The Wedding Plan

by Melissa Shirley

  * * *

  200 Days Earlier

  Mornings were the worst. And moving day didn’t add a single calming effect to her stomach. It rumbled. It churned. It made her want to know what about her body this baby found so repulsive that it would try to escape through her throat.

  Jacob brushed past, came back and pressed a kiss on her cheek as he carried another box through the house. Just that touch—that one little peck—God, that man made her want him. Or maybe it was the hormones, but she didn’t care. He was hers. She was his. Nothing else mattered.

  Well, that was the last of it. The last box, bag and clothes hanger had been shoved into the moving van. A new adventure, he’d promised her. A betrothal…did that mean a real-life proposal? Some dashing surprise that would only seem silly if someone else did it?

  He strolled back inside. “Before we go…” He handed her a rolled up paper secured on its ends by brass buttons attached to the tubes the paper hugged.

  “What’s this?”

  “My promises to you.” As she moved to open it, he laid his hand over hers. “Nat, for as long as I live, I promise to be true to you, to us. I promise to take care of you, to never make you change a tire or clean another gutter or carry a bag of trash out of the house. I promise to share the housework with you, to let you pick the movies we watch because, it turns out, I’m bad at that. I want to share all our minutes, the good and the bad, fill them all with love and passion.” He smiled with his mouth, his eyes, even his hands on her hips had a happy feel to them. “I promise to wake up with you for the middle of the night feedings, the bad dreams, the good ones. And I promise to never make you question that you are the most important person in my life. You are my family, now and forever.”

  She weighed his words. Forever. That was a big one considering they hadn’t discussed much beyond their year contract. She hadn’t hidden the fact she wanted to get the hell out of Rangers End. Did she still? At this moment, no. Not with him standing there promising her everything she never knew she wanted. What about tomorrow? Or the next day or the one after that? Would this all last? Probably not, not if history had a ring of truth to it, but for now, this was enough.

  What she wouldn’t do for his talent with words…“I don’t have a cool piece of paper to give you. I only have me. All that I was, and all that I am.” God, she needed that to be enough. She closed her eyes and wished for it to be enough.

  Instead of answering, he lowered his head, slanted his mouth over hers. Every kiss felt new and special, but this one was more, made her heart ache with its meaning and its tenderness. She needed him, loved him more than she had a right, more than she would ever be able be able to outrun.

  * * *

  JACOB: It wasn’t what she said that made me love her all the more. It was that she said it. We didn’t have all the time other couples get to know each other before the wedding. And we didn’t have all the time in the world either to fall in love before…until the contract ended, either. Every minute was a gift, everything I learned about her was a treasure, but I don’t think I quite understood how important they all were. I wanted to do something that showed her.

  * * *

  She sat down on the sofa and kicked off her shoes. What a day. Boxes of book stood tall in one corner and the TV faced the window rather than the room, but she could sit in this house, their house, on the furniture they’d picked out together, until her dying day and be happy to do it. Jacob, along with Jesse and John had spent the entire day hauling all their stuff out of the truck and into the various rooms of the house, not all of which Nat had seen yet. She’d been as far as the master bedroom upstairs, seen the kitchen and living room downstairs. No one thought she should hold or carry or even unpack a single box. She’d been little more help than one of those traffic cops with the white gloves that Rangers End had only hired to enhance the “small town’ feel while the show was filming.

  Ryhan plopped down beside her and threw her head back. “Don’t get me wrong. Jesse is the kind of husband I never thought I’d have—you know, amazing and sweet and probably the most patient man I’ve ever met. I mean he has to be with me for a wife, but Jacob turning this place into this…we need to share some secrets or something.”

  What had she done to deserve all of this? Signed her name on the dotted line? Gotten knocked up? Threw up on his shoes two days in a row? “I have no clue how I got so lucky.” Thinking about it now, she couldn’t come up with one thing that she’d done or about herself that earned her such a prize, but it didn’t stop her from saying a short prayer of thanks.

  “And that nursery…he had to have had help with that.”

  “Nursery?” Like she said, the master bedroom was the only room she’d checked out upstairs. Although, she’d spent a lot of time in there over the last two days.

  “You haven’t seen it?” Ryhan smacked her head with her hand and blew out a long loud breath. “Good God, I ruined another surprise. People should never tell me anything. I can’t keep a secret to save my life. Thankfully, no one tells me anything earthshattering well unless you count…”

  Nat stood, tuning out the Ryhan-babble that, on any other day, she loved. “I’ll be right back.” She took the stairs two at a time and checked door after door, finding nothing but boxes and more boxes until she came to the one across the hall from the master.

  The first thing she saw was a bassinette, round with its own gauzy canopy. Then a crib, white with an eyelet blanket of the same snowy color as the rocker in the corner. The walls were a minty green at the top and a deeper gray at the bottom. He’d stenciled the words, “To the moon and back” in gray on the wall over the bed. A mobile with a crescent moon in the middle and stars circling the umbrella top hung over the crib. And when she looked up, the ceiling glowed with tiny lights disbursed in some random pattern that reminded her of a night sky.

