Page 36 of Her Billionaire's Baby Secret

Sariah rolled her eyes. They had to be kidding, right?

Kane chuckled and took the seat next to Sariah. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “It’s not like I’m going to complain if they want me to sit next to someone so beautiful.”

Sariah’s heart pounded at both his words and his nearness, and her cheeks heated up.

“What did he just say to her?” Sariah’s grandma said. “Did you hear him, Gayle?”

“No, he was being too quiet. I couldn’t hear a thing. It’s too loud in here.”

“She’s blushing, so it must have been something good.”

That only made Sariah’s cheeks grow even hotter. How was she supposed to get through this meeting with these grandmas teasing her relentlessly? Imagine if she actually got together with Kane.

Mrs. Wheaton took a seat in the row behind them and leaned forward. “So I never heard. How did that date go, Sariah? Will there be a second one?”

Sariah blew out an exasperated breath. She thought she’d heard the last from Mrs. Wheaton today. How was she supposed to know if Kane would ask her out again? “I…uh.” She glanced nervously up at Kane.

He turned and addressed Mrs. Wheaton. “That remains to be seen.”

It did? Sariah had no idea what he meant by that. Did he actually want to go out with her again? It was a bad idea, but she could hardly stop thinking about him since they’d kissed. She desperately wanted him to do it again.

“Well, make your mind up. A girl like Sariah won’t be available for long. If you dawdle too long, some other man will come along and snatch her right up.” Mrs. Wheaton’s daughter, Aubrey, who ran the Whitmore House, a popular venue for weddings, scooted into the chair beside her mom. Sariah wondered how Aubrey fared with a meddling mom like Mrs. Wheaton. The bubbly redhead was still single as far as Sariah knew.

Mrs. Wheaton was wrong about Sariah being a hot commodity. Sariah didn’t see any other guys lining up to date her. Before her date with Kane, she hadn’t been asked out in months.

“Well, we can’t have Sariah getting snatched up by someone else, can we?” Kane said with a wide smile.

How humiliating! Sariah turned around and faced the front. Maybe Mrs. Wheaton would get the message and stop interrogating them.

Across the room, Carrington shuffled into a row with her dad beside her. Chase and Lauren sat a few rows ahead of them. They must have found a babysitter for Penny because she wasn’t with them.

“Come on, Mom. Leave them alone. Why do you always have to stick your nose in other people’s business,” Aubrey scolded.

Sariah turned around to look at her and mouthed a thank you in her direction.

Aubrey smiled back.

“I just want to help them find some happiness. Is that so wrong?”

“I think you need to learn some better boundaries,” Aubrey said. “It’s bad enough that you do it to me. Do you have to try to marry off the entire town too?”

“I can’t help it. I’m a hopeless romantic.”

The meeting got started, and a hush fell over the room. Michael Ross, a balding guy with glasses and a large belly, got up first and started defending his company’s right to build the mall. He insisted that it would bring in positive change for the town. Sariah thought it was a bunch of nonsense. All they cared about was making a load of cash.

Chase got up next and argued against the mall being built. Then Kane’s grandma got up and walked to the front of the room. As the wife of the former mayor, she had a lot of pull in the community still.

“Maple Creek is a magical place. Its roads are safe for kids to walk to school. The traffic is light. It has that classic small-town feel. Everyone knows each other here. We live here because we love that dynamic. If a mall goes in, the next thing we’ll know, the traffic will get heavier, and then a bunch of new neighborhoods will start popping up everywhere. Not to mention the stores that will start flooding into town. This isn’t the kind of change we want for our town. A mall will bring in more crime too. Is that what you want for our future generations?”

She went on for a few minutes. Overall, it was a powerful, moving speech. But Sariah wasn’t sure if it was enough to convince the masses to vote against it.

When she finished, Mrs. Stayton, the president of the Maple Creek Historical Society got up to speak. She was a short, plump woman in her mid-forties with bright red hair. She spoke about preserving the history on that land, and what a shame it would be to bulldoze a home dating back to before the Civil War.

After all the speakers had a chance to defend their stances, they took a vote. After the vote had been counted, Mayor Gibbins, a woman in her sixties with smoothly styled chin-length bleached hair, stood up to the podium to read the results.

Kane squeezed Sariah’s hand. “All we can do now is hope for the best.”

Mayor Gibbins put on a pair of reading glasses and peered at the sheet before her. “We have fifty-three votes in favor of the mall being built and forty-nine against.”

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