Her Perfect Match

She hated herself at that moment for the instant reaction she always had to a strange man’s interest—fear. And this time it was worse. It all but swamped her. It was so much worse than usual, she had a hard time hiding her reaction. Reaching inside herself for the courage she drew on to get through difficult times, Elizabeth forced herself to hold her ground and smile rather than back away and flee.

“Ms. Boyer, pleased to make your acquaintance,” Jack Alton said, as if abruptly aware that staring was rude. Then he dipped his head in a polite, cowboylike salute that went perfectly with his Western accent.

“And it’s a pleasure to meet you, as well,” she said, not meaning a word of it. She hated that interest she saw in his eyes. Almost hated him for having it…

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.

—II
Corinthians
5:17

Dear Reader,

No one was more surprised than I was when I found Elizabeth Boyer waiting in line for her own story. When we met her in the first Laurel Glen book—
The Girl Next Door
—she was just a secondary character who appeared to be a spoiled rich girl. But my wise editor, Patience Smith, saw something intriguing and “redeemable” about her, which got me thinking. As Elizabeth began to take shape, it was clear that she was misunderstood by many and needed a special Taggert man to see her as she really was. But, alas, I’d used them all up!

Then I remembered Aunt Meg Taggert, her early life on Broadway, her tragic lost-soldier love and her selfless act of coming home to care for her niece and nephew even though it meant giving up her acting career. She left home as a teen, not knowing the Lord, but came home from New York a believer. What changed her? And so was born Jackson Wade Alton, the child Meg gave up for adoption thirty-two years earlier when her fiancé died, leaving her alone and pregnant.

With his faith a little shaken but still strong, Jackson arrived on the Laurel Glen scene, looking for his biological mother. After finding the Lord in her darkest hour, Meg had picked a Christian family to raise him, so Jackson was ready to help Elizabeth. When Jackson met her, sparks flew, but he soon saw her injured heart and helped her find the Lord, the Divine healer. Elizabeth felt unworthy until she turned to the Lord. She learned what so many of us forget—if God can move mountains, He can heal hearts. And He will. All we have to do is ask.

God bless,

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

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

“T
hen who am I?” Jackson Alton’s broken whisper was nearly inaudible against the backdrop of the Colorado blizzard raging outside the cabin windows.

Such a simple question, he thought. Any thirty-two-year-old man should know the answer. Minutes ago he’d thought he did. But that was before.

Jackson stared at the adoption papers in his hand, a hard knot having formed in his chest. A split second’s decision—whether to sort through a box of papers or put them in the musty ranch house attic untouched—had not only changed his perception of the life he’d led so far and had planned to lead in the future. It had altered something more essential. It had shifted his vision of who he was.

He sat alone on the floor of his mother’s studio—the shrine his father has kept to his late wife for twenty-eight years. He stopped his thoughts right
there and demanded of himself what no one had the guts to say before. Not his mother. Not his father.

Jackson looked around the small cabin he’d planned to move into any day now. He’d decided he needed a little personal space, and Evan Alton had finally reconciled himself to the idea that it was time to clear out his wife’s studio. Now Jackson felt he no longer belonged there. But then where
did
he belong?

He hadn’t a clue.

And the really scary thing was Jackson might never have known the truth if he hadn’t volunteered to clear out the cabin. He’d been afraid Evan might slide into a depression if he had to go through his wife’s things.

He clenched his fist, wrinkling the papers in his hand. In a moment of clarity, he realized that the depth of his anger at this revelation he’d stumbled across was really mostly caused by his father’s ongoing deep preoccupation with the loss of his wife—even to the detriment of his children.

Though Evan had been a positive presence in their lives, Jackson had always instinctively known that something a parent should have given hadn’t been given to him. And he’d missed it.

With the March blizzard howling outside, Jackson once again stared at the piece of paper he’d unconsciously wadded into a ball. He turned it over and over examining twists and turns of something that, like his life, had been smooth and neat only moments before. He shook his head and smoothed out the crumpled ball before leafing through the rest of the documents and notes in the box on his lap.

The papers with the official adoption decree answered several of his questions. His father’s name was Lieutenant Wade Jackson, which must be why his name was Jackson Wade. His mother was a Broadway actress named Margaret Taggert—she used Meg as a stage name. There was a Broadway playbill from
Hello, Dolly!
in the late sixties. Her name was circled. She’d been in the chorus. There was a sort of family tree on the Taggerts in a handwriting completely foreign to him. He found himself hoping it was his mother’s hand—that she’d cared enough to personally record the information so she’d be sure he had it.

The Taggert family—his family—lived in Pennsylvania on a horse farm called Laurel Glen. How weird was that? Maybe not very, he realized. Meg Taggert might have sought out a life for her son parallel to the one she’d had growing up. After all, the Circle A was a ranch with horses, though they raised cattle as their main livelihood. His horse breeding program was his sideline.

