“I’m going to hide it away as soon as I put Junior down for his nap,” January reassured Sam. “He probably won’t even notice that you are wearing it at the wedding tomorrow.”
“I hope he doesn’t, because being Chase he’d probably point it out, and then HW would be all over me asking why I’d borrowed a dress rather than buying my own.” Sam sighed. “And, then I’d have to explain it to him, and we’d be well on the way to having our first row as a married couple.”
Cam stifled a laugh. “I can see that all too clearly.”
Sam smoothed a finger over the blond fuzz of the baby’s hair and smiled at January. “He’s going to be fair like you.”
January groaned. “Another blond Morgan. Just what we need.” She walked over to the door and opened it. “I’ll see you later tonight, okay? Now go and talk to Avery. She wants to go over the menu for tomorrow, and all the other stuff.”
“Yvonne’s baked the wedding cake.” Sam remembered that at least.
“I know. She brought it up early this morning. It’s safely in the refrigerator.” January made the baby wave good-bye with his pudgy starfish hand. “Text me if you need anything, okay?”
Sam went down the hallway, and then the stairs, and instead of heading out the door went toward the kitchen.
Ruth Morgan, HW’s indomitable grandmother, greeted her with a smile.
“Sam! How are you?”
“Great!” Sam gave Ruth a hug and introduced her to Cam again just in case. She was missing so many things worrying about the wedding that she’d decided it was better to be safe than sorry.
“I’m just going over to see Avery and talk through the final arrangements. Is HW around?”
“I think he’s already on his way over there.” Ruth offered them coffee, but Sam declined. “He’s worried about you, though.”
“What’s new?” Sam countered. She had a sense that if the Morgans had their way she’d be confiding the story of the missing dress to all of them, and eventually someone would tell HW. “He knows that if anyone is going to mess up his big day it will be me.”
Ruth studied her with all the uncanny observational skills of an almost eighty-year-old woman—which basically meant she had X-ray vision as far as Sam was concerned. Sam concentrated hard on looking like a very happy bride-to-be, but suspected she wasn’t fooling anyone.
She held Ruth’s gaze. “Everything between me and HW is fine. I swear.”
“Okay, then.” Ruth nodded. “Maybe you should tell him that.”
“I will.” Sam kissed Ruth’s cheek. “I’ll see you later at the dinner.”
Chapter Four
HW took hold of Sam’s hand, and dragged her out of the dining room where most of the guests for their upcoming wedding were having a great time chatting and getting to know one another. It was the first time that Sam’s grandparents had been to the ranch, and they were enjoying sharing long, boring stories of the good old days with his grandma and Roy, the ranch foreman.
Sam grumbled a bit but didn’t stop him leading her out into the inky blackness of the clear night sky.
“Where are we going?” Sam asked.
“Down to the barn.” HW winked at her. “I know how much you love it in there.”
She blushed and looked down at her boots. “It’s all very nice until you get pricked by the hay.”
“Pricked?”
Sam frowned at him. “Behave yourself.”
“I said you should’ve let me be on the bottom.” HW grinned. He tried to study her expression, but she wasn’t giving much away, which was unusual for Sam.
“Next time, I’ll take your advice, okay?”
Sam squeezed his fingers, which made him feel a whole lot better. All through the dinner he’d sensed that something was troubling her, and his unease still hadn’t gone away.
“I offered to do Dad’s final rounds tonight so he could spend some time with Bella,” HW said. “It won’t take me long.”
He flicked on the lights in the old barn, and several of the horses immediately poked their heads out of their stalls to see what was going down. Sam went over to Dollar and made a big fuss of him while HW got on with the task of making sure all the horses were secured for the night. After a while, Sam started to help without being asked, and they were soon done.
HW washed out the sink in the tack room and stacked the feeding bowls belonging to the barn cats ready for the morning. He also made sure the chickens were locked in their pen and that there were no escapees to tempt the local coyote pack.
When HW returned to the barn, there was no sign of Sam, but he knew where she’d be. Even though it was hard for her to climb the ladder up to the hay store, she loved the view looking out at the Sierra Nevada mountain range as much as he did.
He went up and smiled as he located her sitting on one of the hay bales, her jacket firmly under her butt.
“It’s beautiful out here tonight,” Sam whispered.
“Yeah.” He put an arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him. “Not half as beautiful as you are though.”
“Flatterer.” She elbowed him in the ribs.
“I mean it.” He put a finger under her chin and raised her face until he could stare into her green eyes. “What’s up, Sam?”
She swallowed hard. “Nothing.”
He continued to study her, weighing up the risks of challenging her the day before he was expecting her to walk down the aisle to him. But wasn’t that the whole point? If he didn’t feel she was being straight with him now, wasn’t it better to have it out before the big day?
“What if I said I don’t believe you?” HW asked slowly.
“About which particular part?” Sam was hedging now, and he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
“So there is something wrong.” HW hesitated. “Can you just tell me?”
“It’s nothing worth telling,” Sam blurted out. “It’s just a stupid thing, which won’t make any difference to the day, and I can’t even believe I allowed myself to get worried about it.”
“If it’s worrying you, I’d still like to know what it is,” HW persisted. His grandma had always insisted his middle name was stubborn.
“Then you’ll be worrying about it too, and the whole point of not telling you is so that doesn’t happen!” Now Sam sounded exasperated, and suddenly everything was his fault. “It really is okay. In fact you probably won’t even notice.”
HW considered his options. His gut was telling him to keep asking questions, but experience told him to shut the hell up.
She touched his cheek. “Don’t make that face.”
“Which face?”
“The one when you look all worried, and then I feel bad, and want to hold you tight, and tell you that everything is going to be okay,” Sam whispered. “I’m not going to leave you at the altar, HW. I swear it.”
Sometimes she knew him far better than he was comfortable with. Knew that inside him, the fears of a little boy who’d been abandoned by his mother sometimes got out and took hold of him.