Wife, Mother...Lover?

by Sally Tyler Hayes

  “What did Amy tell you?” he asked.

  “That you were thinking of giving up the boys.”

  Mitch turned away and swore. But he didn’t deny it.

  “It’s true? Would you really do that?”

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business, Leanne. Now, why don’t you hop on a plane and go somewhere. Take some pictures with that fancy camera of yours, before you lose the light.”

  Leanne was trembling in the wake of his attack, but she refused to let him see it. Years of practice had made her adept at hiding most any emotion, particularly from her family.

  “I can’t let you give them up,” she insisted.

  He raised an eyebrow at that, then settled for staring her down once again. Leanne didn’t let herself fidget under his gaze, or turn away, or lash out at him in return.

  He’d loved her sister very much, she reminded herself. Surely he loved the boys, as well. Leanne couldn’t imagine anything happening that could make him give up his boys. And she found herself wishing she had been here in the past sixteen months. She felt guilty now that she hadn’t.

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business what I do with my sons,” he said.

  Leanne refused to be intimidated by the sheer size of him and by the fury within him. “Look, we don’t have to fight about this.” She decided to throw out her bottom line. “If you don’t want them, I do.”

  “You want them?” Mitch laughed sarcastically. “Why? So you can tote them onto an airplane every few weeks and drag them around the world with you? That would be a great life for two little boys who desperately need some stability.”

  “I don’t have to travel.” Leanne thought it through as she went. “I don’t even have to work. I’ve earned a lot of money over the years, and I’ve hardly spent any of it.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “About the money? Do you want to see my bank balance?”

  “No, the boys. You can’t be serious about wanting them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I never knew you had such maternal instincts.”

  Surely he couldn’t have forgotten, Leanne thought. Just in case, she reminded him. “I raised my brother and sisters for six years after our mother died.”

  “And then turned your back on them and walked away.”

  God, this man could wound with his words. Until the day of Kelly’s funeral, she hadn’t known just how good he was at it.

  “Not by my choice,” she said simply, then closed her mouth. She wasn’t sure she could maintain her composure long enough to give him a much more detailed explanation.

  “What? Richard kicked you out once he married Rena?” Mitch taunted. “That’s not what Kelly remembered. She said she begged you to stay. That Amy and Alex did, too, that they felt as abandoned by you as they did when they lost their mother.”

  Leanne bit down hard on her lip for a moment. She refused to cry in front of him.

  “Kelly understood,” she whispered, her pride hanging by a shred. “She told me so. In the letter. Surely she told you about the letter she sent me.”

  He nodded. “She told me she wanted you with her when the boys were born, and I told her not to get her hopes up.”

  “Kelly understood,” Leanne insisted. “She also told me that the two of you were making out wills and picking a guardian for the boys, in case anything ever happened to both of you.”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Who did you pick?”

  “We hadn’t come to an agreement on that,” he said warily.

  “Who did she want to have the boys? I’m sure she told you that if she couldn’t raise them herself she wanted them to be with me.”

  “You can’t be serious about wanting the boys,” Mitch said. His hands clenched at his side, a muscle twitching in his cheek, he stood there looking like a man who’d been to hell and back.

  Leanne asked herself whether she was serious, even as she argued with him. She thought back to her sister’s letter, she’d memorized every word on that long trip home to Kelly’s funeral. She thought about standing over her sister’s grave, about the promise she’d made there. This was the last thing she could do for her sister.

  “I mean it,” she said. “If you don’t want the boys, I do.”

  He said nothing for the longest time. Leanne held her breath, waiting for some response from him.

  “It’s not that I don’t want them,” he said, his expression guarded. “It’s never been that.”

  “I’m sorry.” Relieved, Leanne nearly started to cry then, for him and for the boys. And for her sister, who’d been cheated out of the life she deserved with this man and their children.

