Susan Mallery Fool's Gold Series Volume One: Chasing Perfect\Almost Perfect\Sister of the Bride\Finding Perfect (36 page)

She powered off her laptop, then disconnected it from the docking station. After collecting her notes, a few pens, pads of paper and her address book, she went down the hall to her bedroom.

A little over an hour later, she'd packed what she hoped was enough, loaded the car and gone over everything with Peggy. Her assistant would take care of the house and make sure the bills were paid.

“Are you all right?” Peggy asked.

“Sure. Great. Why?”

Peggy, a forty-something former executive assistant, frowned. “Just checking. This is a lot to take in.” She hesitated. “You know if there's no one else to take care of the girls…”

Liz might suddenly be responsible for two nieces she'd never met. “I know. I'll deal with that when I have more information.”

“Mac and I went to Fool's Gold on our honeymoon. Back when I thought marriage was a good thing. I didn't know you were from there.”

No one did, Liz thought grimly. She found life easier when she didn't talk about her past. “I left right after high school and moved here. San Francisco is my home now.”

Peggy smiled at her. “If you need anything, call me.”

“I will.”

Liz went downstairs to the single car garage and got into her Lexus. She'd packed four suitcases, a couple boxes with Tyler's favorite movies, his Xbox and a handful of books. She went over the inventory because that was easier than thinking about what she was doing. Going back to the one place she never wanted to be. The town where she'd grown up.

For a second she wondered if she really
had
to do this. Go rescue a couple kids she'd never met. Then she shook off the thought. Right now there wasn't anyone else. She couldn't leave the two girls on their own. She would deal with the problem, get it resolved and return to her life. Staying was not an option.

Midday traffic was relatively light and she made it to Tyler's school in about twenty minutes. He was talking to his friends, probably making plans for hanging out. When he saw her small SUV, he waved and hurried over.

“Jason says his family's for sure going to Disneyland in August and they're gonna call and talk to you about me going with them,” he said as he climbed into the passenger seat.

“Hello to you, too,” she greeted with a smile.

He grinned. “Hi, Mom. How was your day?”

“Interesting.”

“Great. Now can we talk about Disneyland?”

Her son was the brightest and best part of her life, she thought as she stared into his dark brown eyes. He had her smile, but everything else came from his father. As if her DNA hadn't been strong enough to overpower his.

Tyler was smart, funny, warm and caring. He had dozens of friends, an easygoing disposition and plans to be an architect when he grew up. She knew that everyone said the early teen years were the worst with boys. That by thirteen or fourteen, he would be making her life hell. But that was a problem for another time. Today, Tyler was her world.

A world that had just been shifted off its axis and was tumbling freely through space.

“Disneyland sounds like fun,” she agreed. “I'll talk to Jason's mom. If they want to take you and you want to go, then we'll arrange it.”

His grin widened. Then he glanced toward the back of the vehicle.

“Whoa, are we going somewhere? Road trip?”

She pulled into traffic, heading toward I-80. She
would take it east, until she turned off to drive into Fool's Gold.

“Sort of,” she said and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

Over the years, she'd done her best not to lie to her son. Not about her past or his father. For the most part, she'd simply told him there were questions she wouldn't answer. At four or five, he'd been easily distracted. At eight, he'd been determined to find out the truth. Now he asked less, probably because he knew he couldn't wear her down. But she knew he wondered.

“I got an e-mail today,” she announced. “You remember I told you that I have a brother?”

“Uh-huh. Roy. We don't ever see him.”

“I know. He's a lot older and he left when I was twelve. I woke up one morning and he was gone. I never saw him again.”

She still remembered her mother's sobs, made thicker and louder by the alcohol lingering in her system. From that moment on, her mother spent her life waiting for Roy to return. Nothing else had mattered, certainly not Liz.

Liz had left town shortly after graduating high school. She'd phoned home once, a few weeks later, saying she thought she should check in and tell her mother where she was.

