Last-Minute Marriage

#942 LAST-MINUTE MARRIAGE

Riverbend

Marisa Carroll

#943 BECCA’S BABY

Shelter Valley Stories

Tara Taylor Quinn

#944 THE DAUGHTER MERGER

Janice Kay Johnson

#945 OBSESSION

Kay David

#946 THE HOUSE AT

BRIAR LAKE

Roxanne Rustand

#947 THE MAN BEHIND

THE BADGE

Count on a Cop

Dawn Stewardson

Dad, can I stay up late tonight?”

“Not on a school night,” Mitch said. “Now, why don’t you go show Granddad your drawing, then get to your homework?”

Sam grumbled something unintelligible and went inside with his head hanging. By the time he’d greeted their yellow Lab and shown his grandfather his drawing, he was in a better mood.

Mitch watched the two most important people in his world for a moment. But a part of his brain refused to focus on the scene. Instead, it kept pestering him to check out the car in the lot near the park’s rose bed. Unless he missed his guess, it was a red compact. And as far as he knew, there had only been one red car there today.

But Tessa Masterson was supposed to be safely ensconced in her room at the River View, not sitting in a dark parking lot on a wet October night.

“I’m going out for a quick run,” he informed Sam and his grandfather.

“It’s raining,” Sam observed.

“Your dad’s losing his marbles, going out for a run on a night like this,” Caleb said, drawing circles on his temple with his index finger.

Maybe he was crazy, Mitch thought. Crazy enough to have to see for himself if the car in the parking lot had California plates and a pregnant, sad-eyed woman inside.

*

Dear Reader,

Over the past year and a half, Riverbend, Indiana, has become very real to us. It has come to life in a manner we would have never thought possible when we were first asked to help create this wonderful little town and the people who inhabit it. And along the way, we’ve gained new friends of our own—the other authors in the series.

We’ve come together from across the country to find that even though none of us has ever been to Riverbend, our visions of what we wanted it to be were very much alike. No matter where we grew up, north or south, city or country, we all hold a place much like it in our hearts.

We hope you enjoy reading Tessa and Mitch’s story as much as we enjoyed writing it, and that all the Riverbend stories will find a permanent place in your hearts.

Sincerely,

Carol and Marian (writing as Marisa Carroll)

Last-Minute Marriage

Marisa Carroll

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Mitch Sterling: Single father, owner/operator of Sterling Hardware and River Rat

Tessa Masterson: Unmarried, seven months pregnant, stranded in Riverbend

Sam Sterling: Mitch’s ten-year-old son

Caleb Sterling: Mitch’s grandfather, lifelong Riverbend resident

Brian Delaney: Father of Tessa’s child

Tom Baines: Prize-winning journalist, estranged father and River Rat

Lynn Kendall: Minister and newcomer to Riverbend

Ruth and Rachel Steele: Tom’s twin maiden aunts, operators of Steele’s Books

Kate McMann: Manager of Steele’s Books and Lynn’s best friend

Charlie Callahan: Contractor, temporary guardian and River Rat

Beth Pennington: Physician’s assistant, athletic trainer and Charlie’s ex-wife

Aaron Mazerik: Former bad boy, current basketball coach and counselor at Riverbend High

Lily Bennett Holden: Golden Girl, widow, artist and River Rat

Abraham Steele: Town patriarch and bank president, recently deceased

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

SHE WAS LOST.

There was no getting around it. She was thoroughly lost on the back-country roads of rural Indiana. Lost, almost out of gas, and totally shaken by her near miss with a gargantuan piece of farm machinery at the last crossroads.

Tessa Masterson got out of the car and took a couple of deep breaths. It wouldn’t help her baby if she went into a fit of hysterics. And even if she allowed herself to give in to the urge, what good would hysterics do in the middle of nowhere?

