The Maverick Marriage

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  “Dad!” Nate came racing in, Mickey fast on his heels. They banged the door after them, the noise forcing Susannah and Trace apart like a shot.

  “Will you show Scott how to make his own lure?” Nate demanded.

  “Yeah,” Mickey added importantly. “He wants to know, but he doesn’t want to ask ‘cause he doesn’t want to put you to any trouble if you’re busy.”

  Trace smiled. “It’s no trouble.” He turned to Susannah with a shrug, “Duty calls.”

  Susannah turned on the washer, then went out on the front lawn to watch. As she watched him tirelessly instruct all four boys simultaneously, she was touched by Trace’s patience and gentleness. She knew she had done him a great disservice, not telling him about Scott when their son was born.

  She realized she could never give back to Trace what she had taken from him. Nor could she re-create those years. But there was something she could do, she thought determinedly. Something she should have done a long time ago. And the sooner the better.

  Chapter Seven

  “It’s not fair!” Jason stormed as the two families gathered en masse in the manicured backyard.

  “We always get to go alone,” Nate said.

  “How come we suddenly need a chaperon?” Mickey asked, looking a little clueless, too.

  Trace frowned as he helped the boys gather up the fishing gear and prepare it for transport to the stream. “After the mess you made with the water balloons last night,” he said heavily, kneeling next to a well-used rod and reel, “I would think that would be evident.”

  “So we goofed up.” Scott defended the group candidly as he carefully restored order to a vintage wooden tackle box. “Now is our chance to show you how responsible we really are.”

  Though no one had asked her opinion on the matter, Susannah felt obliged to add her two cents to the discussion. She stepped into the center of the group. “I don’t know about this idea of the boys going off alone, Trace. Scott and Mickey have never been fishing. They don’t know the Silver Spur.” There was so much that could happen!

  “But we do,” Nate protested quietly as he secured his own fishing pole and gave Susannah an imploring look. “And we promise you, we’ll behave.” When she still hesitated, his expression turned even more imploring. “Please. After all the hard work we did this morning at the dining hall, I think we’ve earned the chance to have a little fun.”

  As he joined forces with Susannah in the center of the group, Trace draped his arm around Susannah’s shoulders. “You’re talking about going to the stream?” Trace asked his two sons.

  Jason nodded. “The one where Nate and I catch all the trout.”

  “It’s a tributary to the Silver River, Susannah, and it’s only four feet deep right now,” Nate added with scholarly precision, “‘cause it’s been a while since it rained.”

  “They’ll be safe there, I promise,” Trace said. Turning slightly, he studied Susannah’s upturned face. “You’d probably feel better if you could see it, though, wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Grab your gear and your sunscreen, guys, while Susannah and I pack the lunch hampers. We’ll all head out there. If Susannah approves, you’ll be on your own for the afternoon. If not, she and I will hang around with you.”

  The boys dashed off to comply. Trace turned to her. “I can also leave them with a cell phone. That way, if there’s any problem, they can call and we can get out there immediately.”

  “You really think it’ll be okay?” Susannah followed Trace inside, to the kitchen.

  Trace nodded as they began to put together a lunch for the boys. “But just to make sure, I have an idea,” he said.

  “WRITTEN CONTRACTS?” Scott echoed incredulously fifteen harried minutes later.

  “To go fishing!” Nate blinked behind his glasses.

  “We’ve never had to do that before,” Jason complained, smoothing his cowlick.

  “What’s a contract?” Mickey asked as he knelt to retie his sneaker.

  “A contract is an agreement signed by both parties, spelling out what they will or will not do,” Trace said patiently as he sat all four boys down at the kitchen table, while Susannah finished loading up the picnic hamper with sandwiches, chips, cookies and cold drinks. “I figured it would be a good idea to go over the rules in writing before Susannah and I turn you loose. So, here’s the deal.” Trace paused to hand out copies of the “contract” he had quickly prepared on his laptop computer and portable printer, then continued explaining sternly. “There is to be no fighting of any kind. All fishing equipment is to be shared equally. All questions about fishing or the ranch are to be answered politely. If anyone needs help, they need to ask for it nicely. We expect you all back home by five this afternoon. Any and all catch will be cleaned and prepared for dinner at that time.”

