More Than Words, Volume 7 Read online

  Dear Reader,

  For many years Harlequin Books has been a leader in supporting and promoting causes that are of concern to women and celebrating ordinary women who make extraordinary differences in the lives of others. Through Harlequin More Than Words, we annually honor women for their compassionate dedication to those that need it most, and donate $10,000 to their chosen causes.

  We are proud to highlight our current Harlequin More Than Words award recipients by telling you about them and, with the help of some of the biggest names in women’s fiction, creating wonderfully entertaining and moving fictional short stories based on these women and their causes. Within these pages, you will find stories written by Carly Phillips, Donna Hill and Jill Shalvis—and online at www.HarlequinMoreThanWords.com you can also access stories by Pamela Morsi and Meryl Sawyer. These two stories are free and we hope you’ll read them and pass them on to your friends. All five of these stories are beautiful tributes to the Harlequin More Than Words award recipients who inspired them, and we hope they will touch your heart and inspire the real-life heroine in you.

  Thank you for your support; all proceeds from the sale of this book will be returned to the Harlequin More Than Words program so we can assist more causes of concern to women. And you can help even more by learning about and getting involved with the charities highlighted by Harlequin More Than Words. Together we can make a difference!

  Sincerely,

  Donna Hayes

  Publisher and CEO

  Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.

  NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY bestselling author

  Carly Phillips

  Donna Hill

  Jill Shalvis

  More Than Words

  VOLUME 7

  CONTENTS

  STORIES INSPIRED BY REAL-LIFE HEROINES

  COMPASSION CAN’T WAIT

  by Carly Phillips

  Inspired by Valerie Sobel

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EPILOGUE

  SOMEPLACE LIKE HOME

  by Donna Hill

  Inspired by Nancy Abrams

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHAT THE HEART WANTS

  by Jill Shalvis

  Inspired by Victoria Pettibone & Sasha Eden

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  Preview of DAFFODILS IN SPRING

  by Pamela Morsi

  Inspired by Karen Thomson

  CHAPTER ONE

  Preview of WORTH THE RISK

  by Meryl Sawyer

  Inspired by Grace Cavnar

  CHAPTER ONE

  VALERIE SOBEL

  Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation

  It was a phone call like so many others Valerie Sobel receives: a desperate mother on the line, stumbling over her words and barely making sense. The woman was emotionally spent, physically exhausted and unsure who to turn to in this darkest hour.

  After speaking with the mother for a few minutes, Valerie understood her plight. The woman had just received a letter signed by her family saying that although they loved her and her son, they could no longer look after “a cripple” while the single mom worked to pay the bills.

  The eight-year-old boy in question, Benjamin, was dying of a malignant spinal tumor.

  “Tell me, what would it take for you to stay home and care for him?” asked Valerie.

  The woman didn’t miss a beat.

  “You don’t understand—I have to work,” she answered. “I’ll need to pay for Benjamin’s caregiver.”

  It took Valerie, founder of the California-based Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation, a few more minutes of prodding before the mother finally understood that perhaps Valerie was offering her a solution she never could have imagined—a way to be with her dying child.

  In the end, Valerie’s charitable organization cut through the red tape and immediately paid for the family’s COBRA insurance as well as the difference between unemployment and the single parent’s salary. And while, sadly, Benjamin did eventually pass away, he had his mother with him for the last days of his journey.

  “I am humbled every day that I can say yes to people whose needs are so great,” Valerie says. “But they should never be in this situation, because to me, it’s the elemental right of a human being to be where they need to be when they have a dying child.”

  When compassion can’t wait

  Giving human life dignity, both for the sick child and the parent, is what ASRL’s Compassion Can’t Wait project is all about. Founded by Valerie in 1995 with a seed donation, ASRL is now a public charity supported by hundreds of donors across the United States.

  Its mission? When compassion can’t wait and single-parent families are in despair, the organization helps with urgent expenses to allow caregivers to stay at their child’s side.

  Knowing there is no emotional room left for dealing with bureaucracy when a little one needs so much time and attention, Compassion Can’t Wait ensures that the parent does not spend precious hours filling out endless forms for aid when they would rather be with their child. Instead, the family’s social worker determines how much financial aid is needed, develops a plan for the family and contacts ASRL on its behalf. If all other resources have been exhausted, ASRL pays the bills and lifts the financial burden.

  The organization has given money to pay for insurance, save homes, put groceries in the fridge—and Valerie has given her heart.

  It started with Andre

  When Valerie holds a grieving parent’s hand, or strokes the head of a critically ill child, she does it out of compassion that only those who have faced tragedy can truly understand.