“Don't bother calling again,” had been the woman's only response before hanging up the phone.

“So Uncle Roy e-mailed you?”

“Not exactly.” Liz didn't know how much to reveal. Telling the truth was one thing, but sharing details was another. “He's, um, in some trouble and I have to help. He has two girls. Your cousins. Melissa is fourteen and Abby is your age.”

“I have cousins? You didn't tell me about cousins.”

“I didn't know about them until today.”

“But they're family.”

True enough, she thought. And the word
family
implied caring and connection. Maybe in most places, but not in the Sutton household. At least not until Liz had had Tyler. She'd done everything she could think of to break the cycle of neglect. She'd been determined to be a warm, loving mother, to offer her child a safe haven.

“I didn't know where Roy was,” she said. “He never got in touch with me after he left.” For six years, she'd waited, hoping he would come get her and take her away. Until he'd walked out, he'd always taken care of her. Been a buffer between her and her mother. Protected her from the worst of it.

By the time she'd been old enough to go looking, she told herself she no longer cared.

“Do they know we're coming?” Tyler asked. “Do they know about me?”

“Not yet, but they will. We're going to stay with them for a couple of weeks.” She didn't mention the fact that Roy was in prison. Time enough for that later. Nor did she discuss the possibility of the girls living with
them permanently. Maybe other family could take care of them.

“I grew up in a small town called Fool's Gold,” she said. “It's in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.”

“Do they get snow?” he asked eagerly. Because at age eleven, seeing snow was about the best it could be.

She laughed. “Probably not in June, but yes, they get snow. There's lots to do there. Hiking, swimming. There's a river and a lake.”

“We could go camping.”

She made a noncommittal noise in her throat, mostly because the thought of camping ranked right up there with being awake during open-heart surgery. Not even thinking about it was pleasant. But then she wasn't an eleven-year-old boy. She hadn't been fascinated by worms and dirt and play cars and plastic guns, either.

More traits she knew he got from his father. Which was another problem. Not the traits, the man himself. Odds were Ethan was still in Fool's Gold. The one place he'd asked her not to be. He'd made it clear he didn't want her or his kid around.

Well, he was just going to have to get over it, she told herself. This was an emergency. She wouldn't make a big deal about Tyler being in town and she certainly wouldn't tell her son about his father. Not when Ethan had rejected them both so completely.

She would deal with the girls and get out as quickly as possible. If she happened to run into Ethan, she
would be pleasant and distant. Nothing more. Because after all this time and all the ways he'd managed to hurt her, there was no way she would ever be vulnerable to him again. She'd learned her lesson. Fool me once and all that.

She gripped the steering wheel tighter and glanced at her nav system screen. It showed the way to her destination and she was counting on the little device to guide her back home when she was done.

* * *

E
THAN
H
ENDRIX STOOD BY THE
barricades between the crowd and the cyclists. The sun was hot, the spectators loud. The noise of a race was specific and not something he would ever forget. There'd been a time when he'd planned on seeing the world on the racing circuit. A long time ago, he thought, remembering the feel of the wind, the sensation of muscles burning as he dug for the will to win.

Winning had come easily. Maybe too easily. He'd gotten careless during a race. At fifty miles an hour, balanced on skinny wheels and a lightweight frame, mistakes could be deadly. In his case, he'd been left with a few broken bones and a permanent limp. For anyone else, it would have been considered lucky. For him, the injury had kept him from ever racing again.

Now, ten years later, he watched the cyclists speed past. He spotted his friend Josh, still making up time from his late start, and wondered
What if.
But he didn't
have a whole lot of energy for the subject. Everything was different now and he was good with that.

He turned away from the race, ready to return to his office, when he spotted a woman in the crowd. For a second he thought he'd imagined her, that he was putting beautiful features he would never forget onto the face of someone else. There was no way Liz Sutton was back in Fool's Gold.

