25 Years Read online

  Foreword by New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

  Happy birthday, Harlequin Superromance, and congratulations on twenty-five groundbreaking years!

  I was a struggling young writer when this romance series was introduced back in 1980. It was a wonderful opportunity for new writers, especially women. Many of us excitedly submitted our books, and over the years, Harlequin Superromance has launched many careers. In the early years I cherished books written by LaVyrle Spencer, Margaret Chittenden and many other authors. Their stories touched my heart.

  Through these twenty-five years, Harlequin Superromance evolved, along with its writers. (And I’m proud to say I’m one of them, with a novella in the twentieth anniversary anthology, Born in a Small Town, and a Christmas story, Those Christmas Angels, in 2003.)

  This twenty-fifth anniversary anthology, which you hold in your hands, features stories by three talented writers: Tara Taylor Quinn, Margot Early and Janice Macdonald. These writers are following the traditions created through the years by those who came before them. Traditions of love, courage, honor and dignity that remain the very heart of the romance genre. Because a Harlequin Superromance novel is a longer, richer story, it can offer more depth and range than other romances. There’s an emotional maturity, an added quality to these wonderful books.

  Congratulations, Superromance! At twenty-five, you’re in your prime—and you just seem to get better and better.

  Debbie Macomber

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  With thirty-seven novels, published in more than twenty languages, Tara Taylor Quinn is a USA TODAY bestselling author, with over four million copies of her books in print. She is a three-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA® Award, a multiple finalist for the National Readers’ Choice Award and the Booksellers’ Best Award. Tara is the president of RWA, a 9200-member international organization. When she’s not writing or fulfilling speaking engagements, she enjoys traveling and spending time with family and friends.

  Margot Early is the award-winning author of eleven novels and three novellas. She lives high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado with two German shepherds and twenty tarantulas. When she’s not writing, she’s outdoors in all seasons, often training her dogs in obedience.

  Born in Lancashire, England, Janice Macdonald came to the United States as a teenager—just a few short years ago. How she got old enough to have grown children and a granddaughter she has no idea, but the mirror offers the ruthless truth. Janice divides her time between Port Angeles, Washington, and Vista, California, where she lives with her husband, Joe. One of her biggest fans is her ninety-three-year-old mother, Dorothy, who lives in Seal Beach, California, is still active in community theater and grumbles if Janice writes too graphically about sex. Janice has written six previous books for Harlequin Superromance and is also a freelance writer specializing in travel and health care.

  Celebrates 25 Years

  with three incredible new stories by

  TARA TAYLOR QUINN

  MARGOT EARLY

  JANICE MACDONALD

  Foreword by

  DEBBIE MACOMBER

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  BEST FRIENDS

  Tara Taylor Quinn

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  WADE IN THE WATER

  Margot Early

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  A VISIT FROM EILEEN

  Janice Macdonald

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  For Jeanine. All my life you were the wind beneath my wings. Now you are my wings. I hope and pray you were as blessed by our friendship as I have been….

  BEST FRIENDS

  Tara Taylor Quinn

  Dear Reader,

  This story is unlike any other I’ve written. It is deeply personal in a way even I didn’t understand until I had difficulty quieting my mind enough to hear the voices and allow the words to flow. And while the characters and plot are fiction, the story I’m telling here—the story of a lifelong friendship that surpasses every earthly distance—is completely true.

  I was lucky enough to be blessed with such a friendship. Though neither of us could ever remember not knowing each other, I first met Jeanine Hall when she was four and I was five. From that moment on, I never took a breath in this world without feeling her love and support. Our families vacationed together—and then moved states apart, and still the friendship endured. And I will never take a breath again without knowing that such a special love is possible. Tragically, Jeanine was killed in a car accident a few years ago, but the love and support and belief she instilled within me are very much alive and thriving. She still helps me through all my difficult moments and is included in all my joyous ones. She’s here now as I write to you, smiling at me through her tears.

  I’m very honored to have been asked to bring our relationship to you. I hope I have given you a story that you can make personal. I wish each and every one of you the presence of someone in your life who believes in you just because you’re you, who accepts you as you are, who loves you in spite of knowing everything about you, who celebrates the day you were born.

  Tara Taylor Quinn

  P.S. I love to hear from readers. You can reach me at P.O. Box 13584, Mesa, AZ 85216, or visit me at www.tarataylorquinn.com.

  For my parents

  CHAPTER ONE

  “DID YOU JUST SAY you want a divorce?”

  Jolene Hamilton Chambers shoved a couple of bras into the duffel open on the bed she’d shared with her husband for the past seven years. And nodded.

  Not the best way to start a week.

