The Baby Bump. Jennifer Greene

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To “my” librarians at the Benton Harbor and St. Joseph libraries. From the start, you encouraged me to write and nourished my writing dreams. You’ve always gone out of your way to help everyone in the community enrich their worlds through books. You’re the best!

       Chapter One

      Back when Ginger Gautier was a block-headed, reckless twenty-one-year-old, she’d have taken the mountain curves at ninety miles an hour and not thought twice.

      Now that she was twenty-eight … well, she couldn’t swear to have better judgment.

      Unfortunately she was eight weeks pregnant—by a doctor who’d claimed he deeply loved her just a day before he bought an engagement ring for someone else. So. Her judgment in men clearly sucked.

      She’d lost a job she loved over the jerk. That said even more about her lack of good judgment.

      Some said she had a temper to match her red hair. Friends and coworkers tended to run for cover when she had a good fume on. So possibly her temper might be considered another character flaw.

      But she loved.

      No one ever said that Ginger Gautier didn’t give two hundred percent for anyone she loved.

      When she passed the welcome sign for South Carolina, she pushed the gas pedal a wee bit harder. Just to eighty miles an hour.

      Gramps was in trouble. And she was almost home.

      The eastern sky turned glossy gray, then hemmed the horizon in pink. By the time the sun was full up, Ginger had shed her sweater and hurled it in the backseat on top of her down jacket. When she left Chicago, it had been cold enough to snow. In South Carolina, the air was sweeter, cleaner, warmer … and so familiar that her eyes stung with embarrassingly sentimental tears.

      She should have gone home more often—way more often—after her grandmother died four years ago. But it never seemed that simple, not once she’d gotten the job in hospital administration. Her boss had been a crabby old tyrant, but she’d loved the work, and never minded the unpredictable extra hours. They’d just added up. She’d come for holidays, called Gramps every week, sometimes more often.

      Not enough. The guilt in her stomach churned like acid. Calling was fine, but if she’d visited more in person, she’d have known that Gramps needed her.

      The miles kept zipping by. Another hour passed, then two. Maybe if she liked driving, the trip would have been easier, but nine hundred miles in her packed-to-the-gills Civic had been tough. She’d stopped a zillion times, for food and gas and naps and to stretch her legs, but this last stretch was downright grueling.

      When she spotted the swinging sign for Gautier Tea Plantation, though, her exhaustion disappeared. She couldn’t grow a weed, was never engrossed in the agricultural side of the tea business—but she’d worked in the shop as a teenager, knew all the smells and tastes of their teas, could bake a great scone in her sleep, could give lessons on the seeping and steeping of tea. No place on the planet was remotely like this one, especially the scents.

      Past the eastern fields was a curve in the road, then a private drive shaded by giant old oaks and then finally, finally … the house. The Gautiers—being of French-Scottish origin—inherited more ornery stubbornness than they usually knew what to do with. The word “plantation” implied a graceful old mansion with gardens and pillars and maybe an ostentatious fountain or two. Not for Ginger’s family.

      The house was a massive sprawler, white, with no claim to fanciness. A generous veranda wrapped around the main floor, shading practical rockers and porch swings with fat cushions. Ginger opened the door to her Civic and sprang out, leaving everything inside, just wanting to see Gramps.