Riley's Baby Boy

by Karen Rose Smith

After Jenny and Katie gave Riley thumbs-up signs, all of the women headed down the trail and Brenna stood perfectly still.

  He approached her. “They’re not deserting you.They’re just giving you over to my safekeeping.”

  She didn’t look as if she believed that. If only he could do this right. If only she believed what he had to say.

  He took her hand.

  She resisted for a moment, but then seemed to decide that wasn’t the best course. Her blond hair blew in the sudden breeze. As his gaze passed down her beaded T-shirt and her well-worn jeans and boots, he knew she’d never looked prettier and he’d never desired her more. His fingers folded around her hand and he led her to Starfall Point, where the valley below and the town of Miners Bluff spread before them.

  “I have something for you,” he said.

  She looked puzzled when he pulled an envelope from his cargo pants pocket and buttoned it again. He handed it to her.

  “Riley, if this is some kind of agreement about Derek—”

  He cut her off by gently placing his finger over her lips. “Open it,” he urged her.

  She pulled out the sheet of paper, glanced at it and then back at him. “This is an airline confirmation of three one-way tickets to New York.”

  “Yes, it is. When I came back to Miners Bluff and settled in again, I thought I needed lots of land around me and the freedom to do what I wanted when I wanted to. After the night of the reunion you were constantly on my mind and in my heart, even though I didn’t want to admit it. After all, it was an old habit I’d perfected fighting feelings for you. I’d been doing it since we were teenagers. I’ve been looking for the wrong things in the wrong places just like I did when I was a teenager. I was hot for you in high school. Yes, I first dated you in defiance of our families and possibly to get revenge. But once we got to know each other, I felt so much I didn’t know how to handle it. When you wouldn’t let me take our relationship public, I felt betrayed. But my feelings for you never went away. That’s why the night of the reunion happened. I didn’t have the past on my mind that night, just chemistry.”

  “Riley—”

  “You’ve got to let me finish, because I may never get this out again. I made some calls yesterday. There’s more than one firm in New York interested in my services. I can go back into IT consulting until we figure out exactly where we want to live and whether or not I want to start some kind of guiding service in New York or Connecticut.”

  “But you don’t like big cities.”

  “We could live in Connecticut. I hear there are trees and flowers and even deer there. We can work out all that. The important thing is that the three of us build a life together.”

  This time he reached into his shirt pocket and he slid out a ring. The antique setting with its multitude of diamonds would remind them of the years they’d loved each other, the love that had taken root long ago but had grown and matured. He didn’t hesitate to drop down onto one knee.

  Brenna put her hand to her mouth but he captured it again. “Brenna McDougall, I love you with all my heart. That love has grown over the years and I know it’s going to get bigger than anything we can predict. Our love is going to make our lives rich and full and give Derek the start he needs for his life to be the same. I loved you long before he came along. I want to marry you because of that love. Will you be my wife?”

  Brenna’s tears started to flow then. She let go of the airline confirmation to put one hand on either side of his face. Then she knelt down with him in the soft grass in the middle of wildflowers and the scent of pine and said, “I love you, Riley O’Rourke. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

  As the airline reservation fluttered in the breeze and fell down into the valley below, their kiss seemed to go on forever.

  And that’s exactly what Riley wanted...forever.

  Epilogue

  Brenna watched Riley lift Derek high in the air as they stood in front of the gazebo in Miners Bluff historic park. Ever since Riley had asked her to marry him, she’d been floating on air, designing more creatively than she ever had, including Aunt Anna’s wedding gown, caring for Derek with so much love she knew she could handle anything. That afternoon on Starfall Point she’d seen the honesty, vulnerability and overwhelming love in Riley’s eyes. It was what she’d wanted to see for a very long time. She’d moved back into his house again and they were thinking about an October wedding. Tomorrow they’d be flying back to New York to make some decisions there.

  Maybe every summer they could return to Miners Bluff to spend more time with their families, in addition to other times throughout the year when they could both get away. They had so many plans to make, and a lifetime to make them. But the wedding was uppermost in her mind now, and how they were going to make arrangements both families could live with.

  “Your father didn’t say why he wanted to meet us here?” she asked Riley as he cuddled Derek into the crook of his arm and held him comfortably.

  “Nope. He just said he wanted to talk to us here at the gazebo.”

  They heard footsteps on the path leading to the gazebo and when they turned to see if it was Liam, Brenna spotted her dad, too. The two men were approaching them together.

  “Oh, my gosh! I think the world’s going to tilt on its axis,” she murmured.

  “It already did that the day I met you,” Riley teased, as he slung his arm around her and held her close. It was the three of them against the world. She just hoped it wasn’t going to be the three of them against their dads.

