One

      “So she’s really ours.”

      Mary Ellen Lockhart Fortune tucked her thick, wavy red hair behind her ears and made a silly face at her wriggling granddaughter who smiled, yawned, rubbed her eyes and flipped over onto her belly, quickly crawling toward the end of the couch. Mary Ellen and her tall, handsome son, Logan, both made a grab for the child. Logan reached her first, coming off his seat on the ottoman at his mother’s knee. Holding his daughter at arm’s length—much like an escaped piglet that had found the mud hole—he gingerly carried her back to the original spot and sat her next to his mother. Sixteen-month-old Amanda Sue promptly flopped and flipped, emitting a shrieking grunt in the process, as if warning him not to interfere with her plans again. Mary Ellen chuckled. Logan quivered. The battle of wills his surprise baby daughter had been waging with him these past two hours was wearing on him.

      “She’s a Fortune, all right,” he muttered, capturing his daughter again. Amanda Sue twisted and screamed, then went limp and put back her head in a dramatic sob for release. “That temperament confirms it, as if the blue eyes, hereditary crown-shaped birthmark and the blood test didn’t. Plus, her hair’s almost as red as yours, a little darker, maybe.”

      “She looks like you and Eden,” Mary Ellen said wonderingly.

      “I’m not sure my sister would appreciate being lumped into the same category of looks as me,” Logan said, struggling to put his daughter back on the couch, “but I did notice that Amanda Sue looks like some of Eden’s baby pictures, discounting the hair, of course.”

      “Was her mother red haired?” Mary Ellen asked gently.

      Amanda Sue stopped wriggling and looked up alertly. “Mama,” she called. “Mama?”

      “Poor darling,” Mary Ellen crooned, gathering the child against her. Amanda Sue crammed her hand in her mouth and waited, as if listening for her mother’s voice.

      Logan sighed. “Her m-o-t-h-e-r was a blonde.” He spelled out the word to avoid causing his bewildered daughter to ask for what she could not have, ever again.

      “Her name was Bailey, wasn’t it?” Mary Ellen went on. “Donna Bailey?”

      Amanda Sue’s ears seemed to perk up, but she made no sound. Mary Ellen eased the pacifier pinned to Amanda Sue’s T-shirt into the child’s mouth. The baby sucked absently.