There was nothing about his father other than his name, however. He sorted through the rest of box, hoping to find something to tie him to the mysterious Wade Jackson other than being named after him. At the bottom of the box he found a tiny manila envelope. He opened the flap and turned it over in his palm. A sparkling diamond ring fell into his hand.

“I guess they were engaged and something went wrong,” he muttered, examining the initials inscribed on the inside.

Wade Jackson had been listed with a title. Lieutenant. The Vietnam War had still been going on about then. He might have been killed, but wouldn’t that have given Meg Taggert more of a reason to keep Wade Jackson’s child? Logic told him his father must have been killed, because if Meg Taggert’s relationship with Jackson had ended bitterly, she wouldn’t have requested his child be named after him and she wouldn’t have left the ring for that child.

Something suddenly occurred to him that wasn’t completely unrelated. He wondered if his sister, Crystal, was adopted, too. He glanced at the picture of Martha Alton and her mother—the grandmother who’d raised him. No way was Crystal adopted. She was the spitting image of the woman who had been his mother for four years. Crystal had the same Native American cheekbones and onyx eyes that stared at him from the thirty-year-old picture. He, on the other hand, looked nothing like anyone else in the family. Apparently he’d just found out why. It had never bothered him before—that different face from all the rest. It did now, and he hated that it did.

“Why would he not tell me? Why the secrecy?” Jackson asked the silent room. It didn’t escape his notice that whenever he had deep personal questions, he usually talked to God, but this time he found himself unable or unwilling to turn to Him. Instead, Jackson talked to an empty room.

Feeling every bit as empty, Jackson stood and gathered all the papers, unsuccessfully fighting anger. He
didn’t need God to answer his questions. Evan Alton had the answers and had kept them to himself for thirty-two years. And Jackson wanted those answers. Now!

E
lizabeth Boyer was not a happy camper. She was on her way from Boyerton, her parents’ estate, to make apologies to her best friend’s family in her father’s name. She felt it was her duty and the right thing to do even though it wasn’t her responsibility. Typical of Reginald Boyer’s self-centered way of thinking, he felt he’d done nothing wrong.

Her heart heavy, she drove toward the private road through Laurel Glen with its iron archway at the entrance that had made the horse farm a Chester County landmark. The mountain laurel that lined the drive was already in full bloom on that second day of July. It was a scene fit for a postcard.

Or at least it would have been if there weren’t TV news vans and various other cars clustered about the entrance like vultures hoping for a tasty set of bones to pick. As she rounded the bend right before the drive and flipped on her turn signal, she saw them.

They turned as one toward her car, and all of them seemed to focus on her tattletale blinker.

It was too late to drive on by. And unfortunately, because it was a cool day, she’d driven from the car wash with the windows down. So within a split second of realizing the inevitability of a confrontation with the reporters, Elizabeth had three microphones jammed in her face and three nearly identical camera eyes peered at her.

“What is your business here? Are you a federal inspector? Are you an employee?” The run-on question came from three separate voices, but they were all of one mind.

Elizabeth thought instantly of her father and the statement he’d given the press. It was the reason she was there and had been a self-serving attempt to divert attention off his culpability in the current crisis at Laurel Glen. But then again, there had been polite bad blood between Reginald Boyer and Ross Taggert, owner of Laurel Glen, for years, and this was just another volley in an undeclared war that was mostly in her father’s mind.

She decided to give the reporters a statement, hoping to balance her father’s criticism of her friend Cole Taggert for trying to save the mare that had come down with West Nile Virus.

“My name is Elizabeth Boyer,” she said. “The infected mosquitoes were breeding in my parents’ unopened pool.”

That caused an excited murmur to move through the crowd of journalists behind the news crews. They
took to scribbling in their notebooks at the speed of light.

“According to your father he doesn’t feel at all responsible. He sees this as a natural occurrence. Do you agree?”

“I believe the animal comes from an area of the country where this isn’t a problem and the vaccine is still in short supply. I think everyone should be mindful that standing water can promote mosquitoes and that we have a dangerous strain of encephalitis moving into the area. I’ve been told that simple precautions are very effective against this sort of natural occurrence.”

“Do you agree with your father’s bleak assessment of the Laurel Glen mare’s chance for survival?” another of the three microphone-toting reporters asked.

“No. I most certainly do not agree. Dr. Taggert would never do anything detrimental or cruel to an animal. He decided to treat her rather than euthanize her, and she happens to be on the mend. That’s all I have to say. Kindly clear the road,” she demanded, using the imperious tone she’d heard her mother use time and again to intimidate others into doing her bidding without question. It worked now, as it always did.

Minutes later, after waving to the farmworker who’d moved the makeshift barricade from across the road, Elizabeth glanced into her rearview mirror at the clustered news vans and reporters. She couldn’t shake the vision of vultures from her mind.

