by Anna Adams
“So was I.” Sophie tugged at his sleeve, sliding her hand into his. “But I’m even more impressed you’re making friends with my father.”
His eyes widened with interest. She felt closer to him than she had since their wedding.
“Don’t get too excited,” Ian said with a strange intensity. “He’d agree to anything to keep an eye on me.”
She leaned into him but watched her mother’s shimmery progress down the long hall. “I just want you and Dad to be comfortable with each other, but, Ian, are you bored up here? Is that why you took Adam’s assignment?”
“No.” He pointed toward her mom, who’d stopped at the edge of the living room. “No one’s welcoming her. Maybe we should.” He slid his arm around Sophie’s waist and headed them both toward the doorway.
She kept up on legs that wobbled. Who knew what her mom would say—in front of the whole family? Ian’s arm around her made her feel better prepared to face whatever came next. The knowledge troubled her. She looked up at his determined profile and let herself relax. Sometimes having a protective husband was a fine thing.
“Mrs. Calvert.” Ian shook her mom’s outstretched French-tipped hand, and Sophie realized she’d never explained her mother’s marital history.
“Franklin,” Nita said. Brad Franklin had been her second husband. “You must be Ian.”
“Nice to meet you.”
According to long-established tradition, Sophie waited for her mother to make the first move. Nita had perfected an embrace that brought her close but kept her perfectly coiffured blond shoulder-length curls out of danger.
Sophie accepted the affection her mother could afford. “Hi, Mom. I’m glad you came.”
Nita studied the less than exuberantly welcoming Calverts scattered around the room, peering in from the kitchen or over the banister from upstairs. “You’re the only one who shows any sign of being happy.”
“Did they expect you?”
“Probably not. I was invited, but I imagine they thought I’d just send a gift.” She pulled Sophie close again. “Which I brought. It’s in the car.”
“You’re not staying in Knoxville this time?” Sophie asked as talk stuttered to a start around them.
“No. At a bed-and-breakfast down the street from Eliza and Patrick’s. Do you think anyone here could offer me a drink?”
“What would you like?” Ian asked.
“Whiskey, straight up.”
“Mom.” Sophie understood her mother’s thirst in the face of her former in-laws’ disapproval. “Don’t make it worse.”
“All right. Wave the soda bottle in the general direction of my glass.” She reached for the nearest sofa, as if her grasping hand led her feet toward it. Sophie followed but hovered at her side, a dutiful audience. “Where’s Ethan?” her mother asked.
“On his way. He had a job in Maryville.”
Nita arched a flirty smile. “I should have coordinated my plans with him. We could have met on the road and carpooled.”
And initiated a whole new ice age. “Good idea, Mom. How long are you staying?”
Nita’s smile collapsed. Disappointment filled her eyes. “Are you hinting I should leave already?”
“Not at all.” Sophie leaned into the chair’s arm and restrained an urge to press her fists into the pressure at her temples. “I’m making conversation.”
“I know it can be an effort.”
“Mom, I’m glad you came. Let’s drop the subject there.”
“Sorry, but everyone in this house would be happy to hold me down and pin a scarlet letter to my breast.”
Sophie froze. As the person who’d accidentally exposed her mother’s affair, she couldn’t joke about that subject.
“I’m sorry, honey. Did I bring back a bad memory for you?” Nita chuckled, sounding nervous. “It’s okay. I’m over it.”
“That’s a relief.” Sophie spoke more sharply than she’d meant to. She sprang to her feet. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
Sophie snatched her own plate off the coffee table and her mother followed her back through the buffet line. Food was a much safer subject.
Greta was the first to approach them. “Nita, I’m happy you joined us this evening.”
Seth appeared at her side, providing a husband’s rescue just when it was most necessary. “Nita.” He took her hand in his but then quickly let it go. “Did you drive straight from Knoxville?”
“Yes, and I’m staying in town. Good to see you, Seth. Greta.” Patrick, her former brother-in-law, and his wife, Eliza, joined them. “How are you?”
