A Gift For The Groom

“I would imagine she got her in the usual way.”

“But she didn’t have a baby when she left Briar Creek! And you didn’t mention any baby in South Dakota, or any husband!”

“No evidence of a husband. My guess would be that she either had the child right before or right after she left Texas. The people I talked to today figured the kid to be about two when she moved here and four when she left.”

“But where was this baby when she was in South Dakota?”

“In South Dakota she lived out away from people, just like she did in Wyoming. If she’d had a baby with her in South Dakota, it would have been easy to hide her. A toddler’s another story, and the people who saw this little girl said she was a pistol. Very visible. Had red hair and was always getting into something. Every time they saw her, the kid was charging around and Abbie was yelling at her, though they said by the time she left. the kid was getting kind of cowed by all that yelling.”

Analise touched her own curls, sadness sweeping over her at the thought of Abbie’s daughter being cowed. “A little red-haired girl, four years old. She’d be about my age. If Abbie hadn’t stolen that money and left town, her daughter and I might have been friends. That’s terrible that Abbie yelled so much at her that she broke her spirit But at least now we know why she stole the money.”

“You think stealing the money to take care of her kid justifies her actions?”

“No, of course not! But it explains why she did it. She must have been pregnant in Briar Creek and the father wouldn’t marry her so she had to leave in shame—”

“Leave in shame? This was 1972, not 1872.”

“Briar Creek can be pretty provincial. Anyway, she managed to hide her pregnancy, but she knew she couldn’t hide the baby ... they make too much noise...so she stole the money and left town. If she’d stayed in Briar Creek and given her child up for adoption, my parents might have taken her and I’d have had a sister. They wanted another child.”

The idea brought an eerie sense of déjà vu, doubtless because she’d always wanted a sister, had even invented one when she was a child, a red-haired sister who looked like her and was named Sara. How sad that she’d missed the possibility. Sad for her and the other little girl. Abbie didn’t sound like an ideal mother, while her own parents were practically perfect...unlike their changeling daughter.

“That’s pretty much the way I had it figured,” Nick said. “However, you should realize that this could mean your fiancé’s father was the father of her baby.”

“No way!”

“Then why did she choose him to take the blame?”

“Because he was the most likely candidate. He’d been in trouble before when he was a teenager. His family was really poor, and when he was in high school he was dating Lucas’s mother, whose family wasn’t poor though they weren’t wealthy, either. Anyway, he wanted to take her to his senior prom but he couldn’t afford to rent a tuxedo, so he stole one. At least, he tried to steal one. They caught him. He got off with probation because he’d planned to return it after the prom and he was an honor student and he’d never been in any kind of trouble before, but when that thing at the bank came up and he looked guilty, nobody bothered to check any further.”

“Which doesn’t mean the man wasn’t the father of Abbie Prather’s child. Why didn’t your fiancé look into this?” He lifted a hand to cut off her protestations. “I just think you ought to know that you may be opening a can of worms here. This may not be the kind of wedding present your Lucas wants. There may be a good reason he never investigated.”

“There certainly is a good reason. Well, a fairly good reason. It’s real good if you understand Lucas’s point of view. He was only four years old when his dad was convicted, so pretty much all he remembers is how people treated the family of a convicted felon. As soon as his dad got out of prison sixteen years ago, they moved to Pennsylvania where nobody knew anything and started over. His parents have told him repeatedly that they have to forget the whole thing, move forward and put it behind them. Give themselves and everybody else a chance to forget. They won’t even come back to Briar Creek for our wedding.”

“If they don’t want to dredge the whole thing up, why are you doing it?”

“So his parents can feel comfortable coming to our wedding and because Lucas really does want to know the truth, deep inside.”

“I see.” Disbelief oozed from the pores of both words.

“He does! Okay, he’s never really said it in so many words, but he says it every day by his actions. He’s a doctor. He could practice anywhere in the country, but he chose to move back to Briar Creek and go into practice with my dad. He tries really, really hard to be an exemplary citizen and show people by the way he lives that his father couldn’t possibly be guilty. If he says his dad’s a total straight-arrow, I believe him. You find that little girl’s birth certificate and we’ll see who the father is and I guarantee it won’t be Wayne Daniels.”

