The two women discussed the wedding while the men talked about work. Claire enjoyed the company as much as she did her meal. Mason kept reaching over and touching her arm as if to make sure she was still there.
Mason couldn’t believe Claire was really with him. She was sitting next to him, talking to Emily about their wedding. She seemed so happy about their plans. He wanted it to be a day she remembered. It was going to be the only wedding either of them had, after all.
“Zat you, Claire?” A man Mason had never seen before put his hand on Claire’s shoulder. He had definitely been drinking—quite a bit.
Claire shrugged out from under his hand. He looked slightly familiar, but she couldn’t place him.
“If you’ll excuse me, I think you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.” She wanted the rude, intoxicated man to be on his way.
“Come on, Claire!” The man leaned close enough she could smell the alcohol on his breath. “Every girl ‘members the guy who pops her cherry.”
Mason was on his feet before he even thought. Cast or not, he was going to deck the guy. Because he had just figured out who the drunk must be. And from the look on Claire’s face, so had she.
“You have two seconds to get away from my fiancée, before I mop the floor with your sorry excuse for a face,” Mason said with a calmness that belied his seething anger.
“Whassit to you?” the man, who Mason now knew had to be Tim Sheffield slurred. “She said she was gonna have my kid, but didja know she was so easy, all I hadda do was kisser?”
Mason drew back and slugged the man so hard, Sheffield actually spun halfway around before he fell to the floor, unconscious.
Claire, who sat silently, was as white as a sheet. She was still just trying to process that the man who had been talking to her—the beer-bellied, sour-breathed man with a receding hairline, was the boy who so easily seduced her over sixteen years ago.
The hostess rushed over to the table.
“Are you all right, sir?” She addressed Mason, evidently concerned because of his cast.
“I will be as soon as that scumbag is out of my sight.” He wanted the pile of crap to stand up just so he could knock him down again. “He was obnoxious toward my fiancée.”
“Somebody needed to knock him out,” another man who had just walked up told them. He looked down at Tim and shook his head. “His second wife just kicked him out. She caught the fool in bed with their neighbor. Tim’s so screwed up, he probably didn’t even know what he was saying.” The man looked at Claire. “I’m very sorry if my brother made you uncomfortable.”
This was Tim’s brother. Here was an opportunity, maybe her only one, to find out some things she wanted to know for Spencer’s sake.
“I…I hope no children are caught up in his problems.” She needed to know if Spence had any half-brothers or sisters out there.
“No, thank heavens.” He lowered his voice. “One good thing he did after a teenage pregnancy scare was surgery. No kids.” The man grimaced. “He’s always hated children. The idiot forgets he used to be one himself.”
“So he lives around here?” It was Mason asking. If he lived in Ransom, it could cause a whole new set of heartaches for Claire and Spence.
“He lives in Wichita. We’re on our way from the airport to my home—a little town up north. He’ll stay until the latest uproar dies down. He’s always in some kind of mess or other.” He leaned down and started to lift Tim up.
Cousins. Claire needed to know if Spencer had cousins. “Does your wife mind having him visit?”
Tim’s brother smiled sadly. “She passed away from cancer a few years ago. So, it’s just the horses and me.” The corners of his mouth lifted a little farther. “Tim fits right in with their rear ends.”
“I’m sorry.” Claire actually did feel sorry for this lonely man.
“I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t even know where he was headed when he got up. I figured he was on his way to the bathroom.”
“That’s okay,” Claire said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ll get his sorry hide out of your hair. I hope he didn’t ruin your evening.”
The four of them sat silently as another man came over and helped Tim’s brother half drag and half carry him out of the building.
“It’s none of my business, but was that sorry excuse for a human being Spencer’s father?” Emily asked softly.
Claire suddenly smiled. “That sorry excuse for a human being was a mistake.” She looked at Mason. “Right?”
He slowly smiled back at her. “An ugly, stinking one.”
Claire had never felt closer to another human being than she did to Mason at that moment. She just faced the source of her greatest humiliation, and her knight in a plaster cast sent him flying.
“We’d better get some ice for your knuckles.”
He flexed his fingers. “I can barely feel it.”
She suddenly didn’t care where they were or who was watching. Claire stood up and walked over to Mason.
“I love you,” she said, right before she kissed him with all the love she could muster.
Mason vaguely heard Emily. “Maybe we should have just left them in the back seat.”
It sounded like a plan to him.
“Do you want me to help you with your homework before I feed your sister?” Mason asked Spencer as he followed the teenager into the house.
Spencer turned and grinned. “Nope. I think you should go ahead and feed Zoey. She’s probably pretty hungry, isn’t she, Mom?”
Claire turned to look at them, and her heart melted. Spencer was hanging his coat up, and Mason was trying his best to get Zoey out of hers while balancing the little girl in his arms.
“Mason should feed Zoey now, right?” Spencer asked again, giving his mom a pointed look.
She saw the twinkle in her son’s eyes and realized what he was thinking. He was throwing Mason into the deep end of the pool. Oh, well. It wouldn’t really hurt anybody.
“She’s used to being fed about now.” She received a big grin from her son in response.
