Nine
Chapter One
Meg Avery twisted in her seat to peek at the baby in the back seat. Cradled in her carrier, tiny Dana slept like an angel.
“Has she grown any more toes in the thirty seconds since the last time you checked?” teased her husband Joe from behind the wheel.
Reassured, Meg settled into place. “Babies can get tangled up, or scared or—well, who knows?” Of course, that hadn’t happened. If it did, she had a feeling Joe would know about it before she did.
He had formed an almost mystical bond with their daughter from the moment of her birth a month ago. Maybe it was because, after Meg suffered pains two weeks early and delayed going to the hospital because she thought it was false labor, Joe had ended up delivering Dana himself.
A doctor couldn’t have done a better job, the paramedics said when they arrived. Ever since, Joe had been the first one to get up and attend to Dana during the night and whenever he was home.
Meg turned her attention to the freeway ahead of her. Through the windshield of her aging sedan, it unrolled for miles as they bypassed downtown Los Angeles, heading north toward her father’s home in Santa Barbara.
Although her dad had had a drinking problem in the past, he was sober now, working as a shoe store manager and eager to meet his first grandchild. Meg looked forward to introducing him to Dana.
She turned around and checked on the baby again. Despite earlier efforts to tame them, wisps of red hair stuck up at odd angles.
“You don’t have to keep checking. There’s no need to worry as long as you follow a few simple precautions,” Joe said, speaking in a formal manner that always puzzled her. For a restaurant worker who, like Meg, had never finished high school, he sometimes talked pretty fancy.
“How would you know? You never had a baby before,” she pointed out.
“I’m not sure how I know.” He rubbed his forehead as if it hurt.
“You’re not getting another headache, are you?” Even though her husband seemed healthy, his recurring headaches made Meg worry that he hadn’t fully recovered from his near fatal accident eighteen months ago. “I can drive if you like.”
“I’m fine, but we are a little low on gas,” Joe said. “I’ll pull over at the next off-ramp.”
“Good idea.” She could rely on Joe to keep track of the gas level the same way he kept track of their finances and every other aspect of their lives. She couldn’t understand how he’d once had a reputation for being irresponsible.
While he watched for an exit sign, Meg indulged herself in admiring the man to whom she’d been married for an incredibly happy year.
From the side, she studied his well-shaped nose and strong jaw. The morning light transformed his blond hair into spun gold and, when he turned his head to smile at her, his deep green eyes glowed like emeralds.
Joe Avery would make a perfect prince in a fairy tale. To Meg, that’s exactly what he was.
Handsome strangers didn’t often wander into Mercy Canyon, the small southern California town where she’d lived most of her life. The few who did paid no attention to waitress Meg O’Flaherty, with her bushy reddish-brown hair and freckled cheeks.
Joe hadn’t had much choice, she reflected with a glint of humor.
He’d come west from Franklin, Tennessee, to take a job he’d arranged on the Internet at the Back Door Cafe, where Meg worked. En route, he’d stopped at the beach town of Oceanside, twenty miles away.
While fishing from the pier, he’d fallen off and bashed his head. Lifeguards had searched for half an hour until, some distance away, they found him thrashing in the surf.
It was a good thing he’d left his wallet on the pier, because he didn’t remember who he was. In his motel room, police had found the phone number of Meg’s boss, Sam Hartman, who’d collected Joe and brought him to Mercy Canyon.
Meg had fallen for Joe on sight and nursed him to health. He’d never regained his memory, although she’d learned plenty about him when she contacted a cousin of his in Tennessee.
She learned that, in the past, Joe had drifted from one job to another, impulsively leaving Tennessee for a post that didn’t pay any more than he was already earning. The police suggested he might have been drinking before he tumbled off the pier.
Meg didn’t care. She knew from personal observation that her Joe Avery was rock-solid. Maybe, she joked to her friends, a blow to the head wasn’t always a bad thing.
Tender and funny and amazingly sexy, Joe had claimed her heart and given her his. After surviving a rough childhood during which she and her younger brother Timmy were shuffled in and out of foster homes, Meg couldn’t believe her luck. Regardless of what anyone else might believe, she trusted her husband completely.
He pulled off the freeway and down a ramp to a service station. In the back seat, Dana began fussing.
“She needs a diaper change,” Joe said, halting at a gas pump.
“I’ll do it.” Meg knew her husband was as good at changing diapers as she was, but he needed to fill the tank. “I’ll take her inside. This chain of gas stations has great baby facilities.”
“Don’t spend too much time. I hate having you out of my sight in a strange place.” Joe wasn’t a controlling person but he’d told her that, since his accident, he felt life was precarious.
“We’ll be quick.” Meg swung out of the car, grabbed the diaper bag and removed Dana from her infant seat.
She took one last, appreciative glance at her husband as he stood at the pump. His muscular build reminded her that he was, indeed, her protector as well as her best friend.
Across the pavement, a red sports car pulled away from a pump. When it went by, the woman driver studied Joe with interest.
Look but don’t touch, Meg thought. That man belongs to me.
JOE’S HEART squeezed as his wife crossed toward the station’s mini-mart with their daughter on her shoulder. Those two people meant everything in the world to him.
He had no one else. Heck, he didn’t even remember the people he’d worked with back in Franklin. Maybe if he’d had some close family, they might have jogged his memory, but his parents had died a few years earlier and there were no siblings.
He wished someone could fill in the inexplicable gaps, the parts of himself that made no sense. When he delivered his daughter, he’d known exactly what to do, yet, when asked, his cousin back in Tennessee couldn’t remember him helping