At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories) - By Barbara Bretton Page 0,69

her guard.

Well, now she'd done it. She had lied to Ben, the one thing she had sworn she would never do. The truth was important to both of them, vitally important, but how on earth do you tell the man you're about to marry that you would rather walk barefoot on burning coals than see his daughter again?

Any woman worth her salt would do exactly what Laquita had done: run for her life. She had shamelessly offered her services at the hospital on her day off which just happened to be the day Gracie was due back in town. If that had failed, she might have thrown herself under a truck.

Gracie had been the one girl in school who intimidated Laquita. She was tall, smart, pretty, ambitious, disciplined, determined to achieve her goals despite the formidable odds against her. Next to her, Laquita had felt like a short, round slug. How she had envied Gracie's only child status, her room of her own, the fact that she could think her own thoughts without having to fight for space to breathe. The only time she had ever felt remotely Gracie's equal was the day they had bumped into each other one early morning in a motel parking lot outside of town. So you're human, she had thought, noting the blush of embarrassment on Gracie's throat and face and the way she clutched Noah's hand. But then there was Noah, arguably the best—if least reliable—catch in town. Rich, smart, wild, great-looking. They were an unlikely match and yet, to Laquita's way of thinking, inevitable. Temporary, but inevitable.

All of Laquita's romances before Ben had been temporary. Romance. Now there was a funny term for you. There had been very little that was romantic about her encounters in bars and motel rooms and the back seats of more cars than you'd find in the parking lot during a Patriots game. Sometimes she had been looking for sex, for the oblivion that came with the act, but most of the time she had been looking for the kind of comfort and security she could only find in the arms of an older man or a bottle of vodka. She'd seen a shrink a few years ago, not long after she and Ben started living together, in an attempt to understand why she had done the things she did and the shrink focused on the obvious answer: she was searching for a father figure.

"I have a father," she had told him. Darnell was a kind-hearted man who loved his kids, all eleven of them.

"But you have to share him," the shrink had pointed out. "You didn't share the other men."

But of course she had shared them with their wives and other lovers. Until Ben Taylor came into her life, nobody had ever loved her totally and completely to the exclusion of others and it was a feeling she cherished and returned in full measure. Her feelings for Ben were unlike anything she had ever known before. It was more than sex, more than security, more than the comfort of a pair of strong arms around you in the heart of the night. It was about wanting to share the good and bad of life, sit down with over dinner at night and breakfast in the morning. Ben knew her darkest secrets, same as she knew his. They had faced down the monsters in the closet and were still standing.

She wanted Gracie to know these things. Gracie and Ben had had a terribly troubled relationship and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the blame lay solely at Ben's feet. He had failed miserably as a parent and Gracie deserved all the credit for turning out as well as she had. But Ben had changed, was changing, and more than anything Laquita wanted Gracie to appreciate that fact, to get to know her father before it was too late.

Because the clock was always ticking. The days passed and then the years and next thing you knew it was time to say goodbye. Every time she looked at Ben, she wondered how much time they would have left and knew it wouldn't be near enough. Her family teased her by calling her an old soul and it was true. She had always been older than her years, able to see the end of things where her friends could only see the beginning. It was part of the reason she had never really enjoyed the company of men