And what had all that pride got her? Simply the worst, the most humiliating day of her life.

How could this have happened? How could she be held liable for her ex-husband’s hospital bill when it was he who had deserted her, deserted his kids, leaving them virtually penniless and with the bank foreclosing on their home?

But unbelievably, none of that had mattered to this Southern judge. Immaterial, he’d called it, even if she’d had proof of her allegations. Which she didn’t. How could she have known Hal would become so desperate as to do such a thing? He’d seemed better, those last few months. She’d even allowed herself to hope… Stupid. Stupid. She should have known.

But it had never once occurred to her that she might not be believed. It was Hal Robey who was the compulsive gambler and congenital liar, Summer who was the responsible parent and respected veterinarian-didn’t that prove something?

Too bad. As the judge had coldly pointed out, there’d already been a ruling in this case, and the deadline for appeal had long since passed. The case could not be retried. Meanwhile, there was a judgment against her. She had been ordered by a California court to pay the rehab hospital’s bill. An order that she had chosen to ignore. Therefore, the judge had no option but to find her in contempt.

Contempt. Oh, yes, she’d seen it in the judge’s eyes when he’d scolded her as if she were a child-or an irresponsible nitwit. Of course, she knew that’s what he thought, that she was just another California bimbo, a dumb little beach bunny. And who could blame him? Because, unfortunately, that was exactly what she looked like.

For most of Summer’s life her looks had been her greatest trial For while she realized she looked very much like her name-golden and breezy, carefree and sunny-that was not who she really was. For one thing, she knew she looked much younger than her thirty-five years-when she wasn’t gaunt and hollow-eyed with worry-young enough to still get carded every time she ordered wine with dinner or bought a six-pack of beer at the supermarket, young enough that she could have fit right in with the crowds of gum-popping teenagers who hung out at the mall near her clinic, making conversation that seemed to consist mostly of “I mean, like, totally awesome, y’know?” No one would ever guess to look at her that she was a practicing vet with two kids and a truly frightening house payment.

And beach bunny? Well, she was blond-thanks to genetics, not choice-with a healthy glow to her skin that had little to do with exposure to the sun. But with the demands of her clinic, not to mention the hectic schedule set for her by the children’s activities, she had precious little time for the beach. If it wasn’t some school project, it was David’s swim practice or one of Helen’s gymnastics meets-for which Summer would almost invariably show up late, still wearing a smock smeared with heaven-knows-what and reeking of nervous animal. At least the children would forgive her for that, since it was what they’d grown up with and were pretty much used to. As co-custodians of an elderly and vile-tempered Persian cat, a timid but adorable Chihuahua, and an African gray parrot with an IQ surpassing that of some college students of her acquaintance, they often wore those telltale smears and scents themselves.

Theirs had been a lively household at times. Interesting, to say the least Had been.

Summer sat quietly, her shoulders slumping with defeat. As she gazed out the courtroom’s high, multipaned windows at a January sky the dingy gray of old dishwater, she thought about the blue of January skies in California, and the roses that would still be blooming in the front yard of her ranch-style house, nestled in its securely affluent suburb at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.

And she thought about the rented mobile home she and the children and the animals lived in now-an ugly brown shoe box set down in a patch of dusty, weedy grass, with a gravel driveway and a single oak tree for shade. But convemently located only a mile from the terminus of the mobile vet service where she’d found employment as a vet-tech, traveling around to local communities, helping to dispense rabies shots and heartworm pills. Her own clinic-yes, perhaps she missed that most of all.

Lively, chaotic…interesting. Oddly enough, she realized as she pulled her gaze away from the windows and began to gather up her coat, her purse, notebook and pen, those words she’d used to describe her former life did still apply to this one. But, oh, how different. Thanks to Hal, that charming scoundrel she’d married right out of vet school with everyone’s blessing, something else had been added. Fear. Of all the things she had to forgive her former husband for, that was the hardest.

Forgive you, Hal?

As much as she wanted to, she really couldn’t blame Hal; she knew compulsive gambling was a sickness, like alcoholism or any other addiction. She knew her husband needed help, more help than she’d been able to give him, and that he’d tried, truly tried, more times than she could count, to straighten himself out.

But this… this time it’s too much, Hal. Even for you. Yes, I’m angry, damn you. I’m angry with you for taking away the life we knew, but especially for putting that look of fear in your children’s eyes.

The cold of the January sky came to settle around Summer’s heart. No way around it, she would have to borrow the money to pay the judgment. Her sisters would help out-Bella, and Evie, if she could track her down in whatever desert or jungle she was filming at the moment. And Mom and Dad probably would, too, if she asked them. Oh, she did hope it wouldn’t come to that. Their retirement income was stretched thin enough as it was.

Slowly she rose, lifted the strap of her handbag to her shoulder, folded her coat over her arm. She took a deep breath, pleased that her legs no longer felt as though they might buckle, and began the short walk up the aisle between the rows of spectators’ seats to the double doors at the back of the courtroom.


