If I'd Never Known Your Love

If I'd Never Known Your Love

Georgia Bockoven

ISBN
9780-373-65407-9

ISBN
0-373-65407-3

A Harlequin® Everlasting Love Publication 2007

Copyright © Georgia Bockoven 2007

"I'm going to miss you.

Every minute of every hour..."

With those words, Julia's husband stepped into his taxi and was gone. Evan McDonald. Julia's lifeline—and the doting father of her two beautiful children.

From the moment she'd first spotted him in high school so many years before, Julia had
known
they'd always be together.

Now... Evan's business trip to Colombia becomes deadly when he's kidnapped, and Julia is thrown into a tailspin of horror...and waiting.

For five tortured years Julia does whatever it takes to bring Evan home. Despite her grief and rage at losing the man she loves, she vows to keep struggling. Until she receives a call that shatters her hopes of Evan's return.
But then...

C H A P T E R 1

"What are you so deep in thought about?"

Evan came up behind Julia as she loaded a cup into the dishwasher. He slipped his arms around her waist, drew her against him and tucked his chin into the hollow of her shoulder.

Julia folded her arms over his and sighed contentedly. "I was just thinking that I should have tried harder to find a way to go with you."

For the past day and a half she'd been telling herself that the elephant sitting on her chest and the panic attack that had driven her from bed in the middle of the night were nothing more than frustration at not being able to accompany Evan on his last-minute business trip to Colombia.

"Should?"
He chuckled. "Now, what's that all about?"

The queasiness she'd felt as she'd watched Evan pack his suitcase that afternoon—

worse than anything she'd experienced during two pregnancies— she'd put off to the shrimp salad she'd had for lunch. She simply refused to acknowledge that the constant, nagging feeling of dread might be anything real, not after all the years of denying the possibility such things existed and that even sane, rational people might be wise to pay attention to them.

She couldn't bring herself to share the depth of her doubts with him. As a child, using maps he'd torn out of books, Evan had escaped the reality of life in a tenement in Detroit by papering the walls of the bedroom he'd shared with his baby brother, and put him to sleep at night with stories of the places they would go someday and the people they would meet.

"I guess I just don't like the idea of you having all that fun without me," she said.

"Hmm...what if I promise to be miserable?"

She laughed. "You would do that for me?"

"Absolutely."

"What a guy."

"And what about you, Mrs. McDonald? Does this mean you're going to sacrifice all the good times I'll be missing while you paint the upstairs bathroom?"

They had been in their new-to-them, fixer-upper home for less than a month, only their second home since they'd moved to the Sacramento area from Kansas ten years earlier. Was it really all that unusual for her to be feeling a little out of sorts with the stress and excitement? Still...

"Can we be serious for a minute?" She turned to face him.

"I don't think I like the sound of this."

"I want you to promise that you won't leave the city." When he started to answer, she held up her hand to stop him. "Even if one of the people you're going there to meet has a villa somewhere in the country. I want you to promise you won't go."

"Be reasonable, Julia. How could I refuse an invitation to someone's home?"

"Tell the truth—that you weren't able to get the shots you needed before you left. You wouldn't even have had a passport if we hadn't gone to Mexico last year. They know you were a last-minute replacement for Harold. They'll understand."

Evan's boss was still in the hospital recovering from a fall into a hole at a construction site. In addition to three broken ribs, he was bruised all along his left side and sore over his entire body. He breathed like a man easing one last puff into a balloon already overfilled and about to pop. Evan taking Harold's place was not only a huge responsibility, it showed Harold's incredible confidence in Evan's abilities to represent the firm. If they got the contract for the state-of-the-art, five-story shopping center, it would be their first international engineering job and a door opening for future business in South America.

"And please remember not to drink or eat anything from a roadside stand." She added that because she knew Evan would be tempted and also knew just as surely that if only one bug lurked in a gallon of water, it would find him. From the day their daughter, Shelly, had started preschool, it was as if Evan's body had rolled out a welcome mat for every stray bacteria and virus. Neither of the kids had ever come down with something their dad didn't come down with a week later.

"Anything else?"

"Well, now that you mention it, I'd really like it if you stayed at the hotel and didn't go—"

"Whoa, slow down a minute. Who have you been talking to?"

"No one." He plainly didn't believe her. "Okay, I did a couple of searches on the Internet."

"I see." He nodded, fighting a grin and failing. "You want to talk about it?"

She did, for herself, for her own peace of mind, but didn't, for him. If she persisted with her unreasonable fears she was going to ruin something he'd wanted all his life.

And to what end? If long-distance paranoia worked, her mother would have a patent on it.

"No," she said. "I'm just—" She shrugged.

"Did you also happen to look up the hotel where I'll be staying?" he asked.

"I did," she said sheepishly.

"And?"

"It looked very nice."

"No-bed-bugs nice?" His eyes sparkled with amusement. "Or four-star nice?"

"Actually, it was the description of the hotel that made me wish I'd worked a little harder to find a way to go with you." It was a lie, but just a small one, and told for the right reason.

He laughed."And how would you have done that? Two days was hardly enough time to get me ready."

"I don't know," she admitted. "I just should have tried harder."

He planted a kiss on the tip of her nose. "Next time."

"Like that's going to happen. Look what it took to keep Harold from going this time.

It's not as if he's suddenly going to learn to delegate just because this trip goes well for you."

