by Caro Carson
Her heart stopped when Jamie stopped touching Sam’s hair and instead cupped her cheek. “And lately, I keep imagining a life with you. Kendry Harrison, I want to marry you.”
He hadn’t really asked a question, but she answered him anyway.
“Yes.”
He didn’t love her. He’d never love her.
But she loved him.
Chapter Eleven
“Yes.”
Kendry had said yes. The rush of adrenaline had been instant. Unexpected.
It was all Jamie could do to play it cool and wait by the motorcycle for Quinn to show up with his truck, when he wanted to grab Kendry by the hand and run to the courthouse before she could change her mind.
Quinn pulled up in Jamie’s practical extended-cab truck and parked it under the eaves. He had the engine off and was rounding the hood when he spotted Kendry holding Sam and stopped short. Jamie stayed where he was, leaning on the motorcycle, arms crossed over his chest. As he watched Quinn take in the scene, he started to grin.
“I believe you’ve already met my wife to be, Kendry.”
Quinn lifted a brow in question, looking so much like their father that Jamie felt a brief pang.
“Well.” That was it. That was all Quinn could come up with.
Jamie would have enjoyed the moment of Quinn’s speechlessness longer, but Kendry was looking acutely embarrassed. “It’s not like we’re—”
Jamie put his hand on Kendry’s shoulder—God, she was all bones—and dropped the bike keys in Quinn’s hand. “We’ve got to run. Thanks for bringing the truck back so quickly.”
“I had no desire to continue to drive around town in a truck with a baby’s car seat in the backseat. It could’ve killed my reputation with the ladies.”
“Or it could’ve made it. Babies are chick magnets. Sam caught me a wife, see?” Jamie nodded toward Kendry, willing her to not look scared to death of his brother.
Before Jamie could think of the right thing to say to put her at ease, Quinn snapped out of his shock and proceeded to give Kendry a bear hug, despite Sam in her arms, and a kiss on the cheek for good measure.
“Welcome to the family, then, sis.”
Good old Quinn, the mathematical cardiologist. Like their father had always done, Quinn neatly categorized everything he encountered. If Kendry was Jamie’s wife, then that made her family. Family got a hug and a welcome. Plain and simple.
Dad would have acted like Quinn.
Somehow, the idea that his father would have accepted Kendry as his daughter-in-law made the knot in Jamie’s gut feel just a little—just slightly—looser. Which made no sense at all, because Jamie was trying to be a different kind of father than the one who’d raised him. Or rather, different than the one who hadn’t been there much at all to raise him.
Impatiently, Jamie snapped Sam into his car seat in the back bench of the pickup truck. Whether his father would have approved or not was irrelevant. If his father had taught him anything, it was that if a boy didn’t have a mother, he’d be a lonely child, indeed.
It was time to get Kendry Harrison to the courthouse.
* * *
Kendry sat in the backseat of the truck’s cab so she could keep an eye on Sam. Her little guy was sleeping hard, exhausted from his afternoon of choking and coughing, but he was otherwise fine. Kendry couldn’t help looking at him every two minutes to reaffirm that fact.
Jamie didn’t need her beside him, anyway. During the few minutes they’d waited for Quinn to arrive with the truck, Jamie had used his phone to learn everything he needed to know about getting married in Austin.
They’d breezed through a fast-food drive-through on the way to their first stop, since Jamie insisted she needed a burger and a shake. Kendry felt a little guilty for not putting up much of a fight on that point. Then they’d driven on to the Travis County Clerk of Courts, which wasn’t in the main courthouse, but rather in a one-story plaza in an unremarkable part of town. Unremarkable, if she didn’t count the building on the opposite side of the street, a warehouse whose sign was a two-story-tall candy cane with a lamb dangling from it. The candy cane looked to be leaning away from the old candy factory it marked, cantilevered at a crazy angle with its motorcycle-sized lamb dangling by a thread...
