For The Twins' Sake. Melissa Senate
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just then, then drooped, opened, drooped, then closed again. There was something familiar about the little face, something in the expression, the eyes, that he couldn’t pin down. He knew that face. The baby’s mother, a woman he probably was with one night... Or maybe the little girl looked a bit like him?
Just get her to the doc, he told himself. Now.
He very gently laid her back down in the carrier, one little fist moving, the lips quirking again. He buckled the five-point harness and settled the blanket around her.
From the looks of her, all scrawny and tiny, tinier than your average baby, he was pretty sure she couldn’t be more than a few hours old. So her mother didn’t want to keep her and dropped her off right after giving birth? That hardly made sense. Mothers who’d just delivered a baby didn’t jump in cars and drop off their babies in the middle of the night. Unless they were desperate, maybe.
All he knew was that someone had left a baby on his doorstep. No knock, no explanation. No concern for the infant’s well-being.
No idea who that person could possibly be.
His baby? His brain wasn’t fully firing right now from the shock, but as he lifted the carrier he managed to think back nine months. It was the second week of April now. Who had he been involved with last July?
There were a few possibilities. One of whom he’d seen in passing just last week as he’d parked in front of the coffee shop in town. She certainly hadn’t been nine months pregnant.
Two or three others back then, one-night stands when his life had still been about drinking too much at bars and trying to forget his troubles with women whose last names he didn’t know.
He wasn’t proud of that time in his life.
He’d been a hot mess. Two years ago, the small ranch he’d managed to buy had gone under—like father, like son, he supposed. The woman he’d loved his entire life had told him she’d had enough and was moving on, unless he changed most things about himself. He hadn’t known how, and she’d gotten tired of trying to help when all her advice fell on deaf ears. And so he’d driven her away and she’d married the biggest jerk he’d ever known. The downward spiral had continued.
And then five months ago he’d inherited the Dawson Family Guest Ranch with his five siblings, most of whom wanted nothing to do with the place. Suddenly, the man on the edge of the cliff had inched back to solid ground. Purpose. Determination. Heritage.
Before his father passed, before Noah had come back home to the formerly dilapidated guest ranch he’d grown up on, he’d had no idea heritage meant anything to him. But it clearly did. Because here he was. Not that he had anywhere else to go, but still. He wanted to be here.
And if this baby was his, she belonged here too. With him on the Dawson ranch. Until he figured out whose she was—aside from his—he’d keep his siblings out of it. Maybe he’d call his sister, Daisy, in Cheyenne. Maybe she’d come visit for a few days and help him out.
The tiny eyes opened, and her face scrunched.
“I’m taking you to the doc, little buddy.”
It struck him that little girls probably weren’t called “little buddy” the way boys were. He recalled how Sara—the one he’d driven away—hated that her father had called her princess. I’m no princess, she’d say. Furthest thing from it.
“You’re no princess either,” he told the infant. “You certainly did not get the royal treatment on your first day on earth.”
Carrier in hand, he headed toward the door, setting it on the floor to put on his leather jacket. Then he picked her back up and headed out to the truck.
“I’m not gonna let anything happen to you,” he said, latching the carrier rear-facing on the back seat, like the little diagram on the side of the carrier wisely showed. “You can count on that.”
Seven weeks later
“I, Willem Michael Perry, in sound mind and body, hereby leave my second-rate wife, Sara Mayhew Perry, absolutely nothing.”
Sara sat in her late husband’s attorney’s office, not surprised by anything in the will. The insults. The disinheritance. She wanted to run out of here, put this—including her marriage to Willem—behind her, and go home with her seven-week-old son. If she even had a home anymore.
The lawyer, Holton Parrington, who’d grimaced through every word of the will as he’d read it aloud, put the document down on his desk and took off his glasses. “Sorry about all this, Sara,” he said, shaking his head. “Willem wasn’t exactly the nicest person, was he?”
Understatement of the year. Decade, maybe. But you make a deal with the devil... “No, he wasn’t.”
Her husband had died in a car accident five days ago. He hadn’t been a good person, but Sara hadn’t married him for his personality. She knew she wasn’t perfect, but doing what needed to be done had always come naturally to her, and she’d hoped she could help Willem change, that she would rub off on him, that impending fatherhood would mean something to him, but he’d actually gotten meaner, more spiteful, more controlling.
She glanced at the stroller to her left; baby Chance slept peacefully. She kept her gaze on him for a moment longer; her son was all that truly mattered. Nothing else.
“Willem also left a letter to you and instructions that I read it aloud in the event of his death,” Holton continued. “It’s sealed, and I have no idea what’s inside. Ready?”
Sara sighed inwardly. “For more bashing? No. But I guess this will be the end of it.”
The lawyer nodded. He put his glasses back on, then slit open the envelope and pulled out one sheet of paper, written in Willem Perry’s unmistakable, perfect handwriting.
“‘Sara, if you’re reading this, I’m dead,’” the lawyer read, pausing as if bracing himself. He cleared his throat and continued. “‘I don’t know what got me in the end, but I hope it was quick and painless and that I lived till at least ninety-three like my father.’”
Willem hadn’t made it to his twenty-ninth birthday. He’d been reckless with the brand-new Porsche, a gift to himself for becoming a father, and had been going more than ninety around the rain-slick curve on the winding service road into town.
“‘I debated about putting what I’m about to say on paper,’” the lawyer continued reading, “‘but decided I couldn’t—make that shouldn’t—take it to the grave with me. Oh yes, I want you to know. You deserve to know. Brace yourself, darlin’.’”
She was already doing that. Who knew what Willem was capable of? She did, actually. She wished she’d known the extent of his cruelty before she’d agreed to marry him. She’d known he was a snob, but he’d been so kind to her before their wedding, and she’d had such faith she’d turn him around. Back then, she’d thought his worst trait was talking down to waitstaff in the nice restaurants he’d taken her to.
She’d never take anything at face value again. That was for damned sure.
She sucked in a deep breath. Whatever it is, whatever his last laugh is, I can take it, she told herself. I’m stronger than I know. Just keep chanting that and maybe it’ll be true.
The attorney glanced at her, and she nodded.
“‘Our son’s twin sister didn’t die during childbirth,’” the lawyer read on a gasp, his eyes widening.
Sara gasped too. What? They stared at each other, his face as pale as hers must be.
The lawyer sucked in a breath and continued reading. “‘The female twin was frail, much smaller than the male.