A Baby for the Bachelor. Victoria Pade

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      “Oh my God,” he said again. Marti Grayson wasn’t just a beautiful, hazy memory of a faraway night in a rustic hotel room at a hardware convention, but a flesh-and-blood person with brothers and a grandmother and who-knew-who-else to contend with and save face with by saying she’d gone to a sperm bank rather than admitting she’d had a one-night stand with a stranger and gotten pregnant.

      But if he was the father of her baby, why hadn’t she come looking for him to let him know?

      “Did I tell her I was from Northbridge?” he asked Dilly as if the donkey might know.

      Truthfully he couldn’t remember. And if all he’d said was that he was from a small town in southern Montana and she hadn’t known his last name, she probably wouldn’t have been able to find him. Maybe it was only by some greater design or coincidence that they’d been brought back together after she’d done everything she could to locate him.

      Or maybe the baby was his and she didn’t want him in on it so she hadn’t bothered to even look for him…

      But thinking that just made things worse.

      Was she another woman who wasn’t going to give him a say or any options as a father? Because if she was, that just wasn’t going to fly.

      Sensing the anger that flooded through him then, the donkey backed up a few steps.

      “It’s okay, Dilly. It’s not you,” he comforted the animal, offering the third carrot to make amends.

      The burro came cautiously forward, keeping her big black eyes on Noah and getting only close enough to reach the carrot.

      “It might not be mine,” Noah said once more in an attempt to calm the emotions that had him reeling. “But I’ll have to find out one way or another.”

      Because if the baby was his, he was going to have to do something about it.

      Something that could keep the past from repeating itself—again.

      Chapter Two

      Later that night, after Marti heard Theresa’s bedroom door close, she said to Wyatt, “How is she doing?”

      “Gram?” Wyatt shrugged. “No better. No worse. She had a bad night last night. The nightmares have been happening on a regular basis and usually with that same theme—she says it’s crying for her, it won’t stop crying, she has to get it back.”

      “Which is why we’re thinking it is not the land she wants back,” Ry contributed.

      Since Theresa’s escape to Northbridge, Wyatt had been looking into their grandmother’s past there. What he’d learned so far was that Theresa’s parents had died when she was a young girl, and that Theresa had inherited the house and many acres of prime property in the heart of Northbridge. Because her only other relative—an aunt—had been ill and unable to take her in at the time, Theresa had spent eleven months after the deaths of her parents as the houseguest of local lumberyard owner Hector Tyson and his wife Gloria.

      During those eleven months she’d had virtually no contact with any of her friends, and at the end of them—three months before her eighteenth birthday—she’d finally left Northbridge to live with her aunt in Missoula. Before she left she sold Hector Tyson her land for a quarter of its value. Hector Tyson had subsequently become wealthy dividing the land into lots, selling those lots, then selling all the building materials to erect the houses that now stood on them.

      When Theresa had been discovered three weeks ago in the house where she’d grown up, she’d been demanding that what had been taken from her be returned. Originally Wyatt had believed she’d been talking about the land. But since the nightmares had begun—and since Theresa had dismissed the notion that this had anything to do with the land—her grandchildren had started to wonder what else she might be referring to. If it might even have been a baby she’d had by Hector.

      “Which is why we’re not thinking it’s the land that she wants back, right,” Wyatt repeated what Ry had said.

      “And why it seems like it might be a baby,” Marti said, summing up what they’d all touched on through recent phone calls. “But you still haven’t asked her straight-out if that’s what was taken from her?”

      Wyatt shook his head. “It hasn’t seemed like a good idea. She’s been in one of her really bad funks—she’s weepy, withdrawn, disoriented. Her memory has been worse than usual—she even forgot who Mary Pat was last week. Today—knowing you two were coming—is the first really good day she’s had since that first nightmare.”

      “And you still haven’t talked to this Hector Tyson?” Ry asked.

      “He’s been out of town this whole time. I understand he gets back on Monday, so it looks like it’ll be up to you, Marti. Ry will be on his way to Missoula right after the wedding to take care of business there, and I’ll be on my honeymoon. Do you think you can handle it?”

      Marti knew her afternoon dizzy spell had them thinking she couldn’t but she wasn’t about to accept that. “Of course, I think I can handle it,” she said as if it were ridiculous for him to ask. Then, because she wanted them to know that everything should be business as usual, she returned to the subject of their grandmother. “And Ry, you have a meeting with the lawyers to see if there are any legal options for restitution from the sale of the land, right?”

      “Right,” Ry answered.

      “Then you and I will take it from here while Wyatt lies on the beach,” she concluded.

      Her brothers exchanged a glance that she would have been able to read even if they weren’t triplets and inordinately in tune with each other.

      “Knock it off,” she ordered.

      “Knock what off?” Wyatt asked.

      “This whole can-I-handle-it, is-Marti-all-right thing. Because I am all right. Yes, Jack’s death hit me hard. Yes, maybe it’s a little over the top to decide to have a baby on my own. But seriously, I’m okay.”

      “You didn’t look okay sitting on the ground this afternoon,” Ry said, never one to mince words.

      “Dizziness—no big deal. I also sometimes throw up if I so much as get a whiff of breakfast sausage—it just comes with the territory.” That seemed like something Wyatt would know, since his first wife had been pregnant when a household accident had taken her life and the life of the baby. But she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “I’ve been to the doctor, I’m healthy as a horse, the baby is doing fine and having it is a sure sign that I’m moving forward. That I’m putting Jack’s death behind me.”

      “It took Wyatt two years after Mikayla died to give in to his feelings for Neily,” a clearly concerned Ry put in. “It’s only been nine months—”

      “Nine and a half, actually,” Marti corrected.

      “Okay, nine and a half months since you lost the guy you’d been madly in love with since you were both kids,” Ry persisted. “The love of your life, Marti. The guy we all thought was your other half. Come on, if you were in our shoes, wouldn’t you be worried that you’re acting СКАЧАТЬ