Staking His Claim

by Karen Templeton

  "And now?" she said.

  He shrugged. "I suppose that'd be up to you."

  "Yes," she said after a moment. "I'd be very interested."

  She could see the tension dissolve from his face, his shoulders. "Well. That's fine, then. When you're feeling up to it, we can hash out the details, how's that? But now—" he pushed himself up off the sofa "—I'm gonna let you get some rest while this pollywog gives you a chance."

  Dawn stood, as well; Sherman kissed the baby's head and handed him back to her, then shoved his hands in the pockets of his Matlockesque linen suit.

  "You think you can ever forgive me?"

  "I think…I'd like to move beyond the past. That's all I can promise at the moment."

  "Fair enough," he said with a nod. Then he added, "I've known the Logans my entire life, honey. Watched all those boys grow up. Cal, especially, being as he and you and Brenda Sue were all around the same age. Boy's got integrity and honor in his veins where most people have blood. And if you could see the way he looked at me last night in my office…" Sherman shook his head, then laid a hand on her shoulder.

  "Just don't let fear make your decisions for you, okay? Fear's like that itty-bitty acorn. And if we don't kick it out of the way…"

  "I get it," she said.

  "Make sure you do," Sherman said.

  * * *

  Nearly three hours later Dawn awoke from a nap she hadn't even intended on taking. Her heart knocking in her chest, she rolled over to check on Max in the cradle….

  But he wasn't there.

  Alarm spiked through her, propelling her from the bed so fast she nearly blacked out. Then—as she sat on the edge of the bed waiting for the woozies to pass—she heard Cal's laughter from the backyard. Which did nothing for the alarm factor, that was for sure.

  Except…something else began to come into focus, no more than a faint shimmer at first. But as Dawn stood up—more slowly this time—slipping on her robe as she went over to the bedroom window, as she saw Cal sitting in the old canopied glider in her mother's backyard, chattering to the bundle of blankets in his arms that was their son, the shimmer grew brighter and brighter still, until at last it burned off the fading remnants of her fear like the morning sun the dew.

  Sometimes, she thought, it wasn't about choosing.

  Sometimes, it was simply about accepting.

  * * *

  The first thing Cal noticed was that the crease between her brows had vanished.

  The second thing was that the rest of her face was equally noncommittal. Which meant she wasn't giving him a single thing to work with here.

  Great.

  But he was a patient man. Ethel had said so. And now that he was awake, he decided he agreed with her. So he'd best be about demonstrating that, hadn't he?

  "Max and I have been having quite the political discussion," he said, the glider groaning as he rocked.

  "Oh, yeah?" she said.

  "Yeah. Figured I'd better get him early before somebody fills him full of liberal claptrap."

  She crossed her arms underneath her breasts, the late-afternoon sun igniting sparks of amber in her brown eyes, streaking copper through her hair. "Whatever happened to the concept of exposing the child to all the sides of an issue and letting him make his own choice?"

  Cal stopped the glider, pretending to think this over for a minute, then cocked his head at her. Saw something in her eyes that rocked him to the core. And for once, something that didn't make him feel like yelling in frustration.

  "Sounds good to me," he said. "But you know, I'm thinking…"

  "Yes?"

  "Never mind," he said, pushing off again. "You'd never go for it, anyway."

  The glider stopped suddenly, nearly sending both him and Max flying; the feel of her curling up beside him, leaning her full weight against his arm with her head on his shoulder, sent him soaring.

  "Try me," she whispered.

  No guts, no glory.

  "Well…it just seems to me, if you're really gung-ho about making sure Max is exposed to all sides of an issue…"

  "Oh, I am. Absolutely."

  "…then the most efficient way to do that, it would seem to me, would be to have him live with two people who never see anything the same way."

  "I see," she said. "Well, I suppose that makes sense. In a convoluted kind of way. Especially if…those two people happened to be his parents?"

  Cal's heart stopped. Only to start up again like a bass drum. "Then…you wanna live together or what? Ow!" he added when she slugged him.

  "In your dreams, buster! If you think I put myself and everybody else through all that hell just to live with you—"

  He stopped her tirade with a kiss. Which she made good and sure didn't end too soon by clamping her hand on the back of his head and holding on for dear life. Cal damn near thought he'd need CPR by the time the kiss ended, but that was just fine with him.

  "Well, hell," he said, their foreheads touching, "I guess that means we'll have to get married."

  "I guess it does at that," she said, snuggling against his shoulder again.