Molly inserted herself between the growing cluster and Nita. “Aunt Nita,” she said. “Nice suit.”
“I always dress in armor when I come up here.”
Laughter rustled, ending with Ian who was the only one who sounded as if he meant it. “I’ll carry your drink, Mrs. Franklin,” he said.
“Thanks, but I suspect you should have made it an IV.”
Ian measured her with a look and then glanced, concerned, at Sophie, who shook her head. Drinking was not one of her mother’s problems.
“Maybe we should sit so you can eat, Mom.”
“I’d like to be out of the way. I forgot how everyone stares at me here.”
Sophie had always assumed her mother enjoyed the attention. Hence her sweeping, prodigal-returns attitude.
“Soph—” Ian set the whiskey on the table in front of her mother “—I see Ethan. I’m going to talk to him about the sideboard.”
He departed on a wave of now-familiar Ian scent that made Sophie follow him with her head and at least half her heart.
“More like he’s gone to warn your father.”
“If Dad’s not expecting you, Mom…”
“You’ve always taken his side.”
What did she expect? He hadn’t cheated. “I’m on your side, too. Tell me about your trip. How’d you get time off work with such short notice?”
“I’ve trained an excellent staff.” Nita dressed windows for Becks, a major D.C.-area department store. “They’ll be fine without me for a couple of weeks.”
Sophie tried hard not to suck in air as if her mother had socked her in the gut. “A couple of weeks?” To talk about babies and marriage and the good old days? “You’ve saved up your vacation.”
“You’re dismayed that I’ll be here so long.” Nita set her plate on the table beside Sophie’s. “But I have even more time left for after the baby comes.”
“You’re overly sensitive because we’re in Gran and Grandpa’s house.”
Her mother tapped the side of her nose. “Maybe. I do hate being in this house again.” She turned with a smile full of brilliant white teeth and moist red lips. “But you’re worth any punishment.” She leaned in. “And I’m pleased with Ian.”
Sophie braced herself.
“He’s a looker, Sophie, and so expressive—in his body.”
“Mom.” Her worst nightmares, full-blown in reality. Her mother had always felt free to discuss her own boyfriends’ attributes. All of them.
“I know.” Nita smirked as if Sophie’s “prudishness” continued to amuse her. “You don’t like to discuss intimate matters. But I am your mother.”
Moments like this tempted Sophie to push her mom headfirst through the nearest door and insist she never return. “You know how we’ve talked about maintaining a relationship?”
Nita sat back. “I remember discussions that continue to astound me. How you can talk to your own mom like that…”
“You are my mother, not my girlfriend.”
Ian’s firm hand on Sophie’s shoulder provided a warning. She looked up and saw that her voice had risen high enough to attract spectators. Meeting her husband’s concerned gaze, she barely restrained herself from yanking him over the sofa to join her.
He turned his head slightly, redirecting her attention, and she took in her father’s anxious expression.
“Hi, Dad,” she said. “Look
who’s here.” Nice, hysterical note. She coughed. “Mom.”
“Nita.” He used the Calvert tone of challenge he reserved for his ex-wife.
“I came for Sophie and Ian’s reception.”
“So I see.” He strolled around the couch, taking Sophie’s free hand even as he focused on Nita. “Don’t even think Ian’s business trip means you’re staying with Sophie.”
Sophie groaned silently. Only her mother could trick her dad into making a mistake like that. Nita flashed a quick look of interest, and Ian stiffened.
But she shot Ethan a false smile. “I’d never force myself on our daughter.” Her next pointed glance suggested a mother should expect a welcome in her daughter’s home.
“We don’t really have room, Mom.” Sophie imagined her mother’s overblown reaction to Ian’s separate bed. “We’re getting a nursery ready.”
“You can breathe again, Ethan.” Nita picked up her drink and inhaled a slug. “Even I don’t go where I’m not welcome.”
