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  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Other Books by KG MacGregor

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  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 Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bella Books

  Synopsis

  Captain Suzann Redeker earned a Bronze Star for valor, one of the highest honors given by the Marine Corps. As leader of a Female Engagement Team that patrolled the combat zone, she took out four Taliban insurgents—but not before losing a soldier under her command and sustaining an injury that ended her military career. Now back home in rural Vermont, she’s forced to chart a new life as a civilian.

  From their very first kiss, Marleigh Anderhall knows Zann is the woman she is meant to marry. Valiant, dashing—the shining warrior she’s always dreamed would sweep her off her feet. Surely they’ll have all they could ever want—an idyllic life. But then Zann discovers something about that fateful day in Afghanistan that causes her to question her very identity. Would Marleigh still love her if she wasn’t the hero everyone thought her to be?

  Copyright © 2017 by KG MacGregor

  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.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  First Bella Books Edition 2017

  eBook released 2017

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designer: Linda Callaghan

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-557-2

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Bella Books By KG MacGregor

  Anyone But You

  Etched in Shadows

  The House on Sandstone

  Just This Once

  Life After Love

  Malicious Pursuit

  Mulligan

  Out of Love

  Photographs of Claudia

  Playing with Fuego

  Rhapsody

  Sea Legs

  Secrets So Deep

  Sumter Point

  T-Minus Two

  The Touch of a Woman

  Trial by Fury

  Undercover Tales

  West of Nowhere

  Worth Every Step

  Shaken Series

  Without Warning

  Aftershock

  Small Packages

  Mother Load

  Acknowledgments

  I’m always happy when I finish a book, but never more than one borne from a challenge. It’s one thing to take readers out of a comfort zone. This book took me out of mine.

  The genesis of Moment of Weakness was the desire to write a romantic novel that opened with a couple on the rocks. It was a book I’d get to someday, but never the book I wanted to write next. So I held it on the back burner while waiting for the characters to present themselves, for their conflict to materialize, for their themes to emerge. Truth be told, I don’t even remember any of that happening. All of a sudden I had a manuscript.

  But not a very good one. In fact, the first draft was so clumsy I almost ditched it. Fortunately I have an editor in Katherine V. Forrest who zeroed in on the strengths and drew them out. It’s probably the most work I’ve ever done on a second draft, and there’s a marvelous sense of satisfaction to cross a challenge off my list.

  I have a great team behind all of my books. Besides Katherine, there’s my partner Jenny, who reads it the way you would and tells me what you’ll think. And finally, the professional team at Bella Books polishes it and puts it in your hands. What would I do without these great women?

  About the Author

  Lesbian romance author KG MacGregor is a former teacher and market research consultant, with a doctorate in media research. In 2002, she tried her hand at writing fan fiction for the Xena: Warrior Princess fandom, and found her true bliss. Three years later, she signed with Bella Books and kicked off her third career. An award-winning author of 24 books, she served as president of the board of trustees for Lambda Literary, the world’s premier organization for LGBT literature. She and her partner make their home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Visit her on the web at www.kgmacgregor.com.

  Chapter One

  Zann Redeker closed the conference room door behind her and blew out a sigh of relief. After months of twisting in the wind, something finally had broken her way.

  It helped a lot that the mayor himself had vouched for her. A longtime family friend, Willard “Ham” Hammerick had helped plead her case with the town manager, all but offering his personal guarantee that she’d be a model employee from this day forward. Now he jostled her shoulder with a fatherly hand. “I know you’re glad this nightmare’s over, Zann. Come Monday morning everything goes back to normal, like it never even happened.”

  She appreciated the sentiment but her life was still light years away from normal. At least getting her job back gave her a fighting chance. “Thanks for sticking your neck out, Ham. I promise I won’t screw up again.”

  “I know you won’t. I’m just sorry we had to put you through all this rigmarole.” Always the gentleman, he helped her into her heavy parka as they walked toward the lobby. “Used to be when you made a mistake, you apologized and everybody moved on. Now the first thing people do is call a lawyer to see how much money they can get.”

  “This was nobody’s fault but mine.” She would be forever embarrassed for the trouble she’d caused her bosses at town hall. In a rural hamlet like Colfax, Vermont, even the tiniest scandal was front page news. It wasn’t long ago that the townspeople were cheering her return from Afghanistan as a war hero. Now they probably thought her just another combat veteran with mental health issues. A walking cliché.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Zann. You made a mistake but you paid the price fair and square. It all comes out in the wash.” Ham’s masterful empathy and habitual use of folksy idioms endeared him to local voters, making his continuous reelection
a foregone conclusion.

