Rows of gold chiavari chairs lined both sides of the aisle. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house, but Kate couldn’t take her eyes off Aidan. Seeing him looking gorgeous in his tux, a serene smile on his handsome face, made Kate feel cocooned in the most delicious love and warmth. She knew down to her bones that this was right.
That this was the moment she had been waiting for all her life.
Anna Nolan, Aidan’s and Daniel’s office manager, was serving as wedding coordinator for the day. When Elle and Jane had almost arrived at the fountain, she put her hand on Chloe’s shoulder, indicating it was time for her to begin her trip down the aisle.
“Remember to walk slowly and take your time scattering the flower petals,” she whispered to the girl.
Chloe nodded, then turned to Kate and threw her arms around Kate’s middle, spilling a handful of rose petals out of the basket.
“I love you, Mommy.” She put her hand on Kate’s stomach. “And I love my baby sister, too.”
It was too early to tell if the baby would be a boy or a girl, but since telling Chloe she was going to be a big sister, the little girl had made up her mind that the baby was a girl. Kate and Aidan hadn’t had the heart to correct her and say it might be a boy, because Chloe had such a capacity to love, and they knew she would love her sibling no matter what.
“I love you, too, Chloe.” Kate kissed the top of the girl’s head. “Grandma and I will be right behind you.”
Zelda blew a kiss to Chloe and the little girl set out down the aisle.
Zelda and Kate had decided to walk down the aisle together to the traditional wedding march. On her walk down the aisle, all Kate could see was Aidan and the promise of their future together. What once had felt so uncertain, a life out of her reach, was finally theirs. It had taken a long journey, complete with years of moving closer to each other, gangly Vegas Elvis and a baby to bring them together, but that was fine. It was their journey, their love story, and Kate couldn’t love it any better if she had written it herself.
After they exchanged their vows and Gigi pronounced them husband and wife, Aidan took Kate into his arms and they danced to “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” Kate smiled up at him. “No one can accuse us of rushing into anything.”
“No, they can’t.” Aidan chuckled, then pulled her closer. “It may have taken a decade and a practice wedding for us to get this right, but Kate Clark Quindlin, you were worth the wait.”
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The Secret Between Them
by Helen Lacey
Chapter One
Sean O’Sullivan knew exactly who owned the big yellow dog that had decided to lay directly in front of his door.
Leah Culhane-Petrovic.
The most annoying woman he’d never met.
Her father, Ivan, lived next door, and she’d moved in with old man two days ago. He’d seen her high school graduation picture sitting proudly on the mantel above Ivan’s fireplace.
She’d moved in to help care for her father, who’d had a stroke five weeks earlier. The news was obviously good for Ivan, but bad for him. Because since six o’clock the previous morning, there had been three moving vans barreling down their shared driveway, kicking up clouds of dust and gravel in their wake. The fact her two dogs had already found their way into his yard and dug holes all over the place was bad enough, but the fact that one of the yellow monsters had decided to sleep on his porch and chew the leg off a cane chair was the last straw.
He checked his watch, saw it was eleven o’clock and decided to walk over and give her a piece of his mind. It wasn’t that he cared about sharing the driveway with his neighbors—he liked Ivan well enough—but Sean had moved to the house by the river for solitude, and that was all about to change. Leah was an artist and would be setting up a studio in the large shed at the rear of Ivan’s yard...right near the hedge that separated the two properties. Which was where the moving vans had unloaded pallets of gear and equipment the previous day.
There goes my privacy.
The more he thought about it, the more irritated he became. Enough to grab his jacket, shove his feet into boots, pick up the house keys and head through the front door. The dog followed him down the path and through the hedge and over the worn track. The mutt started barking the moment they reached Ivan’s yard and its cohort, a bigger and shaggier version, began doing the same thing, and then started racing around Sean as he made his way toward Ivan’s house.
It wasn’t that Sean didn’t like dogs—he’d had one or two as a kid—he just didn’t like the idea of someone else’s lounging on his porch. Because it smacked of a familiarity he was trying to avoid. And Sean had returned to his hometown of Cedar River, South Dakota, to be left alone.
If only he could get that through to his family.
It was bad enough he had to endure their well-meaning attempts to butt into in his life every few days or so,
