The Marriage Bargain

by Stephanie Dees

  Joe frowned. “Maybe you’re not giving Jules enough of a chance. Does she know all this stuff?”

  Cam shifted in his seat. “She knows.”

  The big cop pinned Cam with an ice-blue stare. “And?”

  “And I’m starting to see why you’re good at interrogations.”

  Joe waited.

  Cam lifted his hands and let them drop back to his lap. “And she says she doesn’t care. But I don’t think—”

  “Do you love her?” His brother-in-law interrupted him.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you love her? It’s a simple question.”

  Cam sighed and ground his teeth. “Yes. I love her, but sometimes love isn’t enough.”

  That elicited a low chuckle from his brother-in-law. “My friend, I’ve been down this road that you’re traveling. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.”

  Cam raised an eyebrow. “Well, the road you were on must’ve led you in a big loop because you ended up back with Claire.”

  Joe let out a bark of laughter before he sat back and looked at Cam thoughtfully. “When I told Jules what happened in the park today, she went flying out of the restaurant like her hair was on fire. Out of her own party, at the restaurant she brought to life. She doesn’t care if you’re perfect. She loves you.”

  He’d tried so hard to be the person he thought Jules would want him to be that he’d lost who he wanted to be. The words he’d said to Jules, the words that had haunted him for so many years, came back to him. I’m the kid even a mother couldn’t love.

  Cam had turned his back on Jules as surely as his mother had done to him so many years ago. He’d longed for her to stand up for him and she’d refused. And maybe his motives were better, but he’d turned his back just the same.

  He’d spent his whole life running from the feeling that he wasn’t worth fighting for. He wasn’t going to do that to Jules and Emma and Eleanor. The love they shared—all of them shared—was worth going to the wall for. Maybe it wouldn’t be easy and maybe he couldn’t protect them from pain, but he could protect them from this pain.

  Because he loved them and they were worth the fight.

  He turned back to Joe. “I think maybe I’ll be making a loop.”

  Joe looked up from his phone and smiled. “Glad to hear it. Why don’t you follow me back to the farmhouse for the night? The girls are there. Jules will need you in the morning. Apparently someone told the guardian ad litem that you two got married only for the girls’ money, and she wants some answers.”

  Jules was really angry at him. Angry enough that she hadn’t messaged him about the meeting with the GAL in the morning. “That sounds like a meeting I should attend.”

  Cam wasn’t going to let her down. She’d laid her heart out for him, risking everything, and he’d turned away. He wasn’t going to do that again.

  They needed him. And he needed them.

  He just hoped he wasn’t too late.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jules threw the ball for Pippi, laughing as the puppy galloped across the lawn, slipping in the dew-covered grass. Fog rose in wispy curls over the surface of the pond. The sun was in a half state of wakefulness, just below the trees, sending its pink-and-gold light above the horizon. It was a baker’s favorite hour, before the rest of the world was awake.

  She wasn’t worried about the guardian ad litem. She’d had a long talk with God and had been reminded that she’d prepared for this in every way she could. He would have the rest.

  Claire had the girls for another few hours. The paperwork that proved Jules had put the life insurance money in a trust for the girls the very day it arrived was printed and in a neat file on the kitchen table. She had the copy of Glory and Sam’s will, naming her as Emma and Eleanor’s guardian. And she had the broken heart to prove that she’d actually fallen in love with Cam. Maybe it started out as an arrangement, but it hadn’t ended that way.

  Last night, she hadn’t slept. Instead, she’d lain in bed in the house she’d shared with Cam, replaying every minute of their conversation, as if she could somehow make the outcome different if she thought about it long enough and hard enough.

  Pippi tilted her head, listening, then tore out of the yard toward the front of the house. Jules whistled and called her back, but the puppy had disappeared. She picked up her coffee mug and started after the dog, just in time to see Cam walk around the corner of the house, the pup dancing at his feet.

  She caught her breath.

  He looked so good—a little tired, but so handsome in his jeans and a lightweight sweater. His green eyes were brilliant in the soft light. He sent her a hesitant smile and she took a step forward.

  But then she stopped. His leaving had left her raw and wary, and she wasn’t ready to pretend nothing had happened. “Did the guardian ad litem call you?”

  “Joe.”

  Her brother was meddling. “So you came back to meet with the GAL?”

  “That, too. But I’m not here for the law guardian. I’m here for you.”

  Hope flared, a small flame, struggling to survive in the dark grief she’d felt when he left. She was trembling so hard she could barely get the words out. “You said goodbye.”

  “I did. I didn’t get very far before I realized I was making a terrible mistake. I should never have left you, Jules. But I was so scared.”

  She looked up then, her eyes narrowing on his, searching them to find the truth. He was scared? Past tense?

