She had to laugh. Her younger brother had gone back to the community center for more lumber, but for the entire morning he’d been trying to boss around all ten of the volunteers working on the gazebo for the Hope’s Crossing second annual Giving Hope Day.
“That’s a very appealing idea,” she answered Jack. “But since you designed this, don’t you want to see the project through to the end?”
“I have no problem letting everyone else do the work and just enjoying the finished product.”
She didn’t believe that for a moment. The gazebo had been a labor of love for Jack, his gift to her and to the town. Even after Harry stepped in to donate all the materials, Jack had been excited about the design. When it was finished, this would be a lovely place for people who wanted a shady spot to enjoy the falls. She could even picture her and Jack—and Puck, of course—sitting here, sheltered from the elements, in the middle of a summer-evening rainstorm.
While she was undeniably tempted by the idea of sneaking away to her house for some rare alone time, she knew they couldn’t. “Claire would kill me if she found out we bailed. You know Riley would rat us out to her in a minute.”
He gave her a smile full of enticing promise. “Later, then.”
“Deal,” she said, her voice slightly husky. The past six weeks had been wonderful between them, filled with more joy than she could have imagined.
A week ago, in this very spot, he had asked her to marry her. She gazed at the falls—their spot—wishing with all her heart she had been able to give him a wholehearted yes. Oh, how she wanted to, but she had asked him to be patient a little while longer. With Sage’s baby due in less than a month, the timing didn’t feel right. For now, she felt that they needed to concentrate on their daughter and the difficult choices she faced.
Jack had argued a wedding might be exactly the distraction Sage needed. Maura saw his point, but she still couldn’t feel right planning the rest of their lives together while everything in Sage’s world was still unsettled—even her choice of an adoptive couple with which to place her baby.
In the end, he had held her close. “I’ve waited twenty years. I can wait a few more months,” he had promised.
As she watched him measure the board again and recalculate the angle, she loved him even more for his patience and his steady strength.
“You’re right. The angle is wrong and now this one is going to be too short. Can you go grab me another board and I’ll recut?” he asked.
“Of course.” She hurried to the stacked lumber and picked one of the correct size. Around her, the other volunteers were hard at work on the base of the gazebo. As she watched them, Maura remembered the previous year’s service day, just six weeks after the accident, on what would have been Layla’s birthday.
Her emotions had been scraped raw. She had only been able to attend a few hours before she had had to escape the crush of sympathy.
Everything was different this year. The loss would always be part of her, an empty spot that nothing else would fill, but she had made the choice to move forward, to live instead of hiding away in her grief.
Layla would have wanted exactly that.
She was carrying the board back to Jack’s work area when her cell phone suddenly rang with Sage’s distinctive ringtone. She set the board down on the grass with the others before she answered.
“Hey, Mom,” Sage said. She sounded breathless.
“Hi. How are things going down at the library?”
Sage was under strict orders to sit quietly and help repair dilapidated books at the library. “Um, I guess fine. I have a…little problem. Well, not really a problem but…”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think my water just broke.”
For the first time, she recognized that what she had taken for breathlessness in Sage’s voice was actually fear.
“Are you sure? You’re not due for three more weeks!”
“Yeah. Pretty sure. It’s hard to mistake that when the ground at your feet is suddenly soaked. Fortunately, I was already in the bathroom, so it was easy to clean up with some paper towels.”
Maura fought down panic. Not yet. Not today. “Okay, just sit tight. I’ll grab your father and we’ll be right there.”
“Mom, wait. Harry’s with me. He’s already planning to drive me to the hospital. I was thinking you could meet us there. That will be quicker than you coming down here first. Can you just stop at the house and grab the bag we packed?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Give me ten minutes.”
“Thanks, Mom. I love you.”
“I love you. Honey, hang in there. It will be okay.” Though she tried to sound confident and breezy, she didn’t know how anything possibly would be okay.
“What’s wrong?” Jack asked, instantly alert the moment he saw her face.
“Sage. Her water broke and she’s heading to the hospital now. Harry’s taking her.”
