The Sweetest Mail Order Bride (Sweet Creek Brides Book 1) by Jill Summers

to join in.
    She did not dare. She merely nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
    He nodded once as if he understood. He turned and disappeared through the doorway, leaving her alone.
    She put the pan away and closed the cabinet door. The sound echoed in the empty room—and in her heart.
    * * *
    “Oh, Pa. We have troubles.” Gracie turned on her woe the instant he stepped foot into their bedroom. Darkness reined, casting the urchin in shadows as she bounded across her bedroom floor.
    “Big troubles.” Hope, happy to comply, did the same, leaping onto the bed beside her sister. The two of them sat in the middle of the mattress in their flowered nightgowns and long, unbraided brown hair. The illumination from the bedside lamp perfectly captured their woebegone expressions.
    He crossed the room, dodging wooden toy horses as he went.
    “What troubles are you specifically referring to?” He pulled up the top edge of the covers. “Are you talking about your school performance?”
    “Uh—” Gracie hesitated. Clearly this wasn’t the direction she was expecting to take the conversation. “Well, we could do better in school—”
    “—if we had a ma.” Hope climbed between the sheets.
    “You would do better in school if you paid attention and applied yourselves.” He was not going to go down this road. “It’s called personal responsibility. Self-reliance.”
    “It’s hard to do without a ma.” Gracie managed to sound heartrending as she joined her sister between the sheets and snuggled into her pillow. “Why don’t you like her?”
    “Yeah, why?”
    “I’m afraid to guess what you girls are up to now.” He tucked the covers up to their chins. “I know you have a scheme in mind. Don’t deny it.”
    “Well—” Gracie hedged.
    “Umm—” Hope rolled her eyes.
    “She didn’t yell at us about the biscuits.” Gracie wiggled around beneath the covers, as if she had too much energy to contain. “Not even a little.”
    “Teacher says we’re a trial,” Hope added. “But not Clementine.”
    “She’s awful nice, Pa.”
    “The nicest ma Grandpa could find.”
    A dark, terrible foreboding gathered behind his breastbone. It didn’t take a genius to see where this was going. “We’ve discussed this.”
    “But that was before.” Gracie stopped to give a cute little huff. “Pa, you like Clementine now.”
    “Maybe she could still be our ma?” Hope’s eyes held a glimmer of hope and of love.
    He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to hold back his reaction to that. Emotions were messy. Emotions hurt. It was easier to stay clinical—the objective doctor who felt nothing. But his daughters, for all their spunk and exuberance, were tender of heart and fragile in their need to be loved. Surely they had joined in helping bring Clementine here because they sorely felt the void of a mother’s affection in their lives.
    He opened his eyes. Perhaps this was where he’d always failed his girls, closing down when he should be opening up. Lena had drained him, never happy, turning cold and demanding when she realized a doctor’s life was about long hours and worry for others. After the girls were born, she’d battled hopelessness and didn’t want to find her way out. Turning off his heart had been a way of coping, a way to dull the pain of his broken dreams.
    But his heart was not off now. It was not dull. Something in him had changed.
    And he knew who had done it. Clementine. Everything had changed when he’d taken her hand.
    “Clementine needs us, Pa,” Gracie informed him.
    “Yeah,” Hope agreed. “Cuz she lost her little boy. She’s a ma without a kid—”
    “—and we’re kids without a ma,” Gracie finished.
    “I didn’t realize how much you needed her.” He bent close and ran a hand over Gracie’s head first, then Hope’s. Such great girls. “But do you really want to saddle someone as nice as Clementine with a husband like me?”
    “Yes!” the girls chorused.
    He laughed.
    “Good