Abby, Get Your Groom!

“Best haircut I’ve ever had,” he said without equivocation. “I washed it in the shower, ran a towel over it when I got out and barely had to touch it from there.”

She fought the mental picture of him in the shower—and out of it. Naked. Big and strong and tight. Hard muscles glistening wet. Reaching those impressive arms up to rake a towel over that dark, thick hair and making those massive shoulders stretch while the sinews of his back flexed all the way down to those great glutes she’d caught a peek of when he’d left her station today...

Whew! That was not something she should be thinking about, either! And she wasn’t quite sure where all those details had come from.

She chased the image out of her mind, forced herself to sound cool, detached and objective—which was not how she was feeling—and said, “It isn’t too short...your hair?” she added, reminding herself that that was all she was supposed to be considering.

“Yeah, shorter than I wanted it but you were right to do it. It looks better than it ever has.”

She didn’t know about ever but she did know he looked fantastic there in the late-day, early-autumn sunshine. She restrained herself to say nothing more than an aloof, “Good, I’m glad you like it.”

“My sister is thrilled that you can fit her and her bridesmaids in for the test run Wednesday,” he said then. “And that if that goes well, that you’re free to do the wedding the Saturday after that. Her hopes are high and I told her I didn’t think you’d disappoint.”

“We’ll do our best,” Abby assured, effectively ending the catching-up part of things.

Which, she thought, left them with the reason he’d wanted this meeting. So she waited for him to get to it.

He must have realized it was time for that because he reached into one of his front pockets and produced a key that he held out to her.

She didn’t take it. Instead she narrowed her eyes at him and said, “If that’s the key to your place and this is all some kind of come-on—”

“It isn’t,” he said quickly, setting the key on the picnic table closer to her than to him.

But rather than explaining what the key was for, he said, “Is there anything you know about where you came from? Your family or history or anything?”

“I know the same things you said this afternoon—I was left sleeping on a chair in the hospital waiting room with a blanket and a note saying my name was Abby. Someone along the line added Crane as my last name because there were pictures of cranes on the blanket that I guess I wouldn’t let go of.”

“I’d wondered where that came from.”

“I know that local newspapers did articles and news stations did broadcast stories asking anyone who might be able to identify me to come forward,” she went on, “and no one did. I know that there wasn’t any information other than my first name so I’ve never had a real birth date. The pediatrician who checked me out at the hospital decided I was barely two so they picked a day the month before I was found and that’s what I use when I have to give my date of birth. And that’s it. That’s all I know.”

“I hadn’t even thought about a birth date,” Dylan muttered more to himself than to her.

“Apparently neither did whoever left me.”

“And you don’t remember anything?” he asked.

“I was, as far as anyone could tell, barelytwo years old. Do you remember anything from when you were two?” Abby countered.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“When I think about it, sometimes I get a vague sort-of sense of being somewhere with too many bright lights and being scared. But it’s really just like a kind of faint dream. I’ve always figured that might be from waking up in the hospital with no one around that I recognized, but I’m not even sure if it’s really a memory or if it’s just how I imagine it was.”

Dylan’s handsome face had sobered considerably as she’d talked and his well-shaped eyebrows were drawn together in a troubled expression before he said, “It was your father who left you at the hospital.”

“And you know this how? Because he was connected in some way to your father?”

“Yes, my family did play a part in you being abandoned...”

He sounded loath to admit that.

Then he said, “Your father is—was—a man named Gus Glassman. Ring any bells?”

“None,” she answered honestly. Why had he corrected himself to say her father was Gus Glassman instead of is? Had he changed his name, or was he...no, she shouldn’t get ahead of herself. She needed to pay attention to what Dylan was saying.

“Well, that key came from him.” Dylan nodded at it. “Gus gave it to a prison chaplain just before he died—”

“Gus Glassman—my father—is dead?”

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry,” Dylan said with more sympathy, pausing a moment as if out of respect. Or maybe to let it sink in—which was what Abby was trying to let it do.

But it wasn’t easy. These were just words to her. There were no instant emotions the way she’d thought there would be.

“According to the chaplain,” Dylan went on, “he was the first person Gus ever told about abandoning you. He asked the chaplain to find you, to find the lockbox that this key opens and to give the contents to you.”

“So where’s the chaplain?” Abby asked.

“He came looking for Camdens because there’s a connection. And talking to the Camdens means going to GiGi, first and foremost... GiGi is what we call my grandmother. She’s the head of the family.”

“A prison chaplain just showed up on the doorstep of the foremost Camden with this story and a key to a lockbox? Why? What does your family have to do with it?”

“We actually just found that out ourselves. Recently, we learned that twenty-eight years back your father worked for Camden Superstores. He was on the payroll as store security, but he did more than that...” Dylan said quietly, as if it was something else he didn’t want to admit.

“What more did he do?” Abby asked, feeling removed from what he was telling her, still just trying to absorb it.

“It looks as if, when there was something brewing somewhere that could turn into a headache for some part of the business, my great-grandfather—H.J. Camden—had a few chosen men he sent in to...well, to do whatever it took to contain things before they got out of hand.”

Dylan didn’t seem proud of that because he was again talking quietly. “I guess you could say they were his...enforcers.” That word came out more under his breath than out loud. “We have a lot of production factories. A supervisor in one of those factories was trying to unionize.”

“And you didn’t want it,” Abby guessed.

“I was five, going on six—what I wanted was probably cookies and candy and to play outside. But no, H.J.—along with my grandfather and my dad and my uncle, who all ran the Superstores together—didn’t want unions in the factories.” Dylan’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline in reluctance to say what he was going to say. “They wanted the labor leaders discouraged—”

“And Gus Glassman—my father—was the discourager?”

“Yeah. But that discouragement got pretty heated. It turned into an all-out fight between Gus and the supervisor, and in the course of that fight the supervisor fell back, hit his head and died.”

“So my father was a thug? He was your family’s bully or henchman or something, and he killed someone?” The fantasy of learning about her family had never included that and Abby was beginning to feel slightly knocked for a loop by the reality.

“I don’t know that your father was a thug or a bully or a henchman,” he said as if those terms were too harsh. “But he was involved in a bad situation, following orders that he probably shouldn’t have been given. We—my grandmother, my siblings, my cousins and I—read about it in my great-grandfather’s journal. We checked to see if the supervisor had left family or someone we should compensate—he hadn’t. But when it came to Gus Glassman—”

“He was nothing but the guy who did your family’s dirty work?”

It wasn’t as if Abby felt any kind of affection for the man Dylan Camden kept calling her father, but she had too much experience being in positions where she’d been looked at as a nothing herself and he’d touched a nerve.

“No. What I was going to say was that when it came to Gus, we could contact him directly. So that was what we did—GiGi wrote to him, asking if there was anything we could do for him and if he’d left anyone behind who he might like us to reach out to.”

“And he didn’t say me,” Abby said quietly.