“Would you excuse me for a minute?” Riley touched the sleeve of his client’s expensively tailored suit and moved around him on a course intended to intercept the woman who was just emerging from the courtroom. She hadn’t seen him yet. He had an idea that when she did she’d take pains to avoid him, and he meant to see that she didn’t, if he could

He saw that she still wore a dazed look, along with a slight flush-residual effects, he was sure, from the humiliation of the public dressing-down she’d just endured. Riley did regret that, especially since he knew it was mostly his fault the way Judge Stoner had lit into her. Well, hell, it was his job to bring judges and juries around to seeing things the way he wanted them to, and he was good at it He could have had that judge convinced Summer Robey was Joan of Arc or Lizzie Borden, if he’d wanted to, but it had suited his purposes to make sure she came across as merely arrogant and irresponsible instead. The fact that she had a body that’d look right at home loping across a California beach in one of those red lifeguard’s bathing suits they wore on that popular TV show hadn’t made his job any more difficult, either. But while he hadn’t wanted to risk her appearing even the slightest bit sympathetic, he really hadn’t intended the judge to come down on her quite so hard.

He watched her come toward him, still unaware that she was on a collision course with the man responsible for her degradation, busy digging through her pocketbook for something-car keys, probably-a frown of distraction making a tidy pleat between her brows. In addition to the sun-streaked hair and a body that wouldn’t quit, she had a certain coltishness, he decided, that made her seem much younger than she was. This in spite of the rather dowdy way she wore her hair, pulled back in a nondescript ponytail, and the unbecoming army-green shade of her slacks and turtleneck pullover. Pastels, he thought. She should wear sunny yellows, pale pinks, soft silvery blue…

His regret became a physical pressure inside his chest, demanding that he try to ease it with a breath…almost a sigh. Dammit, he knew this woman. Knew her kind, at least Had seen them sitting bewildered and drained across the table from him, all too often still wearing the black-and-blue marks that came of too much love and too much trust coupled with too much pride. Neither saint nor bimbo, this woman. She was, for want of a better name, what Riley liked to call a Giver. The kind of woman Takers homed in on like bees to a blossom. A sucker for every underdog, a magnet for every weak and needy creature to come down the road. But when she needed help? Her kind of woman inevitably had way too much pride to ask for it. She’d try to go it alone even if it killed her. Sometimes, it did.

“Mrs. Robey? May I speak to you for a minute?”

The frown disappeared as her eyes widened and her head came up, reminding him of a wild doe when she hears a twig crack.

This is a mistake, Riley thought. He could feel the client’s eyes on him, too, and knew the man was going to be wondering what the hell this crafty Southern lawyer of his was up to. In Riley’s experience, Californians and northerners just naturally assumed Southern lawyers were all a bunch of good ol’ boys and crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

The woman had stopped directly in front of him. She was taller than he’d thought, with rather thin, sharply honed features and eyes the clear, pale blue of sapphires. On a level with his chin, they regarded him steadily, telegraphing her resentment, bitterness and hurt. But she didn’t say a word. A little too polite, he thought, to tell him to go to hell.

Still mindful of the watchful client, he spoke softly, choosing his words carefully. “Mrs. Robey, I’d just like to offer you a word of advice. Next time you find yourself in court, you need to do yourself a favor…” She waited, cocked and wary, for him to finish. “Hire yourself a good attorney.”

She caught her breath then, and made a soft sound that might have been a laugh. Her lips tugged themselves into a half smile, stiffly, no doubt against her will. “Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind,” she said as she stepped around him.

Riley watched her make her way down the marble stairs, one hand gripping the rail as if she really needed the support. Dammit, he thought as he turned back to his waiting client. Dammit all to hell.


Summer sat on her hands and stared through the windshield without really seeing the bleakness of the January sky while she waited for the smelly and rust-pocked sedan to warm up. The Olds had been all she could afford after selling everything she owned to pay off Hal’s bills-an attempt to salvage her good credit that now appeared to have been an exercise in futility-and she hated it with a passion. It was transportation, nothing more, and she was never, ever, going to call it hers. In her mind there was a certain symbolism in the acknowledgment of the wretched junker that would be like conceding defeat.

I thought his eyes were cold, cold as that sky, but they aren’t. Not at all.

The thought came out of nowhere, as the image in her mind’s eye merged and blended with the winter scene before her until she could no longer distinguish one from the other. Perhaps she’d only imagined it, just now, but could it possibly have been compassion she’d seen in that coldhearted lawyer’s eyes?


The Starr family’s big old-fashioned kitchen was crowded that morning, noisy with laughter and the clatter of pots and the tinkle of metal jar lids. It smelled of burned blackberry jam, which wasn’t as bad a smell as Mirabella would have supposed, mixed with the scent of new-mown grass carried in through the open door on a sweet June breeze.

The same breeze brought the sound of her stepson J.J.’s squabbles with his cousin Sammi June over baby-sitting rights to eighteen-month-old Amy Jo, who was gleefully in pursuit of the kittens a stray calico mama cat had hidden out in the garden shed sometime in April. The sound of that laughter, Mirabella decided as she watched her daughter through the screen porch door, had to be one of the sweetest in all the world, sweeter than the music of a thousand wind chimes…choirs of angels. Well, maybe she was a little besotted.

At the thought, her gaze shifted automatically to the man she could just see beyond the doorway to the hall, trying to talk on the phone. He had his head down and a finger stuck in his free ear in a futile effort to dampen down the noise all around him. And as so often happened when she caught a glimpse of her husband-little things, like the glint of light on his dark blond hair or the flash of his slow, sweet smile-something bumped up under her ribs and made her catch her breath. Something composed of varying parts happiness, awe and fear. A year and a half later, Mirabella still hadn’t quite gotten used to the wonder of Jimmy Joe Starr.