Victoria Pade - Abby, Get Your Groom!

How— why— would he know that? It wasn’t as if she readily or easily opened up to anyone—clients, friends, dates, anyone. And she’d never met this man before. Plus he was a Camden. Why would someone from a family like that know those kinds of details about her?

“You get off on reading twenty-eight year old newspaper articles?” she asked.

“No, we...uh...had a different source. One closer than a newspaper article.” His eyes met hers steadily. “But that’s better talked about privately so I thought maybe we could set up a time to meet later, too—”

“Okay, what is this?” Abby demanded firmly, switching to the tough-girl tone she’d sometimes needed to use in rough foster homes.

He held up his hands, palms out. “Exactly what I’ve told you—I’m here for a haircut and to talk to you about my sister’s wedding.”

“And about something that you want me to meet you for later?”

“Because it’s better talked about in private ,” he repeated, his voice quieter than hers had been.

China appeared from nowhere just then and Abby knew her friend had been lurking close enough to hear at least a portion of what had been said. China had probably only been hanging around to ogle the guy, but now any indication of admiration was gone. In its place was I’ve-got-your-back mode. China had also been a foster child and it was a pattern the two of them had developed when they’d become friends.

But even though Abby wasn’t sure what was going on here, she didn’t think it was anything she couldn’t handle so she told China, “It’s okay.”

The tall, very blonde China looked from Abby to the man in her chair through narrowed hazel eyes that were always dramatically lined and shadowed.

To the client, China said, “If there’s something fishy with you—”

“There isn’t,” he claimed, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. “Look, I am who I say I am.” He handed Abby his driver’s license and a business card. “And I’m honestly here with only the best intentions.”

Abby looked over the license and card, then let China see them, too. When they were both finished with them he retrieved his license but left the card with Abby.

“Keep that. It has all my numbers on it—business and personal. I was going to leave it with you anyway so you could reach me after this.”

Abby looked at China, who looked back at Abby, both of them confused but still suspicious.

Then China stepped out of Abby’s station and seemed to disappear, though Abby had no doubt her friend would stay nearby.

“So, what’s going on?” she demanded then.

“Right now, a haircut and talk about my sister’s wedding,” he said as if he were narrowing it down for the moment.

Abby was half tempted to refuse both and send him packing.

But she knew that if Sheila—the owner of two shops who left the managing of this one to Abby—heard that Abby’d had the opportunity to do the wedding of anyone as prominent as a Camden and refused, there would be hell to pay. It would likely cost her her job. So she had to at least hear him out.

“A haircut and talk about your sister’s wedding,” she reiterated.

“For now, here. And then maybe we can set up something for later so I can tell you the rest. Somewhere neutral, where you feel completely safe and can just listen to what I have to say.”

Abby glared at him, again adopting her tough-girl attitude.

But once more she thought of how much she’d be risking if she didn’t accept the business he was offering, so she signaled her shampoo boy to come and lead Dylan Camden to the sinks. She stayed where she was, watching from there and wondering what was up with this guy.

When he’d first confirmed his connection to the Camden Superstores, she’d wondered if he was there to offer her a job. She’d heard that the Camden salons were really slipping these days and it wouldn’t be the first time someone had come in to steal her away from Sheila under the guise of having her do their hair.

But then he’d brought up the hospital. And he did seem to know things...

It was stupid. Totally stupid, and it hadn’t happened in years and years and she hated herself for lapsing into some old childhood dream. But a stranger coming out of nowhere, knowing something about her past, saying he had more to tell her, provoked the old fantasy just the same.

The fantasy of someone appearing in her life unexpectedly to tell her she’d been misplaced by loving parents who had finally found her and wanted to whisk her away to somewhere she belonged. To a family she belonged to.

It was far-fetched. She knew it. And Dylan Camden was only a few years older than her own thirty so he certainly wasn’t one of her long-lost parents.

But what if...

What if he was coming to tell her he was her brother? They both did have dark hair.

No, she decided. Dark hair was too common for her to draw conclusions just from that. And she certainly didn’t have the signature blue eyes the Camdens were known for—the Camden Blue Eyes, the papers called them. They were even more striking in person than she’d expected.

But the Camdens were a big-deal family with a huge number of associates and connections. There were countless ways the Camdens could have known her parents. Could she be the daughter of a socialite friend who had had her when she was very young and ultimately given her away to avoid humiliation and embarrassment?

Pie in the sky, she told herself.

Pipe dreams.

Dumb.

But what if Dylan Camden really did know something—anything—about her background?

It wouldn’t take much to know something she didn’t. And just in case...

It was insanely far-fetched.

But even so, the longer she thought about it, the more she knew that she was going to agree to meet with him.

In order to find out if he really did have even a morsel of information about who she was.

Chapter Two

Dylan paid the bill for his haircut at Beauty By Design’s reception desk then leaned around the partition behind it to call back to Abby Crane. “The park on Thirty-Second and Bryant, tonight at six-thirty, at the picnic tables—I’ll find you,” he said, repeating the time and location of the meeting she’d agreed to.

From her station she nodded that so-full head of shiny hair. He’d noted that it was the color of the Belgian bittersweet chocolate that he’d gorged on for the past three months.

“You’d better be on the up-and-up,” muttered the receptionist.

“I am, don’t worry,” he assured her before leaving the salon.

It was only a little after four and Dylan knew he should go back to his office for a while. But as he got into his black Jaguar the thought of that just didn’t sit well.

He wasn’t far away—he was on the very outskirts of the city, and it wouldn’t take him more than fifteen minutes to be sitting behind his desk again.

But since returning from three months of working on the security in the European stores—which he’d done to escape Lara and let the situation here cool off—everything seemed to require so much extra effort. It was taking its toll on him.

Sure, it was effort he was willing to put in. Effort he knew that he owed his entire family. And he definitely wanted to make things right again because he couldn’t even put into words how much he hated the way things were between himself and the family now.

But it wasn’t easy keeping up that eager-to-please attitude nonstop, day in and day out. It wasn’t easy doing things like today’s mea-culpa lunch with Cade and Nati—one of many he’d done during the three weeks since he’d been back. And sometimes he just needed to crawl to the back of his cave like a bear and take a few minutes before he could do more of it.