The Baby Next Door

by Vannetta Chapman

  Was her dat pushing Adrian to date her?

  “Adrian, I am mortified.”

  “Why would you be?” He looked at her quizzically, as if he didn’t understand her embarrassment. Then Adrian did something she did not expect. He tipped his hat back and started laughing.

  “I fail to see what’s so funny.”

  “Come on, Grace. It’s not unusual for Amish parents to push their single children into dating. You’re aware of that I’m sure.”

  “My parents haven’t even mentioned that they think I should date.”

  “Maybe they’re giving you time because of Nicole.”

  “About that...”

  “But any man would be blessed to have you for a fraa, Grace. As for Nicole...she’s a sweet thing. You shouldn’t let your decision to raise your cousin’s child keep you from dating.”

  Except Nicole wasn’t her cousin’s child. And Grace wasn’t sure if now was the time or place to share that fact with Adrian...

  Vannetta Chapman has published over one hundred articles in Christian family magazines and received over two dozen awards from Romance Writers of America chapter groups. She discovered her love for the Amish while researching her grandfather’s birthplace of Albion, Pennsylvania. Her first novel, A Simple Amish Christmas, quickly became a bestseller. Chapman lives in Texas Hill Country with her husband.

  Books by Vannetta Chapman

  Love Inspired

  Indiana Amish Brides

  A Widow’s Hope

  Amish Christmas Memories

  A Perfect Amish Match

  The Amish Christmas Matchmaker

  An Unlikely Amish Match

  The Amish Christmas Secret

  An Amish Winter

  “Stranded in the Snow”

  The Baby Next Door

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.

  THE BABY NEXT DOOR

  Vannetta Chapman

  “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

  —Philippians 4:8

  “If you reveal your secrets to the wind,

  you should not blame the wind

  for revealing them to the trees.”

  —Khalil Gibran

  This book is dedicated to Tracy Luscombe, who loves a good book every bit as much as I do.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Chicken Divan Casserole

  Dear Reader

  Excerpt from The Amish Teacher’s Wish by Tracey J. Lyons

  Chapter One

  Goshen, Indiana, was a beautiful place to be in April, but when Grace Troyer glanced out the kitchen window into the eyes of a llama she fought the urge to scream. She wasn’t afraid of llamas, but this particular one tended to spit, and it belonged next door, not on her parents’ property. Unfortunately, baby Nicole saw the llama at the same time that Grace did. Nicole wasn’t particular as to what animal she was petting. She simply called out, “Mine!” and insisted on moving closer.

  “Nein, baby girl. That is Adrian’s llama, and hopefully he will fetch it soon.”

  “Problem?” Her mamm walked into the room, carrying her knitting basket.

  Leslie Troyer carried knitting with her wherever she went. “If we’re sitting, we’re knitting” was her favorite slogan. It should be cross-stitched and hung on the wall, right beside the Golden Rule.

  “Ya. The problem is Adrian’s llama.” The beast was nearly six feet tall, with white-and-brown fleece. He was surprisingly fast, much too curious and had a disconcerting way of staring directly into your eyes without blinking.

  “It’s an odd-looking animal, for sure and certain.”

  “Mine, Mamm. Mine.” Nicole struggled to be let down, so Grace put her on the floor.

  Only fourteen months old, she had begun pulling up and clinging to things. Grabbing hold of her mother’s dress, Nicole looked up, grinned, then plopped on her bottom, executed a quick change of position to all fours and took off toward the front door.

  “She’ll be walking soon.”

  “So you keep warning me.”

  “After that, your life will never be the same.”

  In Grace’s opinion, they’d already passed that point, but no use bringing it up on a beautiful April morning. Instead, she finished rinsing the last of the breakfast dishes, dried her hands and hurried after her daughter.

  She walked into the sitting room to find Nicole had pulled herself up to the glass storm door and was high-fiving none other than Adrian Schrock. He’d squatted down so that their heights matched better. Nicole was having a fine old time. She considered Adrian a top-notch playmate.

  Grace picked up her doschder and pushed open the door, causing Adrian to jump up, then take a step back toward the porch steps. It was, indeed, a fine spring day. The sun shone brightly across the Indiana fields. Flowers colored yellow, red, lavender and even orange had begun popping through the soil that surrounded the porch. Birds were even chirping merrily.

  Somehow, all those things did little to elevate Grace’s mood. Neither did the sight of her neighbor.

  Aaron resettled his straw hat on his head and smiled. “Gudemariye.”

  “Your llama has escaped again.”

  “Kendrick? Ya. I’ve come to fetch him. He seems to like your place more than mine.”

  “I don’t want that animal over here, Adrian. He spits.”

  “We’re working on that.”

  “And your peacock was here at daybreak, crying like a child.”

  “George Eliot said that animals make agreeable friends because ‘they ask no questions’ and ‘pass no criticisms’ or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.”

