit onto School Street and saw him in her rearview mirror. He was running after her, motioning for her to wait. Instead she pressed down on the gas pedal. It was only when she reached Beckwith’s somewhat diminished commercial area that she noticed she was almost out of fuel.

I doubt if he’s pursued me here, she thought, glancing into her rearview mirror and breathing what she told herself was a sigh of relief when his image wasn’t reflected there. It’s probably safe to stop at Miller’s and pump a few gallons. In the interest of composure and sanity, she didn’t stop to examine the regret she felt too closely.

Turning into the station-cum-garage where Danny had worked as a teenager, she pulled up to the gas pump and switched off the engine. She was about to lift the nozzle from its cradle preparatory to inserting it into her tank when a man’s hand grabbed it first. To her distress, it belonged to Dean Lawler, Brenda’s abusive soon-to-be-ex-husband. Unnoticed by her when she pulled in, his squad car was parked on the other side of the pumps. He was wearing his deputy’s uniform.

Didn’t he ever sleep?

“Let me do it for you, Cate,” he said, flashing her the kind of smile that bordered on a leer. “A pretty woman like you shouldn’t have to pump her own gas. You need a man in your life to perform that kind of service.”

It won’t ever be you, Cate retorted silently. I despise the kind of “help” you stand for. If dating you is my only option, I’ll gladly remain a wallflower.

Even before his breakup with Brenda, Dean had ogled Cate at every opportunity. It wouldn’t be long, she guessed, before she’d be the unwilling recipient of a proposition from him. Not to mention the object of his resentment when she turned it down. It occurred to her that she might have done better to remain at the stadium and take her chances with the inevitable gossip that would occur if her friends and neighbors saw her talking to Danny. Then again, in light of their concern about the plant and the chance that they’d mob him with questions about its future once the game was over, she might have managed to avoid speaking to him altogether.

Meanwhile, Dean was asking her how much gas she wanted.

“I’d rather pump my own, if you don’t mind,” she said.

As expected, he didn’t relinquish the nozzle. His offensive grin broadened to a full-fledged smirk.

“My treat,” he insisted grandly. “Shall I fill ’er up?”

The unspoken symbolism of the nozzle and the gas tank wasn’t lost on her. She wanted to slap his face. “Suit yourself,” she answered. “I’m going inside to use the rest room.”

By the time she emerged, he’d already paid. Meanwhile, circumstances had let her off the hook. He’d received a radio call from his dispatcher about a minor accident on Route 32.

“I’d like to stay and chat, but I’ve gotta go,” he said, taking his place behind the wheel of his squad car with obvious reluctance.

Aware she should thank him, she did so with reluctance.

“Don’t mention it,” he reassured her. “If you want, you can cook me a meal sometime. Know what, Cate? You look better every day. Unlike Brenda, you haven’t put on a pound since high school. When I’m shed of her, you and me are going to rock and roll.”

He was off with his roof lights flashing and his siren going, filled to the brim with self-importance before she could frame a retort.

“Not if we both live to be a hundred,” she told him silently.

The phone was ringing as she walked in her front door. Brenda, I suppose, she thought, racing to answer it.

“Hello?” she said a trifle breathlessly.

It was Danny. “Cate?” he asked. “Got a minute to talk?”

Her heart hammering against her rib cage, she answered in the affirmative.

She could feel him relax a little. “I was hoping to catch up with you at the game,” he said. “We really should exchange a few words. Find out how life’s been treating each other.”

To her relief, he didn’t take her to task for avoiding him. “All right,” she agreed, suddenly willing to do what he asked. She wondered if he planned to come over. It would be better if he didn’t. The sight of his car parked in her driveway would set tongues to wagging—and send her father’s blood pressure through the roof if he happened to spot it there. Yet she couldn’t think of anyplace else to suggest.

