Corie shook her head. “Guilty? If your life had been awful it wouldn’t have made mine any less awful. I’m happy that you’ve been happy.”
“Are you afraid that you won’t know what to do with a good life? That you won’t know how to be happy?” Cassie smiled. “Because I think Ben could teach you how in a minute.”
Corie fell back against the bedspread. “He’s already done that. The trouble is that I feel myself slipping away when I’m with him.”
“You mean your unhappy self? Because you could do without her.”
Corie rolled her eyes at her sister. “I mean my self-sufficient self. I don’t want to give her up. What if I need her again?”
“You mean what if your relationship fails?”
“Well...yeah.”
Cassie swatted Corie’s bare knee. “You’re just afraid to put your heart out there. Ben’s a doll and you know that. He’ll try to boss you around because he wants to protect you, but is that really such a bad thing? Just tell him what you want and listen to what he wants. It’s that simple.”
Corie looked into Cassie’s eyes and saw a shadow there. “How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that. Do you really want to let him go without finding out what could happen if you told him you love him and want to be with him?”
* * *
THIS WAS CRAZY, Corie thought as she drove in the dark, jeans pulled on under her sleep shirt. But by the time she reached the B and B, it seemed less crazy and more...critical to the rest of her life. Her heart was pounding and her breath was coming in short puffs, as though she was doing Lamaze. The birth of a relationship, she thought a little wildly.
She pulled up beside Grady’s rental car, leaped out of her truck and ran to the door of the B and B. She put a hand to the knob then pulled it back, wondering what she would say.
“Ben...” She practiced quietly. “I love you and I want to marry you.” No. That might frighten him.
“Ben,” she tried again, “what do you see in the future for us?” Gross. Completely unimpassioned.
“Hi, Ben. I, uh, have gotten so used to having you in my life that the thought of you being half a continent away just...” What? She groped for the right description of how she felt. A terrible sadness came over her. “Breaks my heart,” she said. “Makes my whole world like nighttime.” She looked up at the starry sky. “And not a night like tonight, but a night that’s stormy and...scary.”
Okay. That wasn’t bad.
“I don’t care that you’re bossy. Well, I do, but I can live with it if you promise you’ll listen to what I want, try to understand how I feel. You’re usually good at that. And I’ll try to be less...”
She heard a sound behind her and turned with a gasp of alarm to see a figure leap off the hood of Grady’s car.
“It’s me, Corie.” Ben’s quiet, rumbly voice came out of the darkness, soothing her fear, quickening her heartbeat. “I’ve been right here while you were talking to the door.”
She put her arms out in the dark. They went unerringly around his waist as he pulled her close.
“Oh, Corie,” he said, crushing her to him.
She felt the tension in his hands, his heart beating under his shirt, matching the rapid pace of hers.
“I love you so much. I’ll do anything you want, except stand by silently while you do things that scare me.”
She held tightly to him, feeling her life fit into his. This was where she was supposed to be. The kid who’d had such a hard time finding her niche, belonged here, in Ben Palmer’s arms.
“I’ll try hard not to do that. I don’t have so much to prove anymore. The Manning kids are back together and you love me. Right?”
“Right.”
“And speaking of kids...” she said with the barest hesitation. “Are you up to starting our lives together with two children?”
“I am.” He didn’t hesitate. “And if we’re all going back to Oregon tomorrow, we’ll have to explain it to Teresa, then to them, so we can all go together.”
She uttered a sad little gasp for the woman who’d been like a mother to her. What would Teresa do with an empty house?
Ben read her mind. “Maybe Teresa will want to come with us for a visit.”
Corie hugged him a little harder for understanding what she felt. “I’ll ask her. Jack said she was going to New York with friends for the new year. Funny that she didn’t tell me.”
“Well, we can extend the invitation. Want to get married New Year’s Day? Just the family and us?”
She hesitated, expecting panic to set in, fear to paralyze her. Instead she felt elation, a sense of security, of rightness. She reached up to loop her arms around his neck. “I’d love that. This is my fairy tale come true as well as Rosie’s, you know.”