He swore, some of the color leaching from his face. “Okay. Looks like Riley gets to be in charge, after all.”
They raced to her house, stopping only long enough to make sure Puck had food and water and to pick up Sage’s bag, then Jack sped to the Hope’s Crossing hospital.
By the time they pulled into the parking lot, her hands were shaking on the bag she clutched on her lap.
“Where do we go?” Jack asked. She quickly gave him directions to the new women’s center and its state-of-the-art birthing rooms that she had toured with Sage during their birthing class.
At the nurses’ station, a too-chipper RN told them a room was being prepared and that in the meantime they could find Sage and Harry in a small family waiting room down the hall.
When Maura pushed open the door the nurse had indicated, she found Sage looking tense and upset. Her daughter jumped up from the sofa and sagged into her arms. “I’m not ready, Mom,” she wailed. “I thought I had a few more weeks!”
“I know, honey.”
“I can’t have this baby yet. I haven’t even picked an adoptive couple. I’ve been trying and trying to pick the best one and…they’re all good. None is any better than another. What am I going to do? This is my baby. I can’t just flip a coin!”
She started to cry, and Maura held her closely, her heart aching. Everything was in place legally for the adoption. Sawyer had readily signed away any parental rights, and Sage had been working with a wonderful adoption agency. But despite all the weeks of counseling and discussion, Sage obviously wasn’t prepared for this emotional tumult. Giving a baby up for adoption was a courageous decision but certainly not an easy one.
She was trying to find impossible words of comfort when Harry spoke from his spot on the sofa.
“Am I the only one with a brain in this family?” he growled.
This was so not the time for one of his cantankerous fits. Maura needed her mother here to mellow him out. Their budding relationship had caused a shockwave of epic proportion to roll over Hope’s Crossing, but even she couldn’t deny that Mary Ella was good for Harry. And, amazingly, he had been good for her too.
She was about to snap at him—the best she could manage under the circumstances—when Harry rose, still a commanding figure. “I can’t believe none of you have figured this out yet. For hell’s sake, the answer is obvious, isn’t it?”
“What haven’t we figured out, Gramps?” Sage asked, her voice small and forlorn. Harry shook his head, his eyes softening as he looked at her.
“You two—” he gestured to Jack and Maura “—should just get married already, and then you can raise the baby. You’re both still young. Hell, you’re young enough to pop another one out yourselves, aren’t you?”
Maura gaped at him, aware of Jack’s features going taut beside her. Sage stopped sniffling and pulled out of her arms to stare at her grandfather.
Suddenly Maura’s whole life seemed to rearrange itself in her head. Everything she thought was right for her and for Jack seemed to shift and settle into a new picture.
A son.
She and Jack could be parents again. At last he would have the chance she had taken from him—to be a father, from the beginning. For sticky toddler kisses and coaching soccer games and helping with math homework, all the things he’d never had the chance to do with Sage.
Her mind started racing with possibilities, but just as suddenly she forced them to a screeching halt. As much as that picture suddenly seemed perfect to her, it wouldn’t be fair to Jack. Surely he wouldn’t want to start the rest of their lives together changing diapers and fixing bottles and rocking a colicky baby....
“I couldn’t ask that of you,” Sage finally said into the gaping maw of silence that stretched out between the four of them.
“Why not?” Jack asked, his voice a little ragged.
Maura stared at him. “Do you… Are you saying you would…actually consider it?”
“I want to marry you, Maura. You know that. I want to have forever with you. I hadn’t expected an instant family to be part of that picture, but that’s what we would have had twenty years ago if things had worked out differently. We’re older now. More mature. Certainly we’re both better equipped to deal with a child.”
He smiled broadly. “Besides. This wouldn’t be the first time I suddenly and unexpectedly became a father.”
She gave a rough laugh at that, thinking of the strange and twisting journey their lives together had taken so far. This was a crazy idea, adopting a child before they were even officially married, but somehow it seemed exactly right.