And she was in the middle of nowhere. She looked around. Cornstalks nine feet high lined both sides of the narrow road. They stretched away, ahead and behind her, like a long golden tunnel, blocking the view of the tree-studded, nearly flat landscape. Overhead the sky was a bright autumn blue, not a cloud in sight. But she knew the blue sky and the warmth of the October afternoon were an illusion. The air would grow cold when the sun went down, and storm clouds were gathering along the western horizon. She’d watched them piling up in her rearview window for the past couple of hours.

Grasshoppers whirred around her, leaping in the dry brown grasses growing along the banks of the shallow ditch that paralleled the road. It was a much smaller ditch than the one she’d nearly driven into trying to avoid the huge green combine with its wicked-looking, spear-tipped attachment that took up almost the entire road.

The wizened farmer in the cab of the machine probably hadn’t even seen her predicament. If he had, he didn’t bother to stop and help. By the time she’d righted the car and stopped shaking enough to drive on, she’d lost track of the directions the highway patrolman had given her as he’d waved her off the main highway to detour around a jackknifed eighteen wheeler. She reached into the back seat, took a map out of her backpack and spread it open on the hood of the car.

Was she supposed to go left at County Road SW-6 or stay on this county road until she came to E-7? She should have written the instructions down, but there’d been cars behind her, their drivers impatient and obviously more familiar with the area than she was. She knew she needed to keep heading east, and she was doing that, but in this part of the state, major highways were few and far between. As was just about everything else but cornfields and silos.

Tessa pushed a strand of her shoulder-length, honey-blond hair behind her ear and looked around. No landmarks of any kind could be seen, dwarfed as she was by cornstalks. A large brown grasshopper landed on a fringed circle of Queen Anne’s lace by her foot. He swayed there for a minute, surveying the world from an even more limited viewpoint than Tessa’s, and then hopped away, leaving the flower swinging in his wake.

No help there.

She had to find a town, or at least a gas station, or she and her temperamental car would be stranded out here in the boondocks for the night. The Wabash River ought to be somewhere to the south. If nothing else, she could head in that direction until she ran into it, and then turn east. But she didn’t know how far south the river was.

She’d caught a glimpse of a blue water tower just before the incident with the combine, but it had disappeared behind the distant line of trees by the time she reached the next open field. If she was reading her map correctly, the water tower belonged to a small dot on the map called Riverbend.

Already the sun was riding low above the cornstalks. The shadows were long, and the whirring of the crickets and grasshoppers had slowed in just the short time she’d been standing at the side of the road. She folded the map, getting it almost right on the first try. She had to find her way to this Riverbend place. And soon. For all she knew it was so small they rolled up the sidewalks at five-thirty and the whole town went home to supper, including whoever ran the filling station. But evidently it was the only town for miles around.

She was so tired. She’d driven most of every night and half the next day for the past four days. She’d gotten into the habit when crossing the desert, because it was cooler driving. But by the time she’d reached the plains of Kansas, she was doing it to save money. Motel rooms were expensive. Even the cheapest, no-frills ones cost more than she could afford. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—arrive at her sister’s home in Albany seven months pregnant, unmarried, and with nothing but the clothes on her back.

I’m going to have a baby in two months. As always, the thought gave her a little shock of anxiety mixed almost equally with joy.

She might have picked the wrong man to be the father of that baby. She might have made a mess of her life in a lot of ways. But she was determined to be a good mother, even if that meant going home to Albany in disgrace, putting up with her older sister’s I-told-you-so’s and going on welfare until the baby was old enough for her to get a job. Even if it meant giving up her dream of teaching history to spend the rest of her life working to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.

She already loved this baby. She was going to keep it. And she was going to raise it the best way she knew how. But she didn’t dare think too far ahead, because the enormity of it all scared her to death. One day at a time. One step at a time. That was how she’d made it so far. It was how she intended to keep on.

And the very first thing she needed to do was buy gas for her car.

“LOOKS LIKE RAIN,” Ethan Staver said, lifting a finger off the steering wheel to point at the horizon. “Clouds been piling up all afternoon.”