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “You did all of this?” Oh God. Screw the money. She was staying right here with him.

  “Lucia helped.” He shrugged, and his cheeks turned that adorable shade of pink she loved.

  “It’s perfect, just…” Oh great, more tears. She’d cried a river’s worth over the last few days at the thought of leaving their house, the place where she’d fallen so far in love with him.

  He pulled her close, letting his warmth, his care, his general Jacob-ness comfort her. “It’s just a room, babe.”

  Yeah. And he was just a man. “It’s where our baby is going to sleep, where I’ll read her bedtime stories or where I’ll sneak in at night to watch him sleep. And you made it so…” Was there another word for perfect? Her stomach growled and she chuckled. “This kid is always starving.” So far, she’d eaten half a pizza, a bag of baby carrots, a candy bar, two Pop-tarts, and had a chocolate shake Lanie made for her—presumably to keep her out of the way while the guys moved the furniture in.

  He guided her out of the room with a hand at her waist. “I was thinking. We should probably come up with a name for him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Or her.”

  “You mean we don’t have to have a town meeting so the people can vote?” Although it might have sounded like poking fun, she was only half-joking. These people loved giving input on everything.

  “Grandma would like that.” He grinned. “Want me to suggest it?”

  She wrinkled her nose because he liked when she did, called it cute even though she’d seen herself in a mirror and it was anything but. “Maybe we could try it on our own first?”

  * * *

  NAT: There was only one name that made sense. As soon as we saw that sonogram and knew what we were having, we looked at each other and it just popped out.

  If he died tomorrow, he would die a happy man, knowing for a moment in time his life was everything he’d ever wanted it to be. And he had Natasha to thank for it. Even in her sleep, with her mouth hanging half open, she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. And she didn’t even realize it. />
  They’d stayed up late last night with her reading him facts about their baby from some book she’d picked up at the library. “At seventeen weeks our baby weighs five ounces and is five inches long.”

  He’d known that. Not because he remembered it from medical school, but because he’d downloaded an app on his phone that alerted him to weekly updates.

  “And the baby’s skeleton is turning from cartilage to bone as we lay here.”

  Knew that, too.

  She closed the book, set it on the table, and turned to lie half on his chest with her chin propped on her hands. “It says not to be discouraged about my changing body figure. That my partner”—she pointed at him and raised her eyebrows until he nodded—“might like exploring my new shape.” Throwing her leg over his, she straddled his hips. “Would you, partner, like to explore my new shape?”

  After that, he’d spent hours appreciating every inch of her, and now, he couldn’t sleep. This being a father business was scary. Granted, he met mostly concerned moms at the office, but there’d been dads, too. He’d seen grown men—some the big and burly type that he wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley—lose it over something as small as a broken bone, or an ear infection.

  And what about teaching the kid about life? He’d never had a father, so no example to follow there. Lucia had tried. She’d played ball with him on her front lawn. She’d taught him to drive a car and how women liked to be treated, but he couldn’t change his own oil, fix a leaky pipe, switch out a furnace filter. Hell, he didn’t know the business end of chainsaw from a kitchen knife. And, now, lying in the dark with the woman carrying his baby, those all seemed like pretty important life skills.

  He slipped from the bed. By God, now was as good a time as any to learn, too. No way was he letting her down or breaking a promise to her. He would be a good father. Starting right now.

  He slipped on his pants, pulled a T-shirt over his head, and tiptoed out of the room. Straight to the garage. He would change his own damned oil or die trying. He considered the car. A couple tons of metal, some rubber, a few pieces of glass. Hell, yeah. He could do this.

  * * *

  NAT: I had never seen such a mess before in my life and the garage didn’t fare much better. But I knew why he was doing it, and if there was a minute where I knew that this guy was going to make a great father, it was there in the garage when he was covered in motor oil and looking so sad. I knew right then there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the baby.

  * * *

  An hour later, covered in engine oil from the ends of his hair to the waistband of his pants, he’d lost his phone, smashed his hand, and there’s wasn’t a drop of new oil in the whole garage to replace what had drained from his motor. In his defense, the video he’d watched had said nothing until after he’d let the old out about having a spare five quarts of oil sitting around. Of course, if might have been his own fault he hadn’t considered the definition of “changing” when he’d loosened the oil-pan plug—a new word for his vocabulary—and black, greasy liquid had sloshed down onto his face and chest. But someone in the damned video should have mentioned he would need to have something to catch the used oil and the speed of the road runner to get the hell out of the way. Hadn’t said to keep his mouth shut either. Nor had the video mentioned that slipping and falling would be a consequence to his other faux pas. Okay, maybe that one should have been common sense.

  He blew out a breath, sat on the steps and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. No telling the damage he’d done to the car. Shit. What kind of man couldn’t even manage to change his own oil without turning the garage into a disaster area and destroying the engine with no idea how to put it all back together? Not one who deserved Nat or a baby.

  “Hey.” He turned and would have gladly died of embarrassment if she didn’t look so frightened. “Four thirty in the morning is a very odd time for car maintenance.”

  “You should be sleeping, Nat.” He reached out to take her hand, give it a tug. Was he not such a grease monkey, he would love to hold her, let her touch soothe the uncertainty weighing in his chest.

