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Sure, he’d had trouble not thinking about her in the last six weeks. Who wouldn’t have? She was just damn gorgeous. She had long blond hair, shot through with lighter streaks of pure sunshine, falling to the middle of her back. She had the softest, smoothest, most flawless skin he’d ever seen—or touched. Her eyes were the dark silver-blue of his first car and her lips were the reddest, fullest, sweetest he’d ever kissed. And her body was just round enough, just full enough in the right spots, just lean enough in the rest. And it was all atop surprisingly long legs for someone who didn’t stand more than five feet four inches tall.
So yeah, he’d had trouble not thinking about her and even dreaming about her a time or two.
But he hadn’t inquired about a Home-Max employee named Marti because he’d been asking himself where it would go even if he did find out her full name or how to reach her. She’d told him she worked and lived in Missoula. He worked and lived in Northbridge—Missoula was on the other side of the state. And a one-night hook-up at a hardware convention was hardly enough to work from. For all he knew, an almost anonymous, one-night fling was all she’d wanted. Certainly the fact that she’d left the next morning without waking him to say goodbye or so much as scribbling him a note seemed to indicate that.
But damn, what a night it had been!
The Hardware Expo had been a chance for him to get away for a weekend and keep himself updated on the latest products and all things construction related that might make his job as a contractor easier. But that was the extent of what he’d been looking for. It wasn’t as if he’d been cruising for women.
Still, he’d noticed Marti more than once—how could he not have when she was such a knockout? They’d exchanged a little work talk in passing at the Home-Max displays. They’d spoken slightly more when he’d gone to the hospitality suite, and yes, his interest had been piqued by something other than the latest cupboards and countertops. But she’d been busy, he’d been interested in a lot of things at the convention and nothing had come of any of it.
Then, late on the last night of the Expo, they’d both happened to be in the nearly deserted coffee shop in the hotel where the convention had been held.
He’d nodded at her.
She’d nodded back.
He’d said hello.
She’d said hello back.
And there they’d been—Marti alone at one table, Noah alone at another table, only waitstaff and a single group of other customers in the entire rest of the place.
So Noah had invited Marti to eat with him.
And she’d accepted.
More small talk about hardware had accompanied two club sandwiches and despite the fact that the conversation was work related, there had been a few flirtatious undertones from them both. And when the check had come Noah hadn’t been eager to see her go.
So he’d asked her if she might like to have a nightcap with him at the hotel bar.
She’d hesitated long enough for him to have figured she was trying to find a way to let him down easy. But just when he’d been sure he was about to get the rebuff, she’d said a nightcap sounded good.
The bar had had live—and loud—music that had prohibited talking. So they had ended up dancing. And drinking. A lot. Enough so that when the bar had closed neither of them had been feeling any pain and not actually knowing each other just hadn’t seemed to matter. He’d felt comfortable with her. He’d sure as hell liked looking at her. The evening had become one of the best he’d ever had, and a playful kiss in the elevator had somehow led her to walk him to his door when they reached his floor.
A good-night kiss there had turned into a whole lot of good-night kisses. Good-night kisses that had moved from the hallway to the inside of his room, then to the bed.
Where a lot more than kissing had gone on…
Noah fed Dilly another carrot. “To tell you the truth,” he confessed to the donkey as if the animal had been privy to his thoughts. “I wish I remembered it better than I do. The details of things, you know? But I was really drunk…”
They both were.
So drunk that when things between them had gone pretty far and he’d told her he didn’t have any condoms, they’d stupidly decided to risk it…
Noah had forgotten that detail completely.
Now that it occurred to him—struck him, actually—everything seemed to stop cold.
He hadn’t used protection…
And now here she was, six weeks later, pregnant…
“Oh my God!” he said, loudly enough for Dilly’s ears to twitch.
No protection and now Marti was pregnant—it went through his mind again, sinking in enough for his mouth to go dry, for him to break into a sweat.
Her brother had said it was by artificial insemination, he reminded himself. Until that moment that’s what he’d assumed was true, and maybe it was.
But as much as he wanted to believe it, it didn’t seem likely. Had she spent the night with him, had unprotected sex that hadn’t gotten her pregnant and then decided to try artificial insemination? Somehow that was hard to buy.
But what if she’d already been pregnant at the Expo? What if knowing she was already pregnant had contributed to her willingness to forego the condom?
Okay, that did seem possible.
Possible enough to give him a little hope and let him at least breathe again.
“It might not be mine,” he said out loud even though Dilly was keeping her distance.
But it might be—he couldn’t help coming back to that. Especially when he factored in that Marti had been every bit as drunk—maybe more drunk—than he’d been. And if she’d been pregnant before that night, she probably wouldn’t have touched alcohol…
“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 out of some kind of grief mania and maybe not thinking straight or handling anything well?”
