For The Twins' Sake

She hadn’t known Dawson’s was reopening. She’d heard that Noah’s widowed father had died and that he’d left the dilapidated ranch to his six children. She’d thought about going to the funeral but wasn’t sure she’d be welcome. She’d been showing then and didn’t want to make Noah uncomfortable, so she’d stayed home. She also would have had to get around Willem about where she was going, and she hadn’t had the energy for that.

When she’d woken up about three hours after giving birth, the rain had been coming down hard. Willem had left their daughter on a ranch porch in the middle of the night during a rainstorm? The Dawson ranch in Bear Ridge was over an hour away from the Perry house in Wellington.

She swallowed back a wail building up deep inside her. “I’m going to see Noah now. My daughter is alive. I feel it.”

“I hope so, Sara,” Holton said. “It seems clear that Willem expected this letter to be read decades from now. There are two bombshells, really. Your daughter. And the midwife’s culpability. We can discuss options for how to proceed there.”

She’d deal with that later. Right now, she only wanted to see her baby girl with her own eyes. Hold her. Get her back.

She reached for her long cardigan and put it on, then gripped the handle of Chance’s stroller. He was fast asleep.

“Sara, again, I’m very sorry,” Holton said. “I hate to bring this up right now, but I do need to tell you that you’ll need to vacate the house within fourteen days. You may take your personal possessions, but everything else now belongs to the estate. If there’s anything you’d like to take, do it before tomorrow, when the appraisals will begin.”

She nodded again. She couldn’t wait to leave that house. Where she’d move, she had no idea. But she did know where she was going now.

To see Noah Dawson. And get her baby girl.

“Should we give Bolt an apple slice?” Noah asked his baby daughter, snug in the carrier strapped to his chest.

He stood at Bolt’s stall in front of the small barn beside his cabin, the mare nudging his arm for her apple. “We should? I agree.” He pulled the baggie of apple slices from his pocket.

Annabel didn’t respond, but according to the book on your baby’s first year, she wouldn’t make sounds or coo for another couple of weeks.

He’d learned quite a bit about babies in the past seven weeks. He’d been right that Annabel had only been hours old when she’d been left on his porch. Doc Bakerton had been a grouch at being woken up at 2:20 in the morning—until he’d seen why Noah had come blazing over.

Because Bakerton was getting up there in years—nearing eighty—and had long been a rural doctor, he hadn’t said anything about calling the sheriff or social services. Noah had showed him the note he’d found in the carrier, and that had been good enough. “The system doesn’t need another abandoned baby when the perfectly good father is standing up,” the doctor had said with a firm nod. Bakerton declared the infant healthy but small, recommended two possible pediatricians to follow up with and sent Noah on his way to beat the worst of the rain.

And so a little over twenty minutes after arriving, Noah had taken the baby home, shell-shocked but focused on the immediate here and now, not even tomorrow. The doc had given Noah some samples of formula and more diapers and wipes and had made a list of the basics Noah should buy in the morning.

Some of the shock had started to wear off while he’d been at Bakerton’s, mostly because he’d realized he could simply leave the infant with the doctor, who’d call whoever needed to be called. The sheriff. Social services. And that would be that.

But what Bakerton had said kept echoing in his head as he’d watched him move that little stethoscope around the tiny back and chest...when the perfectly good father is standing up.

Noah Dawson, perfectly good father? He would have burst out laughing if the situation hadn’t been so incredibly lacking in humor. Thing was, after all that he’d been through, all he’d lost, after the bad day he’d had with a sick calf, Noah had appreciated the extra show of faith in himself as a human being, and Bakerton had uttered the right words at exactly the right moment. The note said the baby was his. The perfectly good—or able, he figured Bakerton had meant—father was here with the infant, doing exactly what he should be doing. That was two for two on the faith scale.

