Willow In Bloom
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Victoria Pade
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Chapter One
“Willow, there’s a guy… Willow? Are you sleepin’?”
Willow Colton woke with a start, dropping the bottle of vitamins in her hand. It rolled across her desk and she grabbed it in a hurry, hiding it in her lap as she tried to appear as if she hadn’t just dozed off reading the label.
“Sleeping? No, I’m not sleeping. Why would I be sleeping in the middle of the day?” she said guiltily.
“Sure looked like you were sleepin’,” Carl said, as if he still thought so but couldn’t quite believe it himself.
Of course, there was good reason not to believe it. Willow ran Black Arrow Feed and Grain, the store her great-grandfather had founded, and she ordinarily put in longer and harder hours than anyone. Without napping in her office at the rear of the store.
But things were different these days.
“What were you saying when you came in?” she asked, changing the subject before it got to be a bigger deal than she wanted it to be. “That there’s a guy…”
Carl’s expression let her know he was suspicious, but he had no choice other than to concede. “There’s a guy out here who wants to open a new account. Says he’s the one bought the old Harris place.”
“Ah,” Willow said as she struggled to fight off the logy feeling of the impromptu snooze, hoping her desk blotter hadn’t left an imprint on her face. “Ask him to wait just a few minutes and I’ll be right with him. Please,” she added, as if it would make this whole thing better.
“Sure,” Carl replied, but his tone had a quizzical edge. And he sent her a curious glance over his shoulder as he left her office.
When he’d closed the door behind him, Willow deflated slightly, hoping she’d dodged the bullet and convinced her store manager that she hadn’t been sleeping on the job.
She also tried to ignore the urge to put her head back on her desk so she could sleep again.
The fatigue was part of it, she knew now. The doctor she’d sneaked into Tulsa to see had assured her of that, so it didn’t worry her anymore. But it was a nuisance. Especially when it interfered with work.
Work she needed to get back to.
With that in mind, she opened the left-hand drawer and slipped the vitamin bottle into it, closing it again with a resounding bang and making a mental note to take the vitamins upstairs to her apartment at the end of the day.
Then she stood and went to the tiny bathroom connected to the office to make sure she didn’t look like she’d just gotten out of bed. That wouldn’t do with a new customer. Or the old ones, for that matter.
The bathroom was barely that—a toilet and a sink crammed into a space the size of a closet. Willow had to avail herself of the facilities before she could even look in the mirror.
It was another of the current nuisances—her bladder seemed to have shrunk to the size of an acorn, and she spent every day hoping no one noticed how much more frequently she was having to go.
When she was finished, she stood at the sink and washed her hands, finally checking herself in the mirror.
She was glad to see there wasn’t any evidence that she had dozed off. No imprints of desk accessories and no puffiness around her gray eyes.
Thank heaven for small favors. And maybe she really had been able to convince Carl that she hadn’t been napping.
She was also glad to see that the now-usual morning pallor of her skin was gone, too. The Native American half of her bloodline had contributed a healthy looking reddish-brown complexion, but these days Willow started out nauseous and almost as pale as the O’Flannery sisters she’d gone to high school with. Not that there hadn’t been a time during adolescence when she hadn’t longed for the O’Flannerys’ alabaster skin. But adulthood had brought with it an appreciation of her own heritage and all that went with it, including her color.
Plus she didn’t want anything to give away her secret.
One well-arched eyebrow needed some smoothing, but not a strand of her long black hair had come free of the braid that fell to the middle of her back like a thick rope. Her lips were a natural pink that she’d only once added color to, and she had come to rue that occasion and the havoc it was wreaking on her life, so she’d thrown the lipstick away. But she did apply a little gloss just to keep her lips moist.
Her nap hadn’t wrinkled her clothes—her blue jeans were fine and so was the plain blue, crew-neck T-shirt she wore tucked into them. As glad as she was that there were no signs of her nap, she was even more relieved that there was no evidence of the pregnancy, either. Her stomach was still as flat as ever. All in all, she judged herself presentable enough to meet her new customer.
