Sweet Laurel Falls. RaeAnne Thayne

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      In her perfect imagination, he would come back on the proverbial hands and knees, telling her what a fool he had been, begging her to forgive him, promising he would never be parted from her again.

      Around the time she’d met Christian, she had been more than ready to put those fantasies away as both impossible and undesirable. She had put all her resources into thrusting Jack firmly into her past, and focusing instead on her new relationship and the love she told herself she felt for Chris.

      She could never completely assign him to the past, of course, not when her beautiful, smart, clever child bore half his DNA. Sage was always a reminder of Jack. She would turn her head a certain angle, and Maura would remember Jack looking at her the same way. Sage would come up with a particularly persuasive argument for something, twist logic and sense in a way that never would have occurred to Maura, and she would remember how brilliantly Jack could do the same.

      In all those early fantasies and all the years to come later, it had never once occurred to her that someday Sage might find him on her own and bring him back to the town he couldn’t wait to leave.

      Her sigh sounded pathetic in her small office, and she shook her head. Nothing she could do about this now. Against all odds, he and Sage had found each other, and now she would have to deal with the consequences of him in their lives. A smart woman would find a way to make the best of it—but right now she didn’t, for the life of her, know how she was supposed to do that.

      “Having a rough night?”

      She turned at the voice and found her mother in the doorway, still lovely at sixty with her ageless skin and Maura’s own auburn hair, the color now carefully maintained at To Dye For. Emotions crowded her chest at the sight of the sympathy in her mother’s green eyes behind her little glasses, and she suddenly wanted to rest her head on Mary Ella’s shoulder, as Sage had done with her earlier, and weep and weep.

      Her mother and her sisters were her best friends, and she didn’t think she would have survived the past eight months without them. Or what she would have done twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and terrified and pregnant in a small town that could still be closed-minded and mean about those sorts of things.

      She fought back the tears and mustered a smile. “Rough night? Yeah. You could say that.”

      “Oh, honey. Why did you keep this to yourself all these years?”

      “I didn’t think it mattered. He was gone and insisted he wasn’t ever coming back. Why did I need to flit around town badmouthing him for knocking me up and then taking off?”

      Mary Ella stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, and those blasted tears threatened again. “I have to admit, I suspected. I knew you had become friendly with him. People told me about seeing you together. I also suspected you had a little crush on him. I just hadn’t realized things had…progressed. I don’t know how I missed it now. Sage looks a little like him, doesn’t she?”

      “Do you think so?”

      “The mouth and her chin.”

      “She might look a little like him, but she’s very much her own person.”

      “Absolutely.” Her mother leaned back a little and smoothed a stray lock of hair away from Maura’s forehead. “Everyone will understand if you need to leave. Go home to Sage. We can carry on without you.”

      She was tremendously tempted to do just that—the going home part, anyway. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to sneak into her house, crawl into her bed and pull the Storm at Sea quilt—the one she and her sisters had made after her divorce—over her head and not crawl out again until the holidays were over.

      Nothing new there, she supposed. She couldn’t remember a moment in the past eight months when she hadn’t wanted to climb into bed and block out the world. But she was a McKnight, and the women in her family soldiered on, no matter what.

      She had managed to keep herself going all these months. She could make it through this too.

      “I’m not about to let Jackson Lange ruin the book club Christmas party for me.” She rose on legs that felt a little unsteady. Low blood sugar, she told herself. All she needed was a truffle or something. “Let’s go party. I think this evening calls for some of Alex’s famous spiked cider. I hope she brought some.”

      “If I know your baby sister, I have no doubts of that.” Mary Ella slipped an arm through hers and walked by her side through the bookstore and back to the gathering.

      She might have predicted the reactions of her friends and family exactly. Angie, her oldest sister and the second mother to the six McKnight siblings, looked at her with deep compassion and concern. Alex, younger than her by only a few years, gave her a look that clearly conveyed solidarity against all males of the species. Claire—Alex’s best friend, who had always seemed like part of the family and had made it official only a few weeks ago by marrying Maura’s younger brother—acted typically solicitous, handing her a mug of something, fragrant steam curling into the air.

      It was tea, not Alex’s cider, a Ceylon black with cinnamon, clove and orange peels, but Maura figured she could build to the cider.

      They were just getting ready to start the annual gift-exchange game, she realized, where everybody picked a wrapped gift and passed it either left or right while someone—in this case, Janie Hamilton—said certain words when she read a passage from a holiday book.

      “We saved a spot for you,” Claire told her. “Pass left when you hear the word the and right when you hear and. What are we reading, Janie?”

      Janie held up a familiar Dr. Seuss book. “Sorry. My kids have all the Christmas books in their rooms, which are a total mess until I shovel them out. All I could find was How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

      “My fave,” Alex said, stretching her feet out on a cushioned ottoman.

      Maura took the empty seat and spent the next few minutes giving an Oscar-worthy performance of someone enjoying herself as, with much laughter, they passed the gifts back and forth, until Janie finished with the Grinch carving the roast beast and everybody ended up with their final gift.

      To her delight, her prize was Charlotte Caine’s gift, a beautifully presented bag of almond brickle from Charlotte’s store down the street, Sugar Rush.

      “Thanks, Charley. Just what I needed!” She smiled, thinking how pretty the other woman looked tonight in her white silk blouse and ruby earrings, despite the extra pounds she carried.

      The distraction of opening presents gave her a much-needed chance to gather her composure, so she was almost ready when Ruth finally brought up what she knew was on everyone’s mind.

      “So it’s true,” she said in her abrupt way. “Harry Lange’s son is Sage’s father.”

      She would like to deny it, but what would be the point? Everybody knew now, and she couldn’t stopper that particular bottle. Trust Ruth not to shy away from the topic everybody else had been avoiding.

      “Yes,” she said, with as much calm as she could muster.

      “I always knew that boy was a troublemaker,” Ruth said promptly.

      “He СКАЧАТЬ