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Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow
Holly Jacobs
WHEN FATE STEPS IN…Joe Delacamp was speechless. Louisa Clancy was the last person he'd expected to see when he walked into the sweet-smelling Perry Square bake shop. She was just as beautiful as he'd remembered, but it wasn't until the E.R. doc caught a glimpse of her green-eyed little boy that he realized that Louisa's whereabouts weren't the only thing she'd been keeping secret for the last eight years. Now he needed to figure out a way to win the trust of the little boy he never knew he had–along with the heart of the woman he'd never stopped loving….
“He called me his dad,” Joe whispered as Aaron ran for the phone, eager to brag about his coolness.
Louisa turned to him and said, “Yes, he did.”
Joe paused a moment, lost in the warm glow of Aaron referring to him as dad, my dad, then said, “Thank you.”
Before he knew what he was doing, he leaned down and kissed her. It started soft and tentative, just a quick thank-you. But it slowly built into something bigger and more intense.
Her arms snaked around his neck, holding him tight, as if she didn’t want to let go. The feel of her pressing against him, welcoming his touch, shook him.
“Hey,” Aaron said.
They broke apart with the speed of guilty teenagers caught in the act. Louisa was blushing as she backed up, putting distance between them.
“Hey,” Joe said, trying to keep it light. “It’s okay if he catches us kissing. We’re his parents.”
Dear Reader,
The summer after my thirteenth birthday, I read my older sister’s dog-eared copy of Wolf and the Dove by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and I was hooked. Thousands of romance novels later—I won’t say how many years—I’ll gladly confess that I’m a romance freak! That’s why I am so delighted to become the associate senior editor for the Silhouette Romance line. My goal, as the new manager of Silhouette’s longest-running line, is to bring you brand-new, heartwarming love stories every month. As you read each one, I hope you’ll share the magic and experience love as it was meant to be.
For instance, if you love reading about rugged cowboys and the feisty heroines who melt their hearts, be sure not to miss Judy Christenberry’s Beauty & the Beastly Rancher (#1678), the latest title in her FROM THE CIRCLE K series. And share a laugh with the always-entertaining Terry Essig in Distracting Dad (#1679).
In the next THE TEXAS BROTHERHOOD title by Patricia Thayer, Jared’s Texas Homecoming (#1680), a drifter’s life changes for good when he offers to marry his nephew’s mother. And a secretary’s dream comes true when her boss, who has amnesia, thinks they’re married, in Judith McWilliams’s Did You Say…Wife? (#1681).
Enjoy!
Mavis C. Allen
Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Romance
Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow
Holly Jacobs
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Sharon Lorei, a woman who, even if she’d chosen a different profession, would always have been a true teacher! I was lucky to have her for a teacher at Seneca High School…luckier still to call her a friend.
Books by Holly Jacobs
Silhouette Romance
Do You Hear What I Hear? #1557
A Day Late and a Bride Short #1653
Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow #1683
HOLLY JACOBS
can’t remember a time when she didn’t read…and read a lot. Writing her own stories just seemed a natural outgrowth of that love. Reading, writing, chauffeuring kids to and from activities makes for a busy life. But it’s one she wouldn’t trade for any other.
Holly lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, with her husband, four children and a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Old English mastiff. In her “spare” time, Holly loves hearing from her fans. You can write to her at P.O. Box 11102, Erie, PA 16514-1102 or visit her Web site at www.HollyBooks.com (http://www.HollyBooks.com).
Contents
Chapter One (#ua1c24cd4-04a6-514d-9fdc-a3d0fddd7244)
Chapter Two (#u7f7c53a6-7958-54c2-9d3f-7e8d3373c758)
Chapter Three (#ucff7deb1-b524-5afa-a485-3a1c3363db44)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
“Aaron Joseph, don’t you dare eat that,” Louisa Clancy called, but her grin took any menace from the words. “What have I told you about sneaking chocolates? You’re eating my inventory.”
“Ah, Mom,” the boy said with all the exasperation of a seven-year-old caught in the act of pilfering treats.
“I mean it,” Lou continued, resisting the urge to shake a finger in her son’s face. “I’m closing the store in fifteen minutes, and then we’re going home and eating dinner. You and I both know that if you’ve been munching chocolate, you’re not going to eat a bite.”
“But it was just a taste,” Aaron said, defending his act of petty larceny. “I mean, this is your new chocolate. What if it’s horrible? Then all your customers would go somewhere else. We’d be broke and then you couldn’t buy me a new video game.”
“Oh, so you’re just snitching chocolate to be helpful?” she asked.
Aaron nodded his head so hard, Lou wondered how it stayed mounted on his shoulders.
She mussed his hair.
When had he gotten so big? Every time she turned around he seemed to have grown another inch. “Well, thanks for thinking of my business. Your thoughtfulness is noted, even though I suspect you’re more worried about buying video games than living on the street.”
Sighing at the injustice of being seven—or maybe sighing because of his failed robbery attempt—Aaron thumped his way out of the showroom and into the back room.
Louisa looked around her store, making sure everything was ready to close for the day.
Her store. The words sounded as sweet as the chocolate she sold. She’d owned it for less than a year, but already The Chocolate Bar had more than lived up to its name and its Perry Square location felt like home.
