Blake tried to pay attention to the rest, to focus on the answers that had nearly driven him insane with their elusiveness. But they just didn’t seem to matter anymore.
He wished Juliet would finish up with her witness and come sit beside him.
She did, and the moment her gaze met his, when that old connection flared between them, was as sweet as any he’d known.
Until, two minutes later, when he heard the words, “Case dismissed.”
He felt like jumping up, whooping and hollering like a kid, but he couldn’t seem to move. Afraid he might do something really stupid, like cry, he sat there, his arms heavy against the arms of his chair, and blinked a couple of times.
It was all the time it took for Mary Jane to come hurtling forward and fling herself on top of him.
“We did it!” she cried, hugging him.
It was the first time he’d ever felt those tiny arms around him.
Tears slowly dripped down his face.
JULIET STOOD and watched while the courtroom quickly cleared out, reporters following Paul Schuster through the back door. She tried not to watch her daughter in Blake’s arms. Tried not to be jealous. Tried not to need to be there, too.
Marcie, who’d come forward behind Juliet, nudged her. “I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you I’m getting married.”
Juliet had suspected as much, and was scared to death of what Marcie’s future would bring her.
She pulled her twin into her arms and held on. “Be happy, Marce.”
Marcie hugged back, tightly, and then leaned back to look Juliet square in the eye. “I am, Jules. For the first time since Mom died, I feel genuinely happy.”
“Did you tell her?” Mary Jane piped up from her father’s arms. Blake had risen and held the little girl high on his suited hip, as though she were little more than a toddler. The sight took Juliet’s breath away. Her daughter had a dad. And seemed to be perfectly happy about it. Mary Jane might be tough, but Blake was tougher. Her mother could have told her that.
“Yes,” Marcie said, the smile on her face going on and on. She rubbed her stomach and though she wasn’t really showing yet, Juliet felt another twinge of envy. Marcie was going to have it all. Mary Jane was going to have it all. Blake was going to have it all.
And Juliet had robbed herself of everything she’d ever wanted.
“So then.” With one arm hooked around her father’s neck, Mary Jane pulled her mother over to them in the now deserted courtroom. “Now that Daddy knows everything about the bad guys, aren’t you guys going to quit lying and just admit that even if you’re mad you really love each other and want us to be a family?”
Juliet choked. And tried not to cry. Her emotions were on overload.
“If I have to have a father, that’d be okay, but there’s no way I’m going to be a split.”
“It’s not that easy, sweetie,” Juliet said, hating the fear she heard behind Mary Jane’s attempt at confidence.
Blake looked at her, at their daughter, and then back at her. “I think it might be.”
She stopped. Stared. Afraid to believe.
“You did what you had to do,” he said, his gaze intent while his daughter looked from one to the other. “You were being true to yourself, and that’s integrity at its core.”
Her eyes filled with tears then, even though she was still in court. “What are you saying?”
He glanced from the child to Juliet again. “Our daughter said it’s time to admit that we love each other.”
She tried to speak. And couldn’t.
“I always tell the truth,” he finished.
“So does Mom,” Mary Jane asserted.
Marcie laughed out loud.
“So I guess this means it’s official,” Mary Jane said. “We should get married before school starts so that I can finally quit getting so mad every time someone says something about dads.”
MUCH LATER THAT NIGHT, on a blanket on the beach behind Juliet’s cottage, Blake lay with Juliet beside him, his arm cradling her head, while they looked up at the stars.
“I want to know everything about her.”
“I have scrapbooks with pictures and journal entries for every major event,” she told him. “I told myself I’d send them to you when she turned eighteen.”
He couldn’t get upset with that. He understood that those books were Juliet’s way of keeping him with her when her fear was forcing him away. Her fears, her life’s experiences and conditioning—his choices—had forced her to raise their daughter alone. But her heart had insisted that she share the time with him anyway.
“When does school start?” he asked.
“In a couple of weeks.”
The cool breeze coming in from the ocean felt glorious on his heated skin.
“Doesn’t give us long to plan a wedding.”
“Flights go from San Diego to Vegas every hour.”
“Can you get off work tomorrow?”
“At the moment, I just lost my biggest client,” she told him, sounding as if she was grinning. “How about you?”
“I’d already cleared my calendar in case of an extended vacation.”
Juliet didn’t say anything and he wondered if she’d come up with some other challenge to block her trip to happiness. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to let her do it twice.
“I know we said we’d wait, but I can’t,” she finally said, her voice fraught with pain.
He turned to look at her. “Wait for what?”
“This.”
With a heavy groan, she rolled on top of him. “I just can’t wait anymore.” Very slowly she lowered her head to his, opened her mouth and took them both back nine long years—to a beach and a night and a moment that they had never forgotten.
No one had ever been like Juliet, nothing like the way he felt in her arms. Or she in his.
“Mary Jane,” he muttered when he could form a coherent thought.
“Is a very sound sleeper.”
Blake didn’t stop for another thought until the dawn was coming up over the ocean.
“We’ve done it again,” Juliet said, sitting beside him on the blanket with her recently donned clothes skewed and wrinkled.
He hoped so. God, he hoped so. Including the very same consequences they’d had nine years before.
Only this time, Daddy would know.
The Rogue’s Return
By Margaret Moore
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND