Can't Stop Loving You Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt1

  Excerpt2

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Copyright

  Mariel wanted this as she had never wanted anything

  in her life.

  He tasted of mint toothpaste and he smelled of soap, and when he touched the sides of her face as he kissed her she quivered, remembering that yes, this was exactly how it was, kissing Noah. This was how he had always begun when he kissed her—by touching her face, cupping her cheeks in his hands as he slowly moved his lips over hers.

  It was good, so incredibly good, to be kissed by him again. When he opened his mouth she did as well, welcoming his warm, gently probing tongue. And when he leaned into her, she sank back on the bed, her hands on his shoulders, pulling him down on top of her. Her stomach was fluttering like mad and her mind was racing and she couldn’t think clearly; all she could do was feel. And need.

  She needed him desperately—had needed him for years—and now he was here. They were back in this inn in this town—

  Then she remembered why.

  BOOK YOUR PLACE ON OUR WEBSITE

  AND MAKE THE

  READING CONNECTION!

  We’ve created a customized website just for our very special readers, where you can get the inside scoop on everything that’s going on with Zebra, Pinnacle and Kensington books.

  When you come online, you’ll have the exciting opportunity to:

  View covers of upcoming books

  Read sample chapters

  Learn about our future publishing schedule (listed by publication month and author)

  Find out when your favorite authors will be visiting a city near you

  Search for and order backlist books from our online catalog

  Check out author bios and background information

  Send e-mail to your favorite authors

  Meet the Kensington staff online

  Join us in weekly chats with authors, readers and other guests

  Get writing guidelines

  AND MUCH MORE!

  Visit our website at

  http://www.zebrabooks.com

  Can’t Stop

  Loving

  You

  Janelle Taylor

  To Joan and Fareed Betros, a truly romantic

  couple and good friends, and to

  McKay Daines who makes dreams come true.

  Prologue

  November, 1986

  Strasburg, New York

  “Two more minutes.”

  “Not even.” Mariel Rowan looked up from the second hand on her watch to see Noah Lyons staring at his own. “So that’s good. In one minute and fifty-six seconds we’ll know.”

  “Not even,” he echoed, and flashed a grim smile at her before looking down at his wrist again.

  Seated beside him on the rumpled dorm bed, she inhaled deeply, then exhaled heavily through puffed cheeks. The waiting was torture, and there was absolutely no way to ease the tension. Nothing to do but sit here watching each second tick by so that they wouldn’t have to look at each other—or at the opened pregnancy kit on the desk, plopped next to a stack of textbooks, an open and untouched can of diet soda, and a framed photograph of Mariel’s smiling family, whom she hadn’t seen in the three months since she had gone away to school.

  If her parents ever knew…

  Well, they wouldn’t know. They were back home in Missouri, over a thousand miles away from here. Either way—no matter how this turned out—Mariel would never tell them. There was no reason to.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Noah’s voice startled her. She turned to see him looking at her, an intent expression on his handsome face. She fought the urge to reach out and brush an errant lock of wavy dark hair out of his brown eyes, afraid that if she touched him, she would crumble. Right now, she had to be strong. There would be time for crumbling later…

  Later? In exactly thirty-one seconds, she realized, looking down at her watch again.

  “Mariel?”

  She shrugged. “What am I thinking? I’m thinking either my whole world is about to turn upside down…or…”

  “Or everything will be okay,” he finished for her. “We can go back to the way it was.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t agree. Nothing would ever be the way it was. This had rocked her to the very core, had cast doubt on dreams she had—until now—been certain would come true.

  Dreams were all she had had, growing up in sleepy Rockton, Missouri.

  Maybe not all. She had had her parents, Andrew and Sarah, and her kid sister, Leslie. And she had had friends, too. Plenty of friends. But she had known from a young age that it was all temporary, that the day would come when she would flee Rockton and never look back.

  Finally, late this past August, when the blazing summer sun had fried the heartland to an ugly brown and it seemed there would never be another season, it had happened. She had left home.

  First stop: this small private college in upstate New York, where a hint of autumn had already been in the air a week before Labor Day.

  Mariel had never even heard of Strasburg College until the summer before her senior year in high school, when she had made her first trip to the East Coast to sing with her girls’ choir at Chautauqua Institution, a cultural arts community in western New York. The group performance in a packed amphitheater had concluded with her heartfelt solo from a Broadway musical. When it was over, she had received thunderous applause—and an invitation from an impressed drama professor who happened to be there. He had asked her to audition for one of a handful of theater arts scholarships at Strasburg—and miraculously, she had won one.

  Her parents hadn’t been thrilled. In fact, they had been pretty much devastated.

  Their plan for Mariel was for her to go to a state university—preferably one that would allow her to live at home, dating only local boys—and become a teacher. That was what her mother had done decades ago, before she married Andrew. And it was what most of Mariel’s friends were planning to do. As her best friend Katie Beth Miller always said, teaching was a family-friendly profession. If you couldn’t afford—or, God forbid, didn’t want—to give up your job after you were married and had children, you would at least have summers and school holidays off, and you would be home early every afternoon.

  Working mothers weren’t the norm in Rockton.

  Working, unmarried women without children were almost unheard-of.

  But that was what Mariel intended to be.

  Not in Rockton, of course. She planned to go from Strasburg to New York City, where she would become a Broadway sensation. Of course, that might take a few years. And before it happened, she might spend some time in Europe after college—to study voice, or maybe just to travel.

  That was the plan.

  The dream.

  The dream didn’t include teaching, or Rockton, or a husband and children.

  All Mariel had ever wanted was to be an actress. A footloose actress.

  Well, that was almost all she wanted.

  For the last three months, ever since she had arrived in Strasburg, she had also wanted Noah Lyons.

  She had even started to fantasize that she might be able to have her dream and
Noah.

  But that was absolutely it.

  There wasn’t room in there for motherhood.

  “Mariel?”

  She blinked. “Yeah?”

  “It’s time. It’s been time. I was waiting for you to notice, but you’re a million miles away. What are you thinking?”

  That this can’t happen.

  Not to me.

  “I just—never mind. Let’s just find out,” she said, standing abruptly and walking toward the white plastic stick sitting on the desk. It was flat on one end and had a little window. She had read the pamphlet that came with it. If there was a dark circle in the window, it would mean she was pregnant.

  Her hand was shaking as she reached for the stick.

  Then Noah was behind her, one hand closing over her fingers as she picked it up, his other hand on her shoulder to steady her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice low in her ear.

  She didn’t answer.

  Her eyes were closed.

  She couldn’t look.

  “Mariel, you have to move your thumb. It’s blocking the window.”

  “Okay.” Her voice came out small and frightened. She hated the sound. She hated being this person—this cliché. The preacher’s daughter, away from the Midwest only three months and already missing a period.

  But not pregnant. She couldn’t be pregnant. It had to be the stress.

  The stress of leaving home for the first time, starting college, falling in love…

  “Mariel?”

  She took a deep breath. Moved her thumb. Opened her eyes. Looked at the stick.

  There was a circle in the window.

  “What does that mean?” Noah asked. “Does it mean you’re not pregnant?”

  She could barely hear his voice over the roar in her own head. She was screaming inside, shrieking in agony.

  Somehow, aloud she only said, “No. It means that I am.”

  “You are?”

  She nodded, head bent, still clutching the white stick helplessly. They hadn’t moved. He was still holding her, but his hand suddenly felt heavy on her shoulder. She couldn’t look up at him; couldn’t bear to know what he was thinking. She was too consumed by her own whirl of thoughts, for the moment, to care.

  “It’ll be okay,” Noah whispered in her ear.

  Anger flared. Irrational maybe, but anger just the same. Of course it would be okay for him. He wasn’t pregnant. This was happening to her.

  She whirled around to look him in the eye. “No, it won’t be okay,” she snapped, wishing she could find something other than compassion on his face. His gentle expression only compounded her inner turmoil, adding guilt to the fury.

  “Look, Mariel, I know you’re upset, but we’ll work this out.” He reached out to touch her again.

  She took a step backward and crashed into her roommate’s dresser. “How can we work this out? I’m eighteen and pregnant, Noah. I’ve barely started college and it’s all over. Everything.”

  “Of course it isn’t over. There are ways—”

  She gasped. “If you think I’m going to terminate the pregnancy, then you’re—”

  “Of course I don’t think that!”

  She swallowed hard. “Because that’s just not an option. Not for me.”

  “I know, Mariel. I know your father—”

  “This has nothing to do with my father being a minister,” she interrupted, trying to quell her anger. Someplace deep inside she knew he was trying to say—and do—the right thing. Just as she was. But right now, he didn’t count. “This has nothing to do with anyone else. This has to do with me. What’s right for me. And I’m going to have this baby, Noah.”

  He nodded, staring down at her so tenderly that she had to turn away, because it made her torn between wanting to lash out at him—and wanting the impossible.

  Her gaze fell on her own reflection in the mirror above her roommate’s bureau. She was shocked to see that she looked pretty much the same as always. Her long, light brown wavy hair was slightly tousled. She must have raked her fingers through it at some point; she did that when she was nervous. And there were deep shadows under her wide-set green eyes, which wasn’t surprising considering she hadn’t slept in the two nights since she had concluded that her period wasn’t going to put in a late appearance after all.

  But other than those telltale signs of what she had been through, she was her usual self on the outside—just a pretty college girl in an oversized, navy hooded Strasburg sweatshirt.