  She moved to sit beside him. “So should you.” She scooted closer and put her head on his shoulder. “I woke up and you were gone. What’s wrong?”

  Did it make him even less of a man to tell her? “Nothing.”

  “Liar.”

  He swallowed hard. The look in her eyes touched him in a place where nothing mattered more than she did, nothing in the world could shake him. She would talk it out, he would be better and life would go on. Yeah. It was a lot of pressure to put on someone at four in the morning, but what choice did he have? And she was up anyway. “I’m scared, Nat. Okay? I don’t know how to be a father. I don’t know guy things. Who’s going to teach our kid all this important stuff?”

  She nodded, and her hair, softer than silk, brushed against his throat. “Like changing oil?”

  Sitting beside her, looking at the destruction of his car and most of his garage, all his fears crushed any confidence he might have built since meeting her. “I can’t fix things, Nat. I hire people to fix things and plant things, cut things down, build shit.”

  “Oh, you dirty-haired goofball.” She lifted her head and guided his chin with her index finger until his gaze pointed at hers. “When our son wants to know how to be a man, there’s only one person I want teaching him, and that’s you.”

  “Teaching him what? How to write a check to the real guy who takes care of you?” God, he could barely face her. Talking about this, most especially with her, made him less than he wanted to be.

  She nodded. “Changing oil isn’t taking care of me. Or the guys at the Jiffy Lube are grossly underpaid.” God love her, she was trying. Not that it helped. “Yes, Jacob. I want you to teach him how to write checks or swipe the card or whip out his wallet. But more than that, I want you to teach him how to be kind, because you are. How to be romantic, how to kiss away the ouchies and scare off the monsters.” She tilted her head and ran her thumb over his lips. “How to make some ordinary girl feel like she’s a princess. I don’t care if you can fix cars or whether or not you build crooked tree houses.” Damn. He’d hoped she hadn’t seen that yet. “I love you because you’re you, and you’re wonderful.”

  What? Did she just say…? “You love me?”

  She smiled and rolled her eyes as her cheeks flushed and she moved to sit on his lap and put a finger against his lips as he opened his mouth, hoping to save her clothes from oil transferring from him to her. “Yep. You wore me down. I love you, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. So I guess you’re stuck with me.”

  He’d hoped, wanted to hear her say those words so badly the need for it burned inside of him. Covered in grease, with no clue how to repair his car now that he had it apart, he’d never been so happy, so alive and in love. He pulled her close, kissed her hair. “I love you, Nat, in ways I thought only existed in stories, but now I know are real and true and make me weak and strong all at the same time. You make me want to be better than the man I thought I was.”

  She narrowed her eyes and waved her arm toward the car. “Is that your way of trying to blame this mess on me?”

  He hugged her tighter, buried his face in her hair. “I love you. Don’t ever doubt that, okay?”

  She nodded then let him kiss her again before she stood and held out her hand. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  “You don’t like the rugged and manly look?”

  “You have raccoon eyes.”

  He laughed and reached for her again, brought her against him, smearing her clothes to match his. “All the better to see you with.”

  When he leaned in for another kiss, she put a hand on his chest. “Okay, you don’t have to fix cars or do yard work, but you must—and I’m not negotiating on this—learn your fairy tales. It was a wolf, not a raccoon.”

  He stopped her on the bottom step. “This is our fairy tale and we can write it any way we want.”
<
br />   * * *

  JACOB: I never did learn how to change the oil. I had a couple choices though. I could pay the eighty dollars for a tow to Grover’s and then another sixty for the oil change or I could let my wife show me how. Yep. I should have known she can change oil. I was shocked, too, but it was like even though we were walking this kind of tightrope together, we balanced each other. She didn’t have the foggiest idea that a baby didn’t need a trip to the ER for every fever and sniffle. And I had no clue how to perform simple car maintenance. A while back when I told her I would clean the gutters and she ended up doing it, it was because I couldn’t figure out how to make the ladder stay open. We taught each other things, made each other better. Every day. I could never have asked for more.

  14

  God, he wanted to hold Nat again, feel her hair whisper against his skin, look into her eyes while he talked to her. His arms ached for it. His body longed for her in equal measure as his soul. And dammit, he was losing her. Every tick of the clock wound him closer to the minute she planned to walk out his life. Well as out of his life as she could.

  But what could he do? He’d tried so hard to make it work with her, to make her see how important she was to him, how the baby… Yeah. He’d tried.

  He watched her moving around the room, talking to all their friends, smiling. Dammit. How could she look so happy? They hadn’t resolved anything, their future was as uncertain as…things that weren’t certain. Jesus. He couldn’t even think. Not about more than the way she woke up in stages in the morning—first a flutter of her eyelids, then a slow, dreamy smile, the finally, she opened her eyes and looked at him. He couldn’t get past the way she hip-hopped her way through cooking dinner. And damned sure he couldn’t live without the way she cried out his name when he brought her to that edge of hanging on until he could topple over with her. Nope. He wasn’t waiting for her to decide anymore. She was staying and that was all there was to it.