Mason finally managed to get both his and Zoey’s coats off and made their way to the kitchen.
“Should I help you cook it?” He looked around. Why wasn’t Claire fixing anything, if he was supposed to feed Zoey? He didn’t want their daughter to be hungry.
Spencer walked over and took jars out of the cabinet. He placed them, along with a small spoon he’d gotten from a drawer, on the table by the high chair.
“She just eats this.” Spencer hiked his backpack over his shoulder and headed to the living room.
“I just feed it to her out of those jars?”
“Yes.” Claire answered him. “I’m just going to change out of my uniform, and then I’ll start our dinner. Just make sure she’s strapped in her high chair, or she’ll wiggle her way out.”
Mason watched as he and Zoey were deserted.
“So, I guess it’s just you and me, huh?” he asked his beautiful daughter.
She started flailing her arms and legs and shaking her head from side to side. What was the matter with her? He had never heard those sounds come out of her mouth before.
“Are you hungry?” He looked at the high chair. “So, this is your seat.” She stopped squirming and seemed to examine it with him. “How am I supposed to get you in there?” There was just a small opening between the tray and the back of the seat. He surveyed her chubby tummy. “I don’t think you’ll fit.”
“The tray comes off.” Spencer walked into the room, and after snapping something under the tray, pulled it off the chair.
“Thank you.” Mason carefully set Zoey in the chair and began trying to figure out how to fasten all the straps. Spencer stood silently by, biting his lip. “Is something funny?” Mason asked him. Spencer silently shook his head.
After what seemed like forever, Mason decided Zoey wasn’t going anywhere. She sure was telling him about it, though. He watched carefully as Spencer replac
ed the tray. Before he could even thank the teenager, he once more disappeared into the living room.
“Okay, then, Zoey, what are you eating?” Mason looked at the labels on the jars. “This one is carrots and this one is bananas.” He picked up the final jar of brown food. “And this is…chicken and chicken gravy?” Deciding it had to look better with the lid off, Mason opened the jar. “Yuck!”
“Be sure to stir her meat and gravy good before you feed it to her,” Spencer called from the living room. “And you might have to put a little bit of bananas on the end of the spoon to get her to eat it. She doesn’t always like meat.”
Mason could see why. He almost shuddered as he stirred the disgusting stuff into something that looked even more disgusting.
“Pththth!” Zoey’s bubbles made it across the tray and hit his arm.
He turned his attention to his daughter. “All you get to eat besides this chicken concoction are carrots and bananas? How can you be so chubby?”
She didn’t seem to have an answer to that, but she had seen her baby food and definitely wanted it. Mason discovered his daughter had a little bit of a temper. He hurried and opened the jars.
“Okay. Here you go.” He dipped the spoon into the carrots and got as much on it as he could. His daughter was hungry, so he wanted to get food into her tummy as quickly as possible. Zoey opened her mouth wide, and Mason slid the spoon in. Only after she closed her mouth, part of the carrots came back out. “You’re leaking,” he told her. He looked around for something to wipe her face with, but all he saw was a dish towel. “I guess this’ll be okay.” He grabbed it and used it to wipe off her mouth.
“Let’s try the bananas.” Zoey was smacking the tray with her hands like a customer demanding service in a restaurant. He decided maybe he’d better not put so much on the spoon this time. “That’s not so bad,” he told her.
They were doing fine until her fifth or sixth bite of carrots. Mason had just spooned them into her mouth when she decided it was time to blow raspberries. While he had become more adept at dodging her, he was totally unprepared, so he ended up with a nice coating of mashed carrots on his face.
“Let’s not do that anymore,” he told her as he wiped his face with the dish towel. She grinned and smacked the tray again. At least she was happy now. He felt like a soldier going into battle when he loaded the spoon again. He just needed a shield. “I can do this.”
“What happened in here?” Claire hadn’t taken more than fifteen minutes to wash up a little and change her clothes. She walked into the room she thought was her kitchen, only to find a five-foot circumference around her daughter practically covered with baby food. Mason, who was stoically feeding Zoey another bite of banana-tipped chicken, hadn’t escaped the onslaught.
He looked up at Claire, his brows raised. “I’m not sure if I’m doing this right.”
When Claire saw the carrots in Mason’s hair, and realized he was speckled with baby food, she couldn’t help it. Laughter bubbled up inside of her and erupted. A howling noise came from behind her, and she turned to see Spencer rolling on the floor, holding his stomach as he laughed harder than she’d ever seen.
“Mom…y…you should’ve…seen…seen…him…” Spence had another burst of manic laughter. “H…he had…her spoon…loaded…like a bulldozer.”
Mason looked from Claire to Spencer and back. “I guess we’re funny,” he told his daughter. Then he took a look at the results of his feeding efforts and realized that Zoey, sitting square in the center of the mess, didn’t have a spot on her. She was a little lawn sprinkler, coating both the kitchen and him.
He started laughing with Claire and Spencer. After looking at her parents and brother curiously, Zoey must have decided she accomplished something wonderful. She began clapping.
