She smiled. “With that large office and its own private entrance, it’s perfect for your law practice. I don’t believe anything else we’ve seen today compares.”
“I agree. I’m still pinching myself to believe a house like this is available right here in Jackson. In good weather Jessica could walk from the high school if she had to.”
“Pierce will be coming any minute to take us to dinner and a movie. He knows a lot about construction and can tell you if the house is in good shape.”
“His opinion will be worth everything. I wouldn’t put down earnest money otherwise.”
Nick had told her on the phone he would try to make it, but an emergency had cropped up at the last minute. He’d phoned Jessica to tell them he’d be late. The news had come as a blow. Samantha had to fight hard not to show her disappointment.
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about anything being faulty,” Leslie said. “It’s too new.”
Samantha didn’t think so, either. She wanted the house. The vaulted ceilings gave a feeling of space she craved. Her contemporary furniture would fit right in.
With three bedrooms and three baths, her parents and Marilyn would be able to stay in comfort when they came for visits. Every window looked out on a breathtaking view of the Tetons.
“Please can we get this house, Mom?” Jessica called out. “The loft is perfect for sleepovers!”
“Please buy it!” Cory echoed. “Lucy will love the stairs!”
Both Samantha and Leslie chuckled.
“When we have parties we’ll soak in the hot tub, and then make popcorn and bring it up here.” Jessica chatted away. “The bedroom has a window seat. It’s big enough to sit in while you read and look out at the trees.”
That was another plus. The property bordered the national forest.
“Dad!” Cory cried out all of a sudden.
“Hi, sport!
He’d seen his father coming through the door before the rest of them. Like a shot he rushed down the stairs to hug Pierce.
“You’ve got to see Jessica’s house!” He started pulling him toward the staircase. “We’re going to sleep upstairs and have parties. Jessica says I can bring Cameron and Logan.”
After the ranch-style houses they’d lived in, Samantha realized a two-story house was a genuine novelty.
“You’ve already bought it then?” another deep male voice inquired.
Samantha spun around to discover Nick on the threshold. She went weak just looking at him. It had been so long. Weeks.
He’d changed out of his uniform and wore a brown cashmere sweater with darker brown trousers. He was so handsome she couldn’t catch her breath.
“Not yet,” she said in a voice that sounded way too shaky. “Leslie suggested you and Pierce take a look around first. Maybe you’ll see a problem I don’t. I’ve never bought a house before. It’s quite different than a condo.”
“Guess what, Dad?” At this point Jessica had joined them. “There’s an office for Mom, and a barn out in back. We could bring some horses from Gillette next spring.”
“I think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself, honey.” His gaze swerved from his daughter to Samantha. She glimpsed a vaguely anxious expression in his eyes that surprised her. “Are you ready to take all this on?” he asked her.
“Yes. Jessica said she would teach me to ride. But it’s a moot point if you think I should keep looking.”
“Come on!” Their daughter grabbed his hand. “You’ve got to see everything. Did you know there’s a shop in the garage? It would make the coolest lab for you.”
“Is that right?” At this point the lines were blurred in Jessica’s eyes. What’s mine is yours. It was very sweet, very touching, really. Nick wasn’t unaffected by the situation, but Samantha would give anything to know what he was really thinking.
For one breathless moment, she found herself visualizing the three of them living here as a family.
“Much as I’d like the grand tour, honey, we don’t have time right now. Did you forget Marsha Gardiner’s birthday party?”
“Oh my gosh!” She put a hand to her mouth.
“I thought it had slipped your mind. I’d forgotten about it, too. Amanda called the house to see if you wanted a ride. I told her I’d bring you. I’ve got your present.”
Jessica eyed both of them with a pained expression. “I don’t want to go.”
“Sure you do, darling. It’ll be fun,” Samantha declared. “Call me when you’re through and we’ll pick you up.” She’d spoken for Nick, too, hoping he didn’t mind.
“Where you will be?”
“At Grayson’s.”
“But you flew all the way from Coeur D’Alene to be with me.”
“Jessica—it’s only for a few hours. Pretty soon I’m going to be living in Jackson. So go on, and have a blast!”
“Okay.” She gave her a hug.
Nick glanced at Samantha, an unreadable expression in his eyes. “I’ll see you back here in a little while.”
“The Realtor has another appointment right away. Why don’t you meet me at Grayson’s instead? I’ll show you the brochure.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Samantha followed them to the front door and waved as they drove off. Just then Pierce and his family stepped out of the garage. The Realtor stood a little distance apart from them.
She waited till the Gallaghers came up to her. Pierce had his arm around his wife.
“Well?” Samantha asked in a quiet voice. “What do you think?”
“You already know my opinion,” Leslie said.
Pierce’s blue eyes lit up with his smile. “I think it’s a great house. Go for it.” Cory gave a little jump in the snow, he was so excited.
“I’m excited too, Cory.” The little boy had no idea just how much.
“Come and have dinner with us,” Leslie urged. “We’ll call Nick to join us.”
