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  Her lips were incredibly soft and oh, so arousing. Shann felt weak, as though only Angie’s touch was holding her together as she drowned in the velvety softness of her mouth. Angie drew back a little, and Shann swayed toward her. She nuzzled Angie’s bottom lip, teased it delicately between her teeth, and sucked it gently. Then she drew back again and Angie took Shann’s guitar and leant it against the wall before kissing Shann again. She ran her tongue tip over Shann’s lips, paused at the corner of her mouth, then sought the sweetness within. Shann moaned softly, at least Shann thought it was her. But it might have been Angie. Then they were straining together, their kiss deepening, breast to breast, stomach to stomach, thighs to thighs. Shann slid her hands inside Angie’s denim jacket, her fingers luxuriating in the smooth warmth of Angie’s skin. Eventually they drew slightly apart again, both breathing raggedly.

  “I don’t think I could have gone another night without doing that,” Angie said thickly.

  “I thought it was only me,” Shann managed to get out.

  Angie gave a soft, throaty laugh. “Oh, no. Believe me. It wasn’t just you.” She slid her fingers into Shann’s hair, cradling her face, and kissed her slowly, deeply, again.

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  Copyright© 2006 by Lyn Denison

  Bella Books, Inc

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  First Edition

  Editor: Anna Chinappi

  Cover designer: Sandy Knowles

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59493-049-2

  Dedication

  For Glenda, my LT

  And For Lorelle F cousin and friend and the very best supporter of women’s literature and music You are greatly missed by us all

  About the Author

  Lyn Denison lives in a renovated old “Queenslander” house in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, Australia’s Sunshine State. Before becoming a writer Lyn was a librarian. Lyn and Glenda, her partner of eighteen years, enjoy reading, modern country music and traveling. Lyn is also obsessive about scrapbooking, but she can’t convince Glenda to get involved in that.

  Chapter One

  “What if they don’t like me?”

  Shann drew her not so comfortable thoughts back to the present. She turned sideways in the stationary car and looked at the young boy in the passenger seat beside her.

  “What’s not to like?” She touched his upturned nose with its sprinkling of light freckles. “Cute nose. Big blue eyes. Trendy hairdo. Definitely Mel Gibson material. They’ll love you.”

  Corey grinned. “I think you’re a bit prejudiced, Mum.”

  “You think so?” Shann took a bite of her sandwich.

  “I reckon.” He sobered. “I hope they do like me, though.”

  “They will.” Shann forced her own disquiet aside. She desperately hoped they would accept her son. For Corey’s sake. He was the innocent party in the total mess she’d made of her life back then. He was only nine, or almost ten, as Corey would remind her, and there was no need to burden him with the intricacies of the dysfunctional Delaney clan. Well, they weren’t all dysfunctional, but those who were did a pretty good job of it.

  “Tell me about them again.” Corey munched on his apple.

  “Oh, love, I’ve often talked about them,” she began, and Corey gave a disbelieving laugh.

  “Yeah, right, Mum. I didn’t even know I had a grandfather until Aunty Liz came down that first time.”

  “Your aunt first saw you the day after you were born.”

  “Well, when I first remembered,” he emphasized, “her visiting us.”

  Shann sighed. “Corey, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on in families, most of it good, but sometimes, some’s not so good. Before you were born, well, there was some bad feeling between your grandfather and me.”

  “Like you were pregnant with me and not married to my dad?”

  Shann hesitated, not wanting to think about that time, about the pain of it all. “Your grandfather was,” she paused again, “disappointed I wasn’t married.”

  “Didn’t he know you were a lesbian?”

  “Not exactly. And I’d rather we just kept that for discussion between ourselves while we’re visiting. Okay?”

  “You mean you haven’t told them?”

  “Not in so many words,” Shann said.

  Corey regarded her levelly. “Why not?”

  “Things were, well,” she made a helpless gesture with her hand, “they were different then.”

  Corey shrugged. “But it’s who you are. Can’t they see that?”

  “Not everyone’s as open-minded as my wonderful son,” she said and gave him a hug. “And you know I told you some people don’t understand about all that.”

  “Yeah.” Corey nodded. “But I still don’t see what all the fuss is about. You’re pretty neat no matter what, and even if I could I wouldn’t swap you for a different mother. Honest. Not even a really, really rich one,” he added with a cheeky grin.

  “I’m glad you wouldn’t, you old smoothie.” Shann ran her hand over his spiky dark hair. “Besides, you lucky guy, you’re stuck with me.”

  “I know.” Corey gave a theatrical sigh. “I’m just making the most of it.”

  Shann chuckled.

  “So, Mum. Maybe they, the family, I mean, were confused because you were with my dad. Do you think?”

  Shann almost choked on her mouthful of sandwich. “Maybe they were,” she finally agreed feebly. What could she say in the face of that sort of logic?

  “So tell me about them again,” Corey persisted. “Who’ll be there, besides Aunty Liz and Amy?”

