Brought together by a secret
Tara Greer’s world is fine the way it is—even if some details of her childhood simply don’t add up. Life on the beautiful Virginia coast with her mother and young foster brother are all she needs. What she doesn’t need is gorgeous stranger Jack DiMarco’s suspicion that she was stolen as a child. Because if he’s right, the truth would devastate her family.
Steering clear of Jack is the easy answer, right? Wrong! The sexy, compassionate on-the-mend baseball player is everywhere she turns...exactly where her heart wants him. But their future seems unlikely when being with Jack means facing a reality that could cost Tara everything.
“According to Mr. Snyder’s buddy, I’m your old man.”
Tara scoffed at Jack’s words. “You’re not my man at all.” She caught the gleam in his eyes and frowned at him. “You’re teasing me.”
“Guilty,” he said. “But I am at your disposal for the next few weeks. You can do what you want with me.”
“I’m not going to ask you to have sex with me, if that’s what you mean.”
“It wasn’t,” he said, his grin spreading. “I was talking about helping you refinish that piece of furniture.”
“Sorry.”
“No apology necessary.” He brushed a strand of hair from her face. “I’m flattered that you look at me and think about sex.”
She wondered how this conversation had spiraled out of control so quickly. So what if Jack was handsome and charming and likable? She should have acknowledged the growing attraction between them and taken better steps to prevent it. “You weren’t listening. I said no sex.”
“It’s okay with me if we start out slow.”
Dear Reader,
Websites of missing persons are filled with images of people who have disappeared, never to be seen again by their loved ones. Way too many of these missing persons are children.
The Truth About Tara grew out of a what-if. As in, what if a woman looked eerily like an age progression photo of a missing child, but didn’t want to know if she’d been abducted? What if she was desperate not to be the face on the milk carton?
Out of those questions, the character of Tara Greer was born. Milk cartons don’t typically depict the photos of the missing anymore, so Jack DiMarco comes to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to check out a tip for his private investigator sister.
I took a research trip to the Eastern Shore to check out the setting for this book. It’s lovely and serene, a peninusla of land surrounded by salt marshes, the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It makes perfect sense that Tara would love her life there. I hope you enjoy “visiting” the Eastern Shore as much as I did.
So is Tara a missing person? You’ll have to read the book to find out!
Until next time,
Darlene Gardner
P.S. Visit me on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.
The Truth About Tara
Darlene Gardner
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
While working as a newspaper sportswriter, Darlene Gardner realized she’d rather make up quotes than rely on an athlete to say something interesting. So she quit her job and concentrated on a fiction career that landed her at Harlequin/Silhouette Books, where she wrote for the Temptation, Duets and Intimate Moments lines before finding a home at Superromance. Please visit Darlene on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.
To my nieces Marlee and Reva
for helping me with the scenes where the Down Syndrome children appear. They’re both longtime volunteers at a camp for children with mental disabilities.
And to the families of the missing.
May the lost be found.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
THAT WHITE PICKUP WAS as conspicuous as the evening sunset over the Chesapeake Bay.
It took its time in coming, too. For the past block, since Tara Greer had crossed the empty street to walk along the sidewalk, the pickup had rolled along at a speed roughly equivalent to her pace.
In ten or fifteen more minutes, children who walked to school from the bordering neighborhood would start appearing. So would the school buses that transported students from the rural
