And Then Came You by Maureen Child Read Free Book Online Page A

tactic. She’d threatened to disinherit him. But he hadn’t been bowed and his mother eventually caved in as he’d been so sure she would.
    Memories rushed through Sam’s mind, staggering her with the onslaught of lost passion and buried pain.But she couldn’t stop it. She felt it all again. Saw it all again. Saw herself as a young bride, living in a tiny apartment, and for the first couple of weeks everything was great. But then reality crashed and took them down with it.
    Didn’t matter, she thought. Nothing mattered now. Nothing but Emma.
    “I sent you a letter, Jeff. Telling you about the baby. You sent it back to me. Unopened.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “And,”
she added, as if he hadn’t spoken at all, “you sent along a set of divorce papers.”
    He shook his head, but something in his eyes shifted, changed, softened from anger to suspicion. “No I didn’t.”
    “
Somebody
did,” she snapped, leaning toward him. “And I’ve still got my returned letter to prove it.”
    He scraped one hand across the back of his neck. “Assuming that such a letter exists,” he said tightly, “why the hell would you keep it?”
    “As a reminder.”
    “Of what?”
    She looked up into his eyes. “It reminds me of the mistake I made in trusting the wrong person.”
    He winced.
    She didn’t care.
    “Show me,” he said.

Chapter Four
    “I don’t believe this,” Jeff said, clutching the unopened, nine-year-old envelope. But he did. Dammit, he did. Standing in Sam’s old bedroom in the Marconi family house, he half-expected one of her sisters to charge into the room swinging a chain saw. And right this minute, he couldn’t even say he’d blame them.
    They’d left Emma back at the inn. The owner’s sixteen-year-old daughter had been happy to earn another twenty bucks babysitting. And this was definitely something he and Sam had to do alone. Just the two of them.
    For years, he’d told himself that he and Emma had been lucky to escape Sam. She’d divorced him and given their child away. She hadn’t wanted either of them in her life. And he’d made peace with that long ago. Now he was forced to face the idea that all of it had been a lie. That his own mother had orchestrated everything from behind the scenes. “Damn her.”
    “Huh? Damn who?” Sam’s voice, insistent, cracking, as if she were about to snap in two. All that was holding her together were the tight bands of anger he could practically
see
.
    His hand tightened on the still-sealed envelope andhis gaze fixed on the too-familiar scrawl across the front of it. “My mother.”
    God, how it cost him to admit this. To acknowledge that Eleanor Hendricks would go to such amazing lengths to get her son away from a woman she’d always considered unsuitable. Rage swept him like a brush fire consuming a hillside. It kept climbing, burning hotter and hotter, and there was no way of stopping it.
    “Your—” She stared at him for a long count of ten and then stomped past him toward the window that overlooked the wide expanse of front lawn. An ancient oak stood in the center of the yard, sending gnarled, twisted branches out into a canopy of papery leaves that danced in the ever-present wind. From below came the muted music of a wind chime moving lazily in the breeze.
    While she stared blankly out the window, Jeff stared at
her
. Nine years and she looked even better than he remembered. And God knew, he remembered way too well—on those rare occasions when a memory of her flitted through his mind. He tried to
not
remember. What was the point, after all? But with Emma growing into a miniature version of her mother, was it so surprising that thoughts of Sam kept cropping up?
    Those few, amazing weeks of their marriage had been the one and only time in his life that he’d let go. That Jeff hadn’t allowed himself to be ruled by the Hendricks dogma, “What will people say?” At nineteen, he’d discovered passion and the freedom of being himself—or at least