Can't Stop Loving You

by Janelle Taylor

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

One of the world's best-loved and most versatile romance authors, Janelle Taylor has captured the hearts and imaginations of countless readers around the globe. Now the award-winning novelist spins the unforgettable tale of a couple irrevocably bound by a love that transcends the years--and by the fierce commitment to a child whose fate lies in their hands. . . Sometimes the Right Decision. . . Fifteen years ago, preacher's daughter Mariel Rowan was a pregnant college student, determined to give her unborn child a better life--with or without Noah Lyons's blessing. Moments after placing her tiny newborn daughter in a stranger's welcoming arms, Mariel forced herself out of Noah's, never to see him again. Now, out of nowhere comes the shattering e-mail with the haunting message that will force Mariel to confront a past she has struggled to put behind her--and the only man she's ever loved. . . .Is the One That Breaks Your Heart Before Mariel can contact the stranger who claims to be her daughter, the girl mysteriously vanishes. Tormented by parental fears, yet cast in an outsider's role, Mariel seeks out the one person who will understand her emotions--and her heartache. As she and Noah retrace their lost daughter's steps, they must face once again the painful yet passionate bond that first brought them together. . .

Release date: October 24, 2011

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 356

Sample

November, 1986

Strasburg, New York

“Two more minutes.”

“Not even.” Mariel Rowan looked up from the second hand on her watch to see Noah Lyons staring at his own. “So that’s good. In one minute and fifty-six seconds we’ll know.”

“Not even,” he echoed, and flashed a grim smile at her before looking down at his wrist again.

Seated beside him on the rumpled dorm bed, she inhaled deeply, then exhaled heavily through puffed cheeks. The waiting was torture, and there was absolutely no way to ease the tension. Nothing to do but sit here watching each second tick by so that they wouldn’t have to look at each other—or at the opened pregnancy kit on the desk, plopped next to a stack of textbooks, an open and untouched can of diet soda, and a framed photograph of Mariel’s smiling family, whom she hadn’t seen in the three months since she had gone away to school.

If her parents ever knew…

Well, they wouldn’t know. They were back home in Missouri, over a thousand miles away from here. Either way—no matter how this turned out—Mariel would never tell them. There was no reason to.

“What are you thinking?”

Noah’s voice startled her. She turned to see him looking at her, an intent expression on his handsome face. She fought the urge to reach out and brush an errant lock of wavy dark hair out of his brown eyes, afraid that if she touched him, she would crumble. Right now, she had to be strong. There would be time for crumbling later…

Later? In exactly thirty-one seconds, she realized, looking down at her watch again.

“Mariel?”

She shrugged. “What am I thinking? I’m thinking either my whole world is about to turn upside down…or…”

“Or everything will be okay,” he finished for her. “We can go back to the way it was.”

She nodded, but she didn’t agree. Nothing would ever be the way it was. This had rocked her to the very core, had cast doubt on dreams she had—until now—been certain would come true.

Dreams were all she had had, growing up in sleepy Rockton, Missouri.

Maybe not all. She had had her parents, Andrew and Sarah, and her kid sister, Leslie. And she had had friends, too. Plenty of friends. But she had known from a young age that it was all temporary, that the day would come when she would flee Rockton and never look back.

Finally, late this past August, when the blazing summer sun had fried the heartland to an ugly brown and it seemed there would never be another season, it had happened. She had left home.

First stop: this small private college in upstate New York, where a hint of autumn had already been in the air a week before Labor Day.

Mariel had never even heard of Strasburg College until the summer before her senior year in high school, when she had made her first trip to the East Coast to sing with her girls’ choir at Chautauqua Institution, a cultural arts community in western New York. The group performance in a packed amphitheater had concluded with her heartfelt solo from a Broadway musical. When it was over, she had received thunderous applause—and an invitation from an impressed drama professor who happened to be there. He had asked her to audition for one of a handful of theater arts scholarships at Strasburg—and miraculously, she had won one.

Her parents hadn’t been thrilled. In fact, they had been pretty much devastated.

Their plan for Mariel was for her to go to a state university—preferably one that would allow her to live at home, dating only local boys—and become a teacher. That was what her mother had done decades ago, before she married Andrew. And it was what most of Mariel’s friends were planning to do. As her best friend Katie Beth Miller always said, teaching was a family-friendly profession. If you couldn’t afford—or, God forbid, didn’t want—to give up your job after you were married and had children, you would at least have summers and school holidays off, and you would be home early every afternoon.

