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

Imply she’d met someone late last year, maybe during the Christmas break, and had spent the spring semester and summer vacation adjusting to the unexpected result. Then Blake Dalton had swooped in and convinced her to marry him.

      Those deliberately vague seeds would sprout and spread to other coworkers. Eventually some version of the story might reach Jack Petrie. It should be enough to throw him off Molly’s scent. It had to be!

      Lost in her contingency planning, she didn’t hear Blake’s return until he came up beside her.

      “One strawberry-peach-mango combo for you. One blueberry-banana for me.”

      She moved the sack with the tarts to make room for him on the patch of grass. Legs folded, he sank down with a loose-limbed athletic grace and passed her a plastic cup heaped with whipped cream and a dark red cherry. They ate in companionable silence, enjoying the scene.

      The Sorgue River flowed smooth and green just yards away. The young lovers were still stretched out nose-to-nose. The father was hunkered down at the river’s bank within arm’s reach of his two laughing, wading daughters. His wife held the baby against her shoulder now and was patting up a burp.

      Grace let a spoonful of her smoothie slide down a throat that suddenly felt raw and tight. This baby looked nothing like Molly. Her eyes were nowhere near as bright a blue, and instead of Mol’s golden curls, she had feathery, flyaway black hair her mother had obviously tried to tame with a jaunty pink bow. Yet when she waved tiny, dimpled fists and gummed a smile, Grace laughed and returned it.

      Blake caught the sound and followed her line of sight. Hooking an elbow on his knee, he watched the baby’s antics until she let loose with a burp that carried clearly across the grass. After another, quieter encore, her mother slid her down into nursing position.

      When Grace gave a small sigh, Blake studied her profile. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw there, or by the plea in her eyes when she turned to him.

      “I’ve had an incredible time in Provence,” she said slowly. “Every day, every night with you has been a fantasy come true.”

      She threw another look at the baby, and he read her thoughts.

      “I miss Molly, too,” he admitted with a wry grin. “Let’s go home.”

Eleven

      His mind made up, Blake moved with characteristic speed and decisiveness. While he and Grace threaded through the crowded market to their car, he used his cell phone to run a quick check of flight schedules for Dalton International’s air fleet. The corporate jet was on the wrong side of the Atlantic, so he booked first-class seats on a commercial nonstop flight to Dallas leaving late that afternoon. With the time differential and the short hop to Oklahoma, they would get home at almost the same hour they departed France.

      That left Grace barely an hour to throw her things together and say goodbye to Auguste and the rest of the staff. Blake’s farewells included exorbitant gratuities for each member of the staff and a promise to bring madame back for a longer stay very soon.

      The rush of leaving and her eagerness to get back to Molly carried Grace halfway across the Atlantic. Having Blake beside her in the luxurious first-class cabin staved off fatigue during the remainder of the trip. His low-voiced, less than complimentary commentary on the action flick they watched together had her giggling helplessly and the other passengers craning to see what was on their screens.

      Fatigue didn’t factor in until after the plane change in Dallas. Fatigue, and a serious case of nerves about coming face-to-face with Blake’s mother again. Delilah had let loose with both barrels at her last meeting with Grace. The note from her that Alex delivered in San Antonio had much the same tone. She hadn’t been happy about the hurry-up wedding and warned that she’d have something to say about it when the newlyweds returned from France.

      Grace couldn’t imagine how the redoubtable Dalton matriarch would react to the altered relationship between her son and his bride. Delilah must have known Blake proposed for strictly utilitarian reasons. Mostly utilitarian, anyway. Would she believe his feelings could undergo a major shift in such a short time? Probably not. Grace could hardly believe it herself.

      * * *

      By the time they turned onto the sweeping drive that led to Delilah’s Nichols Hills mansion, dread curled like witches’ fingers in her stomach. Then the front door flew open and she saw at a glance she’d underestimated Delilah. The older woman took one look at them and gave a whoop that boomed like a cannon shot in the brisk September air.

      “I knew it!” she announced gleefully as they mounted the front steps. “No one can resist the fatal combination of Provence and Auguste. Especially two people who were so danged hot for each other.”

      “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