Safe in Noah's Arms. Mary Sullivan

school? You were already investing back then?”

      “No. It wasn’t that. In school, we were both in love with the same girl.”

      “Mom?” On a dime, Monica’s mood became wistful. She wished she’d known her. Mom had died giving birth to her, and didn’t that just leave her feeling bad, even all of these years later. Monica figured that was the thing that continually felt missing from her life—her mom.

      With a philosophical shrug, her dad said, “I won the fair maiden’s hand in marriage. And that’s where the competition started. Gord was angry for years afterward. But how could we know the joke would be on the two of us?”

      When Monica realized her dad was slurring his words, her already low spirits plummeted further. How could he be drunk at only one in the afternoon? This was so recent, she didn’t know what to make of it.

      “Mom’s death was a joke?” she asked, her voice a sharp knife cutting the air.

      Ian reared back. “God, no. Of course not.”

      He didn’t elaborate. He’d been making a lot of cryptic remarks lately, but whenever she asked for clarification, he would change the subject.

      “Well, what do you mean?” she queried. “What joke?”

      His gaze had become unfocused. “Huh?”

      “What joke was on you and Judge Easton?”

      He shook his head and shuttered his expression. “Nothing.”

      She knew that closed look. No trespassing. This part of the discussion was over. She knew her dad well enough to understand she wouldn’t get any more out of him. Okay, then she would change her tack.

      “So he was getting revenge on losing Mom by sending your daughter farming? How does that make sense?”

      “You never knew...your mother’s parents died when you were still a toddler. Do you remember them?”

      She shook her head.

      “Your mother grew up on a farm. She and her family were the products of generations of farmers.” When the waitress brought Monica’s food, she also brought her dad another drink. Monica frowned, but he ignored it. “Gord thinks it’s funny for my pampered daughter to now have to work on the land.”

      Monica’s hackles raised at being called pampered, but only briefly. She was and she knew it. Or had been. Daddy had always given her everything she’d ever wanted.

      Those days were gone because of her self-imposed austerity plan. By hook or by crook, she was supporting herself from now on.

      She lifted the coffee to her lips.

      Dad sipped his drink then said, “The farm Noah owns? The one Judge Easton sent you to?”

      “What about it?” She took a sip.

      “Used to be your mother’s.”

      Monica finished choking on her coffee then wiped her mouth with her serviette. “Mom grew up on that farm and you never told me?”

      “There was no point in mentioning it.” Dad swirled his Scotch in his glass.

      To a daughter craving every detail about a mother who had never actually existed in her life, Monica disagreed.

      Why had Daddy felt it necessary to hide it from her? Or had he just never thought that her heritage mattered to her?

      It did. She already knew all there was to know about the Accords. Talk about heritage. Dad had been super proud of his.

      His great-grandfather Ian Accord had been a railway baron, had made his fortune building spur lines all over the West. Then he’d settled in the big Victorian that was now the town’s B-and-B and bought up the surrounding land. When settlers flocked to the area, he sold that land at inflated prices, increasing his fortune. He spent his life nurturing and building his wealth for future generations.

      Apparently, Daddy came by his business acumen honestly.

      Ian had built schools and the bank and the library, along with an impressive city hall.

      Then he had married a woman from back east named Maisie Hamilton and had started a dynasty.

      Daddy had finished it.

      Or maybe Monica had.

      The likelihood of her having a family was slim to none.

      She’d never worried about it until now.

      “There’s been a lot of death in our family, hasn’t there?” she asked quietly, thinking of grandparents on both sides dying too young. With Mom’s parents, it had been a car accident. With Dad’s, a plane crash in the Rockies, with her grandfather at the controls in bad weather. Within weeks, her extended family had been decimated. No wonder Dad had been a heavy drinker for a while back then, or so she’d heard. Seems he was at it again. She wondered for the umpteenth time what was going on.

      “Yes,” her dad agreed soberly. “Far too much death.”

      “It’s just you and me, Dad. We don’t have any other family left. Lots of deaths and too many only children.” Dad had been an only child, like her. She missed having aunts and uncles.

      “Yeah,” he said shortly, his gaze sliding away, and Monica wondered what that was about.

      Where was the history on her mother’s side? Who were the Montgomerys? When she had asked him questions, he’d been vague at times, loquacious but nonspecific at others. He’d talked about Mom’s character, her personality as bright as a new penny, her laughter that lit up a room, but nothing about her background.

       Mom used to live on that farm.

      When she asked, “So I’ll be farming where Mom grew up?” she heard the yearning in her own voice.

      Her father’s lips compressed into a hard line. “Yep.”

      “So,” she mused, “Judge Easton thinks it’s poetic justice to send me off to my mother’s farm to muck around in the soil and get my hands dirty.”

      “Essentially, yes. He probably agreed to the lesser charge to avoid jail time, to get you onto the farm.”

      She should be angry. In fact, a flash of refreshing righteousness passed through her, but was quickly replaced by curiosity. Mom had lived on Noah’s farm. Monica would be putting her hands into the same earth her mother probably had.

      Monica had relied on Daddy through the years to make her mother real for her. She did so again now.

      “Tell me about her.”

      Ian Accord glanced away too swiftly and Monica wondered yet again what his action meant. Dad was shifty today. Indirect.

      In the next moment, though, a sad, sweet smile spread across his face and he opened his mouth to speak, bringing Monica into that dreamy state she entered before going to sleep at night.

      “Did I ever tell you about the time she put a frog down the back of my pants? I was only ten, and she did it at school. I ran around the schoolyard like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to get that thing to shake out of one of my pant legs.”

      He laughed. “I pretended to be angry with her, but I wasn’t really. I was already halfway to being in love with the girl.”

      Daddy’s memories about Monica’s mother had always been a lonely little girl’s favorite bedtime stories.

      That evening when she got home from work, she reached for the only photo she had of her mother. Her mood threatened to turn melancholy. That troublesome loneliness dogged her again. Look how it had gotten her into trouble last week. She couldn’t let it get to her tonight.

      Best to shake it off.

      One thing she could do was make amends to Noah as best she could.

      She turned on her