  “George Eliot?”

  “British author. Nineteenth century.”

  “Yes, I remember reading her in school.” Probably the reason that Grace remembered the author was because Eliot was a woman writing under a man’s pen name. “But back to my point—I’d like you to try harder to keep your animals on your side of the fence.”

  Instead of responding to her perturbed tone, Adrian laughed. “When you moved back home, I guess you didn’t expect to live next to a Plain & Simple Exotic Animal Farm.”

  Grace could practically hear the capital letters for Adrian’s newest name for his farm. She’d yet to see an official sign by the road. No doubt that would be next, attracting even more Englischers. Adrian wiggled his eyebrows at Nicole and was in the middle of yet another laugh when he seemed to realize that Grace wasn’t amused. She hated to be a wet blanket, but his animals were driving her slightly batty.

  “I think of your place as Adrian’s Zoo.”

  “Not a bad name, but it doesn’t highlight our Amish heritage enough.”

  “The point is that I feel like we’re living next door to a menagerie of animals.”

  “Remember when we went to the zoo over in South Bend? When was that, fourt
h grade? That was quite the trip.”

  That was part of their problem—she and Adrian shared a history together. To be more precise, they’d attended the same school and church meetings. He’d been two grades ahead of her. They’d never been what you might call close. If he’d been a stranger, she might have been able to be more firm, more brusque. As it was, there was an uneasy familiarity between them that forced her to be polite.

  As for the zoo trip, Grace remembered monkeys that screeched and the reptile house that Eli Zook had taken her to, insisting she’d love it. She didn’t love it. And when she’d screamed upon seeing the giant boa constrictor, Eli had laughed until he was bent over. Although she’d thought she had a crush on Eli, she’d known he wasn’t the one for her at that very moment.

  Thirteen years later, and she still hadn’t found the one—though, of course, she’d thought she had with Nicole’s father. That was a mental path she didn’t want to go down this morning. But looking at Adrian, she remembered Eli and it occurred to her that the two should be best friends. They certainly shared similar interests.

  “What ever happened to Eli Zook?”

  “Eli?”

  Nicole had crawled over to Adrian and had pulled up to a standing position by clinging to his pants leg.

  “Eli moved to Florida. He operates a gator farm there, close to Sarasota. Lots of Amish, but Englischers come by, as well.”

  “You two are not normal Amish men.”

  “Normal is underrated. Isn’t it?”

  “Up, Aden. Up.”

  Adrian scooped her up, held her high above his head, then nuzzled her neck. He treated her like one of his pets. Adrian was comfortable with everyone and everything.

  “Do you think she’ll ever learn to say my name right?”

  “Possibly. Can you please catch Kendrick and take him back to your place?”

  “Of course. That’s why I came over. I was feeding the turtles, and next thing I knew, Kendrick was hightailing it down my lane. I guess I must have left the gate open again.” He kissed Nicole’s cheek, then popped her back into Grace’s arms. “You should bring baby girl over to see the turtles. They like to sun out on the log in the middle of the pond—anytime after noon.”

  “We have a pretty busy day planned.” Her only plans were laundry and cleaning, but it seemed rude to say that she didn’t want to visit his place—between the llamas, emus and wild birds, the place creeped her out a little bit.

  As he walked away, Grace wondered for the hundredth time why he wasn’t married. It was true that he’d picked a strange profession. She didn’t know of a single other Amish man who raised exotic animals. How did that even produce an income to live on? No, Adrian wouldn’t be considered excellent marrying material by most young Amish women.

  But on the other hand he was fairly young—twenty-five years to her twenty-three. He also looked like the typical Amish male who romance authors wrote about and young Amish women dreamed of—brown hair cut as if a bowl had been placed over his head, eyes the color of caramel and an easy smile.

  He was good-looking, if you went for the tall, thin type, which she didn’t. Grace was suspicious of people who were too thin. She always felt the urge to feed them.

  She hadn’t been thin even before Nicole was born, and the baby weight she’d gained during pregnancy hadn’t disappeared after Nicole’s birth. It didn’t matter, she told herself as she carried Nicole back inside. She felt healthy, and she wasn’t in the market for a man. If she was, and weight kept them apart, then he was not the kind of man she would want.

  What was she talking about?

  A man was the reason she was in this situation to begin with. She shook away the memories, again making a mental effort not to dwell on the past this fine day.

  “Let’s go change the sheets.”

  In response, Nicole put her head on Grace’s shoulder and popped the two forefingers of her right hand into her mouth. As Grace walked up the stairs, she glanced out the living room window in time to see Adrian leading Kendrick the Llama back to his property.

  They were the same height. As she watched, Adrian took the hat off his head and set it on the llama, who tolerated such silliness for all of a dozen steps before casting it off. She could practically hear Adrian’s laugh from where she stood. Well, she couldn’t hear it but she could imagine it. He was a lighthearted fellow, but then his life had been relatively easy. Why wouldn’t he be carefree? He hadn’t made the kinds of life-altering mistakes that she had.