“I fully intend to do that, but this is Saturday night, and the courthouses won’t be open until Monday morning at nine.”

She sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to wait to settle that point. What’s the little girl’s name? Did anybody remember?”

“Oh, yes. Several people remembered because Abbie yelled at her so much, calling her name. It’s Sara.”

Talk about déjà vu! “Sara,” she repeated. “When I was a little kid, my imaginary sister’s name was Sara, and then I gave the name to my favorite doll when I was six.”

“It’s a common name.”

“I guess so.” But her doll, like her and like Abbie’s daughter, had red hair. In fact, she still had the doll in a carriage in one corner of her room, a part of her childhood she couldn’t seem to let go of.

She sat quietly for a moment, thinking about Abbie’s daughter and the coincidences of their similarity in hair color and age and of having a doll with the girl’s name. If she believed in fate, she’d have thought Sara was destined to be her friend or even her adopted sister, and Abbie’s crime had sent fate awry.

Many times she’d overheard her parents lament that she had no sister and talk tentatively about having another baby. When she was young, she’d believed they’d refrained from having one because she was such a problem, they didn’t have enough worry left over for a second child. Now that she knew more about the process of obtaining babies, she realized perhaps they hadn’t been able to have another.

Or it could be that her original assumption was right. In her zeal to prove she was competent, she usually ended up proving the opposite. Like with this trip.

The plane hit an air pocket, bouncing down and startling her, throwing her forward. Though her seat belt held her securely, Nick swung an arm across her, the way her parents had done when she was a child riding in the car and they’d had to stop suddenly.

But Nick’s touch didn’t feel paternal as his arm pushed against her left breast, his flattened palm against her right. Her gaze darted to the side, to look at him, without turning even her head as if the slightest movement would increase the accidental, forbidden, delicious sensations of his touch. And the horrible part was, she wanted to increase those sensations, to push them to their limits, whatever those limits might be.

She bit her lip. She shouldn’t be having those thoughts while she was engaged to Lucas! Talk about limits—she’d gone over the line already!

And she’d thought getting out of Briar Creek for a while would help her relax! She should have gone to one of those South American countries where they had the Revolution of the Week. That would have been more tranquil than flying to Nebraska with Nick Claiborne.

He was leaning forward, staring at her, and for a moment frozen in time, neither of them moved. His eyes which had been the color of the Texas sky at daybreak when she’d first seen him were now dark like the sky as a storm rolled in, dark from leashed energy and power ready to explode over the land in a wild tempest.

An illusion because of the dim light in the plane, she told herself.

But logic didn’t alter the effect of his gaze, the storm his touch created in her.

As if he’d suddenly noticed where it was, he jerked his hand back to his side and turned toward the front of the plane, to the darkness outside. “Sorry,” he said, his voice strangely husky. “Automatic reflex. I had four little sisters and an ex-wife who refused to wear her seat belt in the car or the plane.”

She swallowed hard. “No problem. I understand.”

She plowed into her handbag and brought out the rest of the cookies then crammed a whole one into her mouth. If eating could distract her from her fear of flying, surely it could distract her from the pilot, from the memory of his hand on her breast, from the tingling, tantalizing sensations that still lingered where he’d touched her and from the guilt of betraying Lucas, her best friend.

He leaned forward and made an adjustment of some sort. His movement stirred the air in the small space, releasing a scent of dusty denim and dangerous, tantalizing masculinity that she’d have recognized anywhere as belonging to Nick.

Only half a bag of cookies, three more candy bars, two packages of chips, a roll of mints and a bag of pistachio nuts remained in her purse. It probably wasn’t going to be enough.

Chapter Two

Nick awoke to the groaning of water pipes. At least he hoped it was water pipes. Otherwise, somebody was being tortured in a nearby room of the Rest-a-While Motel in Prairieview, Nebraska.

He could only hope Analise Brewster had slept half as badly as he had. If she had, she’d surely be ready to go home.

