by Helen Lacey
It had been Cole’s idea to legally adopt them and Ash had only needed a microsecond to agree. Since they had been in her care for nearly a year, their case worker had pushed the paperwork through as quickly as possible. And now it was official, and JoJo’s was the perfect place to celebrate. Everyone was here and Nicola had booked the entire restaurant for them so they could enjoy the event with their friends and family.
The last six months had been a whirlwind of the best kind. She’d fallen in love, married and now was mother to four incredible kids.
Ash touched her belly lovingly. She was barely two months along in her pregnancy and had only made the discovery that morning after taking a hurriedly purchased pregnancy test when she realized she was late with her period. With the excitement and anticipation surrounding the adoption, she’d kept the news to herself, waiting for the perfect moment to tell her husband and then the world.
And since the smell of pizza was making her queasy, Ash figured she’d have to tell him soon. Like, right now. Which was opportune because he had just finished making a speech about family and kids and the restaurant had erupted in laughter and congratulations.
“Everything okay?” Cole asked as people started milling around the dessert table and as he came behind her and placed his hands on her hips.
“Perfect,” she said and swayed against him. “I’m so happy.”
He rested his chin on the top of her head. “I know that feeling. The kids look happy, too.”
Ash looked toward the booth seats and smiled. Maisy and Jaye were holding court. Micah and Tahlia were scarfing down slices of the cake baked in their honor. Brooke and Tyler were there with their toddler and Lucy stood beside her husband and newborn son. Kayla and Liam were sitting down, since Kayla was heavily pregnant and due within weeks. Nancy had brought along her new boyfriend, Rex, who worked as a foreman on one of the local ranches. He was a nice man and her mom seemed truly happy for the first time in forever. Uncle Ted was chatting with Nicola, and Cole’s parents and sisters had arrived the day before to share in their celebrations. Several of her work colleagues had dropped by along with some other friends and Ash experienced happiness that was so acute she could barely breathe. It was as though she suddenly had this perfect life. Maisy and Jaye had both enrolled at the local high school. Jaye’s transition from home-schooling to regular school had been an easy decision and her son was flourishing in his classes and had made some great friends. And her son adored Cole and for the first time had someone he could call Dad. Which he did, every chance he got. His eagerness to be Cole’s son warmed her through to her bones and now that Micah and Tahlia’s adoption was finalized, she knew Jaye was itching to be next. He’d made it very clear he wanted to be Jaye Quartermaine.
She turned in his arms. “I love you, Cole.”
“I know,” he said and grinned. “Do you know what else, I feel incredibly blessed. Six months ago I never would have imagined that I would be married with four kids.”
Ash took a breath and rubbed his hand. “Five.”
“Yeah, and I just couldn’t...”
His words trailed off and he stared down into her upturned face. “What?”
She grabbed his hand and moved it down, resting it discreetly against her belly. “Five.” Cole couldn’t breathe. Or swallow. Or move. His beautiful wife was staring up at him, her green eyes shining with pure joy and love. A love that humbled him through to his bones.
“You’re pregnant?” he asked, whisper-soft.
She nodded and smiled. “Yes.”
The idea that he had made a child with her, that a tiny human would come into the world who was a part of them both, filled him in a way he could barely fathom. So much had changed in his life. Merging their families together. Working out a way to remain a part of the racing business from South Dakota. It had been hard at first, but he’d made it work. He managed the race team’s marketing and PR and although he commuted once a month to Phoenix, he always knew Cedar River would call him home. He loved living on the ranch. They had plans to build another two cottages and finish renovating the main house. Ash had accepted the promotion to sergeant and it had all, somehow, come to fit together like a perfect jigsaw puzzle.
And now, this last piece made them complete. A baby. Which would mean sleepless nights and diapers and everything else. And it was all he wanted.
“Yours, mine and ours,” she said and cupped his cheek.
“Just ours,” he said and pressed close. “For always.”
Ash smiled lovingly. “I like the sound of that.”
* * * * *
Don’t miss Nicola and Kieran’s story,
the next installment in Helen Lacey’s miniseries
THE CEDAR RIVER COWBOYS
Coming soon to Harlequin Special Edition!
Keep reading for an excerpt from AWOL BRIDE by Victoria Pade.
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AWOL Bride
by Victoria Pade
Chapter One
“This is not turning into a good time.”