“Unfortunately, I have to fly back to Chicago to prepare for a Monday-morning board meeting,” he said, letting her off the hook. “So it can’t be today. I’ve chartered a small plane for convenience’s sake. I’ll be taking off from Ryersville Municipal later this afternoon. I should be able to make it back in plenty of time for Monday evening’s get-together. Meigs Field, Chicago’s lakefront general-aviation airport, is just a five-minute taxi ride from my office if the traffic isn’t too heavy.”

Overwhelmed by the fact that they were having an actual conversation and he was giving her a glimpse of his life, the way people did when they were connected in some way, Cate didn’t immediately catch the drift of what he was saying. “Monday evening’s get-together?” she echoed in a puzzled voice.

“The Save Our Jobs, Save Our Town meeting. I agreed to attend and answer questions from the townspeople. I was told you were on the committee.”

In fact, she was. She’d promised to take notes. Feeling like an idiot for being so focused on him that she couldn’t think straight, she confirmed his impression and explained what her role would be.

“Well, then,” he said, sounding a little more relaxed, “we can spend some time together afterward. Drive over to Ryersville for a beer if you want. It would give us a little more privacy.”

Apparently he didn’t relish the prospect of everyone in Beckwith looking over their shoulders any more than she did. Or a run-in with her father. Meanwhile, the warmth in his voice was giving her goose bumps.

“Okay?” he prodded when she didn’t answer him.

I’d be crazy to turn him down, considering the way I feel, she thought. When he walks out of my life again after making up his mind about the future of Beckwith Tool and Die, it’ll probably be for good. We won’t have any further reason to see each other.

“Okay,” she agreed.

She could almost picture the curve of his mouth, the little grooves that bracketed it.

“Then it’s a date,” he said, making no attempt to hide the satisfaction he felt. “I’m counting on you to keep it, Cate. Don’t disappoint me.”

If he’d kept his vows to me when we were kids, we wouldn’t be strangers now, she thought. Instead, we’d be husband and wife—lovers of long standing with several additional children to our credit. The way things stand, he’ll never know that we share a bright and talented son who bears an uncanny resemblance to him.

“I’ll try not to,” she said, doing her best to keep the deep sadness she suddenly felt under wraps.

Danny hadn’t arrived by the time Cate slid into her place at one end of the committee table in the town library’s reception and circulation-desk area on Monday evening. The folding chairs several of the men on the committee had set out in rows were filling up fast. Before long it would be standing room only. But then, she’d expected the meeting to be packed. The future of Beckwith Tool and Die would affect a lot of lives and pocket-books.

Thank goodness Dad’s too upset and angry to show his face, she congratulated herself. If he came, I wouldn’t be able to exchange a word with Danny, let alone accompany him to Ryersville after the meeting. Afraid her father would change his mind and show up for the sole purpose of embarrassing her and making trouble for the man he hated, she kept glancing nervously at the double glass doors that led to the street. To her relief, Jack McDonough didn’t appear.

Neither did Danny. It was beginning to look as if he might be late.

Cate smiled when Brenda walked in, waved at her and took a seat. She didn’t expect her mother-in-law to attend the meeting. Beverly Anderson had phoned around suppertime to say that Russ was suffering from a bad cold and she thought it best to stay at home with him.

Though Cate knew most of the people who were arriving and nodded hello to some of them as they took their seats, all her real attention was focused on waiting for the dark-haired man who’d disappeared from her life seventeen years earlier. He might break his word to me, but he wouldn’t stand up the whole town, she reassured herself. He must be delayed for a good reason. Maybe it was pouring rain in Chicago and he couldn’t take off in a timely fashion. Or his meeting lasted longer than expected. She imagined him dashing out of the ground-floor lobby of some tall, concrete-and-glass building and hailing a cab to the city’s small, lakefront airport, urging the driver to “step on it” in the crush of rush-hour traffic.