“Really.” He cupped her head in his hand and leaned down to kiss her. “For me, it’s reality come true. More than I ever dreamed for myself.”
He held her close and they simply stood together under the starry sky as fairy tale and reality merged into one longed-for miracle.
* * *
EVERYONE WAS DELIGHTED by Corie and Ben’s engagement. Teresa had made caramel nut rolls for Christmas morning breakfast and Jack and Sarah, Cassie, Grady, Gary and Helen, Ben and Corie, and Teresa talked about what a wonderful Christmas it was.
“Were you really planning to go to New York for New Year’s?” Corie asked. “Because you can go. We haven’t told the kids yet, but I presume they’re going to want to come with us.”
Teresa smiled wryly. “That was the plan, but there’s been a sudden change.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see very soon.”
Ben pushed his chair in and caught Corie’s hand. He looked out the kitchen window. “Soren and Rosie are just sitting on the swings, talking. Looks like the right time.”
Corie couldn’t believe how nervous she felt. “What if they’ve changed their minds,” she asked, walking beside him across the yard, “and don’t want us?”
He squeezed her hand. “Come on. Who wouldn’t want us? We’re charming and have it all together. Well, you have some of it together and I had some of it, so...”
He stopped because both children stood slowly off the swings, a sudden, breathless quality in the air around them. They looked at each other, then at Ben and Corie approaching. The longing in their eyes was almost painful to see.
“What happened?” Soren asked, trying to appear cool, unaware that his face had already revealed everything.
“I asked Corie to marry me,” Ben replied, “and she said yes.”
“Wow.” Rosie took her hand and frowned at her bare finger. “You’re supposed to give her a ring,” she chided Ben.
“Yeah. But it all happened kind of quickly, so there wasn’t time. We’ll get one in Oregon.”
Rosie blinked, uncertainty in her eyes. “Are you going with everybody else tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Corie put a hand to Rosie’s head and tugged her closer. “You want to come and help me pick it out?”
“You mean...in Oregon?”
“Yes.”
Rosie executed a small leap then replied, “Sure.”
Soren looked stricken. Ben put an arm around his shoulders. “You want to come along?”
“Yeah.” His grin was blinding. “But...how’ll we get back?”
“Do you want to come back?”
Soren looked afraid to ask, afraid this couldn’t be true.
Corie knew how he felt.
“We’d like you and Rosie to stay with us,” Ben said, putting an arm around Corie. “It isn’t quite as exciting as Rosie’s fairy tale about being picked up in a storm, but we want the four of us to be a family. The Palmer family. What do you think?”
&
nbsp; Soren pressed his face into Ben’s chest and Rosie wrapped her arms around Corie’s waist and squealed. “I can’t believe it! I don’t have to go into the system. Everybody hates the system.” She looked up at Ben and Corie. “What is the system, anyway?”
“You don’t have to worry about it,” Ben said, turning them all back to the house.
Soren dragged the back of his hand across his eyes and held on to Ben. The boy who’d been without a father for so long apparently feeling secure again.
“We should get you guys packed so we’ll all be ready to go tomorrow. Okay?” Ben asked.
The children ran ahead of him, Soren shoving Rosie, who yelled in complaint then chased after him.
“I think their peaceful collusion is over,” Corie said.
Ben pulled her closer. “That’s okay. Ours is going to last forever.”
She pinched his waist. “No, it won’t. Oh, it’ll last, but it won’t always be peaceful.”
“I’m a cop. I keep the peace.”
* * *
IN THE HOUSE everyone had left the table, and Teresa stood in the living room with a young woman and two blonde little girls about four and six. Corie shooed Soren and Rosie upstairs to start packing.
As Corie and Ben got closer, Ben realized that Teresa had two new residents. The little girls were beautiful and looked frightened.
“Guys, come and meet Katie and Joanna,” Teresa said. “Girls, this is Corie. She used to live here.”
