Grace tamped down the tears threatening to blur her vision. She had known Emma only four weeks, and already the woman was as much a mother as she’d had in more than nine years.

“Thank you, Emma. For everything,” Grace whispered hoarsely.

Emma looked at her watch, ducking her head. But not before Grace saw a flush creep into the woman’s face.

“I’ll take this out to your car and check the car seat,” Emma said, her voice gruff as she picked up the bag. “You’ll miss your flight if we don’t get going.”

Grace rocked her nephew, tempted to close her eyes and fall asleep with him. What was she doing, taking him on such a journey at such a young age? Three flights, each plane decidedly smaller than the previous one. A jet from Virginia to Boston, a turbo-prop from Boston to Bangor, Maine, and then a six-seat bush plane that probably had skis instead of wheels for the last leg from Bangor to home.

What was she hoping to find in Pine Creek?

And just how many more lies would she have to tell before Mary’s ghost rose up from her ashes and bit her on the backside?

Chapter Three

The first thing he noticed was the baby strapped to her chest. The second thing was the fact that she wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

That first little detail should have made the second one moot, but Greylen MacKeage had never been one to run from a fight or from babies. Nor was he prone to second-guessing his gut. Not when his reaction to a woman was this strong.

The hair on the back of his neck stirred when she walked toward him in the Bangor airport terminal looking lost and tired and in desperate need of assistance. But it wasn’t until she walked up to the pilot holding the “Sutter” sign that his senses sharpened acutely.

They would be sharing the plane to Pine Creek.

Which was a blessing for Grey. He needed the distraction of a beautiful woman to take his mind off the fact that he would soon be three thousand feet up in the sky with nothing but air between him and the ground. He couldn’t decide which was worse, the three thousand feet for the next leg of his ride from Bangor to Pine Creek or the thirty thousand feet he had flown at coming from Chicago. Not that it mattered. From either height, the ground was just as hard when you fell.

“You’re Grace Sutter?” the impatient pilot asked when she stopped in front of him and carefully set down her bags.

She nodded.

“You related to Mary Sutter?”

She nodded again.

Just as impatient to get this flight over with as the pilot seemed to be, Grey silently folded the newspaper he’d been reading and studied Grace Sutter. He knew Mary, too.

“You don’t look like your sister,” the pilot said, giving her a skeptical once-over, as if he didn’t believe her.

Grey did. This woman looked a bit older than Mary, but then that might just be the state of exhaustion she was obviously in. Her soft-looking, tousled blond hair was longer, lighter, and a tad more wild. The cherub shape of her face and the cant of her chin were identical to her sister’s, and she was shorter than Mary by a good three inches. And her eyes? Well, they were a deeper, more liquid blue, set off by flawless skin the color of newly fallen snow. But stand the sisters side by side, and a blind man could see the resemblance.

He hoped like hell their pilot wasn’t blind.

Grey knew Mary Sutter as a neighbor. She owned a small herb farm on the west side of his mountain.

The same farm he had unsuccessfully been trying to buy for the last two years. The MacKeages owned nearly four hundred thousand acres of prime Maine forest, and the Sutter land sat right in the corner of a very nice piece of it.

For two years Mary had sold him eggs, herbs, even goat cheese, but she would not sell him her home.

Grey hadn’t pushed the issue. He didn’t really need her sixty-one acres, he just wanted to neaten up his western boundary. But all he had been able to get from Mary, other than food, was the promise that if she ever decided to sell, she’d sell to him.

And so Grey had remained content to be good neighbors. When Mary’s roof had needed repair, he’d sent Morgan and Callum over to fix it. Not that she had asked for his help.

Mary Sutter was an independent woman. And that had been fine with Grey, until he had caught her thirty feet up on the roof one day, with one end of a rope tied around her waist and the other end tied to the chimney. He had decided then that independence in a woman was a dangerous thing.

He had made the foolish mistake of telling her so.

Mary had laughed in his face.

But she had accepted his offer to help. Mary Sutter may be independent, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn

’t like heights any more than he did.

Grey had asked her out once. So had Morgan and Callum and even too-old-for-her Ian. She had kindly, gracefully, refused them all. And then the crazy woman had been seen all over town with the bastard MacBain.

Go figure.

“I know Mary,” the pilot said. He looked around the terminal and then at a piece of paper he held with his sign. “I don’t have her listed for this trip.” He looked at Grace Sutter. “She’s not home, you know.

Been gone about five months.”

“I know,” Grace Sutter said softly.

The baby that was snuggled deeply in the sack on her chest suddenly stirred. The pilot took a step back, not having realized the woman had a child with her.

Dammit. He was blind.

Grey was seriously thinking of renting a car for the last ninety miles of his journey. But the rental company insisted he return the damn thing back here; they had no outlets in the middle of the woods. So that wasn’

t an option. Neither was calling one of his men to come get him. They were too close to the scheduled opening of the resort, and they were nowhere near ready.

Grey stood up, slung his bag over his shoulder, and stooped to pick up Grace Sutter’s two bags by her feet. He was surprised by the weight of one of them. He was even more surprised when she grabbed the lightest one back from him.

He lifted his head to find himself staring over a baby’s head into the deep blue eyes of the woman he intended to marry.

Grey straightened as if he’d been punched. What in hell was this all about? He suddenly felt too big for his skin, his knees wanted to buckle, and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

“Ah…I’ll hold on to this one, thank you,” she said, her voice barely penetrating the haze in his head. He saw her turn to the pilot. “I have three more bags and a car seat waiting at the luggage counter.”

Grey turned and walked out the side door of the terminal without looking back. The cold, drizzling February rain hit him full on the face. He stood there, his head lifted to the sky, and let the rain wash all the fog from his brain.

Talk about reactions. The lady was beautiful enough to take any man’s breath away, but marriage?

Grey shook his head, disgusted with himself. Granted, he did have marriage on his mind lately, but he was expecting the courtship to last a bit longer than two seconds. Yes, that was what had struck him a moment ago—his body was already looking for a mate even if his brain had not caught up to it yet.

Yeah. That’s what happened. A beautiful woman had simply stepped in front of a man on the hunt.

Grey had called a clan meeting just a few weeks ago to discuss this very subject. It was time, he had told his men, that they all got married. They had their land, the resort was due to open next month, and it was time they looked to the future. They needed sons. Lots of sons, with whom they could start building the MacKeage clan back to the greatness it once was.

His men had not embraced the idea. They were still trying to cope with the fact that they were no longer warriors, which was an honorable profession in their minds, but merchants, which was not. They were selling pleasure and sport to hordes of vacationers who traveled from the overcrowded cities of the south.