  “For most of my life, I’ve thought of myself as damaged—the kid even a mother couldn’t love. I’d gotten good at hiding it, but I felt like the longer I was around people, the more likely they’d be to see the real me.”

  She’d suspected it, but hadn’t known he realized it until now. Her heart broke a little more at the thought of what a lonely life that must’ve been. “That’s why you only stay a few months in a place before you move on?”

  He nodded. “I never thought I’d have someone who loved me unconditionally, a family, friends like your brothers.”

  “So we made a deal.” Her words were an echo of the ones they’d spoken that night in the barn, but that night, the conversation had ended there.

  “At first it was enough—it did seem like a dream, but the longer we were together, the more I knew it wasn’t. It was real and it was so much better than I ever imagined it could be. And the better it got, the more scared I got. I was sure that it was all going to crumble around me.”

  She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to reach out to him and tell him she’d never leave him, but she couldn’t. Not yet.

  Pippi flushed a bird from its roost in the bushes beside them. It took flight with a squawk and a rush of wings. Jules laughed, too loud, as she jumped.

  Cam brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers, an achingly tender touch, and she turned her face into the caress. She wanted to believe that he was home, that he’d come back to her. He wasn’t the only one who was afraid of being hurt.

  “I’m so sorry for last night. So sorry I left you.” His words were soft, sincere.

  “It was the incident in the park?” She reached up, tentatively, and touched his hand on her face with just her fingertips.

  He nodded again and looked away, dropping his hand. “For months now, I’ve been living in fear that somehow I’d be found out, exposed for a fake. And yesterday, in the park, I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but...there was a woman watching me the whole time we were at the playground. And when the cops came, there was a crowd of people around, filming and gawking.”

  “And it felt like they were all seeing you and all that you’d been trying to hide. And the girls were there, too, so that made it worse.”

  “How do you...” He pressed his fingertips to his forehead, the emotion he’d felt yesterday still there in the flutter of a blink, the tightness of h
is shoulders. “I should stop being surprised that you know me. I love you, Jules. I don’t know how, but I think my heart recognized you the first time I saw you.”

  He stopped, laughed in surprise, and said it again. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” A tear slid down her face and she impatiently swiped it away. “I don’t need you to be anyone but who you are. You gave me the courage to go after my dream, too, but it’s not a dream for me, unless you’re here.”

  “You’re not settling.” It wasn’t a question.

  Her eyes were steady on his. “Juliet Sheehan Quinn does not settle.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and she leaned forward, kissing him just there. “I love you, Cam. I love every part of you—the author, the adventurer, the husband, the friend. We make each other’s dreams come true.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “But if you ever decide to leave me again, you better pack four bags, because the girls and I are going with you.”

  He pulled her into his arms as the sun broke over the trees. Cupping her face with gentle, reverent hands, he kissed her—forehead, nose, eyelids, lips—whispering “I love you” with every touch.

  And he was perfect. For her.

  Epilogue

  Two years later

  Cam guided Jules through the kitchen with his hands over her eyes. “Uh, you probably want to wait until after your surprise to look at the kitchen.”

  Of course she took that as a challenge and immediately tried to remove his hands.

  “Seriously, Jules. It’s not pretty.”

  “As long as something pretty came out of the oven when you all were through.”

  He thought about that for a minute. Kids, flour, cocoa, frosting. The whole thing was kind of a blur. “Yeah, no. Can’t guarantee that, either.”

  She tripped over a dog bone and he steadied her on her feet. “Careful, now. We’ll be in the hospital soon enough. No rushing the timetable.”

  “Hey, you’re the one driving this—ahem—bus. Besides, you try being forty million years pregnant and then we’ll talk.” Jules laughed, and he loved the sound of it. He never took for granted that she was his. That this wonderful, awful, messy, beautiful life was his.

  These days, he wasn’t doing much adventure traveling. His travel books had shifted their focus and now he wrote about kid-friendly family destinations, and his adventure stories were for middle-grade readers.

  From time to time, he still had the sense that he was living someone else’s life, but he had an easy solution for that problem. All he had to do was try to take a nap and watch a little football. Before he knew it, there’d be a little boy using him as a trampoline or a little girl wanting him to check out her new princess shoes.

  It was his life, and he loved it. “Now, big step over the threshold onto the deck.”

  The fancy deck furniture that came with the house had long since been replaced—with a picnic table that fit their ever-growing family.

  Five-year-old Eleanor ran toward them, still wearing her soccer uniform from the morning’s games. “Mama! We made you a cake!”

  “Mama! Bir’day!” Emma was in her high chair at one end of the table.

  “You made a cake? Oh, my goodness, what a surprise!”

