wouldn’t have discovered the truth about her paternity. Life would have continued as it was projected to go. Marriage to Matthew. Two-point-five kids. Ignorance would have been bliss. Knowledge had darkened the bright light of hope for the future—a future with Matthew. Everything had changed.
Releasing a sigh, she pressed the accelerator with her toe and the SUV picked up speed, heading north on US 63.
Her eyelids grew heavy an hour later listening to Frank Sinatra’s silky-smooth crooning, and she stopped at a twenty-four-hour quick stop along the highway to grab a cup of coffee. She grimaced. The black brew smelled as if it had probably been sitting there since the afternoon before. The clerk gave her a guilty look and pronounced it “no charge.”
A blast of sultry summer air lifted strands of Raven’s sleek black hair off her neck as she exited the convenience store. A motor revved to her left and she turned in time to see a familiar blue car drive away from the parking lot. Familiar from where?
Visions of the back of that car haunted her, keeping her mind busy while she drove the rest of the way to Kansas City. She pulled into her drive and dialed her dad—per his express instructions, no matter what time she arrived—to let him know she’d made it safely to her door.
Her mind went back to the car that had sped by as she was about to pull away from Denni’s curb. So that’s where she remembered a blue car from. Both small, blue and square. She grinned and shook her head. That was a weird coincidence. Nothing more. Probably wasn’t even the same car. Some reporter she was.
“Hi, Dad,” she said when he picked up. “Just letting you know I’m home safely, so you can go to bed now and try to sleep.”
“Praise the Lord.” She could hear the note of relief in his voice. But there was a weariness that she’d noticed lately that concerned her.
“Dad, you feeling okay? When was the last time you checked your blood pressure?”
“I’m just fine, young lady. Don’t start sounding like Ruthie.”
Raven bristled. The last person she sounded like was Dad’s Southern belle of a fiancée. The mention of the woman’s name conjured the flamboyant red hair piled atop her head like Flo from the eighties sitcom, Alice. The too-cheerful-to-be-real demeanor. The knowledge that Mac could be in love with this type of woman after loving Raven’s mother, a classic beauty with more creativity and style in her little toe than Ruth had in her whole body was just too irritating.
“Well, I’ll let you go, Dad. Get some rest, okay?”
“You too, hon.”
Raven disconnected the call. By the time she’d unloaded her bag, gone inside and showered, dawn was just beginning to glisten over the enormous oak tree in her backyard.
She sat on her deck, wearing a white terry-cloth robe and sipping a mug of strong, black coffee. By 6:00 a.m., she could restrain herself no longer. She snatched up her phone and dialed Ken, her camera guy and the one person she knew would be straight with her. His grumbled, sleepy “Hello” didn’t faze her. He’d interrupted her sleep plenty of times.
“Ken, what’s going on with the Matthew Strong story?”
“Raven?”
“Who else?” Impatience edged her voice, but after two days of no inside info after finding out about Matt, she’d had all the delays she was going to take. “Matthew Strong?”
For the next few seconds all she heard was the rustling of sheets and the hiss of a lighter as presumably, the grizzled, old-before-his-time, forty-five-year-old sat up in bed and lit a cigarette.
“Those things will kill you, Ken. You need to quit smoking.”
“Mind your own business.”
“Fine. They’re your lungs.”
“You got that right.”
Raven shifted in her seat, stifling a yawn. “Tell me about Matt.”
“Matt, is it?”
Despite the fact that Ken couldn’t see her, Raven felt a blush creep up to her cheeks. “We had a thing once a long time ago.”
“What kind of thing?” he asked in his I-smell-a-story tone of voice.
“The kind that’s none of your business.”
“Touché, but is it perhaps the kind of ‘thing’ we might be able to use to get access to the almost-senator?”
An uneasy twist affected Raven’s stomach and suddenly the coffee didn’t sit well. “Just meet me at Corner Coffee, will you? We need to talk and map out a strategy.”
“All right, girl. But let me tell you, I’m not wasting my time on personal ethics. If you got an inside to this guy, you better use it or I might take the sweet Miss Kellie up on her tempting offer.”
“You’re old enough to be her dad.”
“Yeah, well. Ain’t that the kicker? I’m not her dad and she seems to go for my natural maturity. And she likes the way our names go together. Thinks it’s downright cute. Kellie and Ken. It does have a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
Raven gave a snort. “Don’t flatter yourself, pops. She wants to break up the wonder twins, and that’s all there is to her sudden attraction.”
It was common knowledge around the station, and had been for the past several years, that Ken and Raven were an unstoppable team. Thanks to Raven’s instincts for where the great story was, they rarely failed to bring it home, and thanks to Ken’s hot ability with a camera, they ended up with unbelievably good shots of whomever they were after. The dream team.
Raven’s ire rose at the very thought that Kellie might be making a play for Ken. And even more so that Ken was exploiting it to bait her into using her past with Matt as a means to an end.
Never mind that she planned to do that anyway, she didn’t need someone reading her so easily. It just made her feel more rotten than she already did.
“Stop threatening me. You know Kellie would get on your nerves in three and a half seconds. You’d be miserable. Meet me in forty-five minutes.”
Without waiting for a reply, she hung up. A second later the phone rang. A grin split Raven’s lips. She snatched up the receiver. “You just have to have the last word, don’t you, cowboy?”
“I’m sorry?”
Raven nearly swallowed her tongue at the unfamiliar voice. “Who’s this?”
“Um, Sonny.”
“Well, Sonny, I think you dialed the wrong number.”
“I don’t think so. Raven Mahoney?”
“All right, buster. I don’t know how you got this number, but I don’t take calls from strange men.”
“Wait! Don’t hang up. If you’re Raven Mahoney, then you’re going to want to talk to me.”
Matthew jolted awake and fought to understand why he could barely breathe.
“Are you awake, Dad?”
A smile lifted the corners of Matthew’s lips and he opened his eyes to find Jamie sprawled across his chest, her dark hair sticking up in about twenty different directions.
“I am now, you little twerp!” Grabbing the little girl he wrestled her across the bed and tickled her just enough to be funny. Too long and it was just mean. Matthew wouldn’t do that. But they both enjoyed a short wrestling/tickle game.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I saw you on TV yesterday.”
“You did?” Irritation nipped at Matt. “How come you were watching it?” And more importantly, why didn’t his mother keep