Suddenly Home. Loree Lough

      

      “Let’s get something on those scratches.”

      For the next five minutes, Alex sat in one of Taylor’s kitchen chairs as she swabbed his cuts with antiseptic. His own mother hadn’t fussed over him this gently when he’d skinned his knees as a boy.

      What made Taylor’s attentions seem so…different? Maybe the way her hands shook, ever so slightly, as she touched the swabs to his cuts. Maybe it was the way her voice trembled just a little when she asked, “Does that hurt?”

      And maybe, just maybe, it was the look in her eyes that said even something as insignificant as cat scratches were important…because he was important.

      If only—

      LOREE LOUGH

      A full-time writer for more than a dozen years, Loree Lough has produced more than 2,000 published articles, dozens of short stories—appearing in magazines here and abroad—and novels for the young (and young at heart). The author of twenty-nine romances (including the award-winning Pocketful of Love, Emma’s Orphans and bestsellers like Reluctant Valentine, Miracle on Kismet Hill and Just One Christmas Wish) Loree also writes as Cara McCormack and Aleesha Carter.

      A comedic teacher and conference speaker, Loree loves sharing in classrooms what she’s learned the hard way. She lives in Maryland with her husband of nearly (gasp, sputter, choke!) thirty years.

      Suddenly Home

      Loree Lough

      

www.millsandboon.co.uk

      MILLS & BOON

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      Come home with me, and refresh thyself,

       and I will give thee a reward.

      —I Kings 13:7

      To Elice and Valerie, my daughters,

       my friends…may the romance of true love

       care for you all the days of your lives.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Letter to Reader

      Prologue

      Date: December 17

       Time: 1600

       Coordinates: 17º 22.3 minutes north

       66º 45.6 minutes west

       Altitude 500 feet

      Like blue-green tentacles, lightning snaked along the F-16’s wingtips, brightening the Puerto Rican sky and blacking out the entire control panel. Lieutenant Alex Van Buren had mere seconds to decide: Eject…

      Or go down with the fighter.

      He jerked back on the throttle, but it was no use. He couldn’t bring the aircraft out of its nosedive. If he abandoned the plane, there’d be no time for his chute to open. Not while flying over the choppy waters at an altitude of five hundred feet.

      He hoped for a miracle. There’d been times when, under similar conditions, other pilots’ parachutes had released…right…?

      Who was he kidding? He’d been a test pilot a long time. More than long enough to know a guy didn’t bullet through the sky at nearly six hundred miles an hour and survive a crash. But even if he didn’t die, he’d be so broken and battered he’d be lucky to see a cockpit again, let alone manipulate its controls.

      Death didn’t scare him. Living—if it meant he couldn’t fly—now, that terrified him. As a much younger man he’d entertained the idea of pastoring a little church in the boonies. But every Van Buren before him had been a naval officer. Who was he to break tradition, especially for something as meaningless as a boyhood dream?

      So many thoughts, so many questions racing through his mind….

      As the sparkling surface of the water hurtled closer, closer, Van Buren held his breath and closed his eyes, steeling himself for the rib-racking effects of ejection, and did something he hadn’t done in ages.

      He prayed.

      Prayed he’d pass out, so he wouldn’t hear his bones breaking, his muscles tearing. Prayed that God, in His infinite mercy and wisdom, would let him drown quickly in the warm island waters; better that than go home as something other than the man he’d worked so long and hard to become.

      Van Buren felt his body catapult from the cockpit.

      And as he became one with the sky, he wondered if he’d survive the impact.

      Date: December 17

       Time: 4:00 p.m.

       Supra-Air Flight 550

       In the skies above Puerto Rico

      If she spoke, even to order coffee, she’d break down. And so when the flight attendant stopped the drink cart beside her seat, Taylor pretended to be asleep…

      And remembered the last time she’d talked to her mother.

      Back then, Taylor had been working at a small pub in Houston. As usual, her mom ended the telephone conversation with a warning about what becomes of folks who live in the fast lane. In her mother’s opinion, Taylor—who’d traded her physical therapist smock for a microphone—had spent the past five years doing exactly that.

      Taylor wasted no time pointing out that, in her opinion, it was the other way around. Because six months before, her mother had taken up with a has-been race-car driver who, frustrated by a dead-end career, had begun hurtling through life at maximum overdrive….

      These past twelve hours had been a crazy, hazy blur: the phone call to her uncle Dave, then booking a last-minute flight from Puerto Rico to Baltimore, packing, hailing a taxi…. Through it all, Taylor fought tears, asking herself why she hadn’t called her mom more often, why she hadn’t visited home more frequently. Because if she’d been there, she could have steered her mother around the hazard signs in the road ahead.

      It hardly seemed possible that just the night before, Taylor had been sitting on a tall padded stool at San Juan’s Posada Felicidad, strumming her Yamaha and singing “In Your Arms” when her boss had waved an arm to get her attention, then pointed at the phone, letting Taylor know the call was for her.

      A slight frown, a small head shake had made clear what she’d mouthed between verses: “Take a message.”