Her newly acquired ability to visualize Danny in the setting where he lived and worked instead of trying to picture him in a vacuum was a luxury she’d never expected to possess. Each detail was precious. She’d spent the weekend and whatever quiet time she could snatch during her busy day of teaching English literature to indifferent teenagers wondering what his apartment was like. Or if he had a house in the suburbs. Trying to envision him in his office setting. With friends. At sporting events. Kicking back in one of his favorite hangouts.

She hoped they could leave together after the meeting without attracting too much attention. Of course, a handful of people were bound to stay on, hoping to put in a good word for themselves or the plant, emphasize its potential for growth and plead for its importance to the small Ohio town where Danny had grown up. They were bound to notice if she stayed, too, and then left with him. Somebody would resurrect the story of their teenage romance, and the inevitable gossip about them would spread, if it hadn’t already.

Yet she didn’t want to drive her own car to Ryersville and meet him there. For once, in almost two decades of missing him, she wanted to be a passenger while he drove, his “date,” in a sense, even if their relationship had to be fleeting.

Despite their limited interaction since his return to Beckwith—a brief phone conversation and a few ill-advised seconds spent pressed to the side of her house in each other’s arms—she’d fallen hard for him again. And she didn’t know what to do about it. Reason and her very real concern for the other people she cared about argued that renewing her relationship with him would never work.

Unfortunately, the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. Now that they’d made contact, she couldn’t bear to lose him again. Yet that was exactly what would happen, she guessed, once he’d resolved the Beckwith Tool and Die situation.

I can’t leave with him, in the unlikely event he asks me to, she thought. Keeping the secret of Brian’s parentage from him would mean living a lie. Yet she couldn’t tell him the truth without hurting the other people she loved. The trauma Brian would suffer if he found out Larry Anderson hadn’t been his real father was too painful to contemplate. She doubted he’d ever recover from it. Or find it in his heart to forgive her for her deception.

Another, more frivolous part of her wanted to impress Danny with how good she looked. Accordingly, she’d dressed up for the meeting. Though its cut was modest, the plum wool-jersey dress she’d worn to school that day clung lightly to her body, calling attention to its slender-but-shapely curves. Her favorite pearl necklace, a gift from Larry on their tenth anniversary, gleamed around her neck.

As the time for the meeting to begin drew closer, the remaining seats filled up. A dozen or so latecomers had taken up standing positions in the back and along the sides of the reception area. Finally, after several glances at the old-fashioned clock above the circulation desk, Beckwith’s mayor, Bud Harvey, who’d agreed to serve as committee chairman, called it to order.

“I want to thank everyone for coming,” he began in his somewhat plodding but friendly way. “We were hoping to have Mr. Daniel Finn, of Mercator Engineering, here to answer your questions about the future of Beckwith Tool and Die. Apparently, he’s been detained. I’m sure he’ll be with us momentarily. Maybe in the meantime we could spend a few minutes going over the various points we want to raise…”

Just then, one of the library’s double glass doors opened to admit another straggler. Danny walked in behind him. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket, indigo shirt and soft-looking tan chino trousers. He appeared somewhat tired, as if he’d had a long day. Cate could feel the color rise in her cheeks as their eyes met.

“Ah, Mr. Finn…glad you could make it,” Bud Harvey greeted him.

Danny smiled. “Sorry to be late. We ran into some fairly strong headwinds flying out of Chicago.…

Seconds later everyone was talking at once. Characterized by strong, if suppressed, emotions from the time its participants had settled in to wait, the meeting degenerated into chaos before Cate could catch the rest of what Danny was saying. As if with one accord, everyone got to their feet and pushed toward the back of the room. Their voices raised to a pitch that made it difficult to hear anything, they surrounded him, demanding information and posing a barrage of worried questions. Though Bud Harvey pounded his gavel repeatedly in an effort to restore order and recall them to their seats, he was unsuccessful. Clearly disgusted by the way the meeting had been hijacked, he gaveled the formal session to a close.

