Always Mine

by Christie Ridgway

  The corners of her mouth quirked in an answering smile. “Like father, like son.”

  Alexander Gerald Palmer slid into Owen’s waiting hands like he was a football delivered by an extremely proficient center. He didn’t share that little tidbit with the baby’s mother, but as he placed the infant on Ellie’s chest, he thought he felt Jerry’s presence somewhere, grinning with approval.

  That damn grin of Jerry’s. Unforgettable.

  But he and Ellie were grinning, too, he realized. She shared hers with him and then went back to crooning to the baby. Owen enjoyed the sight for a moment, then heard the commotion at his front door.

  Grateful to give the reins over to the personnel who did this kind of thing on a more regular basis, Owen let them in, then retreated to his kitchen while they checked out mother and child. He wasn’t alone long. Word must have gotten out, because soon Will and others from the station were milling about his living area, anxious to hear the news.

  “I’m telling you,” Owen said to his friends. “It’s Jerry’s boy. He came into the world whistling.”

  “You look like you’re ready to warble something yourself,” Will answered. “I haven’t seen you smiling like that since…since before.”

  The comment didn’t dissipate Owen’s exuberance. “I don’t just feel good. I feel great.” His training had been worth something again. When the moment came he’d found faith in his ability to handle the situation and help Jerry’s widow while she did the important work of birthing her baby. It did make a man want to whistle. Maybe sing a few bars of misheard lyrics.

  Yeah. Hold me closer, Tony Danza.

  He swallowed a laugh and reveled in how damn good it was to delight in being alive.

  Chapter Twelve

  “There’s a lesson to be learned in all this, right?” Izzy said into her cell phone. She moved about the anonymous hotel room, opening her suitcase by rote, as she pondered why burnt orange seemed to be the favorite color of all business-hotel interior designers throughout the country.

  “That you can’t run away from your problems?” Emily questioned. “Though I think the nuns in The Sound of Music trademarked that one.”

  “No.” Izzy frowned. The bedside alarm clock was a model she wasn’t familiar with. Tack on five minutes to make sure she figured out its mechanics.

  Oh, but that’s right, she didn’t have anywhere to be at any particular time. Not for another week.

  “I think the lesson here is that a woman shouldn’t get married in Las Vegas.”

  “Worked out pretty well for me,” Emily reminded her.

  Izzy sighed. “Okay, maybe that I shouldn’t get married.”

  “Period? Or just in Nevada?”

  She didn’t dare answer the question. She just kept moving about the hotel room, performing her usual tasks: turning back the bedspread and blankets; pulling the light filter curtain so the room wasn’t too bright yet wasn’t too dark, either; unfurling the towels in the bathroom from their decorative, yet inconvenient, snail-like design.

  “Izzy?”

  “I’m here.” She gazed around the room, trying to figure out something to do with herself next. All her usual make-herself-comfortable actions were complete. Unless she suddenly changed course and developed an itch to unpack—as if that was going to happen—then she was out of busy work. Except…

  Sitting herself at the desk, she reached into its drawer for the complimentary stationery and pen she knew she’d find there. “Tell me everything you know about a Nevada annulment.”

  “Izzy…” There was a wealth of doubt in her friend’s voice.

  “Please spare me the warning or the lecture or whatever it is you’re about to say. I need something to occupy my mind, and the annulment has now found its way to the top of my agenda.”

  “I didn’t look into it with much diligence,” Emily confessed.

  “That’s okay. I just need a starting point.”

  “Until it’s actually granted, you shouldn’t enter any beauty pageants.”

  “What?” The answer startled a laugh out of her, though she wasn’t finding much amusing about the past hours of her life.

  “You’ve got to be single to enter most contests like that, and even a quickie wedding in Vegas can mess up your reign if you win.”