“The room is a mess,” Ian said. “Our house is small, and we both had extra furniture. It’s all stacked in there.”
Nita gazed at her husband, annoyed. “See? That’s all anyone had to say—if you wanted to warn me without being rude.”
“I can see you didn’t know about Ian’s leaving, so I should have kept my mouth shut.” He apologized to Sophie and Ian with a regretful smile before he took on Nita again. “Since you’ve taken a room in town, I don’t know why we’re even talking about it.”
Sophie recognized impending disaster, but music from the kitchen saved them all. She slid around on the sofa. “What’s going on?”
The strains of “When I Fall in Love” filled the rooms. Eliza and Patrick followed the song to the kitchen door, arm in arm. Beth stood with Zach and Olivia on the other side of the threshold. A cousin from Greta’s side excused her way through the bodies, taking her daughter toward the bathroom. In the space she left, Sophie saw her grandparents dancing, too close for light to sneak between them.
Their tension completely dissipated, they leaned into each other, moving as one. Greta’s expression, soft with love, squeezed Sophie’s heart. Seth, his arms tight around Greta, was a tender reminder of how a man loved, protected and longed for his wife.
Sophie stood, breaking free of her parents. She moved toward the kitchen, filling the gap between her aunts and their families.
Marriage could work. Her grandparents had problems, but the man and woman floating around their kitchen clearly didn’t want to be anywhere else.
Someone came to stand at Sophie’s shoulder. When Ian slid his arms around her waist, she pulled him closer.
“Feel better?” he asked in her ear.
She shivered, her legs going weak. She might have fallen if he weren’t behind her. Somehow she stayed where she was, resting against his hard, lean body, instead of begging him to take her home to one of their two bedrooms.
She cleared her throat. “My mom’s arrival causes a side effect. She makes any married person in my family appreciate a normal spouse.”
“She’s her own person.”
But Nita had never been happy, never satisfied like Sophie’s gran and grandfather were with each other. Not with Ethan or with Brad. Sophie wondered which blood ran more strongly in her veins—the Calvert brand that featured love of family, or her mother’s, where a hunger for something new always called.
She hoped to be like her grandparents. The rest of the family had disappeared for them. Fifty years fell away. They’d loved like this from the moment they’d met, through raising their own family, establishing themselves in their hometown and finally, coming to retirement with mixed emotions. One feeling ran steady. Their love made the whole family possible.
“Ian.” Sophie backed him away from the others, twisting so that he had to lower his head. “That’s what I want,” she said. “I want to be like that for our grandchildren one day.”
He seemed taken aback, but Sophie didn’t mind. Her grandparents’ kind of commitment took consideration. She wouldn’t want him to jump in and claim they were on their way.
Just then, he took her hand and led her to the two French doors that opened onto Gran and Grandpa’s deck. The moment they were outside, she felt as if they were also dancing. In the night, he took her in his arms, and she knew he felt what she did. They couldn’t wait another second to hold each other.
“I want it, too.” His voice thick and thready, swathed her as tightly as his arms. “Maybe tonight we really start over. I won’t push you, but I want a real marriage.” He pushed one hand between them, stroking her stomach with a possessive touch that lit needful fires within her body. “I want to feel our baby in your belly. I want to know you’re my wife.”
Sinking against him, she forgot everyone inside. His arousal was hard to ignore. She wanted him, too. Desire made the complications they’d faced since their wedding seem simpler.
Ian pressed his lips to her cheek, moving them as if speaking words she couldn’t understand. She stretched, loving the heat of him, the breath he took against her, the longing only he made her feel.
She was content. She could bear to think of asking him to return to her bed. She’d begun to trust him again.
AT HOME THAT NIGHT, Ian tried to persuade his wife to let him carry in the gifts from their reception. As usual, Sophie accepted no quarter because of her pregnancy, and he couldn’t find words diplomatic enough to tell her to take it easy because she looked tired. After all, women who looked tired rarely wanted to hear about it.
