had. The woman who didn’t really know her at all. “Why?”
“You don’t look so good.”
“I, uh, just remembered I didn’t return a phone call this morning and I can’t afford to lose any clients.”
“Then go do it. I’ll watch the girls.”
“You sure?”
“Of course! They’ll be wrapped up in Ariel for the next hour anyway. Get out of here!”
She had to go. But she couldn’t leave Ashley. Could barely wait for Ashley to finish eating so she could lift her out of her booster seat and hold the little girl’s chili-smeared face against her. She’d be all right just as soon as she felt Ashley’s arms around her neck.
“Okay, I’ll hurry,” Jamie heard herself say. And stared again into her bowl of chili. It had been good chili.
She was going to have to leave Ashley with Karen. She absolutely could not allow whatever was to come to touch Ashley’s life. Couldn’t bear for Ashley to know...
“Take your time,” Karen said, clearing their bowls from the table.
Jamie stood.
“Where you going, Mommy?”
Ashley was staring at her mother, big gray eyes wide-open. Always observing. Always aware.
“Just to make a phone call,” Jamie told herself as well as the child. “I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t you want to see Ariel?” Ashley’s sweet voice was filled with concern. Her thumb stole to her mouth.
“Of course I do, baby!” Jamie said. She rounded the table and knelt beside her daughter. “I’ll hurry.”
“Okay, Mommy.” Ashley’s feet swung back and forth, her heels kicking the front of her booster chair.
Smiling, choking back tears, Jamie leaned forward and kissed Ashley’s cheek.
“Love you, Mommy,” Ashley said, pushing her cheek into the kiss without relinquishing her thumb.
“Love you, too, baby.”
Jamie fled.
LEAVING ASHLEY BEHIND in Karen’s kitchen was hard. But not as hard as growing up with a man who’d given her nothing—except bruises. Not as hard as being homeless at seventeen. She could do this.
She was only going next door. Yet as she walked into her house, as she picked up the piece of paper she’d left lying on her counter, the distance that separated her from her innocent little girl seemed suddenly insurmountable.
What did he want?
What could he possibly want?
He was new in town. Lonely. And somehow he knew that Jamie lived in Larkspur Grove.
He could go to hell.
She was already there.
By the time she got to the tiny bedroom she used as an office, Jamie was almost completely transformed. Encased in a hard shell of numbness her daughter wouldn’t recognize, she wondered how far the word had spread. How many more of them knew where she lived?
The phone seemed to jump out at her, threatening to pull her away, back to the life she’d left behind five years ago.
Even now, even here, Ashley was all that mattered. Her daughter was everything Jamie was not. Sweet. Unsoiled. Innocent. She was the part of Jamie that had never been given a chance to live. Not since the devil himself had moved in with Jamie and her mother, just after Jamie’s fourth birthday.
Jamie would do what she had to do, anything she had to do, to protect Ashley’s right to a childhood. Her right to grow up decently.
And if that meant facing down the demons from her past—one or all of them—she’d do it. There was simply no alternative.
PHONE IN HAND, she punched in the number. His number. Only the shaking of her finger testified to the trauma playing itself out inside her. At seventeen, she’d survived her stepfather’s debilitating advances. She’d survive this, too.
She pushed the last button. Lifted the mobile phone to her ear. Heard it ring...
The phone dropped to the floor, the ringing muffled by the plush gray carpet as Jamie flew to the bathroom and vomited. She hung over the toilet for another few minutes, just in case.
She could do this. She could do this.
It was just going to take a minute.
Wringing a washcloth under cold water from the basin faucet, Jamie fought the monsters she’d been fighting for as long as she could remember. Why had she ever thought she could outrun her past? She should have realized it would eventually catch up with her—destroy the present she’d so painstakingly created.
She buried her face in the cloth, welcoming its coolness against her hot skin. How had she ever been stupid enough to believe she could get away with these deceptions? That they wouldn’t always be part of her?
And then she met her eyes in the mirror. Big gray eyes, just like Ashley’s. Except that Jamie’s had seen too much. Way too much. More than any woman ever should. The eyes that stared back at her weren’t innocent like her daughter’s. They were knowing. They knew just the right look to promise a man anything.
They made her sick. So did the woman they belonged to. She’d made her choices. And had to be accountable for them.
Turning away from the mirror before she threw up again, Jamie wadded the cloth in her fist. The thought of Ashley being tarnished by her sins was killing her as surely as her stepfather would have done if he’d managed to catch up with her all those years ago.
He was dead now. But the effects of his having lived would never die.
The anniversary clock in the living room chimed the hour. She’d been gone from Karen’s for more than twenty minutes. Ashley was going to start wondering where she was.
Concentrating on the child, Jamie found the strength to enter her office a second time. To pick up the phone. To dial again. She’d been facing her problems head-on her entire life, even when it meant putting her own body between her stepfather’s fist and her mother’s weaker frame. Her strength was the only reason she’d survived this far.
She had one focus, one goal: doing what was best for Ashley. Life on the run, hiding, wasn’t it. Reaching for a recent photo of her daughter laughing at her from Santa’s lap, Jamie kept her eyes glued to the image as Kyle Radcliff answered his phone.
“Yes, Ms. Archer, thanks for getting back to me so promptly....”
His voice was just as she remembered it. When she remembered it. It was so warm, almost as if he were in the room with her. She could
