Confessions. JoAnn Ross

of prime Arizona ranch land her grandmother Ida Prescott had bequeathed her.

      After years of unhappiness, she’d returned home to Whiskey River. Where she belonged. And where she had every intention of spending the rest of her life with the man who, for eight blissful hours, in what seemed another lifetime, had been her husband.

      Laura returned back upstairs, traded her towel for a long seafoam silk nightgown, then climbed into the cedar log bed.

      Knowing she’d never be able to fall asleep, she sat bolt upright and twisted her hands together atop the Sunshine and Shadows quilt she and Clint had unearthed in a quaint Shenandoah Valley antique shop during a clandestine, love-filled weekend. The same weekend their child had been conceived.

      The storm stalled overhead, wrapping the house in its grip. Rain pounded against the windows. Thunder boomed like cannon fire; psychedelic flashes of lightning streaked across the sky. Wind wailed outside the bedroom window like a savage spirit.

      It was going to be, Laura thought, a very long night.

      Although she’d not considered it possible, Laura eventually fell asleep. She dreamed of Christmas, could actually smell the pungent scent of the pine tree taking up most of the living room. Beneath the tree were gaily wrapped presents. Enough toys to fill F.A.O. Scharwz spilled over the floor.

      A fire blazed in the fireplace; fat white flakes drifted down like snowy feathers outside the window, creating a scene straight out of Currier and Ives.

      Laura saw herself sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, Clint sitting beside her. A little boy with her husband’s jet hair and solemn blue eyes sat on her lap, listening intently as his father read aloud from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

      It was an idyllic scene, born of Laura’s most private yearnings. One she was loathe to leave. Which was why, when the sound of the bedroom door opening filtered into her consciousness, she fought waking up.

      The bedroom lamp, operated by a wall switch beside the door flashed on. Still struggling to hold on to her dream, which was rapidly disappearing like morning mist over the tops of the tall ponderosa pines outside the ranch house, she mumbled an inarticulate complaint.

      The dream faded from view. Laura reluctantly roused, blinking against the blinding light.

      Her sleepy mind recognized the familiar face. As her lips curved in a groggy, puzzled smile, a sound like an early Fourth of July firecracker shattered the nighttime stillness.

      Startled, and unaware she’d been shot, Laura pressed her hand against the searing heat at her breast. Crimson blood flowed over her naked flesh, staining her fingertips.

      Still uncomprehending, she stared up at her attacker, tried to ask Why? but discovered she’d gone mute. A mist covered her eyes.

      Silvery rain snakes streaked down the bedroom window. Her wounded heart continued to beat.

      Pumping out precious blood.

      Laura’s last conscious thought was regret that she hadn’t told Clint about their baby.

      And then, as a second sharp retort filtered through the fog clouding her mind, Laura Swann Fletcher surrendered to the darkness.

      Chapter Two

      “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” Mariah Swann muttered.

      Her fingers gripped the steering wheel of her new fire-engine red Jeep Grand Cherokee. A drenching downpour streamed across the windshield, as the ineffectual swish swish of the wipers added accompaniment to Travis Tritt singing on the CD player about the perils of falling in love with an unfaithful woman. The storm, which had stuck like glue overhead all the way from her Malibu beach house had her two hours behind schedule. The digital clock on the dashboard said two o’clock. In the morning. She still had another twenty miles to go before she reached Whiskey River. And then there was that death-defying drive up to her sister’s ranch.

      “You’ve been gone ten years, dummy,” she scolded herself for her impatience. “What’s another two hours, more or less?”

      It shouldn’t matter. But it did. Because recently she’d been thinking about Laura. A lot.

      The time had come for making amends. For healing old wounds. And who better to begin with than the woman who, once, had been Mariah’s best friend?

      Her thoughts in a turmoil as she relived the tempestuous day she’d left Whiskey River, Mariah almost didn’t see the white barricade blocking the roadway. She slammed the brake pedal to the floor, grateful for the antilock brakes that kept her from sliding through the barricade into the swirling, churning waters.

      The rain had caused the river to flood its banks. Attempting a crossing, especially in the dark, would not only be foolhardy, but possibly deadly.

      “Damn!”

      Mariah glared out at the raging river, at the rain streaming down the windshield, at the stormy sky and considered her options. She could sit here, wait until dawn, and check out exactly how deep the water was running. Or she could turn around, head back the way she’d come, get a motel room in Camp Verde and wait the storm out.

      Choosing caution for once, she managed, just barely, to make a U-turn. Fifteen minutes and thirty-five dollars later, she was sitting on a too soft mattress in the Pinewood Motel, telephone receiver in hand trying to get through to her sister, so she could advise Laura not to wait up.

      Mariah frowned at the busy tone. “Who could she be talking to at nearly three in the morning?” She tried once more. Again, the line rang busy.

      “Maybe she took the phone off the hook.” Mariah wondered if Laura was avoiding her. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering their rocky past. But during the past two years when they’d begun speaking again, she’d hoped that she and her sister had put those days behind them.

      Perhaps the storm had knocked down the lines.

      “Shit.”

      Patience had never been Mariah Swann’s long suit. It wasn’t now. She dug through her purse, searching out the cigarettes she’d bought in Kingman, swearing, as always, they’d be her last. She located the already crumpled pack, shook a cigarette loose and picked up the matches from the tin ashtray on the bedside table. The matchbook cover suggested she was only a free test away from a career as a commercial artist.

      As she lit the cigarette, drawing the acrid smoke into her lungs, she could almost hear Laura lecturing her, the same way she had the first time Mariah had gotten caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom at school.

      Their mother, unable to stand the remoteness of ranch life, had fled Whiskey River—and her domineering husband. The same day Margaret McKenna Swann packed her Louis Vuitton suitcases and returned to Hollywood, Matthew Swann had filed for divorce.

      Angry, unable to understand their mother’s defection, and chafing under her father’s iron hand, Mariah became the rebellious Swann daughter. Which left Laura, by default, the role of the solid, responsible daughter.

      Only lately had Mariah begun to understand how having so much responsibility dumped on Laura’s shoulders at such a young age must have cost her older sister. Not that Laura had ever complained.

      Except the time she’d shocked everyone by eloping with Clint Garvey. The ill-fated marriage had lasted less than a day.

      After their father brought her home Laura never mentioned Clint again. A few years later, she married the man her father had chosen for her, and if the glowing articles Mariah read in all the magazines were any indication, her sister was happy.

      But sometimes, when the camera lens was focused on the senator while Laura stood loyally in the background, a photographer would capture a candid, unpracticed expression on her face. An expression so filled with sadness that Mariah wanted to cry.

      “I’ll make it up to you, Laurie.” Guilt and regret snaked through her.