Marrying Molly

by Christine Rimmer

  She didn't want to get out. She didn't want the lovely night to end.

  "We could go on out to the ranch," he suggested softly through the darkness.

  How had he known what she shouldn't have been thinking? "Bad idea."

  "Why?"

  "You know why. And why do you always park at the foot of the driveway?"

  He grinned, white teeth gleaming through the dimness. "Good question. No reason for it, really—now you hid Dusty's shotgun."

  "Oh, cut it out. Even if I gave her back that gun, she'll never point it at you again, and you know it. Never thought I'd see the day, but in the short span of a week and a half, you have broken her down good and proper. She's putty in your hands now, and don't try to kid me that you haven't noticed."

  "You're not happy that she likes me now?" He sounded a little bit hurt.

  She started to reel off a snappish answer and then stopped herself. Solemnly she told him, "I know it's a good thing. You said it yourself earlier. She's the baby's great-granny and it's best if the two of you can get along."

  "And what about us, Molly?" His voice had gone low, with an intimate roughness. "Isn't it best if we get along, too?"

  She felt way too defensive suddenly. "Yeah, it is— which is why I'm out on a date with you."

  He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was even lower and more intimate than before. "And is that the only reason you're out with me? Because of the baby, because you think we should get along?"

  It wasn't, of course—though she almost wished that it could have been. Things would have been so much simpler if only she didn't constantly dream of the way his big arms felt when they were close around her. "You're working me, Tate. You know you are. And I should go in now. Thanks for a wonderful dinner and the—"

  He cut in. "Stay." Now he sounded so tender, so full of hope and yearning. Her heart melted. "Just for a minute or two," he whispered.

  "I really shouldn't—" The sentence stopped dead as he reached across and took her arm.

  She gasped as heat flared from the point of contact, rushing up her shoulder, flooding down over her breasts, into her belly—and lower still. How did he do this to her? "Oh, Tate..." Her voice came out husky, full of need and confusion.

  "Stay." He pulled her close.

  She resisted—but it was no good. She wanted to kiss him. And he was right there, ready, willing and able to give her just what she wanted. She let it happen, let him pull her to him, until her hip pressed the console and she couldn't get closer.

  "Molly," he whispered, with a yearning and a frustration to match her own.

  "Oh, Tate..." Their lips met and his arms crushed her close.

  Yes, she thought as his tongue toyed with hers. Oh my, yes.

  She let out a tiny groan as he tugged at the silky shirt she wore, getting it out of her tight jeans so he could touch her bare skin. He caressed her, those knowing fingers sliding over the hot flesh of her lower back, inching upward.

  She felt his thumb at her bra strap, teasingly slipping beneath it, and then sliding back and forth. In a second, he would unhook it. He might be a rich man who'd never done hard labor in his life, but when it came to getting a woman's clothes off, Tate had a real talent with his hands...

  No. Uh-uh. This had to stop.

  She pulled away—well, yanked away really.

  "Come back here." His eyes were low-lidded. Oh, this was trouble.

  She frantically tucked her shirt back in. "Thanks again. It was a great evening. But I have to go in."

  "No, you don't." It came out a low growl.

  "Good night." She jerked on the door latch and leaped to her feet, giving the door a hard slam and setting off up the dark driveway at a fast clip. She wore high-heeled sandals and twice she stumbled in her haste to get away from him—and more than from him, from the stunning power of her longing for him.

  Somehow, she managed not to look back once. Not even when he gunned the engine and turned on the headlights, sending a blinding wash of revealing light spilling all around her. She thought he would follow her right up to her door.

  But he only reversed and drove off, leaving her in the dark with the soft golden gleam of her own porch light up ahead.

  He called the next day, early, as she was getting ready to head over to the Cut for her five-hour Saturday shift. Granny picked up the kitchen extension when the phone rang. "Sweetie pie, it's for you!"

  "Who is it?" she called back, as if she didn't know.

  "Tate!"

