April placed the birth certificates back into the suitcase and closed the lid. “I’ll take care of the cleanup. I won’t be able to sleep for hours anyway.”

“I won’t argue tonight.” Nessa covered a yawn with her hand.

After her two cousins had gone down the hall to their rooms, April stared at the suitcase for a few more minutes. If Nanny Lucy had known that she was going to die, would she have destroyed what was in it? Or had she left it on purpose so that they would understand why she had been the way she was?

“Who knows?” She finally stood up and headed to the kitchen to wash the dirty dishes. “I had a father, and I had a grandfather. I wonder how my life would have been different if they would have been part of it.”

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Nessa awoke with a start and sat up so fast that the room did a couple of spins, and then she realized that she had been dreaming. She wasn’t in a king-size bed, and there wasn’t a bottle of wine in a silver cooler sitting on a glass-topped table across the room. For a split second she was disappointed that Jackson wasn’t there with her. After a kiss that had left her wanting to drag him off to the creek for sex under a tree, one part of her would love to have spent the night with him. The other part reminded her that doing something like that would create great big problems.

Oh, yeah, what kind of problems? the niggling voice in her head asked.

The kind that would make it awkward for us to work together or even be around each other as neighbors, she answered.

“It was just a dream, that’s all, one that can’t ever come true,” she whispered as she threw back the covers.

She slung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to shake the dream from her head, but it didn’t work so well. She knew the excitement of that first time having sex with a guy, and then the pleasure of cuddling up next to him in the warm afterglow. The trouble was, she had inherited a few of the same genes that made Flynn go from woman to woman. She liked the fun of the first date, the second one, and then sex on the third date, but then after that she always began to find something wrong with the guy, especially when he was an overbearing jerk like her last boyfriend. But it seemed like those were the kinds who came into her life. Maybe they got a kick out of trying to tame her sassiness, and when they couldn’t, they moved on or cheated.