  “Cool!” Jason said, starting to sign the document without reading it.

  “Sounds good to me.” Mickey followed suit.

  Nate read on, frowning as he studied the fine print at the bottom. “Wait a minute, it says here we’ll be grounded, according to parent-house rules, if we don’t live up to our end of the bargain,” he observed.

  “Right,” Trace said.

  “Fair enough, for an afternoon of freedom and recreation,” Scott said.

  Looking happier than Susannah could recall seeing him in quite a while, Scott signed with a flourish. The other three boys soon did the same.

  Their meeting concluded, their lunch packed, Susannah and Trace walked with the boys through the woods to the stream. After about twenty minutes, they reached the famed fishing hole. “Oh, Trace, it’s gorgeous here,” Susannah said, looking at the sparkling stream beneath the canopy of trees. Toward one end of the clearing, there was a wide sandbar that spread across the center. The water in the channels on either side of it was only a half a foot or so deep, which made crossing to the grassy bank on the other side very easy, Susannah noted as Nate and Jason rolled up their pants legs and waded right in.

  “One of the reasons the boys love it so, I think,” Trace said.

  She nodded, looking around. There was practically no current to the stream. Mickey and Scott were both excellent swimmers. Scott had also taken Red Cross lifesaving classes the summer before.

  Trace continued to study her while she studied the site. “Think they’ll be safe enough?” he asked as the boys began setting up their lines, Trace’s sons offering both help and advice to hers.

  “Yes,” Susannah said as the last of her anxiety fled. Maybe this was exactly what the boys needed. Certainly it would help blend them into a single family.

  While Susannah watched, Trace finished helping the boys set up their rods and reels, and spread out a couple of blankets upon which to have their lunch. It was clear there was a broad spirit of cooperation among them. Watching, Susannah was very pleased.

  Trace handed over the cell phone to Scott and Nate. “Since you two are the oldest, I’m leaving this with you.”

  “We’ll be okay,” Scott promised Trace in a man-to-man way.

  “Yeah, Dad,” Nate added. “We’ll be fine.”

  Because they were clearly not needed, and were in fact mostly in the way, Trace and Susannah said goodbye to the boys and headed back to the lake house through the woods.

  They fell into step beside each other, with Susannah wondering if this was how it was going to be.

  “Want to explain that expression on your face?” Trace remarked almost too casually after a while.

  Susannah started. She hadn’t realized her anxiety was that evident. “What expression?” she asked, to buy herself some time.

  “The same one you’ve had since you came downstairs and found the boys signing contracts.”

  Susannah shrugged a shoulder as she ducked to avoid a hanging branch. “I was just wondering if you have to run absolutely everything like a business deal.” Her fingertips grazed a leafy green tree.

  Trace moved to the side to let her pass firs
t when the path narrowed. His hand resting lightly, proprietorially, on her waist, he followed her through. “It works better that way, if you take a logical systematic approach.” Their shoulders brushed as the path widened enough to allow them to walk side by side again. “The real question is, what are we going to do with ourselves during this unexpected reprieve?” Trace asked. His steps slowed slightly as they entered the backyard. “We’ve got five hours ahead of us.”

  Susannah knew what she wanted to do, although she wanted it to be a surprise. “If you have no objection, I’d like to take our first thirty-minute break apart,” she told him politely, keeping her intentions to herself. “I have an errand to run.”

  Disappointment flared briefly in Trace’s deep blue eyes as he came to a halt. “You want to meet me back here?” he asked after a moment, his casualness as studied as her own.