  They rocked for a while, Cal more or less afraid to blink. Finally, though, he said, "You do realize you just did a total about-face, right?"

  "Yeah, I know." She skootched closer. "Somehow I didn't think you'd mind too much."

  "You can't come back later and blame it on hormones."

  "Not to worry. Hormones have nothing to do with this."

  "So…you're not scared anymore?"

  "Never said that."

  "I don't understand."

  She started fiddling with his shirt buttons, which probably wasn't the smartest thing she could have done, considering she'd just given birth and button-fiddling was as far as they were going to get. "It's like you said. About the love being stronger that the fear. Or at least—" she removed her hand from his button to scratch her nose "—the fear of what life would be like without you is finally stronger than the fear of being with you. And I got to thinking about how I've never let something as dumb as fear get in the way of going after what I want…" She shrugged against him.

  "You want me?"

  "Mmm. Since I was five years old, actually."

  "Whoa," he said. "Well," he said. "Nobody can ever accuse you of being impetuous, that's for sure."

  She laughed, then got quiet again, reaching over his arm to play with Max's hand. "Sherman was here."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah. So, you read him the riot act or what?"

  "It was the least I could do. So…that's all out in the open now?"

  "Yes, thank God. Although I'd figured it out, too, so I would've confronted him eventually, even if you hadn't. But I have to admit, I kinda got off on the knight-in-shining-armor routine. It made me feel…loved." She angled her head to smile into his eyes. "It's a nice feeling. Especially since you're the only man I've ever really loved, too. Which is one of the reasons I left Haven."

  He frowned. "At the risk of spoiling the moment, that doesn't make a lick of sense."

  "Hey. If you want logic, I'm not your woman. Besides, I said one of the reasons. Even now, I don't really understand why I felt suffocated here. Because I was illegitimate? Because I never knew my father? Because that's just the way I am?" She shrugged against him. "I honestly don't know. But I did know that you and I were very different, that we could be friends but that's as far as it could go. The girls you went out with…"

  "I did ask you out, Dawn. You turned me down. Remember?"

  "I thought you were being…kind."

  "You're not serious?"

  "I was at fourteen. I was serious about everything. Even worse than now. In any case, you can't deny we kept growing apart as we got older. And even though I was convinced we'd never be right for each other, there was this itty-bitty jealous spot that was just as glad I'd already decided to leave. Because I couldn't stand the thought of watching you hook up with somebody else."

  Cal sighed. "And I didn't go after you
because I didn't want to get in the way of your dreams. Dreams that didn't include staying home and marrying a farmer." He rocked some more. "So basically this whole thing was nothing but a huge misunderstanding?"

  "No!" Dawn sat up straight, practically vibrating with emotion. "Oh, God, Cal…if we'd gotten together back then, if we'd gotten married, it would have ended in disaster! I had to get out of here, don't you see? Otherwise I'd've been miserable, always wondering what might've been, if I'd sacrificed my soul for my heart."

  "Which leads us back to my question," he said, his gaze steady in hers. "What's different about now?"

  Max started to fuss; Dawn took the baby from him, calmly putting him to breast like she'd been doing it all her life. And Max latched on like he'd been doing that all his life, too. Which, come to think of it, he had.

  "This is going to sound corny as hell," she said over the baby's noisy sucking, "but I really feel our lives are divided into seasons. I had to leave in order to appreciate what I had here. I went to New York because that's what I was meant to do then, where I was supposed to learn whatever I had to learn during that time. The problem was…"

  She got quiet for a moment, then said, "When I came back after Andrew and I fell apart, and we…fooled around, and then I got pregnant…It totally threw me into a tailspin. I mean…" She blew out a sigh. "Sex with you was supposed to be a fantasy fulfillment, okay? And that was it—"

  "You fantasized about me?"

  She actually rolled her eyes.

  "Oh. Me, too. Never thought it would happen, though."

  "Neither did I. And that's my point. It did—"

  "And it was great."

  "—and it was great—" he noticed she was blushing. "But afterward, especially when I realized I was pregnant, my brain exploded, because suddenly nothing made sense anymore and my life had spiraled completely out of control." She blinked. "Loving you had nothing to do with it. Trusting you didn't even have anything to do with it. And the more everything else seemed to fall into place, like with me working with Sherman—" she took a breath "—with my father, when I realized I could actually get into living here far more than I ever thought I could, I finally had to face the one thing I least wanted to face." She looked at him. "That you'd eventually wear me down and get me to marry you, only, then the day would come when you'd look at the big-mouthed, bossy, uptight, snotty woman you'd married and go, 'What the hell was I thinking?'"