  On Thanksgiving Day in 1993, she received news that her beautiful teenage son, Andre, had an inoperable brain tumor. He fought the deadly disease as hard as he could, but passed away on January 12, 1995. Valerie held her son for three hours after his death, wondering how she would ever go on, but knowing she had to find some way to change the world to make up for her son’s terrible absence.

  “There are some things that can never fade,” she concedes. “I don’t even remember the person I was before. It changes you at the cellular level.”

  The year turned out to be cataclysmic. Soon after Andre’s death, Valerie’s mother died—the same woman who ushered the family to safety after they fled their native Hungary during the 1956 uprising against the Soviet regime. Valerie still remembers carrying her younger brother on her back while walking eight miles with her parents through marsh to cross the border into Austria. Months later they left refugee camps behind to settle in Toronto and eventually moved to California.

  Then, one year to the day of Andre’s death, Valerie’s husband took his own life in despair.

  It took four more years of grieving, forgiving and opening herself back up to life before Valerie’s vision to help families with critically ill children could take shape. But it did. She simply could not forget witnessing other children who were by themselves for hours in the hospital, having to face their fears, pain, t
reatments—and at times even their deaths—alone.

  Haunted by what she saw, Valerie kept asking herself how she could have managed Andre’s illness without financial and emotional support. How would their journey have been different if she had been a single parent? She admits her initial ways of trying to honor Andre did not give her the sense of grace his life deserved.

  “Honoring his life is about how I can help others who are going through what I went through,” she says. “It started with him and ended with me.”

  Making change happen

  Today Valerie is a force of nature. Her innovative work includes convening a think tank of leading doctors and social workers to document how single parents with critically ill children can cope. She can also be found on the phone with landlords, negotiating pastrent forgiveness, matching it with ASRL’s own rent payment, and working with utility and credit-card companies to remove late fees and penalties.

  “Valerie is an exceptional woman,” says Anne Swire, the organization’s CEO, who left a job in Washington, D.C., to work in partnership with Valerie on the West Coast. “Her visionary idea has brought urgent assistance to thousands of grateful families, but most will never know her name.”

  Valerie is not in the caring profession to win personal accolades. Her greatest hope is to see real societal change that would embed services like Compassion Can’t Wait right into the health-care system. At present, ASRL tries to accommodate over two thousand free-standing children’s hospitals, and eighty percent of its funding comes from private sources—a challenging way to raise money, especially during tough economic times.

  Until that change happens, Valerie, who seems to have lived at least eight lives (she once won roles in Jimmy Stewart and Paul Newman movies when the acting bug caught her as a teen) keeps moving forward.

  When she’s not working fourteen-hour days, she vacations with friends in Istanbul, writes poetry and connects with families who need her support.

  “It reminds me that a sad time in my life is over and now I can help someone else,” she says. “How fortunate am I to do that?”

  CARLY PHILLIPS

  COMPASSION CAN’T WAIT

  CARLY PHILLIPS

  Carly Phillips started her writing career with the Harlequin Temptation line in 1999 with Brazen, and she’s never strayed far from home! In 2002, Carly’s book, The Bachelor, was chosen by Kelly Ripa for her Reading with Ripa book club, making it the first romance to be chosen by a nationally televised book club. Carly has published thirty books, and, among others, she has appeared on the New York Times, USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. An ABC soap-opera addict, Carly lives in Purchase, New York, with her husband, two teenage daughters and two frisky soft-coated wheaten terriers who act like their third and fourth children. Carly loves to interact with readers!

  You can find Carly online at www.carlyphillips.com and blog with her at www.plotmonkeys.com. Carly is also on Facebook: www.facebook.com/carlyphillipsfanpage and Twitter: www.twitter.com/carlyphillips.

  DEDICATION

  Thank you to Marsha Zinberg for thinking

  of me for this special project, to Brenda

  Chin for your persistence and faith in me,

  and most of all to ASRL and especially

  Valerie Sobel for your inspiration. And to

  Anne Swire for your help and dedication.

  I admire you all.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Smack. Smack. Smack.

  Julia Caldwell listened to the familiar sound of a ball hitting the center pocket of a baseball mitt. It echoed through the hospital corridors, as routine as the monitors beeping at the nurses’ station in Miami’s Caridad del Cobre Children’s Hospital. For the last month, the Cortez family, mother and fourteen-year-old twin sons, had been a fixture at the hospital; Michael Cortez and his baseball obsession were a welcome break from sickness and pain.

  Michael and his brother, Manny, were twins, alike in so many ways except for a cruel genetic twist. Manny had leukemia. Michael did not. Manny had his mother at his side day and night. Michael did not.

  As the healthy child in a single-parent home, baseball was the only comfort Michael Cortez had. Nobody, from the nurses to the doctors to other patients or parents, would ever ask him to stop the repetitive sound.

