by Anna Adams
Sophie had to catch her breath before she could utter a shocked sound. “Don’t talk to my grandmother like that. I’m the one who—”
“No, he’s right.” Gran gripped Sophie’s shoulder. “I’m your grandmother, not your conscience, but think about the marriage you really want.”
Sophie had never really wanted marriage after she’d helped end her parents’. And she’d never trusted passion because her mother’s passion for her lovers had made her such a careless parent. How was she supposed to trust a paper marriage and a passion that had already robbed her of all semblance of rational behavior?
When she didn’t say anything, Ian turned his head to look at her. Tension added a terrifying vulnerability to his face. Sophie mentally nailed her own feet to the floor. She longed to touch him, to smooth away the anxious lines. She loved her family dearly, but she owed him loyalty, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He nodded. “If you want to talk about it, talk to me. We’ll work it out—whatever you need.”
She felt her grandmother behind her. “Okay.”
“Sophie, come show us where to put this couch!” Zach yelled from downstairs.
Gran tore herself from the thick atmosphere in the small hall. “Something must be wrong with Seth,” she said, “if he’s not telling them where to put your things.”
Silence held after she left. Sophie stared at Ian, unwilling to give in. “We have to be careful this time.”
He shook his head. “This separate-room plan won’t work. All it’ll do is put distance between us.”
“Sane distance. We should have tried that from the start. You’ve said so yourself.”
“I don’t want it now. You’re the one who demanded commitment, but you’re making impossible terms.”
“I will commit, but I can’t sort lies from the truth when we’re—” She stopped. Making love. The words stuck in the back of her throat as images of Ian’s nude, needful body made her weak. “I’m doing the best I can.”
He hesitated, his mouth open.
“I am,” she said. “I have to be sure before I sleep with you again.”
“I don’t see you ever being sure.” But the irritation banked in his eyes. “I’d better go downstairs before your family decides I’m a slacker, as well as a ravisher of innocent Calverts.”
Grateful for the reprieve, Sophie fell into step behind him. “I’ve always liked your sense of humor.”
He stopped and turned, and she bumped into him. Despite her best intentions, she didn’t move away from the pressure of his arm against her breast.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Stay up here. I’ll bring up the bed and the bedding, and you lie down. You drove twelve hours yesterday, and I don’t care that you’re capable of lifting the light stuff. I couldn’t stand to watch you doing it.”
Sophie arched her eyebrows. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Give me a break. Just once, do as I ask without forcing the sensible alternative down my throat.”
“How about a sensible compromise?”
“Damn it.” But a smile warmed his eyes.
She laughed. The sexual energy between them had to go somewhere. “How about if I put the kitchen together? You all bring in the boxes, and I’ll unpack and wash everything and put it away.”
He stuck his hands into his back pockets. “Why can’t you let me take care of you?” He touched her cheek, the tips of his fingers burning her.
“I have no answer.” All she could think of was how good his hand felt on her skin.
With a shrug of regret, he let go to start down the stairs. Suddenly he looked back again. “No one else needs to know about the separate rooms.”
“Deal.” She traced the hard muscle of his shoulder. Touching him even so briefly was an astounding relief. “I wish I hadn’t told Gran.”
“It doesn’t matter. I trust her.”
He continued down the stairs, disappearing through the open front door before Sophie could make her feet move. I trust her. That was a hell of a thing to say so effortlessly.
SETH CALVERT WASN’T HIMSELF. He resented his wife’s approach to retirement, but Greta maintained a blissful ignorance of his problem with her attitude. Alone in the cabin’s living room with the moving boxes and Sophie and Ian’s mismatched furniture, he listened to the din of his family making jokes over pizza. As Greta laid out yet another new scheme for Sophie and the baby farm, he dwelled with bitterness on the hard facts.
His wife of more than forty years assumed he was the last person who needed her.
