His Virgin Bride. Margaret Mayo

wanted for her. A home, a safe place to grow up.

      If you didn’t count perverts in the bushes. She giggled tiredly at the thought.

      Of course, there were those conditions. One to live here in Miracle Harbor for at least a year. No problem. But two?

      Preposterous. How could someone get married just for personal gain? What kind of marriage would that be? And given her history with Ty, Belle’s dad, she simply knew she couldn’t trust herself in the all important department of mate selection.

      So, why had she come, uprooted her whole life, knowing she had no intention of fulfilling that second condition?

      During her brief visit with her sisters, she had learned they had been separated at about age three. She had no memory of them, but Corrine said she had foggy memories of something. And Brit’s adoptive parents had told her she was three when she came to them.

      Abby had come because she wanted to know her sisters better, had to know them, had felt as soon as she had seen them, a deep sense of having found herself.

      And maybe, in some small, lost part of herself, she really wanted to believe in fairy-tale endings, wanted to believe in a place with a name like Miracle Harbor, maybe she could expect anything to happen.

      Maybe it had already started, with her at the wrong house, and the car not starting, all things linked together, part of a larger plan.

      For her.

      And what about him? How would he fit into that plan?

      He wouldn’t. He’d done the decent thing tonight, she suspected because his training would allow him to do nothing else.

      By tomorrow, he would be part of her history, somebody she could nod to when she passed him on the street.

      There had been mile-high barriers in that man’s cool eyes, and she felt no desire to try and penetrate that mystery.

      But even if she did decide to try and fulfill that ridiculous condition placed on her gift, she would never pick a man like him. She wanted someone sweet and kind. Someone who would make a good father for her daughter.

      A little pudgy fellow with glasses, who took lunch in a paper bag to his office.

      Upstairs, she heard the groan of a bedspring, and felt the oddest little stir in her stomach. A stir that a little pudgy fellow with glasses would never be able to create.

      Which was just as well. That stir, she knew, led to nothing but trouble.