For his part Danny set about answering the questions that were thrust at him from every side. The way things are going, it’ll take several hours for him to satisfy everyone who wants to talk to him, Cate realized. I can’t hang around on the pretext that I might be needed later. It isn’t going to be that kind of meeting. Getting to her feet, she put on her coat and picked up her purse.

Her hope that Danny wouldn’t notice her departure was quickly dashed. “Wait for me,” he mouthed as she edged past the crowd of people surrounding him.

So this is how a butterfly feels when it’s caught in a net, she thought. “If I can,” she responded in like manner, inclining her head toward the building’s exterior.

A moment later she was outside, alone and unobserved in the cool night air. From her vantage point on the library steps, she could see Danny through the panes of the glass doors, doing his best to answer the barrage of questions he was receiving. Quite a few of the people who were pressuring him for answers and, above all, reassurance, were people he’d known as a teenager. Like her father, some of them had looked down on him, criticized his grandmother and his uncle as misfits. Now he held their futures in the palm of his hand. They were arguing, begging and pleading with him to keep the plant open for the sake of their town and their familiar way of life, their families and their livelihoods.

Mesmerized, she assessed his friendly, noncommittal way of responding to them. He’s probably telling them he hasn’t studied the situation adequately to give them any hard-and-fast answers, she thought. And I’m sure that’s the literal truth. Still, though she hated the way some of them had treated him in the past, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. It hurt having to watch them grovel.

Hanging around here isn’t going to work for me, she decided. I don’t want to be angry with Danny for flaunting the power life has granted him over old enemies, because he isn’t doing that. Instead, he’s being unbelievably gracious. It’s just that I don’t like seeing my friends and neighbors beg. Nor do I want to be caught waiting for my former lover when people start coming out the door.

She almost jumped when an elderly woman she knew slightly did just that.

“Hello, Mattie,” Cate said with some embarrassment.

“Well, Cate!” Seventy-seven-year-old Mattie Stoneking gave her a benevolent smile. “I thought you’d left, honey. Guess you just need a breath of fresh air. Could you possibly give me a ride home? My grandson had to work tonight. He has a second job, you know. Now that he and Carol are the parents of twins and she can’t work, finances are tight. I promised to come in his place. But it’s such a mad scene in there. Impossible to learn anything. My grandson’s not supposed to pick me up until ten o’clock. I thought maybe I’d walk home, since it’s only a couple of blocks. But my arthritis is acting up…”

Cate didn’t see how she could refuse her. “I’d be happy to give you a lift, Mattie,” she answered, accepting her fate. Relieved in a sense, though she was disheartened by the way the evening had turned out, she ushered the older woman to her car.

Brian hadn’t returned home by the time she unlocked her own front door. Damn him! she thought, swearing in her irritation. He’s out past his curfew again, with his friends on the varsity football team. To her added distress, most of his friends had driver’s licenses.

After pacing restlessly for the better part of an hour, she’d just settled down in the kitchen with a mug of hot chocolate when the phone rang. About to reach for the receiver, she decided to let the answering machine pick up. I doubt it’s Brian, she thought. It’s totally out of character for him to call and alleviate my worries.

“Cate,” Danny’s voice said. “Are you there? Say hello.”

She remained mute, seated at her kitchen table.

He let several seconds pass. “Why didn’t you wait for me?” he asked. “We had plans, remember? Are you afraid you might still have some tender feelings for me locked up in your heart?”

Another silence ensued. Sorely tempted to pick up the receiver and answer him despite a strong feeling that it would be a mistake, Cate held her tongue.

At last, he spoke again. “Look,” he said. “Maybe you’re not home. Maybe something came up. If so, I apologize for ragging on you. Call me on my cell phone when you get a chance. I’ll have it with me tonight, at the house. And tomorrow morning, at the plant…”

He repeated the number twice, giving her ample time to grab a pencil.