“Thank you, but I want to drop by a hardware store and find some paint and wallpaper samples to take to the cabin. I would like Jessica to be able to decorate her own bedroom.”
“Your daughter will be in heaven.”
“She won’t be the only one.”
“For eight years I’ve watched Jess grow up,” Pierce commented. “There’s a new glow about her since you came into her life. I’m happy about your plans to move here.”
Her eyes glazed over with tears. “Coming from you, that means a lot.” Pierce’s opinion carried a great deal of weight with Nick.
They all hugged before Pierce helped his family into the car. Once they drove away, Samantha approached the Realtor. “I’d like to make an offer.”
AFTER DROPPING JESSICA off at the party, Nick headed back to Moose. Since his phone call with Sam the other night, his world had changed. She’d asked for his help and she was going to get it, because he’d decided to face the truth about himself.
For thirteen years he’d been stuck in a time warp. No woman since Sam had ever made him want a permanent relationship. Her image had always been before his eyes.
Raising Jessica had made it impossible for him to forget her mother. Now, incredibly, Sam was back in his life, saying and doing all the right things, hooking her womanly tentacles into him deeper and deeper.
She was going to be living here for good. Translated, that meant as long as her cancer stayed in remission.
What am I going to do about you, Sam? I can’t go on like this any longer.
If the memory of their love had prevented her from finding someone else, then he intended to wring that admission from her. Otherwise why was she willing to move to his world?
Their conversation on Halloween would forever be burned in his memory. She’d told her pastor she wanted to go back in time so the three of them could be a family.
If she’d meant it, then that explained why she hadn’t stopped him from kissing her outside her hotel room. She could have turned away in time, using Jessica as an excuse. Instead, she’d la
unched herself into his arms and had kissed him with the kind of hunger he’d never felt from her before.
So why, in the middle of such intensity and rapture, had she unexpectedly wheeled away from him, leaving him bereft?
It was time he found out, but he needed to be smart about it. One thing was certain. He couldn’t handle another rejection.
As one of his favorite college professors had taught him, don’t try to fight or alter nature. It doesn’t work. You have to let it take its course if you want to see the true pattern of things emerge and develop. Then learn from it.
That’s what Nick intended to do with Sam. He wouldn’t fight his feelings. Instead he would let things take their natural course and see what happened.
If nothing did, then he would have learned from the experience and could finally move on.
The drive to Grayson’s seemed to take forever. They kept the place well-lit for their guests. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sam at the door of her cabin. She was juggling a pile of things as high as her head.
Without hesitation he pulled off the road and levered himself from the car to help her. “Sam?”
He must have startled her, for everything she was carrying fell to the porch with a loud thud and she spun around. If his eyes weren’t mistaken, she’d lost color.
“Nick! I didn’t realize you were there.” She seemed to have difficulty swallowing.
“I’m sorry to have frightened you. I thought you heard me coming on the path.” He hunkered down to gather the wallpaper books. When he stood up, she was struggling with the lock.
“Let me.” He took over and jostled the key into the opening until it gave. A little oil would fix the problem.
Once they were inside the warm, rustic room she cried, “I swear I didn’t drop those samples on purpose!”
Her response stunned him. He put the books on the pine picnic table arranged beneath a picture window framed with red-and-green-plaid curtains. “Did I accuse you?”
“After what I did to get your attention years ago, you would have every reason to think so,” she said in a trembling voice. “Here you’ve been going along all these years minding your own business, and now I’ve turned up again like a bad penny.”
His brown brows formed a bar. “Is that how you see yourself? A bad penny?”
“Yes. That’s what I was. A willful teenager who threw herself at you. I was always the one who made you do things you didn’t want to do. Lying to you about my age was unforgivable, but I was afraid of losing you.”
Nick had heard all this before, but he had the advantage of being older now.
Hopefully maturity and fatherhood had helped him put emotion aside long enough to read between the lines and hear what she was really saying. If he bided his time, he might find the answer to the one question that had eaten him alive.
She stood behind an easy chair, clutching the corner. “To call you out of the blue after all these years and ask to see our daughter… I shouldn’t have told you about the cancer.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to understand. “Did you feel you needed the excuse?”
“No! After the first lie I told you, I vowed I would never lie again. If I hadn’t made that promise to myself, I wouldn’t have said anything to you about my illness. I would have just phoned to tell you I wanted to see my daughter, and hoped you might let me.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t you call years ago?”
Sam averted her eyes. “Because I was afraid you would see me as the same needy girl who kept putting you in a position of having to deal with me, one way or the other. It wouldn’t have been fair to you. I was never fair to you.”
“So what you’re saying is it took the prospect of escaping death to override your fear of approaching me again?”
She shook her head. “No. It was the pastor’s unexpected visit at the condo. When he asked me if there was anything I needed to resolve, I thought that, because I’d suffered remorse over my sins for so long, maybe it was a sign that I’d finally been forgiven.”
Nick’s throat constricted as he heard her anguish. “I had no idea you felt such tremendous guilt.”
