“Oh. Wow.”
Jesse felt stunned … and humbled, as he registered the shape of their baby: the outline of the head and the body, even the skinny little legs and arms, and—most awesome and overwhelming—the rapid beating of the heart inside the chest.
He had some experience with ultrasounds—mostly with respect to equine fetuses. But this was completely outside his realm of experience. This was an actual human baby—his and Maggie’s baby. He knew that he’d done very little to help grow this miracle inside her. Yes, he’d contributed half of the baby’s DNA, but since then, he’d done nothing. She was the one who was giving their baby everything he or she needed, the only one who could.
He wanted to say something to express the awe and gratitude that filled his heart, but his throat was suddenly tight.
* * *
The Maverick’s Thanksgiving Baby
Brenda Harlen
BRENDA HARLEN is a former family law attorney turned work-at-home mum and national bestselling author who has written more than twenty books for Mills & Boon. Her work has been validated by industry awards (including an RWA Golden Heart® Award and the RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ choice Award) and by the fact that her kids think it’s cool that she’s “a real author.”
Brenda lives in southern Ontario with her husband and two sons. When she isn’t at the computer working on her next book, she can probably be found at the arena, watching a hockey game. Keep up to date with Brenda on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, at @BrendaHarlen, or send her an e-mail at [email protected].
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For Leanne Banks,
who shared some honest truths about cowboys …
and other subjects :)
XO
Contents
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
July
Jesse Crawford was an idiot. A completely smitten and tongue-tied idiot.
But far worse than that indisputable fact was that Maggie Roarke now knew it, too.
What had ever possessed him to approach her? What had made him think he could introduce himself and have an actual conversation with a woman like her?
While he’d never been as smooth with women as any of his three brothers, he’d never been so embarrassingly inept, either. But being in close proximity to Maggie seemed to rattle his brain as completely as if he’d been thrown from the back of a horse—and that hadn’t happened to him in more than fifteen years.
The first time he saw her, even before he knew her name, he’d been mesmerized. She was tall and willowy with subtle but distinctly feminine curves. Her blond hair spilled onto her shoulders like golden silk and her deep brown eyes could shine with humor or warm with compassion. And her smile—there was just something about her smile that seemed to reach right inside his chest and wrap around his heart. A ridiculously fanciful and foolish idea, of course, and one that he wouldn’t dare acknowledge to anyone else.
It was no mystery to Jesse why a man would be attracted to her, but he was still a little mystified by the intensity of his reaction to her—especially when he didn’t know the first thing about her. The discovery that she was a successful attorney