“Radio said it would start before sundown,” Mitch Sterling replied. “Supposed to rain all night and all day tomorrow.”

“That’ll have the farmers on the move.”

Mitch surveyed the fields of yellowing corn that bordered the county highway through the bug-splattered windshield. “None of them like to get bogged down in wet fields.”

“And the longer it takes for them to get their corn in, the later it’ll be before they can take off for Florida for the winter.”

Mitch grinned. Ethan hadn’t lived in Riverbend, Indiana, all his life the way he had, but the police chief knew farmers.

“What did you think of the renovations to the regional jail?” Mitch asked him. They’d spent the afternoon touring the facility—Ethan as the representative of Riverbend’s small police force, and Mitch as a member of the town council.

“The place looks pretty good. Not that we send a lot of people there, but it’s good to know there’s a secure facility when we need one.”

Riverbend was the seat of Sycamore County, Indiana. It had its own jail in the courthouse, but these days it was pretty much just a holding station for prisoners. There was no way the county, or the town, could afford a state-of-the-art facility like the regional jail.

“And the extra revenue we get from renting our unused bunk space to the guys from Indianapolis is a shot in the arm to my budget,” Ethan said.

“Amen to that,” Mitch answered. Keeping the town budget balanced while juggling the needs and wishes of a population bordering on nine thousand was quite a job. Mitch enjoyed being on the council, but he also had his own business to run.

He glanced at his watch.

Ethan noticed. “I’ll have you back at the lumberyard before three,” he said.

“It’s Granddad’s first day back since his hip replacement,” Mitch reminded his friend. “I don’t want him to overdo it.”

“Sam going to the store after school?”

“He’s got an art lesson with Lily Mazerik after school. I told him he could go home from there if I didn’t come to pick him up. He’s at the age where he thinks he should be able to stay alone.”

“He’s what? Ten? Eleven?” Ethan asked.

“Ten going on forty,” Mitch replied. Sam was growing up fast, too fast, Mitch thought some days.

“How’s he doing in school this year?” Ethan wanted to know. Sam was hearing-impaired. He attended regular classes and got good grades, but he worked hard at it. And so did Mitch. He spent a lot of time with Sam’s teachers and his math tutor, trying to stay ahead of any problems.

“He’s off to a good start. But he was really disappointed not making the Mini-Rivermen football team. He had his heart set on the starting-linebacker position.”

“He’s pretty small to be a linebacker.”

“Yeah. And football is one sport where his handicap really holds him back.” Even with his hearing aid Sam couldn’t hear the play calls or the coaches’ instructions. There was no getting around it.

Sam had done pretty well in Coach Mazerik’s summer sports camp, Mitch had to admit, especially at swimming. And he’d played Little League baseball. The trouble was, as Ethan had just pointed out, Sam was small for his age. In football and basketball, his two favorite sports, that was as much of a handicap as his hearing impairment.

“He’ll have a growth spurt in the next year or two, and then watch out,” Ethan said.

That was probably true. Mitch himself had been something of a runt, the shortest in his group of friends until nearly eighth grade. And then he’d shot up six inches in a year. Maybe it would be that way for Sam, too. He wanted to see his son get as much fun and satisfaction out of playing school sports as he had.

Ethan’s scanner squawked into life, interrupting Mitch’s thoughts.

They both listened for a moment or two as the dispatcher and another disembodied voice discussed the status of the jackknifed rig ahead of them on the highway. “Sounds like the state boys are handling it just fine,” Ethan said. “No need for me to get involved.” He flipped on the cruiser’s turn signal and headed off onto a county road that ran into the outskirts of Riverbend near the golf course. “We’ll make better time this way.”

Five minutes later they topped a low rise that brought a fleeting view of the Wabash winding away toward the west. The sky was blue, darkening to almost black on the horizon. The trees were shades of gold and yellow and brown, with a splash of maple red and the near purple of sumac here and there. Mitch could see tractors and combines working in half-a-dozen fields before they disappeared behind rows of unharvested corn.