  Her heart pounding at his nearness, Susannah shook her head, aware that even on their romp through the woods, Trace had remained dressed in his suit pants and dress shirt, though he had long ago discarded his tie altogether. “No. The boys might show up and I don’t want them to walk in on us unexpectedly while we’re talking.” She consulted her watch and decided after careful consideration that she had time. Her eyes lifted to his once again. “I’ll meet you at the hunting lodge in thirty-minutes.”

  TRACE WALKED into the hunting lodge and stared at his surroundings. It was just as he remembered, nearly half a century old and constructed of rough-hewn logs in a rectangular one-story design, with a high, vaulted roof. A large room, plenty of windows and a flagstone fireplace dominated the front part of the lodge. Toward one end of the open area was a cozy kitchen, furnished with a heavy-duty black Aga stove that Max had imported from England as a wedding present for Susannah, and a large silver refrigerator that was also a wedding gift, from Susannah’s mother. Toward the other end was a conversation area, with an over-stuffed pine-green sofa and two wing chairs. There was a shelf filled with books on forestry. A captain’s desk. A bedroom beyond with a big split-rail-framed double bed where they’d once slept, and a bathroom with a huge old-fashioned claw-footed tub that Trace had always planned but never quite got around to proving, was more than big enough for two. Beside that was another bedroom that had served mostly as a storage room, for it had no furniture.

  As Trace roamed the small, cozy lodge, he thought back over the past seventeen years. He hadn’t spent much time at the lodge since the morning Susannah left. Being there had simply been too painful. He’d thought it better to move on, so shortly after she left him, he’d moved his business headquarters to northern Montana, and set up a home there. Then, he hadn’t felt he was running from the past or the present. Now, in retrospect, he knew he had been. Because what he’d felt for Susannah had never really been over. He had been fooling himself, thinking it had been.

  A noise sounded behind him.

  Susannah came in, looking breathless and windblown, her bobbed sable hair in sexy disarray. Her arms were full of old photo albums and several small boxes.

  His pulse picking up a notch, Trace quirked a curious eyebrow.

  “I can’t give you back the time with Scott that I took away from you, Trace.” Susannah came toward him in a drift of perfume. “But I can fill you in on what’s happened in the years since.” She put her cargo down on the coffee table. Taking his hand, she led him toward the sofa, her expression that of a gift giver on Christmas Day. “It’s all here,” she told him softly as she sat down beside him like the friends they had once been. “Baby albums. School photos, report cards, soccer trophies, everything.”

  She opened a box of loose photos—some of which bore the scars of the quake—and spread them over the coffee table. Moments of his eldest son’s life lay before him. Trace suddenly felt angry that he’d been cheated and deprived of nearly sixteen years of his son’s life, but he quickly reined in his errant emotions. Susannah didn’t have to share these pictures with him, he thought. Two wrongs would never make a right and he wanted to start fixing all that had been wrong with them. To do that he would have to put this hurt behind him, which—he hated to admit—would be no easy task

  Trace focused on one rather crumpled picture of Susannah and her family visiting Disneyland. Scott was eight, Mickey little more than a baby. The man next to her had a friendly, freckled face and strawberry-blond hair. “This is your husband?” Trace asked.

  Susannah nodded. “I met him shortly after I arrived in California. My father had a small character part in a movie out there. Drew was a writer who worked for the studio. He had been brought in to punch up the dialogue for one of the stars. My father introduced us and we began seeing each other.”

  “You got involved awfully fast.”

  Susannah nodded, a distant look in her eyes. “I was scared and I was pregnant. He wanted to take care of me and my baby.” She paused to draw a halting breath. “And he had the kind of job where he could work at home most of the time.”

  Trace studied the picture of Drew. He couldn’t say why exactly, but it was a relief to him that Drew looked like a decent sort of guy. “Did you love him?”