  And standing over her shoulder was a tall, lean, all-American-looking college guy wearing a green and black plaid flannel shirt, jeans—and a similar set of undereye circles.

  Things like this didn’t happen to people like them.

  But even as the thought crossed her mind, she forced it out, knowing it was ridiculous. Things like this happened only to people like them. People who were too caught up in each other to pay attention to details.

  Like using birth control every time.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and tilted his face next to hers. “Mariel—don’t shut me out. Please. We’re in this together.”

  She had to fight back a lump in her throat. “I wish I could feel like we were, Noah. But we’re not. It’s just me. My God, I’ve never felt so alone in my life.”

  “You’re not alone,” he said fiercely. “You’ll never be alone. I’m going to be with you through everything, Mariel. I won’t leave your side.”

  She shook her head, touched by his loyalty even as she was irritated by his lack of logic. “Noah, you don’t have to make a choice. I’m going to have to leave school. The baby is due at the end of June or beginning of July, and—”

  “It is? How do you know?” he broke in, his breathless tone suddenly taking on a hint of…was it wonder?

  “Because when I went to the library yesterday I looked up gestation cycles, and they had this chart. I know when my last period was. I know when the baby is due.”

  He nodded. “The baby. When you say it like that it’s so…”

  She knew what he meant. There was a sense of wonder, no matter what else she was feeling. There was a human life growing inside of her. A life she had created with Noah, whom she…

  No. She didn’t love him. She couldn’t love someone she had known for only three months…could she?

  Maybe, if they had been given a chance to see where this relationship led, they would have fallen in love someday.

  But they would never know now.

  “You said you’ll have to leave school, Mariel.”

  She nodded, steeped in misery again.

  Noah cleared his throat. “Do you mean you’re going to go back home? Because your parents—”

  “My parents would probably throw me out if I came home pregnant, Noah.”

  He didn’t look surprised.

  And she realized what he must think of her parents. Had she made them out to be ogres when she talked about them to him? Probably. She did a lot of grumbling about what it was like to grow up with a minister father and a full-time mom who baked cookies and ran the PTO. About how they didn’t understand her.

  Both her parents were in their late fifties, far older than her friends’ parents. They had married young and tried for years to have children. Long after they had given up hope, Mariel had come along unexpectedly, followed, even more incredibly, by Leslie five years later. As a result, Andrew and Sarah told anyone who would listen that their daughters were miracles from God.

  And now here was Mariel, feeling the opposite. Feeling cursed because she was pregnant.

  More guilt. Everywhere she turned, guilt.

  “Maybe my parents wouldn’t throw me out, Noah,” she told him, needing him to know she had distorted the truth. “They’re not horrible people. Just ultraconservative. And ultrareligious. And Rockton’s a tiny town. They would die of shame if I turned up unmarried and pregnant.”

  “You don’t have to be,” Noah said quickly, a strange expression on
his face.

  She bristled. “I told you, I’m having this baby, Noah. I can’t possibly choose to—”

  “No, I didn’t mean the pregnant part.”

  She stared at his reflection beside hers in the mirror, not understanding.

  Or maybe not willing to understand.

  But when he pulled on her shoulders, spinning her around to face him, she couldn’t avoid it. He dropped down in front of her on one knee before she could say something to stop him.

  Still, she tried. “Noah, please don’t—”

  He grabbed her hand, clasping it as he looked up at her. His voice was ragged when he spoke, his face raw with emotion.

  But it wasn’t the right emotion. It wasn’t the one she would hope—expect—to see there on the verge of the announcement he was so obviously about to make.

  “Mariel, you don’t have to be alone. Ever,” he said fervently. “I’m going to take care of you and our baby. I swear. If you marry me, I’ll never let you down.”

  “Marry you?” It came out so high-pitched that she winced. She didn’t mean to react this way, but she couldn’t help herself. It was just too much. All of this, in the space of a few minutes. First the positive pregnancy test, and now a marriage proposal.

  What he was doing was so noble. So sweet.

  So wrong.

  “Noah, we can’t,” she said, regaining control over her vocal cords if not her emotions. She felt as though she was on the verge of hysteria. Laughter? Tears? Maybe both.

  “Yes, we can,” he said, getting up off the floor, holding both her hands in his and bringing them up against his chest. She could feel his heart racing beneath her wrists, and she realized that somewhere inside of her their baby’s heart was beating as well. For a split second, she was caught up in that—and in him. In the picture he had painted with his heartfelt, foolish words.

  Then reality returned, and she forced herself to face the truth—and to convince him to do the same.

  “Noah, listen to yourself. This is insane. You’re talking about marriage.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We’re in college. We have our whole lives ahead. Not just school, but travel, and careers, and—Noah, we can’t get married. We’re eighteen.”