His to Cherish Read Free

from the car and change them before venturing into the rest of the house. If I needed to beat a hasty retreat from the bathroom or bedrooms, shrieking like the girl I was, I didn't want to trip over the furniture in the shadowy living room.
    I replaced the lights as I went, living room and kitchen first, then the hallway, then the bathroom, where I propped my branch against the door from the inside and took my first pee in my old/new home. I flushed with trepidation, the toilet gasping and gurgling as it refilled. The pipes were the same when I turned the bathroom sink on to wash my hands. Rust-filled water spurted against the porcelain for a good thirty seconds before it was clear enough to put my hands under the faucet.
    Finding the water cold as ice, I reminded myself to check the electric water heater in the utility closet after I looked at the two bedrooms. It hadn't had time to heat the water since I flipped the breaker switch, but I needed to make sure it was safe to keep running. Mice could have chewed through the cord or any number of other things could have happened in six years.
    The master bedroom had weathered my absence in the same fashion as the front of the house -- dusty, with no working lightbulb, but otherwise intact. My nose told me something was wrong with the spare bedroom the instant I opened the door. With the smell of mold assaulting me, I cast the flashlight up at the ceiling. A water stain covered a third of the area. Moving the beam down the wall, my heart shriveled in my chest.
    I had left the room completely empty six years ago. With a life estate left to me under my mother's will, no one else had a right to use the space. Yet "someone" had brought in boxes and trunks. The writing on the labels belonged to a dead hand -- my mother's.
    Reading the descriptions, I could guess at the contents. "SJ Oak/Cit" had to be pictures and other mementos from my father's years at Oakridge Military Academy and at college in South Carolina.
    Its weight pushed down a water-warped box marked "Wedding." My mother had married Evan in the Caribbean, just the two of them while I stayed with my maternal grandmother. Whatever pictures they had taken, the volume wouldn't fill a box, meaning the decaying contents were more memories of my father left to rot.
    I didn't care about the box at the bottom of the pile, the one marked "Mia Kindergarten." But other boxes sent the tears that had threatened at the corner of my eyes streaming down my cheeks -- the wedding dress my mother had worn when she walked down the aisle to join hands with my father, family bibles and genealogy records from both sides, photos of the stables over the year, albums filled with generations of pictures.
    All of it likely ruined.
    Half my tears were pissed. Evan had refused when I asked to remove the items from the main house and put them in plastic bags inside plastic bins with other deterrents to the elements or any creature big or small that might damage them. He had refused because he wanted a chance to value each item. Not that he had said as much, but I could see, my flashlight picking out the labels my mother had written so long ago that here, in this damaged room, were all the things too "valueless" for him to sell.
    Leaving the burnt out light unchanged, I backed quietly from the room and shut the door.
     

Desperately Seeking Mia
     
    "Out." Walking into Trent Kane's office, I jerked my thumb at the man sitting in the visitor chair. Neither a client nor tactical team leader, whatever business he had with Kane could wait. I watched him slowly gather his papers and inch past me, my temper threatening to boil over at the sloth-like pace. When I slammed the door behind him, the man jumped.
    I turned to Kane, the growl lodged in my throat barely kept in check. "You've had twenty-four hours to find her."
    His cheeks colored. He was pissed, no doubt, at being tasked with my little "playmate" after four months of Reed Henley and a four-man