Second Chance In Stonecreek

by Michelle Major

  Mia shook her head and buried her face again and after a moment, Dani sighed. “She wonders if it’s possible to ice-skate on Lake Haven. We watched the most recent Olympics and she became a little obsessed.”

  “You could say that,” Silver said. “She skated around the house in her stocking feet all day long for weeks. A dorkupine on ice.”

  “You can’t skate on the lake, I’m afraid,” Ruben answered. “Because of the underground hot springs that feed into it at various points, Lake Haven rarely freezes, except sometimes along the edges, when it’s really cold. It’s not really safe for ice skating. But the city creates a skating rink on the tennis courts at Lake View Park every year. The volunteer fire department sprays it down for a few weeks once temperatures get really cold. I saw them out there the other night so it shouldn’t be long before it’s open. Maybe a few more weeks.”

  Mia seemed to lose a little of her shyness at that prospect. She gave him a sideways look from under her mother’s arm and aimed a fleeting smile full of such sweetness that he was instantly smitten.

  “There’s also a great place for sledding up behind the high school. You can’t miss that, either. Oh, and in a few weeks we have the Lights on the Lake Festival. You’ve heard about that, right?”

  They all gave him matching blank stares, making him wonder what was wrong with the Haven Point Helping Hands that they hadn’t immediately dragged Dani into their circle. He would have to talk to Andie Bailey or his sister Angela about it. They always seemed to know what was going on in town.

  “I think some kids at school were talking about that at lunch the other day,” Silver said. “They were sitting at the next table so I didn’t hear the whole thing, though.”

  “Haven Point hosts an annual celebration a week or so before Christmas where all the local boat owners deck out their watercraft from here to Shelter Springs to welcome in the holidays and float between the two towns. There’s music, food and crafts for sale. It’s kind of a big deal around here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”

  “I’m very busy, with the practice and the girls, Deputy Morales. I don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” Though Dani tried for a lofty look, he thought he caught a hint of vulnerability there.

  She seemed...lonely. That didn’t make a lick of sense. The women in this town could be almost annoying in their efforts to include newcomers in community events. They didn’t give people much of an option, dragging them kicking and screaming into the social scene around town, like it or not.

  “Well, now you know. You really can’t miss the festival. It’s great fun for the whole family.”

  “Thank you for the information. It’s next week, you say?”

  “That’s right. Not this weekend but the one after. The whole thing starts out with the boat parade on Saturday evening, around six.”

  “We’ll put it on our social calendar.”

  “What’s a social calendar?” Mia whispered to her sister, just loud enough for Ruben to hear.

  “It’s a place where you keep track of all your invitations to parties and sleepovers and stuff.”

  “Oh. Why do we need one of those?”

  “Good question.”

  Silver looked glum for just a moment but Dani hugged her, then faced Ruben with a polite, distant smile.

  “Thank you for bringing in Ollie and Yukon. Have a good evening, Deputy Morales.”

  It was a clear dismissal, one he couldn’t ignore. Ruben gathered his dogs’ leashes and headed for the door. “Thank you. See you around. And by around, I mean next door. We kind of can’t miss each other.”

  As he hoped, this made Mia smile a little. Even Silver’s dour expression eased into what almost looked like a smile.

  As he loaded the dogs into the king cab of his pickup truck, Ruben could see Dani turning off lights and straightening up the clinic.

  What was her story? Why had she chosen to come straight from vet school in Boston to set up shop all the way across the country in a small Idaho town?

  He loved his hometown, sure, and fully acknowledged it was a beautiful place to live. It still seemed a jarring cultural and geographic shift from living back east to this little town where the biggest news of the month was a rather corny light parade that people froze their asses off to watch.

  And why did he get the impression the family wasn’t socializing much? One of the reasons most people he knew moved to small towns was a yearning for the kind of connectedness and community a place like Haven Point had in spades. What was the point in moving to a small town if you were going to keep yourself separate from everybody?

  He thought he had seen them at a few things when they first came to Haven Point but since then, Dani seemed to be keeping her little family mostly to themselves. That must be by choice. It was the only explanation that made sense. He couldn’t imagine McKenzie Kilpatrick or Andie Bailey or any of the other Helping Hands excluding her on purpose.

  What was she so nervous about?

  He added another facet to the enigma of his next-door neighbor. He had hoped that he might be able to get a better perspective of her by bringing the dogs in to her for their routine exams. While he had confirmed his father’s belief that she appeared to be an excellent veterinarian, he now had more questions about the woman and her daughters to add to his growing list.

  Don’t miss Season of Wonder

  by RaeAnne Thayne,

  available October 2018

  wherever Mills & Boon books and ebooks are sold!

  Copyright © 2018 by RaeAnne Thayne

  Keep reading for an excerpt from The Rancher’s Christmas Promise by Allison Leigh.

  The Rancher’s Christmas Promise

  by Allison Leigh

  Prologue

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Ryder Wilson stared at the people on his porch. Even before they introduced themselves, he’d known the short, skinny woman was a cop thanks to the Braden Police Department badge she was wearing. But the two men with her? He’d never seen them before.