Claire had never laughed so hard in her life. She didn’t care that the man she loved was carrot and banana coated. She kissed him anyway, both of them barely able to stop laughing.
“I love you.” She picked up the soiled dish towel and a fit of giggles struck her.
Mason looked at her and decided right then he had never seen anything more beautiful. “I love you, too.”
Then he looked at his daughter. “Practice makes perfect,” he told her. He dipped the spoon back into the jar of carrots and managed to scrape up another bite for her. He looked at his happy soon-to-be family. Life just didn’t get any better than this.
“This has got to be the most pitiful excuse for a stag party in the history of the world,” Jake groaned.
“Just say what you feel, why don’t you?” Mason chuckled. “What happened to you and Tricia?”
“Didn’t last two weeks.” Was that relief in Jake’s voice?
“What happened?”
Jake shrugged. “She wanted a relationship.”
“That’s the best thing in the world that can happen to a man, Jake.”
“A year ago, if somebody would have told me those words were going to come out of Mason Wright’s mouth, I’d have laughed myself sick.” Bo had joined them. “But it’s nice to see you’ve discovered why men are alive, Mason.” He looked at Jake. “About time for you, Landon.”
Jake’s eyes roamed the room. “Whose idea was it to have a stag party in the back room of the Limelight?” The Limelight was a bar with a reputation for having mellow crowds. It was the place where men brought their dates when they just wanted to have a few drinks and talk.
“You can ignore me all you want, but you’ll find out I’m telling the truth one of these days, Jake,” Bo warned him. “You’re going to wake up, and love is gonna hit you like a ton of bricks. Then, we’ll all get to say we told you so.”
Jake snorted. “Never gonna happen.”
“What’s never gonna happen?” Brody asked, having arrived just in time to hear the statement.
“Nothing,” Jake growled before stomping to the bar.
“What’s wrong with him?” Brody asked.
Bo shrugged. “Guess he thinks the truth bites.”
Mason tuned out Bo and Brody. He wondered how Claire’s bridal shower was going. Judy Dyer, who turned out to be a charming woman, was hosting it in a large room at Butlers. Sometimes he almost had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. In ten days, Claire would be his wife. Then, he managed to talk her into taking five days of vacation time, and since he wasn’t set to go back on the site for another two and a half weeks, he was taking her on a honeymoon. Claire and Judy decided it would be easier if Judy just stayed at Claire’s house with Spencer and Zoey than for them to try and relocate the kids, so they were all set. Claire thought they were just spending those days in his apartment, but he had a much more romantic surprise in store for his bride. He’d already rented a suite at the fanciest hotel in Chicago and planned on catering to her every whim. If Mason had his way, they wouldn’t see the light of day for five days and nights, but there were plenty of places to visit if that’s what she wanted. Maybe he’d even take her shopping.
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” Bo was in his face.
Mason grinned and shook his head. “My mind was on something else.”
Bo grunted. “On somebody else, you mean.” He looked across the room and yelled, “Hey, Logan!”
Logan looked away from the group he was talking to, which included Coop, Colton, and Troy Simpson, the Slammers’ sponsor. Bo gestured for Logan to come over. Mason watched as Logan said something to the other men and made his way over to them.
“What’s going on, Bo?”
Bo used his thumb to point at Mason. “This guy is a goner. He’s no more here than a stuffed bear would be. I say let’s go crash a bridal shower.”
“We can’t do that,” Mason automatically protested. Then he thought of being with Claire. “Can we?”
Bo rolled his eyes and addressed Brody and Logan. “See?”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Logan finally asked. “Our wives make us sleep on the sofas for a wee
k or two?”
Brody shook his head. “Never going to happen. I’m not going to let Mason be the only romantic man there. We’ll all tell the women we couldn’t celebrate without them being with us.”
Logan grinned. “Spoken like a true lawyer.”
“I don’t make the big bucks for nothing,” Brody laughingly acknowledged.
With Logan and Bo spearheading the group, the men were soon all on board with the idea. Except Jake.
“I’m sorry, Mason, but I’m not going to crash some party for females. I’ll just tell you congratulations now, and then I’m heading on into the bar.” He shrugged. “I may head on over to Trimble’s and see if I can pick up a little action.”
Mason watched his friend walk away. That had been him once, going to Trimble’s and other places like it, to find women to have sex with. What a sad and meaningless life he had lived. Now, he hated to see Jake walking that path. He wanted all his friends to be as happy as he was.
“You going to ride with me?” Logan asked him.
“Yeah.” He was going shopping for a car tomorrow. His legs weren’t strong enough for the clutch on his truck, and he needed to replace the Charger, anyway. Of course, he wouldn’t be buying another muscle car to haul his wife and children around in. He’d be shopping for a decent family car.
He planned on living his life for his family from now on.
Claire sat beside a table laden with gaily wrapped gifts. Several women she worked with and all the Slammers’ wives were sitting at other tables patiently waiting for her to open them. Judy sat beside her, ink pen in hand. She was going to write what each gift was on the back of its corresponding card so Claire would know who to thank for each one. She should have been happy and excited. But she was miserable.
Believe Me (Hearts for Ransom Book 3) Page 20