Baby Talk & Wedding Bells

by Brenda Harlen

  Still, she had to force a smile for her Baby Talk class. It was all she could do to hold back the tears when Saige released her grandmother’s hand and ran to Cassie, wrapping herself around her legs, but she went through the motions. And because all of the caregivers were focused on their children, no one seemed to realize anything was wrong.

  But after class had ended and everyone else was gone, Ellen approached her. Cassie braced herself, not sure what to expect from the woman she’d always liked and respected but who didn’t understand the concept of boundaries. So she was surprised when Ellen didn’t say anything about the failed engagement. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all; she just reached for Cassie’s hand as she walked past her on the way out, giving it a gentle but somehow reassuring squeeze.

  If she was surprised by Braden’s mother’s discretion and unexpected show of support, she was even more surprised when Irene defended Braden, insisting that his feelings for Cassie were probably deeper than he was willing to acknowledge.

  Cassie appreciated the sentiment but she refused to believe it, refused to let herself hope and have her hopes trampled again.

  * * *

  Braden didn’t want to talk about the break-up with Cassie, so he didn’t. Whenever anyone asked about her, he said she was doing great. If someone wanted to chat about the wedding, he just said they hadn’t figured out any details yet. And while he knew the truth would eventually come out, he was feeling too raw to deal with it right now.

  Of course, his mother didn’t care about that.

  “I’m a little confused,” she said, when he picked Saige up after work on Tuesday. “On the weekend, we were talking about potential wedding venues, and then, when I took Saige to the library for Baby Talk today, I discovered that Cassie wasn’t wearing her engagement ring.”

  “Maybe it needs to be sized,” he suggested.

  “Even if that was true, it doesn’t explain why your supposed fiancée looked as if her heart was broken.”

  “I don’t know why her heart would be broken,” he grumbled, finally giving up the pretense that everything was status quo. “She was the one who decided to give me back the ring.”

  “And I’ve known Cassie long enough to know that she wouldn’t have done so without a good reason, so what was it?”

  He busied himself sorting through a pile of miscellaneous stuff—junk mail, flyers and the book Cassie had lent to him from her personal library—on the kitchen island. “Because I didn’t echo the words back when she told me that she loved me,” he finally admitted.

  Ellen frowned. “And why didn’t you?”

  “Because I was trying to be honest about my feelings and I didn’t want our marriage to be based on a deception.”

  His mother stared at him for several long seconds before she let out a weary sigh. “Now I see the problem.”

  “I’m not going to fall in love again.”

  She shook her head. “The problem is that you actually believe that’s true.”

  “Because it is true,” he insisted.

  “Honey, you wouldn’t be this miserable if you didn’t love her.”

  He set the book on top of the pile so that he could return it to her. Except she might think he was using the book as an excuse to see her again—and maybe he would be. “I’m miserable because I let my daughter down. Again.”

  “If that’s your biggest concern, maybe you should give Heather Turcotte a call,” Ellen suggested. “She was asking about you at the library again today.”

  “Geez, Mom, can you give me five minutes to catch my breath before you start tossing more potential Mrs. Garretts at me?”

  “Why do you need time?” his mother challenged. “If you aren’t in love with Cassie—if all you want is a mother for Saige—why aren’t you eager to move ahead toward that goal?”

  He opened his mouth, closed it again. “I really am an idiot, aren’t I?”

  “As much as it pains me to admit it—in this situation—I have to answer that question with a resounding yes.”

  He sighed. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “You figured out how to screw it up all by yourself, I have faith that you can figure out how to fix it.”

  He sincerely hoped she was right.

  * * *

  Braden knew that after refusing to say the words Cassie had wanted to hear, she would doubt their veracity when he said them to her now. But how was a man supposed to prove his feelings? What kind of grand gesture would convince her how much she meant to him?

  It took him a while to come up with a plan—and a lot longer to be able to implement it. So it was almost three weeks after she’d given him back his ring before he was ready to face her again—to put his heart and their future on the line.

  The moment Cassie saw him waiting on her porch, her steps faltered. He forced himself to stay where he was, to wait for her to draw nearer, but it wasn’t easy. The last few weeks without her had been the emptiest weeks of his life, and he wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms and just hold her for a minute. An hour. Forever.

  She came up the stairs slowly, pausing beside the front door. “What are you doing here, Braden?”

  “I needed to talk to you and you haven’t returned any of my calls.”

  “Maybe I didn’t return your calls because I didn’t want to talk to you,” she suggested.

  “I considered that possibility,” he acknowledged. “But it’s not in my nature to give up that easily.”

  “Where’s Saige?”

  “With my parents. I didn’t want this to be about anything but you and me.”