When they’d arrived in the middle of the night, the outside temperature had been cool, but inside the tiny room was another matter. He’d fully expected someone to come in just before dawn and shove in a few loaves of bread to bake. The sleepy owner they’d rousted out of bed had apologized for the fact that the air-conditioning was broken. Nick had his doubts that the place had ever possessed such a modern convenience.

To make matters worse, he’d had no dinner the night before except the cookies Analise had given him. Every thought of the room’s being hot enough to bake bread, fry eggs, boil soup, had been related to food and had sent his stomach into growling frenzies.

However, neither the heat nor his hunger had been the primary reason he’d tossed and turned all night, kicking the sheet into a twisted rope at the end of the lumpy bed.

Analise had been the primary cause of his disquiet. Analise, who’d talked and snacked pretty much the entire trip, including the drive from the small airport to Prairieview in the rattletrap rental car his contact had left for him. She’d talked about her fiancé, his father, his mother, her mother, her father, her friends... She’d filled his plane with so many people, making them so real, he’d halfway expected them to walk out of the plane when they landed.

By the time they arrived at the motel, the last two years of peace and tranquillity had disappeared without a trace and he was back in chaos. He’d grown up with four—count ’em, four—little sisters who’d kept the pandemonium at a consistently high level and regularly dived headfirst into situations from which he had to rescue them. Then, like a man possessed by masochism, when his twin sisters left for college, he’d married a ditzy woman who made his sisters seem staid and reasonable. His twin sisters had left three years ago and the ex-wife four months after he’d married her. Two years of serenity ... until last night. Until Analise.

She was like his sisters and his ex-wife all put together then multiplied. And to make it worse, his hormones didn’t care. They would betray him, sell him down the river, send him into servitude just to have Analise. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but while his brain told him to get away and save himself while he still could, his body wanted her with an intensity that threatened to overrule his brain.

What little sleep he’d caught in fleeting snatches had been filled with dreams of Analise... Analise talking, eating, offering him candy, taking candy from his fingers with those soft, full lips-

A knock on the door interrupted the thoughts Nick didn’t want to be having but couldn’t seem to stop. He untwisted the sheet from his ankle, retrieved his blue jeans from the worn carpet and went to answer the door.

In the harsh glare of morning sunlight, Nick hallucinated a short, rounded angel with a wrinkled, cherubic face and a halo of snow-white curls. She wore a navy blue dress with white lace on the collar just like the one his grandmother had worn for church and funerals. She beamed up at him and shoved a large tray toward him. “Good morning, Mr. Claiborne. I brought you some breakfast.”

He blinked a couple of times but the hallucination didn’t go away. In fact, his nose was getting in on. the act now, telling him the angel carried bacon, eggs and coffee on that tray.

He stepped back, allowing the angel to enter his room. With any sort of luck, he could get a few bites of those eggs and a couple of sips of coffee before the hallucination vanished.

“I’m Mabel Finch,” she said, shoving aside the lamp on the bedside table and setting down the tray. “My husband, Horace, and I own this place. Horace is the one who let you in last night.”

She lifted the napkin, exposing a plate covered with crisply fried bacon, scrambled eggs, two delicately browned biscuits, a bowl of gravy and a large mug of coffee. Nick was positive then that she was an angel and he was in heaven. He must have died sometime during the night, probably a heart attack from one of those high-voltage dreams about Analise.

“Th-Thank you,” he stammered. “This is great.” Mabel bustled across the room and opened the curtains then leaned back against the dresser, folding her arms across her ample bosom. “Analise wanted you to have a good breakfast. She said you didn’t eat anything last night except a handful of cookies.”

Analise. He might have known. He drew his fingers over his stubbled jaw, needing to feel the slight prickle of reality. “How long have you known Analise?”

“Since about seven this morning. Sit. Eat. You don’t want to be late for church.”

“Church?” He plopped onto the edge of the bed. Damnedest motel he’d ever stayed in. Being served breakfast in his room by the motel owner was nice, but being sent to church was, he thought, a little pushy. However, it was a small price to pay for this kind of food.

