Dancing in the Moonlight - Harlequin.com

178 DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT
She knew Jake’s mother didn’t live on the ranch
anymore, she owned a house in town where she lived
with her second husband, so perhaps Wade Dalton’s new
wife was the gardener in the family. Whoever created it
and maintained it, the gardens were lovely and peaceful.
On a makeshift wooden floor under the swaying
branches of a weeping willow, locals danced to the music
of a country music band that included Mr. Benson, the
high school choir director, Myron Potter, who owned the
hardware store, and a pretty girl with a dulcet voice
Maggie could vaguely recall babysitting eons ago.
Not that she heard much of the band, introduced as
Sagebrush Serenade. She didn’t have much chance, too
busy talking to everyone in town. She had been hugged
more times tonight than she had in the entire dozen years
since she left Pine Gulch, and she thought she had been
greeted by every single person she went to school with.
She couldn’t believe all the people who turned out—
people she never would have expected. Mrs. Hall—her
tenth-grade English teacher whose favorite phrase on
grade sheets had been ‘You’re not working up to your
potential’—looked as if she hadn’t so much as changed
a wrinkle in twenty years.
Pat Conners, her first date, was there with his wife
and two young children.
Even Jesse Johnson, the bus driver who had picked
her and the Dalton boys up as long as she could
remember, was out on the dance floor, and he had to be
pushing eighty by now.
More surprising was the sight of Carmela, the young
pregnant woman she’d met at Jake’s clinic. When she’d