  Izzy held the phone away from her ear for a moment and frowned at it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just one of the pitfalls of research librarianship. I start pulling on a thread and it leads me to the darnedest places.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Izzy rubbed at her forehead. “You were looking into how to end your marriage to Will and you found out about beauty contest rules?”

  “I told you, I didn’t look into it with much diligence.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Hey,” Emily defended herself. “You have the same skills that I do, and you’ve managed to not even find out that much. At least I had the excuse of being in love with my husband and in my heart of hearts not wanting the marriage to be over at all. What’s yours?”

  “I’m not in love with Owen!” She heard the strident tone in her voice and tried too late to calm it. “I can’t be in love with Owen.”

  “Okay, okay,” Emily soothed. “Relax. I remember a little bit more about the annulment rules. If one or both of you is under eighteen without a parent’s consent, the marriage can be annulled. Bigamy gets you out of it. Consanguination.”

  Since they both were thirty, never married before and not related by blood, those were all out. “What else?”

  “Drug or alcohol addiction.”

  “I don’t wish for either one of those. Is there another circumstance?”

  “Hmm…I think if the marriage was the result of threat or duress.”

  Izzy pursed her lips and tried imagining the scene. Your honor, this man’s kisses put me under such duress that I didn’t hesitate to say “I do.” She sighed. “Do you have anything else?”

  “Well…” Emily was quiet a moment. “Fraud might do it.”

  “Fraud?”

  “Yes. You tell the judge Owen misrepresented himself somehow. There was a famous celebrity marriage that ended in just over fifty hours when a pop singer convinced the judge that she and her non-groom hadn’t had an honest discussion of where they would live or if they wanted kids, that sort of thing.”

  Izzy penned the word on her piece of paper. F-R-A-U-D. Then she wrote it how Melvil Dewey might have. F-R-O-D. Then she crossed them both out.

  It was true that they’d never discussed where they might live or anything about children. But…“There’s no one less a fraud in the western half of the United States than Owen Marston,” she said. “He’s a firefighter, for goodness sake. The kind of man who devotes his career to helping others. Every day he’s out there saving lives and property.”

  Okay, she knew she was preaching to the choir, because Emily’s husband, Will, was just such a person, too, but she couldn’t let the words go unsaid. She rose from the desk chair to pace about the room. “I could never stand before anyone and tell them Owen was a fraud.”

  “Okay,” Emily said again. “I get you on that. But Izzy…”

  There was a note in her friend’s voice that told her a lightbulb had gone off. Emily, bless her fact-finding little heart, had thought of something.

  “What?” she demanded. “But what?”

  “Are you sitting down?”

  Izzy huffed in impatience, but she threw herself onto the end of the bed. “Yes. Now out with it.”

  “Well, Iz,” Emily said slowly. “What about Owen going before the judge and testifying that the one in this marriage who perpetrated a fraud was you?”

  Izzy’s stomach whooshed to her toes. She tightened her fingers on the phone and pressed the flat of her other hand to the mattress. “Me? Why would you think he would say that about me?”

  “You weren’t really serious about the marriage at all, were you?” Emily asked.

  “I
don’t know why—”

  “You were scuttling from the hotel when dawn broke.”

  Izzy’s breath didn’t seem to reach her lungs. “You left Las Vegas, too,” she pointed out.

  “I tried to contact Will. And I knew that I was going to be living just a few miles from him. He knew he was going to be able to find me. You didn’t even give Owen your cell phone number.”

  Because she was scared! Because she was scared that if she heard his voice she’d be seduced again by the fantasy of all that she’d learned never to believe in. A man, a marriage, a family that didn’t just see her as an inconvenience or an obligation.

  How could she trust that? How many times when she was five or eight or ten had she let herself think that her current caretaker loved her and wanted her and would love her and want her forever? Each time she’d been disappointed when a different car would drive up and she’d be shuffled to yet another person who didn’t really care.

  There at the new place she’d turn on the charm, she’d make herself small or quiet or helpful, whatever was required, and yet it still was never enough.

