If You Come Back To Me. Beth Kery

      Mari gaped when she recognized Colleen Kavanaugh.

      “Get her inside right now,” Marc growled at Liam, his eyes blazing.

      Liam looked like he was chewing nails as he regarded Eric. For a second, Mari worried he’d refuse to obey Marc’s taut command, but then he grabbed his sister’s arm and murmured to her.

      Colleen stumbled on the gravel, her sandaled feet moving reluctantly as Liam led her back to the bar. She twisted around and pinned Eric with a baleful stare. He didn’t move, just stood there as if frozen, gazing after the retreating Kavanaughs. Mari heard him curse softly beneath his breath as he stared at Colleen’s beautiful, tear-dampened face.

      Soon only she, Eric and Marc remained in the parking lot. She couldn’t fully identify the expression on Marc’s face as his gaze flickered over her, then Eric, then her again. It was as if every imaginable emotion frothed inside him at once in that charged moment. His mouth looked set and hard when he turned and walked toward Jake’s Place.

      Mari exhaled shakily.

      Eric and she regarded each other silently in the dim parking lot lights as the band finished a raucous tune. The final chords faded off in the hot, still summer night. She sensed that Eric knew, as she did, that they’d just narrowly escaped a volatile explosion of emotion.

      Nausea rose in her like a striking snake, taking her by surprise. She gagged and bent over, coughing.

      “Mari?” Eric’s voice sounded shocked and concerned. He touched her back. “Are you okay?”

      She swallowed with effort and straightened shakily. “I…I don’t know. I just felt sick there for a minute.”

      “Come on. Let’s get you home. This is the last thing you needed to deal with on top of not feeling well.”

      But as Eric led her to his car, she turned to watch Marc disappear inside Jake’s and willfully tamped down the desire to go after him.

      Chapter Three

      The second Marc joined his mother on the front porch his gaze immediately traveled down Sycamore Avenue to the sandstone, Arts and Crafts-style house down the block. A dark blue sedan sat in the driveway. Mari’s car had been notably absent when he’d returned this afternoon from their annual visit to Harbor Town Cemetery.

      I didn’t come back to Harbor Town for you, he vividly recalled her saying last night. He leaned against the porch railing and crossed his arms below his ribs. What had she come back for, then?

      He inhaled deeply of the fresh air. It always seemed to take several days into his summer vacation to get the city soot out of his lungs. The sky had turned a pale blue, tinged with lavender, but above the beach at the end of Sycamore Avenue, crimson, pink and gold splashed across the horizon. It would be sunset soon—Harbor Town’s most famous tourist attraction. How many of those sunsets had he watched with Mari in his arms?

      He jerked his mind into the present.

      “When did you say you were headed back to Chicago?” Brigit Kavanaugh asked. She’d placed her sneakered foot on the pavement, stopping the porch swing’s movement.

      Marc knew she’d noticed him staring at Mari’s house. Not that it was odd for him to look at the Itani vacation home on his rare visits to Harbor Town. His eyes had been trained long ago to stray toward that house. Even his ex-wife, Sandra, used to take note of it, usually with a flippant, sarcastic remark, on the few occasions she’d accompanied him to Harbor Town.

      “I was thinking about staying on a couple days past Brendan’s party,” Marc said, referring to his nephew’s tenth birthday celebration.

      “Really? Do you think work can spare you that long?”

      He shrugged. “The county can undoubtedly do without me.”

      “Marc,” Brigit scoffed with a smile. “You’re a state’s attorney, for goodness’ sake. You have over a thousand employees working under you.”

      “Most of whom are gone for the holiday. I’ve never taken off more than day here and there since entering office. I have the vacation time. I might as well use some of it. It’s not like I haven’t been working from here, anyway.”

      All of the Kavanaugh children had taken jobs that would somehow prove they were hard-working, sacrificing, worthy members of society, Marc mused. His sister Deidre was an Army nurse on her fourth tour of duty. Liam was a twice-decorated detective on the organized crime squad of the Chicago Police Department, and Colleen was a psychiatric social worker who worked with high-risk teenagers with emotional and substance abuse problems.

      Survivors’ guilt.

      Their father’s final actions had left its mark on all of them.

      His mother usually wanted her sons to stay on as long as possible for these annual Independence Day visits. She seemed to want Marc long gone at the present time, though. He tried to ignore the flare of irritation he felt at that fact. Brigit loved him. She remembered how much he’d been hurt by Mari’s refusal to see him after the crash. Maybe she just didn’t want to see him get hurt again.

      The porch swing resumed the rhythmic squeaking noise that blended so hypnotically with the sounds of the locusts and the Lake Michigan waves breaking on the nearby beach.

      “You’d do best by staying away from her,” Brigit said, finally saying the words he knew she’d been thinking since the parades yesterday.

      “Maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t seem to be stifling the urge to do the exact opposite.”

      Brigit exhaled at his quiet admission. “After all they did to us—”

      “Mari never did anything to us. As for what Ryan and his aunt did, it’s not that different than what most people would have done in the same situation.”

      “She ignored you! She took that money—blood money! After all this time, you’ve forgotten the effect it had on me—on us.”

      “I haven’t forgotten,” he said, stung. “Maybe it’s never occurred to you that Mari and I might have memories, too, Ma, memories outside of Dad and the crash and the deaths—and the grudge.”

      Her face pale and tense, she brought the swing to a halt and stared at him. He hated seeing her pain, but damn it, what he’d said was true. He exhaled heavily, trying to rid himself of his anger. He wasn’t mad at his mother, necessarily, but at this whole situation.

      He almost heard Brigit building her arguments in her mind. Marc had become a lawyer like his father, but it was his mother who’d taught him the skills for making an airtight case.

      “You want Mari because she’s the only thing you’ve wanted and couldn’t have.”

      Marc started. “That’s a hell of a thing to say. Do you really believe that?”

      “I do,” Brigit said quietly. “You’re my oldest son, Marc. I carried you in my body, and I watched you grow from an infant to a man. Do you really think I’ve never noticed that once you set your mind on something, you make it happen, no matter what kind of storm you cause in the process?”

      Marc scowled. He couldn’t believe he was hearing this from his own mother’s mouth. “You make me sound like a spoiled brat. I’ve worked like hell to get anything I’ve ever had. And I’ve failed at plenty of things. What about Sandra?” he demanded.

      “I said anything you ever wanted. If you’d wanted Sandra more, the two of you would still be married.”

      Marc gave his mother a hard stare, warning her not to tread on that private territory. He’d heard her out after he and Sandra had decided to split, but that decision was his and his ex-wife’s business, not Brigit’s. His mother changed gears, just like that.

      “Mari never married, I hear,” Brigit said levelly.

      “No,”