Instinctively he moved closer, but the road with the barricades was between them. The redhead looked up again, this time facing him. She removed her sunglasses and he saw her wide green eyes, the full mouth. From this distance he couldn't see the freckles on her nose, but he knew they were there. He even knew how many.

He swore softly. Liz was back. Except on the back cover of her books, he hadn't seen her in over a decade. As of five seconds ago, he would have told anyone who asked that he'd forgotten her, had gotten over her. She was his past.

She looked away then, as if searching for someone. Obviously not him, he thought, then grinned. Liz back in Fool's Gold. Who would have thought?

He eased his way through the crowd. He might not be able to find her now, but he had a feeling he knew where she would be later. He would meet her there and welcome her home. It was the least he could do.

* * *

L
IZ KEPT A TIGHT HOLD ON
Tyler's hand on their way to the local grocery store. The crowd around the bike race
was big and seemed to be growing. She'd been foolish to think she could find two girls she'd never met in the throng of tourists. It wasn't as if she even knew what they looked like.

She pointed toward a vendor selling shaved iced and bought Tyler his favorite flavor. Blueberry.

All around them, groups of people laughed and talked about the race. She heard something about a new bike racing school and a new hospital being built. Changes, she thought. Fool's Gold had changed in the past ten years.

But not enough for her to forget. Despite having to detour around blocked roads, she easily found her way down side streets, and back toward the house where she'd grown up.

“You lived here before you went to San Francisco?” Tyler asked.

“Uh-huh. I grew up here.”

“With my grandma Sutton?”

“Yes.”

“She's dead now.”

He spoke the words as information, because that's all they were to him. He'd never met Liz's mother.

When Liz had first left town at eighteen, running away with a broken heart, she'd found her way to the city by the bay, had struggled to find work and a place to stay in a glorified shelter. Then she'd found out she was pregnant.

Her first instinct had been to go home, but that initial
phone call had made her wary. Over the next year, she'd phoned home twice. Both times her mother had made it clear her daughter was no longer a part of her life. The rejection had hurt but hadn't been much of a surprise. Her mother had also taken great delight in telling her that no, Ethan Hendrix never called or asked about her.

When the woman died four years ago, Liz hadn't cried, though she felt regret over the relationship they never had.

Now, as she crossed a quiet street, she found herself in her old neighborhood. The houses were modest, two- and three-bedroom homes with small porches and aging paint. A few gleamed like bright flowers in an abandoned garden, as if the neighborhood was on the verge of being desirable again.

The worst house on the street sat in the middle. An eyesore of peeling paint and missing roof shingles. The yard was more weeds than plants or lawn, the windows were filthy. Plywood filled the space where one was missing.

She used the key she'd found under the front mat to let them in. She'd already done a brief tour of the house, to see if the girls were there. Judging from the school books piled on the dirty kitchen table and the clothes on the girls' bedroom floors, she would guess summer break hadn't started yet.

Now she walked through to the kitchen with tonight's meal. Half the cabinets were gone, as if someone had started remodeling then changed his mind. The
refrigerator worked, but was empty. There was no food in the pantry in the corner. There were a few potato chip wrappers in the trash and one small apple on the counter.

She didn't know what to think. Based on her niece's letter, the girls had been on their own for a few weeks. Ever since their stepmom had taken off. With their father in jail and no other family around, shouldn't the state step in? Where were social services?

She had more questions, but figured she would deal with them later. It was after four. The girls should get home soon. Once they'd all met, she would get more food in the house and figure out what was going on.

“Mom?” Tyler called from the living room. “May I watch TV?”

“Until your cousins get here.”

Peggy had already called to confirm she'd paid all the amounts due on the utility bills and that everything should be working. Liz could see there was electricity. She turned on the faucet and water gushed out, which was a plus. Seconds later, she heard the sound of cartoons, which meant there was cable. Modern life as she knew it had been restored.