  After hugs all around, Riley asked, “All right, so what’s this about?”

  The two men exchanged a look. Then Liam said, “Don’t think we’re the best of friends. We’re not. We’re tolerating each other. But we decided to work on something for you. I just happen to know the mayor. I went to school with Everett and he comes into the restaurant once a week with his wife. We’ve struck up a friendship again. Anyway, because of that, he said he will give the two of you permission to get married in the gazebo and to have your reception in the park.”

  Angus cleared his throat. “We thought this location would be neutral, and we could have as many people as we wanted. Since Liam pulled the strings to make this happen, I offered to take care of the canopies and the flowers. He’s going to handle the food. What do you think?”

  She and Riley had been exploring all the options. They hadn’t particularly wanted to have a luxurious wedding, just one where all their friends and family could celebrate with them. This actually sounded like the perfect idea.

  She looked up at Riley. “What do you think?”

  “I kind of like the idea. What about you?”

  “I kind of like it, too.”

  “We should stick to the beginning of October,” Liam said, “so the weather holds.”

  “How long did it take for the two of you to come up with this plan?” Brenna asked teasingly.

  “Not very long.”

  “Who made the first call?” Riley asked, and Brenna knew he wanted everything out in the open with no secrets and full disclosure.

  “Actually, Brenna’s mother did,” Angus admitted. “Women seem to be better at reconciliation than men.”

  “Though I have talked to Patrick and Sean,” Liam assured them. “They say they’ll behave. They say they’ll keep an open mind. We all need some time to settle in. But we will, because we all love you.”

  Brenna felt tears come to her eyes again. She’d been doing a lot of that happy crying. When she did, Riley just held her, like he was now.

  Derek made a happy baby sound.

  Liam asked, “May I?”

  Riley handed his son over to his grandfather.

  Angus told them, “We’ll take a walk and give you a couple of minutes to discuss things. Then you can tell us what you really think,” he added with a gri
n. He and Liam started off with their grandson under the shade of the live oaks in the summer sun.

  “We don’t need to talk, do we?” Riley asked her.

  “Nope. I like the plan.”

  He pulled her up the couple of steps into the privacy of the gazebo. “Well, good. Then we can make out until they come back.”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her. She returned his passion and his promise, knowing happily-ever-after wasn’t far away.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt of Once Upon a Matchmaker by Marie Ferrarella!

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  Chapter One

  So this was what all the secrecy, giggling and whispers had been about.

  Micah Muldare sat on the sofa, looking at the gift his sons had quite literally surprised him with. A gift he wasn’t expecting, commemorating a day that he’d never thought applied to him. He’d just unwrapped the gift and it was now sitting on the coffee table, a source of mystification, at least for him.

  His boys, four-year-old Greg and five-year-old Gary, sat—or more accurately perched—on either side of him like energized bookends, unable to remain still for more than several seconds at a time. Blond, blue-eyed and small boned, his sons looked like little carbon copies of each other.

  They looked like Ella.

  Micah shut the thought away. It had been two years, but his heart still wasn’t ready for that kind of comparison.

  Maybe someday, just not yet.

  “Do you like it, Daddy?” Gary, the more animated of the two, asked eagerly. The boy was fairly beaming as he put the question to him. His bright blue eyes took in every tiny movement.

  Micah eyed at the mug on the coffee table. “I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” Micah told his son. “Actually, I wasn’t expecting anything at all today.”

  It was Mother’s Day. Granted he’d been doing double duty for the past two years, being both mother and father to his two sons, but he hadn’t expected any sort of acknowledgment from the boys on Mother’s Day. On Father’s Day, yes, but definitely not on this holiday.

  The mug had been wrapped in what seemed like an entire roll of wrapping paper. Gary had proclaimed proudly that he had done most of the wrapping.

  “But I put the tape on,” Greg was quick to tell him.

  Micah praised their teamwork.

  The mug had World’s Greatest Mom written on it in pink-and-yellow ceramic flowers. Looking at it now, Micah could only grin and shake his head. Well, at least their hearts were in the right place.

  “Um, I think you guys are a little confused about the concept,” he confided.

  Gary’s face scrunched up in apparent confusion. “What’s a con-cept?”

  “It’s an idea, a way of—”

  Micah abruptly stopped himself. As a reliability engineer who worked in the top secret missile defense systems department of Donovan Defense, a large national company, he had a tendency to get rather involved in his explanations. Given his sons’ tender ages, he decided that a brief and simple explanation was the best way to go.

  So he tried again. “It’s a way of understanding something. The point is, I’m very touched, guys, but you do understand that I’m not your mom, right? I’m your dad.” He looked from Gary to Greg to see if they had any lingering questions or doubts.

