Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow

“He called me his dad,” Joe whispered as Aaron ran for the phone, eager to brag about his coolness.

Louisa turned to him and said, “Yes, he did.”

Joe paused a moment, lost in the warm glow of Aaron referring to him as dad, my dad, then said, “Thank you.”

Before he knew what he was doing, he leaned down and kissed her. It started soft and tentative, just a quick thank-you. But it slowly built into something bigger and more intense.

Her arms snaked around his neck, holding him tight, as if she didn’t want to let go. The feel of her pressing against him, welcoming his touch, shook him.

“Hey,” Aaron said.

They broke apart with the speed of guilty teenagers caught in the act. Louisa was blushing as she backed up, putting distance between them.

“Hey,” Joe said, trying to keep it light. “It’s okay if he catches us kissing. We’re his parents.”

Dear Reader,

The summer after my thirteenth birthday, I read my older sister’s dog-eared copy of Wolf and the Dove by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and I was hooked. Thousands of romance novels later—I won’t say how many years—I’ll gladly confess that I’m a romance freak! That’s why I am so delighted to become the associate senior editor for the Silhouette Romance line. My goal, as the new manager of Silhouette’s longest-running line, is to bring you brand-new, heartwarming love stories every month. As you read each one, I hope you’ll share the magic and experience love as it was meant to be.

For instance, if you love reading about rugged cowboys and the feisty heroines who melt their hearts, be sure not to miss Judy Christenberry’s Beauty & the Beastly Rancher (#1678), the latest title in her FROM THE CIRCLE K series. And share a laugh with the always-entertaining Terry Essig in Distracting Dad (#1679).

In the next THE TEXAS BROTHERHOOD title by Patricia Thayer, Jared’s Texas Homecoming (#1680), a drifter’s life changes for good when he offers to marry his nephew’s mother. And a secretary’s dream comes true when her boss, who has amnesia, thinks they’re married, in Judith McWilliams’s Did You Say…Wife? (#1681).

Enjoy!

Mavis C. Allen

Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Romance

Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow

Holly Jacobs

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Sharon Lorei, a woman who, even if she’d chosen a different profession, would always have been a true teacher! I was lucky to have her for a teacher at Seneca High School…luckier still to call her a friend.

Books by Holly Jacobs

Silhouette Romance

Do You Hear What I Hear? #1557

A Day Late and a Bride Short #1653

Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow #1683

HOLLY JACOBS

can’t remember a time when she didn’t read…and read a lot. Writing her own stories just seemed a natural outgrowth of that love. Reading, writing, chauffeuring kids to and from activities makes for a busy life. But it’s one she wouldn’t trade for any other.

Holly lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, with her husband, four children and a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Old English mastiff. In her “spare” time, Holly loves hearing from her fans. You can write to her at P.O. Box 11102, Erie, PA 16514-1102 or visit her Web site at www.HollyBooks.com.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Epilogue

Chapter One

“Aaron Joseph, don’t you dare eat that,” Louisa Clancy called, but her grin took any menace from the words. “What have I told you about sneaking chocolates? You’re eating my inventory.”

“Ah, Mom,” the boy said with all the exasperation of a seven-year-old caught in the act of pilfering treats.

“I mean it,” Lou continued, resisting the urge to shake a finger in her son’s face. “I’m closing the store in fifteen minutes, and then we’re going home and eating dinner. You and I both know that if you’ve been munching chocolate, you’re not going to eat a bite.”

“But it was just a taste,” Aaron said, defending his act of petty larceny. “I mean, this is your new chocolate. What if it’s horrible? Then all your customers would go somewhere else. We’d be broke and then you couldn’t buy me a new video game.”

“Oh, so you’re just snitching chocolate to be helpful?” she asked.

Aaron nodded his head so hard, Lou wondered how it stayed mounted on his shoulders.

She mussed his hair.

