A Mother's Wish / Mother To Be: A Mother's Wish. Karen Templeton

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       Chapter Three

      The next morning, Winnie awoke with a yelp when an ice-cold doggy nose torpedoed underneath the comforter to make contact with her warm back. Instantly awake—and cranky—Winnie flipped over to glare at the beast whose toothy grin was a blur in the wriggling excitement that was Annabelle.

       It’s morning? We go play? Find things to herd?

      “Forget it,” Winnie grumbled. Between feeling like she’d hosted a rowdy keg party in her brain all night and an unfamiliar bed, she was lucky if she’d logged in three hours the entire night. Morning, whatever. And it was coollld out there on the other side of the comforter—

      “Oh, hell,” she muttered, remembering that Aidan had invited her to breakfast. That she’d said yes. That loneliness and butter-soft Irish accents were a really, really bad combination. That—

      That somewhere in the distance, a rooster was crowing.

      “Crap, what time is it?” she asked the world at large, grabbing her watch off the nightstand, then sinking back into the mattress, groaning. Lord, show me a sign, she’d prayed the night before, mainly because Elektra was a big believer in the suckers and Winnie was up the creek, whether I should go or stay. Whether her wanting to get to know Robbie was a right idea, or a relapse into the stubbornness that had ruled so many decisions for so many years. Then Aidan had called, not a minute afterward, and she’d thought, Wow. Fast service.

      “I can’t do this,” she now said to the dog, even though she had no earthly idea what this was. Annabelle stopped wriggling long enough to cock her head at her mistress, after which she heaved a great doggy sigh, laid her snout on top of the mattress and commiserated with Winnie with what she probably thought was her best soulful look. Except Annabelle, not being a hound, didn’t do soulful very well. Annabelle was all about perky and playful. Like a cheerleader.

      Sure enough, after, oh, ten seconds of sympathy, the dog moonwalked backward, bowed with her butt in the air and yarped. Her version of Get your fat bee-hind out of bed. Now.

      With a sigh of her own, Winnie dragged said bee-hind out of bed, the comforter wrapped around her shoulders and trailing after her like a poufy coronation cape as she let the dog out, then clumsily put on coffee, because facing the world—and Aidan—without fresh caffeine in her system wasn’t gonna happen.

      Her cell rang. Winnie stared at it, shimmying on the counter like a rattlesnake, a thought that made her shudder mightily. With any luck, it would be Aidan, canceling. Except then she realized, yeah, well, if she wanted to get closer to Robbie, going through Aidan was her only option.

      And according to Elektra, once you accepted a sign, you were pretty much stuck with it.

      “Good,” Aidan said the moment Winnie put her phone to her ear. Now she heard the crowing in stereo. “You’re awake.”

      “Up, yes,” she said, yawning. “Awake, not so much.” Annabelle whined at the back door; Winnie shuffled over to let her in.

      “I thought I said breakfast was at eight-t’irty?”

      And early morning Irish attitude was just what she needed. “It’s eight…” She squinted at her watch. “Ten. So no problem.’

      “Glad to hear it,” Aidan said, and hung up.

      Winnie looked at Annabelle, who’d been pretending not to listen. “Tell me I’m doing the right thing,” she said, but, sadly, dispensing advice was not part of Annabelle’s job description.

      The village of Tierra Rosa, Winnie thought as her truck wound up, then down, the curved main drag like a roller coaster on downers, was oddly charming, in a Tim-Burton-gone-Southwest kind of way—a cross between an old Spanish settlement, a set for a fifties’ Hollywood Western and a trailer park. To add to the confusion, she mused as she spotted the cafe, was the occasional bank or church or police department building that was pure Sixties blah.

      “No, baby,” she said to the dog as she got out, leaving the truck windows at half-mast since the temperature had inched up to maybe fifty or so, “you have to stay here.” After a moment of looking bereft, the dog sighed and sat. Annabelle was nothing if not flexible.

      Then, the breeze zipping right through the persimmon-colored velvet blazer that had seen her through any number of Octobers, Winnie started toward the cafe and was hit by a wave of nervousness so СКАЧАТЬ