Ahead of them a small red car was parked on the side of the road. A woman was standing outside it, looking at something spread out on the hood. She was wearing a long denim jumper and a pink blouse. Her hair was blond and shoulder-length, but since her back was to them, it was hard to pick out any further details.

“That’s an out-of-state plate—can’t quite make it out, though,” Mitch commented.

“California,” Ethan replied tersely. His eyesight was evidently sharper than Mitch’s.

“Suppose her car’s broken down?”

“Could be.” Ethan turned on his emergency lights, but not the siren, and slowed as he approached the car.

Mitch saw his friend’s lips tighten. He couldn’t see Ethan’s eyes behind his mirrored sunglasses, but he knew they would be steady and gray. Ethan was an ex-army Green Beret and all cop. The woman standing beside her car was probably perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing. But until Ethan proved that for himself, he wouldn’t let down his guard.

The chief got out of the cruiser, his hand resting on the holster of his service revolver. The woman turned, surprise and wariness widening her eyes as she swung around, a crumpled road map held in front of her like a shield.

She was pretty, in a bland sort of way, Mitch noticed from his seat inside the police cruiser. Not too short, not too tall and very pregnant. Six months or so, at least, he estimated. She looked downright fearful as Ethan approached, his black police uniform, military haircut, and sidearm making him more than a little intimidating. She shrank back against the door of her car and swallowed hard. Mitch could see the muscles in her throat working from where he sat.

Ethan probably didn’t mean to scare the living daylights out of a pregnant woman, but he was doing just that.

Mitch undid his seat belt and climbed out of the car. Ethan asked to see the woman’s license as Mitch walked up. She cast him a harried glance and leaned into the back seat of the red compact to fumble in a pack that looked as if it had seen better days.

Come to think of it, the car had seen better days, too. The dust and grime of a lot of miles coated the bumper and partially obscured the numbers on the California plate. But the windshield was clean. And so was the back seat. Or what he could see of it, covered as it was with boxes and neatly tied plastic bags. Mitch would bet a week’s profits from the lumberyard that everything she owned was in that car.

Ethan motioned Mitch to move behind him. His hand remained on his weapon, even though the woman he was confronting didn’t quite come up to the level of his chin. She turned back, wallet in hand. A few freckles stood out on her cheeks and across her nose, and her eyes were big and blue and ringed with dark shadows.

Kara had been emotional when she was pregnant with Sam. She would have been sobbing openly by now. But not this woman. She was made of sterner stuff than his ex-wife, pregnant or not. She opened the wallet and offered it to Ethan.

“Here you are, Officer,” she said, only the faintest hint of a quaver in her voice.

“Is this your current address?” Ethan asked, handing it back to her after a few moments’ study.

“I…it was.” She lifted her chin. “I’m moving back to New York. I was detoured off the highway by an accident and I’ve lost my way.” She gestured to her car, the movements of her hands graceful and feminine. “I’m almost out of gas. Can you direct me to the nearest filling station?” She turned her head slightly to include Mitch in the query. “And I do mean the nearest.”

“Riverbend’s about two miles straight ahead,” Ethan said in a friendlier tone, evidently satisfied they hadn’t stumbled on some hardened criminal masquerading as a pregnant woman. “You can get your tank filled there.”

“Thank goodness. Much farther and I’d have to push my car the rest of the way.”

“I don’t think you’re in any condition to push a car, ma’am,” Ethan said, hands on hips.

“I don’t think I’d get very far trying,” she admitted, the tiniest hint of a smile curving her lips.

“I would have offered my friend Mitch Sterling here to do it for you.”

She turned to Mitch. She smiled just a little more, her eyes crinkling around the edges, and Mitch felt a surprising jolt of awareness. “That would make you a really good Samaritan, Mr. Sterling. But I’ve got enough gas to make it two more miles—I hope,” she added under her breath.