If only she could stay awake through the meeting.
Hoping to aid that, she slapped her cheeks a little, the way they did in the movies to make people regain consciousness. It didn’t help the feeling that she needed more sleep, but it did add color to her face, and that was a good thing. As good as it was going to get, she decided, leaving the bathroom to get back to business.
For a split second when she reentered her office, she forgot she’d put the telltale vitamins in her drawer, and felt a rush of panic at the thought that she might have left them out where someone could see them.
One glance at her desktop reminded her that she’d stashed them. So she crossed to the door that led to the sales room, opening it to greet the person she’d kept waiting.
Never in her wildest dreams would she have guessed who that person would be.
In fact, at first she thought she was seeing things.
She blinked, shook her head slightly and took a second look.
But she wasn’t seeing things.
It was him.
It was him!
Her head began to spin.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Her knees buckled right out from under her.
“Whoa! Hold on there.”
He reached out to catch her, but Willow landed with a shoulder against the doorjamb and managed to keep from falling without his help. Barely.
“I…I must have tripped,” she muttered, in the weakest voice she’d ever heard come out of her mouth.
“You sure there isn’t somethin’ wrong with you today, Willow?” Carl asked from where he stood beside the man who had caused her shock. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “Just fine.”
She eased herself away from the jamb, willing her knees to hold her as she did.
“You sure?” Carl persisted.
“I’m sure,” she lied, knowing all the while that she was anything but fine.
“If you say so,” her store manager muttered. Again disbelief rang in his tone, but he let it drop and said, “This here’s Tyler Chadwick. Like I told you, he just bought the Harris place.”
“I know who he is,” Willow answered, wishing for more strength to her still breathy voice as she looked up into the face that had haunted her for the last two months. The face she hadn’t been sure she’d ever see again. The face she hadn’t been sure she wanted to see again.
“And this here’s Willow Colton,” Carl said to conclude the introductions. “She runs things ’round here, and it’s her needs to tell you if you can open an account or not.”
Willow… He knows me as Wyla….
But Tyler Chadwick didn’t so much as blink an eye at the discrepancy. In fact, he smiled a perfectly open smile and said, “Pleased to meet you.”
As if he’d never met her before.
Was he kidding? He’d been quite a tease, as she recalled, so maybe he was just putting her on.
But something about the way he was looking at her, at the blankness in his expression, said he wasn’t kidding at all. That he didn’t remember her.
“Wyla…” she said under her breath, to jolt his memory.
“Wyla?” he repeated. “Or Willow? Did I hear wrong?”
“Wyla?” Carl echoed, overhearing Tyler’s response. “Her name’s Willow.” Then to Willow he said, “What’s goin’ on with you today?”
Willow didn’t answer that because she couldn’t. She just stood there, staring at Tyler Chadwick.
And it was Tyler Chadwick. For a moment she had entertained the idea that maybe this man was just someone who looked remarkably like him. And happened to have the same name.
But of course, that was crazy. This was definitely the Tyler Chadwick she knew. Granted, she’d spent just a short time with him, but it had been a memorable time. He was a memorable man.
He wasn’t terribly tall—only about five feet ten, a scant three inches taller than she was. But it was an impressive five ten of hard muscles honed from making his living riding bucking broncos on the rodeo circuit.
There wasn’t an ounce of fat on that body, made up of broad shoulders, narrow waist and hips, and biceps and thighs that bulged beneath his tan-colored shirt and jeans respectively.
And even if any of that had changed in the last two months, his face hadn’t. It was still handsome enough to make the birds stop singing in the trees just to get a look at him when he walked by.
He had light-brown hair cut short on the sides and left sort of haphazardly spiky on top; a sharp chiseled jaw; a supple mouth Adonis would have envied; a thin, straight nose; deep-set eyes that were so vibrant a green they looked more like emeralds beneath slightly bushy brows and a full, square forehead.