  “I have things to do,” she said. “So please say whatever you need to say and then go.”

  “I love you, Cassie.”

  She looked away, but not before he saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then she shook her head. “It’s not enough to say it—you have to mean it.”

  “But I do mean it,” he told her. “I meant it even when I couldn’t bring myself to say it, but I didn’t want to admit the truth of my feelings because I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t fall in love again.

  “I want you in my life, Cassie. I need you in my life. I don’t even care if you don’t want to put the ring back on your finger—not yet. I want to marry you, I want to spend my life with you, and yes—I do want you to be Saige’s mother because you’re so great with her and I know how much she loves you. But most importantly, I just want to be with you, because my life is empty without you.

  “When I finally realized I loved you, I tried to figure out why—what it was about you that made me fall in love with you. And I discovered that it wasn’t any one thing—it was everything. And every day I’m with you, I discover something new that makes me love you even more than the day before.”

  “You’re doing it again,” she whispered softly. “Saying all of the right things.”

  “But?” he reluctantly prompted, because he could hear the unspoken word in the tone of her voice.

  “But you’re a businessman. You know how to close a deal. I don’t know if you really mean what you’re saying or if you’re saying it because you know it’s what I want to hear.”

  “You have every reason to be wary,” he acknowledged. “I’m asking you to trust in feelings that I wouldn’t even acknowledge a few weeks ago.”

  She nodded.

  “So give me a chance to prove my feelings are real,” he suggested.

  “How?” she asked, obviously still skeptical.

  “Come home with me so that I can show you something.”

  * * *

  Home.

  The word wrapped around her like a favorite sweater—warm and comforting and oh-so-tempting.

  Except that the home he was refer
ring to wasn’t her home, only where he lived with his daughter.

  “The last time I fell for that line was my first year at college,” she said, feigning a casualness she didn’t feel.

  “It’s not a line,” he assured her.

  Cassie sighed, but her resistance had already crumbled. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t say no to him but that she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to shut him out—she wanted him to force open the doors of her heart and prove that he loved her.

  She didn’t know what, if anything, could make her trust that the feelings he claimed to have for her now were real, but she was willing to give him a chance. The past three weeks without him had been so achingly empty, because she loved him so much she wanted to believe a future for them was possible.

  “I need to feed the cats,” she said.

  “I’ll wait.”

  * * *

  Cassie noticed the changes as soon as she stepped through the front door and into the wide foyer of Braden’s house. The previously bland off-white walls had been painted a warm pale gold. The color was still subtle but it drew out the gold vein in the floor tile and provided a sharper contrast for the white trim.

  The living room was a pale moss green and the furniture was all new—the off-white leather sofa and armchairs having been replaced by a dark green sectional with a chaise lounge, and the contemporary glass-and-metal occasional tables replaced by mission-style tables in dark walnut. The only piece of furniture that remained from her last visit was Saige’s train table.

  “End of season sale at Garrett Furniture?” she asked, her tone deliberately light.

  “Something like that,” he agreed.

  “And the paint?”

  “My cousin Jordyn. You seemed to like what she did in Saige’s room, so I asked her to pick out the colors.”

  “She has a good eye,” she noted.

  As they continued the tour, she discovered that every single room—aside from Saige’s—had been redone. Not all of them had new furnishings, but each had at least been repainted with decorative accents added.

  “Why did you do all of this?”

  “It’s partly symbolic,” he confessed. “To illustrate the warmth and color you brought back into my life. But it’s mostly practical, because I hoped that if you actually liked my house you might want to spend more time here, and maybe reconsider moving in. Of course, if there’s anything you don’t like, we can change it. We can change everything, if you want.”

  “I do like your house,” she told him. “And everything looks fabulous, but—”

  “Hold that thought,” he said. “There’s still one more room to see.”

  She’d been so amazed by the changes he’d made throughout the house, she hadn’t realized that he’d ushered her past the main floor den until he paused there now. He seemed more nervous about this room than any other, which made her even more curious about what was behind the closed doors.

  “The painting was simple and, with a full crew of men working round the clock, pretty quick,” he told her. “But I wanted some more significant changes made in this room—which is what took so long. Thankfully, Ryder put me in touch with the right people or I’d still be waiting.”

  Then he opened the doors.

  The room, originally a simple main floor office with a desk and a few bookcases, had been transformed to include floor-to-ceiling bookcases, lots of comfortable seating and a fireplace that was almost an exact replica of the one in Cassie’s living room.

  She had to clear the lump out of her throat before she could speak. “The bookcases are empty,” she finally said.

  “Not completely,” he said, taking her hand and drawing her over to a shelf between two windows where she could see a single book lying on its side: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman.

  “Did you read it?” she asked him.