He’d driven slow as his late grandmother’s molasses back to the ranch in the pouring rain, and once inside he’d gone straight to his laptop, holding the tiny baby along his arm as he watched a YouTube video on how to mix formula, how to hold the bottle—how to hold a newborn, for that matter. Turns out he hadn’t been doing that too wrong. He’d watched each video twice. By the time he’d closed his laptop, word had come that the river had flooded and two roads into town were impassable. He’d breathed a sigh of relief at the timing; the baby was safe and had been checked out, and Noah had what he’d needed to get through the night. The universe had been looking out for Noah lately.

They’d both survived that first night. While feeding the tiny infant, he’d realized he’d have to name her, and Annabel popped into his mind and that was that. He’d refused to let himself dwell on why.

Annabel Dawson. It wasn’t official anywhere, not yet, but he’d have to deal with that too—getting Annabel a birth certificate while worrying that some bureaucrat would demand he hand his baby over.

His baby.

How Noah had gotten from where he’d been the night he’d found Annabel to his baby rolling off his tongue with ease was anyone’s guess, but it had happened, and no one was more surprised than his sister. When the roosters had announced it was officially morning, he’d called his sister, Daisy, who lived out in Cheyenne, and boy, had she been in shock. She’d driven up by early evening and helped him so much—with Annabel and the ranch—the baby making her smile when he’d catch her looking so worried so often. Daisy had been close to five months pregnant then and wouldn’t say a word about who the father was. She’d seemed relieved to have a reason to move somewhere, even to the family ranch, with its tangled roots and all.

Up until the moment he’d found Annabel, he’d spent the four months prior rebuilding the Dawson Family Guest Ranch. That had changed him, turned him around, made him a better person and had to have something to do with how immediately responsible he’d felt for the baby left on his porch—his baby. Add that to a tiny finger clutching his pinkie while feeding her. Being up all hours of the night checking on her—sometimes just to make sure she was still breathing. Googling “lullabies newborns like” and then playing them, and then singing them himself while sitting in the rocker he’d gotten from the town swap shop. Changing diapers. Playing peekaboo. Reading the pertinent pages of Your Baby’s First Year and googling all the little things Annabel did that he wasn’t sure was normal. Like burping so loud from that tiny body.

During the past seven weeks, he and Annabel had gotten even closer with all the walking around the vast property of the ranch, the baby against his chest in the Snugli and cozy footie pajamas. He’d told her all about the history of the ranch—how his grandparents had built it fifty-two years ago, how popular it had once been with tourists and locals coming to relax out in the country, to hike or ride on the vast trails in the woods and open grasslands, to learn to ride a horse, shear a sheep, spin fleece into yarn, milk cows and goats, and make butter and yogurt and his grandmother’s award-winning ice cream, which she’d sold right in their own little shop in the main barn. Bess Dawson had always handed each of her grandchildren a little spoon and sample cup of her new flavors to make sure the ice cream passed the kid test, and every flavor always had. Noah could still taste his favorites: chocolate-chocolate chip, strawberry, Bear Ridge Mix—pistachio ice cream with peanuts. Noah had also told Annabel how his widowed father had destroyed it all within three years of inheriting the place, drinking and gambling away profits, savings, their legacy, his six kids eventually scattering across the West to get away from him.

Noah was the youngest and had been trapped there for a good bunch of those low years. Daisy, two years older, watched over him the best she could until she’d been driven away by their dad’s self-destruction when she was eighteen. Noah had also left the moment he’d become a legal adult, all his pleading to his father to get his act together going in one ear...

Ten years later, the Dawson Family Guest Ranch had been a ghost ranch, rarely mentioned anymore except for someone in town to shake their head over its demise. But with the money Noah and his siblings had invested, he and a hardworking crew had gotten the place in shape—albeit on a smaller scale than the original—in just five months so they could open Memorial Day weekend. The day after tomorrow, Friday, was the grand reopening. His brothers hadn’t responded to his invitation to stop by for the big day, and Noah wouldn’t be surprised when none showed up.

“Let the place go,” the Dawson siblings had all said to Noah one way or another at their father’s funeral.