  “Well, Aunt Liz will be in the hospital for a while, so we’ll be looking after the house for her and Uncle Rhys and your cousins, Gerard and Amy.”

  “And Grandpa with his hip replacement?”

  Shann nodded. “And your grandfather. Ruth, my stepmother, is away in England visiting her mother.”

  “Will Aunty Liz be okay?” Corey frowned. “I mean, it must be pretty serious this operation she’s having.”

  “It is a fairly big operation so she’ll need some time to recuperate. That’s where we come in. We’ll be chief cooks and bottle washers.”

  “There aren’t any kids my age, are there?”

  “No. Amy’s fifteen, but you got on pretty well with her when she came down with your aunt last year. Gerard’s seventeen, and he’ll be tied up with his schoolwork I’d imagine so we probably won’t see much of him.”

  “And Uncle Pat’s not coming home?”

  Shann’s brother Pat and his wife and daughter had called in to see them on their last visit home. Pat had worked overseas for the Australian Embassy since he finished university. He’d met and married his wife in London and their only daughter had been born in Canada.

  “I like Uncle Pat. He’s funny.” Corey laughed. “He told some great jokes.”

  Shann smiled. “He was always like that. The family jester.” Pat had never come to terms with his father’s remarriage after their mother died, and he just couldn’t get on with their stepmother, Ruth. Joking about it had seemed to be his defense mechanism.

  Their mother had died from cancer when Shann was only nine. Ruth had been a widow with a son of her own when their father had married her barely a year later. At thirteen, Pat had been resentful and difficult while Shannon, just nine
years old, had been confused and unhappy.

  Not that Ruth had been unkind to them. She had simply moved in and expected them to go on as though their mother had never existed. Shann remembered once asking Ruth why her mother had to leave them to go to heaven. Ruth had said she was their mother now and that Shann just had to accept it.

  The same way she’d had to accept Ruth’s son, Billy, as a new brother. Shann had never liked him and neither had Pat. She swallowed and pushed thoughts of Billy back into the dark recesses of her mind.

  Only Liz, older than Shann by twelve years, had seemed to sail through unscathed. Of course, with hindsight, Shann knew that she hadn’t. Liz had been in the middle of her nursing training and was already living away from home. The only time Shann had seen her break down had been when Shann had repeated her question about her mother going to heaven. Their mother had been really sick, Liz had said, and then she’d hugged Shann, and they’d cried together.

  Looking back, Shann realized it had been an incredibly sad time for them all. But life had gone on the way it always seemed to do and in their own way they had all done what they had to do to get through it. Liz became the nurturer, Pat the joker and Shann, well, she wasn’t sure what she’d done. Perhaps she’d simply held the hurt of her mother’s loss inside her. Until Leigh Callahan had—no, she told herself forcefully, don’t go there. Not now when they were so close to home.

  “Why didn’t you just stay at home and have me?” Corey broke into Shann’s reminiscences.

  She glanced at her son and away again, uncertain how much she should tell him, wondering if perhaps she should have prepared him a little better for this acquaintance with her family. But how much should she tell him? Although she knew he was mature for his age, he was, after all, still a child. It was something that never failed to amaze her, that she could raise such a well-adjusted child. But he was still a child.

  She took his hand in hers. “I didn’t think that was an option, love. I thought I’d upset my parents and my family enough, and, well, I just felt I needed to get away.”

  “Did you tell them about me?”

  Shann shook her head. “Not in the beginning. No. But I did later. I didn’t want them to pressure me into doing anything I didn’t want to do.”

  “Like marrying my father?”

  “Partly that,” Shann said carefully. She knew that hadn’t been an option either, but she couldn’t tell Corey that. And she’d been terrified they’d want her to have an abortion. Not that she hadn’t considered an abortion herself. At first. But she hadn’t been able to do it.

  So she’d run away. Or tried to. But Pat had found her walking aimlessly around the shopping center, and he’d brought her home. That’s when she’d told them she was pregnant, and her father had been even angrier.

  He’d demanded to know who the father of her child was and she’d angrily told him she didn’t know, that it could be anyone. That statement hadn’t gone down especially well, even if it had been the truth. She hadn’t known who Corey’s father was back then. She’d blanked the whole sordid incident out of her mind. With hindsight she knew she should have told her father what had happened ten years ago, but she’d been too scared, too ashamed. She’d only discovered the awful truth two years later when it all came back to her in harrowing detail.

  However, if they’d known the true circumstances, who knew what Ruth and her father would have done. And Shann herself had been too fragile to fight them. Flight had been the only solution she could see. So she’d run away again, this time successfully.

  She found out later from Liz that her parents had been frantic until her mother’s only sister, to whom she’d run, had let them know Shann was safe with her.

  After much discussion, argument and recrimination, they’d decided it was for the best that Shann stay with her Aunt Millie until they’d all had a cooling off time. Especially her father, who had been devastated over Shann’s pregnancy and even angrier that his daughter had run to his sister-in-law, Millie. Jim Delaney and Millie, Shann’s mother’s only sister, had disliked each other on sight, and when he moved his family interstate before Pat was born, Millie had never forgiven him for what she saw as his theft of her only sister.

