The Unexpected Wedding Gift

by Catherine Spencer

  She didn’t like her replacement, but nor did she know how to get rid of her. She didn’t even know how to shut her up. “How convenient!” her inner devil sneered. “Is this how you’re going to handle things in the future, Ben? By using Marian Dawes’s baby as an excuse to avoid facing up to the fact that you’ve ruined the life we had planned?”

  “I don’t need an excuse. He’s my baby, too, and until he’s old enough to look out for himself, I’ll put his interests above my own.”

  “Even if it means losing me?”

  He regarded her steadily, a long, penetrating gaze that had her fidgeting with fear inside. Back off now or you’ll live to regret it! her common sense warned. But pride’s more strident urging had her glaring back at him mutinously.

  “I hope it won’t come to that, Julia,” Ben said evenly, “but if that’s the choice you force me to make, then yes. Even if it means losing you.”

  Devastated by such uncompromising honesty, she cried, “I should have listened to my parents!”

  “Perhaps you should have.”

  “They were right when they said I didn’t know you well enough to marry you.”

  He shrugged and moved toward the patio door. “You already spelled that out to me yesterday. I don’t care to go over the same tired ground again now, not with a month-old baby upstairs screaming for attention.”

  It was their first fight—well, first if she discounted the blowup at their wedding—and the way his nostrils flared in distaste as he brushed past her almost destroyed her. He’d never looked at her in such a way before, as if she were something nasty he’d found stuck to the underside of his shoe.

  Of course, she’d said mean-spirited, disgusting things and she hated herself for it, so it didn’t really surprise her that he’d responded so coldly. But for him actually to come out and admit that he’d choose the baby over her wounded her deeply. The little shows of tenderness between two people who’ve had a spat but who really love each other—a softly uttered apology, a touch, a kiss—they weren’t going to fix what was broken this time. What divided them was too big, too permanent, too life-altering.

  And she was making everything worse, letting pride and hurt feelings back her more tightly into a corner until she wondered if she’d ever find her way out again.

  Instead of following him upstairs, as any woman with a shred of compassion in her soul would have done, she remained where she was, staring out at the brilliant blue sea until her eyes stung from the glare. And the distance between her and the man she loved, which had started with Marian Dawes’s startling revelation the day before, yawned wider with each passing day until, instead of behaving like honeymooners so besotted with each other that they couldn’t see straight, Julia and Ben were like strangers living under the same roof. Aloof, unsmiling, uncommunicative and so scrupulously polite that it made her teeth ache.

  On the Tuesday, he came to where she was folding clothes in the laundry room. “I’m driving into town,” he said. “Is there anything I can pick up for you while I’m out?”

  “No,” she said, unable to meet his glance for the pain she knew she’d see there. “I can take care of whatever I might need.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and left. He didn’t return until after lunch.

  Later that same afternoon, a delivery truck drew up in the driveway and two men carried in a variety of baby furniture. Under his direction, they took it up to the room she and Ben had set aside as a future nursery.

  “I never thought, when we bought this house, that someone else’s baby would be sleeping in here,” she remarked bitterly, when she saw.

  “So where would you have me put him?” Ben said, in the politely indifferent tone that he’d perfected over the last few days. “In a closet? At the other end of the house where I can’t hear him when he wakes up in the night? Or would you prefer that I buy a dog kennel and keep him at the bottom of the garden?”

  “That’s not fair!” she cried. “Stop painting me as the wicked stepmother in all this!”

  He shrugged. “Why not? You’re giving a pretty fair imitation of one.”

  “Perhaps if you’d taken the trouble to discuss the matter with me before you—”

  “Discuss? Don’t make me laugh, Julia! I’m tired of begging you to talk to me. You can hardly stand to breathe the same air as I do, let alone engage in rational conversation.”

  “Well, I’m engaging you now,” she replied, stung. “You shouldn’t be putting the crib so close to the window. If there was an earthquake, the glass could shatter all over your son.”

  He paused in the middle of lowering the mattress into place. “Where do you suggest I put it, then?”

  “It’s not my decision to make,” she said, perversely retreating into the hard shell of reserve that had become so much a part of her in recent days. “I was just pointing out something I thought everyone knew.”

  He skewed a glance her way and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know beans about looking after a baby. I could use some help.”

  Oblique though it was, she recognized his comment as an invitation for her to become involved with his child. But even as a small part of her warmed to the offer, another, much larger part resented it. This was their house, their nursery, and it should have been their baby sleeping in the gleaming new crib with rabbits painted on the headboard.

  “Then you ought to have picked up a couple of child care books while you were out on your shopping spree,” she muttered.

  His mouth twisted. “There are a lot of things I ought to have done, Julia, including, I’m beginning to think, waiting a bit longer to ask you to marry me. If I’d shown a little restraint in that respect, I might have spared us both a lot of painful regrets.”

  The hurt he inflicted with that remark left her so breathless that she turned and literally fled, not just from the room, but from the house, too. Grabbing her purse and keys, she raced out to her car and drove away with no fixed plan in mind beyond knowing that she needed to pour out her heart to someone who cared enough about her to be objective.