Though she didn’t return Danny’s phone call, they met again much sooner than she’d expected—the following afternoon at Clingers’ Market. She’d stopped by after school to pick up a few things for her larder. She was just reaching for a can of peaches in order to make cobbler for dessert that evening when he spoke her name in a low, sexy whisper.

Startled, she dropped the can. To her mortification, it rolled down the aisle and lodged under another shopper’s cart. Luckily, the woman pushing it wasn’t anyone Cate knew well, though she’d seen her around town occasionally.

“Sorry,” Cate apologized as Danny retrieved the can and handed it back to her.

The woman smiled. “No harm done.”

Seconds later she’d disappeared into another aisle. The store wasn’t crowded, and for the moment, at least, they were unobserved.

“How did you know I was here?” Cate said, aware the question had combative overtones.

Danny grinned. “I saw your car. You know…the one you were driving when you took off from the football field in such a hurry the other day.”

“Trust you to remember,” she returned peevishly.

He laughed outright. Moved a step closer to her so that they were standing just inches apart. She could smell his aftershave, his remembered skin scent. If only circumstances didn’t have to keep us apart, she thought.

“It’s like this, Cate,” he said, his voice quiet and uncompromising, yet as delicious to the woman in her who still loved him as honey from the comb. “Your reasons for leaving me in the lurch last night are ancient history as far as I’m concerned. What matters is that I want to see you. In other words, to date you. I don’t plan to take no for an answer.”

Sorry, Cate balked without putting her objection into words. It would be much too dangerous. Ultimately Brian and the Andersons would have to know the truth.

“I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” she said at last, starting to reach for another can of peaches and then dropping her hand, letting it rest on the handle of her shopping cart. “My life is settled. I have a demanding job, and I’m the widowed mother of an active teenager. At the moment that’s about as much as I can handle. Meanwhile, you have your life in Chicago…”

He doubted he’d be in the Windy City for long after finishing his work in Beckwith. But he wasn’t ready to tell her about his future options just yet. First, he wanted to see if she had any interest in spending some time with him. About to ask if they could go somewhere, anywhere at all, and talk, he dropped the notion when her son suddenly appeared.

“Brian! What are you doing here?” Cate asked in surprise.

“I saw your car in the parking lot.” He gave Danny a questioning look. “I was wondering if, um…”

As usual, Cate guessed, he hoped to bum a few dollars from her. And for once she was more than willing to give them to him—if it would shorten the amount of time he spent in Danny’s company. “I suppose you’re weak from a lack of junk food,” she quipped nervously, digging in her purse. “Well, I’m not the sort of mother to starve a growing boy.”

Brian pocketed the crumpled bills she handed him with obvious surprise that she’d been such an easy touch. “Thanks, Mom,” he muttered.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Danny asked.

It was the moment she’d dreaded since before Brian’s birth yet perversely had longed for with all her strength. Tears welled and she struggled to hold them back. I’m not sure I can handle this, she thought. The need to introduce my son to…to his fa-ther…without telling either of them about the relationship…is so poignant, so ironic I could choke. Yet, if she couldn’t manage it, they’d both demand to know the reason.

“Danny, this is my son, Brian,” she said, amazed at the calm, somewhat expressionless words that came out of her mouth. “Brian, this is Danny Finn, the man whose job it is to decide what will happen to the plant where Grandma Beverly and Grandpa Jack work. He grew up around here. We went to school together. He played basketball for Beckwith.”

Once again her insistence that Brian behave in a mannerly fashion around adults paid off. “How do you do, sir?” he said politely, offering his hand. “If you played basketball, you must have known my dad.”

With equal courtesy Danny took it. “Glad to meet you, son,” he said, unknowingly driving a stake through Cate’s heart. “You’re right. I did know your father. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school. By the way, that was some touchdown you made on Saturday.”

Brian gave him a surprised look. “You were at the game?”

Danny nodded. “Where’d you learn to run like that?”