  Shann sighed and turned to her son again. He was gazing at her with his big eyes, mirrors of her own. “We’ve had this discussion about your father, Corey. You know I couldn’t marry him, even if I’d wanted to.”

  Corey nodded. “Because he was already married.”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t tell him any more. How did you tell a child, a child you loved more than life itself, that he should never have been born, that his father was nothing but a rapist. She’d wanted to end her life, and had planned to as soon as he was born, but when she’d held his tiny body in her arms, felt his warmth, the sweet baby smell of him, she’d been filled with wonder. And a burning need to protect him. Her son had virtually saved her life.

  Corey gave a heartfelt sigh. “And then he died.”

  “Yes, he died,” Shann said gently.

  “As I see it,” Corey continued, “it would have been so much easier for you if you could have married my father. Then you wouldn’t have had to leave your family.”

  “Perhaps. But we’ve managed okay, haven’t we?”

  “Course we have.” He was silent for a moment. “Does Grandpa know you’re famous?”

  Shann laughed. “Famous? To quote you, yeah, right.”

  Corey chuckled, too. “Well, you are. You’ll just have to live with it, Mum. And besides, all the kids at school think you’re famous. Everyone knows the theme from The Kelly Boys.”

  “Oh, sure. Now, enough of that. Let’s head off so we can get there before dark. So buckle up.” Shann switched on the engine and drove out of the rest area where they’d stopped for lunch. She turned left, heading north on Highway 1.

  They made good time up the Pacific Highway. Reluctantly bypassing most of the Gold Coast to save traveling time, Shann promised herself she’d spend some time down at the beach with Corey. She had fond memories of family holidays there before her mother died.

  Now they were almost on the outskirts of Brisbane, and Shann was grateful they were heading into the city, rather than joining the stream of traffic outbound. At least she thought they were on the outskirts of the city. It all seemed so different, especially the freeway. She couldn’t seem to find a familiar landmark. Buildings must have been torn down and others erected and, of course, the trees would have grown in the intervening ten years.

  Her hands tightened on the steering wheel of her new four-wheel drive. Liz had said she shouldn’t have any trouble getting through the city, but it was nothing like she remembered it to be. Still, if she just followed the signs she should be all right.

  “Do you know where we’re going, Mum?” Corey asked as the other three lanes of traffic surged past them.

  “Do I know where I’m going? How can you ask that? I was born here.” Shann grimaced. “Yes. And no. So you’d better help me look out for signs.”

  “Well, first up I’d suggest the left lane,” Corey said matter-offactly. “The speed limit in this one seems to be for racing cars.”

  Shann laughed and eased the car over. And then the road swept around a gentle curve and the high-rise buildings of the city center appeared before them. “There’s my old hometown.”

  Corey snickered. “Some hometown. It’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”

  “And probably bigger than when I left ten years ago. For some reason the buildings look taller.”

  The traffic bunched up, and Shann fell silent as she concentrated on her driving. The freeway skirted the Brisbane River and she pointed out Southbank on the other side of the river, with its walkways, tropical palms, and colorful bougainvillea. Corey craned his neck to see over the guardrails.

  “There’s even a man-made swimming pool with its own sandy beach,” she told Corey. “It’s built on the site of Expo 88.”

  The traffic had back
ed up and they crawled along. “Not far now,” Shann said, more for her own benefit than her son’s, and she tried to relax her tightening stomach muscles.

  She veered off Coronation Drive and joined the traffic on Milton Road. Then she was turning onto the street of her childhood. She’d come back after ten long years, after vowing never to return.

  The street was wide compared to most of the surrounding ones in the inner city suburb, and huge jacaranda and poinsiana trees grew in the center nature strip and on the footpaths, providing a leafy canopy. The old homes, referred to as Queenslanders, snuggled among the greenery of trees and shrubs and picket fences.

  A few of the houses dated back to the late 1800s but most were the smaller workers cottages, early 1900s vintage. All had been renovated over the years, verandas closed in, outsides encased in faux brick cladding. By the time Shannon had left home the new renovators were moving in. The cladding was being removed and the verandas replaced, as people restored the houses to their former glory.

  Shann’s own family home had been built in 1935 by her grandparents. They’d married quite late in life and Shann’s father had been their only child. When her grandparents died within months of each other, not long after Shann’s sister Liz was born, her father had inherited the house. He’d moved his family back to Queensland and into his childhood home.

  When Shann was born her father had built two extra bedrooms onto the back of the house, and later he’d added a covered back deck. But the front of the house was still in original condition, with its gabled roof and leadlight glass in the windows.

  Shann slowed the car, pulling to the side of the road, letting the engine idle as she gazed at the rambling old house.

  “Which one is it?” Corey asked, and Shann heard the thread of apprehension in his young voice.

  She reached over and gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze before she pointed to the house two doors down, on the opposite side of the road. “The cream one there, with the pale green roof.”