Except Noah hadn’t been able to—and then his siblings had rallied around him, making a plan to invest in rebuilding because doing so meant something to him and would mean everything to their grandparents. Noah wouldn’t ever let the ranch go. For many reasons. So many reasons he hadn’t even told Annabel all of them yet. And he’d told her just about everything. His confidante was a seven-week-old, ten-pound, nine-ounce baby with chubby cheeks. There was a first for everything.

He heard a car coming up the drive and turned around. A silver Range Rover SUV was barreling up the dirt road toward the foreman’s cabin. Did he know anyone who drove a Range Rover? The eldest Dawson sibling, Ford, maybe. But Ford had also said hell would freeze before he’d step foot on the ranch again.

Whoever it was sure was in a hell of a hurry to get to the cabin.

One hand protectively on the back of Annabel’s head in the Snugli, he watched the SUV suddenly come to a dead stop halfway up the drive. The glare from the sun made it impossible to see who was behind the wheel. Why stop there?

The Range Rover suddenly started up again and inched forward, this time at two miles an hour.

When the SUV finally got within a few feet, he could see inside.

Holy hell.

Sara.

How long had it been? Almost two years. After she’d told him she was marrying Willem Perry—he could barely even think the name in his head without wanting to vomit or hit something—he’d then heard they’d moved out to Wellington, an affluent town an hour away. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since. He’d been close with Sara’s only living relative, her father, but Preston Mayhew had gotten very sick a few months before she’d married Willem. He’d also heard Sara had had her dad transferred from the county hospital to the state-of-the-art one in Wellington. Noah had once called about visiting hours and was told that all visitors had to be preapproved by Willem Perry. So much for that. It was better that there was no one to talk to him about Sara or what she was up to or how great her life was with that bastard Willem; Noah wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

The car door opened and she stepped out, and his heart lurched. That wasn’t a surprise. The sight of Sara Mayhew had always had that effect. Not just because she was so pretty with her silky light brown hair and round, pale brown eyes; his attraction to her had always been about who she was, not how good she looked. Though she did look good.

She must have heard about the Dawson Family Guest Ranch reopening this weekend and decided to check the place out for herself. After all, she’d grown up here too.

“I can’t tell you how great it is to see you, Sara,” he said, surprising even himself with his honesty. But it was bursting out of him. He’d missed her so much the past couple of years that he’d done regretful things to forget her, nothing working.

She shut her car door and walked toward him, her gaze on the Snugli, then moving up to his face. “You found that baby on your porch seven weeks ago? The early-morning hours of April 9?” Her voice sounded strange. Desperate and shaky.

He stared at her, his grip a bit tighter on the baby carrier. “How did you know that?”

“Because Willem—my late husband—is the one who put her there. She’s mine, Noah. My daughter.”

What? Noah took a step toward Sara, then a step back. “There was a note with her. It said she’s mine.”

Sara shook her head. “She’s not yours. Willem told me she died during the home birth. But he just didn’t want her because she was a girl and frail-looking when her healthy, robust twin brother—the male heir—had been born two minutes earlier.”

No. That’s insanity. On what planet does that sound believable? Even the worst of the worst like Willem Perry wouldn’t do something like that. To his own flesh and blood? His newborn daughter?

She stepped forward, her gaze on the baby’s head before looking up at him. “He left a letter for me via his lawyer detailing how he drove her here right before the rain started to come down in the middle of the night. I had no idea. I thought she didn’t survive the birth.” A sob escaped her, and she put her hand over her mouth.

Oh God. Unthinkable.

So unthinkable that it wasn’t quite sinking in. All he could do in the moment was look at Annabel, whom he’d taken care of for the past almost two months, whom he loved. She was his daughter. The note had said so. She was his child.

“That’s my baby girl, Noah,” she said, taking another step, then stopping. Maybe because of the expression on his face, which had to be something like horror.

For a second he could only stare at Sara, trying to process the craziness that had just come out of her mouth.

He thought about the first moments after bringing Annabel inside the night he’d found her. There had been something familiar about the little face, something in the expression, the eyes, that he couldn’t pin down. He’d figured the baby’s mother was a woman he’d been with for one night...