She found Laurel Glen relatively quiet, unlike what
she’d heard it had been like for the last several days with investigators crawling everywhere. They’d been trying without success to find the source of the West Nile Virus that had infected a mare belonging to Laurel Glen’s female trainer. That was because Elizabeth’s parents’ pool had never been opened, and the source of the infection was the water in the winter pool cover.

Elizabeth parked in the small lot behind the first two of four stone and brick stables that formed an X with a large competition-size practice ring connecting them. She stepped into the unusual cool of the sunny, breezy July day and headed toward the clinic. As she walked next to the practice ring, she was surprised to see Cole Taggert bent over the engine of one of the big tractors used to mow the hay.

Cole was the least mechanical person she’d ever met.

“I hope this means CJ’s mare is even better today,” she said, stepping next to him. “But I’ve got to wonder if success hasn’t gone your head. Unless something drastic has happened in the last several days you’re not exactly qualified to operate on a tractor, Dr. Taggert.”

She sucked in a quick breath and stepped back when he stood straight and looked at her with eyes the color of the night sky. It wasn’t Cole at all but Jack Alton, the new foreman. She remembered in a flash the dinner at Laurel Glen last week when she’d met him the first time. She’d made the same mistake then….

As she’d crossed the threshold of Laurel House’s parlor, Ross Taggert laughed at something his son, Cole, had said. Elizabeth was surprised because the two of them usually reacted to each other like gasoline and a lit match. She was about to loop an arm around Cole’s waist and join them—she was, in fact, only a couple feet from doing just that—when she stopped in her tracks.

Cole was across the room! She watched him engage in an earnest discussion with CJ Larson, Laurel Glen’s trainer. She blinked, doubting her sanity as well as her eyes, then she turned to Ross Taggert and the Cole Taggert look-alike.

“And this lovely lady is—” Ross was speaking as she studied the two men near her “—Elizabeth Boyer, Cole’s, ah, friend. Elizabeth, I’d like you to meet our new foreman, Jack Alton.”

Jack Alton’s deep, nearly indigo eyes startled her almost as much as his resemblance to Cole did. Elizabeth searched his features, looking at both the striking resemblance and the small nuances of difference. His hair, though close in color to Cole’s, was definitely a shade darker, making it nearly black. His cheekbones were a bit sharper, his jaw a bit more chiseled. He was taller, too, though only by an inch or two. But it was those eyes, Taggert blue, Cole’s aunt Meg called them, which Cole did not have, that took her breath away when he leveled them on her. The new foreman and Cole could be brothers, but standing next to him felt nothing like the safe feeling being near Cole gave her. Jack Alton stared at her
openly for a long uncomfortable moment. The look in those blue, blue eyes of his was nothing like the brotherly expression Cole had when he looked at her, either.

Elizabeth’s heart sped up, pounding in her chest. She hated herself at that moment for the instant reaction she always had to a strange man’s interest—fear. And this time it was worse. It all but swamped her. It was so much worse than usual it was hard to hide her reaction. Reaching inside herself for the courage she drew on to get through difficult times, Elizabeth forced herself to hold her ground and smile rather than back away and flee.

“Ms. Boyer, pleased to make your acquaintance,” Jack Alton said, as if abruptly aware that staring was rude. Then he dipped his head in a polite cowboylike salute that went perfectly with his western accent.

“And it’s a pleasure to meet you, as well,” she said, not meaning a word of it. She hated that interest she saw in his eyes. Hated him for having it….

And being near him was just as bad this time. Her heart pounded so loudly she could hardly hear over its thunder, and she felt light-headed and breathless, too.

“Sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Boyer,” Jack Alton said a little disdainfully. “Cole’s been tied up these last few days. Seems
someone
let their pool become a mosquito breeding ground and it’s caused a lot of trouble around here. I hope you haven’t brought any more infection with you.”

He had that same look in his eyes he’d had the other night, but today there was anger, too, and there was no one around to deflect the male intensity of his gaze. She took another step back. Unsettled, she resorted to haughtiness, as she always did to cover her anxiety. She knew it didn’t win her friends but she didn’t care. It was yet another lesson she’d learned from her mother and one of the few she agreed with. Finding yourself disliked was better than having your weaknesses exposed to the world.

“I’m well aware of the problems and the cause,” she told him, working to interweave every word with icy disdain. “I took precautions. And I’ll express my apologies where they’re due. I don’t need hints from you as to my duties and you, sir, are due no apology. You are
paid
for the time you put in at Laurel Glen.”

She’d apologized to Cole for the problems and for her father’s outrageous statement to the press. She couldn’t imagine how Reginald could have told the world Cole was wasting resources on an animal that should be put down.

