Home At Last

Home At Last
Laurie Campbell

WHERE WERE HER CHILDREN?They were gone like a flash in the night. Now Kirsten Laurence was desperately searching for her precious three. And her only recourse was to elicit the help of Detective J. D. Ryder–a man with whom she'd shared a past and from whom she still kept a very special secret!Though every instinct screamed not to become involved in Kirsten's plight, J.D. could not turn his back on the single mom who still made him long for what he couldn't have. He would help Kirsten recover her missing children…and then he'd walk away. Unless he could admit that the eldest child's eyes strangely resembled his own…and that in Kirsten's arms he could come home at last…!

“I can’t do this.”

Kirsten gulped, wiping the back of her wrist against her eyes. “I can’t lean on you.”

“You damn well can.” J.D. was right behind her, resting his arm around her shoulders, and she wrenched herself away.

“Not for long,” Kirsten protested. He obviously had no problem offering her a shoulder to cry on, but she couldn’t let herself take refuge in his arms. “I can’t go through that again.”

“What?”

“You leaving,” she whispered, not even caring about hiding the old wound.

“Kirsten—”

“I…I thought we had a…a future together,” she blurted out before realizing how idiotic that must sound. “I know it was stupid,” she continued. “You’d never said you wanted me—”

“My God,” J.D. interrupted, staring at her in disbelief. “I never wanted anybody like I wanted you.”

Dear Reader,

While every romance holds the promise of sweeping readers away with a rugged alpha male or a charismatic cowboy, this month we want to take a closer look at the women who fall in love with our favorite heroes.

“Heroines need to be strong,” says Sherryl Woods, author of more than fifty novels. “Readers look for a woman who can stand up to the hero—and stand up to life.” Sherryl’s book A Love Beyond Words features a special heroine who lost her hearing but became stronger because of it. “A heroine needs to triumph over fear or adversity.”

Kate Stockwell faces the fear of knowing she cannot bear her own child in Allison Leigh’s Her Unforgettable Fiancе, the next installment in the STOCKWELLS OF TEXAS miniseries. And an accident forces Josie Scott, Susan Mallery’s LONE STAR CANYON heroine in Wife in Disguise, to take stock of her life and find a second chance….

In Peggy Webb’s Standing Bear’s Surrender, Sarah Sloan must choose between loyalty and true love! In Separate Bedrooms…? by Carole Halston, Cara LaCroix is faced with fulfilling her grandmother’s final wish—marriage! And Kirsten Laurence needs the help of the man who broke her heart years ago in Laurie Campbell’s Home at Last.

“A heroine is a real role model,” Sherryl says. And in Special Edition, we aim for every heroine to be a woman we can all admire. Here’s to strong women and many more emotionally satisfying reads from Silhouette Special Edition!

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

Home at Last

Laurie Campbell

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

For my sister, Lisa,

who’s shared a lifetime of creating characters we love

LAURIE CAMPBELL

spends her weekdays writing brochures, videos and commercial scripts for an advertising agency. At five o’clock she turns off her computer, waits thirty seconds, turns it on again and starts writing romance. Her other favorite activities include playing with her husband and son, teaching catechism class, counseling at a Phoenix mental health clinic and working with other writers. “People ask me how I find the time to do all that,” Laurie says, “and I tell them it’s easy. I never clean my house!”

Contents

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 One

“Where are my children?”

“I don’t know,” the airport clerk repeated, and Kirsten Laurence fought back a flare of panic. “All I know is, they’re not on this flight. If they were, we’d have the Un-accompanied Minor paperwork.”

But what if Brad had forgotten to fill it out? Or the airline had lost it someplace? Maybe she was grasping at straws, but the possibility of not seeing Lindsay, Adam and Eric as soon as the plane arrived was making her stomach twist with horror.

“Unless they look older than their ages,” the clerk offered, evidently seeing her stricken expression. “Once in a while, we’ll get a teenager who can pass for—”

“My daughter is seven,” Kirsten interrupted, clenching her fists in the folds of her flowered shirt—Lindsay’s favorite, which was why she’d worn it today. “And the twins are five. They’ve been visiting their dad for two weeks, and I’m picking them up this morning!”

“Well, we have another Seattle-to-Tucson flight coming in at three-fifteen, and the first one landed two hours ago….”

Dear God, could she possibly have missed them? It was impossible, but she couldn’t find any better explanation.

Worse ones, yes. Like Brad forgetting the date. Or losing track of time, except that surely by now he would have called her. Maybe a car accident on the way to the airport. A trip to the emergency room. Brad knocked unconscious, her children not knowing the phone number of their brand-new house….

No, she was being silly. Overprotective. It was probably something simple, like a flat tire. Or Brad deciding right before they boarded that another airline had better first-class seats. She could easily imagine him buying new tickets on the spot, discarding the original ones without a thought for the cost.

That had to be it, Kirsten told herself, trying to steady her breathing while she headed toward the cluster of pay phones to call Seattle. That would be typical of her ex-husband.