Days Like This

  DAYS LIKE THIS

  Jackson Falls Series Book 3

  Laurie Breton

  c. 2013 by Laurie Breton

  All rights reserved.

  Special thanks to Patti Korbet for acting as

  proofreader/editor/idea person

  and all-around cheerleader.

  Without you, this book would never

  have made it to the finish line.

  PREVIOUS BOOKS BY LAURIE BRETON

  Coming Home: Jackson Falls Book 1

  Sleeping With the Enemy: Jackson Falls Book 2

  Black Widow (Ellora’s Cave)

  Final Exit (MIRA)

  Mortal Sin (MIRA)

  Lethal Lies (MIRA)

  Criminal Intent (MIRA)

  Point of Departure (MIRA)

  Die Before I Wake (MIRA)

  PRAISE FOR LAURIE BRETON’S

  COMING HOME:

  "Lyrical and gorgeous...just beautiful in its portrayal of the

  devastating changes of love over time."

  -- Judith, I Love Romantic Fiction

  “a beautifully told, beautifully written story of love and loss”

  -- Jessica Van Den, Experiment: Life

  “wonderfully written”

  -- Shelly, {Dive} Under the Cover

  Casey

  August 1991

  Jackson Falls, Maine

  Becoming a member of the Jackson Falls Public Library Committee had, quite possibly, been the worst decision Casey Fiore MacKenzie had made in her entire thirty-five years. The six of them had spent the last two hours embroiled in a heated debate about book censorship that had ended in a stalemate. Now she had the beginnings of a headache and was seriously rethinking this whole community service gig. It was all part of the What-is-Casey-Going-to-do-With-the-Rest-of-Her-Life self-actualization program that she’d recently embarked on. Not that it had been her idea. As far as she was concerned, at thirty-five, she had plenty of time to figure out the next sixty years.

  But Rob had been prodding her, and when he got like that, it was usually easier to just give in. The man could be relentless, and the fact that he was nearly always right didn’t make it any easier to take.

  She’d stopped writing after Danny died. It wasn’t that the well had dried up; she’d simply turned off the spigot and hadn’t bothered to turn it back on. Without him, without that golden voice to bring her music to life, there no longer seemed to be any point to it. Rob had remained uncharacteristically silent on the issue, although she knew it bothered him more than he wanted to admit. They’d worked together as partners since they were little more than kids. But aside from a couple of half-hearted attempts at persuasion that had fallen flat in the early days following Danny’s death, he’d avoided bringing it up. It was probably better for both of them if he stayed away from that particular can of worms.

  But he’d been working without her. He hadn’t said so, but she recognized the signs. All those hours he’d been spending out in the zillion-dollar studio they’d built in the barn. She knew damn well he was out there working on new material, which meant that she needed to start pushing harder with the self-actualization thing. New material meant a new album, and a new album meant he would be going back out on the road. She’d seen the restlessness in him for a while, knew him well enough to recognize the signs.

  He was a musician; performing was programmed into his DNA. He would almost certainly ask her to come with him, but they both knew she’d rather have bamboo shoots shoved under her fingernails. Been there, done that, bought the tour shirt. He would leave, and she would be left alone for three months while he was out there playing rock god with his Fender Strat. She’d better find something constructive to do with her time, because Rob MacKenzie was a strong proponent of tough love, and he was apt to plant one of his size-eleven Reeboks up her backside if he thought she was going to spend those three months sitting in her rocking chair, waiting for him to come home.

  She’d fully expected that by this time, there would be some indication that they were percolating the newest little Fiore-MacKenzie collaboration. But so far, nothing. Even though thirty-five was still young, she knew that once a woman passed thirty, her chances of conceiving decreased with each passing year. She was nowhere near ready to accept defeat, but sometimes, lying awake in the wee hours, her thoughts danced all around the dark possibility that it might not ever happen. If it didn’t, they would deal with it. There were always other options. She would love any child, no matter the age or race, that was placed in her arms. They both would. But she so wanted that child to be a part of both of them.

  She turned the car into the driveway and parked under the giant elm tree that shaded the old Gothic revival farmhouse. When she and Danny had bought the place four years ago, she’d privately dubbed it Fiore’s Folly. The house had been his baby from day one, and they’d spent months pouring money and sweat equity into it. With the clarity of hindsight, she suspected that for Danny, the home rehab had been an external symbol of the very personal rehab he’d been doing on the inside. Somehow, they’d managed to turn the place into a real home.

  And then he’d died. Sometimes it was hard to believe she’d lived here with Rob longer than she had with Danny.

  As soon as she stepped into the shed, she heard the music, Steely Dan’s Dirty Work from Can’t Buy a Thrill. He’d been playing that damned album for two decades. Something about the cool, sophisticated, jazzy flavor of Becker and Fagen’s compositions had grabbed Rob MacKenzie the first time he’d heard one, and in the intervening years, it had never let go of him.

  She opened the door to the kitchen and it hit her smack in the face, the mouth-watering aroma of something spicy and pungent and swimming in garlic. Her husband stood at the stove, poking at the old steel wok. Whenever Rob cooked, the kitchen ended up looking as though a series of small explosions had just been detonated, but the end result usually made up for the disaster, so she tried to turn off the compulsive housekeeper inside her and just roll with it.