  “Getting my job back…at least that takes the pressure off. Now all I have to do is sort this mess out with Marleigh and catch up on our bills.”

  He gave her a grim half smile. “I was sorry to hear you’d moved back home with your mom and pop. What’s going on with the house?”

  Zann cringed to think how many people in the closely-knit town knew of their marital problems. “Marleigh got an offer from the real estate agent but she needs me to sign the papers too. Maybe now that I’m going back to work, we won’t have to sell. I’m heading over there right now to try to talk her out of it.”

  It wasn’t only their house that needed saving. Marleigh didn’t trust her anymore, and like everything else, that too was her fault.

  “Good luck, hon. We’re all pulling for you.”

  Feeling exposed under his watchful eye, she thanked him again and skated tentatively across the icy parking lot to her SUV, a rusted Jeep Grand Cherokee with 164,000 miles of wear and tear. As usual, the engine turned over several times before finally catching and sending a blast of frigid air up from the floorboard. With her fingers shaking from the cold—to say nothing of her gut-wrenching anxiety—she tapped out a text on her phone: Just got big news can i come to your office?

  More than a week had passed since they last spoke by phone, which should have been enough time and distance for Marleigh to calm down and rethink her rash decision to sell the house. Instead she’d forged ahead and jumped on the very first offer, dropping the papers off for Zann’s signature without even hanging around to talk.

  The reply was devastating but not surprising. Only if ur ready 2 sign contract.

  “Twist the knife, how ’bout it?” Zann pounded her steering wheel as she studied the ultimatum on her text screen. An open-handed slap would have been kinder.

  Another fight about the house was the last thing they needed, especially with all of Marleigh’s coworkers straining to hear. She’d bring the contract, all right, but that didn’t mean she’d sign it. The house was all they had. If they sold it, what would bind them together?

  It was after three o’clock, almost press time for the Colfax Messenger, the newspaper where Marleigh worked as city editor. They’d be winding down their workday.

  On my way.

  What choice did she have? With her back against the wall, there was nothing left to do but come clean. Marleigh had been right all along—Zann had hidden something from her since last May, a secret so explosive it could rock the very foundation of their marriage. But then keeping the secret had done that too.

  Bottom line—she wasn’t the person Marleigh thought she was.

  “Goddamn it.” This was it. The whole truth, nothing but the truth. It wasn’t just the last three and a half years they stood to lose, but the rest of their lives too.

  Her Jeep plowed through the slush onto Colfax’s Main Street, now bustling with after-school traffic. Between the crosswalks and bus stops, it took almost ten minutes to travel a quarter of a mile to the newspaper office, a flat one-story building at the edge of the town’s modest commercial district. The lined spaces near the door were reserved for customers, so she parked alongside Marleigh’s gray sedan in the area designated for Colfax Messenger employees. Six cars…that was practically everyone on staff, making this a spectacle for all to see.

  The stakes of her last-gasp appeal were high—if Marleigh said no this time, it really was over.

  * * *

  On my way, the text read.

  The coffee turned to acid in Marleigh’s throat. It wasn’t in her nature to be so pigheaded, but Bridget had a point—pigheadedness was the only language Zann understood anymore. One of them had to be the adult. Now three months behind on their mortgage, they faced foreclosure by the bank within days if they didn’t act.

  Financial ruin wasn’t even the worst of it. Even if they somehow staved off bankruptcy, their marriage had suffered a savage blow. Her heart still held out for a miracle but her rational side was quickly losing hope. The woman she’d married only three years ago had been a kind, peaceful soul whose love felt like the most precious thing in the world. Was it even possible for Zann to be that person again? Their love should have been for all time. Six months of nudging, begging and demanding hadn’t worked. Zann was on a road to self-destruction and she was taking Marleigh down with her. With each day that passed, the end game looked more and more like divorce.

  Divorce. She’d never even uttered the word aloud and now it seemed all but inevitable. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. It wasn’t supposed to end at all.

  “Everything okay?” Bridget asked, peering from her adjacent desk over a pair of Oliver Peoples reading glasses that she didn’t actually need. The lenses were the lowest possible strength, she’d explained. Apparently her boyfriend Luc thought they gave her a sophisticated flair.

