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It is a brilliantly sunny day in the mountains outside Atlanta. A beautiful two-year-old girl is left to nap in front of her family's gas station. Suddenly, a strange woman snatches her from her stroller and takes off. Barking furiously, the child's loyal golden retriever breaks its rope and chases the speeding car until it vanishes into the distance.
Growing up in a magnificent Charleston home, Jessie Roland wants for nothing. Her rich, indulgent father has filled her bedroom with expensive toys, and even brought her her own merry-go-around. And yet, she feels lost and unhappy. Sheltered by her frantically over-protective mother, Thea, who forbids her from having friends and never lets her out of her sight, Jessie yearns to be like other kids. But as she grows into young adulthood, her family's stifling possessiveness feeds her feelings of loss and desolation and fuels the terrible dreams from which she wakes screaming, night after night.
Not until she is nineteen will Jessie finally find a way to break free. Refusing to touch the Roland money, she relies on her own savings to make her escape to Washington, D.C., where no one knows her and where, as assistant to prominent Texas senator Angus Kingsley, she will soon be swept into a whirlwind marriage to his handsome, irresistible charming son. But as the senator's dazzling political career collapses in scandal, her marriage turns ugly and abusive, and her best friend, the irrepressible Sophie, succumbs to her own cruel demons. Jessie is once again haunted by dreams of lost happiness, of simple, tender gestures buried deep in her memory. Only in Lucas Palmer, the reclusive Texas rancher with a golden retriever named Buzz, will she discover the strength she needs to penetrate the darkness.
Finders Keepers is Jessie's story—the story of a child stolen from a poor but loving home of a woman lost in a life that is not her own, of a family shattered by the bitter secret of an unspeakable crime that happened so long ago. In Jessie, Fern Michaels has created an indomitable character who must rip the veil of every illusion before she can reclaim her life, and who must journey through a maze of heartbreak and loss before she can find her way back to the place she can truly call home.
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