The Comeback Mom Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Copyright

  “May I?” she asked.

  He looked at her doubtfully. “I don’t think so. Everybody from the maid to the elevator operator has tried to—”

  Libby lifted the baby from his arms, smug with her insider knowledge that this particular infant was colicky and had responded well in the hospital to the football hold. The baby’s sobs quieted almost immediately.

  The man was astounded. She smiled modestly.

  “I was looking for Jared Ransom,” she said, trying to look past him into the room to get a glimpse of the old fogy she’d come to see. But the man’s broad shoulders filled the doorway.

  His eyes moved from the baby to her face, roved it with a thoroughness that made her wonder what he could possibly be thinking.

  Finally he said, “I’m Jared Ransom.”

  Libby clenched her teeth to prevent her jaw from dropping. The old fogy was gorgeous!

  Dear Reader,

  Have you ever wished you had a second chance at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? A chance to make another decision, to take a different path?

  No doubt we all have. And that’s why American Romance introduces you to four women who actually get that unique opportunity—whether it’s to marry the one that got away or to have children or to follow an exciting career—in MAYBE THIS TIME.

  Muriel Jensen brings this original quartet to a close with the story of a special woman destined to know the meaning of motherhood. It’s another wonderful family story from this award-winning author.

  Don’t miss any of the MAYBE THIS TIME books—for stories that will touch a spot in every woman’s heart!

  Regards,

  Debra Matteucci

  Senior Editor & Editorial Coordinator

  Harlequin Books

  300 East 42nd Street

  New York, NY 10017

  The Comeback Mom

  Muriel Jensen

  Prologue

  “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Liiibby…”

  Libby Madison smiled as the off-key, out-of-tune but enthusiastic rendition of the old tune swelled around her. The wait staff of Truffles were gathered around the table like a cheerful white-coated, bow-tied army, and Charlene Whitney and Sara Perez, with whom she’d been coming to the restaurant every other Thursday night for ten years, smiled fondly at her as they sang. Other diners also picked up the chorus.

  She tried to look worthy of their enthusiasm while feeling strangely disconnected from the proceedings.

  She was thirty-five. God, that was ancient. She should have all the answers by now, shouldn’t she? Or she should at least know the score. But she didn’t—except to know that she was behind. It wasn’t exactly that she was losing, but more as though the game had been called.

  The young redheaded waiter who always saw that their table had extra focaccia bread, extra butter and extra whipped cream on their desserts offered, “And many moooore!” in a dramatic baritone. That was followed by cheers and applause that didn’t cease until she blew out the candles.

  There was more applause, then a distribution of plates, forks and cake, and she was left alone again with Charlene and Sara. A fire blazed behind them in a stone fireplace decorated with hunting horns, pewter mugs, bridle tack and other appointments intended to provide a European-country-inn atmosphere.

  “When does the new book come out?” Sara asked, eyeing her square of cake as though it had the potential to hurt her. She was short and plump, and had been on a diet ever since Libby had met her in fifth grade. She lived in Lake Oswego with her lawyer husband, three children and a Saint Bernard, in what she seemed to consider suburban heaven.

  Sara tossed her chin-length dark hair and picked up her fork, apparently resolved to indulge. The decision made, she smiled brightly. “I promised Molly we’d go to the autographing. She’s hooked on The Rosie Chronicles. And, of course, she finds it all doubly exciting that the author is her aunt Libby.”

  Molly was seven, and though not Libby’s biological niece, they had unofficially assumed a relationship. The child had all her mother’s sweetness and all her lawyer father’s balancing skepticism.

  “Tell her I have the first one out of the box saved for her,” Libby replied. “The signing’s a week from Saturday at Hawthorne’s at the mall.”

  “I suppose Boris Bumpkin will be there, hanging over your shoulder and basking in your celebrity?” Charlene’s sarcastic question was asked as she forked a bite of cake. The dramatic redhead studied the sweet with the greedy interest she applied to everything, then placed it in her mouth with a seductive movement. Charlene’s credo was that a woman should always operate as though she were being observed by a wealthy, eligible man.

  Libby frowned at her friend with annoyance mingled with understanding. Though very different, Libby and Charlene had something important in common—loneliness. Libby dealt with it by working long hours on her illustrations for the line of children’s books that had gained her national attention. Charlene dealt with it by operating a lingerie boutique by day and touring singles bars by night, always on the lookout for the man who was handsome enough, rich enough, suave enough to be her husband.

  There were even times when Libby secretly admired her. Charlene hadn’t given up on finding Mr. Right. Libby had. The old saw was true. After a woman reached a certain age, every man she met was married, divorced and disillusioned, or single—for painfully obvious reasons.

  Boris was one of the latter. Still, he was her friend.

  “Boris Pushkin,” Libby corrected, “and he’s a very fine editor.”

  Charlene swallowed and rolled her eyes. “He’s a nerd.”