  He nodded. “I’m not sure I agree it was better than the movie, but it was a good book,” he acknowledged.

  “You did this for me—so that I would have a place in your house for my books?”

  “Our house,” he said. “You only have to say the word and it’s our house.”

  “What word is that?”

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket and showed her the ring she’d given back to him three weeks earlier. “Yes,” he told her. “When I ask again, ‘Will you marry me, Cassie?’ you just have to say yes.”

  Then he dropped to one knee and took her hand in his. “Cassie MacKinnon, I love you with my whole heart, and there’s nothing I want more in this world than to spend every day of the rest of my life with you by my side. Will you marry me?”

  She held his gaze, her own steady and sure, and finally answered his question, not with a yes but with the words that came straight from her heart. “As you wish.”

  Epilogue

  February 14th

  Every morning when she woke up in her husband’s arms, Cassie took a moment to bask in the sheer joy of her new life.

  In the five months that they’d been married, Braden had given her everything she’d ever wanted: a home, a family, love. He never missed a chance to tell her that he loved her, and though her heart still swelled each time she heard the words, he showed her the truth of those words in even more ways. Every day with Saige brought new joys and experiences, too. After waiting for so long to be a mother, Cassie was loving every minute of it.

  On Valentine’s Day, Cassie made a pork roast with sweet potatoes and parsnips, which Saige hated, followed by ice-cream sundaes, which Saige loved. After dinner, Braden presented Cassie with two gifts. A diamond-encrusted heart-shaped pendant and a homemade Valentine. The former was stunning, but the latter took her breath away: Braden’s handprints—in red paint—were upside down and overlapped at the thumbs to form a big heart inside which Saige’s handprints—in pink paint—formed a smaller heart. On the outside, making a border around the edge, he had written:

  For Cassie—on our first Valentine’s Day together with tons of love and thanks for being such a fabulous wife and mother and making our family complete. We love you more than you will ever know. Braden & Saige xoxoxoxoxo

  Cassie’s eyes filled as she read the printed words, but she didn’t know the tears had spilled over until Saige asked, “Why you cwyin’, Mama?”

  She wiped at the wet streaks on her cheeks. “Because I love both of you more than you will ever know, too,” she said.

  Of course, Saige continued to look perplexed. Braden dropped a kiss on the little girl’s forehead and told her to go play with her trains. She skipped out of the room, happy to comply with the request.

  “Cassie?” he prompted when their daughter had gone.

  “Sometimes I can’t believe how much my life has changed since I met you.”

  “But in a good way, right?”

  She managed to smile. “In the very best way,” she assured him.

  He plucked a tissue from the box and gently dabbed at the streaks of moisture on her cheeks. “So these are...happy tears?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, obviously relieved.

  “But I should warn you,” Cassie said, lifting her eyes to his, “I think I’m going to be one of those women who is really emotional in the first trimester.”

  Braden stared at her for a minute, his hand dropping away from her face as the confusion in his gaze slowly gave way to comprehension and joy. “Are you saying...?”

  They’d decided to stop using birth control as soon as they were married, because they didn’t know how long it might take for Cassie to get pregnant and they were hoping that Sa
ige would have a little brother or sister sooner rather than later—which was apparently going to happen even sooner than either of them had anticipated.

  But she could understand why he’d be hesitant to ask the question. Although she didn’t know all the details of everything he and Dana had gone through in their efforts to conceive a child, she knew how disappointed he’d been by their lack of success—and that he would, naturally, be reluctant to hope that it would happen now.

  “Yes.” She took his hand and laid it on her abdomen. “I’m pregnant.”

  He whooped and lifted her off the chair and into his arms, spinning her around in circles. Then he stopped abruptly and set her carefully back on her feet and framed her face with his hands. “Are you all right? Have you been to see a doctor? How are you feeling?”

  She laughed, a little breathlessly, before she answered each of his questions in turn. “Yes. Not yet. Happy and excited and so incredibly lucky.”

  The grin that spread across his face assured her that he was feeling happy, too. Even if he still looked a little dazed.

  “Wow. That was...fast,” he decided.

  “Too fast?” she wondered.

  He immediately shook his head. “No, it’s not too fast,” he promised. “And this news is the second best Valentine’s Day present ever.”

  She lifted her brows. “Second best?”

  “Second best,” he confirmed. Then he lowered his head to kiss her. Softly. Deeply. “Second only to you.”

  * * * * *

  Look for Tristyn Garrett’s story, THE LAST SINGLE GARRETT, the next installment in award-winning author Brenda Harlen’s miniseries for Harlequin Special Edition THOSE ENGAGING GARRETTS!

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  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE COOK’S SECRET INGREDIENT by Meg Maxwell.

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