“I can ride into town with you if you’d like,” Mitch heard himself offer.

The wariness came back into her big eyes. “No thank you.”

Mitch felt like an idiot. Where she came from, women did not accept rides with strange men. They didn’t much around Riverbend, either, come to think of it. But he’d been brought up to offer his assistance to people in distress. “No problem,” he said to fill the awkward silence that followed her words.

“The first gas station is just three blocks inside the town limits,” Ethan told her. “You follow us and we’ll have you there in no time.”

“Thank you.” She got into her car and fastened the seat belt over her distended middle. “I’m ready when you are.”

Ethan nodded, tipped the bill of his hat and walked back to the cruiser, Mitch behind him.

“She’s pretty far along to be making a cross-country jaunt,” Mitch said as they passed the little red compact and its occupant. Mitch watched in the side mirror as she followed them onto the road.

“Yeah, she is pretty big,” Ethan agreed. He picked up the receiver of his radio and pushed the toggle switch. “We’ll just run a routine search on her license plate and ID.”

“Jeez, Ethan. You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

“Nope. Ain’t that why you hired me?” Ethan retorted with a grin.

Mitch shook his head and settled back in his seat for the rest of the trip into town. Ethan was a damned good cop. And good cops were suspicious cops. Yet anyone with half a brain and one good eye could tell that the woman in the car behind them wasn’t a threat to anyone.

Except maybe a man’s heart, with those big blue eyes and that lost-little-girl smile.

Mitch caught himself looking in the side mirror again, wondering what she’d look like if she smiled fully and without restraint. She’d be a real beauty.

Where the hell had that thought come from? He hadn’t had the energy or inclination to look at another woman in a long, long time. He sure wasn’t about to start now. She was a perfect stranger. She was pregnant. She was just passing through. In an hour she’d be gone from his life.

He leaned his head against the back of the seat and watched the clock tower on the Sycamore County Courthouse come into view, then the water tower and the elevator rising above the trees and the flat Indiana farmland he loved. The three tallest points in Riverbend.

This was the place where his roots went deep into the dark fertile soil. This was home. But his mind wasn’t interested in the familiar view. It was still focused on the pregnant woman in the red compact.

He turned his head enough to bring Ethan’s profile into view. “What did you say her name was again?”

CHAPTER TWO

TESSA LEANED BACK in the wooden glider located in the center of the little park and set it swinging with a push of her feet. She looked out over the Sycamore River to the far shore. It wasn’t that far away, maybe a few hundred yards? She’d never been a very good judge of distance. The water was a mixture of shades, blue and green and brown, deep and slow-moving. It seemed tamer, more sedate, than its famous neighbor, the Wabash, of which she’d caught glimpses from the car.

A rowboat with a small outboard motor putt-putted its way to a landing across the river where houses lined the bank. Some were older and looked as if they could use a little loving care. Some were new, a few large and substantial, with landscaped lawns and big wooden docks jutting out into the river. But beyond the manicured lawns the land was claimed by cornfields. Two-story white farmhouses and red-and-white barns stood in tree-filled yards as big as city parks. Cylindrical blue silos dotted the cloudy sky above pastures of black-and-white cows. For a moment Tessa wondered if she’d landed in her own private version of Oz. The town behind her looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. A town of her dreams.

She settled back in the swing and kept it going with a gentle push now and then. As she watched the reflections of clouds and trees in the water, she felt her eyes grow heavy. She wished she could stay here for the night. Catch up on her sleep, get her hair and her clothes really clean. It would be heaven. Certainly this little town, with the river at its feet and the late-afternoon sun and the scent of a few fading roses in a nearby flower bed, seemed about as close as you could get.

Her quiet reverie was broken by the sound of a car pulling into the parking lot behind her swing. She didn’t turn around to see who it was. She didn’t know a soul in Riverbend.