As he eased a box of her grandmother’s china out of the car and she scooped out the quilt Eliza and Beth and Olivia and Molly had made, Nita drove up. Ian straightened first.
“You don’t think she’s inviting herself to stay?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her.” Sophie hugged the quilt. “But she never did get her gift out of her car. Maybe she’s dropping it off.”
He doubted it. Nita wasn’t as bad as her reputation, but there was a definite method to her madness. She knew how to get her own way.
“Keep her out here,” he said.
“What?” Sophie looked alarmed. With an armload of quilt, she managed to grab his sleeve.
“I’m going to strip my bed and shove some extra boxes in the room.”
“I didn’t think.” Sophie sounded desperate. “I know I don’t deserve your help, but please don’t let her know about the separate—”
“That’s what I’m going to fix. Stall her.”
“Thank you.”
He leaned down and caught her mouth in a swift kiss, lingering, drawn by the sheer pleasure he found in her soft lips. His heart raced, his breath went short, and he damn near dropped the china to take his wife in hungry arms. Nita’s unsteady footsteps reminded him she’d arrived, and for once, Sophie wanted him to protect her.
He ran without caring if his escape gave them away.
CHAPTER NINE
SOPHIE HURRIED to her mother. Bewildered, Nita stumbled a little as she returned her attention to her car.
“Will you help me, honey? Although I really think the box is too heavy for either one of us.” Reaching in, she pulled her keys from the ignition.
Nita headed toward the trunk, her narrow skirt and high-heeled pointy shoes hampering her stride through the gravel. She fluffed her hair. “I know I said I wouldn’t horn in on you and Ian, but I got to thinking.”
Not that big a surprise. Her mother waited for the explosion, but Sophie nodded and then realized Nita could hardly see her in the moonlight. She was so intent on keeping her mom out of the house she couldn’t afford to be upset over the change in her plans. “What about your reservation?”
“Ah, you know me better than I know myself. You already guessed I’d feel I should come up here, but you shouldn’t be alone with Ian gone. You need me.”
She’d needed Nita when she was fourteen, when her company hadn’t compared with an attractive man’s. At twenty-nine, staying a
lone in her own home no longer scared her. “I’m fine, Mom.” She glanced at the house. Ian’s window was on the other side. She couldn’t even see shadows through her bedroom window on the second floor. “Maybe we’d like to be alone our last night before he leaves.”
“He’ll only be gone a few days.” As if that settled the matter, Nita poked at the trunk with her key. Still enduring her mother’s jabs after all these years, Sophie felt a little sorry for the car. Finally, with a metallic slide, the key went in, and the trunk popped open. Her mom wrestled with a large, long box.
“See? I knew it was too big.”
“Leave it, Mom.”
“No. I’ll bring it in. Ian can come back for my things.”
Sophie didn’t know what to say. Years of trying to maintain a relationship with her mother weighed in one hand. Pity, because the rest of the Calverts couldn’t come to terms with Nita, made her turn toward the cabin.
She opened the door and planted herself in front of the stairs to keep her mom from going up. “Want some coffee?”
“Do you have a beer?”
“Probably.” Her dad’s favorite brand had turned up in the fridge in much the same way he seemed to turn up at odd hours.
“I could use a beer after all that hilarity.”
Sophie eyed her sharply.
“I know, I know.” Nita set down the box. “You love them. They’re fun for you, but I can’t enjoy myself when I feel all that hatred directed at me.”
“No one hates you. They love Dad and me, and they just don’t like the choices you made when you left.”
“It was all so long ago. I say get over it.” Nita tapped the top of her unwrapped box. “What do you think?”
Sophie finally looked. “A child’s car seat. That’s great, Mom. We don’t have one yet.”
“Well, what did you think? I’d wait till the kid’s born to give you something?” Nita did a rendition of “Wipeout” on the box. “I’m determined to do the right thing by your child.”