  She had never been enough.

  “Izzy? Izzy, you know I love you.”

  “Yes,” she said dully. “Yes, I know that.” She had found good, close friends, and she cherished them, though truth to tell, even they weren’t the same as what she’d pretended for three days in Las Vegas that she could have with Owen.

  “So you know I don’t like saying this,” Emily continued. “But I’m right, aren’t I? It was you who went to the altar under false pretenses.”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  “You didn’t believe in a lifetime with the man.”

  “Yes,” she agreed again.

  “And you weren’t the least bit in love with him.”

  Izzy took a breath. The agreement to that sentence just sat on her tongue.

  “Iz?”

  She stayed silent.

  “You weren’t in love with him, right?” Emily insisted. “You aren’t in love with him, right?”

  Wrong.

  Izzy put her head in her hand. She’d been wrong about so many things, but it was too late…for her and Owen.

  And for her crumbling heart.

  At the sound of the doorbell, Owen continued his phone conversation with Will. He pulled open the front door to find his brother, whom he gestured inside. “I’ll work shifts for you. I’ll cut your damn lawn for a month. Just get me her cell phone number.”

  Will started to hem and haw, but Owen interrupted him. “She walked out on me. And took my car. For God’s sake, I at least need to demand my ride back.”

  Bryce waved his hand in Owen’s face. “You need Izzy’s cell phone number?”

  Cupping his hand over the phone, he addressed his brother. “Yeah. And don’t say anything about me being stupid not to have it. I get that.”

  Bryce grinned. “But I have it.”

  “Never mind, Will,” Owen said into the phone, hanging up and looking at his brother expectantly, his fingers hovering over the keypad. “Go ahead.”

  Grinning, Bryce dropped onto the couch and stretched out his legs. “Wait a minute. Aren’t we going to negotiate? You were offering to cut Will’s lawn.”

  “I’ll cut important parts of your body off if you don’t give it to me right now.”

  “Ouch.” Still grinning, Bryce crossed his legs. “But c’mon, bro, I do you a favor, you do me a favor…”

  Owen took a breath. “Fine. Here’s the favor—I’m not going to join the family company, where I would have swiftly risen in the ranks to become your boss and then taken great pleasure in canning your irritating ass.”

  Bryce sat up straight. “Really?”

  “Really. So thank me for saving your career by giving me Isabella’s phone number.”

  His brother dug in his front pocket for his phone. “I see a man retaking control of his life.”

  “Yeah.” He paused, then felt his mouth curve in a smile like it had been doing about every fifteen minutes since the day before, when Alexander Gerald Palmer made his way into the world. “I helped deliver a baby yesterday.”

  “No kidding. Anybody’s I know?”

  “Jerry’s wife. Jerry’s son.” It still felt damn good to know that he’d been able to help Jerry’s widow. The experience had given Owen back his juice, the motivation and the energy to return to the work that was his life’s calling.

  And the motivation, energy and determination to try to get a certain wife to return to his life, too.

  The way he figured it, now that his head was finally back in working order, was that Izzy had gone AWOL in Las Vegas because she was afraid to believe they could have a real marriage. But she hadn’t disbelieved enough to start proceedings to end it, either. That said something. “Give me the number, Bryce.”

  His brother rattled it off and Owen punched it into his phone. Then he hesitated, and added the number to his address book instead of directly dialing Izzy. Still considering, he glanced at his brother again.

  “I figure you owe me more,” he told Bryce.

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s a big thing to save a man’s job, not to mention his standing in the family. Look, I’ll keep quiet about the emergency birth thing, if you give me a couple hours of your time.”

  Amusement sparked in Bryce’s eyes, but he made a show of grumbling. “Want to make a bet that we’ll all be sitting around the turkey at Thanksgiving and you’ll somehow let it slip?”

  “Right now there’s only one thing I’m willing to gamble on,” Owen replied.