"He's getting better," Evan said mysteriously."I can see all kinds of things opening up for us in the future."

"You did that on purpose."

"Yes, I did."

"You can't possibly think you're going to get away with saying something like that and just leave it hang."

"I'm saving the rest for when I get back."

She actually laughed at that. He'd never been able to keep a secret from her. It was one of the reasons he had to wait until the last minute to buy her birthday and Christmas presents. "Fat chance."

"I'm serious," he insisted despite the grin twitching the corner of his mouth.

Feigning disinterest was the one sure way she knew to get him to talk. "Okay. I guess it will have to wait."

Before he could say anything, there was a shriek and then a thud as something heavy hit the floor directly above them. "What the hell?" Evan said.

A second shriek followed, and thumping on the stairs. "Ee-ee-uu-uu-w-w-w—"

Shelly screamed."It touched me." Racing into the room, she threw herself into Evan's arms.

"This better not be about your brother," he said.

"There's a
mouse
in my room. It ran over my foot. It was so-o-o-o-o gross, Daddy.

Do something. Get it.
Kill
it."

"Think about what you're saying, Shelly. Do you really want me to kill that poor mouse? Just because it scared you?"

She looked up at her father, her chin planted in the middle of his chest, her arms wrapped around his waist. "Yes?"

"And do you honestly believe I'm going to do that?"

"Would you at least think about it? What if it gets in bed with me when I'm sleeping?"

"Okay, and then what should I do to you? You undoubtedly scared it as much as it scared you."

"Oh, Daddy, that's just dumb."

Evan shot Julia a grin. "It appears you'll have to finish grilling me later." He went to the hall closet and glanced inside. "I thought we were going to keep the broom in here."

For the three-and-a-half weeks they'd been in the house it seemed as if they always were looking for something they'd put away in what they were sure were perfect, logical places. "I'm sure I saw it in the garage. I'll check."

Julia finally fell into a restless, troubled sleep at two-thirty that night, an hour before the airport van would be there to pick up Evan and take him to San Francisco for his flight. Evan had insisted she should sleep in, that he could see himself off. She'd insisted just as strongly that she would get up with him.

The soft click of the front door opening woke her. She instantly knew what he'd done and was overcome with a sense of loss. She leaped out of bed and ran after him in her nightgown, flung open the door and shouted, "Wait."

Evan turned and gave her a look of such love and longing that she would only need to remember this moment for years to come to forgive him anything. He met her in the middle of the walkway, swept her into his arms and held her as if it were the end of their separation instead of the beginning.

"I'm going to miss you," he said. "Every minute of every hour."

She desperately didn't want him to go and couldn't say what he needed to hear, the words that would make leaving her okay.

"Harold is making me a partner," he said.

She gasped. Of all the things she might have guessed, this wasn't even on the distant horizon.

He smiled. "Just what I wanted—to leave you breathless."

"What does that mean?"

"Five percent now, another one percent every year from now on."

"Oh, Evan, that's... That's so...so amazing. I'm stunned." Five percent of a privately owned company like Stephens Engineering was huge. She kissed him.

"Congratulations. You're awesome. When did this happen?"

"The same day Harold asked me to take his place on this trip. He said he'd planned on waiting until he came back, but then thought what the hell, might as well give me something to think about while I was gone. I was going to tell you, but then thought it would be more fun when we could go out and celebrate together." He grinned."And as usual, I couldn't keep a secret from you."

The driver leaned out his window and waved at Evan. "Hey, buddy, I got a schedule."

"I'll tell you all about it when I call you from the hotel."

Ignoring the increasingly impatient driver, Julia stood on her tiptoes and hugged Evan even tighter, kissing him with a thesaurus-full of meaning. "I love you."

"I love you, too." Evan started to leave, then abruptly came back. He held her face between his hands and stared deeply into her eyes. "You are everything to me—always have been, always will be."

His intensity nearly destroyed her shaky resolve to handle his leaving in a sane, rational manner. From somewhere, she found a halfway convincing smile. "Hurry home." She grinned. "We have some big- time celebrating to do."

"Give the kids a kiss for me."

She nodded. She and Evan were back on solid ground, speaking familiar words, exchanging unspoken promises. She watched the van pull out of the driveway, holding herself against the sudden cold. She couldn't tell if Evan was still turned toward her when the van made the corner, but she waved and, in her mind's eye, saw him wave back.

Knowing there was no way she would go to sleep again right away, and not wanting to go upstairs for her robe, Julia took Evan's sweater from the hall closet and went into the kitchen to make coffee. She found a single peach-colored rose, one of the last of the season from the small rose garden in the front yard, sitting in a kitchen glass. A note sat beside the rose.

Julia,

I haven't told you often enough how much I love you or what you mean to me. You are my world. I haven't
left yet and I miss you already.

Buy something black and sexy and expensive while I'm gone—something you
can wear for dinner. No, make that two things black and sexy and expensive— one
of them something you'd get arrested in if you wore outside the bedroom. I'll
explain when I get home.

Love,

Evan

Thinking more about lacy lingerie than dresses, Julia put the note on the refrigerator, then reconsidered and tucked it in her pocket. Shelly was a mature ten-year-old, and Julia wasn't interested in adding to her education. She waited for the coffee to finish brewing. Then, the rose in one hand, her cup in the other, she went into her office to work until it was time to wake the kids for school.