He and Sara had made love hundreds of times during their brief time as a couple, but the last time was right before she’d dumped him two years ago. He certainly wasn’t the father of her daughter.

He glanced down at what he could see of Annabel’s little profile, and yup, there it was, that slight something in the turndown of the eyes, the way the mouth curved upward. It was Sara’s face. No wonder he’d felt so strangely connected to Annabel from the moment he’d brought her inside the cabin—before he’d even read the note falsely declaring the baby was his.

“I want to hold her so badly,” Sara said. She reached out, and Noah felt the surrender everywhere in his body—the region of his heart most pointedly. This was Sara’s baby. Not his.

Hell, he might break down crying. But he lifted Annabel out of the carrier. He handed her over with a stabbing awareness that this was it—it was over. His stint at fatherhood. He was proud of what he’d accomplished with the ranch, but he was proudest of what he’d accomplished with his daughter.

Not his daughter. He’d have to take that phrasing out of his vocabulary, out of his head. She wasn’t his.

As Sara clutched the baby to her chest, tears streaming down her face, he closed his eyes, not surprised by the weight of sadness crushing his chest.

He loved Annabel. That was a surprise. But it was true.

“Is there somewhere I can go to spend time with her?” Sara asked, her gaze moving from the baby to Noah as she gently touched her wispy light brown curls, her cheek, her arm, her little fingers. “I just can’t believe this is real.”

Me either. He stared at his daughter—her daughter—and the jab in his chest intensified.

“You can take her into the cabin,” he said. “She’s eaten recently and been changed, so she’s all set.”

Now she stared at him, as if shocked he knew anything about Annabel’s feeding and diaper-changing schedule.

“My son, her twin brother, is in the SUV,” Sara said. “Could you take him out for me? I can’t bear to let go of my daughter.”

My daughter. My daughter. My daughter.

Noah’s head was swimming, and his knees were wobbly. He nodded and lurched toward the Range Rover, mostly to have something to brace his fall if his legs did give out.

He pulled open the door, and there was Annabel’s honest-to-goodness twin in green-and-white-striped pajamas. They looked so much alike—the wispy light brown curls. The slate-blue eyes. The nose. The expression. It was all Sara.

He took out the car seat and brought it around to where Sara stood. He lifted up the seat to Annabel’s level. The baby that had been in his arms until five minutes ago. “Annabel, you’re about to meet your twin brother.”

Sara’s mouth dropped open. “Annabel? That’s what you named her?”

He nodded. It was Sara’s middle name.

Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked hard.

“This is Chance,” she said. “Chance, meet Noah Dawson. I’ve known him a long time.”

A very long time. “Very nice to meet you, Chance.” He gently touched a hand to the downy little head with its soft brown wisps.

“And Chance, this is Annabel, your twin sister,” Sara added. “You’re back together where you belong.”

Oh hell. He was about to break down himself.

“I want to hear everything,” she said, her pale brown eyes imploring. “From the moment you realized she was outside on your porch to the moment I drove up. I need to know about her life these past seven weeks. But first I just need some time alone with her. To let this sink in.” She cuddled Annabel against her, her gaze going from her daughter to Noah and back again.

All these weeks that Annabel had been right here, with him, her mother had believed that her baby girl was dead. He had to stop thinking about himself and focus on that—what Sara had been through.

And how twin babies had almost been separated forever.

“I understand,” he said, the sturdy weight of the car seat in his right hand making him both happy and miserable. “I’ll help you inside with the twins, and you can have the place to yourself for however long you need. Text me when you’re ready and I’ll come fill you in.”

She let out a breath. “Thank you, Noah. You can’t imagine.” She shook her head, her tear-streaked face his undoing as much as the situation.

He couldn’t imagine.

They started walking to the cabin, which had once been her home when her father had been foreman. She stopped for a moment, staring up at the newly renovated two-story log house with the hunter green covered porch and flower boxes his sister had insisted on putting everywhere. Sara didn’t say anything about the place, how it had changed, but she had much bigger things on her mind than the ranch.

