Heartwishes Read online

  “It’s a cop-out,” Luke said. “What is it? The lawyer in you can’t reveal anything? You could wish for a backbone.”

  “You could wish for—” Rams began.

  “Don’t you two start!” Joce said. “I haven’t had my wish yet.”

  They all looked at Joce. “I’ve decided to save my wish for when I really need it.”

  “I think I’ll do that, too,” Rams said.

  “True Love!” Sara said. “One of us must wish for True Love.”

  Everyone looked from Gemma to Colin and back again, as they were the only unmarried people there.

  “Colin is a Frazier,” Gemma said, “so I’m not sure he should fool around with this.”

  “You believe in these wishes, don’t you?” Joce asked, her eyes wide.

  Gemma couldn’t tell them what Tris had told her in confidence. “I’d just like to do some more research before—”

  “I agree with Sara,” Colin said as he stood up. “Why not wish for True Love? I’ve got a house now, so why not fill it?” He lifted his glass of lemonade and everyone picked up their glasses and held them aloft. “I wish that next year at this time we’re all here together again, but that I will have my True Love with me.”

  “And she’s expecting a baby,” Sara added.

  “Right,” Colin said. “And that Sara has two babies—you better get to work, Mike—and Tess is the best mother in the world, that Mike has brought down a master of true evil, and—Who am I forgetting?”

  “Luke!” Gemma said. “The writer.”

  “And Joce and me,” Rams said.

  Colin kept his glass lifted high. “Luke gets his books remembered forever, and Rams and Joce come up with something to wish for.” He started to take a drink.

  “What about Gemma?” Mike asked.

  “The last person on earth I’d forget is Gemma,” Colin said as he looked at her. “I hope you get everything you wish for in life.”

  Everyone turned toward Gemma and noted the way her face turned red.

  “To answered wishes,” Rams said and they all took deep drinks.

  In Miami, sitting at her father’s bedside in the hospital, Nell held up her bear. “See, Daddy, I told you.”

  “Told me what, sweetheart?”

  “That Landy’s necklace blinks.”

  “It sure does.” He took the bear and held the necklace for a moment. It was a pretty thing, with a tiny, glistening rock inside a little cage made of gold. The necklace looked as though it could be valuable. “Where’d you get this?”

  “It was in that box of junk jewelry I bought at the church rummage sale,” her mother, Addy, said from the other side of the bed.

  “Where’d it come from to get there?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” Addy said. “Why are you interested?”

  “No reason,” he said. “It just doesn’t look like junk and maybe somebody’s looking for it.”

  Nell took the bear from her father. She didn’t like what he was saying. She’d almost forgotten that daddies made rules that weren’t to be broken.

  “I don’t think so,” Addy said. “That necklace was stuck inside two flat pieces of lead, like somebody’d been using it for fishing. Nell and I had to use the vise on your workbench and two screwdrivers to get it open.”

  He chuckled. “Like mother, like daughter.”

  Nell clutched her bear and its necklace to her. “I like it.”

  “All right,” he said, “you can keep it.” He looked at his wife. “But later . . .” He left the rest of the sentence blank. She knew what he meant. When they got back to Edilean she’d find out where the necklace came from.

  14

  COLIN LEFT MERLIN’S Farm and his friends reluctantly. He’d wanted to drive Gemma home, but she’d declined his offer. He knew what she meant, that he was to clear things with Jean before Gemma would be alone with him.

  He knew that Gemma was right, but that didn’t keep him from dreading the confrontation with Jean. He parked behind the sheriff’s office and started to get out, but instead, he sat in his car and looked up at his apartment windows. Gemma said she wanted him to tell her about his life, but he didn’t want to do that. For so many years, he’d gone in the wrong direction, trying to be what he wasn’t. His lifelong obsession with wanting to help people had, at times, made him almost forget himself.

  Obligations to his family, to people he’d grown up with, to his hometown, and especially to a woman he’d once loved with his whole heart, had nearly overwhelmed him. These weren’t things he wanted to tell a woman he thought he might have a future with.

  As he looked up at the windows of the dreary apartment he hated, he envisioned what was coming. Jean loved drama and scenes—which was why she was so good in a courtroom—and he didn’t know which way she was going to play this particular episode. Would it be tears, which would end up with Colin comforting her? Or would it be anger and her shouting at him and saying that he’d betrayed her?

  Back when he was younger, her scenes had been something he needed. A rip-roaring good argument with Jean—who could give as good as she got—helped release some of his own rage at the way his life was going.

  After one of their fights—and the following makeup sex—he’d be able to stand working at his father’s car dealership for another six weeks or so. When the pressure inside him had built until he’d been ready to explode, he knew just how to push Jean’s buttons to make her angry enough that they could have a fight.

  But all that had ended long ago, Colin thought, as he leaned back against the seat of his Jeep. He had walked out just as she’d taken a job in D.C.

  Closing his eyes, he let himself remember those first days with Jean.

  When Colin was in his last year of school—University of Virginia—his father was begging him to join his car business.

  “I’ll give you anything you want,” his dad said. “Have a lawyer draw up a contract. You want fifty percent—eighty percent—whatever, you got it. You want me to retire and turn everything over to you and your brothers, I will.”

  The only thing Colin wanted, had ever wanted, was to be the sheriff of Edilean. The fact that the town didn’t have a sheriff didn’t bother him at all.

  His father, in an attempt to “reason” with him—meaning to make his eldest son see things his way—said, “You need a job that pays you, one you can make money at. It’s a matter of pride.”

  He’d added the last because he knew his son didn’t need money. When Colin was sixteen, his father had complained about the software that kept track of all the cars his dealership sold. Peregrine Frazier had ranted and raved about it in detail, saying that the program was made for one dealership and about a hundred cars. “It gets confused when I put more than that in it,” he said in derision.

  At the time, Colin was a senior in high school and taking a computer course. The next morning he talked to his teacher about the problem, and together they wrote a new program.

  Colin presented it to his father on the day he graduated.

  “I’m supposed to give you a gift, boy,” Mr. Frazier said, looking at the four CDs in puzzlement. “Is this music?”

  “Stick it in a computer and see,” Colin said.

  When Mr. Frazier saw what the software could do, he copyrighted it, paid a lot to have some IT guys smooth it out, then marketed it. Every penny in royalties that came in was split between Colin and his teacher. The money was enough that both of them never had to work again.

  When Colin graduated from college he didn’t want to sell cars, but he hated to see his father beg. Worse, he couldn’t bear to tell him no. And too, there was the weight on him that his ancestors had always worked with anything with wheels. To not do so was letting down generations of Fraziers. So Colin had agreed to try it. He’d gone to work in the Richmond dealership and done his best to sell cars.

  But he’d hated it. Selling was not something he liked and he was very, very bad at it. His sales were so low the other sale