  “Nerds,” Libby said firmly, “are people, too. Just be quiet about him.”

  Charlene put her fork down and looked from Libby to Sara. “For heaven’s sake, Lib. Don’t you see a pattern here?”

  Libby knew she’d missed something when Sara sighed, gave Charlene a speaking look and replied, “Yes, but let’s not bring it up now, all right?”

  “What pattern?” Libby demanded. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your pattern with men. You use them to punish yourself.”

  At Libby’s startled blink, Charlene shook her head. “Oh, not with a guy in leather or anything fun like that, but with every social misfit, every nerd, every wounded soul who isn’t strong enough to deal with life and living.”

  Sara, too, put her fork down and pleaded, “Charlie, don’t go there. It’s her birthday.”

  “And she’s thirty-five!” Charlene exclaimed with a horror that made it sound like “ninety-five!” “If she’s ever going to get out of her studio and live her life, she has to forgive herself for not adopting the Bonello kids, and stop trying to make up for it by mothering this interminable line of men who act like children!”

  Sara put a hand over her eyes and groaned. Libby pushed her cake away and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.

  Charlene drew a breath and squared her shapely shoulders. “I’m sorry, but it’s time you look at yourself, before you turn around and discover you’re fifty and still having lattes with Boris on Sunday afternoons. Savannah and Zachary are all grown up by now. Forget them.”

  Libby placed her na
pkin beside her plate and replied calmly, “I like Boris. Even if he isn’t the paragon of charm and success you’re searching for, he’s a nice man.”

  Sara looked Libby in the eye apologetically. “Libby, he’s a whiner who uses you like an audience.”

  “Then there was that sales rep,” Charlene said, “who’d had his Major League career cut short. He got a year’s worth of Wednesday-night dinners out of you.”

  “Bone spurs,” Libby said stiffly, “at that age were a tragic—”

  “He wasn’t any good at the game,” Sara interrupted mercilessly. “Remember? Tony checked up on him. He’d been cut from the team. His career ended abruptly because of his own lack of skill.”

  “Then there was the chef who got you to illustrate his cookbook and put him up in your coach house because he convinced you he’d lost everything in a fire. Then Tony found out he’d been axed from the Ritz and evicted from his apartment because of a tendency to tipple the sherry.”

  “He was recovering while we worked on the book.”

  “He wasn’t recovering—he just didn’t have money to buy booze.”

  Libby leaned back in her chair and confronted her friends. They weren’t entirely wrong, but they weren’t entirely right, either. Her tendency to befriend the underdog was a response to a need to nurture, not necessarily a need to make reparation for failing to keep the appointment with the Bonello family’s lawyer.

  She had been only twenty-five, after all, when she’d volunteered at the hospital the night four-year-old Savannah and five-month-old Zachary Bonello had been brought in, the only survivors of an automobile accident that had claimed their parents. Orphaned herself in high school, she’d been deeply touched by their plight and done her best to distract Savannah with stories while she and her baby brother spent several days in the hospital under observation.

  During that time, John Miller, the Bonellos’ attorney, had tried to find a family member willing to take in the children. But the only relative he’d been able to locate was an aunt in her eighties. She told him Mrs. Bonello had a sister who’d left the family at age sixteen and never been heard from since. A very cold trail had led him to abort his attempt to find her. Seeing how attached Savannah had become to Libby, he’d teased that she should consider adopting the children.

  But she’d been just getting by waitressing part-time while trying to market her illustrations. She’d given the matter serious thought, decided that it would be impossible to work full-time, pay a baby-sitter and still support herself and the children, much less pursue a career in art—then agreed to meet the attorney anyway to discuss the possibility. She could find a way to make it work. She knew she could.

  She’d called an emergency meeting with Sara and Charlene at Truffles, told them what she was considering, and been told she was crazy. Sara had just married Tony then, and Charlene was trying to put the money together to buy her shop.

  “How will you support two little children?” Sara had demanded.

  “I’ll find a way!” she’d said, completely determined that she would.

  She’d practically lived at the hospital during the past few days, holding Savannah in her lap as the big-eyed child tried to right her overturned world.

  She told her stories she’d written herself, and one she was trying to market, and read to her from the hospital’s considerable children’s library.

  She fed Zachary and played with him, trying to make the room the children shared seem more like a home and less like a hospital room.

  Savannah had asked her that morning when they’d be able to leave the hospital.

  “Soon,” she’d promised.

  “Then, do we have to die and go to heaven?” she’d asked. “Or will we go live someplace else?”

  The question had seemed logical to Savannah. Home was wherever her parents were, and Libby had been the one to explain carefully just two days before where Savannah’s and Zachary’s parents had gone.

  That question had resolved her dilemma. The children needed an earthly mother and now. And she was sure they could adjust to living simply more easily than they could deal with the uncertainties of foster care.