He opened the door, then stepped aside so she could enter with Annabel. He followed her in, wanting to rip his daughter from her arms. He had to stop walking for a second; the pain in his chest was that severe, and dammit, he was worried he’d start bawling like a little kid any second.

He led her into the living room and set Chance’s carrier on the floor beside the sofa. Sara dropped down on the sofa, crying, laughing, staring at the baby girl in her arms.

“Her baby bag is on the stroller by the door if you need anything,” he managed to say. “Plus, there’s a big basket of baby stuff on the side of the coffee table.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off Annabel. She nodded as if barely able to hear him.

“Take as long as you want,” he said. “Text me when you’re ready for me to come back and we’ll talk.” He jotted his cell number down and left it on the coffee table.

She nodded, not taking her eyes off her daughter.

He wanted to grab Annabel away from her and run. Or just stay here, not letting the baby girl out of his sight.

Because no matter how many times he told himself she wasn’t his daughter, he couldn’t make himself believe it.

He forced himself out the door, his heart staying behind.

Chapter Two

Sara couldn’t stop staring at the tiny baby nestled against her chest. Couldn’t stop touching her, couldn’t stop telling her she loved her, that she was so sorry she hadn’t been there the past seven weeks, that nothing would ever come between them again.

On the drive over to the ranch from the lawyer’s office, she’d kept thinking, Please let my daughter be alive. Please let her be there. Please, please, please. Her prayers answered, Sara’s relief, her pure joy at being reunited with her baby girl, trounced her anger—murderous rage, really, at what had been done to the infant, done to Sara. That monster took so much from us. He’s not getting a second more of any piece of me. Not my thoughts or my emotions. Nothing. He’s gone.

“We have so much to catch up on,” Sara whispered, in awe of everything about Annabel. Her ten fingers and toes. Her little nose and chin. The way her chest rose and fell in her sea-foam-green-and-white pajamas with little ducklings across the front. That she was really, truly here.

The baby’s eyes were drooping, and Sara would be happy to sit here forever with Annabel napping in her arms. She glanced down at Chance, who was already asleep in his carrier. The siblings, twins, back together. She took in a deep, satisfying breath. Seven weeks felt like so much to miss out on, but she knew as time went on, she’d be grateful it had barely been two months.

She stood up, gently rocking Annabel, and walked over to the stone fireplace that dominated one wall of the living room, photos on the mantel. She’d lived in this house from the time she was born until she was sixteen, had sat on the sofa facing that fireplace night after night with her father after her mother passed away when she was nine. Talks, homework, reading, her dad’s delicious sub sandwiches as they watched a series they could enjoy together. Her entire life was up in the air right now, but being here in this cabin made her feel safe.

“I grew up here,” she whispered to Annabel. “Your grandma lived here. And your grandfather loved this cabin. He was the foreman here.” Now Noah was.

She froze, biting her lip as Noah’s words came back to her. There was a note with her. It said she was mine.

All this time, Noah had thought the baby was his. She glanced around the room, taking in the pale yellow playpen with its pastel mobile atop it by the bay window. The baby swing. The big basket of baby paraphernalia by the coffee table—she could see neatly folded burp cloths, a pack of diapers, a pink pacifier on a silver tray on the coffee table. An infant stroller was by the front door with a tote bag hanging from its handles. Lots of photos on the mantel were of Annabel, a few of Noah holding her.

She gasped as it really sank in that Annabel had lived here these past seven weeks, that Noah had taken her in—as his daughter.

Was he relieved that the mother had come back to take her? Upset? Noah Dawson was the bachelor of bachelors. Clearly he’d gotten his act together to reopen the guest ranch, but perhaps his siblings were all involved in that. The Noah she’d known near the end of their relationship two years ago didn’t wake until noon, despite having a ranch to run. Didn’t take care of business. Didn’t take care of their fledgling romance, the one she’d fought and kicked so hard for. Turned out Noah Dawson had been right about himself—that he’d only break her heart in more ways than one.

She always thought she knew better, didn’t she.