  Before she could say anything else, the door behind her opened with a swish and a pretty, young woman in a long, white coat, with a stethoscope around her neck, walked in.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Weston. I hear someone in this room needs stitches,” she said to Leanne. “You’re the mother?”

  “No.” Leanne stumbled over the explanation, then Mitch jumped in.

  “I’m the father.” He stuck out his hand. “Mitch McCarthy.”

  “Hi.” The doctor shook his hand, then leaned over the crib. “And this must be Timmy. Poor baby. We’ll have him fixed up in no time, but we’re going to have to keep him still while I stitch that cut. Can you hold him down for me?”

  Mitch paled.

  “We can strap him to a backboard, if that’s what you want.”

  “Are you going to hurt him?” Mitch struggled with the words.

  “Not on purpose.” Dr. Weston smiled reassuringly and let one of her hands rest on Mitch’s shoulder for a second. “The injection to numb the area will hurt a little. The stitching itself won’t be painful, but he’ll feel a tugging sensation as the needle goes in and out. Usually, more than anything, it’s being strapped to the board that scares the little ones.”

  Mitch nodded grimly. “I’ll hold him.”

  “Okay. Let me get my supplies, and I’ll be right back.”

  The doctor walked out, leaving Mitch and Leanne alone with the sleeping child. Leanne had seen the way Mitch looked when the doctor talked about stitches and needles.

  “Do you want me to stay with Timmy while they stitch the cut?” she offered.

  “Do you think you can handle this any better than I can?”

  “I’ve done it before,” she said, gently now. “For Kelly, when she was ten.”

  Mitch’s anger seemed to drain out of him as quickly as it had come. Obviously, he was remembering his wife.

  “That cut on her chin?” He touched his finger to the spot on his own face.

  Leanne nodded. “She fell out of a tree one night.”

  “Where was your father?”

  “At work, where he always was.”

  Mitch considered that. She thought he might apologize for the way he’d talked to her earlier. Instead, he turned all wary on her again.

  “I can do this,” he said.

  “Okay.” She turned to go. “I’ll wait outside.”

  “Leanne?” She faced him again. “If you want to help, you could go to the house and stay with Teddy. My partner’s wife is there now, but she has kids of her own, and it’s getting late.”

  Leanne saw that it was hard for him to ask that of her. She wondered if it was his pride or the fact that he still wanted to somehow punish her for hurting Kelly.

  I loved her, too, she wanted to tell Mitch. I loved her so much. And I miss her.

  Instead, she said, “I’ll be at the house with Teddy.”

  “Thank you.” He turned, his attention back on his son.

  Leanne headed for the door. Just before she opened it, she glanced into the room across the hall and saw her stepmother and her father sitting in the waiting area.

  “Oh.” All the breath rushed out of her body. She took one step back, then another. She hadn’t seen Rena since that last, awful duty visit she’d paid her father after Kelly had died.<
br />
  It was silly of her, but it always took her a little by surprise that Rena looked like an absolutely ordinary woman. Because in Leanne’s mind, Rena was something of a monster—the kind that had her wanting to hide in the closet in the dark when she was a child. Somehow, Leanne had never gotten over being irrational where Rena was concerned.

  Her stepmother was of medium height, medium build, had light-brown hair, ice-blue eyes. She was a totally nondescript woman. And she was but forty-two years old now, only ten years older than Leanne. How could she still be so afraid of her?

  Beside Rena sat her father, who appeared older than his fifty-six years. Whereas it frightened Leanne to look at Rena, it hurt to look at her father, who’d always taken his second wife’s side over his daughter’s.

  “Leanne?”

  Mitch’s voice came from beside her. She turned, realizing she’d forgotten for a moment where she was. From the expression on his face, she had to wonder just what he’d noticed in the time she’d forgotten to try to hide her reaction at seeing her father and stepmother.

  Amazingly, Mitch seemed almost concerned. What would it take, Leanne wondered, for Mitch ever to be concerned about her?

