Читать книгу I Cross My Heart - Vicki Lewis Thompson - Страница 6

June 18, 1982, Last Chance Ranch

From the Diary of Eleanor Chance

A BABY APPEARED ON OUR doorstep today. Not literally, but as good as. Nicholas Jonathan O’Leary, five months old, arrived in a taxi with his own personal lawyer as a temporary nanny.

Apparently fourteen months ago, my son, Jonathan, conceived this child with that flighty Nicole O’Leary, one of the women he attached himself to during what I call his yee-haw phase. She was only in town for a couple of months, and after she left, Jonathan didn’t hear from her. Until this baby showed up.

According to the lawyer, Nicole had wanted Nicholas’s existence to be kept secret while she was alive, but she’d arranged for him to be brought here in the event of her death. Good thing she made those provisions, considering she’d taken up skydiving! Who does that kind of thing when they have an infant to care for? I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but, honestly! She had Shinola for brains, if you ask me.

Jonathan, of course, is shocked by her death and the baby he’d had no clue about. He also feels guilty for having unprotected sex with her. But Archie and I don’t really blame him. He wasn’t himself after his no-good wife, Diana, left him and their toddler, Jack, two years ago. Archie and I made sure that Jack was cared for during those months when Jonathan battled a sense of failure by painting the town.

Then, thank the good Lord, he met Sarah, and they had the loveliest Christmas wedding this past December. Sarah is everything Jonathan’s ex-wife was not. She’s a nurturing and loving presence in our lives and little Jack finally has a mother.

We’ve all been anticipating the birth of Jack’s baby brother, Gabriel, due in four months, and now…well, Sarah says Jack will have two little brothers, Nick and Gabe. That tells you what my new daughter-in-law is made of. The angels smiled on us when she agreed to marry our son.

So, before you know it, Archie and I will have three grandchildren! Archie is over the moon about that. Jonathan will inherit the Last Chance Ranch when we’re gone, and the odds are good that one of those boys will take over from Jonathan someday. Maybe they’ll even share ownership. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Archie feels very sentimental about keeping the ranch in the family. Today, in the midst of the hullabaloo about Nicholas arriving, Archie coined a name for Jonathan’s boys, each with a different mother. He calls them the Sons of Chance. I think that’s sweet.