Working mothers weren’t the norm in Rockton.

Working, unmarried women without children were almost unheard-of.

But that was what Mariel intended to be.

Not in Rockton, of course. She planned to go from Strasburg to New York City, where she would become a Broadway sensation. Of course, that might take a few years. And before it happened, she might spend some time in Europe after college—to study voice, or maybe just to travel.

That was the plan.

The dream.

The dream didn’t include teaching, or Rockton, or a husband and children.

All Mariel had ever wanted was to be an actress. A footloose actress.

Well, that was almost all she wanted.

For the last three months, ever since she had arrived in Strasburg, she had also wanted Noah Lyons.

She had even started to fantasize that she might be able to have her dream and Noah.

But that was absolutely it.

There wasn’t room in there for motherhood.

“Mariel?”

She blinked. “Yeah?”

“It’s time. It’s been time. I was waiting for you to notice, but you’re a million miles away. What are you thinking?”

That this can’t happen.

Not to me.

“I just—never mind. Let’s just find out,” she said, standing abruptly and walking toward the white plastic stick sitting on the desk. It was flat on one end and had a little window. She had read the pamphlet that came with it. If there was a dark circle in the window, it would mean she was pregnant.

Her hand was shaking as she reached for the stick.

Then Noah was behind her, one hand closing over her fingers as she picked it up, his other hand on her shoulder to steady her.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice low in her ear.

She didn’t answer.

Her eyes were closed.

She couldn’t look.

“Mariel, you have to move your thumb. It’s blocking the window.”

“Okay.” Her voice came out small and frightened. She hated the sound. She hated being this person—this cliché. The preacher’s daughter, away from the Midwest only three months and already missing a period.

But not pregnant. She couldn’t be pregnant. It had to be the stress.

The stress of leaving home for the first time, starting college, falling in love…

“Mariel?”

She took a deep breath. Moved her thumb. Opened her eyes. Looked at the stick.

There was a circle in the window.

“What does that mean?” Noah asked. “Does it mean you’re not pregnant?”

She could barely hear his voice over the roar in her own head. She was screaming inside, shrieking in agony.

Somehow, aloud she only said, “No. It means that I am.”

“You are?”

She nodded, head bent, still clutching the white stick helplessly. They hadn’t moved. He was still holding her, but his hand suddenly felt heavy on her shoulder. She couldn’t look up at him; couldn’t bear to know what he was thinking. She was too consumed by her own whirl of thoughts, for the moment, to care.

“It’ll be okay,” Noah whispered in her ear.

Anger flared. Irrational maybe, but anger just the same. Of course it would be okay for him. He wasn’t pregnant. This was happening to her.

She whirled around to look him in the eye. “No, it won’t be okay,” she snapped, wishing she could find something other than compassion on his face. His gentle expression only compounded her inner turmoil, adding guilt to the fury.

“Look, Mariel, I know you’re upset, but we’ll work this out.” He reached out to touch her again.

She took a step backward and crashed into her roommate’s dresser. “How can we work this out? I’m eighteen and pregnant, Noah. I’ve barely started college and it’s all over. Everything.”

“Of course it isn’t over. There are ways—”

She gasped. “If you think I’m going to terminate the pregnancy, then you’re—”

“Of course I don’t think that!”

She swallowed hard. “Because that’s just not an option. Not for me.”

“I know, Mariel. I know your father—”

“This has nothing to do with my father being a minister,” she interrupted, trying to quell her anger. Someplace deep inside she knew he was trying to say—and do—the right thing. Just as she was. But right now, he didn’t count. “This has nothing to do with anyone else. This has to do with me. What’s right for me. And I’m going to have this baby, Noah.”

He nodded, staring down at her so tenderly that she had to turn away, because it made her torn between wanting to lash out at him—and wanting the impossible.

Her gaze fell on her own reflection in the mirror above her roommate’s bureau. She was shocked to see that she looked pretty much the same as always. Her long, light brown wavy hair was slightly tousled. She must have raked her fingers through it at some point; she did that when she was nervous. And there were deep shadows under her wide-set green eyes, which wasn’t surprising considering she hadn’t slept in the two nights since she had concluded that her period wasn’t going to put in a late appearance after all.