  And after the load of crap they’d just spewed, he’d like to never see them again.

  “We’re not kidding, Mr. Wilson.” That came from the serious-looking bald guy. The one who looked like he was a walking heart attack, considering the way he kept mopping the sweat off his face even though it was freezing outside. March had roared in like a lion this year, bringing with it a major snowstorm. Ryder hadn’t lived there that long—it was only his second winter there—but people around town said they hadn’t seen anything like it in Braden for more than a decade.

  All he knew was that the snow was piled three feet high, making his life these days even more challenging. Making him wonder why he’d ever chosen Wyoming over New Mexico in the first place. Yeah, they got snow in Taos. But not like this.

  “We believe that the infant girl who’s been under our protection since she was abandoned three months ago is your daughter.” The man tried to look past Ryder’s shoulder. “Perhaps we could discuss this inside?”

  Ryder had no desire to invite them in. But one of them was a cop. He hadn’t crossed purposes with the law before and he wasn’t real anxious to do so now. Didn’t mean he had to like it, though.

  His aunt hadn’t raised him to be slob. She’d be horrified if she ever knew strangers were seeing the house in its current state.

  He slapped his leather gloves together. He had chores waiting for him. But he supposed a few minutes wouldn’t make much difference. “Don’t think there’s much to discuss,” he warned as he stepped out of the doorway. He folded his arms across his chest, standing pretty much in their way so they had to crowd together in the small space where he dumped his boots. Back home, his aunt Adelaide would call the space a vestibule. Here, it wasn’t so formal; he’d carved out his home from a converted barn. “I appreciate your concern
for an abandoned baby, but whoever’s making claims I fathered a child is out of their mind.” Once burned, twice shy. Another thing his aunt was fond of saying.

  The cop’s brown eyes looked pained. “Ryder—may I call you Ryder?” She didn’t wait for his permission, but plowed right on, anyway. “I’m sorry we have to be the bearer of bad news, but we believe your wife was the baby’s mother, and—”

  At the word wife, what had been Ryder’s already-thin patience went by the wayside. “My wife ran out on me a year ago. Whatever she’s done since is her prob—”

  “Not anymore,” the dark-haired guy said.

  “What’d you say your name was?” Ryder met the other man’s gaze head-on, knowing perfectly well he hadn’t said his name. The pretty cop’s role there was obviously official. Same with the sweaty bald guy—he had to be from social services. But the third intruder? The guy who was watching him as though he’d already formed an opinion—a bad one?

  “Grant Cooper.” The man’s voice was flat. “Karen’s my sister.”

  “There’s your problem,” Ryder responded just as flatly. “My so-called wife’s name was Daisy. Daisy Miranda. You’ve got the wrong guy.” He pointedly reached around them for the door to show them out. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got ice to break so my animals can get at their water.”

  “This is Karen.” Only because she was a little slip of a thing, the cop succeeded in maneuvering between him and the door. She held a wallet-sized photo up in front of his face.

  Ryder’s nerves tightened even more than when he’d first opened the door to find these people on his front porch.

  He didn’t want to touch the photograph or examine it. He didn’t need to. He recognized his own face just fine. In the picture, he’d been kissing the wedding ring he’d just put on Daisy’s finger. The wedding had been a whirlwind sort of thing, like everything else about their relationship. Three months start to finish, from the moment they met outside the bar where she’d just quit her job until the day she’d walked out on him two weeks after their wedding. That’s how long it had taken to meet, get hitched and get unhitched.

  Though the unhitching part was still a work in progress. Not that he’d been holding on to hope that she’d return. But he’d had other things more important keeping him occupied than getting a formal divorce. Namely the Diamond-L ranch, which he’d purchased only a few months before meeting her. His only regret was that he hadn’t kept his attention entirely on the ranch all along. It would have saved him some grief. “Where’d you get that?”

  The cop asked her own question. “Can you confirm this is you and your wife in this picture?”

  His jaw felt tight. “Yeah.” Unfortunately. The Las Vegas wedding chapel had given them a cheap set of pictures. Ryder had tossed all of them in the fireplace, save the one the cop was holding now. He’d mailed that one to Daisy in response to a stupid postcard he’d gotten from her six months after she’d left him. A postcard on which she’d written only the words I’m sorry.

  He still wasn’t sure what she’d meant. Sorry for leaving him without a word or warning? Or sorry she’d ever married him in the first place?

  “You wrote this?” The cop had turned the photo over, revealing his handwriting on the back. So much for vows.

  Ryder was actually a little surprised that it was so legible, considering how drunk he’d been at the time he’d sent the photo. He nodded once.

  The cop looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry to say that she died in a car accident over New Year’s.”

  He waited as the words sank in. Expecting to feel something. Was he supposed to feel bad? Maybe he did. He wasn’t sure. He’d known Daisy was a handful from the get-go. So when she took a powder the way she had, it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it had been.

  But one thing was certain. Everything that Daisy had told him had been a lie. From start to finish.