  “We know that,” Gary told him as if he thought it was silly to ever confuse the two roles. “But sometimes you do mom things,” he reminded his father.

  “Yeah, like make cookies when I’m sick,” Greg piped up.

  Which was more often than he was happy about, Micah couldn’t help thinking. Greg, smaller for his age than even Gary, was his little survivor. Born prematurely, his younger son had had a number of complicating conditions that had him in and out of hospitals until he was almost two years old.

  Because of all the different medications he’d been forced to take, the little boy’s immune system was somewhat compromised. As an unfortunate by-product of that, Greg was more prone to getting sick than his brother.

  And every time he did get sick, Micah watched him carefully, afraid the boy would come down with another bout of pneumonia. The last time, a year and a half ago, Greg had almost died. The thought haunted him for months.

  Clearing his throat, Micah squared his shoulders. His late mother, Diane, had taught him to accept all gifts gracefully.

  “Well, then, thank you very much,” he told his sons with a wide smile that was instantly mirrored by each of the boys.

  “Aunt Sheila helped us,” Gary told him, knowing that he couldn’t accept all of the credit for the gift.

  “Yeah, she drove us to the store,” Greg chimed in. “But me and Gary picked it out. And we used our own money, too,” he added as a postscript.

  “‘Gary and I,’” Micah automatically corrected Greg.

  The little boy shook his head so hard, his straight blond hair appeared airborne for a moment, flying to and fro about his head.

  “No, not you, Daddy, me,” Greg insisted. “Me and Gary.”

  There was time enough to correct his grammar when he was a little older, Micah thought fondly.

  Out loud he marveled, “Imagine that,” for his sons’ benefit. A touch of melancholy drifted over him. “You two are growing up way too fast,” he told them. “Before you know it, you’re going to be getting married and starting families of your own.”

  “Married?” Greg echoed, frowning as deeply as if his father had just told him that he was having liver for dinner for the next year.

  “To a girl?” Gary asked incredulously, very obviously horrified by the mere suggestion that he be forced to marry a female. Everyone knew girls were icky—except for Aunt Sheila, of course, but she didn’t count.

  “That’s more or less what I had in mind, yes,” Micah told his sons, doing his very best not to laugh at their facial expressions.

  Covering his face, Gary declared, “Yuck!” with a great deal of feeling.

  “Yeah,” Greg cried, mimicking his brother, “double yuck!”

  Micah slipped an arm around each little boy’s very slim shoulders and pulled them to him. He would miss this when the boys were older, miss these moments when his sons made him feel as if he was the center of their universe.

  “Come back and tell me that in another, oh, ten, fifteen years,” he teased.

  “Okay,” Gary promised very solemnly. “We will, Daddy.”

  “Yeah, we will!” Greg echoed, not to be outdone.

  Micah’s aunt, Sheila Barrett, stood in the living room doorway, observing the scene between her nephew and her grandnephews. Her mouth curved in a wide smile. While she lived not too far from Micah, it felt as if this was more her home than th
e place where she received her mail. She took care of the boys when her nephew was at work, which, unless one of his sons was sick, was most of the time.

  “They picked that mug out themselves,” she told Micah, in case he thought that this was her idea. “They absolutely refused to look at anything else after they saw that mug. They thought it was perfect for you.”

  “And of course you tried to talk them out of it,” Micah said, tongue in cheek. His amusement was there, in his eyes.

  Sheila shrugged nonchalantly. “The way I see it, Micah, little men in the making should be as free to exercise their shopping gene as their little female counterparts.”

  “Very democratic of you,” Micah commented, the corners of his mouth curving. Aunt Sheila had always had a bit of an unorthodox streak. He learned to think outside the box because of her. He sincerely doubted that he would be where he was today if not for her. “Well, just for that, I’m taking all of you out for lunch.”

  “Aunt Sheila, too?” Greg asked, not wanting to exclude her.

  “Aunt Sheila most especially,” Micah told his younger son. There was deep affection in his voice. “After all, Aunt Sheila is the real mom around here,” he emphasized pointedly.

  Clearly confused, Greg turned to look at the woman who came by every morning to take him to preschool and his brother to kindergarten. Every afternoon she’d pick them both up and then stayed with them until their father came home. Some nights, Aunt Sheila stayed really, really late.

  “Aunt Sheila has kids?” Greg asked his father, surprised.

  Sheila smiled, answering for Micah. “I have your dad,” told the boy.

  They had a special bond, she and her sister’s son. When the world came crashing in on him when his parents were killed in a car accident while on vacation, Micah had been twelve years old. Injured in the accident, too, he’d been all alone at that San Jose hospital. She’d lost no time driving up the coast to get to him. She’d stayed by his side until he was well enough to leave and then she took him home with her. There was no looking back. She’d raised him as her own.