They’d finished unloading Sophie’s things two hours ago and then they’d shared their makeshift dinner. Zach’s wife, Olivia, and Molly had brought spoils from Big Tom’s Pizza.
Ethan, barely stopping to eat, had already whacked together a couple of new shelves that looked as if they’d always hung on the kitchen walls. Greta had pronounced herself satisfied with yellow-checked kitchen curtains she’d whipped up on Sophie’s sewing machine.
“Just so the ladies don’t feel tempted to peep in on you,” she’d said.
It was time to go home. But Greta lingered. Seth rubbed his chest, where loneliness had begun to ache like actual physical pain.
Last fall, as a gift to him on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, Greta had promised to find someone to take her place up here. Then she’d found something wrong with each applicant until Sophie had shown up.
From Greta’s conversation all day, her plans for settling Sophie into her new office, the changes they could make to the patient schedule, the new programs they would enact, it was obvious Greta would keep her hand in until Sophie found the courage to evict her grandmother from the premises.
He couldn’t count on any such luck. Greta had been Sophie’s surrogate mom since the day Nita had packed her bags and left Bardill’s Ridge. Far too aware of how easily a girl could lose her mother, Sophie would do nothing that might hurt Greta.
Which left him where he’d been for fifty-five years—last on Greta Calvert’s list of priorities. It hadn’t been so bad while he’d sat on the circuit court bench. Even in Bardill’s Ridge, the criminal element had kept him busy, but he’d retired over a decade ago. Since then he’d discussed retirement with Greta almost every day.
He’d persuaded her to agree their time had finally come, but now she didn’t seem to want it. Ambition had pushed her into a world women had rarely inhabited in her youth, and her drive still rode her like a demon.
He pushed off Ian’s plaid couch. “I’m going home,” he announced.
“Grandpa?” Sophie poked her head out of the kitchen. “What are you doing alone in here?”
“Not much room left in there.” He sounded petulant, but he was too tired, too sick of wanting the wife who took his waiting for granted, to care. “Tell your grandmother I’ve gone home, would you?”
Sophie must have heard the peevishness he couldn’t seem to hide. She wove between boxes to catch his arm. “What’s wrong?”
What kind of man ruined his granddaughter’s first day home? He wasn’t that childish in his tarnished golden years, was he? “Nothing. I have a little research to do. I’m writing an article for the Tennessee Law Journal.”
“You and Gran work too hard.” She hugged him without realizing she’d hit that particular nail soundly on the head. “But I’ll let Gran know you’ve gone.” Compassion filled her eyes. “You know, she’ll get over being so excited, but for now I’m flattered.”
He hugged her back. “Flattered? What are you talking about? I’ve never heard you admit to a moment’s self-doubt before. You’re like Greta that way.”
“The Mom’s Place is just as much her child as Dad or Uncle Patrick or Zach’s father.” She patted his arm absently, as if she was looking inward. “I don’t doubt myself, but I’d hate to let Gran down. Last-minute jitters, I hope.”
His resentment of Greta’s distraction faded before his concern for their granddaughter. “She
held out for you because she believed you were the one to take over. You’re going to improve the services here.”
“Improve?” Sophie opened the door but clung to it with an uncharacteristically shy smile. “I doubt Gran believes anyone could care for the baby farm better than she has, but I’ll always be able to ask her for advice.”
No doubt about that. Rubbing his chest, he turned toward the grassy driveway. “Say good-night to the others for me.”
“Why don’t you wait? Olivia says her dad’s down here visiting, and he’s watching Lily and Evan tonight.” Evan was Zach and Olivia’s son. Lily was Zach’s daughter from a previous marriage. “He made some sort of date with Aunt Beth, so she and Zach and Olivia are about to leave. You could drive down with them.”
“I’m fine on my own.” He tried to picture her suggesting something similar to her grandmother.
“I just thought you might lead them down. Night, Grandpa.”
He ignored his granddaughter’s faintly anxious tone. Reassuring her took more energy than he could spare.
