A Daughter's Story
Read A Daughter's Story Online
Authors: Tara Taylor Quinn
You can’t change the past but you can
choose
the future!
Twenty-five years ago…
Emma
Sanderson’s life was completely overturned. Her baby sister was kidnapped, right
there in Comfort Cove, and her family fell apart.
Now…
Emma lives quietly,
cautiously. Until suddenly she finds out that the cold case involving her
sister’s disappearance has been reopened. Then, she ends her engagement—and
meets another man. Chris Talbot shares her intense unexpected attraction, and
their hours together mean more than anything she’s ever experienced.
Despite that, she’s uncertain about a relationship with him.
He’s a man in a dangerous profession, a man who makes his living from the sea,
and there are reasons,
good
reasons, for Emma to
keep her distance. But that night could have
lasting
consequences….
She tried not to think about Chris
Tried not to let her body remember the sensations he’d
evoked.
Finding herself on the couch before bed, irritated with
television commercials and no longer distracted by movies, Emma pulled out the
journal again. Just to see what she’d written.
1.
I want to be loved by a man who loves
me so much that my love changes him.
She stared at the words. She’d written them down because, in
that moment, she’d felt them so strongly. Now, days later, she still felt the
same way.
She grabbed her pen.
2.
I want to be brave enough to live my
life to the fullest.
She read what she’d written again. And reread it several
times. If there was going to be any value in this exercise, she had to be
completely honest.
And she realized that, like it or not, her resolutions were
about Chris....
“Tara Taylor Quinn writies with wonderful
assurance and an effective, unpretentious style perfectly suited to her
chosen genre.”—Jennifer Blake,
New York
Times
bestselling author
Dear Reader,
Ever wake up and look at your life and wish some things were
different? I have. And sometimes still do. And then what? You shrug and go on
with your routine, your day. Most of the time, you’re happy. Or at least
content.
But what if…
What if
you
decided that the
things you wished were different
were
going to be
different? What if, instead of shrugging and going on with “normal,” you made
changes?
What if gets me every time. Meet Emma Sanderson. She’s a high
school teacher with a mortgage and family responsibilities. She can’t just
change any of those things in her life. Truth is, she doesn’t really want to.
She likes teaching and loves her family. But she wants more.
A Daughter’s Story
is about that
more.
It’s about having the courage to make
changes where you can—even in small ways. It’s about daring to want and to reach
for what you want within the realm of who and what you are. It’s about taking
what you have and doing something to make it even better.
A Daughter’s Story
is about
finding answers. And…as always with me, it’s about love.
By the way, I’d really like to know what you think happened
to Claire. Write to me at
[email protected]
! And watch
for
The Truth About Comfort Cove,
coming in January
2013.
Tara Taylor Quinn
A Daughter’s Story
Tara Taylor Quinn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With fifty-seven original novels, published in more than
twenty languages, Tara Taylor Quinn is a
USA TODAY
bestselling author. She is a winner of the 2008 National Readers’ Choice Award,
four-time finalist for the RWA Rita® Award, a finalist for the Reviewers’ Choice
Award, the Booksellers’ Best Award, the Holt Medallion and appears regularly on
Amazon bestsellers lists. Tara Taylor Quinn is a past president of the Romance
Writers of America and served for eight years on its board of directors. She is
in demand as a public speaker and has appeared on television and radio shows
across the country, including
CBS Sunday Morning.
Tara is a spokesperson for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and
she and her husband, Tim, sponsor an annual inline skating race in Phoenix to
benefit the fight against domestic violence.
When she’s not at home in Arizona with Tim and their canine
owners, Jerry Lee and Taylor Marie, or fulfilling speaking engagements, Tara
spends her time traveling and inline skating.
