Emma has been a godsend. She gives my children so much love and attention, and is still such a wonderful mother to her own little Billy. What would I do without her now?
I haven’t the strength to write any more now. The children will be home from school soon. I want to be able to greet them with smiles and hugs. There is so little time left for me to be with them.
BAILEY’S FACE was wet with tears when she sensed his presence in the bedroom doorway. She looked up from the diary that she’d almost finished reading to find him watching her, his black hair disheveled, his lower lip slightly swollen, his dark eyes guarded, watchful.
“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice husky.
“Walking in the woods,” he answered. “It’s cold out. There’s a scent of winter in the air. I scratched my hand on a broken fence post.”
More tears escaped her in response to the wonder in his voice. Cold. Fragrance. Pain. Sensations she’d taken for granted for so long.
She never would again.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked with a tremulous smile.
He didn’t smile in return. “No. You weren’t there to share it with me.”
Her eyes welled again.
“You’re crying.”
She mopped at her face and nodded. “I’ve been reading your mother’s diary. I hope you don’t mind.”
He stilled. “My mother’s diary?”
She nodded again. “I found it in this box of old books. Oh, Bran—Ian. She was a very special woman. She loved you so much.”
He moved slowly toward her, his gaze fixed on the slim volume in her hands. “I didn’t know it existed. I never saw it.”
“She wrote in it at night mostly, when you and your sister were sleeping. She poured her heart out in these pages.”
He knelt beside her. With a reverence that almost made her start crying again, he reached out to touch the journal. “Anna will want to see this.”
“Of course. We’ll show it to her as soon as she returns.”
He lifted his gaze to hers, his eyes still carefully shuttered. “Will we?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She drew a deep breath. “About what I said earlier—”
He winced. “It wasn’t true, Bailey. I wasn’t trying to use you. I only wanted to help you.”
“I know that now.”
“I didn’t try to make you… fall in love with me,” he continued doggedly. “I tried to keep my distance from you. I knew you deserved better, even if there was a chance that we—”
“Ian, I love you.”
His mouth tightened. “I don’t need your charity, Bailey,” he snapped. “I’m not another of those needy men who used you before. I won’t be dependent on your compassion and your assistance.”
She thought of the words in his mother’s diary. The wish. She looked again at the raw cut on his lip. “It’s different this time,” she murmured. “I love you. And, oh, Ian, I need you.”
His voice was hoarse now. “You deserve better. I have nothing to offer you. I don’t belong in your time. I have no job, no skills. I don’t know how to use that computer device, or… or who Lois Lane is.”
Her soft heart twisted, but she held his gaze steadily. “Do you love me?”
“Bailey—”
“Ian,” she broke in firmly, clinging to the words in the diary. “Do you love me?”