The Sheriff's Nine-Month Surprise. Brenda Harlen

      “You must have aced geography in school,” she remarked.

      “I didn’t ace anything in school,” he confessed. “But I recently visited the town of Haven.”

      “Why were you there?” she asked, then held up a hand before he could respond. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

      “Why don’t you want to know?”

      “Because almost everyone in Haven knows everyone else—or at least knows someone who knows that someone else, and if it turns out that you hooked up with someone I know, this—” she gestured from her own chest to his and back again “—isn’t going to happen.”

      “Is this—” he copied her gesture “—going to happen?”

      She sipped her wine. “I’m thinking about it.”

      “While you’re thinking, let me reassure you that I’ve never hooked up with anyone from Haven.” His lips curved as he lifted his bottle. “Yet.”

      She set her glass on the table, her fingers trailing slowly down the stem. “You’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”

      “Optimistic,” he told her. “But I do need to ask you something.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Is there anyone waiting for you at home in Haven?”

      “Aside from my father, grandparents, sister, two brothers, several aunts, uncles and cousins, you mean?”

      “Aside from them,” he confirmed.

      “No, there’s no one waiting for me.” She traced the base of her wineglass with a neatly shaped but unpainted fingernail. “What about you, Sheriff Davidson—are you married?”

      He shook his head. “Divorced.”

      “Girlfriend?”

      “No,” he said again. “Any more questions?”

      “Just one,” she said.

      He held her gaze, waiting, hoping.

      “Do you want to take these drinks back to my room?”

       Chapter Two

      Five weeks later

      “I can’t believe you’re leaving.” Trish Stilton pouted as she rubbed a hand over the curve of her hugely pregnant belly. “Especially now, only a few weeks before the baby’s due to be born.”

      Reid dumped the entire contents of his cutlery drawer into a box. Though he didn’t dare say it aloud, considering the imminent delivery of his ex-wife’s baby, he’d decided that his timing was almost perfect.

      “Just last week, I told Jonah that we should ask you to be the godfather, but now that you’re moving to Nevada, that’s out of the question.”

      Which further convinced Reid that he’d made the right choice in accepting the offer to take over the sheriff’s position in Haven. Though he and Trish had been divorced for more than four years and she’d been remarried for almost three, they’d remained close. Maybe too close.

      When she’d walked down the aisle to exchange vows with her current husband, Reid had been the man to give her away. Yeah, it had seemed an odd request to him, but he didn’t see how he could refuse. When she’d found out that she was pregnant, she’d stopped at the Sheriff’s Office to share the news with Reid even before she’d told her husband. And when she’d cried—tears of joy, because she was going to be a mother, mingled with grief, because her child would never know his grandfather—he’d held her and comforted her.

      If she’d asked him to be her baby’s godfather—as Jonah Stilton had warned him she intended to do—Reid wouldn’t have been able to refuse. How could he refuse any request from the daughter of the man who’d saved his life?

      Reid had been an orphaned teenager running with a bad crowd when the local sheriff took him under his wing. He didn’t just turn Reid’s life around, he saved it, and Reid knew there was no way he could ever repay the man who had been his mentor, father figure and friend. So when Hank realized he wasn’t going to beat the cancer that had invaded his body and he’d confided to Reid that he was worried about his daughter, Reid had promised to take care of her. The news of their engagement had been a balm to the older man’s battered spirits, and he’d managed to hold on long enough to see Reid and Trish exchange their vows.

      “I’m honored that you thought of me,” he said to his ex-wife now. “But I’m sure your baby’s father would prefer to have his brother fill that role.”

      “Jonah understands how important you are to me,” she said, without denying his claim.

      “You’re important to me, too, but I think this move is going to be the best thing for all of us.”

      “But why do you have to go so far away?” she demanded.

      “Nevada’s not all that far,” he said soothingly.

      “But Haven?” she pressed. “I looked it up—it might as well be called Nowhere, Nevada, because that’s where it is.”

      “Then I won’t expect you to visit,” he said mildly.

      “Of course, I’ll visit,” she promised. “Because you don’t have any friends or family in that town.”

      “Actually, I do have a...friend...in Haven.”

      “A female friend?” she guessed.

      He nodded.

      “I knew there had to be another reason that you suddenly decided to leave Echo Ridge—something more than a temporary job.”

      “She’s not the reason I’m leaving,” he said truthfully. “But I am looking forward to seeing her again.”

      “What’s her name?”

      Reid shook his head. “None of your business.”

      Trish smiled. “Afraid I’ll track her down and ask about her intentions?”

      “Yes,” he admitted.

      Not that he was really worried. He had no doubt that Katelyn Gilmore could handle his ex-wife. But the attorney had no idea that he was moving to Haven, because they hadn’t exchanged any contact information before they went their separate ways after the conference. And with the perspective that came with time and distance, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made the weekend they’d spent together into more than it really was.

      “Well, it would only be fair,” Trish said now. “You wouldn’t let me go out on a second date with Jonah until you’d done a complete background check on him.”

      “Because your father asked me to take care of you,” he reminded her.

      “He wanted us to take care of each other,” she said.

      And for a while, they’d done just that. But Trish had wanted more than he’d been willing or able to give her—an irreconcilable difference that led to the end of their marriage. When that happened, he felt as if he’d let down Hank as much as Trish, but he knew his old friend would be pleased to see his daughter in a committed relationship with a man who could give her everything Reid couldn’t.

      He was sincerely happy for her, because she was happy. For himself, he’d decided a long time ago that he wasn’t cut out to be a dad. A kid who’d been knocked around by his mother’s various boyfriends for the first six years of his life, then raised by his widowed grandmother for the next eight before being kicked into and around the system didn’t know anything about being a father. He’d lucked out when he’d met Hank. Trish’s father had given him an idea of the type of man a dad should be, but Reid suspected