Books by Tara Taylor Quinn
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
1309—THE PROMISE OF CHRISTMAS
1350—A
CHILD’S WISH
1381—MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABIES
1428—SARA’S
SON
1446—THE BABY GAMBLE
1465—THE VALENTINE GIFT
“Valentine’s Daughters”
1500—TRUSTING RYAN
1527—THE HOLIDAY
VISITOR
1550—SOPHIE’S SECRET*
1584—A DAUGHTER’S TRUST
1656—THE
FIRST WIFE**
1726—FULL CONTACT*
1793—A SON’S TALE‡
SINGLE TITLE
SHELTERED IN HIS ARMS
MIRA BOOKS
WHERE THE ROAD ENDS
STREET
SMART
HIDDEN
IN PLAIN SIGHT
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
AT CLOSE
RANGE
THE SECOND LIE**
THE THIRD SECRET**
THE FOURTH VICTIM**
*Shelter Valley Stories
**The Chapman
Files
‡It Happened in Comfort Cove
Other titles by this author available in ebook format.
For Rachel
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
S
OMETHING
WASN
’
T
RIGHT
. Something besides the hot
chocolate splashed across the cream-colored silk blouse and brown-linen slacks
that twenty-nine-year-old Emma Sanderson had come home to change.
Pulling her key from the lock that Friday morning in early
September, she stood just inside the open front door of her two-story townhome,
allowing the screen door to close behind her. She listened. But heard
nothing.
Was Rob home?
She was in a hurry to get back to the high school before study
hall ended and twenty-two fifteen-year-olds converged on her American History
class. So she’d parked her car in the driveway and come in by way of the front
porch, rather than through the garage as usual.
Was someone in the house? Rob Evert, her fiancé of two years,
was attending an accounting seminar at a local college that morning. Besides,
the sweet citrusy smell in the air wasn’t something she associated with Rob.
With her finger on the pepper-spray tube attached to her key
chain, Emma moved forward a couple of steps. She should probably head right back
outside. Call the police.
Then she’d be late for class. She had to change.
And what criminal smelled like citrus?
There was no sign of forced entry.
Maybe, in the back of her mind, Emma knew she didn’t need
law-enforcement protection. Because if she thought she did, she’d be outside and
on the phone. Immediately. She wasn’t a risk-taker.
But then, she wasn’t going to let the past rob her of her
present and future, either. Not anymore. Not since the phone calls she’d
received over the past month from a Comfort Cove detective, Ramsey Miller.
Miller’s news had upended her world. Frank Whittier, the man
she’d spent two years adoring and the next twenty-five years hating, was not
guilty of abducting her baby sister. All this time she’d blamed him....
Slipping out of her low-heeled pumps because she had to change
her pants, Emma crept up the stairs. Someone could be up there.
Probably not. She was overreacting to the citrusy smell.
It was
her
house. She wasn’t going
to let paranoia run her out of the home she owned, the home shared with her
fiancé.
Hugging the fall-foliage wallpaper—everything was fall for
Emma, since the fall day Claire had disappeared—she listened as she rose slowly
to the second floor.
Definite rustling sounds came from the upper region of her
home. As if someone was moving around, but not opening drawers or closets. Or
throwing things.
Her mother, who lived nearby, had a key, but Mom wouldn’t stop
in without asking permission first. And, as the principal of a local school,
Rose Sanderson was at work.
The only other person who had a key, besides Emma, was Rob. And
he’d lied to her once before about his attendance at a seminar. He’d sworn he’d
never lie to her again. She’d believed him enough to let him move in with
her.
But she didn’t fully trust him.
Her issue. One she was working on.
Their bedroom was the first door on the left. It had its own
attached bath. The second bedroom and smaller bath were to the right.
She looked that way first. Surely the intruder wasn’t in
her
room.
At the top of the stairs, Emma paused, flicking her long dark
curls back over her shoulder, suddenly questioning the wisdom of her actions.
The rustling was louder, but steady. A familiar rhythm. Clearly she hadn’t been
discovered yet.
And then she heard the familiar moan. Short, staccato, deep in
the throat. Followed by a longer, louder, expression of relief. The moan she’d
thought had been particular to
her.
The one only she
could elicit.
He was in their room. For a brief second, as she rounded the
corner toward the open door, Emma wondered if he was alone. Hoped he was.
If so, she could slip away, pretend she hadn’t seen, and they
could continue to…
The woman was on the bottom, her naked backside sinking into
the freshly laundered gold sheets Emma had just put on the queen-size bed that
morning. Blond hair splayed across Emma’s pillow.
“Oh, God.”
The other woman was looking at her.
On another day, any day previous to the last phone call from
Ramsey Miller, Emma would have turned around and left Rob to get his mess
cleaned up and out of their house.