Sage sank back down onto one of the sofas, gazing at them both with a raw, almost painful hope. “I don’t want you to feel pressured or anything, but this would be beyond perfect. Maybe that’s the reason I couldn’t make a decision. Maybe in my heart, something like this is what I wanted all along but was afraid to ask—or even let myself think about.”
Maura gripped Jack’s fingers. He squeezed tightly, out of nerves or anticipation or simply love, she couldn’t tell.
“You have to be sure, darling,” she said. “And you’ll have to be very clear in your own head that if we do this, we wouldn’t just be babysitting for you until you’re in a better place to be a parent. This would be our child. We would be the mother and father.”
“I can’t imagine two better parents for my baby, Mom.” Sage gave a watery smile and Harry wrapped an arm around her. “I was a really good big sister to Layla. I think I can be a great big sister to your son too. It would be super cool to have a little brother.”
Without releasing her hand, Jack reached for a tissue from a box on the table and passed it to her. That was the first moment she realized she was crying, tears of joy and anticipation and no small amount of fear.
A baby.
Dear heavens. They were going to have a baby.
She didn’t have time to fully adjust to that before the chipper nurse from out front bustled into the room.
“Okay. We’ve finally got your birthing room ready. If you’ll come with me, Sage, we’ll get you settled first, and then your family can come in.”
“Okay.” Sage gave a nervous smile and followed the nurse. She seemed lighter somehow, freed of the fear and uncertainty she had been carrying along with her baby.
After she left, Harry stood up, a look of sublime self-satisfaction on his weathered features. “I parked in one of the emergency-room spots. I should probably go move my car, even though they wouldn’t dare ticket me.”
He headed out, leaving the two of them in the waiting room alone.
Maura was nervous suddenly, still unable to believe the enormity of the decision they had just made. “Are you sure about this, Jack? It’s not too late to change your mind. We can figure something else out. I don’t want you to feel obligated to something you didn’t want.”
He wrapped his arms around her, and she felt some of the tension seep away. “Do you want to know a secret? The idea of adding to our family isn’t completely foreign to me. I’m embarrassed to admit that adopting Sage’s baby never even occurred to me, but lately I’ve caught myself wondering what it would be like to have another child with you. Harry’s right. We’re both young. Young enough, anyway. Plenty of couples don’t even get started until their late-thirties. I guess I was waiting to see if you might be thinking along the same lines, or if you figured you had done your time raising young children.”
“I love being a mother. If things had gone differently in my life, I would have wanted at least one or two more.”
After her divorce, she had just accepted that part of her life was gone. The idea of shopping now for a crib and buying baby clothes and having to rearrange her work demands to accommodate a new life was both overwhelming and intoxicating.
“I never would have pressured you,” Jack assured her. “But I can think of nothing more beautiful and right than raising a son together.”
She caught her breath, dizzy at how quickly the pathway of her life had suddenly veered off in a completely different direction than she’d started on that very morning. Outside the window, the rest of the world was carrying on as usual, the citizens of Hope’s Crossing busy helping each other, while in here a new life was about to enter the world and a family was shifting and changing to welcome it.
She looked out the window at a beautiful June afternoon, rich with promise. A lush, wild rosebush bloomed there, its flowers a vivid pink in the sunlight. Somehow she wasn’t at all surprised to see a flicker of orange amid the pink as a monarch butterfly flitted from flower to flower.
Another message from Layla? Maybe. She had seen butterflies everywhere these past few months, but perhaps that was only because she was finally ready to notice them again.
She reached for Jack’s hand, this wonderful man she had once loved and lost, then found again.
She smiled at him, her heart nearly bursting with happiness. “Let’s go have a baby.”
* * * * *
New York Times Bestselling Author
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eISBN-13: 978-1-4603-6443-7
RaeAnne Thayne Hope’s Crossings Series Vol 1
Copyright © 2014 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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Blackberry Summer
Copyright © 2011 by RaeAnne Thayne
Woodrose Mountain
Copyright © 2012 by RaeAnne Thayne
Sweet Laurel Falls
Copyright © 2012 by RaeAnne Thayne
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RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry SummerWoodrose MountainSweet Laurel Falls Page 85