“Does your husband know you’re here?”

      He must know, Nate surmised. He couldn’t see Sarah sneaking around on the guy. She wasn’t like that.

      She gave him a quick, startled glance. “How did you know I’d remarried?”

      “It wasn’t exactly a secret on base. There were plenty of people who didn’t mind passing along the information. It took a while to get to Afghanistan, but I heard it.”

      She nodded. “You didn’t hear all of it. David died more than three years ago. A hit and run.”

      Nate hadn’t let himself think of her married to another man, but he didn’t like the fact that she was on her own again, either. “You’re right. I didn’t hear that. I’m sorry.”

      “Thank you,” she said with quiet dignity.

      “Who told you I was back in Riley’s Cove? You haven’t been in touch with anyone in my family. They’d have told me.”

      “I checked with your old unit. Sergeant Harris is still there.

      He said you’d moved back to Michigan…I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at the lake. “I know you’d planned to make the Army your career.”

      “It was time for me to go.” He’d made it safely through three tours, but his luck had run out two days before his unit shipped home from Iraq. A nineteen-year-old Earnhardt wannabe in a Humvee, anxious as hell to be on the plane back to the States, had pinned him against a loading dock, breaking his knee and crushing his ankle. He’d been damn lucky not to lose half his leg. “You didn’t come all this way from Texas just to offer your sympathy for something that happened eighteen months ago. Why are you here, Sarah?”

      “I need you to marry me.”

      Dear Reader,

      Nate and Sarah loved each other deeply, but their inability to agree on having a child destroyed their marriage. Now, four years later, Sarah has come to Cottonwood Lake, Michigan, to ask Nate to marry her again, and raise her fatherless three-year-old son. Nate agrees because Sarah is dying.

      But what happens when she doesn’t die, and they find themselves bound to each other once more, a family in name only? Marriage by Necessity is a story of two people working their way through a tangle of old hurts to forge a future together. We hope you enjoy your trip to Cottonwood Lake. It’s one of those places we love to write about, filled with good times, good food, good fun and good people.

      Enjoy,

      Carol and Marion (Marisa Carroll)

      Marriage by Necessity

      Marisa Carroll

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      COTTONWOOD LAKE was quiet today, its blue-gray surface as smooth as glass. Sarah closed her eyes and heard the sound of a boat starting up far out on the lake, and closer, the scolding chatter of a squirrel in the tree beside her car. The autumn sun was warm on her face and shoulders as it filtered through the branches of yellow-leaved cottonwoods. It was a perfect southern Michigan Indian summer afternoon.

      Far too lovely a day to think about dying.

      But she had no choice. She must talk to Nate today. She couldn’t come this far only to turn around and go back to their dreary little motel room in Ann Arbor. She had to drive up the sandy, unpaved lane, past the fork in the road that led to Riley’s Trailer Trash Campground, to the top of the hill, and ask her ex-husband to marry her again.

      She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel of the secondhand minivan. She hadn’t seen or talked to Nate in almost four years, not since he’d shipped off to Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Their marriage was already on life support by then and war and distance had done nothing to heal the wound. The divorce had become final while he was still overseas. Nate had wanted it that way. So had she, at least she thought she had.

      She no longer had the luxury of what-ifs.

      She had a child to protect and provide for.

      Another man’s child. Her late husband, David Taylor’s son.

      She half turned in her seat to stare at the sleeping toddler who was the center of her world. The movement sent a wave of prickly sensation down the right side of her body, followed by a sudden numbness. She sucked in her breath and rubbed her fingers over her worn jeans. She couldn’t feel the fabric or the skin beneath. She turned her hand over and looked at the palm where the skin was reddened from this morning’s dumb accident. She hadn’t even felt the scalding water. No pain, no heat, no cold. The loss of sensation was only one of the symptoms of the deadly growth that was rapidly twining itself around her spinal cord, already threatening to burrow into her brain. The risky and complicated surgery to remove it was scheduled in a week’s time. She would need that long to complete the legal arrangements for a wedding.

      If Nate agreed to her plan.

      He had to. She had no one else to raise her son if— She cut off the panicky thought. Not now. Save that terrifying scenario for the wakeful hours of the night when she was too tired to keep the fear at bay.

      Now she had to be strong. For Matthew’s sake. For his future.

      NATE FOWLER grabbed a rag and wiped the grease from his fingers. “Just a minute. I’m coming!” he hollered over his shoulder. He’d never had people banging on his door asking to see his bikes before his sixteen-year-old cousin, Erika, designed a Web site for him as a school project. Turning away from the 1938 Indian Four motorcycle he was rebuilding for a wealthy collector in Detroit, he limped across the scarred, wide-planked wooden floor of the hundred-year-old barn that was his workshop, and he hoped someday, his home. He flung open the small side door. “What can I do for—Sarah?”

      “Hello, Nate.”

      His ex-wife was the last person on earth he expected to see standing there. He stared at her for a moment. She was just as pretty as he remembered. Her hair was shorter now, no longer the riot of cinnamon-brown curls it had been when they were married, but still shiny and fine as silk, just brushing the curve of her chin and the collar of her apple-green sweater. Her figure was more mature, too, her breasts a little heavier, her hips more rounded, but like the hairstyle, it suited her.

      “I…I hope I’m not interrupting your work,” she said as his silence dragged out.

      “What are you doing here, Sarah?” His voice sounded as gruff as his granddad’s, but there was nothing he could do about it, even if he’d wanted to. The shock of seeing her again after all this time overrode everything. She looked at him