LITMIR.BIZ

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seat belt seemed to present an epic challenge. Then the key refused to fit in the lock. Finally she started the engine—which sounded like a sonic boom to her frantic ears—and then she almost forgot to push the garage door opener before backing out.

      Her gaze kept shooting to the back door. Waiting for it to open. Afraid it would open. No matter how well she’d planned, no matter what she’d said, she was still afraid something or someone would find a way to stop her from leaving, stop her from taking Tess.

      In an ideal world, she’d have made contingency plans—but she hadn’t been living in an ideal world for a long time now. She had no alternate plans, no contingency ideas.

      This was it. Her one shot to tear apart her entire life in one fell swoop.

      That thought was so monumentally intimidating that she considered having a full-scale nervous breakdown—but darn it, she didn’t have time. Her hand coiled on the gearshift and jerked it in reverse. The instant the car cleared the driveway, she gunned the accelerator.

      Rain slooshed down in torrents, blurring her vision of the house and neighborhood. For so long she’d thought of Grosse Pointe as her personal Camelot. It struck her with a flash of irony that it really had been. She was the one who’d goofed up the happy-ever-after ending. She’d not only failed to follow the fairy-tale script, she’d somehow turned into the wicked character in the story.

      Kasey knew people believed that. For months, she’d believed herself at fault, too—but no more.

      She leaned forward, fooling with knobs and buttons. The windshield wipers struggled valiantly to keep up with the rain, but the defroster was losing ground. Steam framed the edges of the windows, creating a surreal, smoky world where it seemed as if nothing existed but her and the baby.

      Kasey spared a quick, protective glance at her daughter. In that tiny millisecond, her heart swelled damn near to bursting. She’d never imagined the fierce, warm, irrevocable bond between mother and child until she’d had Tess. Sometimes she thought that love was bigger than both of them.

      It still struck her as amazing, what even a spineless wuss—such as herself—would do for her child. And for love.

      Emotions clogged in her throat, welled there, jammed there. Even now, she knew she could turn back. It was hard, not to want to be safe. Hard, to believe she had what it took to take this road.

      By the standards of another life—the life she’d been living a year ago—Kasey knew absolutely that others would judge her behavior as wrong. Dead wrong, morally and ethically wrong, wrong in every way a woman could define the word.

      A sudden clap of thunder shook the sky. The storm was getting worse, lightning scissoring and slashing the sky over the lake. When Kasey turned on Lakeshore Drive, Lake St. Clair was to her left, the water black and wild and spitting foam. There were no boats on the lake, no cars on the road. No one else was anywhere in sight.

      Sane people had the sense to stay home in storms this rough.

      At the first traffic light, she whipped her head around again, but Tess didn’t need checking on. The baby was wide awake and staring intently at the car windows, where streetlights reflected in the rain drooling down the glass.

      The look in the baby’s eyes warmed Kasey. It didn’t suddenly miraculously make their situation all right—nothing could do that. But it was so easy to think of the storm as uncomfortable and unpleasant. Through the baby, Kasey saw the night diamonds, the magic in rain and light. Her vulnerable daughter had brought her miracles in every sense of the word.

      Whatever frightening or traumatic things happened from here, she was simply going to have to find a way to cope with them.

      The instant the traffic light turned green, she zoomed through the intersection. Quickly the lake disappeared behind them. The long sweeps of velvet lawns and elegant estates turned into ordinary streets. Lakeshore Drive changed its name when it got past the ritzy stuff. Kasey started sucking in great heaps of air at the same time.

      The extra oxygen didn’t particularly help. She still couldn’t make her pulse stop zooming, her hands stop shaking. But it was odd. She didn’t really mind being shook up to beat the band. At least those feelings were real. She didn’t have to hide being anxious, being afraid—being who she was—anymore.

      Love had the power to change a woman.

      Kasey would never doubt that again.

      The trick, of course, was for a woman to be able to tell the difference between life-transforming love and the kind of love that could destroy her.

      She ran a yellow light. Then another. Courage started coming back in slow seeps. Of course, she was nervous and afraid. Who wouldn’t be?

      She knew where she was going now. It was just hard to stop the questions from spinning in her mind.

      How could she possibly have come to this point?

      How did a nice, quiet, decent woman who’d always played by the rules get herself into such a situation?

      How had the dream of her life become such a soul-destroying nightmare?

      But the answers, of course, couldn’t be found in this night. The answers were steeped in the events over the past year. In fact, the whole story began almost a year ago to the day….

      CHAPTER 1

       “F or God’s sake, Kasey. No one’s killing you. You’re just having a baby!”

      “Yeah, well, they told me all the pain would be in my head. None of it’s in my head!”

      “Yelling and swearing isn’t going to help.”

      Well, actually, she thought it might. She should have known it would happen to her this way. Breaking her water at a party—right in front of people she wanted to respect her, people Graham respected. Still, knowing she was going to die within the next hour definitely helped. It was a little depressing, realizing that peoples’ last memory of her would be with bloody water gushing down her legs in the middle of a dinner party. On the other hand, she’d be dead, so what was the point in worrying about it? For the same reason, there didn’t seem much point not to howl her heart out when the next pain hit, either.

      As far as she could tell, she wasn’t likely to live through the next pain anyway.

      “You wanted this baby,” Graham reminded her.

      “Oh, Graham, I do. I do.”

      “So try and get a grip. We’ll be at the hospital in fifteen minutes. Just stay here. I’ll run upstairs and get your suitcase and some towels for the car….”

      He was gone, leaving Kasey in the kitchen alone for those few minutes. She sank against the white tile counter as another contraction started to swell.

      Something was wrong with her. It wasn’t the stupid pain. They’d all lied about the pain—and she was going to stay alive long enough to kill the Lamaze instructor who promised that labor was simply work. It wasn’t work. It was torture, cut and dried. Yet Kasey fiercely, desperately, wanted this baby, and had expected to feel joyous when the blasted labor process finally started.

      Instead, she felt increasingly overcome by a strange, surreal sense of panic. Goofy thoughts kept pouncing in her mind. This wasn’t her house. This wasn’t her life. This wasn’t really happening to her.

      As the contraction finally ebbed, leaving her forehead flushed with sweat, she stared blankly around the high-tech kitchen. She realized perfectly well that anxiety was causing those foolish thoughts, yet the acres of stainless steel appliances and miles of white tile really didn’t seem to be hers. She’d never have chosen a white floor for a kitchen. The doorway led to a dining room with ornate Grecian furniture that she’d never chosen, either. The dining room led into a great room with cream carpeting and cream furniture—Graham had chosen all that stuff before they’d married, wanting a neutral color like crème to set off the artwork on the walls. He was a collector.

      But

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