“I didn’t know, either. Not in the beginning. It took months after Jessica was born before the numbness went away enough for me to feel anything again. Then the pain and guilt descended in full force.
“When I talked to my old pastor in Fort Collins, all these feelings came out. I admitted lying to you about my age. I’d lied to my parents about the amount of time I spent with you. I’d had a sexual relationship outside of marriage. I’d given up my baby.” Tears gushed down her cheeks.
“The pastor told me I was forgiven. That it was my job to forgive myself and make the best future I could from there on out. He promised me that in time the pain would lessen, and he could think of no better outlet to assuage it than to pursue my studies.
“So I left for Boston with the determination to be the top student in my class. I studied day and night. It’s all I did. Throughout undergraduate school I couldn’t think of dating. I didn’t feel worthy yet.
“Later on things got better. The guilt subsided. I went out with several guys in law school. I tried to like them, but after a few dates the idea of a relationship turned me off. It was such a relief to finally get my degree and move to Coeur D’Alene, where there wasn’t the pressure from friends to go on a blind date, or meet somebody’s brother.”
Nick could relate to that.
“Life was good, but there was a void.”
He could relate to that, too. But he still had to hear why she’d refused to marry him.
“Sam—if you loved me enough to lie to keep me, to lie to your parents so you could continue in the relationship with me, then what held you back from saying yes to my proposal?
“The baby book you made is proof you had the instincts to be a wonderful mother. Your parents wouldn’t have disowned you if you’d decided to marry me the day you turned eighteen. So what was really going on in your head when I couldn’t change your mind in that hospital room?”
Her face took on a tragic cast. “Haven’t you been listening to me?”
“Every word,” he declared through gritted teeth. “You’ve suffered a lot, that’s clear, but I’m still waiting for an answer.”
He could see a shudder run through her beautiful body. “It wasn’t because I didn’t love you, Nick.”
He stiffened. “You could have fooled me.”
“It was just the opposite!” she cried. “I realized I loved you too much. I’d lied to get you and keep you. Brenda’s older sister did the same thing to hold on to her boyfriend. He left her after they’d been married only six months! Her life was a mess after that, and her parents ended up raising her baby. I couldn’t bear to be like her and trap the man I loved into marriage if he didn’t really want me. I’d already lied to you about my age and felt sick with shame.”
Nick’s heart was racing. “You never told me about your friend’s sister. I thought those ideas came from your parents!” He could barely remember the girl, whom he’d been introduced to on only one occasion. After finding out Sam was still in high school, Nick had realized she’d kept her friends from meeting him so he wouldn’t learn the truth.
“They did, but I wouldn’t have listened to them if I hadn’t already seen what happened in Brenda’s family. They would have financed her college, but the divorce devastated her. She lost interest in school and old friends. Eventually she left home and got into drugs. Her rare visits to see her child had to be supervised, increasing her parents’ emotional burden.
“There was resentment and tension from the other siblings. The father of the baby never came around because he’d never loved Brenda’s sister in the first place. I was convinced you would end up despising me and would leave me after we were married. I couldn’t bear that.”
“Sam, you would never have turned out like that, and I would never have left you.”
“Maybe not. But I
could understand my parents’ fear that my dreams to become a good attorney with a successful career would be jeopardized by getting married so young. You have to understand that because they’re socially prominent, I was afraid to be an embarrassment to them.
“But more than that, I was terrified you felt like you had to marry me, and that one day you would leave me. It would have been the punishment I deserved for not telling you the truth about my age.”
She wrung her hands. “In the end I wanted to do the noble thing, so I set you free, but my heart died that day.”
“So did mine,” he whispered.
You have your answer, Kincaid.
“Perhaps now you understand why I don’t want you to think I’m trying to manipulate you or the situation with Jessica. I’ll never lie to you again. I’ve found out life’s too short to be anything but honest.”
He took a fortifying breath. “In that case, I want to know what your plans are for the future.”
A wistful smile curved her mouth. “Since I found out I have a future to look forward to, you have no idea how just hearing the word makes me feel.”
“I’m sure I can’t imagine,” he murmured. She’d been to hell and back. It tore him apart thinking about that. It tore him apart to know she’d loved him so much she’d sacrificed everything to let him be free.
“My plan is to live near our daughter so we end the commuting. Taking airplanes is a disruption we can all live without.”
Amen to that.
“My parents will come often to visit. I’m hoping to get my friend Marilyn here, too. As for Jessica, she can’t spend every weekend with me, and she won’t want to once things settle down. I don’t expect to see her every spare moment, and I’m not going to encourage it. Frankly, I’d like to be here as a backup for you.”
Backup? “I appreciate that.”
“Thirteen years is a long time to shoulder all the responsibility, Nick. No matter how much you adore Jessica, there are times when you’re sick, when you need to travel, when you want a…a breather.”
“You mean a date?” he demanded.
A blush crept up her neck into her face. “Yes. From now on I’ll be here to help out. Because you’re a ranger, I can’t imagine any kind of a visitation schedule we could come up with that would work.”
To Be a Mother Page 17