There was no one else in the rented SUV to hear Conor Madison’s observation as he drove through a Montana snowstorm that was getting worse by the minute.
When his plane had landed in Billings on that mid-January Sunday, snow had been falling. As promised, he’d called his sister Kinsey to tell her he’d arrived safely. But when he did, he’d discovered that Kinsey wasn’t in their small hometown of Northbridge, where she and Conor were slated to meet. Instead, she was snowed in inside her Denver home.
And by now, the snow was in his path, piling up fast. Conor could barely see two feet in front of him on this mountain road.
And on top of that, he was worried about his brother and thinking this whole idea might have been a mistake.
When he’d left the veterans’ hospital in Maryland, his younger brother Declan’s condition had been stable. In fact, Declan—who had been severely wounded in Afghanistan—had been doing so well he’d pushed Conor to make this trip. But when Conor had talked to Declan from the Billi
ngs airport, Declan hadn’t sounded very well, though he’d insisted that Conor stay.
But an hour and a half into the drive, when he’d called to check in with Declan again, Declan had been even more sluggish and lethargic, and had informed Conor that he’d spiked a fever—which could herald a dangerous complication that Conor wouldn’t be there to monitor.
As a doctor Conor couldn’t treat family, but he could follow what was being done closely. Monitoring his brother’s condition was the reason he was on leave from his own duties from the navy. Now he wasn’t where he felt he should be—by his brother’s side. If he hadn’t learned that all flights in and out had been canceled due to the storm, he might have headed back.
But there was no going back either to Billings or to Maryland, so all Conor could do was get somewhere safe—and get back to worrying about his brother once he arrived.
He’d grown up around here so he recognized where he was—about fifteen miles outside of Northbridge. But visibility was getting worse by the minute, and he was having more and more trouble plowing through the deepest of the drifts. There was no way he was going to make those last fifteen miles.
Luckily he wasn’t far from a cabin owned by the family of an old friend. When he noticed his patchy cell service was working for the moment, he’d called Rickie Dale to find out if the cabin was still standing and if he could use it.
Thankfully, the answer to both of those questions had been yes.
Just before he reached the turnoff, he saw the first car he’d seen in the last hour—nose-first in a ditch.
The sedan’s horn was blaring and the driver’s side door was ajar so the dome light was on. In the dim glow he could see that the driver was still in the car, slumped over the steering wheel.
As a doctor, his duty was clear. He came to a slippery stop and ran against the wind to the other vehicle.
The driver was a woman. In a sleeveless wedding dress without so much as a coat on over it. There was an abundance of blood from a head wound, likely the result of hitting the windshield since—for some unknown reason—the airbag hadn’t activated.
She didn’t react to him opening her door. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. So the first thing he did was check for a pulse, grateful to note that it was strong. She might be unconscious, but she was alive.
“Miss!” he shouted to be heard over the howling wind. “Can you hear me?”
She didn’t so much as moan.
But Conor was a doctor of emergency and trauma medicine and a commander in the United States Navy, trained to work in the field. He knew what to do.
He took off his jacket and wrapped it firmly around her neck to stabilize it. Then, keeping her head and neck aligned, he eased her back against the seat.
She had a massive amount of hair and much of it had fallen forward into her face, heavily coated in blood. Still, something about her struck him as familiar. But nothing concrete clicked for him, with his focus on her condition. Right now, all that mattered was getting her out of this cold.
He dashed back to his SUV and opened the passenger door, lowering that seat so it was as flat as it would go. Then he ran back to the sedan. With special care to keep her head and neck supported, he eased her from behind the steering wheel into his arms, took her to the SUV and laid her on the passenger seat.
Conor reached across her to crank up the heat, closed that door, ran back to the sedan to turn it off, lock it and pocket the keys before he rushed back behind the wheel of his own vehicle and put it into gear again.
It was a little less than a mile to the cabin. But already the dirt drive was covered in snow and drifts. The only thing Conor could do was go slow enough to feel that his tires were in the wheel ruts, letting them guide him. And hoping like hell that he’d opted for the right road and was headed toward shelter.
Just as he was beginning to doubt it, he caught sight of the small log cabin in the clearing of trees.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he drove the SUV up to the cabin’s front porch and stopped. Leaving the engine—and the heat—running for his passenger, he made his way onto the porch and found the key in Rickie’s hiding spot. He unlocked the door and entered with a mental thank-you to whoever had used the cabin last and left wood and tinder in the fireplace, ready to be lit.
