Ten Acres And Twins

Kaitlyn Rice

Lethally sexy playboy Jack Kimball raise a baby? No way! Abby Briggs yearned to keep her orphaned twin niece and nephew together. But the will gave her the baby girl and Jack the baby boy! The devil-may-care bachelor couldn't possibly be a daddy.But when Abby offered to take both twins, Jack refused. Even worse, he looked utterly irresistible with a baby cradled in his strong arms. Abby needed a plan….Staying together on the farm they'd both inherited would surely bore Jack and show him he wasn't cut out for fatherhood. But as late-night feedings led to powerful longings, Abby dared to wonder…could a fancy-free bachelor become a forever family man?

“We need to work out a way to keep the twins together.”

Abby felt a rush of relief. “Of course,” she said. “Are you planning to leave Wyatt with me?”

“No,” Jack said, dashing her hopes in a word. “I’ll sublet my place in the city and find a place to rent around here. You know of any place?”

She thought of the land surrounding the farm. The land that Jack owned. And the farmhouse on it that was now hers.

Her gaze swooped across to the precious baby girl she’d been entrusted to raise, and then to baby Wyatt. She loved these babies. She wanted to be near both of them every single day and night. She’d do anything to achieve that goal.

Anything.

“We could both move in here,” she suggested.

Ten Acres and Twins

Kaitlyn Rice

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a child, Kaitlyn Rice loved to lie on the floor of her bedroom and draw pencil sketches of characters. She remembers assigning each one a name and personality, and imagining what their lives might be like. This study of people and relationships—both real and made up—has always fascinated her. By her midteens she was drawn into the world of romance fiction.

Through the years, Kaitlyn’s most enduring pastime has been to curl up with a good romance novel, and her fondest dream has been to create full-fledged versions of those character sketches—in book form. She’s thrilled to have finally realized that goal. Kaitlyn lives in Kansas with her husband and two daughters.

CONTENTS

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

ABIGAIL BRIGGS had outgrown temper tantrums well over twenty years ago, when she still wore bandages on her knees and thought marshmallows were a satisfactory lunch entrеe.

Still, if someone didn’t answer her questions soon, she was considering lying on the floor, screaming like a forgotten tea-kettle and thrashing around as wildly as the most precocious of toddlers.

Even in her brand-new business suit.

After she’d announced her arrival to the receptionist, she had sat on the edge of the sofa to begin her wait. She must have glanced at her wristwatch at least a hundred times. The second hand kept whirling around its perpetual circle with easy fluidity, but the minute and hour hands seemed sluggish. Twenty-eight minutes she’d waited. It may as well have been twenty-eight hours.

Abby’s mother had always said she was intense, while her father called her spirited. They were apt descriptions, she knew, since she’d spent her adolescence diving blindly and defiantly into a sea of mistakes.

Over the years, however, she had developed patience for most things. Anyone who made her living as a gardener learned to wait.

She could scatter a few handfuls of seeds, and in a season orchestrate the blooms of enough bouquets to please every bride, mother, wife and lover in Topeka, Kansas, and the surrounding county. She could plunk the rooted end of a twig into the ground and nurture it for years, until it became a robust tree capable of bearing bushels of fruit so tender their flesh melted in your mouth.

But some things were too hard to wait for, and this appointment must rate at the top of the charts in importance. Whatever that slick lawyer was doing right now, it could har