“Technically, I suppose she is, but—”
“Who?” Ryan growled. “Who is she seeing? Did Bettina say?”
James sighed and leaned back in his chair. “How would Bettina know? I just told you, the girl hardly speaks to her.”
“Well, then how do you know she’s seeing somebody?”
“I don’t.”
Ryan went very still. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t know,” his grandfather said, and chuckled. “But I certainly got your dander up, didn’t I, boy?”
“Dammit,” Ryan said softly, “if you weren’t my grandfather, I’d...I’d—”
“Stop blathering, Ryan, and try admitting the truth for a change. You fell in love with Devon and you’re still in love with her.”
Ryan glowered at the old man and then he sighed and dropped back into his chair.
“All right,” he said softly. “If you must know—yes. I loved her. But she never knew. Thank God for that, anyway.”
“You’re pleased she never knew?”
“You’re damned right I am!” Ryan shot to his feet, his temper at the boiling level. “Listen, you crafty old man, you’d better just stop playing God. Hell, you got me—and Devon—into one hell of a mess.”
“Falling in love is never simple,” James said.
“Simple? It’s hell! How do you think I feel, knowing I fell head over heels for a woman who was playing me for a sucker?”
“Ryan. Ryan, my boy. What happened? You’ve only told me you quarreled the last time you saw each other, never what you quarreled about.”
“Hell,” Ryan muttered, slashing his fingers through his hair. “Hell, how do I know what it was about? She accused me of not having been faithful to her and I got angry and I said some things...” He took a deep breath. “I could feel the walls closing in. I know you don’t understand, but—”
“Of course I understand,” James said. “It’s how I felt just before I proposed to your grandmother, sixty-three years ago.” He laughed. “It’s how I feel now, knowing I’m going to pop the question to that miserable old hag in the kitchen.”
Ryan’s eyes widened. “Brimley?” he said. “Are you serious?”
James smiled. “A man needs a good woman at his side, Ryan, one with spirit and determination, one who loves him enough to take his bad temper and throw it right back in his teeth.”
“Devon scored in all those departments.” Ryan’s mouth thinned. “She also played me for a fool. She admitted—well, never mind what she admitted. The bottom line was that she’d only pretended to care for me in hopes of having me agree to extend our marriage contract.”
“For what reason?”
“What reason do you think? For money.”
“Ah.” James nodded. “Of course. So she could have access to even more money she would never touch. Yes, indeed. That makes perfect sense.”
Ryan shook his head. “Listen,” he said gently, “I know what you’re trying to do. And I’m grateful, Grandfather. Really. But... but even if I eliminate the profit angle, what happened that last day only proves she didn’t love me.”
“For instance.”
“Well, for one thing, we bumped into an old girlfriend of mine.” His mouth tightened. “Devon turned right around and accused me of cheating on her.”
“Did she have any cause to think you’d been cheating?”
“Of course not. Sharon—the old girlfriend—put on an interesting performance, but—”
“Devon was jealous, then.”
“Jealous? Why should she have been jealous?”
James smiled. “Perhaps because she loved you.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. His smile twisted. “I tried telling myself that, but then she started snapping at me about how I’d been out nights and she’d never known where I was or what I’d been doing.”
“Typically female, hmm?”
“Yes, dammit to hell. Typically!” Ryan slammed his fist onto the mantel. “And the hell of it is, I’d have sold my soul if I’d thought it would have made her really give a damn about where I’d been spending my time. Why couldn’t she understand that no one mattered to me after I’d met her?”
“Women profess themselves to be the intuitive sex, my boy,” James said gently, “but I have found that they need to be told certain things.”
“If I’d thought for a minute that Devon wanted me near her, I’d have been home every night. She was everything to me, Grandfather, everything I ever wanted...”
Ryan’s words drifted to silence. After a moment his grandfather cleared his throat.
“Life is short,” he said. “Before you know it, you look around and it’s all behind you. Find her, Ryan. Tell her what’s in your heart.”
Ryan nodded. He wanted to say something but his throat felt tight. He cleared it, hard.
“Thank you, sir. For everything.”