  The bras covered a corner of the eight-inch blue rectangular box poking out from the pajamas she’d already packed on top of it. Except for a brief glimpse to ensure that she’d grabbed the right package from the back of the bottom shelf in her linen closet, Jolene hadn’t looked at that box for months. Not since she’d purchased it and then unexpectedly not needed it. She didn’t need it now—but she was waiting until she was with Tina, until she was stronger, before she tackled that one.

  Steve, standing with his arms crossed on the opposite side of the bed, watched her silently. He was still wearing the dress shirt and tie he’d worn to a new teachers’ July orientation meeting at the school earlier that morning. He’d been an elementary school principal when they’d married. His eyes had been softer then.

  Now, seven years later, he was principal of Boulder’s Valleyview High School and his gaze could intimidate even the most pierced, purple-haired, grunge-wearing students under his authority.

  Jolene wasn’t intimidated. She knew the tender-hearted man beneath the “Dr. Chambers” look. Adored him.

  “Talk to me, Jo.”

  His tone pleaded with her. She turned her back, scooped a handful of socks out of the open underwear drawer. So what if they didn’t match? She was only going to the cabin. That drawer shut, she yanked on the larger one below it. Three pairs of jeans, faded to varying degrees, followed the socks into the suitcase. And sweaters, she’d need sweaters. Didn’t matter that they were in the middle of Colorado’s hottest summer
in years, the state’s northern woods still got chilly at night.

  “You want a divorce.” His voice was deadpan. A complete antithesis of the emotional tug-and-pull twisting her insides.

  Not trusting herself to speak, or to look at him, she meticulously refolded a couple of perfectly well-folded sweaters, and nodded again. The sweaters fit on top of the jeans with room to spare.

  “Jo.” The back of Steve’s hand appeared in her line of vision. It rested on hers. She needed to slide her fingers from beneath his, to decide which blouses to take. Tina’s plane from Roanoke was landing just after two. That only gave her an hour and a half to load the car with the groceries and cooler and linens she’d packed that morning and get to the airport early enough to meet her best friend of twenty-five years.

  His hand was warm, thrilling and comforting at the same time. “I…mean it, Steve.” While her words were barely above a whisper, her voice didn’t waver. And neither did her intent.

  He released her hand. “Why?” Thrusting his own hands in the pockets of his dark brown dress slacks, he paced to the end of the bed. “Is there someone else?”

  She couldn’t blame him for sounding incredulous. How could she possibly be hungry for another man when she was so easily aroused by the man she was leaving—as their usual Sunday morning in bed had shown him quite clearly the day before.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then…why?”

  She walked to the closet, her legs shaking as she pulled open the folding door. “Because I love you so much it’s killing me.”

  Hand trembling, Jolene reached for a group of hangers and dropped the whole pile on the sweaters in her suitcase. She went into the adjoining bathroom, carried out her bag of toiletries, plopped it on top of the rest. And couldn’t avoid her husband’s gaze any longer.

  He hadn’t moved. His face, normally so expressive, was stiff, his eyes glassy with shock as he stared at her. Jolene stared back. She didn’t know what else to do. She was so close to falling apart she didn’t trust herself.

  She’d made the right decision. There was such absolute certainty about that she knew she’d be able to go through with it. But she felt no clarity about anything else. How did one go about divorcing the love of one’s life? And what would come afterward?

  “Could you explain that?”

  Jolene jumped. Had he read her mind?

  Then she understood.

  He’d been responding, about five minutes late, to the reason she’d given him for the divorce.

  “I can’t do it anymore, Steve.” Emotion suffocated her, making it nearly impossible to speak. Yet in spite of the trembling of her lips, the tears pushing against the back of her throat, she was resolute.

  “Do what?”

  “You, me, us. Our need to be parents. No baby. I can’t get over the guilt.”

  He moved so quickly around the bed, he had her by the shoulders before she could shift to avoid him. “That’s what this is about?” he asked, his voice almost light, as though at any moment laughter would burst forth. “This is just another bout of pretest jitters?”

  His grasp, as he pulled her against him, was fierce, almost crushing. She could feel the shaking in his arms, hear the pounding of his heart. “Thank God,” he murmured raggedly. “We’ll get through this, babe, we always do. No matter what we find out, we’ll go forward just like we have every other time.”

  Drawing back, he held her arms, staring at her, moisture glistening in his eyes. “You have no idea how scared I was, Jo, thinking I was the only one here who’s still so much in love I can’t see straight. I couldn’t figure out how your feelings had changed without my knowing. I’m so damned relieved, I’m babbling like an idiot….”

  His grin scorched her from the inside out. If she could have, she would’ve grinned back. If it had been a year ago, or the year before that. If she hadn’t already gone through the crushing disappointment so many times, she might’ve had the capacity to handle more, might’ve had shoulders strong enough to take on his disappointment as well as her own.

