One-Night Love-Child. Anne McAllister

the meantime…

      Flynn shoved back his chair and got up to prowl the room, cracking his knuckles. It was on his return to the desk that his eyes were drawn to the spot of blue paper in the bottom of the bin.

      It was every bit as dirty and crumpled and unappetizing as Mrs. Upham had said. And yet it intrigued him.

      It wasn’t another bill or another set of estimates. It wasn’t a circular about a farm auction or an invitation to Lord and Lady So-and-So’s house party. It wasn’t stuffy. It wasn’t embossed.

      And it was, he could see, addressed half a dozen times over, to him. A call from his old life.

      “Junk,” his father would have said, dismissing it.

      But he had never been his father, as they all well knew.

      Flynn reached down and fished it out. The original address had been sent to him in care of Incite magazine in New York City.

      His brows lifted at that. Once upon a time he’d done entertainment personality pieces and feature articles for them. But he hadn’t written articles for Incite in years. Not since he’d covered what had been dubbed “The Great Montana Cowboy Auction” in tiny Elmer, Montana, six years before.

      His father had always called those articles “fluff” and said it was a pity Flynn hadn’t been good enough to write real news about something that mattered.

      In fact, he had been. And the succession of addresses crossed out on the envelope were pretty much a record of where he had proved exactly that: Africa, the East Indies, west central Asia, South America, the Middle East.

      One hot spot after another, each one hotter than the last.

      Now he stared at the envelope, caught up in a flickering cascade of memories—of excitement, of challenge, of life.

      He studied again the firm but neat feminine handwriting beneath the others. He didn’t recognize it. He was amazed that the letter had caught up with him at all. It must have been a labor of love or sheer stubborn perseverance on the part of the world’s post offices. The single U.S. domestic postage stamp had first been canceled in November five years before.

      Five years?

      Five years ago last November Flynn had been in the middle of a South American jungle, writing a “real news story” on twenty-first-century intertribal warfare—by experiencing it firsthand.

      “You sure you want to do this?” His editor in London had been skeptical when Flynn had announced he was going. “You’ve already been shot once this year. This time you could get yourself killed.”

      That had been the general idea at the time.

      His older brother, Will—“the heir,” his father had always called him—had died just months before. And depending how you looked at it—certainly if you looked at it the way the earl did—Will’s death had been Flynn’s fault.

      “He was going to the airport to meet you!” the earl had railed, feeling only his own pain, never even acknowledging Flynn’s. “You’re the one who had to come home to recover! You’re the one who got shot!”

      But not the one who’d died.

      That had been Will—steady, sensible, responsible Will who had stopped on the way to the airport to help a motorist change a flat tire and got hit by a passing car.

      In a matter of an instant, the world changed—Will was gone and Flynn had become “the heir” in his place.

      It was hard to say who was more dismayed—Flynn or his father.

      Certainly when he’d recovered from his gunshot wound received pursuing one of those “real news stories that mattered”—the one he’d come home to recuperate from when Will had been killed—no one, least of all his father, had objected when he’d left for the intertribal warfare in South America.

      No one had objected when he’d pursued increasingly dangerous assignments after that.

      But no matter how dangerous they were, no matter that he got shot again, more than once, Flynn hadn’t died. He’d still been the heir when his father had dropped over from a heart attack last July.

      Now he was the earl. He wasn’t traveling the world anymore. He was stuck at Dunmorey Castle.

      And a five-year-old letter that had chased him around the world and finally tracked him down seemed far less demanding—and much more appealing—than thinking about any of that.

      Flynn slit it open. Inside was a single sheet of plain white paper. He took it out and unfolded it. The letter was brief.

      Flynn. This is the third letter I’ve written you. Don’t worry, I won’t be writing any more. I don’t expect anything from you. I want nothing. I just thought you had a right to know.

      The baby was born this morning just after eight. He was seven pounds eleven ounces. Strong and healthy. I’m naming him after my father. Of course I’m keeping him. Sara.

      Flynn stared at the words, tried to understand them, put them in a context where they would make sense.

      Expect…nothing…right to know…baby.

      Sara.

      The paper trembled in his fingers. His heart kicked over in his chest. He started again—this time with the signature: Sara.

      An image of intense brown eyes, flawless ivory skin and short-cropped dark hair flickered through his mind. A vision of smooth golden skin and the taste of lips that spoke of cinnamon and spice teased his thoughts.

      Sara McMaster.

      Dazzling delightful Sara from Montana.

      Good God.

      He stared at the letter as its meaning became clear.

      Sara had been pregnant. Sara had had a baby.

      A boy…

      His son.

      It was Valentine’s Day.

      Sara knew this because last night she had helped her five-year-old son, Liam, print his name laboriously on twenty-one Valentine cards complete with cartoon-art mutant creatures saying, “Be Mine” and “I’m 4 U.”

      She knew it because together they had covered a shoe box with white paper and red hearts to be his own “mailbox” at kindergarten and because she had baked cupcakes—chocolate ones with chocolate frosting and red and white candy hearts on them—as right before he went to bed Liam remembered he had volunteered to bring the cupcakes for the class party today.

      And she knew because—for the first time since Liam was born—she actually had a date.

      Adam Benally had asked her to dinner. He was the foreman out at Lyle Dunlop’s place. He had come to the valley a few months ago from Arizona. A widower with a past he didn’t often talk about, he was at least candid about “trying to outrun his demons.” He’d brought the ranch accounting work in for Sara, and that was how they’d got to know each other.

      No stranger to demons herself, Sara thought she and Adam might have a lot in common. He at least was getting past his demons. It was about time she got past hers.

      “You can’t be a recluse forever,” her mother, Polly, had told her more than once. “Just because you had one bad experience…”

      Sara let her mother talk because that’s what Polly did. A lot. And her mother was probably right about the recluse part. It was the “bad experience” part that was the sticking point.

      It hadn’t been bad. At least not while it was going on. While it was going on it had been the most amazing three days of her life. And then…

      Nothing.

      That was the bad part. That was the part that made her gut clench every time she thought about it. The part that spooked her, that made her hesitant to ever