He unfolded the napkin, picked up the fork and began to eat.

“Analise told us all about why you’re here, looking for that Abbie Prather person.”

Nick broke open a flaky biscuit, poured gravy over it and crunched another piece of bacon. He wasn’t going to let Analise interfere with this unexpected feast. He wasn’t

“Horace and I bought this place ten years ago from the Claxtons who sold out and moved to Arizona because he had arthritis and they’d heard the climate was better there. We’re from Wisconsin, so this climate seems better to us. It’s all relative, I guess. Anyway, we don’t know Abbie Prather or June Martin, but if she lives out away from everything and keeps to herself, we might not know her since we’ve only been here ten years. I told Analise that the ministers would be the ones to ask because they know everybody.”

Like an embezzler would go to church, Nick thought, breaking open the second biscuit.

“And sure enough, when Analise called Bob Sampson, who pastors the Freewill Baptist Church on Grand Avenue, he told her to come talk to him. Analise said she was sure you wouldn’t mind her borrowing your car and going over there so we wouldn’t have to wake you.”

More gravy on that biscuit, Nick ordered himself Muffle everything this woman is saying with eggs and bacon. Drown it in coffee.

But it was no use. She had his attention.

Analise had borrowed his car? Since he had the only key, that must mean she’d practiced more of her questionable skills and hot-wired it.

“She said to tell you that she’ll be back to get you during Sunday school so you can both go to the service at eleven,” Mabel continued, then shook her head slowly, the action not disturbing her tight curls. “I don’t believe the good Lord will mind if she wears those purple shorts to church, but we’re Methodists. I’m not so sure about those Baptists. I offered to loan her one of my dresses, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

Purple shorts?

He laid down his fork, drained the cup of coffee and gave up.

Before he was even out of bed, Analise had befriended the motel owners, procured breakfast for him, found a contact who remembered their missing party, stolen his car and gone to church in purple shorts.

And he’d thought he was finished with taking care of, riding herd on and bailing out irresponsible, resourceful females.

Not that his ex-wife, Kay, had ever sent his libido spiraling out of control the way Analise did.

How the heck was he going to keep her out of trouble when he was in major trouble himself?

Analise left the Reverend Robert Sampson’s house and headed back to the motel to get Nick so they could go to church and talk to other long-standing members of the congregation who might remember Abbie Prather—a.k.a. June Martin—and Sara.

A vivid picture was emerging of the woman who’d caused Lucas’s family untold agony, and it wasn’t a pretty one. She’d been so strict on her daughter that even the Reverend Sampson, a by-the-book clergyman, thought she was cruel rather than dedicated.

The decrepit car Analise had borrowed from Nick inched along the asphalt, so slow she wanted to open the door, put her foot out and push. What a difference from her own car, a small red sporty model with five on the floor and enough power to keep her in regular speeding tickets.

But her car was parked at the Tyler airport while she chugged along in this clunker, fighting her impatience to get back to the motel, back to Nick to share her news with him. Not that she was especially anxious to see him again, or that she felt any need to tell him what she’d accomplished, to prove that she wasn’t flaky. It didn’t bother her one bit if he thought she was flaky. And after last night, she’d bet her beloved fast red car that he definitely thought she was.

Yesterday had not been one of her diamond days. More like a lump-of-coal day, actually. And Nick had been the crowning lump, a promise of escalating fiascoes to come if she couldn’t control her obsessive penchant for flirting with trouble.

Nick was the complete opposite of Lucas. Lucas was safety, security, a friend she could count on. Nick was danger, an invitation to the unknown, to taste the exhilaration of a flight into skies that terrified her even as they tempted her, to prove she could do it.

For most of the night she’d lain awake in the hot little room at the motel, trying to forget the way his accidental touch had made her feel, the way the scent of him had invaded her senses and lingered as surely as if he’d been in that bed with her.

She gripped the steering wheel tightly and ordered herself to stop thinking about that. Not only were those inappropriate feelings for an engaged woman, they were inappropriate feelings for a sane woman. Her bad habit of dancing with disaster usually resulted in a catastrophe rather than success.

