For The Twins' Sake. Melissa Senate

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СКАЧАТЬ had been trapped there for a good bunch of those low years. Daisy, two years older, watched over him the best she could until she’d been driven away by their dad’s self-destruction when she was eighteen. Noah had also left the moment he’d become a legal adult, all his pleading to his father to get his act together going in one ear...

      Ten years later, the Dawson Family Guest Ranch had been a ghost ranch, rarely mentioned anymore except for someone in town to shake their head over its demise. But with the money Noah and his siblings had invested, he and a hardworking crew had gotten the place in shape—albeit on a smaller scale than the original—in just five months so they could open Memorial Day weekend. The day after tomorrow, Friday, was the grand reopening. His brothers hadn’t responded to his invitation to stop by for the big day, and Noah wouldn’t be surprised when none showed up.

      “Let the place go,” the Dawson siblings had all said to Noah one way or another at their father’s funeral.

      Except Noah hadn’t been able to—and then his siblings had rallied around him, making a plan to invest in rebuilding because doing so meant something to him and would mean everything to their grandparents. Noah wouldn’t ever let the ranch go. For many reasons. So many reasons he hadn’t even told Annabel all of them yet. And he’d told her just about everything. His confidante was a seven-week-old, ten-pound, nine-ounce baby with chubby cheeks. There was a first for everything.

      He heard a car coming up the drive and turned around. A silver Range Rover SUV was barreling up the dirt road toward the foreman’s cabin. Did he know anyone who drove a Range Rover? The eldest Dawson sibling, Ford, maybe. But Ford had also said hell would freeze before he’d step foot on the ranch again.

      Whoever it was sure was in a hell of a hurry to get to the cabin.

      One hand protectively on the back of Annabel’s head in the Snugli, he watched the SUV suddenly come to a dead stop halfway up the drive. The glare from the sun made it impossible to see who was behind the wheel. Why stop there?

      The Range Rover suddenly started up again and inched forward, this time at two miles an hour.

      When the SUV finally got within a few feet, he could see inside.

      Holy hell.

      Sara.

      How long had it been? Almost two years. After she’d told him she was marrying Willem Perry—he could barely even think the name in his head without wanting to vomit or hit something—he’d then heard they’d moved out to Wellington, an affluent town an hour away. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since. He’d been close with Sara’s only living relative, her father, but Preston Mayhew had gotten very sick a few months before she’d married Willem. He’d also heard Sara had had her dad transferred from the county hospital to the state-of-the-art one in Wellington. Noah had once called about visiting hours and was told that all visitors had to be preapproved by Willem Perry. So much for that. It was better that there was no one to talk to him about Sara or what she was up to or how great her life was with that bastard Willem; Noah wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

      The car door opened and she stepped out, and his heart lurched. That wasn’t a surprise. The sight of Sara Mayhew had always had that effect. Not just because she was so pretty with her silky light brown hair and round, pale brown eyes; his attraction to her had always been about who she was, not how good she looked. Though she did look good.

      She must have heard about the Dawson Family Guest Ranch reopening this weekend and decided to check the place out for herself. After all, she’d grown up here too.

      “I can’t tell you how great it is to see you, Sara,” he said, surprising even himself with his honesty. But it was bursting out of him. He’d missed her so much the past couple of years that he’d done regretful things to forget her, nothing working.

      She shut her car door and walked toward him, her gaze on the Snugli, then moving up to his face. “You found that baby on your porch seven weeks ago? The early-morning hours of April 9?” Her voice sounded strange. Desperate and shaky.

      He stared at her, his grip a bit tighter on the baby carrier. “How did you know that?”

      “Because Willem—my late husband—is the one who put her there. She’s mine, Noah. My daughter.”

      What? Noah took a step toward Sara, then a step back. “There was a note with her. It said she’s mine.”

      Sara shook her head. “She’s not yours. Willem told me she died during the home birth. But he just didn’t want her because she was a girl and frail-looking when her healthy, robust twin brother—the male heir—had been born two minutes earlier.”

       No. That’s insanity. On what planet does that sound believable? Even the worst of the worst like Willem Perry wouldn’t do something like that. To his own flesh and blood? His newborn daughter?

      She stepped forward, her gaze on the baby’s head before looking up at him. “He left a letter for me via his lawyer detailing how he drove her here right before the rain started to come down in the middle of the night. I had no idea. I thought she didn’t survive the birth.” A sob escaped her, and she put her hand over her mouth.

      Oh God. Unthinkable.

      So unthinkable that it wasn’t quite sinking in. All he could do in the moment was look at Annabel, whom he’d taken care of for the past almost two months, whom he loved. She was his daughter. The note had said so. She was his child.

      “That’s my baby girl, Noah,” she said, taking another step, then stopping. Maybe because of the expression on his face, which had to be something like horror.

      For a second he could only stare at Sara, trying to process the craziness that had just come out of her mouth.

      He thought about the first moments after bringing Annabel inside the night he’d found her. There had been something familiar about the little face, something in the expression, the eyes, that he couldn’t pin down. He’d figured the baby’s mother was a woman he’d been with for one night...

      He and Sara had made love hundreds of times during their brief time as a couple, but the last time was right before she’d dumped him two years ago. He certainly wasn’t the father of her daughter.

      He glanced down at what he could see of Annabel’s little profile, and yup, there it was, that slight something in the turndown of the eyes, the way the mouth curved upward. It was Sara’s face. No wonder he’d felt so strangely connected to Annabel from the moment he’d brought her inside the cabin—before he’d even read the note falsely declaring the baby was his.

      “I want to hold her so badly,” Sara said. She reached out, and Noah felt the surrender everywhere in his body—the region of his heart most pointedly. This was Sara’s baby. Not his.

      Hell, he might break down crying. But he lifted Annabel out of the carrier. He handed her over with a stabbing awareness that this was it—it was over. His stint at fatherhood. He was proud of what he’d accomplished with the ranch, but he was proudest of what he’d accomplished with his daughter.

      Not his daughter. He’d have to take that phrasing out of his vocabulary, out of his head. She wasn’t his.

      As Sara clutched the baby to her chest, tears streaming down her face, he closed his eyes, not surprised by the weight of sadness crushing his chest.

      He СКАЧАТЬ