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She had to work to make her voice function properly. “Rena’s here. In the waiting room.”

  “I know.”

  He studied her as if trying to look inside her and figure out what she was doing such a poor job of hiding. When he spoke again, his tone was softer, though still wary.

  “If you don’t want to see them, there’s another door.” He nodded to the right. “It leads to the nurses’ station. You can get out that way without having to walk down the main hall.”

  “Thank you,” she said before she turned and rushed away, escaping from what would surely have been an unbearable scene with her stepmother and father.

  “Mitch?”

  A few minutes later, Mitch turned and found Marc Dalton, his partner and a good friend, standing in the doorway.

  Timmy was once again resting in the big, metal crib, having cried himself to sleep.

  Marc knelt on the floor to get a better look at him, then whistled. “Poor little guy. Looks like he went ten rounds with somebody and lost.” He ruffled Timmy’s hair.

  “Four stitches,” Mitch said, then had another flash of a needle working its way in and out of that soft, smooth flesh of his son’s forehead. Dammit. Four stitches.

  “I tried to phone and tell you, but I had trouble getting the hospital to put a call through to you in here. Ginny was headed for your house an hour and a half ago, with Hannah and Will, to take care of Teddy.”

  That was good. Teddy loved to play with Marc and Ginny’s children. Maybe he wouldn’t be so afraid with them.

  “Thanks,” Mitch said. “I appreciate it. I don’t know what I would have done without Ginny’s help. And yours.”

  More than once, Ginny had saved him by taking care of the boys when something came up. And then he remembered Leanne.

  “My sister-in-law showed up today.”

  “Missy?” That was Mitch’s brother’s wife. They lived about forty-five minutes away.

  “No, Kelly’s older sister, Leanne. I wasn’t sure if you’d gotten ahold of Ginny or not, so I asked Leanne if she would go to the house and stay with Teddy.”

  “I’ll call Ginny and let her know,” Marc said. “One more thing—I thought you should be warned. Rena’s in the waiting room, running her mouth. You can imagine what she’s saying.”

  “I’ve already heard it. Straight from her.”

  Marc swore. “The perfect addition to an otherwise rotten day. Do you want me to try to get rid of her?”

  “Nothing short of arresting her would work this time.”

  “Hey, don’t let her get to you.”

  “What if she’s right, Marc? What if the boys would be better off with her?” Or maybe someone else. Anyone but him.

  “I’ve said it before—she’s done a number on your head. Rena wasn’t exactly one of Kelly’s favorite people, remember?”

  “No, she wasn’t. And I know it was hard on Kelly having a new stepmother when she just turned thirteen. But Rena was there for her every day,” Mitch said, though right then all he seemed to think about was Leanne’s reaction earlier at merely catching a glimpse of her stepmother.

  Mitch was a cop; he knew what fear looked like. And this afternoon, his sister-in-law had been so afraid. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her show that much emotion so clearly on her face.

  He’d thought she was a coldhearted woman, one who always held herself a little apart from everyone and everything around her. Of course, he had always seen her around her family, and the relationship between them had been strained almost to the breaking point for years. Mitch supposed that could explain the carefully composed expression his sister-in-law normally wore.

  Still, he was surprised by the strength of her reaction to seeing Rena. And now that he was actually considering giving the boys to Rena, Leanne’s reaction left him decidedly uneasy.

  “Mitch,” Marc began, “you’re not going to make any decisions about the boys right away, are you? You’ve got to give this some time. You don’t know if Rena is the answer.”

  Mitch wasn’t sure of anything today, except that he’d left his sons with someone he barely knew, someone who had allowed Timmy to be hurt. “Rena isn’t perfect. I know that. But it wouldn’t be like leaving the boys with someone new every week or every month. She wouldn’t be someone who was hired to do a job or who turned out to be so damned irresponsible she let something like this happen.”