  Susannah frowned as if she had been expecting that question. “He loved Scott and Mickey fiercely. He was an excellent father to the boys.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “He was a good father and husband and, yes, I cared a great deal for him.” Her shoulders stiffening slightly beneath the clinging cotton fabric of her sweater, Susannah stood. As she moved to draw one of the blinds so the early-afternoon sun would not be in their faces, she replied, “Not in the way you mean, not in the passionate way you and I were in love when we first got married. But I had feelings for Drew from the very first, and our friendship grew into a deeper, steady, more familial kind of love,” she continued, choosing her words carefully as she came back to sit opposite him, in the far corner of the sofa. “Our home was a tranquil one. No real highs or lows. Just a comforting haven from the outside world.”

  Trace tore his eyes from the pictures long enough to slant her an inquisitive glance. “Did you ever feel like you were missing something?”

  As she considered that, Susannah’s eyes darkened to a deep sable brown.

  “Sometimes.” She brought her espadrille-clad feet to the sofa cushion, her knees to her chest, and laced both her hands around her upraised knees. “What about you? What was your second marriage like?”

  “Pretty much the same as yours, I gather.” Trace continued to go through the pictures, one by one, enjoying the visual history they made.

  “Calm and peaceful?”

  Trace nodded, knowing it was no exaggeration to say it had been. “Natalie’s father had been a self-made man and CEO, so she knew from the get-go what her life with me would be like and she accepted that. If I missed dinner or had to go out of town for weeks on end, as sometimes happened, I never had to worry about her complaining.”

  “She must’ve been very understanding.”

  Almost too understanding, Trace thought. To the point where he had sometimes felt as if he was almost an unnecessary and somehow incidental part of Natalie’s life. “She was a very competent woman. And she was a great mother to the boys.”

  “It shows. Jason and Nate are great kids.”

  “So are Scott and Mickey.”

  Silence fell between them. Trace turned back to the baby albums. His mood veered between the deeply sentimental, to yearning, to melancholy.

  Susannah seemed to be feeling the same torrent of emotions. After a moment, she asked, “Would it have made a difference? If I had told you I was pregnant before I left, would anything have changed?”

  It was an honest question. It deserved an honest answer. His gaze holding hers, Trace replied, “If you’re asking me would I have worked shorter hours or not been away as much, the reverse is probably true. I was trying so hard to make a home for us, to prove I was a man. Knowing we had a child on the way probably would only have intensified my drive at that
time.” He had been, after all, only twenty-one.

  “I see.” Susannah stood. She was unable to completely mask her hurt.

  Trace felt his own hurt feelings come quickly to the flashpoint. “What’s done is done,” he said gruffly, vaulting to his feet after her. “All we can do is go on from here.”

  “But can we?” Susannah whirled to face him. “Or are we just making things worse by getting involved again—even to this point?”

  Trace saw the tears in her eyes, the hurt on her face, and knew he had to do something—anything—to get past the no-win situation they had been in all these years.

  Acting purely on instinct, he wrapped his arms around her and took her into his arms, testing the waters cautiously. “We have to do something for Scott,” he told her firmly.

  Susannah splayed her hands across his chest, her fingertips grazing the hard muscles of his chest. A pulse beat wildly in her throat. She stepped back slightly. Because he refused to let go of her, she remained caged in his arms. “This isn’t for Scott,” she said, beginning to tremble.

  “I know.” Trace murmured softly as he lowered his mouth to hers. He had things to make up to her, just as she had things to make right to him, now, he could think of no better way to ease either of their pain. No better way for him to win back control of their lives. “It’s for us.”

  Their lips met in a firestorm of need. Years of pentup passion spilled into their kiss. Hours of yearning intensified everything they felt.

  Before she knew it, Susannah was standing on tiptoe, pressing all of her against all of him. With a low moan of satisfaction, Trace threaded one hand through her hair. His other hand splayed across her spine, urging her closer yet, so their kiss could deepen. And with his every move came the need to be so much closer.

  She trembled as his hand slipped beneath the hem of her sweater and moved upward, skimming over her breasts. Her response to his touch, instantaneous. Susannah heard him groan deep in his chest.