Abby exhaled deeply, stirring her bangs so that strands of hair tangled in her lashes. “Oh, no…”
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” her daughter asked as she gave her mother a tug.
Abby’s feet stopped moving—she didn’t want to get any closer to Clayton. No one had told him about Lara. While Abby appreciated her friends’ loyalty, she wouldn’t have minded if they’d broken their promise not to tell anyone in Cloverville about her daughter. Why had she made them pledge their silence in the first place? She wasn’t ashamed of being a single mom. But a part of her was still eighteen, hurting from the disapproval of the townspeople. And no one in Cloverville had disapproved of her more than Clayton.
If only she’d worn one of her tailored business suits instead of her most casual outfit, but now it was too late to change either her clothes or Clayton’s opinion of her.
He walked toward them, eating up the short distance with just a couple of strides. “Abby.”
She drew in a breath and then pasted on a smile. “Clayton.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said, his gaze hard as he stared at her.
Not long enough. He obviously didn’t want her back in Cloverville any more than she wanted to be back.
Then his head dipped, and his gaze softened on her little girl. His throat moved as he swallowed, and then he asked, “So who’s this pretty young lady?”
“My daughter.”
“I can tell,” he said, his lips curving into a warm smile that etched creases into his cheeks.
Abby’s pulse quickened. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen him smile before. Lara, however, was more frightened than charmed and ducked behind her mother’s legs, grasping Abby’s hand tightly with one hand as she clutched a well-loved teddy bear with the other.
“You don’t have to be scared,” she assured her daughter, even though she’d spent much of her childhood fearing her friends’ older brother. But she’d grown up many, many years ago—she’d had no choice. “Clayton isn’t a stranger. I’ve known him a long time. Well, I knew him a long time ago.”
“I knew your mother when she was your age,” Clayton said as he dropped to his haunches, his slacks pulled taut across muscular thighs. “You look exactly like she did the first time she followed my sister Molly home.”
Like a stray dog. That was how he’d always seen her. But then he hadn’t been all that wrong. She used to come to the McClintock house with her clothes dirty, her knees scraped and her stomach growling with hunger. And his mom had always cleaned her up and fed her. Mrs. Mick, as Abby had always called her, had been more of a mother to Abby than her own sad excuse for a mother had been. Mom had spent more time in the bar than at home, and Abby’s dad had always been gone because he drove a semitruck for a living.
“What’s your name?” he asked the child.
The small girl whispered her response. “Lara.”
“Lara?” Clayton glanced up at Abby.
She nodded, then confirmed what he had to be thinking. “Lara Hamilton.”
He straightened up. “So you’re not married.”
“Nope. The closest I’m getting to an altar is Molly’s wedding tomorrow.” The one reason she had come back to Cloverville: she was going to watch her friend make the biggest mistake of her life, unless somehow she could manage to talk Molly out of it. If not for all the projects Abby had had going on in the past couple of months, she would have come back to Cloverville much sooner. She hoped she had enough time to talk Molly out of the wedding. “I’m sorry you were sent to get me, Clayton. I thought one of the others…”
“They’re already at the rehearsal.”
She glanced at her watch, then closed her eyes. “We’re late.”
He probably held her responsible for the computer problems at O’Hare that had delayed their flight. She blamed herself, too, for not coming in earlier. But Clayton was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted to come back to Cloverville at all. No matter what she’d accomplished since she’d left, everyone here—and especially Clayton—would always see her as the poor, screwed-up Hamilton kid who’d been failing high school even before she’d been expelled for malicious mischief and vandalism.
“Is it too late for me to be the flower girl, Mommy?” Lara asked.
Abby’s lids lifted, her gaze on her daughter’s concerned expression. Lara had been looking forward to her “job” in Molly’s wedding, and she’d be disappointed if Abby convinced her friend to cancel.
Clayton turned back to Lara, too, offering reassurance before her mother had a chance to speak. “No, honey, the wedding is tomorrow, and you’re going to be the most beautiful flower girl Cloverville has ever seen.” He closed one dark eye in a wink, his lashes brushing his cheek.
Abby’s heart fluttered. It had to be an aftereffect of flying. Not that she was an anxious flyer. Nope, the nerves were because she was here, less than an hour away from the Cloverville city limits.
“But we do need to get to the rehearsal,” Clayton continued. “So we know what to do tomorrow. And after the rehearsal, we’re having dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Kelly’s. They own the bakery and they always have lots of goodies around, including the best cookies in the world.”
Lara tugged on Abby’s hand. “Can I have a cookie, Mommy?”
Abby nodded. Even though it would be awfully close to Lara’s bedtime when the rehearsal concluded, if it wasn’t finished already, sugar didn’t affect Lara as it did her mother.
“I’ll get your bags and we’ll be on our way,” Clayton said as he headed toward the carousel.
Abby rushed after him, pulling Lara along with her. She didn’t want to accept his help. She really should have rented a car, but Brenna Kelly, the maid of honor and one of Abby’s oldest and closest friends, had insisted that it would be easier and faster for someone to pick her up from the airport. “I’ll get my own bags, Clayton. You don’t know what my suitcases look like.”
“I imagine they’re the only ones that are left,” he said with a smug smile, turning toward the conveyor.
Abby clenched her free hand into a fist and wished she had something to whip at the back of his head. Clayton McClintock had always irritated the heck out of her, with his smug I-have-everything-under-control personality. Why had her friends sent him to get the two of them? Just how crazy had this wedding made everyone?
“He’s nice, Mommy.”
Clayton McClintock was a lot of things. Judgmental, humorless and uptight. But he was not nice. While all the other McClintocks had always accepted her as one of the family, Clayton made her feel as if she didn’t belong.
Then again, she really hadn’t. But most of the time when she was growing up, she’d had no place else to go.
“Mommy?”
She blinked, then gazed down at Lara. “What, honey?”
“Don’t you like Clayton?”
She turned to watch him lift their suitcases from the carousel, his impressive biceps straining his shirtsleeves. Then she lied to her daughter for the first time in her life. “Sure I do.”
Clayton stood only a few feet away. Despite the grinding of the conveyor belt, he heard her and smothered a laugh. Abby had never liked him, which was fine with him. She’d been such a brat in her day. Her daughter might look exactly like her, but apparently she acted nothing like the wild child her mother had been.
“I wouldn’t let them leave again,” a male voice commented near Clayton’s shoulder.
He glanced over at a gray-haired man who