This Time For Keeps. Jenna Mills

done nothing to mute the low quickening, the visceral reaction she’d first experienced one crisp fall day in New York a lifetime ago. He’d come into the lecture hall as a guest lecturer for her News Editorial class.

      He’d walked out with her heart.

      Now he stood not fifty feet away, the man who’d pulled into the parking lot as she and Charlotte had walked away, the man she’d seen at the edge of the clearing, watching. The low-slung jeans and wrinkled button-down were just as she remembered.

      The limp was new.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Two and a half years before

      “MEG, YOU READY?”

      She looked up from the well-worn parenting magazine and grinned. Instinctively her hand slid to her tummy. “Absolutely.”

      Dr. Brennan’s smile was warm. A tall, slender woman nearing sixty, she’d taken care of Meg since her first ob-gyn appointment over a decade before. “I thought Russell would be here.”

      Meg refused to let the frown form. Not today. “So did I,” she admitted with a quick glance at her watch. She’d been leaving messages for half an hour. He’d yet to call her back. “He must have gotten hung up at a meeting.”

      It wasn’t the first time, and, she figured, it wouldn’t be the last. Russell was like that, always losing himself in one project or another. His mother called it escape, but Meg thought that was overly harsh. Russell was an intensely intense man. He did nothing halfway. He was all in, or all out.

      “Should we wait a little bit?” Dr. Brennan asked. “I can probably spot you another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

      It was the right thing to do. Over the years he’d been by her side at so many appointments and procedures. Rarely did he miss. But today…

      “Nah,” Meg said, standing. There was no telling how much longer Russell would be, and as it was, she’d been waiting just about her whole life for this. She could tell him the news herself. She could surprise him. She already had the pink and blue booties purchased.

      After the sonogram, she’d know which pair to wrap.

      “Let’s do this,” she said, reaching for her satchel.

      Dr. Brennan nodded. “If you’re sure,” she said, escorting Meg toward the exam room. “Do you have any feelings, one way or the other?”

      “Russell thinks girl.”

      “And you?”

      “Healthy,” Meg replied as a little flutter quaked through her. “I’m just thinking healthy.”

      Present Day

      TWO YEARS WAS A LONG TIME.

      Russell Montgomery stood on the edge of the field of blue, as much an outsider as the night he’d walked out the front door of the house that had quit being a home. He’d told himself not to look back. It wasn’t healthy. Life was ahead of you, not behind.

      His eyes had shifted to the rearview mirror anyway, for one last look. Of the cheery blue century-old house. Of the yard that sloped down to the lazy creek, the row of willows, weeping. Of her.

      Instead, he’d found clay pots with wilted flowers, a swing in need of repair, an empty porch and the truth.

      There was nothing to look back at.

      But forward… Forward had taken him far, given him much. In the primitive villages of Mozambique, the tight, poisonous coil inside him had loosened. There, he’d been able to breathe. With the passing of each day, all those dark, festering emotions that had chased him from Pecan Creek faded a little more, until all that remained was the clinical realization that the life he and Meg had been creating had been an illusion.

      He’d never planned to come back.

      Hell, who was he kidding? He’d never planned anything that had happened since the day Meg first walked into his world.

      Africa was a continent of extremes, breathtaking beauty and mind-numbing depravity, lush jungles and barren deserts, kindness and cruelty.

      Innocence.

      Savagery.

      Being back in America…in Pecan Creek…

      It was like stepping back into an old, faded dream, familiar but fuzzy, fleeting but somehow ever seductive. You knew you were going to wake up, but for that briefest of moments, you wanted to just…linger.

      She sat there among the army of bluebonnets, the warm April wind whipping wheat-colored hair against an oval face that had once dominated his dreams. The angles were the same, the wide cheekbones and tilted eyes. The mouth that had once been so quick to—

      She wasn’t smiling now. Her hair was longer than before, looser. The shield of flowers hid her clothes, but he could make out a trace of something dark—and a whole lot of skin.

      And the baby…

      Something hard and sharp sliced through him. He’d seen a lot during his time away. He’d seen mothers and children, birth and death. But the sight of that chubby-cheeked little girl in Meg’s lap, the frilly white dress and shot of bright red hair…

      His bad leg throbbed. And for one brutal moment, everything between them fell away, the flowers and the years, the tears and the broken promises, leaving only him and Meg…and the baby they’d lost.

      With eyes of blue like her mum’s, he’d predicted.

      Even now, the urge to pound his fist into something hard and unmovable ripped through him.

      Slowly she rose from the bed of bluebonnets, easing the child to her chest. Sleeping, he realized. His sister’s baby was sleeping.

      Ainsley.

      He still couldn’t believe she was gone.

      And that he was here.

      And Meg was walking toward him. Meg of the pretty floral dresses, now wearing camouflage cargo pants and a black top that left little to his imagination.

      Or his memory.

      The urge to reach for his camera was pure instinct, the desire to capture the vivid contrast between innocence and—

      He didn’t know what. Typical Meg, she kept that all shuttered away, locked deep, deep inside, where no one could reach her.

      No one could touch her.

      Especially not him.

      He didn’t have his camera, but knew he didn’t need it. Some images had a way of lasting all by themselves.

      In the distance, old man Ray Blunt shuffled back into view. He paused and lifted a hand to his brow, watched.

      The automatic wave surprised Russell. He’d always liked Ray, had learned a lot about the world from a man who’d never left Texas.

      Ray returned the gesture, even though Russell was pretty sure the old man had no idea who he was.

      But Meg did. She moved toward him, her stride strong and confident, her chin high, allowing the breeze to keep playing with the tangled strands of her hair. The longer length made her look younger than the last time he’d seen her.

      Or maybe that was the baby sprawled all over her chest.

      He was a man used to watching, to standing on the sidelines and documenting. Never get involved. That was how you stayed intact. But he started toward her anyway, acutely aware that he was not in Pecan Creek as a journalist.

      Narrow trails of mutilated bluebonnets wound through the flowers. Once he’d chosen his steps carefully. Now he let instinct guide him—and kept his eyes trained forward.

      On the woman he left behind.

      IN THE BEGINNING, she’d imagined this. During those first few weeks