Abby, Get Your Groom!. Victoria Pade
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just sit,” she said, preferring to stay near to the busy street and her apartment.
“Oh, right, you work on your feet all day—taking a walk is probably not high on the list of things you want to do,” he reasoned.
Sure, let him think that.
He stood then, and Abby was struck once more by how tall he was and what a great body he had—lean and toned, muscular, and wow, those shoulders and the way they tapered down to that narrow waist were impressive!
He motioned for her to sit on the now-free bench but she rounded the table and sat on the other side instead.
Something about that distance she put between them made him smile as he slung a long leg over the seat he’d just offered her and took it himself. And when he smiled small lines fanned out from the corners of his astonishingly blue eyes and drew the most appealing little parentheses around that supple mouth.
She tried not to notice, let alone appreciate the sight, but it was almost impossible not to appreciate someone who looked as good as he did.
“How’s the hair?” she asked, letting herself look at him even more closely for a moment to assess the work she’d done on him earlier.
“Best haircut I’ve ever had,” he said without equivocation. “I washed it in the shower, ran a towel over it when I got out and barely had to touch it from there.”
She fought the mental picture of him in the shower—and out of it. Naked. Big and strong and tight. Hard muscles glistening wet. Reaching those impressive arms up to rake a towel over that dark, thick hair and making those massive shoulders stretch while the sinews of his back flexed all the way down to those great glutes she’d caught a peek of when he’d left her station today...
Whew! That was not something she should be thinking about, either! And she wasn’t quite sure where all those details had come from.
She chased the image out of her mind, forced herself to sound cool, detached and objective—which was not how she was feeling—and said, “It isn’t too short...your hair?” she added, reminding herself that that was all she was supposed to be considering.
“Yeah, shorter than I wanted it but you were right to do it. It looks better than it ever has.”
She didn’t know about ever but she did know he looked fantastic there in the late-day, early-autumn sunshine. She restrained herself to say nothing more than an aloof, “Good, I’m glad you like it.”
“My sister is thrilled that you can fit her and her bridesmaids in for the test run Wednesday,” he said then. “And that if that goes well, that you’re free to do the wedding the Saturday after that. Her hopes are high and I told her I didn’t think you’d disappoint.”
“We’ll do our best,” Abby assured, effectively ending the catching-up part of things.
Which, she thought, left them with the reason he’d wanted this meeting. So she waited for him to get to it.
He must have realized it was time for that because he reached into one of his front pockets and produced a key that he held out to her.
She didn’t take it. Instead she narrowed her eyes at him and said, “If that’s the key to your place and this is all some kind of come-on—”
“It isn’t,” he said quickly, setting the key on the picnic table closer to her than to him.
But rather than explaining what the key was for, he said, “Is there anything you know about where you came from? Your family or history or anything?”
“I know the same things you said this afternoon—I was left sleeping on a chair in the hospital waiting room with a blanket and a note saying my name was Abby. Someone along the line added Crane as my last name because there were pictures of cranes on the blanket that I guess I wouldn’t let go of.”
“I’d wondered where that came from.”
“I know that local newspapers did articles and news stations did broadcast stories asking anyone who might be able to identify me to come forward,” she went on, “and no one did. I know that there wasn’t any information other than my first name so I’ve never had a real birth date. The pediatrician who checked me out at the hospital decided I was barely two so they picked a day the month before I was found and that’s what I use when I have to give my date of birth. And that’s it. That’s all I know.”
“I hadn’t even thought about a birth date,” Dylan muttered more to himself than to her.
“Apparently neither did whoever left me.”
“And you don’t remember anything?” he asked.
“I was, as far as anyone could tell, barely two years old. Do you remember anything from when you were two?” Abby countered.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“When I think about it, sometimes I get a vague sort-of sense of being somewhere with too many bright lights and being scared. But it’s really just like a kind of faint dream. I’ve always figured that might be from waking up in the hospital with no one around that I recognized, but I’m not even sure if it’s really a memory or if it’s just how I imagine it was.”
Dylan’s handsome face had sobered considerably as she’d talked and his well-shaped eyebrows were drawn together in a troubled expression before he said, “It was your father who left you at the hospital.”
“And you know this how? Because he was connected in some way to your father?”
“Yes, my family did play a part in you being abandoned...”
He sounded loath to admit that.
Then he said, “Your father is—was—a man named Gus Glassman. Ring any bells?”
“None,” she answered honestly. Why had he corrected himself to say her father was Gus Glassman instead of is? Had he changed his name, or was he...no, she shouldn’t get ahead of herself. She needed to pay attention to what Dylan was saying.
“Well, that key came from him.” Dylan nodded at it. “Gus gave it to a prison chaplain just before he died—”
“Gus Glassman—my father—is dead?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry,” Dylan said with more sympathy, pausing a moment as if out of respect. Or maybe to let it sink in—which was what Abby was trying to let it do.
But it wasn’t easy. These were just words to her. There were no instant emotions the way she’d thought there would be.
“According to the chaplain,” Dylan went on, “he was the first person Gus ever told about abandoning you. He asked the chaplain to find you, to find the lockbox that this key opens and to give the contents to you.”
“So where’s the chaplain?” Abby asked.
“He came looking for Camdens because there’s a connection. And talking to the Camdens means going to GiGi, first and foremost... GiGi is what we call my grandmother. She’s the head of the family.”
“A prison chaplain just showed up on the doorstep of the foremost Camden with this story and a key to a lockbox? Why? What does your family have to do with it?”
“We actually just found that out ourselves. Recently, we learned that twenty-eight years back your father worked for Camden Superstores. He was on the payroll as store security, but he did more than that...” Dylan said quietly, as if it was something else he didn’t want to admit.
“What more did he do?” Abby asked, feeling removed from what he was telling her, still just trying to absorb it.
“It looks as if, when there was something brewing somewhere that could turn into a headache for some part of the business, my great-grandfather—H.J. Camden—had a few