Winter's Proposal

by Sherryl Woods

  As she huddled in the rapidly cooling car, she recalled the oft-told story of the joy with which she’d been welcomed into the world twenty-three years ago tomorrow. She had been born in the middle of a Texas blizzard with no one around to assist her mother except Luke Adams, her uncle at the time and the man who became her father. Luke had been blind drunk that night, but he’d sobered in a hurry when faced with the immediacy of those shattering labor pains. He had risen to the occasion like a true Adams hero.

  From an early age Angela understood that they both considered her to be their Christmas blessing, a miracle on a cold and bitter night. With her natural father dead, her birth had brought Luke and Jessie together, helped them to overcome the anguish and guilt they’d felt at having fallen in love even before her father’s fatal accident. Just as her name implied, she was their angel. Living up to such a lofty label had been daunting.

  Admittedly, though, their expectations for her probably hadn’t been half as exalted as she’d imagined them to be. She hadn’t done a lot of listening before breaking the ties with home. At the first opportunity, she had fled Texas, first to attend college, then to roam the country in search of herself. It was time, she had thought, to do something totally outrageous, to discover what she was truly made of. Being angelic was a bore. She wanted to be wicked or, if not actually wicked, at least human.

  Unfortunately, even after four years at Stanford and a year on her own the answers still eluded her. Over the past few months she’d had plenty of empty nights to examine her past. She was human, all right. The very human mistakes were mounting up.

  She’d made the worst miscalculation of all in Montana with a rancher named Clint Brady, a low-down scoundrel if ever there was one, she thought bitterly. Her mound of a belly was testament to that. She wasn’t looking forward to the hurt and worry that her parents would try their best to hide when they saw her and realized just how much trouble she’d managed to get herself into. She hated the thought of the heartbreak she would read in their eyes.

  She was less worried about the reaction of her incredible grandfather, Harlan Adams. When it came to family, he was thoroughly predictable. He would probably set off fireworks to celebrate the birth of his first great-grandbaby. If he had questions about the baby’s conception, he’d keep them to himself.

  For the time being, anyway, she amended. As meddlesome as he was capable of being, he wouldn’t be silent for long. By year’s end he’d probably have a lynch mob searching for the baby’s father, assuming he could get Angela to name him, which she had no intention of doing. Not even Clint Brady deserved to face the rancor of the Adams men, once they’d been riled up.

  In addition to Luke and her grandfather, there were Cody and Jordan. They might be wildly different in some ways, but they all shared the Adams gene for pure cussedness and family loyalty. Clint wouldn’t have a prayer against the four of them. He’d be hogtied and married to her before he could blink. She would have no more say in the matter than he did.

  To her chagrin, just the thought of Clint and her wild and reckless behavior in Montana made her blood run hot. Until she’d met him, she’d had no idea that passion could be so overwhelming, so completely and irresistibly awe inspiring.

  Nor had she known how quickly passion could turn to hatred and shame.

  She was glad now that she’d lied to him, that she’d faked a whole identity so that she could pretend for just a little while that she wasn’t Luke and Jessie Adams’s little angel. It had been liberating to pretend to be Hattie Jones, a woman with no exalted family history to live up to, a woman who could be as outrageous as she liked without regrets.

  The decision to lie had been impulsive, made in a darkened country-western bar where she’d stopped to ask about a waitressing job that had been posted in the window. Clint had had the kind of lazy smile and sexy eyes that made a shy, astonishingly innocent college graduate imagine that all sorts of forbidden dreams were hers for the taking.

  The job had been forgotten as she’d succumbed to newly discovered sensuality she hadn’t even been tempted to test with the boys she’d met at Stanford. By the end of the night they were lovers. By the end of the week, she had moved in with him. She supposed that there was yet more irony that after all her running, she’d wound up with a rancher, after all.

  More than once in the blissful days that followed she had regretted the casual lie she’d told when they met. More than once she had vowed to tell him the truth about who she was and where she came from, but Clint had been the kind of man who lived in the here and now. He didn’t talk about his own past. He never asked about hers.

  As weeks turned into months, it seemed easier to live with the lie. She liked being devil-may-care Hattie Jones, who flirted outrageously and never gave a thought to tomorrow. She liked the way Clint murmured her name in the middle of the night, as if he’d never before heard a word so beautiful.

  In Clint’s arms she was ecstatically happy. His ranch was a fraction of the size of her father’s or her grandfather’s, the days were long and exhausting, but none of that mattered, not at night when they made magic together. She found peace on that tiny Montana spread and something she had thought was love.

  Then she’d discovered she was pregnant, and all of the lies and secrets between them—most of them admittedly her doing—had threatened to come unraveled.

  When Clint had reacted in stunned silence to the news they were expecting a baby, that famous Adams pride had kicked in with a vengeance. She’d shouted a lot of awful, ugly things and he’d responded in kind. Even now the memory of it made her shudder.

  If he’d been that furious over the baby, she couldn’t imagine what his rage would be like once he discovered that she’d lied to him from the start. In her entire life, no one had ever made her feel so low. Nor had she ever before wanted to hurt a person so deeply that he would never recover from it. Words were their weapons and they had used them well.

  Angela hadn’t waited for tempers to cool. She’d loaded up her car and hit the road before dawn, determined to put Clint Brady and Montana far behind her.

  That had been nearly seven months ago. She’d been in a lot of cities since. Few of them had even registered. She had no more than vague memories of cheap hotels and back-road diners.