And when he smiled—even just a little—he had one dimple, one deep crease in the middle of his left cheek, that made him look mischievous and dashing and deliciously dangerous all at once.
Oh no, she wasn’t mistaken. This was Tyler Chadwick. The one and only Tyler Chadwick. The unmistakable Tyler Chadwick.
He wasn’t someone she could forget.
Which, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be something he could say about her.
Unless maybe he thought she might be embarrassed if anyone found out she already knew him and how, and he was trying to spare her that by pretending they were just meeting for the first time…?
That must be it, she concluded.
“Why don’t you come into the office,” Willow suggested, thinking that once they were alone he would let her know he was merely being considerate of her feelings by making it seem as if he didn’t already have intimate knowledge of her.
Tyler shot a glance at Carl and said, “Thanks for your help.” Then he turned those oh-so-striking green eyes back on Willow.
She got lost in them for a moment before she realized he wasn’t looking meaningfully into her face, he was merely waiting for her to move out of the doorway so they could go into her office.
“This way,” she said unnecessarily, mentally yanking herself into line as she turned to go back the way she’d come.
She heard the click of his boot heels behind her, but he didn’t close the door to allow them privacy.
“Oh, we should have shut the door,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Okay.”
He backtracked to do that, then joined her at her desk.
Willow pointed to one of the visitors chairs and took her own seat on the opposite side of the gray metal desk before she said, “Okay, the coast is clear.”
Tyler smiled that dimpled smile, but his brows pulled together in a show of confusion. “The coast is clear for what? Talkin’ money?”
If he was playing dumb, this was taking it too far.
Or did he really not remember her?
She searched his glorious green eyes for any sign of recognition.
But it honestly wasn’t there. Not a hint of it. Not one iota. Not so much as an indication that he thought she looked vaguely familiar, and was trying to figure out where he’d seen her before.
How was that possible?
He hadn’t been drinking that night. Even though they’d met in a blues club where liquor was flowing like water, he’d been ordering ginger ale. So she knew alcohol wasn’t to blame.
But then it occurred to her that not only did Tyler know her as Wyla—the nickname her old friend Becky Lindstrom had called her all through college and used that night—but Willow had also looked considerably different.
Thanks to Becky’s makeover, her hair had been loose and her face had been made up—complete with lipstick. And she’d been wearing one of Becky’s dresses—a form-fitting little red number Willow would never have had the courage to buy, let alone wear at any other time.
She definitely hadn’t looked the way she did today. Or any other day or night before or after that fateful evening she’d met Tyler Chadwick.
So maybe that was the problem. Maybe without the face paint, with her hair tied back, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, introduced to him by another name, and in an entirely different setting, she looked so different that he just wasn’t putting two and two together.
And maybe if she helped with that two and two he might see past the surface and add it all up.
With that in mind, she said, “So are you on hiatus from rodeo riding?”
“That’s right, you said you know who I am, didn’t you? You follow the circuit?” he asked.
“No, but I saw you ride in Tulsa in June. Mid-June. On a Friday night…” Of course, when she and Becky had met him in that bar much later that evening they’d pretended they hadn’t seen the rodeo and didn’t know who he was. Just to give him a hard time.
So that wasn’t much of a hint.
“There was a packed crowd that night,” he was saying as Willow worked to pay attention. “Standing room only. You must have had your tickets a long while in advance. Was that your first time?”
“Yes.” For the rodeo. And only the second for what came later that night….
“It was my next-to-last,” he said quietly, soberly.
Willow sensed that she’d hit on a sore subject. “Did you retire?” she asked, using the term facetiously, since he was hardly retirement age.
But all he said in answer was, “Something like that.”
It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it, and because it wasn’t getting her any nearer her goal, anyway, she didn’t pursue it. Instead she decided to try a different tack.
