A Gift For The Groom

“That’s pretty much the way I had it figured,” Nick said. “However, you should realize that this could mean your fiancé’s father was the father of her baby.”

“No way!”

“Then why did she choose him to take the blame?”

“Because he was the most likely candidate. He’d been in trouble before when he was a teenager. His family was really poor, and when he was in high school he was dating Lucas’s mother, whose family wasn’t poor though they weren’t wealthy, either. Anyway, he wanted to take her to his senior prom but he couldn’t afford to rent a tuxedo, so he stole one. At least, he tried to steal one. They caught him. He got off with probation because he’d planned to return it after the prom and he was an honor student and he’d never been in any kind of trouble before, but when that thing at the bank came up and he looked guilty, nobody bothered to check any further.”

“Which doesn’t mean the man wasn’t the father of Abbie Prather’s child. Why didn’t your fiancé look into this?” He lifted a hand to cut off her protestations. “I just think you ought to know that you may be opening a can of worms here. This may not be the kind of wedding present your Lucas wants. There may be a good reason he never investigated.”

“There certainly is a good reason. Well, a fairly good reason. It’s real good if you understand Lucas’s point of view. He was only four years old when his dad was convicted, so pretty much all he remembers is how people treated the family of a convicted felon. As soon as his dad got out of prison sixteen years ago, they moved to Pennsylvania where nobody knew anything and started over. His parents have told him repeatedly that they have to forget the whole thing, move forward and put it behind them. Give themselves and everybody else a chance to forget. They won’t even come back to Briar Creek for our wedding.”

“If they don’t want to dredge the whole thing up, why are you doing it?”

“So his parents can feel comfortable coming to our wedding and because Lucas really does want to know the truth, deep inside.”

“I see.” Disbelief oozed from the pores of both words.

“He does! Okay, he’s never really said it in so many words, but he says it every day by his actions. He’s a doctor. He could practice anywhere in the country, but he chose to move back to Briar Creek and go into practice with my dad. He tries really, really hard to be an exemplary citizen and show people by the way he lives that his father couldn’t possibly be guilty. If he says his dad’s a total straight-arrow, I believe him. You find that little girl’s birth certificate and we’ll see who the father is and I guarantee it won’t be Wayne Daniels.”

“I fully intend to do that, but this is Saturday night, and the courthouses won’t be open until Monday morning at nine.”

She sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to wait to settle that point. What’s the little girl’s name? Did anybody remember?”

“Oh, yes. Several people remembered because Abbie yelled at her so much, calling her name. It’s Sara.”

Talk about déjà vu! “Sara,” she repeated. “When I was a little kid, my imaginary sister’s name was Sara, and then I gave the name to my favorite doll when I was six.”

“It’s a common name.”

“I guess so.” But her doll, like her and like Abbie’s daughter, had red hair. In fact, she still had the doll in a carriage in one corner of her room, a part of her childhood she couldn’t seem to let go of.

She sat quietly for a moment, thinking about Abbie’s daughter and the coincidences of their similarity in hair color and age and of having a doll with the girl’s name. If she believed in fate, she’d have thought Sara was destined to be her friend or even her adopted sister, and Abbie’s crime had sent fate awry.

Many times she’d overheard her parents lament that she had no sister and talk tentatively about having another baby. When she was young, she’d believed they’d refrained from having one because she was such a problem, they didn’t have enough worry left over for a second child. Now that she knew more about the process of obtaining babies, she realized perhaps they hadn’t been able to have another.

Or it could be that her original assumption was right. In her zeal to prove she was competent, she usually ended up proving the opposite. Like with this trip.

The plane hit an air pocket, bouncing down and startling her, throwing her forward. Though her seat belt held her securely, Nick swung an arm across her, the way her parents had done when she was a child riding in the car and they’d had to stop suddenly.

But Nick’s touch didn’t feel paternal as his arm pushed against her left breast, his flattened palm against her right. Her gaze darted to the side, to look at him, without turning even her head as if the slightest movement would increase the accidental, forbidden, delicious sensations of his touch. And the horrible part was, she wanted to increase those sensations, to push them to their limits, whatever those limits might be.

She bit her lip. She shouldn’t be having those thoughts while she was engaged to Lucas! Talk about limits—she’d gone over the line already!

And she’d thought getting out of Briar Creek for a while would help her relax! She should have gone to one of those South American countries where they had the Revolution of the Week. That would have been more tranquil than flying to Nebraska with Nick Claiborne.

He was leaning forward, staring at her, and for a moment frozen in time, neither of them moved. His eyes which had been the color of the Texas sky at daybreak when she’d first seen him were now dark like the sky as a storm rolled in, dark from leashed energy and power ready to explode over the land in a wild tempest.

An illusion because of the dim light in the plane, she told herself.

But logic didn’t alter the effect of his gaze, the storm his touch created in her.

As if he’d suddenly noticed where it was, he jerked his hand back to his side and turned toward the front of the plane, to the darkness outside. “Sorry,” he said, his voice strangely husky. “Automatic reflex. I had four little sisters and an ex-wife who refused to wear her seat belt in the car or the plane.”