The bell over the front door chimed merrily as Lou slid an envelope back behind a stack of birthday cards.
She glanced at her watch. Five more minutes until she shut the doors. This was her last customer of the day.
She turned, plastered her business smile in place and said, “Hi. Welcome to The Chocolate Bar.”
She looked up. Her smile slowly faded as she stared into piercing green eyes she hadn’t seen in almost eight years.
“Joe,” she whispered as she stared at the one man she never wanted to see again. Despite that fact, her heart sped up of its own accord.
“Hello, Lou. Fancy meeting you here.”
Joseph Delacamp could have kicked himself.
Fancy meeting you here?
What kind of lame greeting was that?
He stared at Louisa Clancy. She hadn’t changed in the past eight years. At least not much.
She still wore her auburn hair long. It was in a messy ponytail today, making her look more like eighteen than the twenty-seven he knew she was. Blue eyes darted everywhere but at him.
This was more awkward than he’d ever imagined it would be.
Not that he’d imagined walking into a candy store and running into Louisa. For years he’d imagined running into her at home in Lyonsville, Georgia, but he never had. Finally he’d simply decided she wasn’t coming back. But that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about her.
And now here she was.
“So, how are you?” What he wanted to ask was, How could you? But he didn’t.
“Fine. Fine. And yourself?”
“Fine.”
So polite. After all they’d shared, they were reduced to pleasant, little, meaningless social nothings.
Silence hung in the room, thick and painful.
Louisa finally broke it by asking, “So what brings you to Erie?”
“I took a job in the E.R. at the hospital. It was a great offer. Plus, you can walk outside and see the bay.”
He wanted to ask if she remembered all the times they’d talked about Lake Erie, about living on its shores, about buying a sailboat and going out every evening to watch the sunset.
He wanted to ask, but he didn’t. Too much time had passed, and childhood dreams were long since put away.
“So, you did it, then. You’re a doctor,” she said. “I’m not surprised. I always knew you could, I just wasn’t sure if your parents would let you. And you’re working in an emergency room. I know your dad wanted something more in keeping with the family image. A surgeon or some other impressive specialty.”
“I didn’t let my father live my life back in school, and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.” He left the underlying accusation that it was about the only thing that hadn’t changed.
Louisa might look like the girl he’d known so long ago, but she wasn’t who he’d thought she was back then, and he was sure she was even less like his imagined first love now.
“And you?” he asked. “Did you study marketing or advertising like you planned?”
“No. Things—” She stopped short.
Joe wondered what she’d been about to say.
“Well,” she continued, “my plans changed. I came to work in Erie. I opened The Chocolate Bar last year. It’s all mine. At least with the bank’s help it is.”
“When I came here, I never expected to find you here. After—” He forced himself to cut off any recriminations. “Well, it just never occurred to me you’d have come here. Actually, this was the last place I thought I’d find you.”
“You were wrong,” she said with a small shrug of her shoulders.
“What made you look for a job in Erie?”
Erie, Pennsylvania.
When they were in high school back in Lyonsville, they’d sworn they wanted to leave town. They wanted to move someplace where no one knew who the Clancys or the Delacamps were. They wanted to go someplace where they could be anonymous, where no one knew their family histories three or more generations back.
They wanted a chance to be just Joe and Louisa.
Joe remember that day when, as a joke, they’d thrown a dart at a map. It had landed on Lake Erie, just beyond the Erie shoreline.
We’ll move to Erie when I graduate, Louisa had said, laughing.
All these years later, he could still hear the sound of her laughter.
Despite the hardships in her life—her father had been the town drunk before he died and had left Louisa and her mother impoverished—she’d always been laughing. A quiet, joy-filled sound that had made his heart constrict even as it had made her blue eyes light up.
There was no laughter in those eyes today. Just wariness as she answered, “It’s just that I always thought I’d live here. I’d spent such a long time dreaming about a Great Lake, about a place where I could just be me, not ‘Clancy’s kid’—you know how they used to say it with that mixture of scorn and pity in their voices. I just wanted to leave that behind.”
When she’d left that behind, she’d left him behind, as well. Joe didn’t understand it then, and he didn’t now, but he was too proud to ask her why.
Why she’d left him when he would have followed her anywhere.
“I drove here on a whim. I drove to the foot of the dock. It wasn’t as touristy then as it is now. But I stood there, and could look at the peninsula across the bay, and I knew this was home, just like I’d always dreamed it would be.”
“That’s how I felt, too,” he said. “I’d been working at the hospital in Lyonsville, but wanted to do something different. A friend told me he knew someone who was on staff at a hospital that needed an E.R. doctor. When I checked it out and found it was in Erie, well, I knew it was the job for me, so here I am.”
“Welcome to Erie.” She glanced at a door toward the back of the shop, then at her watch. “But as much as I’ve enjoyed catching up, it’s time for me to close.”
“I came in to buy something for the nurses and aides in the E.R. Everyone’s been so great helping me settle in, and I wanted to thank them.”
“Fine, but we need to make it quick. What did you have in mind?”
She was looking at the back of the room again.