If only he could find matches.
Matches. Matches. Matches...
After a moment of searching, he finally found a box of stick matches near a bucket of wood to the side of the hearth.
With a fire going, he returned to the SUV and carefully removed his passenger.
Inside with her, he laid her on the floor in front of the fire, letting the hard wooden surface act as the backboard he would have used had he had one.
She was breathing without any problems—that was good.
As he covered her with a blanket from the worn sofa nearby, the woman groaned.
“Good girl,” he praised. “Come on, come to...”
But when she didn’t stir again, he ran outside to turn off the SUV and then returned to survey the territory.
With the exception of shelter, the cabin didn’t likely offer much in terms of medical tools or supplies. Rickie had assured him that there was plenty of bottled water so Conor went in search of that, a cloth of some sort to clean the wound as best he could and a first-aid kit.
Returning to his patient—who was moaning again—he saw that bleeding from her head wound was increasing as she warmed up.
Working fast, he dampened the cloth with the bottled water and cleaned the wound.
“Can you wake up for me?” he urged. “Come on, open your eyes...”
More moaning but her eyes remained closed.
The wound was a clean cut free of debris. It could have used a couple of stitches but he had to settle for three butterfly bandages covered with a compression wrap.
Then he wet the cloth again to clean her face and get the hair away from it. The more he saw of her, the more he was struck by that sense of familiarity.
Her hair was thick and lush and the color of a new penny—he hadn’t registered that before but now he did.
Red hair.
Maicy had had hair like that...
Just as that thought struck him, the woman opened her emerald green eyes.
Conor reared back and froze.
It couldn’t be.
Could it?
No, it couldn’t be. It just wasn’t possible for the woman coming to on the floor in front of him to be the girl he’d left behind.
And yet the more closely he looked at her, the more he knew it was...
* * *
Everything was hazy. Maicy’s mind, her senses, were slowly fading in from darkness. She could hear a voice but she couldn’t quite make out words. And she felt too heavy to move.
Her head hurt. And she was lying on something hard.
Why would that be?
She remembered that she’d been in her car...
And it had been cold. So cold.
And then, too, there was that voice. A man.
She faded in a little more and blinked open her eyes. Her vision was blurry, and the light seemed dim. There was a man there...
“Good girl! Come on, wake up.”
This time she heard the words.
But she still couldn’t quite focus her eyes. And she was so disoriented that for a minute the sound of the man’s voice actually made her think of Conor Madison. As if that made any sense...
“Can you tell me your name?” the man asked.
Definitely not Conor Madison, then—he would know her.
“Maicy,” she managed.
“How about your last name, Maicy?”
“Clark,” she muttered.
She heard him say, “Holy...
” under his breath before shifting back into a calm, professional tone to ask, “Can you tell me what year it is?”
“A new year. January...” The date rolled off her tongue.
But maybe that wasn’t the right date. Maybe she only said it out of habit. She’d given that particular date a million times in the last few months while planning the wedding.
The wedding...
“How old are you?” the man asked.
These questions were dumb. “Old enough,” she said peevishly.
She pinched her eyes closed against the pain in her head and reached up to feel the source. She discovered that her hair was damp and that there were bandages of some sort on her forehead, just below her hairline.
“Good, you can move your right arm. How about this side?” the man asked, taking her other hand. “Can you squeeze my hand?”
She did that. He had a big hand.
“Strength is good,” he decreed. “How about your feet? Can you flex those for me?”
She did as he asked and felt that her feet were bare.
Bare feet? She didn’t leave home in her bare feet.
Her wedding shoes...
“Where are my shoes—I love those shoes!”
He didn’t answer her question. Instead he asked, “Can you tell me what happened to you?”
She opened her eyes again. Her vision was a bit clearer this time, and the fuzzy image of the man on his knees beside her looked even more like her old boyfriend.
This really was bizarre.
“There was a deer. I swerved to miss hitting him,” she said, remembering. She also recalled that it was her wedding she’d come from.
And Gary...
“What’s around my neck?” she asked when she also became aware that there was something there.
“My coat,” the man answered. “Are you experiencing pain anywhere?”
