This Time For Keeps. Jenna Mills

she’d seen him at the edge of the cemetery.

      It was always the same. She would stand. He would approach. Arms were opened. She stepped in. Words weren’t spoken.

      Words weren’t needed.

      Only Russell.

      Now…God…now. Her chest tightened. Her throat burned. Beyond him she saw her car, but knew there was no way to reach the Lexus without getting by him.

      Russell Montgomery was back in Pecan Creek.

      “Meggie,” he said as the distance between them narrowed, and something inside her screamed. The last fringes of the dream shattered, even as the whisper of a different dream echoed through her.

      Two years. Two years since she’d heard the rolling lilt of her own husband’s voice.

      “And this must be little Charlotte,” he commented with the polite formality of a complete stranger. “She looks—”

      “Don’t.” The word burned on the way out. Meg stopped and looked up at him, could do nothing about the hot boil moving through her. “You don’t get to say that.”

      Russell stopped moving. “Meggie, look, I understand—”

      “You don’t understand a thing.” Meg barely recognized the rasp to her own voice. It had been almost ten weeks since the insanely clear February day when they’d buried this man’s sister…ten weeks during which he’d been conspicuously silent. No way could he just stroll back into town and say hello, make some kind of inane remark about who Charlotte looked like. “She was your sister, Russell. She deserved better.”

      So had Meg.

      The lines of his face went tight. “You know that’s not how I meant it,” he said, and she made herself swallow. “I just… Christ, Meg, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

      Hadn’t that always been the problem?

      “This isn’t about me,” she said automatically. It wasn’t about them. “It’s about Ainsley. She worshipped you, Russell. Thought you hung the moon. And yet you couldn’t even be bothered to come say goodbye.”

      “I didn’t know.”

      That stopped her. She shifted the baby, careful to keep one hand against the back of Charlotte’s head. “Didn’t know what? That Ainsley loved you? Why else would she have left Scotland to come live with us?”

      Only a few clouds drifted across the blue sky, but the shadows about Russell deepened. “That she died.”

      The quiet stillness to his voice went through Meg like broken glass.

      “I didn’t know that she died until two weeks ago.”

      “I called your parents.” Had called him first, from the hospital moments after Dr. Harrison had given her the horrible news. Instinctively she’d reached for her phone and called Russell, held her breath while the phone rang.

      Froze when she got his voice mail.

      She’d stood there in the starkly lit Emergency Room in the hour before dawn, listening. To his voice. His warm, casual message. But the beep had brought everything back into cruel, sharp focus, and she’d ended the call and swallowed hard, annoyed that after all this time, despite the divorce papers she’d had drawn up the month before, he’d been the first one she’d thought of.

      Because Ainsley was his sister, she’d realized. Meg had loved her dearly, but in the end, it was Russell’s blood that flowed through Ainsley’s veins.

      And Charlotte’s.

      He stood there now, a tall man with a body that promised strength, even as an unmistakable mist clouded his eyes.

      “I was on assignment,” he said in a voice so stripped down Meg had to concentrate to hear him. “My parents decided to wait until I was back before telling me.”

      She couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “Because they didn’t want to inconvenience you? She was their child. She deserved…” The words trailed off as the memories edged closer. The knock at the door. The race to the hospital. Ainsley on the bed, the tubes and machines, the punishing sense of urgency as everyone seemed to move in slow motion.

      “I would have come, Meggie. If I’d known, I would have been here.”

      A fresh wave of grief surged up from that deep, dark place, burning her throat anew. For Ainsley, she told herself. Not because of the sound of her name in her husband’s voice. No one else had ever called her Meggie.

      No one else had ever made her name sound like a caress.

      And for that, she hated him.

      “No one was here,” she said, still stung by how wrong it had been. “No one from your family. None of her friends.” Not even Charlotte’s father. Only Meg and Julia and Lori, a handful of locals. “She deserved better than that.”

      Russell’s jaw tightened. “I’m glad she had you,” he said. “That’s why she stayed, you know.”

      After he left.

      “I wasn’t family.”

      Russell frowned. “Meggie…you know that’s not true.”

      She looked away, toward the honeybees buzzing around her ankles. Meg had always wanted a sister. She had two cousins in town, but it wasn’t the same. Julia and Faith had lived in a big two-story house in a nice subdivision and took exotic vacations…with both their parents.

      Meg had never even known her father.

      Then Ainsley had come to town shortly after Meg and Russell married, a troubled teenager with a rebellious streak as long as a hot summer day, and a heart as tender as a dewdrop. After Russell left—

      Meg looked back up, felt something inside her shift. His smile was soft and warm, gentle. Sad. The lines of his face had relaxed, even the perpetual five o’clock shadow looked softer. But it was his eyes that got her, the crinkling at the corners, the warmth of the green, the glow of discovery and vulnerability.

      Meg’s hold on Charlotte tightened. She glanced down to find the baby awake, her big eyes trained curiously on the uncle she’d never met.

      “Well, hello there, poppet,” he murmured in the dialect of his childhood, and Charlotte’s little mouth lifted into a delighted smile.

      Meg wanted to wake up.

      But knew that this was no dream.

      “There’s my girl,” she said, shifting Charlotte so that she rode Meg’s hip. “What a good little nap you had.”

      Russell kept staring, as if the baby might vanish if he so much as took his eyes off her. “She’s—”

      “Wonderful,” Meg finished for him. A bittersweet gift she’d never expected. “She’s got so much of Ainsley in her.” And Russell. His eyes. His smile.

      His infectious laugh.

      At first being around Charlotte had hurt. But there’d been no one else to step in. Ainsley had never tried to track down her daughter’s father, saying only that he couldn’t be with them.

      “Then she must not be sleeping much,” Russell said, and before she could stop herself, Meg laughed.

      She didn’t want to laugh.

      “Fits and starts,” she said. Insomnia had been Ainsley’s middle name. Rumor had it she’d had her days and nights mixed up from the time she was born. “But we’re working on it.”

      “Ainsley always said—” Russell broke off, lifting a hand to feather a finger along the underside of Charlotte’s foot.

      She giggled.

      “Always said what?” Meg asked.

      “That