To Cate’s amazement, Brian flushed with pride. “We’ve got a pretty good coach,” he said modestly. “Sorry I can’t stay and talk, sir. But some of my friends are waiting outside.”

A moment later he was off in the direction of the chips and the soft-drink aisle.

“He’s a good-looking boy,” Danny said with a smile. “How old is he?”

“Fifteen.” Cate winced at perpetuating the falsehood she and Larry had begun at her father’s insistence. Of course, this was one of the moments it had been crafted for. Meanwhile she was painfully aware of Danny’s calculations.

“Your romance with his father happened pretty fast after me,” he said finally. “Too bad I didn’t leave that kind of imprint.”

It was Cate’s turn to blush. She could feel the heat of it creeping up into the roots of her hair and staining her cheeks. Incredibly, Danny was telling her he wished he’d impregnated her. Yet in real life he’d left her in the lurch without any thought that he might have given her a baby. She was keenly aware of the covert glances some of the store’s other patrons were casting in their direction.

“Don’t worry, I don’t think he’s mine,” Danny added. “He’s a little too young for that. Besides, if he had been mine, your father would have made you get rid of him before he had a chance to draw breath.”

He wanted to, Cate told him silently, furiously, wondering if she would get through their conversation without dying of pain and embarrassment. I wouldn’t let him. I phoned my parents’ pastor in Ryersville and begged him to intercede on my baby’s behalf.

“You must be very proud of Brian,” Danny added. “I wish I had a son like him. Unfortunately, I don’t have any children.” He paused, smiled, as if in an effort to dispel the disappointments life had dealt him. “Kids his age sure do favor some awful haircuts.”

Despite the added pain his remarks had caused, Cate couldn’t help smiling back at him. The moment she’d dreaded had come and gone, and she’d lived through it. “I figure if I don’t protest or give him too much flak about things like his hair and that earring, his protest gestures will run their course a lot more quickly,” she said. “Indifference seems to lower their shock value.”

Danny nodded. “You sound like a wise and loving mother.”

The compliment tugged at her heartstrings. “I hope I am,” she answered. “I try to be. Like most parents of teenagers, I need all the luck I can get. Since joining the varsity football team while he’s still a sophomore, he’s been running with a faster crowd. Most of his friends have driver’s licenses. I can’t help worrying.…”

Danny looked as if he wanted to take her in his arms. Invite her to nestle there. Vow to protect her against whatever danger threatened. Yet he left me when I most needed him, she thought. I’d be wise not to trust him now, even if I could.

“Well, it seems we’ve had our talk, after all,” she said. “I guess I’d better finish rounding up the rest of my groceries.”

Though he acquiesced, leaving her alone long enough to gather a bag of chips, a loaf of bread, some lunch meat and a six-pack of beer, Danny turned up beside her at the checkout counter. “We’re together,” he announced to the startled young woman behind the cash register, plunking down a hundred-dollar bill and his minimal purchases next to Cate’s.

“I can’t let you do this!” Cate protested, digging in her purse for the second time that afternoon.

“Too late…I already have,” Danny insisted. “C’mon…I’ll help you stash this stuff in your car.”

Outside the market he was as good as his word, neatly arranging her groceries in the cargo space of her little hatchback.

“I suppose I should thank you, even if you’re embarrassing me to death,” Cate said, aware several people were craning their necks.

In response, Danny meshed the fingers of his right hand with her left and slipped both hands into the patch pocket of her corduroy skirt. An intimate, almost erotic gesture, it made her resistance go weak.

Much as he reveled in the feeling of intimacy it gave him, a shadow crossed Danny’s face. For perhaps the millionth time he wondered why she’d never answered any of his letters. Or bought a bus ticket to Chicago with the money he’d sent. Had she adopted her parents’ view of him after the debacle they’d suffered at the Heart’s Desire Motel and later at the Clermont County Jail? If so, she no longer seemed to feel that way. Yet something was keeping the wall that had sprung up between them firmly in place.

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