She swallowed hard. “No problem. I understand.”

She plowed into her handbag and brought out the rest of the cookies then crammed a whole one into her mouth. If eating could distract her from her fear of flying, surely it could distract her from the pilot, from the memory of his hand on her breast, from the tingling, tantalizing sensations that still lingered where he’d touched her and from the guilt of betraying Lucas, her best friend.

He leaned forward and made an adjustment of some sort. His movement stirred the air in the small space, releasing a scent of dusty denim and dangerous, tantalizing masculinity that she’d have recognized anywhere as belonging to Nick.

Only half a bag of cookies, three more candy bars, two packages of chips, a roll of mints and a bag of pistachio nuts remained in her purse. It probably wasn’t going to be enough.

Chapter Two

Nick awoke to the groaning of water pipes. At least he hoped it was water pipes. Otherwise, somebody was being tortured in a nearby room of the Rest-a-While Motel in Prairieview, Nebraska.

He could only hope Analise Brewster had slept half as badly as he had. If she had, she’d surely be ready to go home.

When they’d arrived in the middle of the night, the outside temperature had been cool, but inside the tiny room was another matter. He’d fully expected someone to come in just before dawn and shove in a few loaves of bread to bake. The sleepy owner they’d rousted out of bed had apologized for the fact that the air-conditioning was broken. Nick had his doubts that the place had ever possessed such a modern convenience.

To make matters worse, he’d had no dinner the night before except the cookies Analise had given him. Every thought of the room’s being hot enough to bake bread, fry eggs, boil soup, had been related to food and had sent his stomach into growling frenzies.

However, neither the heat nor his hunger had been the primary reason he’d tossed and turned all night, kicking the sheet into a twisted rope at the end of the lumpy bed.

Analise had been the primary cause of his disquiet. Analise, who’d talked and snacked pretty much the entire trip, including the drive from the small airport to Prairieview in the rattletrap rental car his contact had left for him. She’d talked about her fiancé, his father, his mother, her mother, her father, her friends... She’d filled his plane with so many people, making them so real, he’d halfway expected them to walk out of the plane when they landed.

By the time they arrived at the motel, the last two years of peace and tranquillity had disappeared without a trace and he was back in chaos. He’d grown up with four—count ’em, four—little sisters who’d kept the pandemonium at a consistently high level and regularly dived headfirst into situations from which he had to rescue them. Then, like a man possessed by masochism, when his twin sisters left for college, he’d married a ditzy woman who made his sisters seem staid and reasonable. His twin sisters had left three years ago and the ex-wife four months after he’d married her. Two years of serenity ... until last night. Until Analise.

She was like his sisters and his ex-wife all put together then multiplied. And to make it worse, his hormones didn’t care. They would betray him, sell him down the river, send him into servitude just to have Analise. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but while his brain told him to get away and save himself while he still could, his body wanted her with an intensity that threatened to overrule his brain.

What little sleep he’d caught in fleeting snatches had been filled with dreams of Analise... Analise talking, eating, offering him candy, taking candy from his fingers with those soft, full lips-

A knock on the door interrupted the thoughts Nick didn’t want to be having but couldn’t seem to stop. He untwisted the sheet from his ankle, retrieved his blue jeans from the worn carpet and went to answer the door.

In the harsh glare of morning sunlight, Nick hallucinated a short, rounded angel with a wrinkled, cherubic face and a halo of snow-white curls. She wore a navy blue dress with white lace on the collar just like the one his grandmother had worn for church and funerals. She beamed up at him and shoved a large tray toward him. “Good morning, Mr. Claiborne. I brought you some breakfast.”

He blinked a couple of times but the hallucination didn’t go away. In fact, his nose was getting in on. the act now, telling him the angel carried bacon, eggs and coffee on that tray.

He stepped back, allowing the angel to enter his room. With any sort of luck, he could get a few bites of those eggs and a couple of sips of coffee before the hallucination vanished.

“I’m Mabel Finch,” she said, shoving aside the lamp on the bedside table and setting down the tray. “My husband, Horace, and I own this place. Horace is the one who let you in last night.”

She lifted the napkin, exposing a plate covered with crisply fried bacon, scrambled eggs, two delicately browned biscuits, a bowl of gravy and a large mug of coffee. Nick was positive then that she was an angel and he was in heaven. He must have died sometime during the night, probably a heart attack from one of those high-voltage dreams about Analise.

“Th-Thank you,” he stammered. “This is great.” Mabel bustled across the room and opened the curtains then leaned back against the dresser, folding her arms across her ample bosom. “Analise wanted you to have a good breakfast. She said you didn’t eat anything last night except a handful of cookies.”

Analise. He might have known. He drew his fingers over his stubbled jaw, needing to feel the slight prickle of reality. “How long have you known Analise?”

“Since about seven this morning. Sit. Eat. You don’t want to be late for church.”