At first she’d thought it was just stress, but when she’d begun to have some very odd symptoms that couldn’t have been stress-related she’d had to entertain the possibility that something else was going on.
Pregnancy.
She’d actually passed out cold in the doctor’s office when her worst fear was confirmed.
And then she’d come to and cried. Sobbed. Right in front of the doctor.
That had caused the doctor to talk about alternatives if she didn’t want the child, which had made Willow cry all the harder.
“Alternatives? I don’t have any alternatives,” she’d wailed.
But by the time she’d returned to Black Arrow that night she’d thought about the alternatives the doctor had laid out for her and she’d known she couldn’t choose any of them. This was her baby and she was going to have it, raise it, love it.
She just didn’t know anything else.
She didn’t know how she was going to have and raise a child alone.
She didn’t know how she was going to tell her brothers.
She didn’t know what they were going to do when she did.
She didn’t know whether or not she should find Tyler Chadwick and tell him.
Only now he’d found her.
He just didn’t know it.
Willow slumped in her desk chair like a wilting flower.
The father of her baby was a man who obviously had had so many one-night stands with so many different women that he didn’t even remember the women he’d had them with.
It kept coming back to that.
Back to what Willow had thought the previous day—that he was the worst kind of creep.
But he hadn’t seemed like a creep that night in Tulsa.
She’d thought he was the nicest guy she’d ever met.
He’d made her laugh. He’d put her at ease. He’d made her feel good about herself. He’d made her feel free. Free from being the little sister to Bram and Ashe and Jared and Logan.
Which had been exactly what she’d needed.
It had just been so wonderful it had all apparently gone to her head.
“But that was then and this is now,” she said to herself as she crossed her arms on her desk and laid her head on them to rest.
And as much as she wished she could just forget about Tyler Chadwick and that night, the way he apparently had, she couldn’t.
So what was she going to do? she asked herself.
One thing that she definitely couldn’t see herself doing was marching up to him and announcing out of the blue that, whether he remembered it or not, they’d slept together and that she was pregnant as a result.
But what if she gave him more of a chance to remember her? What if she did what she could to spend some time with him? To let him get to know her? To see more of her?
Maybe something about the sound of her voice or the way she looked at just the right angle would make him remember her and that night together.
Surely somewhere in his brain there was some image of her that could be brought back to the surface.
And then…
And then…
She didn’t know what then.
But at least it was a first step. It was something to do.
And she needed to do something. Something that could give her a clue as to where to go from here.
Because not only had Willow been knocked for a loop when she found out she was pregnant, she didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about breaking the news to her brothers, or whether or not to tell the baby’s father, or what to expect his reaction would be if she did, or what to do about her entire future.
But getting the baby’s father to remember the baby’s mother seemed like a logical beginning.
She just hoped that her initial impression of Tyler as a genuinely nice guy had had some validity to it and that he wasn’t really the jerk she’d decided he was the day before. That maybe along the way he’d tell her she reminded him of someone he’d once encountered, and she would learn that he hadn’t forgotten her at all, that he just hadn’t connected the dots and realized that she and Wyla were the same person.
It was a hope she tried hard to hang on to even though she was very much afraid the odds were against her.
But still it was a whole lot better to hope that his not knowing her had a simple, believable explanation than to accept what seemed more likely—that he’d spent an entire night making love to her and now didn’t remember who she was.
Willow had the perfect excuse to see Tyler again, and once she’d closed up the Feed and Grain for the day she decided to use it.
But not before making a stop in the apartment above the store.
The apartment had been her grandmother’s, but Willow had moved into it with Gloria when Willow had taken over the running of the Feed and Grain. Now that her grandmother had passed away she lived there alone.
And she never climbed the stairs at the back of the store without wishing she would still find her grandmother there to greet her.
But she was learning to weather those moments, and tonight, when she had, she made a beeline for her own bedroom to change her clothes.
Only as she stood in her closet, trying to figure out what to change into that might give Tyler a hint as to who she was, did it occur to her that all of her things were basically the same—jeans and tops.
She had a couple of pairs of slacks she wore to church, and a plain, simple black dress that she wore with a matching jacket to funerals and, without the jacket, to weddings. But that was about it. And because she knew she’d feel overdressed if she wore her Sunday slacks—besides the fact that it would no doubt raise eyebrows and questions if anyone who knew her saw her—the closest she could come to Wyla-wear was a red V-neck T-shirt with a clean pair of jeans.
She did unbraid her hair, though, brushing it and letting it fall free the way she’d worn it that night. And although lip gloss was all she owned in the way of makeup, she made a mental note to buy herself a few cosmetics as soon as possible to aid her cause.
Then she locked up the apartment and used the outside stairs to go down to her old blue pickup truck, wishing she had a better, sexier vehicle, too.
But there wasn’t anything to be done about it, and so she climbed behind the wheel, started the engine and pulled away from the curb, feeling more anxious than she could ever remember having felt before.
Willow was familiar with all the farms and ranches around Black Arrow. It had been her job at the Feed and Grain to make deliveries after school as soon as she’d been old enough to drive. So she knew exactly where she was going.
The former Harris place was south of town about four miles. She’d gone all through school with the Harrises’ only child, Samantha. But she and Willow hadn’t been friends. Samantha had been a very girly girl—worlds apart from tomboy Willow.
As she turned off the main road onto the private drive she could see the house in the distance. It was a two-story frame, painted white and trimmed in black, with a steep black roof.
The house had a nice front porch—that was what Willow had always liked best about it. The porch was bordered with a spindled railing that looked beautiful at Christmas, decorated with lights and evergreen boughs.
But August was not the time for that, and other than a wicker rocker and a chair swing hanging from chains, the porch itself was