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“Great,” Gemma said. “I’ll come by your office at six.”

“Perfect.” He smiled at her. “And don’t worry about Pere. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Nice to have met you, Dr. Burgess,” she said quickly, then kissed Tris’s cheek and left.

As soon as she got to her car, she texted Tris to tell Burgess nothing about her or the Stone.

I don’t trust that man.

He wrote back,

Thanks for the tip

An hour later she was in the guesthouse, but even the beauty of the library couldn’t make her keep her mind on her work. She kept thinking about what Tris had said, that he may have found the Heartwishes Stone.

At twelve-thirty, she got a text from Joce.

Did you hear Sara’s news?

She typed back that she hadn’t heard anything about Sara.

Joce wrote back:

Call me or come over and I’ll give you lunch and tell all.

It was the break Gemma needed. She practically ran to her car and was at Joce’s beautiful old house five minutes later. The door was ajar, so she pushed it open. She very much wanted a tour of the house, but from the cacophony it seemed that both babies were crying.

Joce looked exhausted and frantic. “They’re dirty at both ends,” she said.

Gemma didn’t reply, just took a baby and stripped him/her—it turned out to be a him—and plunked him down in a sink full of warm water. Like magic, he got quiet.

Joce looked at her in awe.

“My sister taught me how to do this.”

For the next few hours, she and Joce worked like a team, with washing babies, feeding them, then washing again, and redressing. Joce never stopped telling Gemma thanks. When the babies were ready to go down for their second nap, it was three hours later.

“Why don’t you lie down and take a nap yourself?” Gemma said to Joce. “I’ll listen for the babies and look after the house.”

“I couldn’t allow that,” Joce said. “You’ve done too much already.”

Gemma had to practically push her up the stairs, with Joce saying thanks at every step.

While they slept, Gemma toured the house on her own and got the laundry done, cleaned up the kitchen, and put the living room back in order. When everyone was still asleep, she checked the fridge and found ingredients to make a meat loaf. She smiled as she worked, remembering Colin teasing her about her meat loaf, which she’d never made for him.

At a little after five Joce came downstairs with two smiling babies in her arms. Gemma took one.

“I can’t thank you enough for this,” Joce said as she looked in the oven window. “Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I can’t think. If it weren’t for friends like you I don’t know how I’d manage. I don’t know how Sara is going to cope. She knows so few people outside of Edilean.”

“Are you saying she had her baby?”

“Good heavens! You came over to hear the news and I forgot to tell you. Last night Sara had an emergency C-section and delivered twins.”

Gemma quit bouncing the baby and stared at Joce. “Twins? Didn’t she have a sonogram so she knew how many kids she was having? Or did she just not tell anyone?”

“She didn’t know. The second baby was positioned behind the front one in such a way that no one saw it on the sonograms.”

Gemma was having trouble collecting her thoughts. “At the barbecue, Sara wished for . . .”


Tags: Jude Deveraux Edilean Romance