It was all so bizarre. This whole day was bizarre. Kendry slurped the last drop of the shake as quietly as she could. She looked at Sam. He was sleeping peacefully, but it was quite possible that his lungs were battling an infection while she sipped a strawberry shake.
The clerk’s offices weren’t empty, but it seemed all the people they ran into were on their way out of the building. Perhaps the good citizens of Austin were in a rush to get back to their jobs after running an errand on their lunch hour. Whatever the reason, she and Jamie and Sammy were the only ones eager to go into the government building, rather than out of it.
Eager? Was she eager to reach the marriage license window?
This was not, ever, the way she’d imagined getting married. Not in a rush. Not wearing scrubs that still felt stiff and itchy in their newness. Not lugging a sleeping baby in his car seat, and not with a man who wasn’t in love with her.
But he did love her, in some small way. Or rather, he loved the idea of making her Sam’s mother. He loved the idea of being a settled, married man. He was grateful to her.
And she, Kendry Harrison, was settling for less than she really wanted. Again. An orderly instead of a nurse. A mother instead of a lover. She should stop this marriage.
“The marriage license is seventy-one dollars. We only take cash.”
The clerk was more concerned with the cash than she was with verifying that the two people standing in front of her were eligible to be married. A casual look at their driver’s licenses was all it took for the paperwork to cross the counter.
“You have to wait three days before you can get married,” the clerk explained.
Kendry saw Jamie’s pen stop in midstroke on the paperwork.
“Three days?” he asked.
“There’s a seventy-two-hour waiting period.”
Three days. This crazy idea that today, a random Thursday in September, would be her wedding day, ended. They had time to come to their senses. Jamie surely would change his mind, and she would not be his wife.
She looked at the set of his jaw, at his close-cropped hair, military in its style, at the way he kept one hand on Sam’s car seat, always keeping that baby safe, although the seat was securely sitting on a wide desk.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to wait. Jamie would change his mind, and she would lose him. And lose Sam. And lose the feeling of being wanted and needed.
She was worried about compromising, about settling for being Jamie’s platonic wife. But when faced with not being his wife at all, she realized this was one compromise she was willing to make. She wanted, more than anything, to get married on this Thursday to this man, while wearing brand-new pink scrubs and holding her brand-new sleeping son.
“Three days will be Sunday,” Jamie said.
“Yep,” the clerk said, after dutifully checking her desk calendar.
“I’m in the army. I have to report to my new unit tomorrow night. Friday.”
“Oh,” the clerk said, brightening. “If you’re active-duty military, you don’t have to wait. Just show your military ID to the justice of the peace. The closest one who might do a wedding today is at the courthouse on Guadalupe Street.”
Jamie looked as relieved as Kendry felt. Briskly, he held the door open for her, then drew her to his side as they headed for the truck. “Let’s go right now. Today.”
He really wants to marry me.
Kendry smiled at him.
He didn’t smile back but gave her the smallest of squeezes before letting go. “I have to turn in my act
ive-duty ID when I report to my reserve unit tomorrow night. We made it in the nick of time.”
Or maybe he was just an efficient kind of groom.
* * *
Efficient was an understatement. Her actual wedding had been a blur, a handing over of paperwork and IDs, a local judge who was willing to spend his break between scheduled hearings to earn an extra hundred dollars, and a civil exchange of vows. The judge skipped the part about exchanging rings and pronounced them man and wife. Jamie had quickly thanked him before the judge could say anything like, “You may now kiss the bride,” so that part was eliminated as easily as the rings. Minutes later, Jamie was checking his watch as he opened the passenger door for Kendry.
“I think Sam’s going to sleep a little longer,” he said. “Let’s go replace those scrubs I threw away.”
Kendry began her married life at a big-box store, pushing a shopping cart and keeping an eye on Sam. He slept in the car seat, which snapped into place on the cart’s handle. On their way to the back of the store, Jamie passed a display for the melt-in-the-mouth kind of allergy medicine. “This one works fast,” he said, “so take it now, and you’ll be feeling better by the time we leave.”