  “I just got a text from Zann. Says she has big news about something, asked if she could come by.” Feeling guilty for her weakness, she quickly added, “But I told her only if she brought me the signed contract.”

  “Good for you. You need to hold the line on this, Marleigh. I’m here if you need backup. You’re the one who taught me to stand up for myself.”

  “I think I can handle it,” Marleigh muttered.

  The heavy glass door swung wide, sending a gust of wintry air around the room. Editor Clay Teele entered and stomped his snow-covered shoes on a welcome mat that stretched all the way to the chest-high customer service counter. Though short and wiry, he always managed to overpower the room with his intensity. “What have you got, Anderhall?”

  Marleigh held out her working versions of the day’s assignments. “Suspicious garage fire on Highbridge. Owner of puppy mill pleads guilty to animal cruelty charge. I’m still working on the police blotter for tomorrow…couple of break-ins, vandalism at Hannaford’s, and a hit-and-run on a parked car at the armory.”

  “Over a thousand expected for Winter Festival,” Bridget said, adding her story to Clay’s pile. “Plus I got some good snow pictures from Barry. And the high school honor roll’s out. I went over this morning and got quotes from some of the kids.”

  Clay’s shoulders drooped, his typical response to a slow news day. Scandalous drug busts, graphic vehicle accidents and raucous town council meetings sold more papers. That mattered a lot with all the ads running for Christmas sales. “Please tell me there’s something exciting in sports.”

  Terry Henderson, whose desk sat behind Marleigh’s in the back corner, continued typing as he answered, “Bruins won, Celtics lost. Got those off the wire. Colfax varsity plays Rutland tonight.”

  Marleigh, Bridget and Terry were all that remained of a local news staff that had withered from a dozen over the past six years amid a continuing downturn in newspaper readership. Clay culled national and state news from the wire services and wrote a daily column for the editorial page, answering directly to the corporate office in Burlington.

  Tammy Hatch, the youngest Messenger employee at twenty-four, handled advertising sales. Like Clay, she had a glass-enclosed office with a door, a blessing to everyone since she spent ninety percent of her time on the phone chattering with potential advertisers.

  Though Clay was editor and boss, it was Fran Crippen who kept the place going. A widow with Colfax roots going back to the American Revolution, she’d managed the customer service desk for almost forty years and knew every subscriber by name.

  Marleigh punched up the lead on her puppy mill story and submitted the final version electronically to Terry’s inbox for copy edits. She was ahead of schedule for a change—which gave her a few minutes to talk if Zann actually stopped by.

  As Clay disappeared into his office, Bridget leaned over and murmured, “Is it my imagination or is he crankier than usual?”

  “He’s always like that when he gets back from a meeting at corporate. They’re probably leaning on him for more budget cuts.”

  “Cripes, we’re down to six people. It’s
all we can do to get the paper out as it is.”

  Marleigh worried every day the honchos in Burlington would decide to cut their losses on the cluster of small-town dailies and shut them all down. They’d folded a handful already and were hiring stringers to cover local news for the statewide Burlington edition. In fact, she’d taken on some freelance work in nearby Middlebury to make ends meet after Zann lost her job.

  “Luc says I ought to try working at the Montreal Gazette,” Bridget scoffed. “Like I’m just going to walk in there and get a job. I reminded him I’m not even Canadian.”

  After years of being emotionally and physically abused by her former husband, Bridget deserved someone who would lavish her with the finer things. That was Luc Michaux, a day trader from Montreal who had fallen in love with both Bridget and the small-town life of rural Vermont.

  “What are you and Luc up to this weekend?”

  Bridget scrunched her nose and shrugged. “Not sure. He’s been in New York all week. He’s been so busy…hasn’t even called me in like, two days.”

  Marleigh briefly considered inviting her over to hang out, but she needed to finish packing. If their sales contract went through, she’d have only a couple of weeks to get out. The buyers were paying cash and wanted to close by the end of the month.

  “Don’t look now, but somebody’s coming,” Bridget said. Her desk afforded the best view of the entrance. “And I’ll be damned…it looks like she’s got the papers in her hand.”

  Just knowing Zann would walk through the door any moment filled Marleigh with both longing and dread. Longing for the thrill Zann had aroused since the first day they met, and dread that today could be the beginning of the end. The last time they spoke, Zann had warned of leaving Vermont once and for all if they split up. Sign on with a private military contractor and return to a war zone, she said. Threats like that were hard to swallow, but they only prolonged the suffering. Marleigh had to put her own feelings first for a change and let the chips fall.