Man of His Word

In a flash, she was gone. Marissa didn’t have to be encouraged any further to serve herself a tall glass of the lemonade. She poured a generous serving from a fat-bellied pitcher into the two ice-filled glasses and handed one to Kimberly.

“Mmm...this is good, Mom! Why doesn’t our lemonade taste like this?” Marissa smacked her lips appreciatively.

“Because we use a mix?” The lemonade was good—not too sweet, not too tart, perfectly chilled. It tasted of fresh lemons.

A tall rangy man about Kimberly’s age in a dusty white T-shirt rounded the house. His hair was dark and rumpled, a hint of stubble along his jaw, his skin tanned, and he looked all sinew and bone and muscle in just the right proportions. The chief’s son, perhaps?

“Hey. I’m Daniel Monroe. Ma said you were looking for me?”

Kimberly scrambled up in surprise. This was the fire chief? Had to be about her age, maybe very late thirties.

“Uh, yes. I’m Kimberly Singleton. And this is my daughter, Marissa.” She swept her hand toward Marissa while nudging her to stand up with a carefully placed tap to the ankle. Likewise, Marissa rose to her feet.

Daniel Monroe’s face continued to show polite curiosity, salted with a little apprehension in eyes that were the exact color of the summer sky. “Yes?”

“Well, we’re sorry to bother you on your day off, but we’re hoping you can give us some information. My daughter, Marissa...”

This was harder than she’d thought. She hadn’t rehearsed it, and maybe she should have. She swallowed, feeling Marissa’s growing anxiety emanating in waves beside her. “She was left as a newborn at your fire station. And I believe you were the one who found her?”

It was as though she had sucker punched Daniel Monroe. He rocked back on his heels and regarded first her and then Marissa for a long, long moment.

“So. You kept your name.” The man’s words, directed at Marissa, were tinged with wonder. It was an odd reaction that Kimberly had not at all expected.

Marissa shrugged her shoulders, then hunched them with the shyness that made her so often close up around strangers, or whenever she found herself the center of attention. She appeared, to Kimberly at least, as though she wanted to fall through the porch floor, not daring to meet the eyes of the fire chief—her rescuer. “My mom named me,” she mumbled.

“The bracelet...” Kimberly’s words trailed off. She dug the tiny baby bracelet out of her pocket and handed it to the chief.

He turned it over in his big sturdy hands, the delicate filigree of the bracelet so out of scale in comparison. Did his fingers shake? Or was that a figment of Kimberly’s imagination? “I was afraid they wouldn’t get it to you. To whoever adopted her—Marissa, I mean.” He nodded in Marissa’s direction, then handed the bracelet back to Kimberly. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

“We were hoping you could give us some information,” Kimberly said.

She held her breath. Finally, finally, they were close to getting answers that could help Marissa’s doctors—why had Kimberly put this off? Why had she been so afraid to make this trip?

Daniel didn’t reply at first. Instead, he crossed the short distance to a chair and pulled it around to face the swing and the table. “Why don’t we all have a seat?” he suggested, before he collapsed into the chair as though his legs wouldn’t hold him any longer. “I’ve been picking beans since sunup, and I’m worn out. I see Ma got y’all some of her famous lemonade.”

Kimberly and Marissa sat back down as well, the swing rocking under them. “It’s very good, Chief Monroe,” Kimberly told him. “Please give your mother my compliments.”

But she couldn’t ease back in the swing, not even if Daniel Monroe had sagged back against his chair and was downing a glass of lemonade.

He might have all the time in the world, but she didn’t.

He placed the glass on the table with a thud. “Call me Daniel. I’m so new at the job that when I hear Chief, I think of my old boss, who recently retired, and when I hear Chief Monroe, I think they’re talking about my dad. He was chief for years, but that...”

Daniel paused, his face shutting down for a moment. It left Kimberly pondering whether his father had pulled some strings to get his son the job. That would explain why Daniel was relatively young and yet had such a position of responsibility.

But he still hadn’t offered any details about finding Marissa. Instead, he sat there, looking at them, his foot tapping restlessly on the porch floor, a pensive expression on his face.

“What—” Kimberly started to ask, but Marissa jumped in.

She blurted out, “So you found me? Where she dumped me?”

Kimberly winced. “She didn’t—”

Marissa started to roll her eyes, then stopped because she must have been sure Kimberly would nail her on it. “Mom, you can dress it up any way you want, but the facts are the facts—she dumped me. She didn’t want me, and she dumped me.”

Daniel frowned. It erased the boyishness Kimberly had seen earlier in his face. “She brought you to a place where you’d be safe. She thought that’s what she was doing—that fire stations were safe havens for newborns.”

“You talked with her, then?” Excitement bubbled up in Kimberly as she leaned toward Daniel, nearly knocking over her half-empty lemonade glass. She hadn’t dared to hope for anything as promising as this. All the court documents showed was that the baby had been left at the fire station.

“Yes.” Daniel’s response was clipped. “Briefly.”

“You knew my birth mother?” Despite her earlier hostility, Marissa leaned forward, as well. Gone was her fading-into-the-woodwork reaction, and Kimberly realized for the first time how deeply Marissa wanted to know about the woman—girl, really—who had brought her into the world.

“No. I didn’t know her. I guess you could say I met her. That would be accurate.”

“And she just drove up and handed me to you and left?” Marissa asked.

“No. Not exactly.”

Even Kimberly found herself more than a little exasperated with Daniel’s cagey answers. Am I going to have to drag it out of him bit by bit? I only have the summer! I have to find this woman, have to know if she can tell us anything that will help Marissa. “What can you tell us?” she asked.

He closed his eyes. For a few beats, he said nothing, only sat there, his arms folded across his chest.

Kimberly fought the urge to strangle him in frustration at his long silence. Finally he opened his eyes and gazed at her with a directness that jolted her. He compressed his lips and gave her a small, almost undetectable nod.

But his next words?

“Not much. I can’t tell you much at all.”

Then her heart did a double beat as he leaned forward and asked, “But how about I show you?”

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_acdea925-97c7-5b6a-9e9c-6231b2442452)

DANIEL PARKED HIS pickup in the slot marked Chief and glanced in the rearview mirror. Yep. There was the little Toyota, with the mom and the daughter, pulling up behind him. They’d tailgated him the whole ride back into town from the farm.

He rubbed at a head that ached from too little sleep and too much sun. Between the new job and harvest time just gearing up, he felt as if he’d been run ragged.

And now this.

Blowing out a long breath, he opened the door. Gravel crunched under his foot, and behind him he heard the flags clanking against the pole. Wind was coming in from the west today, hot and dry. Unbidden, he found himself hoping there’d be no car fires on the interstate with such a stiff breeze.

Slamming the door, he saw that the girl and the woman had gotten out, as well. What was the mom’s name? Kimberly? Yeah, Kimberly. She wasn’t what he’d expected. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Adoptive parents didn’t have to look like their kids.

And Kimberly and Marissa didn’t match at all. Marissa had taken after Miriam, who’d been tall and had given Marissa her strawberry blond hair. Kimberly was slimmer and darker and much more petite. And she looked almost too young to be Marissa’s mother.

But like Miriam, Kimberly possessed courage of a sort. Miriam had ginned up the courage and the fortitude to escape a dangerous situation, and he figured Kimberly had shown a similar bravery to tackle the red tape required to adopt a baby.

“So it was here?” Kimberly asked him.