  Of course, she couldn’t go home to her parents. They couldn’t be objective about anything to do with Ben if their lives had depended on it. But there was someone she could turn to and almost as if it knew exactly where she was headed, the car nosed its way through the summer tourist traffic to the freeway running north to Vancouver.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I LET him chase me out of my own house, Amma,” Julia wailed an hour later, sobbing out her story to Felicity and dripping tears all over her grandmother’s silk-cushioned French sofa.

  “Nonsense,” Felicity said, plopping a box of tissues in Julia’s lap. “You let that poor benighted Marian Dawes chase you away. I’m surprised at you, Julia. I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”

  Indignation put a dent in Julia’s woebegone histrionics. “As if I care about her!” she whimpered.

  “That’s sheer foolishness, Julia! Of course you care about her. This whole business is about her. Or are you trying to tell me you’d be reacting the same way if Ben had no connection to that baby beyond having found him abandoned on the side of the road and bringing him home for you to care for?”

  Leaving Julia to ponder the truth of that question, Felicity went to the rosewood cabinet where she kept her liquor and poured two glasses of sherry. “It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and start facing reality, my angel, so dry those useless tears and take a healthy swig of this,” she said, returning and placing one of the glasses in Julia’s hand. “I have great faith in the restorative powers of good sherry.”

  Half a glass later, Julia admitted, “You’re right on all counts, of course. It is about Marian. I’m so angry with her for her timing and for how she’s behaved.”

  “You’re angry with Ben, too, Julia. Let’s be brutally honest here.”

  “Yes, I am. And I’m disappointed in him, too.” She looked anywhere but at her grandmother. “And I guess I’m retaliating
by refusing to acknowledge the baby.”

  “Yes,” Felicity said briskly. “Well, keep it up and you’ll lose your husband. He gave you the chance to walk away and you chose not to, but if this is how you intend to treat him, you’d have done him a bigger favor by leaving him at the outset. Because the way you’re going about things, you’re likely to find yourself free of him and all the baggage he’s brought with him into this marriage, whether you want to or not.”

  She took a sip of her sherry, then went on, “And I’ll tell you this. He’s the kind of man women find attractive. He has a great deal to offer. If you’re not interested in the job of being his wife, it won’t be too long before someone else offers to step into your shoes. Is that you want? Have you fallen out of love as quickly as you fell in?”

  Julia stared at the veil of liquid draping the inner rim of her glass. “I don’t know anymore, and that’s the truth. I’ve asked myself a hundred times, if all this had come to light before we were married, would I have called off the wedding? Or has it more to do with the fact that Ben had what was obviously a hot and heavy affair with a married woman that ended only months before he met me? Or is it that there’s someone else demanding all the attention I was used to having him give to me?” She lifted her shoulders helplessly. “I’m too confused to sort out the answers.”

  For a few minutes, Felicity didn’t reply. She seemed to be debating the kindest way to deliver her next chunk of grandmotherly wisdom. She patted a cushion into place, played with her pearls and swung a delicate ankle.

  “Ben has let you down, there’s no question of that, Julia,” she finally said, “and I imagine he’d be willing to kiss your toes daily for the next sixty years, if that’s what it would take to make you forgive him. But you’re not the only one with pride and when a man’s is trampled in the dust, he can become very intractable, as you’re likely to find out if you keep on punishing him.”

  “If you’re suggesting I should—!”

  Felicity shook her head. “I’m suggesting nothing. Only you know how far you’re willing to go to keep your marriage intact. All I’m saying is, you’d do well to figure it out before it’s too late. Because if Ben gets to the end of his rope with the way things are and walks out, I doubt you’ll ever persuade him to come back again. He’s had too much experience of not being wanted, as you very well know, to tolerate a wife’s rejection kindly.”

  “That might be all you’re saying, Amma, but what you’re thinking is that I should go home and just forget everything that’s happened.”

  “Wrong again, my darling. The only way I’d advise you to do that is if I was convinced that you’re ready to accept the decision he’s made regarding his son. But I don’t think you are. I think you’re willfully closing your mind and heart to that little boy, and I’m rather ashamed of you.”

  “What if he’s not Ben’s son?” Julia blurted, stunned that the grandmother who’d encouraged her throughout every phase of her life could take such a hard line now, when she most needed her support.

  “Why can’t you see that genetics are no longer important? What matters is that that little boy desperately needs people willing to step into the role of parents and give him the kind of loving home he deserves. That Ben is prepared to do that, without benefit of official proof that he’s the natural father, doesn’t lessen his worth, it adds to it. As for poor misguided Marian Dawes, maybe she slept with fifteen different lovers and doesn’t know which one is the father, but at least when she decided to give away her child, she made sure she chose a man with the backbone and integrity to take on the job.”

  “Are you defending her?” Julia was outraged.

  “It’s not my place to defend or condemn. But I’ll say this. There aren’t many women brave enough to admit that they’re not cut out for motherhood and I applaud her for at least having the courage to recognize her own unsuitability for the part. I’m sure the decision has, and will, cost her dearly. But I’m equally certain that that baby shouldn’t also be made to pay the price.”