And then, when enough time had passed to take away the sting of
his betrayal, she’d have listened patiently while he expressed his
self-condemnation and regret. She’d have let him beg. And then she’d have taken
him back.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been unfaithful to her. But it
was the first in their bed. In her home. The first since he’d put the huge
diamond ring on her finger.
At least the first she knew of…
Thoughts sped through Emma’s mind as she stood frozen and
watched the slender long legs disentangle themselves from the man and the
sheets.
Rob rolled to his side and Emma pulled the ring off her left
hand. He noticed her standing there.
The instant consternation on his face couldn’t have been faked.
Nor could the sorrow in his eyes.
“Emma, baby, I…”
Ignoring the woman who was in Emma’s peripheral vision pulling
on sweatpants and a T-shirt, Emma approached the bed and held out the ring to
Rob.
“I see she dressed up for the occasion,” she said calmly, as if
they were discussing what color to paint the bedroom walls.
“Emma, please…” Rob, looked at her pleadingly, holding the
sheet around his naked midsection despite the fact that both women in the room
clearly knew what the covered parts looked like. He didn’t reach for the ring.
But he’d expect it back. He was an accountant. Money mattered.
She placed the two-carat promise on the corner of the dresser.
Grabbed a hanger out of the closet that held one of her three-piece suits—the
tailored black slacks and jacket and red short-sleeved blouse—grabbed her most
expensive black pumps and marched toward the door.
“I’m going back to work,” she said, facing the open door,
effectively blocking the blond woman’s escape. “I’ll go straight to Mom’s
afterward, spend the night there and return here in the morning to meet a
locksmith who will be changing the locks.” She owned the place. She could do
this. “You have until then to clean out anything of yours you want to keep. The
furniture all stays. The payments you helped make are in lieu of rent for the
past two years.”
She heard her voice and wondered at the woman speaking. She
didn’t recognize a thing about her. But, damn, her words felt good.
“Emma…”
She heard scrambling behind her, a thump as Rob’s feet landed
on the floor, and then his footsteps behind her.
“Emma!”
Head high, she just kept walking. Down the stairs. Out the
front door. Knowing he couldn’t follow her. He hadn’t had time to pull on his
pants.
In a nearby gas-station bathroom, as she changed her clothes,
Emma crumpled, half dressed, on the toilet. She started to cry. To panic. To
hurt.
But she didn’t go back.
And that afternoon, when she left school, she didn’t back
down.
* * *
T
HE
FUNERAL
WAS
SO
CROWDED
that early September Friday
afternoon that more than half the attendees had to stand. Forty-year-old Chris
Talbot was one of those standing, holding his place in a back corner of the big
old Comfort Cove church with shoulders grown thick from a lifetime of
lobstering. Fishing was a dangerous business. The most dangerous in the world if
you believed what you saw on television.
To Chris it was a way of life. The only way of life.
It had been that way for Wayne Ainge, too, though Chris had
barely known the young man whose funeral he’d given up a day of work to attend.
Wayne was only twenty. He’d arrived in Comfort Cove from Alaska that summer. Had
signed on with one of Chris’s competitors. And three days ago he’d gotten his
foot tangled up in a trapline and was pulled from his boat to the bottom of the
ocean. He’d drowned before anyone could get to him.
The accident had not been the boy’s fault. It hadn’t been
anything he could prevent. A wind had come up, a wave, just as he’d been
hoisting a trap overboard, forcing him into one small step to keep his balance.
The one small step had cost him his life.
His wasn’t the first industry death, by a long shot.
But it was Comfort Cove’s first in more than fifty years. The
first in Chris’s lifetime.
Wayne’s father spoke. His brother did, too. A man of the
cloth—Chris wasn’t a churchgoing man so he wasn’t sure if the man was a priest
or pastor or what—read from the Bible and asked them all to pray.
Chris bowed his head out of respect for Wayne’s family, who’d
flown in from Alaska to bury their son where he’d said his heart was—the
Atlantic Ocean. And then, as people began to file out, he shook hands with his
fellow fishermen and their families.
None of them looked one another in the eye.
Every fisherman knew that any one of them could be in that
casket up there. It was only by the grace of God that they made it safely home
each day.