It doesn’t surprise me to hear that Cassidy Maxwell’s landed in London with the job of her dreams, assistant to the U.S. ambassador. Her old friend Eric Barnes would be so proud of her—if only Cassidy hadn’t severed ties with him and with everyone else at Saunders immediately after graduation.
Eric’s been haunted by his memories of Cassidy for years. After all, his childhood friend was set to become so much more until she vanished from his life without a trace. But it might finally be time to discover the secrets of her past and plunge headlong into the promise of the future….
Dear Reader,
Well, we’re getting into the holiday season full tilt, and what better way to begin the celebrations than with some heartwarming reading? Let’s get started with Gina Wilkins’s The Borrowed Ring, next up in her FAMILY FOUND series. A woman trying to track down her family’s most mysterious and intriguing foster son finds him and a whole lot more—such as a job posing as his wife! A Montana Homecoming, by popular author Allison Leigh, brings home a woman who’s spent her life running from her own secrets. But they’re about to be revealed, courtesy of her childhood crush, now the local sheriff.
This month, our class reunion series, MOST LIKELY TO…, brings us Jen Safrey’s Secrets of a Good Girl, in which we learn that the girl most likely to…do everything disappeared right after college. Perhaps her secret crush, a former professor, can have some luck tracking her down overseas? We’re delighted to have bestselling Blaze author Kristin Hardy visit Special Edition in the first of her HOLIDAY HEARTS books. Where There’s Smoke introduces us to the first of the devastating Trask brothers. The featured brother this month is a handsome firefighter in Boston. And speaking of delighted—we are absolutely thrilled to welcome RITA® Award nominee and Red Dress Ink and Intimate Moments star Karen Templeton to Special Edition. Although this is her first Special Edition contribution, it feels as if she’s coming home. Especially with Marriage, Interrupted, in which a pregnant widow meets up once again with the man who got away—her first husband—at her second husband’s funeral. We know you’re going to enjoy this amazing story as much as we did. And we are so happy to welcome brand-new Golden Heart winner Gail Barrett to Special Edition. Where He Belongs, the story of the bad boy who’s come back to town to the girl he’s never been able to forget, is Gail’s first published book.
So enjoy—and remember, next month we continue our celebration….
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
Secrets of a Good Girl
Jen Safrey
To Crystal Hubbard who, every time I send up a signal,
swoops in with her superpowers to save the day. Thanks, kid.
JEN SAFREY
grew up in Valley Stream, New York, and graduated from Boston University in 1993. She is a nearly ten-year veteran of the news copy desk at the Boston Herald. Past and present, she has been a champion baton twirler, an accomplished flutist, an equestrienne, a student of yoga and a belly dancer. Jen would love to hear from readers at [email protected].
Dear Eric,
I wish I could find the strength to face you. I know you’d be so disappointed if you ever learned the truth about me, about what I did. I never meant to hurt you—I care about you more than I ever thought possible.
I can’t bring myself to see you. I only wish I had it in me to come clean, to send this letter to you—but it would only make it harder to walk away.
Somehow you must know that you’re the only man I could ever love…perhaps someday I’ll be able to tell you that.
Yours always,
Cassidy
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Prologue
New Jersey, July 1982
It was the kind of hot Saturday that forced suburban families to temporarily abandon cookout plans and take refuge in their air-conditioned bedrooms. On many picnic tables on many lawns, packages of paper plates and bottles of mustard sat unopened on tablecloths unruffled by an absent breeze.
On one lawn, in that thick, still air, Cassidy Maxwell turned cartwheels.
Well, she turned semi-cartwheels. She wasn’t very good at them yet.
When Eric Barnes brought a bowl of his mother’s potato salad to Cassidy’s mother in anticipation of the afternoon cookout, Mrs. Maxwell told him Cassidy had been tumbling in the backyard for two hours, showing some signs of improvement, but no signs of quitting.
Eric, standing on the Maxwells’ back porch, relinquished the cold casserole dish and turned to watch Cassidy. Unaware of her audience, she raised her hands up in the air with her fingers spread and palms turned out like an Olympian. She nodded her head once at nobody. Then she threw the weight of her tiny body forward onto her hands. Her waist-length auburn hair swept the ground. She lifted her legs up last, but they were bent strangely and she crumpled at the end of the tumble, collapsing to the ground on her knees. When she jumped up again, Eric could see her knees were two dark grass stains.
Cassidy turned her head, saw her friend Eric and smiled a smile that was always changing as teeth fell out and grew in. She raised her arms again, and now that she had the attention of her favorite person, her fingers and elbows were a little stiffer and her nod was a little prouder. She hurled herself upside-down again, though not as crookedly, and crashed down again, though not as hard.
Eric shook his head, but waited until she wasn’t looking to do it. Girls were into weird things. He didn’t think falling down all afternoon could be any fun, unless you were maybe playing a good game of touch football or something.
“Want some Kool-Aid, Eric?” Cassidy’s mother asked, returning to the screen door. Eric nodded. “What color?”
Eric was grateful for the question. At his house, there was no Kool-Aid because his mother only bought—yuck—real juice. At the Maxwells’, a kid not only got Kool-Aid but got a choice of colors. “Purple,” he requested.
Mrs. Maxwell disappeared and Cassidy did three more shaky cartwheels before her mother came back to Eric with two glasses. “Give one to Cassidy, will you? I keep telling her to get in here and drink something because it’s too hot for that nonsense, but she won’t listen. You’re the only one she listens to.”
Even though it sounded like Mrs. Maxwell was complaining, Eric felt good. “Okay,” he said. He took both glasses.
“Cassidy saw another little girl doing cartwheels at the playground this morning when we were on the way to the supermarket,” Mrs. Maxwell explained. “Now she’s dead set on being able to do them herself, as soon as possible. I don’t know whether that kind of ambition is healthy or what.”
Eric had a feeling Mrs. Maxwell was talking more to herself than him,