A Bride Before Dawn. Sandra Steffen

nephew?” she managed to ask.

      “You don’t have to keep your voice down,” Noah said. “He can sleep through anything, as long as it’s his idea.”

      So the child already had a mind of his own. He sounded like a Sullivan, Lacey thought.

      Gently, Noah placed the car seat on the bar and continued. “I had no right to accuse you of leaving Joey on our doorstep last night. It’s no wonder you didn’t join us for dinner today. That reminds me.” He reached into a canvas bag he’d placed beside the baby, and brought out a clear, covered bowl of spaghetti. “I brought a peace offering.”

      The next thing she knew she was holding the bowl, still slightly warm, in her hands.

      “Are you ever going to say anything, Lacey?”

      She raised her chin and opened her mouth only to reverse the process. She didn’t know what to say. What did a girl say when she was standing three feet away from her first love, a man who looked as if he hadn’t slept, a man whose dark hair was a little too long to be considered civilized, but who continued to keep a steady hand on the car seat where an unbelievably small baby slept?

      “Did you use your homemade spaghetti sauce?” she asked, only to groan aloud.

      She could tell by the slight indentation in his left cheek that his grin was no longer humorless. “Would you accept my apology if I said yes?” he asked.

      Lacey wasn’t ready to smile. She wasn’t one to get angry and get over it. For her, forgiveness was a process. “So this is Joey,” she said, moving to a safer topic. “Have you determined whose son he is?”

      With a shake of his head, Noah said, “We won’t know for sure until Marsh and Reed have a DNA test and get the results. Meanwhile, they’re hoping they can locate Joey’s mother as quickly as possible, not that it’s going to be easy. They’re meeting with the P.I. right now. I’m on baby duty. You can ask me anything you want, but first, I’d like to finish my apology.”

      Lacey placed the bowl of spaghetti on the bar with her camera. Settling onto one of the stools, she made a show of getting comfortable.

      Noah eased onto the stool next to her. Looking at her in the mirror, he said, “Our breakup two-and-a-half years ago came as a shock to me. Hell, it blew me out of the sky. Looking back, I realize it shouldn’t have.”

      She wanted to tell him to stop, because this was dangerous territory, more dangerous than he knew. She took a deep breath and willed herself to hear him out.

      “I don’t know how I could have missed the clues,” he said. “But I did. If there was a little kid within a hundred feet, your eyes were on him. Just like now.”

      She dragged her gaze from Joey and stared at Noah’s reflection. He had the tall, rangy build of a barroom brawler. One of these days he would probably get around to shaving, but it wouldn’t change that moody set of his lips or the depth in his brown eyes. He rarely talked about himself. On the surface, he was all bluster and swagger. If a woman was patient and paid attention, every once in a while she caught a glimpse of the part of him he kept hidden most of the time.

      One day after she’d been seeing him for about a year, he’d taken her flying. It was during that flight that she’d learned how he felt about becoming a father. He was wonderful with kids—she’d seen that for herself—but his feelings about parenthood had nothing to do with how children responded to him and vice versa. That May morning, two thousand feet above the ground, he told her about the day his parents died in an icy pileup on the interstate.

      Every now and then someone in Orchard Hill recalled a memory of Neil and Mary Beth Sullivan. Noah’s mother and father had been well liked and were sadly missed. It was common knowledge that Marsh had stepped directly out of college and into the role of head of the family after they’d died, and that Reed came home two years later to help. The youngest, Madeline, had been everyone’s darling, and Noah was the hell-raiser everybody worried about.

      Until that day, Lacey hadn’t known he’d been in the car when it crashed. With his eyes on the vast blue sky outside the cockpit and the control held loosely in his able hands, he’d described the discordant screech of tires and the deafening crunch of metal. Trapped in the back, he hadn’t been able to see his parents. But he’d heard the utter stillness. The silence. Fifteen-year-old Noah had walked away with a broken arm and minor cuts and bruises—an orphan. He didn’t remember much about the days immediately following the accident. During the burial, the fog in his brain had lifted and he’d solemnly vowed that he was never going to put a kid of his through that. He wasn’t going to have children. Period.

      Over the years she’d tried to find the words to tell him that lightning didn’t strike twice and that their children wouldn’t be orphaned. But who was she to make that promise?

      She’d loved him, and for a long time she’d told herself what they shared was enough. He was right, though. She never had been able to keep her eyes off little ones. After April and Jay had their twins three years ago, yearning to have a baby of her own became an ache she couldn’t pretend didn’t exist.

      “Until you spelled it out for me,” he said, drawing her back to the present, “I didn’t know you even wanted kids. But you did. And I didn’t. It was a classic breakup. End of story, right?”

      Lacey remembered the day she’d ended things with Noah. They used to fight sometimes. When it happened, their arguments were messy and noisy. That final night neither had raised their voices. It made their breakup unforgettable on every level.

      “Then we wound up in bed last year,” Noah said. “And Joey is about the right age to have been a product of that night. That’s no excuse for barging into your apartment last night and accusing you of deserting him. I hadn’t seen you in a while, but I should have known. People don’t change. You knew how it felt to lose your mother. You never would have left a baby on my doorstep. Slapping me with a lawsuit or siccing the cops on me—that I could see you doing.”

      Nothing else could have made her smile just then.

      Their gazes met, and this time it wasn’t in the mirror. Emotion swirled inside her, welling in her eyes. Her doctor in Chicago had told her that sudden tears were part of her healing process. She had a feeling it was too much to hope that Noah didn’t notice.

      She knew how she looked. Her fine dark hair skimmed her shoulders and turned wavy in the summer humidity. Her shorts were threadbare, her T-shirt was thin and her breasts were sensitive. No doubt he noticed that, too.

      She found herself looking into his eyes again. It was easy to get lost in that dark brown gaze. There was a time when she wouldn’t have been able to drag her eyes away. Last night, for example, and a hundred other nights, too.

      Today she flattened her hands on the worn surface of the bar and slid off the far side of her stool. “Okay. I forgive you for scaring the daylights out of me and for accusing me of leaving Joey on your doorstep.”

      He stood, too. Cocking his head slightly, he said, “Can I get that in writing?”

      She rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help smiling, too. Feeling lighter—perhaps there was something to this forgiveness business—she spied her favorite 35 mm camera. The instant it was in her hands, she felt back in her element. She aimed it at Joey, adjusted the focus and snapped a picture.

      The poor baby jerked. His little hands flew up and his eyes popped open. Surprisingly, he didn’t cry. Instead, he found her with his unwavering gaze.

      His eyes were blue and his cheeks were adorably chubby. Fleetingly, she wondered how his mother could stand to be away from him for even a day.

      “I’m sorry,” she murmured quietly. “I didn’t mean to startle you. The next time I’ll ask for permission before I take your picture. Deal?”

      The change in his expression began in his eyes. Like the wick of an oil lamp at the first touch of a lighted match, delight spread across