  With a smile Cal stretched an arm around her shoulders and tugged her against him again. "Honey, something tells me I'm gonna wonder that every day of our lives. And then I'll remember exactly what I was thinking and feel like the luckiest damn man on the planet. Because I need you, darlin'. To keep me grounded, to make me see and think about things I wouldn't see or think about without you prodding me. I need you because…" Smiling, he looked deep in her eyes. "Because you're silver and every other woman I've ever known has been stainless steel."

  "Wow," Dawn said. "I had no idea you were so…"

  "Full of it?"

  She laughed. "Poetic."

  "Yeah, well, I think I just shot my wad for the next twenty years, so don't go expecting stuff like that on a regular basis."

  After a moment she said, "Yeah, well, I think after that, I'm good for at least twenty years, so you're off the hook."

  "We'll be fifty," he said, then kissed her forehead. "And you'll have gray in your hair and all these great laugh lines—"

  "And my boobs will be very well acquainted with my navel," she added on a sigh.

  "That's okay, 'cause I'll be right there to hold 'em up for you."

  "That a promise?" she said, grinning.

  He held her even closer. "Absolutely. Because, see, Logan men are real good at making promises." He tilted her face to his and kissed her, finally, finally getting his fill of that sweet-tangy essence that was uniquely Dawn's, as his dream sharpened into reality, a reality far too full of joy and laughter for life's sorrows to even make a dent. "But they're even better at keeping them."

  Then he kissed her again, just to prove his point.

  Epilogue

  They had the wedding at Cal's the first weekend in June, on the very spot and the same day where Hank, Sr., had taken Mary Louise Brown to be his wife nearly fifty-five years before. Ivy thought that was fitting, that Cal's and Dawn's finally acknowledged love should bring healing to a house where grief had all but drowned out so many years of happiness.

  Although Dawn had opted for a simple white dress that floated around her ankles and a few white rosebuds tucked into her French-braided hair, some of the guests, Ivy thought on a chuckle, seemed to be under the illusion this was Mardi Gras. Lord, she'd never seen so many outlandish hats in her life. Ethel's, in fact, was big as a beach umbrella, and nearly as bright. Not as bright as her smile, though.

  Speaking of smiles…Jacob and Sherman were both grinning their heads off. For all intents and purposes, Dawn had gone from having no father to having two, though it was hard for Ivy to fathom how she'd ever been involved with either of them. And at the same time, looking at the pair of them decked out in their summer suits, she found it easy to see why. Easier, anyway. Not enough to resurrect that past with either of them, though. Oh, Lord, no.

  Mary's beloved Steinway had been tuned, although you couldn't really tell from Luralene's butchered rendition of "The Wedding March." But nobody cared. Especially the bride and groom, who, judging from the goony looks on their faces, probably didn't even hear it. They were going to New York for their honeymoon—with Max, of course—to close up her apartment and for Dawn to show Cal the city she would always love.

  Actually, what with all the babies in here, Ivy thought on a chuckle, nobody could hear much of anything. Poor Pastor Meyerhauser had to stop three times during the service to wait out this one's wail or that one's shriek of laughter. He didn't seem to mind, though. Nor did anybody else. Just like they didn't mind that it was hotter'n blazes in here, even with all the windows open. This is what life was all about, after all—weddings and babies and falling in love. It had taken the Logan boys a long time to figure that out. But—she glanced over at Hank, sitting with his arm resting on Jenna's shoulders, holding hands with his daughter; then to Maddie, near to popping with Ryan's baby, near to popping with love as she grinned at her husband, standing up with Cal as his best man—figure it out, they had.

  It's okay, Mary, she thought, thinking of the boys' mama. You can rest easy now.

  And from the piano—even though Luralene was now sitting clear over on the other side of the room—came a single, soft, peaceful note in return.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-8108-4

  STAKING HIS CLAIM

  Copyright © 2004 by Karen Templeton Berger

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

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  †How To Marry a Monarch

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  †How To Marry a Monarch

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  **The Men of Mayes County

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  **The Men of Mayes County

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>
  **The Men of Mayes County

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  *Weddings, Inc.

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  *Weddings, Inc.

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  *Weddings, Inc.

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  Table of Contents

  KAREN TEMPLETON,

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue