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Last-Minute Marriage
Marisa Carroll
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING RIVERBEND, INDIANARiverbend…home of the River Rats–a group of small-town sons and daughters who've been friends since high school. The River Rats are all grown up now. Living their lives and learning that some days are good and some days aren't–and that you can get through anything as long as you have your friends.Mitch Sterling has a lot on his plate. He owns a hardware store that's competing with a big national chain. He's taking care of his elderly grandfather–though Granddad might argue about that–and he's a single father to a young child. On top of that, he's just met a very pregnant, very stranded, very single woman who needs a friend. And if Mitch is honest with himself, he'll admit that he wants to be more than her friend.…
#942 LAST-MINUTE MARRIAGE
Riverbend
Marisa Carroll
#943 BECCA’S BABY
Shelter Valley Stories
Tara Taylor Quinn
#944 THE DAUGHTER MERGER
Janice Kay Johnson
#945 OBSESSION
Kay David
#946 THE HOUSE AT
BRIAR LAKE
Roxanne Rustand
#947 THE MAN BEHIND
THE BADGE
Count on a Cop
Dawn Stewardson
Dad, can I stay up late tonight?”
“Not on a school night,” Mitch said. “Now, why don’t you go show Granddad your drawing, then get to your homework?”
Sam grumbled something unintelligible and went inside with his head hanging. By the time he’d greeted their yellow Lab and shown his grandfather his drawing, he was in a better mood.
Mitch watched the two most important people in his world for a moment. But a part of his brain refused to focus on the scene. Instead, it kept pestering him to check out the car in the lot near the park’s rose bed. Unless he missed his guess, it was a red compact. And as far as he knew, there had only been one red car there today.
But Tessa Masterson was supposed to be safely ensconced in her room at the River View, not sitting in a dark parking lot on a wet October night.
“I’m going out for a quick run,” he informed Sam and his grandfather.
“It’s raining,” Sam observed.
“Your dad’s losing his marbles, going out for a run on a night like this,” Caleb said, drawing circles on his temple with his index finger.
Maybe he was crazy, Mitch thought. Crazy enough to have to see for himself if the car in the parking lot had California plates and a pregnant, sad-eyed woman inside.
*
Dear Reader,
Over the past year and a half, Riverbend, Indiana, has become very real to us. It has come to life in a manner we would have never thought possible when we were first asked to help create this wonderful little town and the people who inhabit it. And along the way, we’ve gained new friends of our own—the other authors in the series.
We’ve come together from across the country to find that even though none of us has ever been to Riverbend, our visions of what we wanted it to be were very much alike. No matter where we grew up, north or south, city or country, we all hold a place much like it in our hearts.
We hope you enjoy reading Tessa and Mitch’s story as much as we enjoyed writing it, and that all the Riverbend stories will find a permanent place in your hearts.
Sincerely,
Carol and Marian (writing as Marisa Carroll)
Last-Minute Marriage
Marisa Carroll
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Mitch Sterling: Single father, owner/operator of Sterling Hardware and River Rat
Tessa Masterson: Unmarried, seven months pregnant, stranded in Riverbend
Sam Sterling: Mitch’s ten-year-old son
Caleb Sterling: Mitch’s grandfather, lifelong Riverbend resident
Brian Delaney: Father of Tessa’s child
Tom Baines: Prize-winning journalist, estranged father and River Rat
Lynn Kendall: Minister and newcomer to Riverbend
Ruth and Rachel Steele: Tom’s twin maiden aunts, operators of Steele’s Books
Kate McMann: Manager of Steele’s Books and Lynn’s best friend
Charlie Callahan: Contractor, temporary guardian and River Rat
Beth Pennington: Physician’s assistant, athletic trainer and Charlie’s ex-wife
Aaron Mazerik: Former bad boy, current basketball coach and counselor at Riverbend High
Lily Bennett Holden: Golden Girl, widow, artist and River Rat
Abraham Steele: Town patriarch and bank president, recently deceased
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u3bf976fa-000f-591a-87f0-90090509d128)
CHAPTER TWO (#u053a6e7c-0fd1-56bf-86d1-3b254e72ef42)
CHAPTER THREE (#ufc509323-53fc-5eb5-8a95-c7371e38d99b)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u8a5f1b25-946a-5b6c-af50-90d7018a1b6e)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u7507b736-d93f-5acb-a386-dcc4ab3d267a)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
SHE WAS LOST.
There was no getting around it. She was thoroughly lost on the back-country roads of rural Indiana. Lost, almost out of gas, and totally shaken by her near miss with a gargantuan piece of farm machinery at the last crossroads.
Tessa Masterson got out of the car and took a couple of deep breaths. It wouldn’t help her baby if she went into a fit of hysterics. And even if she allowed herself to give in to the urge, what good would hysterics do in the middle of nowhere?
