One Tough Marine by Paula Graves

Author:Paula Graves
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2010-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Wanda gave him a long, considering look. “Well, you’d better be worth the headache.”

“I’m the one who put him crossways with the law, Wanda.” Abby caught Wanda’s hands. “Luke was in the Marines with Matt.”

Wanda’s eyes narrowed at her mention of Matt’s name. Most people had liked Matt as soon as they met him. He’d been that kind of guy, charming, funny and impossible to resist in a lot of ways. But Wanda had never warmed to him the handful of times she had visited Abby in California. Abby had always figured it was because Wanda blamed Matt for keeping Abby out West after her college days were done. She knew Wanda had thought Abby would head back home to Texas after school. When it didn’t happen, Matt had been as good a scapegoat as any.

Although, knowing Wanda’s keen insight into people, maybe she’d seen what even Abby hadn’t seen until much later—the liar and cheater hidden beneath Matt’s pleasing exterior.

Abby crossed and took Stevie from Luke’s arms. Luke gave her an odd look, as if he were seeing her for the first time. Maybe he was, in a way. When her parents died, she’d let the move to California for school create an almost complete break from her old life. It had been the only way she could survive the crushing grief that had driven her away in the first place.

The separation had changed her, not always for the better. She’d learned to compromise, to settle for less than what she really wanted, because she knew that life wasn’t fair. But sometimes she’d settled for far too little, hadn’t she? She’d let Matt get away with lies and betrayals that she should never have accepted. Maybe if she’d stood her ground with him more in the past, she wouldn’t be in the mess she was in now.

But as her mother used to say, that was dirty water under a rickety bridge. She had to deal with the here and now. And standing here in Wanda Langston’s kitchen, surrounded by the people she loved most in the whole world, she felt like a whole new woman. In this place, she was no longer the woman Luke had known for almost a decade.

She was Abigail Jane Seymour, from Texarkana, and she was a force to be reckoned with.

She crossed back to Wanda, her drowsy son clinging to her side. “Wanda, this is my son, Stevie.”

Wanda’s eyes widened with surprise and no small amount of hurt, and Abby felt a rush of guilt for having stayed distant from Wanda and Billy for so long. “Good lord, Billy, did you hear that? Our Baby Abigail has a baby of her own.”

“Hard to believe, ain’t it?” Billy grinned. “I remember when you weren’t any bigger than a pea pod, walkin’ around here like you owned the whole world, and here you are a mama now.”

“Now you’re going to make me cry,” Abby said with a watery chuckle. Stevie twisted in his arms to look up at her as if she’d grown an extra head.

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