Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve: The Paternity Promise / Stolen Kiss From a Prince / The Maid's Daughter

“Don’t you ever get tired of being right?” Blake drawled as he bent to kiss her cheek.

“Never.” Blue eyes only a shade lighter than her son’s skewered Grace. “And that’s something for you to remember, too, missy. Now get over here and so I can give my newest daughter-in-law a hug.”

Enfolded in a bone-crunching embrace and a cloud of outrageously expensive perfume, Grace made the instant transition from employee and former nanny to member of the family. She was so grateful to this fierce and occasionally overbearing woman that she found herself battling tears.

“Thank you for trusting me with Molly and for…and for…everything.”

“We should be thanking you.” The hug got tighter, Delilah’s voice gruffer. “You brought Molly to us in the first place.”

Both women were sniffling when they separated. Embarrassed by her uncharacteristic descent into sentimentality, Delilah flapped a hand toward the stairs.

“I expect you want to see the baby. She’s up in the nursery. I just heard her on the monitor, waking up from her nap.”

The last time Grace had climbed this magnificent circular staircase was as an employee in Delilah’s home. She couldn’t quite get a grip on her feelings as she ascended them alongside Blake, anxious to embrace the baby now making come-get-me noises from the room on the left at the top of the stairs. Nerves played a major role. Excitement and eagerness bubbled in there, too. But mostly it was sheer incredulity that she now had the right to claim this man and this child as hers.

When they swept into the nursery Delilah had furnished so swiftly and so lavishly, Molly was standing up in the crib. Her downy blond hair formed a spiky halo and her blue eyes tracked their entrance with a touch of impatience, as if asking what took them so long.

Grace’s heart melted into a puddle of mush at the sight of her. It disintegrated even more when Molly gave a gurgle of delight and raised her arms.

“Gace!”

Half laughing, half sobbing, Grace swept the baby out of the crib.

* * *

September rolled out and October came in with a nighttime temperature dip into the forties and fifties. As the weeks flew by, a nasty little corner of Grace’s mind kept insisting this couldn’t last. Sometime, somehow, she would pay for the joy she woke up with every morning. But her busy, busy days and nights spent in Blake’s arms buried that niggling thought under an avalanche of others.

Their first order of business was finding a house. Rather than move Molly’s nursery to Blake’s bachelor pad during the hectic process of inspecting available properties, they accepted Delilah’s invitation to occupy the guest wing of her mansion. So naturally both Molly and Delilah went with Grace to check out the possibilities when Blake got tied up at work. Julie, too, when she wasn’t flying or distracted by the business of setting up the home she and Alex had recently moved into.

Grace worried at first that Delilah might try to push her toward something big and splashy, but her mother-in-law was motivated by only one goal. She wanted her granddaughter close enough to spoil at will. So she was thrilled when Grace settled on a recently renovated half-timbered home less than a mile from the Dalton mansion. The two-story house sat well back from the street on a one-acre lot shaded by tall pines. Grace had fallen in love with its oak floors and open, sunny kitchen at first sight, but balked at the five bedrooms until Blake convinced her they could convert one to an entertainment center and one to an exercise room unless and until they needed it for other purposes.

Once the house was theirs, Grace faced the daunting prospect of filling its empty rooms. She thought about tackling one room at a time, but Delilah graciously offered the services of her decorator to coordinate the overall scheme.

“Take her up on it,” Julie urged during a weekend brunch at their mother-in-law’s.

The two brides lolled on the sunlit terrace, keeping a lazy eye on Molly in her net playpen while their husbands checked football scores in the den. Delilah had taken her other guest to the library to show him some faded photographs she’d unearthed from her early days working the oil fields with her husband. Grace found it extremely interesting that Julie’s irascible partner, Dusty Jones, had apparently become a regular visitor to the Nichols Hills mansion.

“The decorator is good,” her new sister-in-law asserted. “Really good.”

Grace could hardly disagree. She’d lived in these opulent surroundings for several months as Molly’s nanny. The Lalique chandeliers and magnificent antiques suited Delilah’s flair and flamboyance, but Grace had lived in constant dread of Molly spitting up all over one of the hand-woven Italian silk seat cushions.

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