Corie squatted to look into their eyes. “You’re going to love it here. When you put your things away—” there were tall paper bags at their feet “—I’ll show you this cool play set we have in the backyard.”
* * *
BEN TURNED AT the sound of a commotion behind him. Soren and Rosie were dragging Teresa’s ladder toward the tree.
“Hey, hey,” he said, intercepting them. “What are you doing?”
“We want to get our ornaments and our chains down.” Rosie pointed to her angel tree-topper ornament hanging from the dining room light. “You said we could take them home with us. And we’re going home, right?”
Ben had the best feeling. “Right,” he said.
Corie came to throw her arms around him. “So am I,” she whispered then kissed his ear.
EPILOGUE
GRADY HATED THE thought of going home. He loved home, but this Christmas, with the Palmers in Texas of all places, had been one of the best in his memory.
Everybody was packed and ready to go, except for Teresa, who was staying with the new children. She’d made caramel nut rolls again this morning as a last hurrah before they all piled into cars to go to the airport in McAllen.
A lot of this trip had felt surreal, most of all the arrival of the supermodel who had thrown her arms around his neck then fainted in his arms. He could live on that memory for a long time. He realized a relationship with such a woman would never work for him. She was too beautiful, too famous, too...too everything. He was suspicious of anything that was too good to be true. Like Celeste. Taking that chance once had been enough.
Everyone sat around the table, having a last cup of coffee for the road, but he was in the living room, rooting through his luggage for his plane ticket.
“Grady!”
He looked up at the sound of his name. Cassidy, peering through the curtains, beckoned him. He still couldn’t get used to the sound of his name on the lips of a supermodel.
He went to join her. She grabbed his arm and tugged him out of sight of the window, pulling back the curtain. He looked in astonishment at a caravan of cars and vans with high-tech surveillance equipment on the roofs and the call letters of television stations emblazoned on the sides. Men and women began to ooze out.
“Can you take me to the airport?” she asked urgently, her eyes like a lake in a storm. “Please? You can come with me. You won’t have to ride folded up in coach.”
“Uh...”
“If we slip out the back I can have a helicopter waiting for us in McAllen. Please, Grady? If I’m photographed now, I’m dead.”
Jack wandered out of the kitchen, frowned at what appeared to be their urgent conversation and then noticed the traffic in front of the house. “What’s going on?”
“The press found me,” Cassidy explained briefly. “Grady’s going to take me out the back and we’re going to Oregon by helicopter. Will you cover for me?”
“Uh...of course. Go. I’ll keep the reporters busy to buy you some time.”
“You’re a prince, Jack!” She kissed him quickly and picked her bag out of the lineup of luggage near the stairs, ready for everyone to leave later in the afternoon.
Grady closed his bag, shouldered it and followed her pleading look to the kitchen.
“Jack will explain,” she said as she walked around the table to the door. Grady just followed. “I love you all. Thanks for everything, Teresa, and I’ll see the rest of you in Oregon.”
She blew a kiss. Grady waved into their looks of confusion and led the way to his car.
“Shall I put you in the trunk?” he teased softly as he stowed their bags in it without making any noise.
“My legs are too long,” she whispered back. “Do you have a blanket in the car?”
“This is a rental. Are you cold?”
“No. I was going to hide under it. You don’t know much about escaping the press, do you?”
He smiled wryly. “Doesn’t come up very often in my life. You can have my jacket. It was in the thirties when I left Oregon.”
“Perfect.” She climbed into the back. He tossed a leather jacket over the seat. As he drove south, he saw the caravan pulling away from the curb van by van and heading north. Jack was as good as his word.
“Yech!” Cassidy exclaimed from under the jacket. “There’s a smashed candy bar in your inside pocket!”
“Sorry. But, then, I don’t faint from hunger into strangers’ arms, either. And stay out of my pockets.”
Grady drove like a madman, glancing in the rearview mirror. He had a question of his own.
“When you said, ‘If they photograph me now, I’m dead,’ did you mean literally?”
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460385074
To Love and Protect
Copyright © 2015 by Muriel Jensen
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