When had he gotten so big? Every time she turned around he seemed to have grown another inch. “Well, thanks for thinking of my business. Your thoughtfulness is noted, even though I suspect you’re more worried about buying video games than living on the street.”

Sighing at the injustice of being seven—or maybe sighing because of his failed robbery attempt—Aaron thumped his way out of the showroom and into the back room.

Louisa looked around her store, making sure everything was ready to close for the day.

Her store. The words sounded as sweet as the chocolate she sold. She’d owned it for less than a year, but already The Chocolate Bar had more than lived up to its name and its Perry Square location felt like home.

The bell over the front door chimed merrily as Lou slid an envelope back behind a stack of birthday cards.

She glanced at her watch. Five more minutes until she shut the doors. This was her last customer of the day.

She turned, plastered her business smile in place and said, “Hi. Welcome to The Chocolate Bar.”

She looked up. Her smile slowly faded as she stared into piercing green eyes she hadn’t seen in almost eight years.

“Joe,” she whispered as she stared at the one man she never wanted to see again. Despite that fact, her heart sped up of its own accord.

“Hello, Lou. Fancy meeting you here.”

Joseph Delacamp could have kicked himself.

Fancy meeting you here?

What kind of lame greeting was that?

He stared at Louisa Clancy. She hadn’t changed in the past eight years. At least not much.

She still wore her auburn hair long. It was in a messy ponytail today, making her look more like eighteen than the twenty-seven he knew she was. Blue eyes darted everywhere but at him.

This was more awkward than he’d ever imagined it would be.

Not that he’d imagined walking into a candy store and running into Louisa. For years he’d imagined running into her at home in Lyonsville, Georgia, but he never had. Finally he’d simply decided she wasn’t coming back. But that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about her.

And now here she was.

“So, how are you?” What he wanted to ask was, How could you? But he didn’t.

“Fine. Fine. And yourself?”

“Fine.”

So polite. After all they’d shared, they were reduced to pleasant, little, meaningless social nothings.

Silence hung in the room, thick and painful.

Louisa finally broke it by asking, “So what brings you to Erie?”

“I took a job in the E.R. at the hospital. It was a great offer. Plus, you can walk outside and see the bay.”

He wanted to ask if she remembered all the times they’d talked about Lake Erie, about living on its shores, about buying a sailboat and going out every evening to watch the sunset.

He wanted to ask, but he didn’t. Too much time had passed, and childhood dreams were long since put away.

“So, you did it, then. You’re a doctor,” she said. “I’m not surprised. I always knew you could, I just wasn’t sure if your parents would let you. And you’re working in an emergency room. I know your dad wanted something more in keeping with the family image. A surgeon or some other impressive specialty.”

“I didn’t let my father live my life back in school, and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.” He left the underlying accusation that it was about the only thing that hadn’t changed.

Louisa might look like the girl he’d known so long ago, but she wasn’t who he’d thought she was back then, and he was sure she was even less like his imagined first love now.

“And you?” he asked. “Did you study marketing or advertising like you planned?”

“No. Things—” She stopped short.

Joe wondered what she’d been about to say.

“Well,” she continued, “my plans changed. I came to work in Erie. I opened The Chocolate Bar last year. It’s all mine. At least with the bank’s help it is.”

“When I came here, I never expected to find you here. After—” He forced himself to cut off any recriminations. “Well, it just never occurred to me you’d have come here. Actually, this was the last place I thought I’d find you.”

“You were wrong,” she said with a small shrug of her shoulders.

“What made you look for a job in Erie?”

Erie, Pennsylvania.

When they were in high school back in Lyonsville, they’d sworn they wanted to leave town. They wanted to move someplace where no one knew who the Clancys or the Delacamps were. They wanted to go someplace where they could be anonymous, where no one knew their family histories three or more generations back.

They wanted a chance to be just Joe and Louisa.

Joe remember that day when, as a joke, they’d thrown a dart at a map. It had landed on Lake Erie, just beyond the Erie shoreline.

We’ll move to Erie when I graduate, Louisa had said, laughing.

All these years later, he could still hear the sound of her laughter.

Despite the hardships in her life—her father had been the town drunk before he died and had left Louisa and her mother impoverished—she’d always been laughing. A quiet, joy-filled sound that had made his heart constrict even as it had made her blue eyes light up.

There was no laughter in those eyes today. Just wariness as she answered, “It’s just that I always thought I’d live here. I’d spent such a long time dreaming about a Great Lake, about a place where I could just be me, not ‘Clancy’s kid’—you know how they used to say it with that mixture of scorn and pity in their voices. I just wanted to leave that behind.”

When she’d left that behind, she’d left him behind, as well. Joe didn’t understand it then, and he didn’t now, but he was too proud to ask her why.

Why she’d left him when he would have followed her anywhere.

“I drove here on a whim. I drove to the foot of the dock. It wasn’t as touristy then as it is now. But I stood there, and could look at the peninsula across the bay, and I knew this was home, just like I’d always dreamed it would be.”

“That’s how I felt, too,” he said. “I’d been working at the hospital in Lyonsville, but wanted to do something different. A friend told me he knew someone who was on staff at a hospital that needed an E.R. doctor. When I checked it out and found it was in Erie, well, I knew it was the job for me, so here I am.”

“Welcome to Erie.” She glanced at a door toward the back of the shop, then at her watch. “But as much as I’ve enjoyed catching up, it’s time for me to close.”

“I came in to buy something for the nurses and aides in the E.R. Everyone’s been so great helping me settle in, and I wanted to thank them.”

“Fine, but we need to make it quick. What did you have in mind?”

She was looking at the back of the room again.

Joe looked, as well, but all he could see was a door framed by shelves, loaded with little trinkety sorts of items.

“Do you have any suggestions?” he asked.

“Would you like an assortment of chocolates? That way you’re bound to have something everyone will like in the mix.”

“Fine. Give me…what do you think? Five pounds?”

“Well, that would ensure that everyone got their share and then some.”

“Great. Five pounds, then.”

He watched as Louisa ducked behind the big glass case. She plucked handfuls of chocolate from this pile, then from that, filling up a huge box.

Five pounds of chocolate was an awful lot of chocolate. Not only could he treat the staff, but all the patients, as well.

“So this is all yours?” he asked, needing to fill up the silence.

“Like I said, it’s mine and the bank’s. I bought out my old boss’s equipment when he decided to get out of the candy business.”

She smiled when she mentioned her old boss. Joe felt a spurt of something hot. What was it?

No way could it be jealousy. He and Louisa hadn’t seen each other in almost a decade. They had no claims on the other. He had no cause to be jealous.

“The lease was up on his store,” she continued, “so I moved everything here. Perry Square is perfect. There are so many businesses down here, and there’s been such a surge in tourism that The Chocolate Bar has done well its first year.”

“I’m happy for you.” He paused, looking for something else to say. “Do you ever go home?”

“No. With Mama dying six months after I left…well after that, there was nothing holding me there.”

“I heard about your mother. I was sorry.”

“Me, too. She’d have loved—” Louisa stopped short and stared at him a moment, then gave a little shake of her head “—to see me succeed. She always told me I could do anything I set my mind to.”

“She was an amazing lady.”

Louisa placed the box on the counter. “Here you go.”

“How much?”

“Nothing. It’s on the house.”

“I can’t take it without paying.” He reached in his pocket and withdrew a bill and placed it on the counter.

Louisa looked ready to argue, but suddenly her eyes moved past him, and focused on something behind him.

“Hey, Mom, I’m done with my homework. Can I take a Mud Pie home, do you think?”

Joe turned around and found himself face-to-face with a boy…a boy who had his black hair and his green eyes.

“Aaron, you know better than to interrupt when I have a customer. Go into the back, and I’ll come get you when I’m done.”

“Geez, I just want one stupid Mud Pie,” the boy mumbled as he left the room.

Joe stood, unable to move or say anything, as he tried to process what he’d just seen.

No, who he’d just seen.

“Louisa?” he said as he slowly turned around and faced her.

She didn’t need to answer his unasked question. It was there in her face.

Guilt. “Why?” he asked.

Why had she hidden the fact he had a son—he had a son!

The boy had to be sevenish, he thought, quickly doing the math in his head.

“Why?” he repeated.

Louisa was white as a sheet. “I didn’t mean for you to ever know.”

“That’s obvious,” he said. He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. He didn’t want to.

Even after she’d left him without a word, Joe would have sworn that Louisa would never do anything so despicable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you didn’t want kids—”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know enough. And I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry we rocked your nice, neat little world. You can be sure that wasn’t my intention. You never wanted kids—you made that clear. I didn’t plan on Aaron, but I don’t regret him. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Just walk away and forget that you saw me, forget that you saw him. Go back to the life your parents planned and plotted for you.”

When they were young and talked of a future, he’d said no children. He looked at the mess his parents and Louisa’s parents had made raising children and had decided he wouldn’t take the chance of following in their footsteps.

He was so young then, and all he’d wanted was the woman standing in front of him. He thought she’d known him inside and out, but if she thought he would turn away from her because she was pregnant, she’d never really known him at all.

But she was about to.

Joe needed to think. Needed to somehow find a way to breathe again. He felt as if he’d been sucker punched and there was no oxygen left in the room.

He turned to leave. Not to walk away, but to get his feet planted firmly beneath him before he tried to decide what to do next.

He just had one more question before he left. “What’s his name?”

For a moment he didn’t think Louisa was going to answer.

She sighed and said, “Aaron. Aaron Joseph Clancy.”

She hadn’t even given the boy his last name. The thought added to the pain.

He turned and walked toward the door, chocolates forgotten.

“Joe,” she called. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out.”

But figuring it out was harder than Joe could have imagined. Hours later Joe still didn’t have a clue. His mind couldn’t seem to focus on anything except the fact that he had a son.

Aaron.

The boy’s name was Aaron.

He’d lost the first seven years of the boy’s life…of Aaron’s life. He felt a sense of awe and wonder every time he thought his son’s name.

He made his way to the dock, though if asked he couldn’t have said how he got there.

“Aaron Joseph,” he whispered out loud. He didn’t say Clancy. The boy should be a Delacamp.

Louisa had given the boy his name for a middle name, but that’s the only thing Aaron had of his. He’d walked into the room, looked Joe straight in the eye, and there hadn’t been the slightest trace of recognition.

But Joe had known. Aaron looked just the way he had at that age. All gangly, not quite grown into his body. Dark hair. And his eyes.

Aaron had his eyes.

Joe had given him physical attributes, but nothing else. Not by choice, but that didn’t matter.

Joe had missed so much, so many things he should have done for and with his son.

He’d never gotten to change a diaper, never cradled him when he fussed. He hadn’t seen Aaron take his first step, never kissed a boo-boo. He’d never sat up with him all night when he was sick or afraid. He’d never sung him a lullaby.

Of course, with his lack of singing ability, Aaron probably wouldn’t miss that part, but Joe did. He resented the hell out of it.

The list of nevers kept growing as he sat on a bench at the end of the dock, mindlessly watching the sun sink behind the peninsula.

He hadn’t taken Aaron to his first day of school, hadn’t helped him with his homework. He’d never gotten to teach his son how to stand up to bullies, or how to stick up for the underdogs.

There were just too many “nevers.” The endlessness of them weighed so heavily on Joe he was afraid he couldn’t move under it.

Joe couldn’t change the “nevers.” His heart ached at the thought, but he was sensible enough to acknowledge one fact.

Joseph Anthony Delacamp had a son, and he didn’t plan to miss any more of his life.

That was a promise, to himself and to his son.