She’d left her room early and, to her surprise, found a lead, something she could do to be useful, to take her mind off those hazardous-to-her-health feelings. She’d come up with information that would help them locate Abbie...and rescue Sara.

The familiar sound of a siren intruded on her thoughts.

Automatically her foot hit the brake while her eyes scanned the descending speedometer needle.

Damn! Had she been speeding again? What was the speed limit, anyway? She’d been too caught up in her thoughts to notice.

This decrepit car couldn’t possibly be speeding! Maybe the dangling taillight had fallen completely off, or the wire Nick had used to hold up the muffler broke or maybe the car with its three shades of rusty paint and primer violated some law of ugliness.

In her rearview mirror she watched the young officer swagger up to her car.

Swaggering was not a good sign.

She located her driver’s license and held it out the window as the man approached. She didn’t want him to look too closely inside, to see that she’d hot-wired the car rather than wake Nick to ask for the keys, rather than risk going inside that overheated motel room where he slept, probably in the nude, when she was already overheated.

The policeman accepted her license wordlessly then went back to his car to, she assumed, check for wants and warrants. Good grief! The police in Briar Creek never did that! She could be here all day!

Finally he swaggered back and leaned down to look in, dark sunglasses hiding his eyes. She leaned toward him so he couldn’t see the dangling wires.

“Going a little fast, weren’t you, Ms. Brewster?” And she’d have to go twice as fast to make up for lost time after this. “Only a little,” she protested. Why didn’t he give her a clue? Tell her what the speed limit was?

“Oh? How fast do you think you were going?”

How did she know what answer she should give when she had no idea what the speed limit was? “Well, I think possibly the speedometer said somewhere around about the vicinity of fifty-eight.”

He straightened and began to scribble on his clipboard. “The speed limit through this stretch is forty-five. Big sign a mile back.”

Great. An out-of-state ticket to start a brand-new blunder list for today.

“But you see,” she improvised, “this car is eleven years old, and since carbon buildup in internal combustion engines results in a gradual slowing of all exposed parts revolving counterclockwise, it’s necessary to deduct approximately one mile every year, which means I was only doing forty-seven, and what’s a couple of miles between friends?” She gave him her best smile.

The officer stopped writing, lowered his clipboard, raised his sunglasses to his forehead and looked at her. “What?”

“I said—”

“Never mind.” He shook his head and replaced his sunglasses. “It’s not right, whatever you said. You were doing fifty-nine. Slow down.”

“Okay,” she agreed. Had her gobbledygook really worked? Was she going to get off without a ticket?

He raised his clipboard again, dashing her hopes with the action. “You didn’t signal when you changed lanes, either.”

“But there was nobody else on the highway to signal to!”

“You have to obey the law all the time, not just when there’s somebody watching. Anyway, I was watching.”

She sighed. “All right. From now on I’ll signal before changing lanes if it’s two o’clock in the morning and I’m in the middle of the Sahara Desert.”

“You’re not wearing your seat belt.”

“It’s an old car. The belt’s broken.”

“I need to see your vehicle registration.”

Amazing what a quick downswing her luck had taken in the last few minutes. The way things were going, Nick’s contact probably hadn’t left them the vehicle registration.

Fumbling in the glove box, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks when she found the document. She gave it to the policeman, leaned her elbow out the window and smiled as innocently as she could.

“This vehicle’s registered to Fred Smith of Omaha, Nebraska.”

“Yes, it’s a borrowed car.”

He took a step backward and his hand dropped to his gun. “Borrowed?”

Analise froze. Was she going to be shot for taking Nick’s car that wasn’t really Nick’s car? “Yes, borrowed! You see, my friend...well, he’s not really my friend.” Oh, dear! She was getting nervous and incoherent. “My detective,” she said firmly, pleased with herself for finding the right word, “Nick Claiborne, flew into a small airport and it was late and his friend...well, I don’t know if it was his friend or just an acquaintance...anyway, he left him this car and I borrowed it this morning because I had to go to church and find out about Abbie Prather who’s now June Martin and—”