  “And you think that’s what I’m doing—punishing him?”

  “Yes. Because you are the maternal type. You’ve always wanted children. You just don’t want this particular little soul. And I’m very much afraid that he’s part of the marriage equation now. So if remaining Mrs. Ben Carreras is at all important to you, you’re going to have to come to terms with that.”

  Julia almost gagged on her sherry. “I’m not up to glossing over everything and smiling till my face aches, just to save my marriage!”

  “I’m not suggesting you should.”

  “It seems to me that you are. You think that if I don’t want to lose my husband, I ought go home, fling myself into his arms and pretend I’ve had some sort of epiphany about the baby and can’t wait to take on two a.m. feedings.”

  “Oh, get over yourself, Julia!” Felicity snorted with indignation, a rare occurrence with her but not without precedent. The difference was, she usually directed such outbursts at her daughter-in-law, not her granddaughter. “You don’t have the right to try to hang on to Ben unless you’re willing to accept his baby, too, but you have even less right to try to bamboozle him! Merely going through the motions of motherhood isn’t good enough. Not only does the baby deserve better, so does Ben. Furthermore, he’s no fool. He’d see through that sort of act in a flash. For heaven’s sake, child, put aside your silly pride and focus instead on the thing that really matters—namely the love you and Ben have for one another. That’s what’s going to see you through this unhappy time.”

  Julia slumped against the cushions. “I’m sorry if this disappoints you, Amma, but I’m not ready to make such a leap of faith quite yet.” With her forefinger, she traced the outline of a damask rose on the arm of the sofa. “Perhaps I need to put a little distance between me and the situation before I can sort out my true feelings.”

  “Well, darling,” Felicity sighed, “when all’s said and done, you’re the only one who can decide what’s best for you. But please try to remember why you fell in love with Ben in the first place and don’t be in too much of a hurry to give up on him. At the risk of sounding trite, let me remind you of that old saying not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you’re half the person I’ve always believed you to be, you’ll keep that in mind, both literally and figuratively, as you work through your decision.”

  When he first heard Julia’s car roar off down the driveway, Ben blamed himself. He’d been insensitive—hell, he didn’t seem able to be anything but these days! Already, she thought all he was really interested in was getting her in the sack. Given that he wound up with an erection every time he got within six feet of her, he could hardly blame her.

  And if his being permanently horny wasn’t enough to tick her off, he was also short-tempered, worried, exhausted and feeling profoundly sorry for himself. Not exactly a barrel of laughs to be around.

  As for the business of the nursery…!

  More tired than he’d ever been in his life before, he sank down on the edge of the unmade bed in the master suite and buried his face in his hands. Sheesh! Even a moron would know better than to lay claim to the one room in the house originally intended to be set up as the nursery for children not yet conceived, let alone born!

  Trouble was, he wasn’t much more than a walking moron these days. The baby never seemed to sleep for more than an hour at a stretch, and whatever technique there was to getting a kid that age to burp after every meal was beyond anything Ben had been able to figure out.

  How else to account for the almost constant vomiting? Then there were the bruises, fading now but still visible and too closely matching the marks left by a man’s rough hand for Ben’s peace of mind.

  I have to make sure he’s safe, Marian had said, and he was afraid he knew now why “safe” had been the word she used.

  Heaving a sigh, he lay back on the bed with his legs hanging over the side and his arms folded behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. For on
ce, the house was so blessedly quiet he could actually hear the faint swish of waves breaking on the beach below the garden.

  The next thing he knew, there were long shadows fingering their way across the room and the baby monitor on the bedside table was emitting little outraged squawks from the nursery.

  Bleary-eyed and groggy, Ben hauled himself to a sitting position and checked the time. Six o’clock? Hell, the squirt had slept nearly three hours! As for Julia, she’d been gone almost four.

  The realization lodged in his stomach like a great soggy lump of week-old bread. Where the devil was she? Had she come back while he slept, or had she left for good?

  Rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks from where he’d been sleeping, he staggered to the window and looked out. There was no sign of her car but the door to the garage where she usually kept it was closed, so it could be that he’d simply not heard her come home.

  The baby was burbling to himself, funny little snotty noises, but at least he wasn’t crying. Turning from the window, Ben decided he had enough time to go downstairs and, while a bottle of formula was warming in the microwave oven, check the garage to see if Julia’s car was there.

  It wasn’t. Nor was there a message on the telephone answering machine, or a note on the kitchen counter to indicate that she’d come back and gone out again. And if that wasn’t enough to sour his mood even further, he accidentally set the oven timer for four minutes instead of forty seconds, and nuked the formula to boiling point.

  And the baby was screaming. Again.

  The baby! Still feeling as if he’d been hit across the side of the head with a two-by-four, Ben directed a breath out of the corner of his mouth and took another bottle of formula out of the refrigerator.

  He shoved it in the oven, made sure he’d set the timer properly this time and paced to the window overlooking the garages. Still no sign of Julia, but the baby was certainly making his presence felt. Whatever else he might be lacking, the kid had a great set of lungs!