Marriage By Necessity

Marriage By Necessity
Marisa Carroll

Cottonwood Lake was so calm, it looked like glassSo why did Nate feel as if he was at the center of an out-of-control storm? Sarah. Here on his doorstep. The last person he'd ever expected to see was his ex-wife–with a child, no less. And then to hear her say those four incredible words, "Will you marry me?"But Sarah has to have a life-threatening operation and there's no one to care for little Matty but her. And that's why Nate grudgingly agrees to go along with her plan. Against his better judgment.After all, what happens if Sarah survives?

“Does your husband know you’re here?”

He must know, Nate surmised. He couldn’t see Sarah sneaking around on the guy. She wasn’t like that.

She gave him a quick, startled glance. “How did you know I’d remarried?”

“It wasn’t exactly a secret on base. There were plenty of people who didn’t mind passing along the information. It took a while to get to Afghanistan, but I heard it.”

She nodded. “You didn’t hear all of it. David died more than three years ago. A hit and run.”

Nate hadn’t let himself think of her married to another man, but he didn’t like the fact that she was on her own again, either. “You’re right. I didn’t hear that. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said with quiet dignity.

“Who told you I was back in Riley’s Cove? You haven’t been in touch with anyone in my family. They’d have told me.”

“I checked with your old unit. Sergeant Harris is still there.

He said you’d moved back to Michigan…I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at the lake. “I know you’d planned to make the Army your career.”

“It was time for me to go.” He’d made it safely through three tours, but his luck had run out two days before his unit shipped home from Iraq. A nineteen-year-old Earnhardt wannabe in a Humvee, anxious as hell to be on the plane back to the States, had pinned him against a loading dock, breaking his knee and crushing his ankle. He’d been damn lucky not to lose half his leg. “You didn’t come all this way from Texas just to offer your sympathy for something that happened eighteen months ago. Why are you here, Sarah?”

“I need you to marry me.”

Dear Reader,

Nate and Sarah loved each other deeply, but their inability to agree on having a child destroyed their marriage. Now, four years later, Sarah has come to Cottonwood Lake, Michigan, to ask Nate to marry her again, and raise her fatherless three-year-old son. Nate agrees because Sarah is dying.

But what happens when she doesn’t die, and they find themselves bound to each other once more, a family in name only? Marriage by Necessity is a story of two people working their way through a tangle of old hurts to forge a future together. We hope you enjoy your trip to Cottonwood Lake. It’s one of those places we love to write about, filled with good times, good food, good fun and good people.

Enjoy,

Carol and Marion (Marisa Carroll)

Marriage by Necessity

Marisa Carroll

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

MARRIAGE BY NECESSITY

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 THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER ONE

COTTONWOOD LAKE was quiet today, its blue-gray surface as smooth as glass. Sarah closed her eyes and heard the sound of a boat starting up far out on the lake, and closer, the scolding chatter of a squirrel in the tree beside her car. The autumn sun was warm on her face and shoulders as it filtered through the branches of yellow-leaved cottonwoods. It was a perfect southern Michigan Indian summer afternoon.

Far too lovely a day to think about dying.

But she had no choice. She must talk to Nate today. She couldn’t come this far only to turn around and go back to their dreary little motel room in Ann Arbor. She had to drive up the sandy, unpaved lane, past the fork in the road that led to Riley’s Trailer Trash Campground, to the top of the hill, and ask her ex-husband to marry her again.

She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel of the secondhand minivan. She hadn’t seen or talked to Nate in almost four years, not since he’d shipped off to Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Their marriage was already on life support by then and war and distance had done nothing to heal the wound. The divorce had become final while he was still overseas. Nate had wanted it that way. So had she, at least she thought she had.

She no longer had the luxury of what-ifs.

She had a child to protect and provide for.