Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve: The Paternity Promise / Stolen Kiss From a Prince / The Maid's Daughter. Merline Lovelace

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      She threw another look at the baby, and he read her thoughts.

      “I miss Molly, too,” he admitted with a wry grin. “Let’s go home.”

Eleven

      His mind made up, Blake moved with characteristic speed and decisiveness. While he and Grace threaded through the crowded market to their car, he used his cell phone to run a quick check of flight schedules for Dalton International’s air fleet. The corporate jet was on the wrong side of the Atlantic, so he booked first-class seats on a commercial nonstop flight to Dallas leaving late that afternoon. With the time differential and the short hop to Oklahoma, they would get home at almost the same hour they departed France.

      That left Grace barely an hour to throw her things together and say goodbye to Auguste and the rest of the staff. Blake’s farewells included exorbitant gratuities for each member of the staff and a promise to bring madame back for a longer stay very soon.

      The rush of leaving and her eagerness to get back to Molly carried Grace halfway across the Atlantic. Having Blake beside her in the luxurious first-class cabin staved off fatigue during the remainder of the trip. His low-voiced, less than complimentary commentary on the action flick they watched together had her giggling helplessly and the other passengers craning to see what was on their screens.

      Fatigue didn’t factor in until after the plane change in Dallas. Fatigue, and a serious case of nerves about coming face-to-face with Blake’s mother again. Delilah had let loose with both barrels at her last meeting with Grace. The note from her that Alex delivered in San Antonio had much the same tone. She hadn’t been happy about the hurry-up wedding and warned that she’d have something to say about it when the newlyweds returned from France.

      Grace couldn’t imagine how the redoubtable Dalton matriarch would react to the altered relationship between her son and his bride. Delilah must have known Blake proposed for strictly utilitarian reasons. Mostly utilitarian, anyway. Would she believe his feelings could undergo a major shift in such a short time? Probably not. Grace could hardly believe it herself.

      * * *

      By the time they turned onto the sweeping drive that led to Delilah’s Nichols Hills mansion, dread curled like witches’ fingers in her stomach. Then the front door flew open and she saw at a glance she’d underestimated Delilah. The older woman took one look at them and gave a whoop that boomed like a cannon shot in the brisk September air.

      “I knew it!” she announced gleefully as they mounted the front steps. “No one can resist the fatal combination of Provence and Auguste. Especially two people who were so danged hot for each other.”

      “Don’t you ever get tired of being right?” Blake drawled as he bent to kiss her cheek.

      “Never.” Blue eyes only a shade lighter than her son’s skewered Grace. “And that’s something for you to remember, too, missy. Now get over here and so I can give my newest daughter-in-law a hug.”

      Enfolded in a bone-crunching embrace and a cloud of outrageously expensive perfume, Grace made the instant transition from employee and former nanny to member of the family. She was so grateful to this fierce and occasionally overbearing woman that she found herself battling tears.

      “Thank you for trusting me with Molly and for…and for…everything.”

      “We should be thanking you.” The hug got tighter, Delilah’s voice gruffer. “You brought Molly to us in the first place.”

      Both women were sniffling when they separated. Embarrassed by her uncharacteristic descent into sentimentality, Delilah flapped a hand toward the stairs.

      “I expect you want to see the baby. She’s up in the nursery. I just heard her on the monitor, waking up from her nap.”

      The last time Grace had climbed this magnificent circular staircase was as an employee in Delilah’s home. She couldn’t quite get a grip on her feelings as she ascended them alongside Blake, anxious to embrace the baby now making come-get-me noises from the room on the left at the top of the stairs. Nerves played a major role. Excitement and eagerness bubbled in there, too. But mostly it was sheer incredulity that she now had the right to claim this man and this child as hers.

      When they swept into the nursery Delilah had furnished so swiftly and so lavishly, Molly was standing up in the crib. Her downy blond hair formed a spiky halo and her blue eyes tracked their entrance with a touch of impatience, as if asking what took them so long.

      Grace’s heart melted into a puddle of mush at the sight of her. It disintegrated even more when Molly gave a gurgle of delight and raised her arms.

      “Gace!”

      Half laughing, half sobbing, Grace swept the baby out of the crib.

      * * *

      September rolled out and October came in with a nighttime temperature dip into the forties and fifties. As the weeks flew by, a nasty little corner of Grace’s mind kept insisting this couldn’t last. Sometime, somehow, she would pay for the joy she woke up with every morning. But her busy, busy days and nights spent in Blake’s arms buried that niggling thought under an avalanche of others.

      Their first order of business was finding a house. Rather than move Molly’s nursery to Blake’s bachelor pad during the hectic process of inspecting available properties, they accepted Delilah’s invitation to occupy the guest wing of her mansion. So naturally both Molly and Delilah went with Grace to check out the possibilities when Blake got tied up at work. Julie, too, when she wasn’t flying or distracted by the business of setting up the home she and Alex had recently moved into.

      Grace worried at first that Delilah might try to push her toward something big and splashy, but her mother-in-law was motivated by only one goal. She wanted her granddaughter close enough to spoil at will. So she was thrilled when Grace settled on a recently renovated half-timbered home less than a mile from the Dalton mansion. The two-story house sat well back from the street on a one-acre lot shaded by tall pines. Grace had fallen in love with its oak floors and open, sunny kitchen at first sight, but balked at the five bedrooms until Blake convinced her they could convert one to an entertainment center and one to an exercise room unless and until they needed it for other purposes.

      Once the house was theirs, Grace faced the daunting prospect of filling its empty rooms. She thought about tackling one room at a time, but Delilah graciously offered the services of her decorator to coordinate the overall scheme.

      “Take her up on it,” Julie urged during a weekend brunch at their mother-in-law’s.

      The two brides lolled on the sunlit terrace, keeping a lazy eye on Molly in her net playpen while their husbands checked football scores in the den. Delilah had taken her other guest to the library to show him some faded photographs she’d unearthed from her early days working the oil fields with her husband. Grace found it extremely interesting that Julie’s irascible partner, Dusty Jones, had apparently become a regular visitor to the Nichols Hills mansion.

      “The decorator is good,” her new sister-in-law asserted. “Really good.”

      Grace could hardly disagree. She’d lived in these opulent surroundings for several months as Molly’s nanny. The Lalique chandeliers and magnificent antiques suited Delilah’s flair and flamboyance, but Grace had lived in constant dread of Molly spitting up СКАЧАТЬ