  He turned, saw the expression on her face, and said, “Bad one?”

  “Au contraire, mon ami. Bad would be a vast improvement.” She dropped her purse on a chair, hoisted herself up onto the wooden tabletop, and demurely crossed one leg over the other. Reaching up to sweep her dark hair back over her shoulder, she said in disbelief, “My god, Flash, those people are lunatics.”

  He picked up the glass of white wine he’d already poured and had waiting for her, crossed the room and handed it to her. “I figured you’d be needing this.” Both palms braced against the edge of the table, he leaned into her. She reached her free hand up to cup his cheek and they kissed, his mouth soft against hers. He moved back a few inches, and those warm green eyes studied hers. “Hey,” he said.

  Casey brushed a wispy blond curl away from his face and said, “Hey.”

  She’d never been much of a drinker, but drastic times called for drastic measures, and he’d been plying her with wine since she was eighteen. She raised the glass and said, “I realize you probably think it’s all that hot jungle sex, but the real truth is that this—” She twirled the wine glass by its stem. “This is why I keep you around.” She took a sip of wine, rolled it around inside her mouth, and swallowed. Sighing, she stretched her shoulders to release the tension and said glumly, “The Brochu sisters. Somebody needs to point out to those two darling ladies that this isn’t the nineteenth century. And Al Frechette. The man is a Neanderthal. Please remind me why I’m doing this.”

  “Because you’re an incredible human being. And because it gives you a chance to show the world how hot you look in that red suit.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Easy for you to say, MacKenzie. You’re not the one being tortured. And stop staring at my legs.�
� She reached down and tugged at her skirt in an attempt to make it cover a little more thigh. The suit she wore was a screaming shade of scarlet, light years outside her comfort zone, which ran more to neutrals like navy or gray. He had, of course, picked it out. He had, of course, been right. With her olive complexion and the straight, dark hair that fell to midway down her back, the color looked stunning on her.

  “Don’t be such a prude, Fiore. You’ll spoil all my fun. It’s been so long since I saw my wife wearing anything besides jeans, I forgot she had legs.”

  Since the legs in question had been wrapped around his waist less than twelve hours ago, it seemed doubtful he’d really forgotten. Instead of responding, she reached down and peeled off the high-heel torture devices she wore on her feet and dropped them on the floor. And wiggled her toes. “Cook,” she ordered, pointing with her wine glass.

  Aided by the wine, the music, the wonderful garlicky aroma, and the sight of him working, her stress began to dissipate. She loved to watch him, six feet of long, loose, rangy man in faded, snug-fitting jeans, loved watching the way he moved as he chopped vegetables and dropped them into the sizzling wok. All of it intimately familiar and yet at the same time new and exciting. He needed a haircut; the tangled mess of golden curls that fell to his shoulders was getting out of control again. But then, when hadn’t he needed one? He’d been her best friend, the one solid, stable thing in her life, since she was eighteen years old. And sometimes, even after a year of marriage, it still didn’t feel real, the two of them together like this.

  They’d taken a long and circuitous route to get here. She’d seen him through two failed marriages and a half-dozen years as a card-carrying member of the girl-of-the-month club. Every time Danny had broken her heart—and she’d lost count of the number of times—Rob had been the one to pick her up, dust her off, and glue the pieces back together. There was an intimacy to their bond that couldn’t be easily explained. It hadn’t been about sex, not back in the days when she’d been blind to every other man but Danny Fiore. Their relationship had been based on brutal honesty, blended creativity, and a willingness on each of their parts to open up a vein and bleed for the other.

  Rob MacKenzie had seen her through the darkest times in her life, and some of those times had been very, very dark. She’d loved him forever, and although neither of them could pinpoint a precise moment when their feelings for each other had turned into something that went light years beyond platonic, somewhere along the way, with a fatal inevitability, they had. After Danny died—a long time after Danny died—they’d finally decided to stop running from the way they felt about each other and do something about it instead.

  She clasped the stem of her wine glass in both hands and said to his back, “So, hot stuff, what did you do all afternoon while I was out battling the dragons of small-town narrow-mindedness?”

  “Oh,” he said, focusing his attention on his cooking, “this and that.”

  Evasiveness was so unlike him that Casey narrowed her eyes and took a closer look. There was something in the set of his shoulders that hadn’t been there fifteen seconds ago. With the better part of two decades of history between them, she was intimately acquainted with his body language, and red flags were flying everywhere. He was getting ready to dump something on her. And she wasn’t going to like it. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing’s wrong. But we have to talk.”

  She’d been about to take another sip of wine, but she stopped dead with the glass an inch from her mouth. “That sounds serious.”

  Rob picked up a fistful of shrimp and tossed them into the wok. “It is serious.”

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t be scared. Everything’s fine. But something happened this afternoon and I’ve spent the last two hours trying to wrap my head around it. I’m not sure I’m there yet.”

