For the Love of Lilah

For The Love Of Lilah, by Nora Roberts

The Calhouns # 3

Summary:

Mystery and danger still swirled around Lilah Calhoun's ancestral home. The fabled lost emeralds continued to attract treasure hunters––and at least one dangerous criminal. And they had brought a man unlike any Lilah had ever known.

Maxwell Quartermain was a reserved college professor, more at home in the past than in the present. But from the moment Lilah dragged him from the Atlantic, she found he could make her melt with merest glance––and that troubled her deeply. For Lilah wasn't used to needing anyone as much as she needed Maxwell Quartermain...

Prologue

Bar Harbor, 1913

The cliffs call to me. High and fierce and dangerously beautiful, they stand and beckon as seductively as a lover. In the morning, the air was as soft as the clouds that rode the sky to the west. Gulls wheeled and called, a lonely sound, like the distant ring of a buoy that carried up on the wind. It brought an image of a church bell tolling a birth. Or a death.

Like a mirage, other islands glinted and winked through the faint mist the sun had yet to burn from the water. Fishermen piloted their sturdy boats from the bay and out to the rolling sea.

Even knowing he would not be there, I couldn 't stay away.

I took the children. It can't be wrong to want to share with them some of the happiness that I always feel when I walk in the wild grass that leads to the tumbled rocks. I held Ethan's hand on one side, and Colleen's on the other. Nanny gripped little Sean's as he toddled through the grass after a yellow butterfly that fluttered just beyond his questing fingers.

The sound of their laughter–the sweetest sound a mother can hear–lifted through the air. They have such bright and depthless curiosity, such unquestioning trust. As yet, they are untouched by the worries of the world, of uprisings in Mexico, of unrest in Europe. Their world does not include betrayals or guilt or passions that sting the heart. Their needs, so simple, are immediate and have nothing to do with tomorrow. If I could keep them so innocent, so safe and so free, I would. Yet I know that one day they will face all of those churning adult emotions and worries.

But today there were wildflowers to be picked, questions to be answered And for me, dreams to be dreamed.