  He wanted his car back. Of course he wanted his car back, Izzy acknowledged. It was mortifying to recall that she’d driven off in it and then never given the vehicle another thought. Her mind had been occupied elsewhere.

  She was in love with Owen, and she’d blown it.

  The worst thing about the situation, she thought, as she pulled into his driveway, was that even if she could replay the last four weeks, she didn’t see herself doing anything differently.

  You could know that you were in love.

  You could see that you’d had a chance at something you’d never expected to touch.

  But you could still be unable to make yourself reach out and grasp it.

  Her foot caught on a pile of flattened empty boxes stacked against the garage and she gave them a little kick before marching toward the front door. It felt like an execution was in the offing, but she wasn’t going to let him know that this meeting would be the lethal injection to her heart.

  It wasn’t his fault that she couldn’t be the kind of woman he deserved. She could work at being friendly, fun and pleasing, but for the life and marriage he wanted she had to be trusting and open. For too long she’d only had herself to rely on, and she couldn’t see herself learning to rely on someone else.

  As she reached the front door, it suddenly opened. She took a hasty step back, then saw that it was Bryce, who looked a little sweaty and dusty. He smiled, then swooped in to grab her up for a kiss on the forehead. “Later, little fairy,” he said, then breezed past her at a jog.

  She gazed after him with a sad smile. “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye,” she murmured to his retreating back. It was likely she’d never see him again.

  “Tears?” a voice said at her back. “Don’t tell me you’re crying over my little brother.”

  She blinked rapidly and then spun around. “Of course not.” There was going to be no sentiment during this meeting. She’d hand over the keys and they’d exchange thoughts on how best to end their marriage.

  Owen backed away from the threshold. “Come inside.”

  On the small table in the shallow foyer was a huge arrangement of pale-blue roses. Maybe two dozen. She stared at the flowers, wondering who had sent them, and then immediately thought of single mom Alicia. Had she stepped up her courtship of Owen despite Izzy’s laying claim to him?

  Or had he called the other woman and explained th
eir not-really-a-marriage himself?

  “They’re from Ellie Palmer’s parents,” he said, his gaze on her face. “Yesterday, during the visit you arranged, we had a surprise special delivery on these very premises.”

  Izzy’s eyes widened as she deduced his meaning. “What? The baby? Born here?”

  “Yep.” He smiled. “The baby. Born here.”

  “Wow. They’re okay?”

  “They’re okay. I’m okay.”

  She studied the relaxed expression on his face. He looked different. Happy. Purposeful. The tightness in her chest eased a little. It appeared as if the old Owen—the man she’d married—was back.

  “Let’s sit down for a minute,” he said.

  Following him in, she tried breathing slow and easy. He sat on the couch, and she took the chair opposite. Something seemed different, besides his newly relaxed demeanor, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Frowning, she reached out to place his keys on the table between them. “Sorry about taking off with your car.”

  “No problem.” He scooped up the metal ring and immediately pocketed it.

  She frowned again, annoyed with herself for not thinking to call a cab to pick her up here at a certain time. Now she’d have to have Owen drive her back to the hotel or stand around on his sidewalk while she waited for a taxi once they were through.

  Oh, well. She wiped her palms on her thighs and took a quick breath. “We should talk.”

  He nodded. “We should.”

  She looked down at her hands as a silence stretched between them. “I’ve started looking into the annulment laws.”

  “Yeah? Me, too.”

  Why did that hurt so much? She twisted her fingers together. “There’s a couple of possibilities.”

  “No. No, there’s not.”

  Her gaze jumped up to meet his. His expression was unreadable, but his face was so handsome and so…so dear to her. How had this happened? How had she been so stupid as to fall in love when she was the kind of person who couldn’t let herself count on forever?

  “The annulment idea won’t work,” Owen said.

  “Oh, but I think we can find something in our circumstance that fits—”