  "I'll take it in ray room." She set her mascara wand on the side of the sink and turned the corner to her bedroom. "You can hang up now, Granny," she said into the phone. Nothing. "Granny?"

  "Oh. Well. Sure enough. Bye now, Tate."

  "Bye, Dusty."

  Molly waited. Still the click didn't come. "Granny," she said in a warning tone.

  "All right, all right." The disconnecting click came at last.

  Tate got straight to the point. "Come out to the ranch. We'll have a picnic."

  "Today?"

  "Yeah."

  "I can't. I have to work."

  "Tomorrow, then."

  She wanted to go to him. Way too much. But she'd spent most of the night awake, thinking. If she didn't plan to marry Tate—which she didn't—she shouldn't be dating him. Not when she knew that he was asking her out with the aim of coaxing her into saying I do. "Tate, I can't."

  "Can't tomorrow?"

  "I mean, we've got to stop this."

  "Stop...?"

  "This. You and me. Going out."

  "No, we don't."

  "We do. It's just...not fair to you."

  He was silent—but not for long. "Since when did you start deciding what's fair to me?"

  "Since you think you're going to talk me into marrying you—and I know you're not."

  The line was quiet again. At last he said softly, "You afraid, Molly?" His voice poured in her ear, sweet and rough and heady as homemade berry wine.

  She cleared her throat. "Afraid of what?"

  "That maybe I'll end up convincing you to do the right thing, after all?"

  She clutched the phone tighter, as if holding on might protect her from the certainty in his tone. "You won't convince me of anything—and getting married isn't necessarily the right thing. Not for everybody."

  "I'm not talking about everybody. I'm talking about you and me and our baby—and you didn't answer my question. Are you afraid?"

  "No, I'm not." Oh, but she was. And they both knew it. "It's just not right, Tate. For me to be dating you, when I know what you want, and I also know I'm not going to give it to you."

  Yet another silence echoed through the line. One with a kind of seething quality to it. "Molly?"

  "What?"

  "Maybe you ought to let me decide what's right for me."

  She shook her head vehemently, though he couldn't see her do it. "I don't want to argue about this anymore. It was foolish of me to even try. The point is, I'm not going on a picnic with you tomorrow. I'm not going out with you again, period."

  Yet another heartbeat of taut silence elapsed and then, so very softly, he said, "In the end, you will say yes." She almost contradicted him. But no. He hadn't listened when she said no all those other times and she had no reason to hope he might hear her now. He spoke again. "Suppose you tell me, then..."

  "Tell you what?"

  "Your plan—what exactly is it?"

  "My plan?"

  "For the future. When the baby comes."

  She didn't really like where this was going. Carefully she lowered herself to the edge of her bed. "What do you mean, plan?"

  "Are you planning to allow him to know his father?"

  "I think she's a girl—and yes. Of course you'll know her. I've said from the first that you would."

  "When was it you said that? I really don't recall."

  Now that he mentioned it, neither did she. "Urn, well, whether I said it or not, it's what I've intended. Why else
would I have told you, if I didn't mean for you to have a part in her life?"

  "Well, Molly, I don't know. Truth is, I don't know why the hell you do half the things you do."

  "Don't get insulting or I will hang up this phone."

  There was a pause. She could just see him on the other end, taking slow, careful breaths. Counting to ten...or maybe all the way to twenty. Eventually he tried again. "Joint custody, then? Of her—or him. That's what you're planning?"

  Joint custody? That meant Tate would get her baby half the time? She'd never even considered that. And she couldn't see it working. She had Granny to help her out. What would Tate do? Hire some stranger to look after their child?

  Oh, this was awful. She'd never imagined he would want to take any major part in the baby's life. But it sounded as though he did. And what did that mean? In the end, when she still refused to marry him, would he sue her for custody if she argued that he wasn't set up to take care of a child?

