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Chapter One
Maddie Jackson looked around the friendly town of Crockett, Washington, and smiled, her first real smile in days. She loved it here. People waved from their cars, and the service station attendants had even pumped her gasoline though the sign said it was self-serve.
It was really nice—a bit like her home in New Mexico, but probably greener and cooler in the summertime. And bigger. Crockett had a population of over ten thousand, while Slapshot topped out at seven hundred.
“Hey, kiddo, I’ve been waiting for you,” called a deep voice, and she turned to see a man come striding toward her. He had a loose-limbed, sexy gait and the wide, comfortable shoulders of a football player. At another time in her life she might have been thrilled to see a hunk like that trying to catch her attention.
But not now.
Now she was smarter and wiser. She’d sworn off romance for good. No more hunks for Maddie Jackson. Not that she had much experience with hunks—only a sort-of hunk—but that was more than enough.
The man stopped in front of her with one eyebrow raised. “Something wrong, gorgeous?”
He dropped a kiss on her cheek, which made Maddie squeak and jump back several feet. Now that was new. She couldn’t remember an attractive stranger ever calling her gorgeous and kissing her. Granted, she didn’t have much experience with that sort of thing, but maybe Crockett wasn’t such a nice town, after all. Maybe it was just strange.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, trying to look confidently intimidating.
“Kissing you. What else?”
“I caught that.” Actually, it had been an awfully nice kiss, but they didn’t know each other and it wasn’t the sort of thing you did with someone you’ve never met.
Maddie glanced around, hoping to see a policeman standing conveniently nearby. Her father had been the county sheriff before getting elected mayor of Slapshot, New Mexico, and she put a lot of faith in law enforcement.
She sighed.
They didn’t make men like her dad any longer, the faithful-till-the-day-he-dies sort of guy. She’d found out the hard way, which was why she’d walked out on her own wedding just two days ago. Women tended to do things like that when they found their fiancé in a clinch with the girl hired to serve punch at the reception. Of course, she had been looking for Ted to suggest postponing the ceremony, but that was beside the point.
“Say, is the pregnancy putting you on edge?” the man said, and Maddie’s eyes widened.
Pregnancy?
This week was getting weirder by the minute, and it had already been pretty weird.
“Preg—What are you talking about?” Maddie demanded. “Never mind. I’m leaving.”
She might be shaken by the events of the past few days, and she was certainly a little on the scatterbrained side, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t need an explanation from this attractive-lunatic hunk, she needed to get away from him. Obviously, she wasn’t ready to be a world traveler—Washington was a world away from comfortable, dusty little Slapshot.
“What’s gotten into you, Beth?” the man asked, clearly puzzled. “Kane told me about the baby, but he didn’t say it was a secret. I wanted to congratulate you in person, but the store was closed.”
Maddie was intrigued despite herself. “It’s a secret to me, because my name isn’t Beth.”
He leaned closer and peered into her face, the space between his eyes creasing thoughtfully. “I’ll be damned. You look just like my sister-in-law. Jeez, you must have thought I was…” His words trailed away and he shook his head.
Suddenly everything became clear to Maddie. It was just a case of mistaken identity—the stranger wasn’t a lunatic after all, and the reason that folks had been friendly was because she reminded them of this Beth person. It was disappointing, but she’d weathered far worse disappointments lately, so she wasn’t planning to let it get her down.
“I’m really sorry,” the man said. “You look a lot like Beth, and since she owns this store, I naturally thought you were her.” He pointed to the maternity and children’s clothing shop in front of them. “She must have decided not to open today.”
Maddie tucked the information into the back of her mind. She’d come back when the place was open—it might be a clue to finding her birth family. Though, just because you resembled someone, it didn’t mean you were related.
“They say everyone has a double,” she murmured.
Patrick O’Rourke looked at the woman he’d mistaken for his brother’s wife and shook his head. At first glance his new sister-in-law and this woman looked identical, but with each passing second he was seeing big differences between them.
The woman’s blond hair was lighter and streakier—it looked natural, so it was probably from the sun…and she wore chunky silver jewelry that suited the defiant tilt to her chin. And her gauzy turquoise dress with the long scarlet sash should have been a dead giveaway. Beth tended to dress more quietly, though Patrick had to admit the stranger’s choice of scarlet and turquoise was kind of pretty.
“Patrick O’Rourke,” he said.
“Maddie Jackson,” she returned, staring at his proffered hand. She finally put her fingers over his, only to instantly yank her arm away. Patrick didn’t blame her. The O’Rourke men were tall, and more than once he’d seen a woman take a step backward as if his size intimidated her.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he murmured.
“You didn’t.”
Oh, yeah. He believed that. You bet.
Maddie lifted her chin a fraction higher and gave her long skirt a tug. “I’m from Slapshot, New Mexico. And I’m not pregnant.” She looked down at her trim tummy, then back at him with a frown. “I don’t look pregnant, do I? I mean, I’ve been upset but I haven’t eaten that much and I never seem to gain weight, anyhow.”
“Certainly not.” A grin tugged at his lips. The non sequitur sounded perfectly normal coming from her mouth. “I apologize for the misunderstanding.”
“That’s okay,” she said generously. “You must have wondered why I was so surprised when you kissed me.”
Yeah, he’d wondered about that…and he’d wondered why he was having a less-than-platonic response to his sister-in-law. It was a relief to discover the response was to someone he didn’t know, rather than the woman his brother had recently married.
“New Mexico, huh? What are you doing so far from home?” he asked, deciding it was a safer subject than the one he’d just been contemplating.
To his surprise, the question transformed the charmingly flustered expression on her face to a blank mask. “I’m visiting,” she murmured.
“Visiting?”
“Well,