AFTER EVERYONE ELSE LEFT, Greta stayed to help store dishes and glassware. Stationed between the women, Ian took the newly washed and dried china from Sophie and passed it to Greta.
Sophie seemed distracted, but finally she spoke up. “Gran, what’s wrong with Grandpa?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought something was bothering him. He’s not sick or anything?”
“Funny you ask. He’s been moody, but I have a theory. I wonder if maybe he retired too early. He seems bored, but I can’t persuade him to take up a hobby. He writes a little now and then, a few articles for the law journals, but other than that, I think he spends most of his time waiting at home for me.”
“Waiting for you?” Sophie leaned around Ian with a sharp glance.
He frowned, seeing new reasons to dread living among the Calverts. Flaws in the family structure would drive Sophie crazy, and any extra worry for his wife aroused his strongest urge to protect her.
“Did you talk to Seth?” Ian asked. “I saw you walk him to the door.”
She seemed startled that he’d noticed. “He claimed he had some work to do on an article, but I honestly thought he seemed annoyed.”
Greta sighed with almost too much emphasis, as if she’d suffered long and needlessly. “He wants me to retire right this very minute. You know. You were at our anniversary last fall.”
“He set a deadline?” Sophie asked.
Ian shook his head. Sophie must be blind if she thought Greta would accept a time limit, even from Seth.
“I’ve explained I have to show you how things work up here.”
Sophie put down her dish towel and turned her grandmother away from the cupboards. “You should go home, Gran. Now.”
Greta’s face stilled, as if Sophie’s audacity stunned her. Just then the phone rang. Ian ducked between his wife and her grandmother.
“The phone’s on,” he said. He and each of the Calverts had checked for a dial tone about twenty times apiece today, all with Sophie’s pregnancy in mind.
He didn’t have the knowledge or confidence of an OB/GYN. In Sophie’s eyes, he might not have advanced any farther along the evolutionary scale than Cro-Magnon Man, but he didn’t want to be stuck on a mountain, miles of winding roads away from the nearest hospital without a telephone. “I’ll answer it in the bedroom.”
“Don’t you want me here?” Greta asked Sophie as he left them in the kitchen.
He ran up the stairs to Sophie’s room and picked up the receiver from the table beside her bed. “Hello?”
“Son?”
His mother’s tentative voice shocked him. He’d given her and his father the number, but he hadn’t actually thought they’d use it.
“Mom, how are you? Something wrong with Dad?”
“Not at all. He’s mixing martinis, and we thought we’d wish you luck in your new home.”
Why? He couldn’t help wondering after they’d ducked his wedding, though that had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He had yet to tell them about the baby. They’d screwed around with his life plenty, and he planned to keep them away from his child as long and as much as possible. The most effective diplomatic strategy seemed like a bland truce that kept them on the other side of the Atlantic.
“Thanks, Mom. How’s the golf these days?”
“Fine. Your dad has a tee time at Saint Andrews next week, so we’re heading over to Scotland for a few days. I’ll see some old friends from the diplomatic service while your father plays.”
“Sounds good.”
“Do you like your new house? You didn’t tell me much about it.”
He glanced at the boxes stacked along the uneven plaster walls. “It’s fine. We’ll probably find something of our own after we settle in, but this works for now.” No need to explain that Sophie had insisted on taking the house on the property as if she expected him to disappear and leave her in sole charge of a mortgage.
“Good. Good. Your father wants to say hello.”
“Put him on. Take care of yourself, Mom. Have fun with your friends.”
“Ian,” she said, “be happy. I hope you’ll be very happy.”
Her unnaturally formal tone implied his father wasn’t mixing his first batch of martinis for the evening. Either that, or tears were strangling her. Ian felt better putting his money on the booze.
“I am happy, Mom. I hope you’ll meet Sophie soon.” In a year or so, when he and she were both capable enough parents to protect their infant from his snobbish, pseudo-aristocratic mom and dad.