  “Wait a minute.” Marc put a hand on Mitch’s shoulder. “Hannah’s had stitches twice already, and you know it’s not because Ginny and I aren’t taking good care of her. Little kids have accidents, no matter how closely someone’s watching over them. So don’t think you’d be saving Timmy from ever ending up in the hospital again just because you gave him to Rena.”

  “I don’t think that, but...” Mitch swore, using words he never would have uttered if his son had been awake. “They deserve better. They deserve someone who’s always going to be there for them.”

  “Maybe a father?”

  “No, someone who can be home with them every day. Someone who won’t leave because another employer offers her more money or because her husband gets transferred out of town.” He could go on and on, but he knew what the bottom line was. “They deserve someone who loves them, not someone I pay to take care of them.”

  “You mean you want them to have a mother,” Marc said. “Think about it, Mitch. You don’t need to find yourself another sitter. You need to find a wife.”

  Mitch closed his eyes and saw his wife’s beautiful face, saw her smile, saw the excitement in her eyes as she turned sideways to show him how big her tummy was getting and made jokes about not fitting through the front door any longer.

  He coutd see the worn photograph of her that he carried in his wallet. He could see the videotape of their wedding reception, the one he’d watched dozens of dozens of times late into the night because it was practically the only video he had of her.

  And he remembered that nightmarish day at this very same hospital when he’d lost her, remembered the day he’d buried her.

  “I love my wife,” he said. Present tense. Love, not loved.

  “And you love the boys, too,” Marc said.

  Mitch couldn’t argue with that. And it did make him stop and think.

  “You’d do anything for them,” Marc said.

  “I would.”

  “Then don’t give up on them yet. I know it’s been awful, and it’s more than any single person should have to cope with. But just because the three of you are all alone in this right now, it doesn’t mean you’ll always be alone.”

  “Marc...”

  “Once you give up the boys, that’s it. It’s over. Think about that.”

  Chapter 3

  It was nearly dusk when Le
anne pulled to a stop in front of the modest brick house in the suburbs where her sister had lived. She saw a bright-red ball on the front lawn, a toy bulldozer on the steps that led to the porch, a stuffed animal in one chair.

  Obviously, the boys were growing up.

  Leanne closed her eyes and waited a minute before she got out of the car. Coming home just never got any easier. Rushing all over the world for her job hadn’t solved that problem.

  And now, she simply couldn’t run away anymore. Leanne wanted her family back. She decided to start here, with her nephew. Wearily, she walked to the front door and rang the bell.

  A beautiful little girl with long, golden curls and incredible blue eyes opened the door. She grinned and said, “Hi.”

  Leanne was enchanted. She thought the girl might be four, and she looked like a princess. She even dressed like one. She had on what Leanne guessed was her mother’s nightgown, complete with embroidered flowers, long, flowing sleeves and a plunging neckline. When the girl lifted the dress to curtsy quite formally to her, Leanne saw pink, plastic high heels on her feet.

  “I’m Hannah,” she said. “I live ov’r’dare.”

  “Over there? Across the street?”

  Hannah beamed. “I’m a pwincess.”

  “I can tell.” Leanne remembered Kelly’s princess phase, with feather boas, baby-pink nail polish and pilfered lipstick. “You make a lovely princess.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Leanne. I’m a friend of Mr. McCarthy’s.”

  “Hannah?” A woman’s voice called out from inside. “Who’s there?”

  The princess turned and ran, as fast as her plastic high heels could carry her, into the living room and stood at the end of the hallway. “It’s Wee-Ann, and she’s wooking for Mr. Carthy.”

  “Be right there.”

  Leanne glanced around the living room and saw toys strewn everywhere, a newspaper on the floor, a plate from someone’s lunch, a cup and a soda can. The house was a mess.

  When Leanne looked up, a little boy came careering around the corner on shaky legs. He was headed for the open door, obviously thinking of escape, but Leanne blocked his way.