  But it wasn’t last year. Or any other time. It was now. She was thirty years old and couldn’t spend the next seven years wasting her energy on something that would never happen. She couldn’t spend another year living with the shadows in her husband’s eyes whenever they went out to eat and were seated near a couple with a small child, or went to the grocery and passed a toddler sitting in the store cart, or went to church or to the movies or shopping, or stopped at a light next to a van with a car seat. She was through with this—had to be. The pressure was too much.

  “I’ve lost ten pounds, Steve.”

  “You’ve had a rough couple of months at work—”

  She shook her head, effectively cutting him off. Yes, her position as social worker at the local crisis nursery was stressful. Yes, it had been particularly bad this spring and into the summer as her files filled with more children than there were acceptable foster homes to accommodate them.

  “My inability to conceive is destroying me.”

  “So we’ll adopt—”

  “Steve!” She was as shocked by her scream as he was.

  Lowering her head, Jolene zipped her bag and pulled it off the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said, extending the handle as the suitcase landed at her feet. “But this is exactly what I mean. The guilt, the disappointment, the pressure—it’s just too much for me. I can’t even maintain control of my emotions.” She looked at him because she couldn’t not look at him. “I know how much you need children of your own—not someone else’s children to care for. You do that all day long, and so do I. You need children who are a continuation of you, of your father….”

  Steve’s father, a policeman, had been gunned down by a desperate homeless teenager trying to break into a pay phone. Steve was ten. His mother had died shortly after he was born from a blood clot following simple outpatient surgery to fix a prolapsed bladder resulting from his birth.

  She yanked on the suitcase handle and headed out to the hall, the bag feeling like a mass of hundred-pound rocks moving slowly at her heels.

  “Sure I want kids.” Steve was right behind her. “But not more than I want you. You’re my life, Jo….”

  And she’d had ovarian cysts that, once removed, had left scar tissue making it unlikely she’d conceive. Unlikely that she’d ever give Steve—her healthy and perfectly fertile husband—the one thing he wanted most out of life. A child of his own.

  The last time they’d spent the thousands of dollars necessary for the medical procedure that had a twenty percent chance of impregnating her, she’d started her period almost immediately. That night, he’d thought she was asleep when he crept quietly from their bed. She’d been lying quietly beside him, trying to regulate her breathing, but she’d been far from asleep. She’d crawled out of bed, too, thinking they’d share a late-night drink as they had after a couple of the other disappointments. He hadn’t heard her. And he hadn’t gone for a drink. Instead, she’d seen him in his office, staring at a photo book she’d never seen before, but one she’d perused several times since. It was filled with pictures of him and his dad.

  And that night, while she watched from the doorway, her husband of more than five years, the man who’d never shed a tear in her presence, had wept like a baby….

  “I have to go….”

  Opening the door off the kitchen leading to the garage and her year-old Ford Explorer, Jolene fled.

  And didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CABIN HADN’T AGED a bit, or so it seemed to Tina Randolph as she peered through the Colorado spruce and aspen trees for her first glimpse of the place. Certainly the road in—two tire tracks in the dirt—hadn’t changed much in the twenty-five years she’d been coming here. Taller trees maybe. She was taller, too, but they still seemed to tower as they had when she was a child.

  There was a certain comfort in the sameness of it all—in knowing that there was something in life that could be
counted on not to change. To be there, just as it always had been.

  She glanced at Jolene, looking beyond the halfhearted smiles and the obvious effort it was taking her friend to keep up a steady chatter. “It’s good to be with you, you know?” she said softly.

  Looking briefly at Tina, Jolene met her gaze as openly as always. She nodded. “I missed you.”

  It was first time Jolene had totally connected with her since they’d hugged at the airport a couple of hours earlier.

  Tina watched as the hundred-year-old stone cabin came fully into view. As usual, the heavy wooden shutters were down. They’d probably have to chase out a critter or two—if not a mouse, then certainly some spiders. The electrical fuse would have to be put in the pump, the water turned on and beds made before she’d have a chance to pin down her friend about the sadness lurking in her posture, her eyes.

  The in vitro must not have worked. She’d been dreading the possibility of hearing this since she’d boarded the plane in Roanoke that morning. For more than five years, Jolene had been putting herself through uncomfortable and embarrassing medical procedures, trying to have the child who’d fill the holes in her husband’s heart. For more than five years, Tina had hurt with her friend and worried about her, as Jolene saw each unsuccessful attempt as a personal failure. How long could she blame herself for something that was completely out of her control? At some point, Jolene was going to break. And then what would happen?