“Nonsense. I’m an interfering old man. We both know that.”
A smile eased across Ryan’s lips. “You’re right,” he said. “Which reminds me... I’ve been meaning to ask you about that diagnosis your doctors supposedly gave you all those months ago.”
“Are you questioning my veracity, Ryan?”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said politely, “I most certainly am.”
His grandfather’s eyes twinkled. “Everything I told you was the truth. They said my time was limited and that it would be wise to put my affairs in order.” James chuckled. “But then, that’s the advice any intelligent physician gives a man who’s staring ninety in the face, wouldn’t you agree?”
Ryan tried to look stern but it was impossible. After a moment, he began to grin.
“I’m counting on you to look one hundred in the face, old man. What would my children do without you around to make their lives miserable?”
The two men looked at each other and smiled. Then Ryan put his arms around his grandfather and hugged him.
“I love you,” he said gruffly, and then he was gone.
Chicago was caught in the grip of an Indian summer heat wave.
The hot breath of the prairie had blown in over the city five days before and showed no signs of retreating. Each day, the temperature hit new highs and dispositions hit new lows.
Devon was definitely not in the best of moods.
During the night, the wheezing electric fan in the tiny bedroom of her all-but-airless apartment had given its last gasp and died, breathing out a wisp of acrid electrical smoke.
And now the air-conditioning system in Holdridge’s Department Store had decided to do the very same thing. The store was rapidly turning into a sauna.
The customers were not fools. They fled. But the sales staff was trapped, and trapped in uniform.
And a stupid uniform it was, Devon thought irritably as she tried to straighten the sweaters that were piled on the men’s boutique sales counter. A black suit, the pocket emblazoned with the Holdridge crest, a white blouse, stockings and medium-heeled leather pumps might make sense in midwinter.
On a day like this, with the AC only a memory, the outfit was simple torture.
The blouse—polyester, so it didn’t breathe at all—was stuck to her skin. The suit—also polyester—was so wet it was clammy. And the miserable heat had made her feet swell so that every step in the pumps was agony.
No, Devon thought grimly as she folded sweater after sweater, her mood was not good. But then, it hadn’t been good for a long time now, if the succession of roommates she’d gone through in the last three months was to be believed.
“Honestly, Devon,” the last one had said just a few days ago, “if I were you, I’d go back and confront the guy that put me through the mill, and I’d either tell him I still love him or I’d sock him in the jaw. Maybe then you’d be fit for human company again.”
“Nobody put me through the mill,” Devon had snapped. “And besides, I never loved him and I already did sock him in the jaw.”
She should have socked him again, Devon thought furiously
. But she hadn’t. Her roommate was probably right. Maybe that was the reason she was still so damned angry.
She’d been angry since she left New York, which she’d done an hour after she’d marched out of that stupid restaurant and out of Ryan Kincaid’s even stupider life. She’d paused only long enough to stuff her clothes into her suitcase, then headed for the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
“I want a one-way ticket on the first bus heading out of the city,” she’d said.
That was how she’d landed in Chicago. What did her destination matter? She had no place she wanted to be, only places she didn’t want to be, like San Francisco. Like New York.
And Chicago was working out just fine. It was big, it was impersonal, she’d found a job and a place to live almost overnight, and pretty soon now, any last, unpleasant memories of Ryan Kincaid would be gone from her life forever.
It was just pathetic that she’d ever thought herself in love with him.
Devon made a face as she folded another sweater. In love with Ryan Kincaid?
“Ridiculous,” she muttered, under her breath.
What she’d been in love with was the idea of being in love. It was lots more palatable than admitting the truth, that she’d wanted to go to bed with Ryan from Day One.
Well, she had. She had, and so what? Sex had turned out to be—to be fun. Yes, she thought, slamming another sweater into the stack, that was the word for it. Fun. All the rest—the magic and the mystery and the dizzying joy—had been products of her overheated imagination.
As for Ryan himself—if she ever saw him again, she’d—she’d do what that last roommate had suggested, she’d make a fist, haul back and hit him. Then maybe she wouldn’t waste time thinking about him, seeing him in every tall, dark-haired stranger, hearing his voice...