  Cam removed his hands from her eyes and she took in the whole tableau. The chocolate sheet cake with at least two boxes of candles on it, the frosting that had been tasted by many, many little fingers. He couldn’t think about that too much.

  But he knew Jules wouldn’t have to think about it at all. It would be perfect.

  The sound of sweet voices rose around Jules.

  “Surprise!”

  “Happy birthday!”

  Despite herself, her eyes filled with tears. She and Cam were slowly but surely filling up all the rooms in their big house with kids. Kids who, like Cam, needed people who wouldn’t turn their backs on them. She hadn’t birthed any of their kids. Yet. But they were hers, just the same. And she loved them all so much.

  “Happy birthday, Mom. Love you.” Devon was their oldest—the shyest and quietest of the whole bunch. He and his four-year-old brother, Derek, had moved in with them a month before Devon turned eighteen, just before he aged out of foster care. He was theirs now, a permanent part of their family.

  Maybe it seemed weird to some, to adopt a technical adult, but they didn’t think so. Devon was one less orphan going through life believing he was unloved and unwanted.

  And that had become Cam’s mission, a mission Jules fully embraced.

  Eleanor and Derek were now five, precocious and smart as little whips. Emma was three and so full of sass.

  Their family drew stares wherever they went, their skin in shades of black, white and brown. But funny enough, when they’d stopped looking for the approval of everyone else, they’d stopped caring what anyone else thought. They found their worth somewhere else, in Someone else.

  She sucked in a sharp breath as her belly tightened in a band of pain. “Hey, Cam.”

  Cam looked up. He must’ve seen something on her face because he was on his feet immediately. “Devon, buddy, I think you’re gonna have to be in charge until Grandma Bertie gets here.”

  His eyes widened. “No problem. Don’t worry, I got this.”

  Cam’s strong hand was under Jules’s elbow, helping her to rise. “I can bring my truck around for you.”

  Her laughed ended in a hiss. “As if I could get up into that thing.”

  Cam didn’t laugh. And as she leaned into him, she could feel the tension lacing him. She looked up. “We’re gonna be okay, babe,” he whispered, his arms strong and firm around her.

  The police lights flashed on as they turned from the driveway onto the highway. Cam squeezed her hand, but she knew he wasn’t worried. This time, the two patrol cars weren’t there for him, but for her. One cruiser sped around them, leading the way, and her brother Joe lifted a hand in silent salute.

  Six hours later, a baby girl entered the world, all six pounds of her. The doctor gave her to Jules and she wrapped her arms around her brand-new baby girl, kissing her head.

  She looked up at Cam, her eyes full of tears, but she didn’t care. “I love you. We did this.”

  He shook his head, the awe on his face humbling her. “She’s so beautiful. Do you think we should introduce her to the kids?”

  Jules nodded and the nurse opened the door. Eleanor was the first one in, followed by Derek, then Devon, who was holding Emma.

  Devon peered into the pile of blankets. “It’s...cute.”

  Cam threw his head back and laughed. “It’s a baby sister.” He paused and said, “And her name is Gloriana.”

  They’d picked it as soon as they’d known Jules was having a girl. The name meant “glorious grace” and Jules thought it was perfectly fitting. It was God’s grace that had brought Cam and Jules to love and God’s grace that had brought their family together.

  Jules looked up into Cam’s beautiful ocean-green eyes. She whispered, “I love you.”

  He kissed her gently, with so much tenderness it almost broke her heart. “I know.”

  * * *

  If you loved this story,

  pick up the other books

  in the Family Blessings series

  from author Stephanie Dees:

  The Dad Next Door

  A Baby for the Doctor

  Their Secret Baby Bond

  Available now from Love Inspired!

  Find more great reads at www.LoveInspired.com

  Keep reading for an excerpt from The Promised Amish Bride by Marta Perry.

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  Dear Reader,


  Thanks so much for joining me in Red Hill Springs in The Marriage Bargain! When Jules appeared in her siblings’ stories, I noticed that she always appeared to be perfect and calm, never a hair out of place. She just seemed to know where she was going and how to get there. In order for Jules to grow, I knew she was going to have to learn to deal with chaos, which came by way of two precious baby girls and their handsome uncle (who brought his own version of chaos to the party).

  Over the course of the story, though Jules and Cameron struggle with different things, they both learn that their identities don’t come from perfection or family or success or any of the other things we try to replace God with in our empty hearts.

  Just like Cam and Jules, you have a Father who says that you were wonderfully made, who knew you before you were even born. I pray that you can rest in the knowledge that His opinion is the only one that matters and He loves you far beyond anything you can imagine.

  I hope you’ve enjoyed your time with the Sheehan siblings in the Family Blessings series. For more information about upcoming books, please visit www.stephaniedees.com, or find me on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/authorstephaniedees.

  Warmly,

  Stephanie

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