But other than those telltale signs of what she had been through, she was her usual self on the outside—just a pretty college girl in an oversized, navy hooded Strasburg sweatshirt.

And standing over her shoulder was a tall, lean, all-American-looking college guy wearing a green and black plaid flannel shirt, jeans—and a similar set of undereye circles.

Things like this didn’t happen to people like them.

But even as the thought crossed her mind, she forced it out, knowing it was ridiculous. Things like this happened only to people like them. People who were too caught up in each other to pay attention to details.

Like using birth control every time.

He put his hands on her shoulders and tilted his face next to hers. “Mariel—don’t shut me out. Please. We’re in this together.”

She had to fight back a lump in her throat. “I wish I could feel like we were, Noah. But we’re not. It’s just me. My God, I’ve never felt so alone in my life.”

“You’re not alone,” he said fiercely. “You’ll never be alone. I’m going to be with you through everything, Mariel. I won’t leave your side.”

She shook her head, touched by his loyalty even as she was irritated by his lack of logic. “Noah, you don’t have to make a choice. I’m going to have to leave school. The baby is due at the end of June or beginning of July, and—”

“It is? How do you know?” he broke in, his breathless tone suddenly taking on a hint of…was it wonder?

“Because when I went to the library yesterday I looked up gestation cycles, and they had this chart. I know when my last period was. I know when the baby is due.”

He nodded. “The baby. When you say it like that it’s so…”

She knew what he meant. There was a sense of wonder, no matter what else she was feeling. There was a human life growing inside of her. A life she had created with Noah, whom she…

No. She didn’t love him. She couldn’t love someone she had known for only three months…could she?

Maybe, if they had been given a chance to see where this relationship led, they would have fallen in love someday.

But they would never know now.

“You said you’ll have to leave school, Mariel.”

She nodded, steeped in misery again.

Noah cleared his throat. “Do you mean you’re going to go back home? Because your parents—”

“My parents would probably throw me out if I came home pregnant, Noah.”

He didn’t look surprised.

And she realized what he must think of her parents. Had she made them out to be ogres when she talked about them to him? Probably. She did a lot of grumbling about what it was like to grow up with a minister father and a full-time mom who baked cookies and ran the PTO. About how they didn’t understand her.

Both her parents were in their late fifties, far older than her friends’ parents. They had married young and tried for years to have children. Long after they had given up hope, Mariel had come along unexpectedly, followed, even more incredibly, by Leslie five years later. As a result, Andrew and Sarah told anyone who would listen that their daughters were miracles from God.

And now here was Mariel, feeling the opposite. Feeling cursed because she was pregnant.

More guilt. Everywhere she turned, guilt.

“Maybe my parents wouldn’t throw me out, Noah,” she told him, needing him to know she had distorted the truth. “They’re not horrible people. Just ultraconservative. And ultrareligious. And Rockton’s a tiny town. They would die of shame if I turned up unmarried and pregnant.”

“You don’t have to be,” Noah said quickly, a strange expression on his face.

She bristled. “I told you, I’m having this baby, Noah. I can’t possibly choose to—”

“No, I didn’t mean the pregnant part.”

She stared at his reflection beside hers in the mirror, not understanding.

Or maybe not willing to understand.

But when he pulled on her shoulders, spinning her around to face him, she couldn’t avoid it. He dropped down in front of her on one knee before she could say something to stop him.

Still, she tried. “Noah, please don’t—”

He grabbed her hand, clasping it as he looked up at her. His voice was ragged when he spoke, his face raw with emotion.

But it wasn’t the right emotion. It wasn’t the one she would hope—expect—to see there on the verge of the announcement he was so obviously about to make.

“Mariel, you don’t have to be alone. Ever,” he said fervently. “I’m going to take care of you and our baby. I swear. If you marry me, I’ll never let you down.”

“Marry you?” It came out so high-pitched that she winced. She didn’t mean to react this way, but she couldn’t help herself. It was just too much. All of this, in the space of a few minutes. First the positive pregnancy test, and now a marriage proposal.

What he was doing was so noble. So sweet.

So wrong.

“Noah, we can’t,” she said, regaining control over her vocal cords if not her emotions. She felt as though she was on the verge of hysteria. Laughter? Tears? Maybe both.

“Yes, we can,” he said, getting up off the floor, holding both her hands in his and bringing them up against his chest. She could feel his heart racing beneath her wrists, and she realized that somewhere inside of her their baby’s heart was beating as well. For a split second, she was caught up in that—and in him. In the picture he had painted with his heartfelt, foolish words.