“I suppose you must have met a lot of people along the way.”
“Probably more than my fair share.”
“A lot of women.”
He smiled wryly. “Probably more than my fair share.”
Willow acknowledged that with a raise of her chin, but began to give in to the inevitable thought she’d been trying to avoid—that she had been just one of many. That that night, so unlike anything she had ever done in her life, had been so commonplace to him that he didn’t even remember it.
“So you got around pretty good, did you?” she heard herself say before she even knew she was going to. In a very accusatory tone.
“I didn’t have a different woman every night of the week, if that’s what you’re asking, no. But what does that have to do with opening an account for feed?”
Good question.
Willow had to think fast to come up with an answer.
“I was just wondering if you’d settled down with a wife or a girlfriend who would also be on the account.”
Feeble. Oh, was that feeble.
But it was the best she could do on the spot.
And he didn’t really buy it. She could see the doubt in his expression.
But he went along with it, anyway.
“No, there’s just me. I’ll be the only one on the account. Shouldn’t you be writing something down?”
Willow felt even more stupid—if that were possible—because he was right, she hadn’t so much as taken out a piece of paper or a pencil.
She did that now, filling in his name at the top of the form she used.
“You’ll have to give me the formal address. I know the Harris place, but I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head,” she said, trying hard to sound businesslike to counteract her total unprofessionalism up to that point.
Tyler rattled off the route number and zip code, and as Willow wrote those down, too, she worked to come up with more questions or conversation that might spur his memory without seeming completely inappropriate.
But she couldn’t think of anything, and instead just asked the usual things about his finances, references, and about how much feed and grain he thought he’d be needing per month.
And then the form was finished and all that was left was for him to sign it to authorize her to run a credit check on him.
When he’d done that, he stood. “Guess that takes care of it then.”
A sudden feeling of panic rushed through Willow at the thought that he was on the verge of leaving and she hadn’t made any headway whatsoever in getting him to remember her.
“So did you end up taking home all the prize money that weekend in Tulsa?” she asked in a last-ditch effort, hoping any mention of Tulsa or that weekend might spur something in him.
But it just seemed to dampen his mood again. “No, only Friday’s purse. The competition you must have seen,” he said, once more sounding as if he didn’t want to talk about it.
And maybe that was the problem, Willow thought. Maybe losing the following two days had caused him to block out the entire weekend. Her included.
Not that that made it any more heartening as she finally gave in and admitted she was failing miserably at making him remember her.
“You’ll let me know once you get the credit report and okay the account, so I can put in an order?” he asked as he made his way to the office door with Willow following him this time.
“I’ll be in touch,” she assured him, unable to keep her own dismay out of her voice.
Apparently he heard it, because he tossed her a small frown. But he didn’t question it. He just said, “I’ll be lookin’ forward to hearing from you. And to doing business with you.”
Willow could only manage a nod, at which point he headed down the main aisle and left the store.
And as she stood in her office doorway again and watched him go, she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.
The one man she’d done something totally outrageous and uncharacteristic with, the one time in her life she’d ever done anything totally outrageous and uncharacteristic at all, had just strolled in, apparently without a single memory of ever even having met her.
And she didn’t know what to do about it.
It was so humiliating.
So humiliating that she wished that night they’d spent together could be left a secret she could carry with her to her grave, so no one would ever be the wiser. So her humiliation would never be known.
She wished she could steer clear of Tyler Chadwick for the rest of her life, in spite of those eyes and that face and that body.
And as she retreated back into her office and closed the door once again, she considered doing just that—steering clear of Tyler Chadwick for the rest of her life.
But she wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do. Even if he was the kind of creep who spent the night with a woman and then forgot all about it. All about her.
Because even if he was that kind of creep, even if he didn’t remember having met her, it didn’t change the fact that he had. That he’d done much, much more than just meet her.
It didn’t change the fact that she was now pregnant with his baby.