  She desperately dug around in her mind for the right thing to say—and came up with nothing but the plain truth. "I, well, I haven't really given it a lot of thought yet. I'm not even three months along and there's a plenty of time to—"

  He cut her off. "Time? When? If you're not going to see me, how are we going to come to any agreement on how things will be?"

  She was sorely tempted to tell him that the two of them were never coming to any agreements, anyway. Never had, never would. But that would not be constructive, and she was doing her level best to be reasonable about this. She told him that, speaking slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece so he wouldn't miss a single word: "I am trying my level best to be reasonable about this."

  "You know," he replied, sounding scarily philosophical, "that day at the ranch house, the first time I asked you to marry me—"

  "You did not ask. You told!"

  "Well, if you want to go nitpicking, I didn't ask or tell. You never gave me a damn chance to do either one."

  "There was no—"

  ''As I was saying..." He put heavy emphasis on each word—and then waited, his silence daring her to interrupt again. Oh, she did long to. But she bit her lip and kept her peace. Finally, he continued, "The day I tried to ask you to marry me, right before you stormed out on me, you laid it on me good and hard about words like reasonable and right and fair. You said that when I used those words, I only meant we'd be doing things my way."

  "That's right. I said that. I said it and it's true."

  "And exactly what words have you been using in the last few minutes, Molly?"

  She had a kind of sawdusty dryness in her mouth. "I, uh..."

  "What words?"

  Busted. "All right. You got me."

  He turned the knife a tad. "You used fair and right and reasonable."

  "Okay," she admitted with a heavy sigh.

  "And when you used them, you meant that we were going to be doing things your way."

  "Yeah." She owned up to it. Proudly. No flinching. Because, after all, he had only proved her point. "And that's exactly why we aren't the least suited to each other. I want things my way, you want things your way. For a relationship to work, someone's got to back down now and then."

  "I can learn to back down." He didn't sound especially convincing.

  "It's never going to work between us, Tate," she cried. "Oh, why can't you see that?"

  He immediately changed the subject. "You're just scared. Because when I kiss you, you don't want me to stop."

  She held the phone away from her ear for a second, glared at it, and then flopped back on the bed. "Oh, there is no sense in talking to you..."

  "Admit that kissing me scares you."

  "Tate, do you hear me arguing?"

  "You admit it then?"

  She pressed her lips tight together and glanced at the bedside clock. "I have to be at the salon in twenty minutes."

  "Three little words—'You're right, Tate.'"

  Molly closed her eyes and silently counted to ten. "You are impossible."

  "Wrong three words...and Molly?" She didn't answer. She was considering hanging up on him. But she couldn't quite bring herself to do something so bad-mannered when all he'd done was to tell the truth. "I'm not giving up," he said, gently but with absolute determination.

  The tender vow echoed in her ear, followed by silence. He had hung up on her.

  Chapter Eight

  Tate stared down at the phone he'd just turned off— and considered hurling it against the far wall of his study. He wasn't feeling nearly as gentle or as calm he'd forced himself to be in that maddening conversation he'd just had with Molly.

  I'm not giving up, he'd told her.

  Well, damn it. Maybe he should give up. Maybe he should just forget about her and their baby.

  Then again, he had a grim and sinking feeling that he would never forget Molly. And no man worthy of the name forgot his own child. Plus, even if he were the kind of lowlife no-account who turned his back on his children, even if he someday managed to put Molly from his mind, still he'd have a hell of a time actually forgetting either one of them. In a town the size of Tate's Junction, it was pretty hard to forget about anyone for long.

  Good enough, then. Instead of forgetting her, he would ignore her. He would pretend she wasn't there when he saw her on the street. In town council meetings, he would not address her directly. If anyone mentioned her name to him, he would reply, "Who? Never heard of her." They would all learn fast enough not to dare to speak her name around him.

  Regular as clockwork—every blessed month—he would send her a big, fat child-support check. She could cash it or tear it up into itty-bitty pieces. He wouldn't give a damn, either way. Hell, if she didn't take his money, he would invest it, turn it into a Texas-sized nest egg. Eventually he would make sure his kid got the use of it. Molly would burn with resentment that he could give their kid more than she could. Let her burn. That would be just fine with Tate.