Then reality returned, and she forced herself to face the truth—and to convince him to do the same.

“Noah, listen to yourself. This is insane. You’re talking about marriage.”

“Exactly.”

“We’re in college. We have our whole lives ahead. Not just school, but travel, and careers, and—Noah, we can’t get married. We’re eighteen.”

“So? We’re pregnant,” he shot back, his eyes flashing at her. Finally, he was showing a trace of anger, and for that she felt oddly grateful. She didn’t want—or need—him to be her selfless hero.

“I’m pregnant, Noah. Not us. Me. I’m the one who’s having the baby.”

“And I’m the one who was raised by a single mother,” he retorted. “I’m the one who knows what that’s like. I’m the one who’s spent every day of my life thinking how differently things would have turned out if I’d had a father. A child—our child—needs two parents—”

“You’re right,” she said softly.

“—and there’s no way I’m going to—what?” he asked suddenly, as if he had just heard what she had said. “Did you say I’m right?”

She nodded.

His face lit up.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she put her fingers against his lips before he could make a sound. “Our child does need two parents, Noah. But those parents aren’t going to be you and me.”

May, 2001

Rockton, Missouri

“Mariel? Where are you?”

Mariel paused with her hand on the study door, hearing her sister’s voice in the foyer below. “I’m up here, Leslie,” she called wearily. “What’s wrong?”

“Can you come back down for a second? You won’t believe this.”

With a sigh, Mariel turned away from the study and headed back down the flight of steps to the first floor. She hadn’t walked up them more than fifteen seconds earlier, confident her sister was headed out to have a manicure at last.

As sisters went, Leslie was usually pretty laid back and self-sufficient. But with her wedding countdown dwindling from months to weeks, she was becoming increasingly high maintenance. Luckily, the bridal shower would be over with by this time tomorrow, leaving only the wedding for Mariel to guide her sister through.

Only the wedding?

She was dreading that ordeal already. Not that she wasn’t anxious to see her sister happily married to Jed Peterson, her high school sweetheart, who also happened to live right next door.

But Leslie was already fretting about the tiniest details—whether the type on the printed matchbooks would be the exact shade of dark pink as the frosting roses on the cake, and whether the faint scar on Jed’s knuckle would show if the photographer decided to snap a close-up shot of their hands in their new wedding rings.

Mariel had no idea how she was going to make it through another seven weeks of listening to her sister’s irrational worries without completely losing her sanity.

“What’s wrong, Leslie?” she asked, finding her sister in the living room. She was sitting on the old-fashioned, uncomfortable couch—which their mother had always called the “davenport”—and there was a large, open gift box filled with what appeared to be layers of tissue in front of her.

“You have to look at this, Mariel,” Leslie said in a choked voice. “The UPS guy delivered it just as I was walking out the door.”

“What is it? A shower gift?” Mariel reached across the glass coffee table for the box, careful not to knock over the cluster of china religious figurines that had been there as long as she could remember.

“It’s from Jed’s two cousins,” Leslie said.

“The twins from Texas?”

“Lord, no.” Leslie looked horrified. “Mary Ellen and Pamela Joan aren’t invited to the shower, remember? We knew they’d fly up for it, and it’s already going to be hard enough on Jed’s mom to have the two of them staying under their roof the weekend of the wedding. They never stop talking.”

“Then, which cousins?”

“Millie and Helen.”

“They sound like little old ladies,” Mariel said.

“They are little old ladies. Spinsters. They’re Jed’s second cousins, or maybe third. They can’t come to the shower because they play bingo at their retirement home every Sunday afternoon. Go ahead, Mar. Look what they sent.”

Mariel parted the layers of tissue and pulled out something white and satiny. Long and white and satiny. And lacy. And sequiny. She looked up at Leslie, her arms clutching what seemed like yards and yards of the billowing garment. Something tickled her nose, and she sneezed. “Was that a feather? What is this, Leslie?”

“It’s a peignoir set,” her sister said in a strangled voice.

“Are you laughing or crying?”

“I’m not sure.” Leslie sank back on the couch and threw her head back.

Mariel shifted the fabric, and something fluttered to the floor. She bent to pick it up and saw that it was a note written on old-fashioned floral stationery. The spidery handwriting read, For your wedding night, dear Leslie.