She meekly obeyed the doctor’s orders, especially after the man opened the package and put the pill in her hand. They had to pay for the opened package, so there was no sense arguing. She could practically see Jamie checking an item off his imaginary mental list: Treat allergies. Check.
In the uniform department, Kendry carefully selected one set of scrubs in her size. Jamie grabbed four more sets and tossed them in the cart. He made a beeline for the shoe department. “I don’t think Sam’s going to sleep long enough for me to get you something nicer, but these will be better than nothing for work tomorrow.”
Kendry looked down at her sneakers. Compared to the new pink scrubs, they looked horribly worn. She wanted to point out that these would last another day, but Jamie was already halfway down the aisle of women’s shoes. It took her longer to try on sneakers than it had to say “I do,” although she only tried on two pair. When she said, “These fit fine,” Jamie produced a pocketknife, cut the tags off the new ones and threw her old pair into the box and then the cart.
It was embarrassing to see his hands handling her battered sneakers. She gave up pretending this was a normal shopping trip on a normal day, and silently followed Jamie through the store, mustering a smile and a nod when he asked her if she needed socks, too.
Get the orderly outfitted for work tomorrow. Check.
Jamie was practically in full E.R. doctor mode, a man on a mission, and he didn’t need her input. He led the way to the baby aisle. Kendry kept calculating how much it would all cost. The diapers and formula alone were enough to pay her rent. Jamie didn’t seem to care. In fact, he kept adding more baby items to the cart, more concerned with which brand of teething biscuits Sam would enjoy than with which brand cost the least.
Kendry hadn’t set foot in a major supermarket in a year. It was too time-consuming and expensive to switch buses to get from the inner city out to the suburbs, so she bought things like cereal in overpriced gas stations. She’d forgotten how colorful the superstores were, how high the ceilings, how many different brands of everything filled shelf after shelf. It was dazzling. It made her want to cry.
Sam began to cry instead. Kendry unbuckled him from the seat and held him close, grateful for the comfort she received from comforting him. He was important. He was what it was all about.
“Here, let me hold Sam while you get what you need.” Jamie lifted Sam off her hip with a “hey, buddy,” and waited patiently by the cart.
Kendry looked around, then felt herself blush. She’d followed Jamie into the cosmetics aisle.
“I don’t wear makeup.” She tried not to squirm when Jamie automatically looked at her face—not at her, but at the surface of her. Her skin and stuff. She couldn’t stand it; she put her hands on her blushing cheeks. “I probably should, I know, but—”
“Why should you?”
She dropped her hands. “I don’t know. It gives women a more professional appearance, I guess.” As soon as she said that, she thought of her hasty, homemade haircut and tugged on her bangs.
Jamie spoke to Sam. “Do you think Kendry needs to look more professional?”
Sam cooed and stuck his fingers in his mouth.
“Me, neither,” he said, smiling at Sam before turning back to Kendry. “We like you just the way you are. If you want makeup, go for it. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.” He nodded at the shelves behind her. “You at least need some shampoo and items like that.”
“Oh! Shampoo!” She whirled to the shelf behind her. She’d been using one bar of soap for her face, body and hair for so long now, she’d forgotten the luxury of having separate products. Soap was soap, and they all did the same job, but Jamie would think she was weird if she didn’t use shampoo, wouldn’t he? She didn’t want him to think she was weird.
That was her excuse to start touching the bottles. She even picked up a couple, popping their caps open for a quick sniff of heavenly fruits and flowers. Thanks to that tiny allergy pill, her nose was actually drying up enough to smell something. The ginger and lemongrass shampoo smelled so good, she held it up for Sam to smell, too. Then she put it back on the shelf and bent down to pick up the economy-sized bottle of the store-brand shampoo.
“Okay,” she said, placing the bottle in the cart. “Next aisle.”
“Kendry.” Jamie sounded hoarse. He looked angry.