Elizabeth turned and started toward the barn, but Jack Alton stepped in her path. Again, she backed away from him. “What?” she demanded, reaching for anger to drown her uneasiness.

“Cole doesn’t need any more pressure to put that mare down.”

Her temper notched up. Anger felt better than fear. She gave him an icy glare. “Mr. Alton, just because my father says something, that doesn’t mean I automatically adopt it as gospel. Morning is a beautiful
creature and, from what I understand, she’s the only thing CJ has left from her life with her parents, who are deceased. Knowing Cole as I do, I’d expect nothing less from him than desperate measures to save his patient. And I applaud those efforts. Now if you will kindly get out of my way, I’d like to go see for myself how well Morning is doing today.”

Jack Alton stepped smartly to the side and bowed. “Yes, your highness. Anything you say, your highness.”

Tempted for some odd reason to smile, she waved a dismissive hand the way the royal Elizabeth might. “It is so much more pleasant when the peasants know their place,” she quipped in her haughtiest tone. Then, as if she hadn’t a care in the world, Elizabeth sailed off toward Laurel Glen’s historic barn and the clinic Cole had recently modernized.

Her stomach churned as she pretended not to hear Jack Alton’s deep rumbling laughter following her. Elizabeth was acutely disturbed that she’d let him frighten her so badly when he’d stepped in her path, especially since she was sure he hadn’t meant to be at all threatening. She had to think it was due to his strange resemblance to the Taggert family and his unexplained presence. She feared they had a wolf in sheep’s clothing in their midst.

But even with a plausible excuse, she still hated the fear that had taken her unaware and hated herself for feeling it. Her one small consolation was that no one knew what a coward she was inside, where her fear
of men was a living thing clawing at her and threatening to show itself to the world at any time.

Elizabeth entered the barn. The old building had been converted into offices, rest rooms and an animal clinic years ago. She walked down the hall toward the clinic and heard Cole’s sister Hope’s voice raised in anger. Choosing not to retreat in case Cole needed her support, she forged ahead and arrived to hear Hope Carrington, who lived on the neighboring property, scolding him because he’d kissed CJ Larson then had discounted it as meaningless. Their backs were toward her, so neither knew she was there.

“Obviously a kiss means a lot more to her than you,” Hope chastised her brother. “Really, Cole, how could you toy with someone as inexperienced as CJ Larson? She isn’t in Elizabeth’s league, and you know it!”

“And how, Hope dear, would you know what
league
I’m in?” Elizabeth demanded, hoping to draw Hope’s fire. She owed that to Cole and so much more. Elizabeth refused to be cowed by his sister’s disapproval. Instead she walked to stand next to him, crossing her arms and looking imperiously down her nose at Cole’s younger sister.

“Play in the mud, Elizabeth, and you get it all over yourself,” Hope said, glaring. “It’s really quite easy to spot,” she continued, then she looked at Cole with fire in her blue eyes. “I’ll go see if I can calm CJ down.”

“Leave CJ alone!” Cole snapped. Elizabeth zoned out on the rest of the argument. Her thoughts turned
inward. Why, when she’d been no more than a casual date for any man, did Hope and others around Laurel Glen see through her mask to her soiled soul? Elizabeth had successfully hidden her secret shame from society at large for going on fifteen years, but it didn’t seem to stay hidden at Laurel Glen.

“Save the world from obnoxious little sisters,” Cole grumbled as Hope stalked out.

“Mind telling me what I did to get on Hope’s wrong side?
Again?
” Elizabeth asked.

“It’s my fault,” Cole admitted. “And I’m sorry. I’ve been using you and I just did it again. Not only didn’t I ask you for permission first but now I have to ask you to continue the charade.”

“Used me how, and what charade?”

Cole grimaced. “My family just assumes we’re, well, you know—
involved.
And I’ve just let them go on assuming.”

Stunned, Elizabeth dropped into the chair next to him. Betrayal from Cole was something she wasn’t prepared to deal with. He was her best friend. Her only real friend. The only person in the world she’d thought she could trust. “Oh, Cole, how could you? I trusted you.”

She couldn’t ever remember not trusting Cole. Not since he’d appeared out of nowhere like an avenging angel the day Jason Lexington had lured her into the woods behind the high school. Cole had dragged her attacker to his feet and beaten the older, much larger senior until he’d run him off. Then the natural-born healer in Cole had replaced the tough-guy image he’d
always projected at school. He’d calmed her, taken care of her, told her sweet lies about how she was just the same as she’d always been. Then he’d taken her home where he’d foolishly thought she would be cared for by her parents.

Had he not seen her running along the road later that night and stopped her, she might have done something foolish and changed her life forever. She’d gone out that night looking for trouble, hoping to publicly embarrass her parents with a deliberate act since they were embarrassed by one she’d had no control over. Somehow Cole had convinced her that she was only hurting herself.