  Every afternoon, Michael walked to the hospital from school and took up residence in either his brother’s room or the family lounge. Not wanting to be a burden to his mother, he’d do his homework without being reminded, bring his mom coffee and then turn to the comforting routine of tossing the ball into the glove.

  Smack. Smack. Smack.

  From her small office near the nurses’ station, Julia filled out the Request for Assistance forms for the Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation. As the social worker responsible for the pediatric wing of Caridad del Cobre, Julia had already been in contact with the program manager at ASRL and the foundation was expecting the formal request. Within twenty-four hours, ASRL would cut a check to Anna Cortez’s landlord, electric company and phone provider. The rent for their apartment and other essential expenses would be taken care of while Anna sat by Manny’s bedside, willing him to live. Anna had already lost her job because, as everyone at the hospital understood too well, a child’s illness was all consuming. ASRL’s motto was Compassion Can’t Wait.

  And the foundation always stepped up immediately.

  Before Julia faxed in the Request for Assistance, she said her usual prayer of thanks to the people at ASRL, grateful she’d contacted the foundation almost two years ago for another single parent of a teenage girl with a brain tumor. Since then, Caridad del Cobre routinely applied to ASRL for funding for families who met the criteria—single caregivers who needed to be with their sick children.

  Julia leaned against the wall and sighed. But who would make sure the needs of Michael Cortez, the healthy child, were met?

  Smack. Smack. Smack.

  She listened to the sound, as familiar to her as the number 22 emblazoned on the fourteen-year-old boy’s jersey. Number 22, Kyle Hansen, star pitcher for the Miami Suns, the city’s three-year-old expansion team, which had made it as far as the playoffs last year. Kyle was their multi-million-dollar boy, their marquee player and their captain.

  He was also Julia’s high school sweetheart and first love—before life choices got in the way. The fax machine beeped loudly, letting her know the message had gone through. Shaking off the past, she headed down the hall to tell Anna Cortez that everything would be taken care of soon.

  Smack. Smack. Smack.

  Drawn by the sound, Julia paused by the family waiting room and glanced at the dark-haired boy sitting alone in the lounge, rhythmically smacking the ball into his glove.

  “Hey, Michael.”

  “Hey.” He didn’t take his eyes off the ball. With hard work and a guardian angel, the boy’s focus and concentration could take him far.

  Just like his idol.

  “What time is today’s Suns game?” she asked him.

  “Seven.”

  Julia nodded. Her paid day ended at five. “Want company?” She didn’t have plans for the night and she could just as easily watch the game here as at home.

  The boy shrugged. “Don’t care.”

  Smack. Smack. Smack.

  “Good. That settles it, then. I’ll pick us up burgers for dinner and be back in time for the game. It’ll be like we’re at the stadium.”

  “Burgers from Burgers, Shakes and Fries?” he asked, showing the first sign of eagerness.

  Julia grinned. “Yeah. I can go to Burgers, Shakes and Fries.” Even if it was fifteen minutes in the other direction. Michael’s smile was worth it.

  Her heart swelled and she felt an overwhelming empathy for the boy who was losing his childhood along with his brother. She’d once been there, the healthy sibling with a sister dying of leukemia, and she knew exactly how Michael was feeling.

  Alone, lonely, resentful and afraid. She also knew that whether Manny
recovered or not, Michael’s life would never be the same. His relationship with his mother, his sibling, even the rest of the world, would be forever altered. As hers had been.

  If someone didn’t step in and acknowledge that he was important too, his already rioting emotions would change him from just a teenager with attitude to one who found validation elsewhere, in crime or, worse, in one of the street gangs prevalent in the downtown area where he lived. Julia knew it would take a special person with unique skills to get past the teenager’s well-honed defenses and impress him. Someone like the man Julia hadn’t seen in nine years and who she’d never had any intention of contacting again.

  She ran her hands up and down her arms as she traveled down memory road. Kyle had signed a letter of intent to play baseball for the University of Miami, but turned down the scholarship when he was selected in the first round of the amateur draft to play for the Seattle Mariners right after graduation. He’d asked, actually he’d expected, her to go with him.

  She’d refused. For more reasons than she could think about now.

  Could she just resurface in his life all these years later and ask him for help? And even if she was willing to step up and do that, she couldn’t easily find a way to contact him now that he was a celebrity.

  But she had resources. Illness didn’t discriminate, and thanks to her work at Caridad del Cobre and her association with ASRL, she had met people from all walks of life.

  With all sorts of connections.

  As always, Kyle arrived at the newly built Suns Stadium way before game time. Usually he stretched and hung with the team, and on a pitching day, he used the time to get into the zone. Today wasn’t his day on the mound, so he could relax his focus somewhat. He parked his Porsche in the private team lot, grateful for the reprieve from the female groupies who never stopped believing the star players would single them out for attention.