  He still wasn’t looking at her, and her rapidly expanding dismay sent her stomach plummeting. He moved to the sink and turned on the water, soaped and rinsed his hands to rid them of the eau de shrimp. Tearing a paper towel from the roll on the counter, he finally met her eyes. “I was planning to wait until after we ate,” he said, drying his hands, “but you know me too well. Listen, babe, this came at me out of the blue, and I don’t have any idea how you’ll react. I’m still not sure how to react myself. I’m still having trouble believing it.”

  Casey looked at her glass of wine, closed her eyes for an instant, then tipped her head back and finished it off in a single long slug. Rob turned off the stove, filled a plate for each of them, and carried the plates to the table. She sat down across from him and picked up her fork. “All right, MacKenzie,” she said. “Spill.”

  He rested his elbows on the table and ran the fingers of both hands through his tangled mess of curls. “I had a call this afternoon from a lawyer in Boston. Do you remember Sandy Sainsbury?”

  “Of course. You had an off-and-on thing going with her back in the day.”

  “She died two weeks ago. From cancer.”

  “Oh, Rob, that’s terrible! She was so young!”

  “Thirty-five. And she had a fifteen-year-old daughter.”

  “That poor girl. It’s so hard to lose your mother at such a young age. I know how it feels.”

  “Yeah. I thought about that. It’s a lousy thing to have in common.” He was looking at her oddly, and she couldn’t figure out why. “The lawyer,” he said. “He’s in the process of settling Sandy’s estate.”

  “I see,” she said, although she really didn’t.

  “When she first got sick, Sandy had a will drawn up. She didn’t have much, and she wanted to make sure her daughter ended up with what little she did have. But that wasn’t her main concern. Both of Sandy’s parents are long gone, and she never had any brothers or sisters, so the only family she had left was a couple of distant cousins. She was worried about what would happen to Paige—that’s her daughter’s name—if she didn’t beat the cancer. So she spelled it out in her will. If anything happened to her before the kid came of age, she wanted custody of Paige to go to the girl’s biological father.”

  “And?”

  He didn’t respond, just looked at her with those green eyes, and suddenly it all came together. Lawyer. Custody. Fifteen-year-old daughter. Biological father. She quickly did the math. Set down her fork. And took in a hard, sharp breath. “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “Um…yeah.”

  “You’re telling me that you have a fifteen-year-old daughter?”

  He raised his shoulders, looked at her helplessly, and said, “Apparently.”

  She saw her own shock reflected in his eyes. A million thoughts raced through her mind, but when she opened her mouth, only one came out. “Holy mother of God.”

  He cleared his throat. “She’s staying with her downstairs neighbor right now, but the woman’s already got four kids and no husband, and she can’t take on another kid, not on a permanent basis. If I don’t take her, the kid will go into state custody and end up in foster care.” He paused. “I won’t blame you if you want to bail. You didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Oh, for the love of God, MacKenzie! After everything we’ve been through together, you still don’t know I’d walk through fire for you? I’ve probably heard something more colossally idiotic coming from that mouth of yours at some point in the last two decades, but right now I can’t remember what it could possibly have been.”

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were suspiciously damp. “I don’t deserve you,” he said.

  “Shut up, you fool. I love you, and after everything you’ve done for me over the years, we have a few miles to go to even up the odds. And I so hate that this is the first question coming out of my mouth, but I have to ask it. How do you know for sure she’s really yours? And don’t say it’s because Sandy wouldn’t have any reason to lie. Considering that she couldn’t manage, at some point in the last fifteen years and nine months, to call you up and say, Hey, by
the way, you have a kid.”

  “Don’t feel bad, it was the first question I asked, too. He faxed me a copy of her birth certificate, Sandy’s will, and a couple of Paige’s school photos. Once you see the pictures, you’ll stop wondering. She’s mine.”

  He reached for a folded sheaf of papers she hadn’t noticed and slid them across the table to her. Casey picked them up gingerly, glanced at him across her untouched dinner plate, and unfolded them. Skimmed the will until she reached the part where it said Full custody of the minor child to be retained by the biological father, Robert K. MacKenzie. She swallowed hard, then studied the birth certificate. Name of child: Paige Morgan MacKenzie. Mother: Sandra Louise Sainsbury. Father: Robert Kevin MacKenzie.

  She glanced at him again before looking at the photos. The adolescent girl who stared back at her had a mass of thick golden curls, a strong, square jaw, a face with more angles than curves, and a light dusting of pale freckles across her nose. Although it was impossible to tell from a black-and-white photo, Casey would have bet the farm that her eyes were the trademark MacKenzie green. A tear ran unbidden down her cheek. “Oh, babe. She looks just like you.”

  “Poor kid got my hair.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your hair, MacKenzie. You just need to comb it a little more often. So of course you told him we’d take her.”

  “I did not. I told him I had to talk it over with my wife. This is a life-altering decision, Fiore. It was hard enough springing this on you as it is. I wasn’t about to give you the news as a fait accompli.”

  “Um, sweetie? This fait is about as accompli as it gets. Of course we’re taking her. We don’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice. But whether or not we bring her here, she’s still my responsibility. At least until she’s eighteen.”