Her hand hovered over the bottle. “I’m sorry, is it too much? I wasn’t thinking—I mean, it probably looks greedy, doesn’t it? But it’s cheaper per ounce and it won’t expire—”
“Kendry.” But Jamie didn’t say anything else. Instead, with Sam in one arm, he grabbed the ginger-lemongrass shampoo off the shelf and placed it in the cart. Then he grabbed the matching conditioner, too.
She was going to cry. It was humiliating, being so poor, making do, pretending you didn’t want all the products you couldn’t afford. Sam started fussing and reaching for her, wriggling to get down from his father’s arms. Children had a way of picking up the tension around them.
Jamie handed Sam to her. “Money’s been tight for you, I can tell, but we’re a family now. Sam deserves the best I can give him, and Sam’s mother deserves the same. Please, pick out whatever you need.”
He touched her under the chin, a move she was certain he meant to be comforting. Maybe, like Sam, Jamie could sense that she was on edge. For the first time in hours, he smiled at her. “We’ll still be able to send Sam to college, I promise.”
She smiled back, because she wanted to pretend everything was okay, that she wasn’t the most pitiful bride ever, and this wasn’t the least romantic wedding day in history. Then she threw into the cart a facial cleanser and a lotion that had sunscreen in it.
Just as they were leaving the aisle, she grabbed a lip gloss and tossed it in with the rest, telling herself it had nothing to do with the warmth of the man’s fingers as he’d lifted her chin.
Chapter Twelve
The trip to the superstore landed Kendry in an optometrist’s office. She’d paused at the rack of reading glasses that looked like the ones Sammy had broken. Jamie’s interrogation had begun, and he’d insisted she get a proper prescription. She’d agreed to make an appointment. Soon.
Jamie’s idea of soon was to call a friend, an optometrist who immediately made room in her schedule for them. Kendry suspected the optometrist, who was very pretty and very blonde, wasn’t terribly thrilled to find out she was helping a female friend of Jamie’s and not Jamie himself.
If she finds out Jamie is no longer a bachelor, she’s really going to be unhappy.
She didn’t find out. When they were alone in the exam room and the optometrist needed Kendry’s last na
me for the vision prescription, Kendry said “Harrison” without thinking, and that was that.
Next patient.
When the staff member who was supposed to help Kendry select new frames for that prescription began fetching frames from displays labeled Versace and Gucci, Kendry had to protest.
“I need something for everyday. Nothing fancy. I’m with babies all day, and I’m not always fast enough to dodge them, you see?” She waved the old taped frames, which she held in her hand, hoping her explanation accounted for dime-store plastic in this shiny world of designer frames.
Thanks to the dilating eye drops Kendry had been given, the office grew brighter as her vision grew blurrier. By the time Kendry was persuaded to order the wire-thin, flexible frames that a child could bend without harming, along with invisible lenses that were supposed to be nearly impossible to break, a headache was clearly starting. The saleswoman placed the taped-up old frames in a new case and assured her they’d put in a rush order—as a professional courtesy, of course.
Kendry tried to muster a smile before returning to the waiting room. She was grateful that the office provided disposable sunglasses, a thin rectangle of plastic brown film with paper earpieces.
Jamie was talking quietly to Sam, who sat in his father’s lap and waved his empty bottle in the air, turning it this way and that with serious concentration. Kendry was content to stand, unnoticed, and watch Jamie and Sam, together. It was the first time Jamie had looked relaxed since...
She racked her brain. Since the night they’d worked together in the E.R.? The night he’d sat on the bench with the rain falling beyond them, right before he’d told her they didn’t have that kind of relationship?
Kendry watched him a moment more. Somehow, when a big man held a little baby, it made him look all the bigger and more masculine. Jamie smiled while Sammy babbled at him as if he were speaking in complete baby sentences, explaining something fully, and Kendry could see the traces of laugh lines at the corner of her new husband’s eyes.
