“I’m not sick,” she interrupted, beaming. “Oh, Reuben. We’re pregnant.”
He didn’t move; he was in open-mouthed shock. “But we can’t be,” he finally got out.
“I know! But we are!”
“How?”
“The usual way, I guess.” She giggled. “Dr. Burke says it’s one of those things.”
“One of those things,” he echoed, wide-eyed.
“He started talking about Graafian follicles and egg viability and blastocysts—but then he just admitted he really can’t explain it. I said it was a miracle, and he said that was as good an explanation as any.” For no reason she could think of, she started to cry.
Reuben wrapped her up in his arms. He was still dumbfounded, still trying to believe it. “A baby,” he said, trying the word out.
“A baby,” she sniffled.
“Ours. Oh, Christ, Gus. Our own little baby.”
They rocked each other until she pulled away. “Are you crying, too?” she asked, astonished.
“Hell, no.”
“Yes, you are.” She pressed her wet cheek against his and whispered, “Thank you for giving me a baby. I love you, Reuben.”
“I love you, Grace. Let’s he down,” he whispered.
They kissed, and fell back on the bed, and touched each other with gentle hands. It could’ve gone either way then; they could’ve kept laughing and crying and caressing each other, or they could’ve pulled themselves together and made love. A moment passed, and Grace felt things beginning to move in the latter direction—when the sound of footsteps coming down the hall told her they were about to have company. She tried to sit up, but Reuben wouldn’t let her—he hadn’t heard a thing—until Henry coughed, Lucille tittered, and Ah You sighed, all of them huddling in the doorway like sheep trying to get into the fold.
“Hello, there,” Reuben greeted them, with, a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.
“I thought you were coming right back down,” Henry complained, bustling in, oblivious to nuance.
“Are we interrupting?” Lucille trilled good-humoredly. “We thought we’d have a toast.”
Grace acknowledged her half-wink with a grin. This sort of thing happened fairly often, and if it wasn’t Lucille accidentally walking in on her and Reuben, it was Grace accidentally walking in on Lucille and Henry. They were all newlyweds here, or at least they felt like it.
Ah You carried a tray with a magnum of champagne and four glasses. He set it on the edge of the bed, opened the wine expertly, and began to pour.
Reconciled to the interruption, Reuben brightened. “We’ve got something even better than this to toast,” he announced, reaching for one of the bubbling glasses. “God, will you look at that color?”
“No, let’s drink to the wine first,” Grace said quickly, touching his arm. It seemed only fair; they had the rest of their lives to celebrate their miraculous new child, but Reuben’s champagne victory was necessarily fleeting. She would be gracious, secure in her glorious motherhood, and let him go first.
“Sure?” he said softly, skimming his fingers up the back of her neck. “Ah You knows already, doesn’t he?”
She nodded. Ah You knew everything at all times. “No, I want to toast the wine first. Then we’ll tell.”
“Okay.” He touched his lips to the side of her mouth, then faced his family and held up his glass. “A toast to Willow Pond.”
“To all of us,” Lucille put in.
“To rolling in dough,” Henry amended crassly, lifting his shot glass of orange juice.
“To Sparkling Sonoma,” Grace offered.
Ah You was a teetotaler, but today he was making an exception. Holding up his bubbling flute, he cried, “Mazel tov!”
A Biography of Patricia Gaffney
Patricia Gaffney is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.
Born on December 17, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to an Irish Catholic family, Gaffney grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. After graduating from college, she worked as a high school teacher for one year before beginning a fifteen-year career as a freelance court reporter. It was during this time that she met her husband, Jon Pearson.
Gaffney’s life changed course in 1984 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her battle with the disease prompted her, in 1986, to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Her first novel, Sweet Treason (1989), won a 1988 Golden Heart Award and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award for First Historical Romance. Her second novel, Fortune’s Lady (1989), which is set in England against the backdrop of the French Revolution, was shortlisted for the RITA. She followed her early success with Another Eden (1992), Crooked Hearts (1994), Sweet Everlasting (1994), Lily (1996), Outlaw in Paradise (1997), and Wild at Heart (1997), the latter of which was among ten finalists for RWA’s reader-nominated Favorite Book of the Year Award.
Since the late nineties, Gaffney has found added success writing women’s fiction. Her novels The Saving Graces (1999), Circle of Three (2000), Flight Lessons (2002), and The Goodbye Summer (2004) all appeared on several national bestseller lists. The Saving Graces was on the New York Times bestseller list for seventeen weeks.
With her friends Nora Roberts (writing as J. D. Robb), Mary Blayney, and others, Gaffney has also contributed novellas to three anthologies, all of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Gaffney lives with her husband and two dogs in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
Gaffney at age three.
Gaffney celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Vienna, Austria, during her junior year studying abroad.
Gaffney attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s pictured here during what she refers to as her “hippie days” in the early 1970s.
Gaffney and her husband Jon Pearson, high on love.
Class photo from East Mecklenberg High School in Charlotte, NC, where Gaffney taught twelfth-grade English for a year.
Romance Writers of America Winner’s Ribbon from the 1988 conference in Seattle.
At Nora Roberts’s house in the early 1990s. Left to right: Nora Roberts, Mary Blayney, Christine Dorsey, Elaine Fox, Gaffney, Beth Harbison, and Mary Kay McComas.
Example of a first draft, always done longhand.
A final outline for Mad Dash.
The Gaffney clan in 1989. From left: Mike (brother), mother, father, Pat.
Gaffney and Jon with their dog Hannah in 2000.
Gaffney with Jon and dogs Jolene (left) and Finney (right) in 2007.
Gaffney’s office in the attic.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1994 by Patricia Gaffney
cover design by Connie Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY PATRICIA GAFFNEY
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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Crooked Hearts Page 36