His Surprise Son

His eyes turned serious when he added, “How about if we start fresh, pretend we just met? Could we do that tonight?”

She tried to speak but could get nothing past her throat, not even breath.

You can’t pretend that, her conscience protested. Tell him about his son. He needs to know.

“Nate,” she finally managed. “I think it would be best if—”

He touched her lips. “Think less. This one time.”

He pulled her chair closer, close enough for him to cup the back of her head. “On second thought, you should know my intentions before we set our plans in stone.” His voice was so soft.

Her heart beat so hard she could barely draw the breath to speak. “What are your intentions?”

Tenderly his lips settled on hers, soft as down. How could she have forgotten the feel of them, the scent of his skin? It was a homecoming.

She kissed him back with yearning and passion and a hunger she couldn’t satisfy on a neighborhood porch.

This is wrong, her conscience cried out.

If it was, it was an exquisite, magnificent mistake.

* * *

The Men of Thunder Ridge:

Once you meet the men of this Oregon town, you may never want to leave!

WENDY WARREN loves to write about ordinary people who find extraordinary love. Laughter, family and close-knit communities figure prominently, too. Her books have won two Romance Writers of America RITA^>® Awards and have been nominated for numerous others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with human and non-human critters who don’t read nearly as much as she’d like, but they sure do make her laugh and feel loved.

For my daughters, Liberty and Elliana, beautiful through and through. Thank you for being my teachers, my miracles, and for having the best laughs in the world. I love you.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

Thunder Ridge, Oregon

Izzy Lambert considered herself an honest person, and she’d bet her last dollar that most people who knew her would agree. In her whole life, she’d told only two whoppers. And if you wanted to get technical about it, the first was really more a lie of omission than an outright fib.

She’d spent a whole lot of time afraid her secrets would be discovered and nearly a decade and a half on the lookout for the man from whom she’d withheld the truth. Sometimes she’d think she was seeing him...

...at the Thunderbird Market, reaching for a quart of creamer in the dairy aisle...

...in line at the bank...

...in the car behind hers at the Macho Taco drive-through in Bend...

And once she’d nearly choked on a Mickey Mouse pancake at Disneyland, because she thought he was there, pushing a double stroller.

In reality, it never had been him—thank you, God—but each time Izzy thought she saw Nate Thayer, her heart began to pound, her pulse would race, she’d feel hot and dizzy, and flop sweat drenched her in seconds.

Kinda like right now.

“Join us for lunch at The Pickle Jar. A joke and a pickle for only a nickel,” she said distractedly as she handed a flyer to a group of tourists. Her eyes darted from their sunburned faces to the tall, dark-haired man at the far end of the opposite side of the block.

One of the women waggled the flyer. “Is this a genuine New York deli?”

“It’s a genuine Oregon deli,” Izzy murmured, squinting into the distance. She remembered a headful of thick black hair just like on the man down the block. And broad, proud shoulders like his.

“Where is it?” one of the other women asked.

“About a hundred feet that way.” Taking several mincing steps, Izzy made a half turn and pointed. As she turned back, a tour bus pulled up, blocking the man from her view. Dang it!

“Is that why you’re dressed like a pickle?” asked an elderly gentleman who was perspiring in the sun almost as much as she was.

Admonishing herself to concentrate on the prospective customers, she forced a smile. “I’m not just any pickle—I’m a kosher dill.”

Yeah, she was dressed in a foam rubber pickle suit, the latest in her series of desperate attempts to scare up some new customers for the aged deli. “The Pickle Jar has quarter-done, half-done and full dill pickles, all homemade from a secret family recipe. You can take some home in a collector jar, too.”

According to her online class, Branding is Your Business, having a mascot emphasized the idea behind the product, built connections with customers and humanized the company. Although one could argue that a pickle was not human.

It wasn’t as if she enjoyed dressing as a giant briny cucumber. Once upon a time Izzy had imagined herself in college, studying business, then having an office of her own and wearing beautiful professional attire. Of course, once upon a time she’d imagined a lot of things that had turned out to be nothing more than fantasies. She’d learned several years back that you couldn’t move forward unless you were first willing to accept reality. So with The Pickle Jar losing potential customers every day to the newer, hipper eateries in town, Izzy had succumbed to desperate measures, even going online to purchase this warty green pickle suit, only “slightly” used.