The Bachelor's Northbridge Bride

Once inside they chose a table in the center of the small establishment and within moments, Ry had discovered clams on the long list of available toppings.

“I suppose they’ll come out of a can, and fresh are a whole other experience, but let’s have them anyway,” he decreed. “Or shall I just get them on half so you can have something else?”

“I think anything that has you in this much rapture had better be tried,” Kate said indulgently.

“Rapture?” he repeated with a crooked smile. “You think this is rapture? This is nothing but a little yen for clams.”

Kate wasn’t about to explore what he considered rapture to be, so instead—when their pizza was ordered and their drinks were served—she said, “If you do believe there was a baby between your grandmother and Hector, and you want to find it, what’s your plan?”

He obviously had one because he didn’t need to think about it before he said, “I know adoption records—especially from that far back—are sealed, but I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll use the computer to access what I can of newspaper articles and birth announcements at the time. See if anything seems like a clue to who could have acquired a baby that didn’t seem to be their birth child. I could also comb over old records and compare births to census reports from around here—maybe that will tell me whose family grew even though there’s no record of the mother having given birth.”

“I don’t mean to be a naysayer, but that sounds like trying to find a needle in a haystack. And the fact that it was over fifty years ago won’t help anything.”

“You know what would help things, though?”

“Hmm?” Kate asked as she sipped her iced tea.

“If I knew the city clerk—that is who oversees and has access to anything that’s a matter of public record, like census reports and births—isn’t it?”

“Did you have this up your sleeve all along?” she accused.

“I found out you were the city clerk when I was shirtless—just a couple of hours ago. So no sleeves have been involved in this,” he deadpanned.

“You didn’t know I was the city clerk before that?” Kate persisted.

“Sorry to disappoint you when I’m sure you’d be happier if you could believe I was calculating and conniving, but this really was coincidental.”

“Why would I be happier if I could believe you were calculating and conniving?”

He shrugged. “It’s just the sense I get from you—that you want not to like me.”

Great, he was intuitive, too.

But why did the idea that she was trying not to like him seem to strike him as amusing?

“You’re smiling,” she observed. “You have the sense that I want not to like you and you find that funny?”

“And challenging—which is dangerous for me because I can never resist a challenge.”

That comment went unexplored when their pizza arrived just then and Ry was intent on her tasting it and telling him what she thought.

“I love it!” she said without disguising her own shock at finding it true. Since she wasn’t a big fan of seafood, she’d expected to dislike clams on pizza.

Ry grinned but looked as stunned as she was by her declaration. “Really?”

“The tomato and the clams together have this sort of buttery richness—honestly, I love it.”

“If you think this is good, someday you’ll have to have linguine and clam sauce made with fresh clams—that’s something.”

After a few more bites, rather than returning to the subject of her not wanting to like him, he said, “So, how about it? Can I look through your records?”

He made that sound seductive, which caused Kate to roll her eyes as if he were beyond redemption, and turn a bit preachy. “They aren’t my records. They’re city records. And since they’re public, they’re available to anyone who wants to look through them.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll be at that office tomorrow afternoon. The records department is in the courthouse building on the corner of Main Street and South—”

“I know where it is. But how late are you open? I’m swamped with Home-Max stuff tomorrow so it’s going to be tough for me to get away, but I want to jump on this.”

“Government offices close at five.”

He laughed. “Geez, loosen up, will you? You sound like a recorded phone message.”

Had she stiffened at the prospect of seeing him again tomorrow?

Probably. It was just that he made it so easy to be with him and she knew that was a pitfall.

She put some effort into outwardly relaxing, though, and announced that she was breaking her one-slice-of-pizza rule and having half of a second slice.

“Go for it!” he encouraged, taking a full second slice of his own.

Then, as if he were slightly baffled, he said, “So, city clerk, I can see that job for you. But how did you decide to become a masseuse?”

“A therapeutic massage therapist,” she corrected because once more he’d made masseuse sound a little off-color. “I wanted to do something in health care but I didn’t want to be a doctor or a nurse—I wanted something that wouldn’t take too much dedication so that when I have a family, my family can genuinely come first. Being a physical therapist or a chiropractor seemed to offer more flexibility, but Northbridge already has one of each of those, and the town isn’t big enough to support more than that. But there was no massage therapist.”

“You wanted a career in health care but you actually chose what line based on what Northbridge needed, not on what you wanted? As if Northbridge is the only place you could get a job?”

“It’s the only place I intend to live, so, yes,” she said matter-of-factly.

“There’s a great big world out there, you know?”

“But I want to live here.”

“And the whole flexible-hours issue so you could devote yourself to a family you don’t even have yet? You let a lot of outside things dictate your choice.”

“I just thought it through and made my decision based on what I want for myself now and in the future. You find that odd?”

He shrugged. “That just isn’t the way I do things. I like to make choices based on the moment, on going with the flow of things as they happen, on what feels right.”

“Is this the first time it’s occurred to you that we’re different?”

He laughed, pushing his plate away after his third slice of pizza and lounging slightly in his chair while Kate continued to sit very straight in hers.

“Believe me, I know we’re very different,” he said then, his tone wry.

“You say that as if I have a tail or green scales for skin,” she pointed out.

“No green scales—your skin is like cream. And your tail is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. But damn, you’re serious. What if things don’t work out the way you think they will? What if you don’t ever get married and have a family? What if a tornado strikes and there’s no more Northbridge? Will you be able to be happy doing massages anyway or will you regret that you didn’t do something you actually wanted to do?”