Embraced by Love by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

at her, but his eyes were calm and confident. Josie held his gaze as if it were a lifeline. With Cooper by her side, she knew she was going to get through this. Somehow they’d pack up her brother’s things, make arrangements to sell his little farmhouse, see his two small children placed in a loving home—
    Josie felt her eyes fill with tears, the way they did every time she thought about Ben and Lucy. Ben was tiny, only nine months old. As he grew up, he would never really remember his mother and father. If he missed them, he’d never he able to verbalize it. But Lucy . . .
    Lucy was four. Lucy was old enough to feel the loss, but perhaps not old enough to understand.
    Hell, Josie was thirty years old, and
she
still didn’t understand why Brad and Carla had had to die. But she understood what death meant, oh yeah, she understood
that
all too clearly. Her own mother had died when she was only eleven, and that loss still haunted her.
    But a
four
-year-old . . . Could a four-year-old really understand
why
her mommy and daddy could never come back home?
    “We’ve landed,” Cooper said softly into her ear.
    Sure enough, Josie felt the jostling of the plane as its wheels bumped along the landing strip, and heard the scream of the engines as the jet slowed.
    “You okay?” Cooper handed her a tissue and Josie wiped her eyes then blew her nose.
    “I can’t stop thinking about those children, Coop,” she said.
    Cooper watched her dark eyes fill with tears again.
    “Brad named us legal guardians in his will,” she said. “He wanted us to take care of Ben and Lucy—”
    “We are,” he interrupted gently. “We
are
taking care of them. We’re going to make sure they’re adopted by people who will love them and have time for them and—”
    “That’s not what Brad wanted and you know it,” she said. She closed her eyes, but still the tears leaked out. “Lord, Brad’s dead, and I
still
don’t have time for him.”
    Cooper couldn’t do anything but let her cry. He had no magical words to say that would make her feelings of guilt disappear. “There’s just no way we can take these kids, babe,” he said. “We just can’t do it. Besides, we’re strangers. Ben and Lucy don’t know us. It’ll be best for them to stay with someone they know, someone they’re familiar with.”
    The seat belt light went off with a ping, but Josie didn’t make a move to stand up. “I don’t want to get off the plane,” she said. “It’s like, if I don’t get off, then I won’t have to deal with any of this.”
    Cooper smiled. “If you don’t get off, you’re going to have to deal with another plane ride right away.”
    “It would be worth it,” Josie said. “It would really be worth it.”
    It took a little over two hours to get from Nashville to Walterboro. Cooper drove the rental car, following the directions Annie had clearly typed out. Route 40 east, then north on a secondary road, heading toward the rolling hills of Kentucky. According to his map, Walterboro was just south of the Kentucky border.
    Josie was asleep as he rolled into town—if you could even call it a town. Main Street held a small general store, a row of dilapidated houses, several of which were professional buildings, a run-down bar and grill, and an ancient-looking five and dime. A weather-beaten church sat on the corner in front of a dusty park. The paint on the park benches was split and peeling, and weeds grew around a rusted swing set that no longer had any swings. On the other side of the park was a boarded-up Dairy Delight. The building was in the shape of a giant clown’s head, with the roof as its hat, and the front window its mouth. The once brightly-colored paint was faded and worn, yet the clown still grinned happily, its giant eyes staring into the sky. It stood as a silent memorial to good times gone by.
    Josie was absolutely going to hate this place.
    She stirred, opening her eyes as they were directly across from the giant