whether or not she should find Tyler Chadwick and tell him.
Only now heâd found her.
He just didnât know it.
Willow slumped in her desk chair like a wilting flower.
The father of her baby was a man who obviously had had so many one-night stands with so many different women that he didnât even remember the women heâd had them with.
It kept coming back to that.
Back to what Willow had thought the previous dayâthat he was the worst kind of creep.
But he hadnât seemed like a creep that night in Tulsa.
Sheâd thought he was the nicest guy sheâd ever met.
Heâd made her laugh. Heâd put her at ease. Heâd made her feel good about herself. Heâd made her feel free. Free from being the little sister to Bram and Ashe and Jared and Logan.
Which had been exactly what sheâd needed.
It had just been so wonderful it had all apparently gone to her head.
âBut that was then and this is now,â she said to herself as she crossed her arms on her desk and laid her head on them to rest.
And as much as she wished she could just forgetabout Tyler Chadwick and that night, the way he apparently had, she couldnât.
So what was she going to do? she asked herself.
One thing that she definitely couldnât see herself doing was marching up to him and announcing out of the blue that, whether he remembered it or not, theyâd slept together and that she was pregnant as a result.
But what if she gave him more of a chance to remember her? What if she did what she could to spend some time with him? To let him get to know her? To see more of her?
Maybe something about the sound of her voice or the way she looked at just the right angle would make him remember her and that night together.
Surely somewhere in his brain there was some image of her that could be brought back to the surface.
And thenâ¦
And thenâ¦
She didnât know what then.
But at least it was a first step. It was something to do.
And she needed to do something. Something that could give her a clue as to where to go from here.
Because not only had Willow been knocked for a loop when she found out she was pregnant, she didnât have the faintest idea what to do about breaking the news to her brothers, or whether or not to tell the babyâs father, or what to expect his reaction would be if she did, or what to do about her entire future.
But getting the babyâs father to remember the babyâs mother seemed like a logical beginning.
She just hoped that her initial impression of Tyler as a genuinely nice guy had had some validity to it and that he wasnât really the jerk sheâd decided he was the day before. That maybe along the way heâd tell her she reminded him of someone heâd once encountered, and she would learn that he hadnât forgotten her at all, that he just hadnât connected the dots and realized that she and Wyla were the same person.
It was a hope she tried hard to hang on to even though she was very much afraid the odds were against her.
But still it was a whole lot better to hope that his not knowing her had a simple, believable explanation than to accept what seemed more likelyâthat heâd spent an entire night making love to her and now didnât remember who she was.
Â
Willow had the perfect excuse to see Tyler again, and once sheâd closed up the Feed and Grain for the day she decided to use it.
But not before making a stop in the apartment above the store.
The apartment had been her grandmotherâs, but Willow had moved into it with Gloria when Willow had taken over the running of the Feed and Grain. Now that her grandmother had passed away she lived there alone.
And she never climbed the stairs at the back of thestore without wishing she would still find her grandmother there to greet her.
But she was learning to weather those moments, and tonight, when she had, she made a beeline for her own bedroom to