“For your wedding night?” Mariel looked at her sister. “But this is…”

“Hideous. I know.”

“Les, this thing is covered in…stuff. Feathers, sequins…you name it.”

“I know!” Her sister buried her face in her hands. “I can’t wear it. Ever! Let alone on my wedding night.”

“Just send them a nice thank-you and give it to charity.”

“Mariel, you don’t understand. They’re going to ask me if I liked it. They’re going to want me to model it for them. They’re going to ask Jed—”

“Calm down, Leslie! You’re getting carried away.”

Her sister, the Drama Queen, groaned. “I can’t take this. The stress is killing me. Why didn’t we just elope?”

“You wanted a big wedding, remember?” Mariel attempted to stuff the peignoir back into the box and jammed the cover on. A feather wafted in the air. “I’m the one who said maybe we should keep it more…manageable.”

“I know. But I kept picturing the kind of wedding Mom would have wanted for me. She always talked about our wedding days—mine and yours. I guess maybe I’m doing it for her, in a way.”

Tears sprang to Mariel’s eyes. Her mother had been gone almost two years, and she still became emotional at the mere mention of her. They all did. Especially Dad.

Luckily, he was out visiting Reverend Henry, the minister who had taken over the church when Dad retired last year and moved to Florida.

“Go have your nails done, Leslie. And forget all about this crazy getup. Nobody will know what you wear on your wedding night except you and Jed.”

“You’re right.” Her sister smiled and picked up the gift box, walking toward the door. “I wonder if he’s back from St. Louis yet. He’ll get a kick out of seeing this.”

With the latest prenuptial crisis safely averted and her sister on her way through the lilac bushes to the Petersons’, Mariel climbed the steps once again.

In her mother’s former sewing room—which she had recently transformed into a study—she sat down at her desk and turned on the computer. As she waited for it to boot up, she looked around the room, admiring the navy-and-green striped wallpaper, the freshly painted white woodwork, and the braided rug on the hardwood floor. Her own bedroom across the hall seemed strangely empty now that she had moved her desk, chair, and bookshelf in here, but she was thinking of buying new furniture after Leslie moved out in July. Either that, or moving into the master bedroom suite.

But, much as it made sense, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with that idea. She might have the small, white colonial-style house all to herself, but she wasn’t certain it would ever feel as though it truly belonged to her, no matter where she slept or put her computer.

You can always buy a place of your own, she reminded herself.

But she pushed that thought out of her head. That would be almost like…

Like what?

Giving up?

Admitting to herself—and the world—that she was probably never going to get married?

Well, wasn’t that what she had always wanted? To be single, and free?

Yes. But not like this, a small voice reminded her. Things were supposed to be different. She was supposed to be in New York, or London, or even Hollywood. Not in Rockton, Missouri, living in the town—and the very house—she had spent most of her youth trying to escape.

The computer clicked and hummed and the start-up screen appeared at last. She quickly logged on to the Internet. Her heart leaped when she saw the mailbox icon with the flag up and heard the disembodied voice that announced, “You’ve got mail.”

E-mail.

Her one link to the world she had once thought she might actually experience. Now she did so vicariously through her on-line friendships.

She wondered who had written since she had last checked the mail early this morning, before Leslie woke up and went on a roll, deciding they should bake five dozen wedding-cake-shaped cutout cookies for the shower guests. Cookies that were even now spread all over the kitchen on sheets of waxed paper, awaiting icing and decoration, which Leslie had decided to leave up to Mariel. “You’re much more creative than I am, Mar,” she had said. “Maybe you can pipe my and Jed’s names on each one in pink frosting with little rosebuds.”

Maybe. But that could wait.

Mariel leaned forward in her chair, dragging the mouse to click on the mailbox. There were quite a few messages. She scanned the list, recognizing the user names.

One from her chat room pal Jackie, who was an actress up for a lead in the touring company of Fiddler on the Roof.

One from Anthony, another chat room acquaintance who didn’t seem to think she meant it when she said she wasn’t interested in a long-distance web relationship.

One from an on-line bookstore, probably notifying her that her order had been shipped.

And one from someone she didn’t recognize.

She stared at the unfamiliar screen name.

Who was Indegrl?

She had no idea. She clicked on it, and after a brief electronic whirring, a short document appeared.

Dear Mariel Rowan,

I was born in St. Thoma. . .