“Son?” His father’s usual bark made Ian jerk the phone away from his ear. “I hear you’re settling into the honeymoon cottage.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Golfing a lot, Dad?”
“Never enough, son, never enough. Got a tee time over at Saint Andrews next week. Your mother has some plans. Shopping, a reception at the embassy, that sort of thing.”
His father’s bonhomie rarely failed to raise Ian’s hackles. Tonight was no exception. “Sounds great.” He rubbed his fist in the sweat that beaded on his forehead. “Listen, I’ve got to stock up on some groceries, so I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for calling.”
“Glad to. See you soon, son.”
“Good.”
“Hello to that bride.”
His father rarely spoke in complete sentences. Ian had long since learned to translate. “I’ll tell her.” He dropped the phone into its cradle but considered pulling it out of the wall. Bad plan, his dad would have said.
Ian patted his pockets, searching for car keys. Tomorrow would have been soon enough to buy supplies, but purchasing bread and milk and a late newspaper would take him away from the “honeymoon cottage” and from Sophie. He could pretend life was normal with his parents or with her, but both at the same time? No mortal man was that strong.
He hit the stairs at a run and barely stopped in the kitchen doorway. “I’m heading into town for provisions. I’ll be back in a while.” He broke off. “Well, you know how long I’ll be better than I do. Good to see you, Greta. Thanks for all the help.”
“Wait.” With one word, Sophie demolished his escape plan. “Gran’s leaving. I’ll come with you.”
“Aren’t you tired?” He tried not to look as if he hoped so. A fast drive without his wife or her family might make him fit company for the rest of their first night at home.
“I’m fine.” He must be one hell of an actor. She didn’t seem to notice he wanted to go alone. “Ready, Gran?” she asked, all sweetness.
“I guess.” The older woman rooted in the piles of discarded brown packing paper for her bag, then turned it up with a faintly aggrieved expression. “We still have several items to discuss, Sophie. I’ll meet you in my office at nine tomorrow morning?”
“Nine?” Sophie grabbed her own purse and all but shoved her grandmother out of the kitchen. “What time will you be there?”
“Seven, but I plan to clear
my desk before you arrive.”
“I’d better observe. The sooner I learn all my duties, the sooner you’ll be a free woman.”
“You sound like your grandfather.”
“I was thinking you might not be hearing exactly what he says to you.”
Greta puffed up like a cat who’d padded into a nosy interloper. “I understand my own husband.”
“Okay.” Sophie assisted her grandmother through the front door, casting Ian an exasperated glance that included him on her side of the skirmish.
He stumbled. Since she’d told him about the baby, he hadn’t felt natural with her. Since their wedding he’d felt as if he was in a play, performing badly.
But with one glance she’d turned him into her ally.
“Ian?” Already halfway to the car, Sophie looked back for him.
He was still standing in the doorway. Greta continued to her vehicle, still badgering Sophie in a tone that hovered on the sweet mountain breezes.
“You coming?” Sophie asked.
He felt as if she’d shouted for help. Damn. He could use a charger and some armor. Something to mark the occasion with more importance than merely locking the door and pocketing their house keys.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DARKNESS BEHIND THEM fell away like a blanket pulled off a bed. Ian parked at the edge of the well-lit square. Beyond the wrought-iron fences, the farmers’ market stalls stood under undulating tarps, set up for morning business. The Bardill’s Ridge courthouse and the small shops around the square lent more light to the clean-swept sidewalks.
Sophie pushed the car door open, trying not to notice how the couples passing, some with children, some on their own, turned their heads to stare at her and Ian in his unfamiliar car.
“How do they always know when you’re new?” Ian asked.
“When you live here, even part-time the way I did, it’s hard to pretend you don’t notice new people.” She smiled. “I used to feel suffocated, but tonight Bardill’s Ridge is home.”