“I know how it looks,” Marti said calmly. “It looks like I’ve gone a little nuts. But I haven’t. In spite of the dizziness and the rest of the pregnancy annoyances, I feel good about this baby. I feel better than I’ve felt since Jack died and I can’t believe that’s anything but positive, so that’s how I’m going to look at it. If you have qualms—”
“Keep them to yourself,” Wyatt advised.
“I was going to say get over them, but that’s good, too,” Marti said. “And as for staying in Northbridge a while to be with Gram, and checking out the site Wyatt found for the new store here, I’m as capable of doing all of that now as I was before I was pregnant. End of discussion!”
Neither of her brothers looked convinced. They both just sat there with worried expressions on their faces.
“I appreciate that you guys care. I really do. But I haven’t gone off the deep end. It was just meant to be that I have a baby at this point—with Jack or without him,” she said, pushing on to get through this. “Yes, it’s sad that it isn’t Jack’s baby or that he isn’t here to have it with me and make up the family we thought we’d have…” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with this new path. It’s just a new path.”
And with that she couldn’t possibly have said another word on the subject without breaking down. So she stood and said she was tired and was going to bed.
She’d made it to the bottom of the stairs when she heard Ry say to Wyatt, “I told you, ever since the Expo she’s been different.”
Marti pretended she hadn’t heard and went up the creaky old stairs, maintaining her air of confidence until she was behind the closed door of her current bedroom.
The first floor was beginning to show signs of im provement and after the wedding Marti intended to move into the downstairs den. But until then she was staying upstairs in what had been her grandmother’s room as a girl, and almost nothing had been done to that. While the room was clean, it showed its age in the canopy bed that was missing its canopy due to decay, an ancient, scarred bureau and matching dressing table and a large cheval mirror that was cracked in one corner.
Marti went to the bed and collapsed in a heap, letting a long sigh deflate that phony facade she’d been keeping up for the last few days since she’d invented the artificial insemination story for her brothers. The facade she’d had to kick up a notch since that afternoon when yet another curveball had been tossed at her in the form of Noah Perry.
“Am I the only one you can knock around?” she muttered to whatever unseen forces seemed to be at work in her life for the last nine-and-a-half months.
Regardless of how she was presenting everything to her brothers, underneath it all she was a wreck.
She’d hoped never to go through anything more stressful than the death of her fiancé. But the last few weeks had rivaled it.
Pregnant. She’d done one dumb thing in her life and had she been allowed to just get away with it? No. She’d gotten pregnant!
It wasn’t as if she’d planned to go to Denver that last weekend in March and sleep with a stranger. It wasn’t as if it had even crossed her mind. She’d volunteered to oversee the Hardware Expo just to escape for a few days. To escape the constant reminders of Jack everywhere she looked, everywhere she went, every which way she turned. To escape all the well-intentioned sympathy and pity of friends and family. To escape the awkward position of being a sort-of-but-not-really widow.
She’d just wanted a few days without anyone tiptoeing around her or being overly solicitous of her. A few days of not needing to assure everyone she spoke to that she was okay. A few days to interact with people who didn’t know her or Jack or what had happened. People who were just going about their lives the way they always had.
Which was exactly what she’d found and for the whole three days of the Expo she’d felt as if at least half of the weight on her shoulders had been lifted. It had actually been easier to endure the bouts of grief without all the coddling and fussing.
Bouts of grief—she realized as she thought that that’s what the grieving was becoming. That it wasn’t the constant, ever-present entity that it had been at the beginning. That now she was doing what Wyatt had said she would—that the times when she felt better and more able to cope, more as if she really was going to get through it, were increasing. That the times when she was blinded by it were becoming fewer and further between.
And the Expo had helped that along.
And so had Noah Perry…
She’d encountered him on several occasions over those three days. Not that she’d known his name. Until the night in the coffee shop he was just another face among the gazillion faces that had passed through Home-Max’s displays or visited the hospitality suite.
And yet here she was, having his baby.
Overwhelmed by that all over again, she lay on her side on the bed with her feet still on the floor.
The image of Noah’s face had stuck with her at least, she thought in a feeble attempt to somehow make this seem less awful than it did. He was memorably handsome, though. Which was why she’d noticed him even among the crowd at the Expo and amid a sea of other faces in the suite when he’d passed through.
He had rugged good looks—a sharply defined bone structure that gave him a square brow, high cheekbones, a razor-sharp nose and a jawline that was strong and prominent.
But it was his hair and eyes that had really stuck with her. There was nothing common or ordinary about them.
He had great hair. Dark and thick and wavy. And although he wore it a little longer than she’d liked Jack to wear his, it suited this guy. Full and carelessly combed away from that chiseled face, it touched his collar in the back and gave him an untamed, bad-boy air.
