Secret Whispers (Heavenstone 2)

“Oh, don’t bother tonight, Mrs. Dobson,” I said. “I’m going out.”

“Oh? By yourself?”

I smiled. “Yes, Mrs. Dobson, but don’t worry.”

She nodded, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t. I smiled to myself and hurried on to dress. Twenty minutes later, I was down and out to my car. I sat there for a moment hesitating, my fingers trembling before starting the engine. Would I regret doing this? Would Daddy be enraged?

“Do it,” Cassie said. She was sitting beside me. “Stop worrying about what everyone else will think. Damn it, Semantha,” she continued when I still hesitated. “Haven’t I instilled any Heaven-stone courage in you at all?”

I looked at her and then started the car.

“Satisfied?”

“We’ll see,” she replied, folded her arms across her breasts, and sat back.

I drove away from the house, down the driveway, and out the gate slowly—too slowly for her, I was sure—but as I continued to the highway, I sped up.

“I have no idea what I’m going to do when I get there,” I muttered.

“You’ll figure it out,” she told me. “With my help, of course.”

Close to an hour later, I turned off the highway and followed a road I had driven many times before in my dreams. It was quite a beautiful rural area, with elaborate farmhouses and corrals. Behind the fenced-in landscapes enclosing lush rolling hills, I saw mares and foals grazing. Some lifted their heads and looked at me cruising by. The spindly-legged colts that scampered at their mothers’ sides looked so fresh and new I imagined they weren’t more than weeks or months old. Their curiosity about me brought a smile to my otherwise nervous face. It was as if nature was working to bring babies and infants of every kind to mind.

My mind now centered on only one.

I slowed down as I approached my mother’s cousin’s property. Royce and Shane also had a farm where they raised thoroughbreds. I had never been there, but I had always known exactly where it was. I slowed down and pulled over to a wide, clear area off the road just across from the driveway. I shut off the engine and sat, unsure of what I would do next or why I had even come.

Over the last few years, I had read a number of stories about this exact situation, a situation in which a married couple adopt a teenage girl’s child. Most of the adoptive mothers voiced the same fear, that someday, somehow, the biological mother would lay some claim to her child and they would be in some jeopardy of losing the child they had brought up as their own. No matter

how much or how well their attorneys reassured them that their written agreements were ironclad, they lived with the nightmare. Some court, some judge, something, would negate it all in favor of the biological mother. What was stronger than blood, after all?

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t my intention to go there to ask for my daughter back. My presence would surely bring a firestorm of hysterics to my father’s doorstep. Right now, the ranch house looked so peaceful, idyllic. My knocking on that door was surely the farthest thing from their minds. And what did I expect would happen when my four-year-old daughter set eyes on me? Did I really believe that there would be some recognition, that she would somehow sense that I was her mother?

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, why I came,” I muttered.

“Of course you do. There’s a Heaven-stone in that house,” Cassie reminded me. “And she doesn’t even know she is.”

“I can’t do this. Daddy will hate me.” I spun on her. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want Daddy to hate me. You’re jealous of our new relationship.”

She laughed. “What new relationship? Lucille Bennet shines so brightly in his eyes that he can’t see anyone or anything else. You have no one but the child in that house.”

“I have Ethan,” I said

She gave me that condescending Cassie smile.

“I do!”

She shook her head.

“Damn you!”

I had gone to start the car again when I suddenly saw Shane and Royce step out of the house. Royce was holding my daughter’s left hand, and Shane was holding her right. I was too far away to see much detail in my daughter’s face, but I saw that she had my golden brown hair and it was nearly down to her shoulders. I remembered Daddy telling me that they were naming her Anna.

“That’s your flesh and blood. That’s a Heaven-stone,” Cassie whispered.

I watched them walk off to show my daughter a new colt.

“Get out. Go up there. Pretend you’re just visiting. Let her see you. Go on,” Cassie urged.