“Mamma, you’re sad today,” Aaron said that night.

Louisa had tried to keep up the appearance of normalcy for Aaron’s sake. Oh, rather than cooking dinner, she’d treated him to fast food, but that was a treat. She’d even managed to focus enough to scold him after he showered and missed a dirt smudge on his right arm.

“Soap. It’s not a real shower if you don’t soap all over,” she’d told him.

His grumbling had felt good. It had felt normal.

But nothing else did.

Joe Delacamp had met his son today.

The thought kept intruding, inserting itself between showers and scoldings, making her stomach clench and her head ache.

“Mom?” Aaron repeated.

She’d finished reading a chapter of the newest Harry Potter book to Aaron. It was their evening tradition. She enjoyed sitting next to him, feeling his warmth and sharing the quiet time with her son.

Her son.

Not Joe’s. Joe had made it clear he didn’t want children all those years ago, and today, when he’d turned and seen Aaron…

“Mom? What’s up?”

Joe Delacamp had met his son today.

Louisa pulled herself together and kissed Aaron’s forehead. “Nothing. I’m just tired. See you in the morning, bud.”

She walked woodenly toward the door.

“Hey, Mom?”

She turned back and drank in the sight of her son.

When he’d asked, she’d told him she’d loved his father, that they’d been young—too young to handle a relationship.

That much was true, at least as far as it went. She’d told him when he was older she would help him find and meet his father, if he wanted. He accepted her explanation and never seemed particularly bothered by the lack.

What would he think of Joe?

What would Joe would think of him?

Aaron was snuggled under the denim quilt she’d made him. It fit so perfectly with the dark-blue walls of his room. A giant poster of the planet earth was behind his head, other space pictures dotted the other walls. Aaron dreamed of being an astronaut someday, and she’d done her best to indulge him.

She wanted nothing more than for every one of her son’s dreams to come true.

“Yes, Aaron?” she asked.

“I love you.”

She held back the tears that threatened to overflow and managed to croak out, “I love you, too.”

She turned off the light, and shut the door.

Joe Delacamp had met his son today.

She was still numb.

No, she was aching. There was a lump in her throat, and she thought her heart was going to break all over again.

Joseph Delacamp had come into her store today, and he’d found out he had a child. He wasn’t pleased. She could see that on his face.

Maybe he was worried that she would come after him for support, or would try to make him take some interest in his son. His wife wouldn’t like that. His mother would like it even less.

Well, Louisa could put Joe’s mind to rest. She wanted nothing at all from him. He could keep his society wife and his society life.

Once upon a time she’d thought she couldn’t live without Joe…but she’d learned differently. She wondered that she was able to keep breathing after she’d left town…left him. And yet, day after day, breath after breath, she survived.

Not that it hadn’t been tough at times.

She’d moved to Erie when she was almost three months pregnant and had worked full-time throughout the remainder of her pregnancy for Elmer Shiner at his small chocolate store. Somehow she’d managed to survive her mother’s death, just weeks before Aaron’s birth.

Elmer had helped her through that. And he’d been the one to suggest she bring the baby to work with her, when Aaron was born.

Elmer had started out a boss and turned into her best friend. She smiled at the thought. Oh, maybe it was odd, having a seventy-year-old man as a friend, but Elmer was full of life and wisdom. He was the only father figure Aaron had ever known.

She owed him a debt she’d never be able to repay.

Everything she had, she had because of Elmer.

Aaron had never gone to day care, but had spent his first five years going to the candy store with her. He was a favorite with the customers.

When Elmer’s lease on the building ran out, he announced he was ready to retire, and sold her the chocolate-making machinery at a ridiculously low price.

He’d helped her locate her new building. Helped her set up everything and get the store off the ground. He still stopped in almost every day, just to check on her and was always willing to work when she needed him.

She heard the downstairs door slam.

She rented the upstairs flat. Elmer lived in the lower one. He was home.