  Only Grace couldn’t quite bring herself to think of Nicole as a mistake. She hadn’t realized it was possible to love someone so much that your heart literally ached, but when she’d first held her newborn daughter, she’d felt that exact thing—a yearning and satisfaction that seemed to exist at the same time but in tension with one another.

  Her life had definitely changed in the eighteen months she’d been effectively exiled to her aenti’s home in Ohio. She’d grown up, learned what responsibility really was and abandoned any ideas of a rumspringa. She’d become a mother and a woman, putting childish things aside.

  She’d returned home to find that her parents’ home and the small town of Goshen were much the same as before she’d left. The only dramatic change had been at the property next door. No one had lived on the place as long as she could remember—though when she was a child, someone had leased it and worked the fields. But the fields had lain fallow for a long time.

  There wasn’t even a house there.

  As a child, Grace and her siblings had run through the pastures enjoying games of tag.

  She’d been surprised to learn that Adrian had bought the property and begun building his exotic-animal zoo. Since they were outside Goshen city limits, there were no restrictions on what animals he could and couldn’t own. She certainly hoped he’d stay away from reptiles. Perhaps she should talk to him about that.

  Regardless of Adrian’s plans, which were really none of her business, she was glad to be back in Indiana, in Goshen and in their Plain community.

  She was grateful that her parents had allowed her to come home. Grace had realized while staying with her aenti in her rather large Mennonite community that she wanted to be Plain, and she wanted to raise Nicole that way. If it meant confessing all of her misdeeds in order to live in Goshen, then she was willing to do exactly that.

  The strange thing was that, so far, there had been no one to make a confession to.

  She was both relieved and perplexed.

  She’d tried a few times to start a conversation with her old school friends—who had quickly changed the subject. Her oldest schweschdern had been the one to tell her that people thought Nicole belonged to their cousin in Ohio and that Grace had agreed to raise her. Grace didn’t know where they’d come up with that idea, but then again, it was somewhat common for Amish families to take in an extra child or two. It was a bit on the unusual side for a single Amish woman to do so.

  It seemed people wanted to believe this alternate truth.

  Who was she kidding? It wasn’t the truth. It was a lie, whether she’d been the one to tell it or not. She needed to set people straight, but how was she to do that other than taking out an ad in the Goshen Daily News or the Budget?

  She planned to join their church in the fall. In fact, the day before, she’d begun attending the class for new members. Bishop Luke instructed the candidates while the rest of the congregation was singing. They’d have nine meetings total. Grace was by far the oldest in the class. Each week, they would cover two different articles of instruction. Luke had led them through Bible verses explaining what it meant to have faith in God as well as the creation story.

  Grace wasn’t sure exactly what was coming up in the next meetings, but she hoped to have a chance to share the truth of Nicole’s parentage.

  While she dreaded doing so, another part of her looked forward to it.
She was ready to wipe the slate clean and move on with her life—hers and Nicole’s.

  If only this could be their life.

  If only Nicole’s father wouldn’t look for her, wouldn’t find her.

  If only she could relax and feel at home again here in Goshen.

  She’d give almost anything for those things to be true. There were days when her mood plummeted, and she thought the heaviness of her sins would pin her to the mattress. She certainly couldn’t bring herself to dream of a home and marriage anymore. Those thoughts were like splinters in her heart. Nein, she would set her sights lower—a safe home for Nicole, a gut place to raise her child, the love and companionship of family. Certainly those things could satisfy the longing in her heart. She was even willing to live next door to the Plain & Simple Exotic Animal Farm, though she certainly wished the owner would keep the animals on his side of the fence.

  * * *

  Adrian whistled all the way home, thinking of the image of Grace and Nicole standing on the front porch. Grace was a nice-looking woman. She had pretty brown eyes that reminded him of freshly baked brownies and blond hair that was exactly the same tint as Kendrick’s fur. He didn’t understand why she wasn’t dating. She’d been back in Goshen for two months. That was enough time to settle back into her parents’ home again. The fact that she’d brought Nicole home to raise, well, that just raised her attractiveness in his point of view.

  Raising someone else’s child, even another relative’s, showed she was kind and compassionate.

  He’d like to meet a woman like that.

  Of course it would have to be a woman who shared his love of animals and nature. Maybe someone who had a bit of a sense of humor. His mamm had told him just the other day that “a wife will make or break a household.” She was always dropping little proverbs here and there, hoping he’d take the hint.

  But Adrian didn’t need prodding. He was more than willing to court. The problem was that none of the women he knew seemed willing. True, most were married already. Or too young. The few that were of the right age and single weren’t interested in a man who was trying to make a living raising exotic animals.