  She’d tried to explain that to her friends.

  “What about your art?” Charlene had asked.

  “It’s my birthday,” she’d told her with the certainty of a decision well made. “And that always feels like a fresh start. I can do this.”

  She’d left the restaurant enthused and excited, living in her imagination rather than paying attention to her surroundings—and been hit by a messenger on a bicycle. She’d awakened two days later in the hospital, a patient herself, to learn that a Bonello family friend had appeared and already taken the children away.

  She’d felt as though she might die of disappointment and been tortured by images of Savannah wondering where she was and why she’d deserted her.

  John Miller had assured her that the family friend was a fine, well-respected man and that the children would have better opportunities with someone in a stable financial position. On one level, she knew that to be true, but inside, she’d always felt as though things would have been different had she acted more decisively, more quickly. She’d inadvertently tampered with her own fate, botched her own karma.

  Though she’d spent only four days with the children, she’d come to love them deeply. And the past ten years had seemed empty without them.

  That sense of something unfinished that had plagued her since that fateful day seemed to inflate inside her.

  “The children aren’t all grown up.” Wearily she corrected Charlene. “Savannah would be fourteen. Zachary would only be ten.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Charlene insisted with a sympathetic touch on her arm. “They’ve belonged to someone else for ten years. You’re all you’ve got, Libby. Do something about you.”

  “She’s got us,” Sara said, patting Libby’s other arm. “Come on, Lib. Come home with me tonight. Tony’s cousin from Boston is staying with us. He’s a nice guy with a healthy podiatry practice, and if you discount a tendency to think he’s king of karaoke, he can be fun.”

  Libby smilingly refused. “Thanks, but I’m on a deadline for Rosie’s next adventure.”

  “Good grief. How many Rosie books will that make?” Charlene picked up her coffee cup with a graceful gesture and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed.

  “Eleven,” Sara replied.

  “Thirteen.” Libby pushed her wedge of cake aside and took a sip of coffee. “And my publisher doesn’t seem to be getting tired of them.”

  “And he won’t be as long as you keep winning the Caldicott Medal.” Sara glanced at her watch and gasped. She hurriedly jammed the last bite of cake into her mouth, then reached for her purse. “I’m sorry, girls, but I’ve got to get home before Little Tony’s ten o’clock feeding, or he’ll make Big Tony’s life miserable.”

  Charlene put her cup down and watched Sara’s hurried preparations to leave. “Are you really that happy?” she asked. The question held less skepticism than genuine interest.

  Sara stopped in the act of shrugging into a light wool jacket and looked back at her friend, clearly surprised that she’d asked. “Of course. Why?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Charlene replied, “if you were single and didn’t have a man and three kids waiting for you, you could stay and have more coffee. You could party till the wee hours without being answerable to anyone.”

  Sara considered that but did not appear tempted. “Then I’d go to bed alone tonight, and there’d be no one to give me hugs and dandelions in the morning.” She leaned down to hug Libby, then Charlene. “Happy birthday, Libby. Ignore us, okay? Do with your life what you want to do with it. God knows you’ve achieved more than either one of us.”

  Libby wondered about the truth of that as she and Charlene sat for another half hour, then settled the bill and waited just outside the door while the parking attendant went for their cars.

  She’d made more
money, had a big house in the hills, a Mercedes, and a personal trainer, but she hadn’t borne any children as Sara had, and she hadn’t maintained a belief in happily-ever-after as Charlene had.

  “I didn’t mean to sound like such a witch,” Charlene said, staring moodily at the lights of Portland spread out before them like a sequined blanket. Then she turned to look into Libby’s face, her eyes grave in the harsh light of the restaurant’s doorway. “But you should find a good man. You have so much more to offer than I do. But they’re not going to find you as long as you have losers hanging on to you. Please. Do yourself a favor. Forget what might have been with the children and live now—for you.” She smiled suddenly and pointed to Libby’s hair. “I like the new cut. Short is in, you know. It brings out your eyes and your cheekbones.”

  Libby accepted the compliment with an answering smile, but was thinking about Charlene’s analysis. She doubted there was a man anywhere who didn’t want mothering from a woman. Sara loved her Tony, but he often behaved like one of their children. And Charlene’s men all used her and left her, displaying the selfish irresponsibility of narcissistic immaturity.

  No. If she were to surround herself with family, she would add children, not a man.

  Feeling as though she’d uncovered a grave truth, she said goodbye to Charlene as the driver brought up her Mercedes. She stepped out from behind the boxwood hedge that surrounded the restaurant and started across the driveway toward her car.

  She wondered absently where the roar was coming from as she picked her way carefully over the decorative brick walk. Then she heard Charlene’s shrill cry and saw the urgent expression on the attendant’s face as he waved frantically at her. She stopped and turned as the sound grew louder. Mystified, she watched the bright glare of a single light approach her at great speed.