And she was in the middle of nowhere. She looked around. Cornstalks nine feet high lined both sides of the narrow road. They stretched away, ahead and behind her, like a long golden tunnel, blocking the view of the tree-studded, nearly flat landscape. Overhead the sky was a bright autumn blue, not a cloud in sight. But she knew the blue sky and the warmth of the October afternoon were an illusion. The air would grow cold when the sun went down, and storm clouds were gathering along the western horizon. She’d watched them piling up in her rearview window for the past couple of hours.
Grasshoppers whirred around her, leaping in the dry brown grasses growing along the banks of the shallow ditch that paralleled the road. It was a much smaller ditch than the one she’d nearly driven into trying to avoid the huge green combine with its wicked-looking, spear-tipped attachment that took up almost the entire road.
The wizened farmer in the cab of the machine probably hadn’t even seen her predicament. If he had, he didn’t bother to stop and help. By the time she’d righted the car and stopped shaking enough to drive on, she’d lost track of the directions the highway patrolman had given her as he’d waved her off the main highway to detour around a jackknifed eighteen wheeler. She reached into the back seat, took a map out of her backpack and spread it open on the hood of the car.
Was she supposed to go left at County Road SW-6 or stay on this county road until she came to E-7? She should have written the instructions down, but there’d been cars behind her, their drivers impatient and obviously more familiar with the area than she was. She knew she needed to keep heading east, and she was doing that, but in this part of the state, major highways were few and far between. As was just about everything else but cornfields and silos.
Tessa pushed a strand of her shoulder-length, honey-blond hair behind her ear and looked around. No landmarks of any kind could be seen, dwarfed as she was by cornstalks. A large brown grasshopper landed on a fringed circle of Queen Anne’s lace by her foot. He swayed there for a minute, surveying the world from an even more limited viewpoint than Tessa’s, and then hopped away, leaving the flower swinging in his wake.
No help there.
She had to find a town, or at least a gas station, or she and her temperamental car would be stranded out here in the boondocks for the night. The Wabash River ought to be somewhere to the south. If nothing else, she could head in that direction until she ran into it, and then turn east. But she didn’t know how far south the river was.
She’d caught a glimpse of a blue water tower just before the incident with the combine, but it had disappeared behind the distant line of trees by the time she reached the next open field. If she was reading her map correctly, the water tower belonged to a small dot on the map called Riverbend.
Already the sun was riding low above the cornstalks. The shadows were long, and the whirring of the crickets and grasshoppers had slowed in just the short time she’d been standing at the side of the road. She folded the map, getting it almost right on the first try. She had to find her way to this Riverbend place. And soon. For all she knew it was so small they rolled up the sidewalks at five-thirty and the whole town went home to supper, including whoever ran the filling station. But evidently it was the only town for miles around.
She was so tired. She’d driven most of every night and half the next day for the past four days. She’d gotten into the habit when crossing the desert, because it was cooler driving. But by the time she’d reached the plains of Kansas, she was doing it to save money. Motel rooms were expensive. Even the cheapest, no-frills ones cost more than she could afford. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—arrive at her sister’s home in Albany seven months pregnant, unmarried, and with nothing but the clothes on her back.
I’m going to have a baby in two months. As always, the thought gave her a little shock of anxiety mixed almost equally with joy.
She might have picked the wrong man to be the father of that baby. She might have made a mess of her life in a lot of ways. But she was determined to be a good mother, even if that meant going home to Albany in disgrace, putting up with her older sister’s I-told-you-so’s and going on welfare until the baby was old enough for her to get a job. Even if it meant giving up her dream of teaching history to spend the rest of her life working to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.
She already loved this baby. She was going to keep it. And she was going to raise it the best way she knew how. But she didn’t dare think too far ahead, because the enormity of it all scared her to death. One day at a time. One step at a time. That was how she’d made it so far. It was how she intended to keep on.
And the very first thing she needed to do was buy gas for her car.
“LOOKS LIKE RAIN,” Ethan Staver said, lifting a finger off the steering wheel to point at the horizon. “Clouds been piling up all afternoon.”
“Radio said it would start before sundown,” Mitch Sterling replied. “Supposed to rain all night and all day tomorrow.”
“That’ll have the farmers on the move.”
Mitch surveyed the fields of yellowing corn that bordered the county highway through the bug-splattered windshield. “None of them like to get bogged down in wet fields.”
“And the longer it takes for them to get their corn in, the later it’ll be before they can take off for Florida for the winter.”
Mitch grinned. Ethan hadn’t lived in Riverbend, Indiana, all his life the way he had, but the police chief knew farmers.
“What did you think of the renovations to the regional jail?” Mitch asked him. They’d spent the afternoon touring the facility—Ethan as the representative of Riverbend’s small police force, and Mitch as a member of the town council.
“The place looks pretty good. Not that we send a lot of people there, but it’s good to know there’s a secure facility when we need one.”
Riverbend was the seat of Sycamore County, Indiana. It had its own jail in the courthouse, but these days it was pretty much just a holding station for prisoners. There was no way the county, or the town, could afford a state-of-the-art facility like the regional jail.
“And the extra revenue we get from renting our unused bunk space to the guys from Indianapolis is a shot in the arm to my budget,” Ethan said.