  She wasn’t exactly sure when she’d realized that Clint was following her. It had been almost a sixth sense at first, a nervous knotting in the pit of her stomach, a prickly sensation scampering down her spine. She was too hurt, too sure that she’d been wrong to get involved with him, too ashamed of her age-old predicament to let him catch her. What was the point of one more argument, anyway? It was best to put him in the past, along with all the other mistakes she’d made. A fresh start beckoned from around every curve in the road.

  To her surprise, Clint hadn’t given up easily. He’d nearly caught up with her in Wyoming, cutting short the part-time waitressing job she’d taken to get gas money to move on. Warned about the man who’d been in earlier asking questions about her, she’d slipped out the diner’s back door just as Clint came through the front.

  The narrow escape had made her jittery for days. She hadn’t felt secure until she’d managed to trade her beloved blue convertible in for cash and a sensible beige sedan so old she hadn’t even been born the year it was made. No car that old should have been expected to survive the kind of journey she’d taken it on.

  She had moved quickly on to Colorado, then doubled back north to Cheyenne, looped up to South Dakota, then headed west to Seattle, enchanted by the idea of living by the water.

  In Seattle she’d found a one-room apartment in an area called Pill Hill for all the hospitals clustered together. For the first time she had searched until she landed a halfway decent job as a receptionist. She’d found a kindly obstetrician to make sure she was doing all the right things for the baby she’d already learned to cherish. She’d vowed that the baby would n
ever have to pay for the mistakes she’d made. Oddly enough, though being Angela Adams had daunted her, being a single mom did not.

  In Seattle she’d even made a few friends, older, married women who invited her over often for home-cooked meals and the kind of nurturing concern she’d missed since leaving home. She took endless walks along Elliott Bay, bought fresh produce and fish at Pike’s Place Market, sipped decaf cappuccino in every Starbucks she passed.

  Clint seemed to have lost her trail or else he’d just given up and gone home, satisfied that he’d made a noble attempt to find her. No doubt that enabled him to sleep well enough. By then, he was probably sharing his bed with some other woman. At any rate, she’d felt it was safe to linger in Seattle. Contentment seemed almost within her grasp. She couldn’t bring herself to admit that she was disappointed that he had given up.

  Maybe, if it hadn’t been for the Seattle weather, she could have made it work. But as summer gave way to fall and then to a premature winter, all that rain and gloom had finally gotten to her. She began to miss clear blue skies and the kind of heat that baked the earth.

  When she packed up and moved on, she told herself her goal was merely sunshine. The undeniable truth was, she was heading straight for Texas, toward home.

  For better or worse, she was going back to become Angela Adams again. The spirited Hattie Jones had died in Montana. Like it or not, Angela Adams was a Texan through and through. Her baby would be, too. The heritage she had abandoned for herself, she had no right to dismiss for the baby. It should be up to her child to decide someday if being an Adams was too much of a burden.

  Not that she ever sat down and listed all the pros and cons for going home. The choice was instinctive. She’d hardly even needed a map to guide her south along the Pacific Coast and then east. If she’d stopped to reason it out, she probably would have found a hundred excuses for staying as far away from Texas as she could.

  She’d developed a bad case of jitters near the end and wound up in Dallas, bypassing the turn to the south that would have taken her home much sooner. For days she’d lingered, wandering around the stores that had been decorated for the holidays, pretending that maybe this would be the final destination. It was close enough to home for an occasional visit, but far enough away to maintain her independence.

  This afternoon, though, she had gotten into her car and impulsively started driving, taking familiar turns onto back roads and straight highways that were unmistakably leading her back to Los Pinos. Her static-filled radio had crackled with constant threats of an impending blizzard, but she hadn’t once been tempted to turn back or to stop. Not even the first flurries of snow or the blinding curtain of white that had followed daunted her. Home beckoned by then with an inevitability she couldn’t resist.

  It was ironic, of course, that it had been on a night very much like this that her mother had gone into labor practically on Luke Adams’s doorstep, had delivered Angela in his bed, with his help.

  That had worked out well enough, she reminded herself as she tried to work up the courage to leave the safety and comfort of the car for the bitter cold walk home. Their marriage was as solid and secure as a bank vault.

  Maybe that was why Angela had run from Clint Brady, had kept on running even when she knew he was chasing after her, even when she realized that it was possible that he wanted her back. She had seen what it could be like for two people who were head over heels in love, who faced problems squarely and grew strong because of them. She wanted nothing less for her child. If she couldn’t offer the baby that, then she could at least make sure there was a wide circle of family around to shower her son or daughter with love.

  As if in agreement, her baby kicked ferociously. Boy or girl, she thought defiantly, the kid was definitely destined to be a place kicker in the NFL. She rubbed her stomach and murmured soothing words, then drew in a deep breath.

  Exiting the car to face an icy blast of air, she shivered and drew her coat more snugly around her.

  “Okay, little one,” she whispered as excitement stirred deep inside her, overcoming dread or at least tempering it. “This is it. Let’s go home.”

  The Littlest Angel

  by New York Times bestselling author

  Sherryl Woods, available now

  wherever MIRA Books are sold!

  Copyright © 2020 by Sherryl Woods

  ISBN-13: 9781488055287

  Winter’s Proposal

  Copyright © 2019 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  The Cowboy and His Baby

  Copyright © 1996 by Sherryl Woods

  The Rancher and His Unexpected Daughter

  Copyright © 1996 by Sherryl Woods

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