  Yeah. Maybe he would do all that. Oh, yeah. He just might...

  Muttering swearwords, Tate turned to the window that looked out over the main porch and the wide, curving driveway beyond it.

  Who the hell did he think he was kidding? He wasn't going to do any of those things. He would have Molly yet—and their kid would have married parents, damned if he wouldn't.

  Hadn't Tate seen the bad things that growing up with no dad could do to a kid?

  You bet he had. Take Molly, for instance. He had to hand it to her, she was strong and smart and she knew how to look after herself. But he'd never met a woman so downright unyielding to the male of the species—him, in particular. She was carrying his baby, she practically went up in flames every time they touched—and he was rich. For your average non-man-hating woman, any one of those reasons would have been more than enough to make her jump at his offer of marriage. Tate was no shrink, but it seemed pretty clear to him that her inability to get along with a man arose from growing up fatherless— from not even knowing who her dad had been.

  And what about Tate's own brother, Tucker? Penelope Tate Bravo had always claimed that Tate's dad, the mysterious and long-dead Blake Bravo, was Tucker's father, too. Their grandfather had gone along with that fiction. And if Tucker Tate IV—sometimes known as Ol' Tuck—gave the nod to something, everybody else in a forty mile radius knew damn well they'd better call it right and true. Especially in Ol' Tuck's presence. But according to Tate's mother, Blake Bravo had died out in California while she was pregnant with Tate. So how had a dead man reappeared five years later to sire a second son?

  It was a question that both Tucker and Tate were never allowed to ask.

  And don't think they hadn't tried. They had tried, both of them—when they got old enough to figure out that dead men did not, as a rule, return from the grave. Back then, their questions on the subject were met with vagueness by their mother and distraction by their grandmother.

  Tate still remembered what bis grandfather had said when Tate drummed up the courage to ask him
...

  "Your mother is a good woman. Are you insulting her?"

  "No, Grandfather. I only—"

  "Tucker is your brother. Are we clear on that?"

  "But—"

  "Enough. I see no need to discuss what does not require discussion. We won't be speaking of this again."

  And they hadn't. Ever.

  Tate always felt kind of sorry for Tucker, that he— like Molly—never even knew who his father might be. At least Tate knew his father's name; at least his mother had married his father. Weren't there those two faded pictures in one of the old family albums of his mother and his long-dead father on their wedding day? His father had his head turned away from the camera in both pictures, so you couldn't see much of his face. But there was a marriage license—his grandfather had made certain Tate saw that—so there was no doubt the ceremony had taken place.

  Growing up, Tate got better treatment from Ol' Tuck than Tucker ever did. And somewhere inside, Tate had always known it was because Ol' Tuck considered him to be the legitimate one. Tucker knew it, too; he and Ol' Tuck never could seem to get along.

  And look at Tucker now. Out wandering the world somewhere. Dropping in and out of law school, cut off from his roots.

  Hell, no.

  Tate wasn't giving up on this. No way his kid would be born without his name.

  He still had the phone in his hand. Without further hesitation, he punched the talk button.

  Molly tapped lightly on the bathroom door. "Granny, you okay in there?"

  "I'm fine, sweet stuff. Just fixing my face."

  From where she stood in the little square of hallway, Molly could see into her bedroom, where the morning sun streamed in through the open curtains and her bed was still unmade. The clock on the night-stand said it was ten. Granny had been monopolizing the bathroom for over an hour.

  Bewildered, Molly wandered back into the kitchen and poured herself a second cup of decaf. She dribbled some milk into the decaf, put the carton away and leaned against the counter, sipping thoughtfully.

  No doubt about it. Something was up. Granny had been acting strangely since yesterday, when Molly got home from the Cut. Kind of secretive and jumpy.