  He might be an uncomplicated guy, but he understood the bottom line facing him now. “And you want to pawn off her baby on me.” He looked the dark-haired guy in the face again. “Or do you just want money?” He lifted his arm, gesturing with the worn leather gloves. “Look around. All I’ve got is what you see. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let a couple strangers making claims like yours get one finger on it.”

  Grant’s eyes looked like flint. “As usual, my sister’s taste in men was worse than—”

  “Gentlemen.” The other man mopped his forehead again, giving both Ryder and Grant wary looks even as he took a step between them. “Let’s keep our cool. The baby is our focus.”

  Ryder ignored him. He pointed at Grant. “My wife never even told me she had a brother.”

  “My sister never told me she had a husband.”

  “The situation is complicated enough,” the cop interrupted, “without the two of you taking potshots at each other.” Her expression was troubled, but her voice was calm. And Ryder couldn’t miss the way she’d wrapped her hand familiarly around Grant’s arm. “Ray is right. What’s important here is the baby.”

  “Yes. The baby under our protection.” Ray was obviously hoping to maintain control over the discussion. “There is no local record of the baby’s birth. Our only way left to establish who the child’s parents are is through you, Mr. Wilson. We’ve expended every other option.”

  “You don’t even know the baby was hers?”

  Ray looked pained. Grant looked like he wanted to punch something. Hell, maybe even Ryder. The cop just looked worried.

  “The assumption is that your wife was the person to have left the baby at the home her former employer, Jaxon Swift, shared with his brother, Lincoln,” she said.

  “Now, that does sound like Daisy.” Ryder knew he sounded bitter. “I only knew her a few months, but it was still long enough to learn she’s good at running out on people.”

  Maybe he did feel a little bad about Daisy. He hadn’t gotten around to divorcing his absent wife. Now, if what these people said were true, he wouldn’t need to. Instead of being a man with a runaway wife, he was a man with a deceased one. There was probably something wrong with him for not feeling like his world had just been rocked. “But maybe you’re wrong. She wasn’t pregnant when she left me,” he said bluntly. He couldn’t let himself believe otherwise.

  “Would you agree to a paternity test?”

  “The court can compel you, Mr. Wilson,” Ray added when Ryder didn’t answer right away.

  It was the wrong tack for Ray to take. Ryder had been down the whole paternity-accusation path before. He hadn’t taken kindly to it then, and he wasn’t inclined to now. “Daisy was my wife, loose as that term is in this case. A baby born to her during our marriage makes me the presumed father, whether there’s a test or not. But you don’t know that the baby was actually hers. You just admitted it. Which tells me the court probably isn’t on your side as much as you’re implying. Unless I say otherwise, and without you knowing who this baby’s mother is, I’m just a guy in a picture.”

  “We should have brought Greer,” Grant said impatiently to the cop. “She’s used to guys like him.”

  But the cop wasn’t listening to Grant. She was looking at Ryder with an earnest expression. “You aren’t just a guy in a picture. You’re our best hope for preventing the child we believe is Grant’s niece from being adopted by strangers.”

  That’s when Ryder saw that she’d reached out to clasp Grant’s hand, their fingers entwined. So, she had a dog in this race.

  He thought about pointing out that he was a stranger to them, too, no matter what sort of guy Grant had deemed Ryder to be. “And if I cooperated and the test confirms I’m not this baby’s father, you still wouldn’t have proof that Daisy is—” dammit “—was the baby’s mother.”

  “If the test is positive, then we know she was,” Ray said. “Without your cooperation, the proof of Karen’s maternity is circums
tantial. We admit that. But you were her husband. There’s no putative father. If you even suspected she’d become pregnant during your marriage, your very existence is enough to establish legal paternity, DNA proof or not.”

  The cop looked even more earnest. “And the court can’t proceed with an adoption set in motion by Layla’s abandonment.”

  The name startled him. “Layla!”

  The three stared at him with varying degrees of surprise and expectation.

  “Layla was my mother’s name.” His voice sounded gruff, even to his own ears. Whatever it was that Daisy had done with her child, using that name was a sure way of making sure he’d get involved. After only a few months together, she’d learned enough about him to know that.

  He exhaled roughly. Slapped his leather gloves together. Then he stepped out of the way so he wasn’t blocking them from the rest of his home. “You’d better come inside and sit.” He felt weary all of a sudden. As if everything he’d accomplished in his thirty-four years was for nothing. What was that song? “There Goes My Life.”

  “I expect this is gonna take a while to work out.” He glanced at the disheveled room, with its leather couch and oversize, wall-mounted television. That’s what happened when a man spent more time tending cows than he did anything else. He’d even tended some of them in this very room.

  Fortunately, his aunt Adelaide would never need to know.

  “You’ll have to excuse the mess, though.”

  Copyright © 2018 by Allison Lee Johnson

  Connect with us for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!

  Sign up to our newsletter

  Share your reading experience on:

  Mills & Boon Australia site

  Facebook

  Twitter

  Watch our reviews, author interviews and more on Mills & Boon TV

  IMPRINT: Cherish

  ISBN: 9781489272621

  TITLE: SECOND CHANCE IN STONECREEK

  First Australian Publication 2018