Wedding Vows: With This Ring: Rescued in a Wedding Dress / Bridesmaid Says, 'I Do!' / The Doctor's Surprise Bride

HOUSTON watched Molly walking fast to catch up with him. The truth was all he wanted was an hour or so on his punching bag. Though maybe he waited, instead of continuing to walk, because the punching bag had not done him nearly the good he had hoped it would last night. Now it felt as if it was the only place to defuse his fury.

That beautiful little girl’s mother didn’t want her. He knew he was kidding himself that his anger was at her mother.

From the moment he’d heard Molly laughing from under the pile of children a powerless longing for something he was never going to have had pulled at him.

You thought you left something behind you, but you never quite left that. The longing for the love of a mother.

The love of his mother. She was dead now. He’d hired a private detective a few years back to find her. Somehow he had known she was dead. Because he’d always thought she would come back. He would have left Beebee’s world in a minute if his mother had loved him and needed him.

It had been a temporary relief when the private eye had told him. Drugs. An overdose.

Death. The only reasonable explanation for a mother who had never looked back. Except, as the P.I. filled in the dates and details, it wasn’t the explanation he’d been seeking after all. She’d died only a few years before he made the inquiries about her—plenty of time to check in on her son if she had wanted to.

She hadn’t.

And he was powerless over that, too.

There was nothing a man of action like Houston hated so much as that word. Powerless.

Molly came and walked beside him. He deliberately walked fast enough to keep her a little breathless; he knew intuitively she would have a woman’s desire to talk, to probe his wounds.

He could feel his anger dispersing as they left the edgier part of the Lower East Side and headed back to where Second Chances was in the East Village.

“This is where I live,” she said as they came to a well-kept five-story brownstone. “Do you want to stop for a minute? Meet Baldy? Have a coffee?”

She obviously intended to pursue this thing. His feelings. He was not going to meet her bird, enter her personal space and have a coffee with her!

On the other hand, the punching bag had not been working its normal magic. He hesitated. And she read that as a yes. In the blink of an eye she was at the door with her key out.

He still had a chance to back away, but for some reason he didn’t. In fact, he ordered himself to keep walking, to call after her, Maybe some other time. But he didn’t.

Instead, feeling oddly powerless again, as if she might have something he was looking for, he followed her up the three flights of stairs to her apartment.

“Close it quick,” she said, as he came through the door behind her. “Baldy.”

And sure enough out of the darkness of the apartment a tiny missile flew at them, a piece of flesh-colored putty with naked wings. It landed on her shoulder, pecked at her ear, turned and gave him a baleful look.

“Good grief,” he said, but he was already glad he had come. The bird was so ugly he was cute. The tiny being’s obvious adoration for Molly lightened something in Houston’s mood. “ET call home!”

Still, there was something about that bird, looking as if it, too, would protect her to the death, that tugged at a heart that had just faced one too many challenges today.

The bird rode on her shoulder as she guided him into the apartment which looked to be all of five hundred square feet of pure feminine coziness.

The bird kissed her cheek and made a whimpering noise that was near human. She absently stroked his featherless body with a tender finger. The bird preened.

“Just have a seat,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”

But he didn’t have a seat. Instead he questioned his sanity for coming in here. He studied the framed poster of a balloon rising over the Napa Valley in California. He turned away from it. How was it her humble five hundred square feet felt like home in a way he had never quite managed to achieve?

It must be the fresh flowers on the coffee table between the two sofas.

“Nice flowers,” he heard himself say.

“Oh, I treat myself,” she called from the kitchen. “There’s a vendor on the way home from work.”

He went and stood in the doorway of her tiny kitchen, watched her work.

“No boyfriend buying you flowers?”

That’s exactly why it had been a mistake to accept her invitation into her personal space. This was going too far. He’d chased her with a worm. And danced with her. He’d felt the exquisite plumpness of her lip on his finger when he’d fed her from his hand. Now he was in her house.

In high school, he scoffed at himself, that might count as a relationship. But for a mature man?

“Believe me,” she muttered, “the boyfriend I had never bought me flowers.”

“Really?” he said, and some of his dismay at that must have come through in his tone. What kind of cad wouldn’t buy her flowers? He would buy her flowers if he was her boyfriend.

Now that was a dangerous side road his mind had just gone down!

Her tongue was caught between her teeth as she concentrated on putting coffee things on a tray. She pressed by him in the narrow doorway, set the tray on the coffee table by the flowers.

It all looked very cozy. He went and sat down.

She poured coffee. “He was more than my boyfriend. My fiancé.”

“Ah.” He took a generous gulp of coffee, burned his mouth, set it down and glared at it.

She took a tiny sip of hers. “His name was Chuck. We were supposed to get married and live happily ever after. Instead, he emptied my bank account and went to live on a beach in Costa Rica. That’s what finished me for being a romantic.”

Why was she telling him this? He got it very suddenly. They were going to share confidences.

“Now I see it as a good thing,” she said. “It got me ready for you.”

He stared.

“Hardened me,” she declared. “So that I’m not a romantic anymore. So that I can handle all the changes at work.”

And he wasn’t aware he had stopped breathing until he started again. For a suspended moment in time, he had thought she was going to say losing her fiancé had freed her to love him. What would give him such a notion?

Still, it was very hard not to laugh at her declaration that she was hardened. “But there’s such a thing as being too hard,” she went on.

“I guess there is,” he agreed warily.

“I’d like you to trust me. Tell me why the situation at the daycare with the little girl and her mother made you so angry today?”

Her perception—the feeling that she could see what he least wanted to be seen—was frightening.

What was even more frightening was the temptation that clawed at his throat. To take off all the armor, and lay it at her feet. Tell her all of it. But the words stuck.