“Good afternoon, miss.”
Devon’s heart turned over. She was doing it again, hearing Ryan’s voice. Damn him, she thought, damn him.
“Miss? Could you help me, please?”
“No,” Devon whispered, without so much as turning around. “No, I cannot help you.” She cleared her throat. “I’m very busy, sir. Surely, you can see that.”
“What I can see,” the amused male voice said, “is that you are a very impolite salesclerk. I think I’m going to have to report you to the manager.”
Devon took a deep breath. “Do it, then,” she said, and whirled around. “Do it and be—and be...”
Oh, Lord.
It was Ryan. Ryan, tall and handsome and just as she remembered him.
“Bastard,” she swore, and launched herself at him over the sweaters.
Laughing, he caught her in his arms, one hand pinning her wrists against his chest between them, the other tangling in her hair so that the pins that held it neatly at the nape of her neck tumbled to the floor and her hair came cascading down her shoulders.
“Uh-uh, sweetheart,” he said. “You only get to punch me out once.”
“You—you rat! You baboon! You—”
“Is that any way to say hello to your husband?”
Devon glared at him. “You are not my husband!”
“I sure as hell am. I’ve got a piece of paper in my pocket that says so.”
“Ryan, dammit, let go of me!”
He grinned. “No.”
Devon wriggled in his arms. “Let—me—go!”
Ryan’s breath caught. “If you keep moving like that,” he said softly, “I’m liable to toss you down on those sweaters and give you a much more graphic demonstration of our marital status.”
Color flooded her cheeks. “What are you doing here? And how did you find me?”
“Bettina gave me your address.”
“Bettina! You spoke to my mother?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. She misses you, Devon. She almost has me convinced that somewhere beneath all the paint and sequins, there’s a woman wanting to try to be a mother.” Ryan buried his nose in Devon’s hair. “Lord,” he murmured, “I’d almost forgotten how wonderful you smell.”
“You still haven’t explained what you’re doing here, Ryan.”
“What do you think I’m doing here? I came to find you and take you home.”
“I am home. I live in Chicago now.”
Ryan smiled. “Your home is in New York, with me.”
A faint tremor swept along Devon’s skin. Don’t, she thought, please, don’t do this to me. Don’t let me begin to hope.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “Did your lawyers find something wrong with that contract?”
“What contract?”
“Don’t play games with me, Ryan. You know very well what contract, and I’m warning you right now, I don’t care what they found wrong with it. I lived up to my end and—”
“Actually, you didn’t.”
“I did. I had to put in six months as your wife, and I put in—”
“You put in five months, three weeks, and one day.” He smiled. “I figured it out, darling. You owe me at least forty-three years more.”
Devon blinked. “What?”
Ryan took her face in his hands and kissed her. She fought him at first, twisting her head from side to side, but he was persistent and oh, the warmth of his mouth was as sweet and wonderful as she’d dreamed night after lonely night since she’d left him.
With a little sob, Devon gave herself up to the kiss.
After a long, long time, he drew back, just far enough so he could look into her eyes.
“That’s how long my grandparents were married,” he whispered. “Forty-three years plus a couple of months, but I’m damned and determined to break that record.”
“Ryan.” Devon couldn’t help it. Her voice broke; she could feel tears filling her eyes. “Ryan, don’t do this. I—I don’t understand what you want.”
“You,” he said. “That’s what I want. I love you, Devon, I love you with all my heart.”
“But...but you said—”
“I said a lot of things. And so did you.”
Her face pinkened. “I know. But...but I was angry. And hurt. I didn’t mean—”
“I didn’t, either.” Ryan stroked his thumb over her bottom lip. “I was going to tell you I loved you that day in Central Park.”
“But...but why didn’t you?”
He sighed and leaned his forehead against hers. “I don’t know. A combination of wanting the right setting and sheer terror, maybe.” He smiled and pressed a gentle kiss to her lips. “We confirmed bachelors are a special breed, sweetheart. We don’t give up easily.”
Devon laughed softly. “So I see.”
“Anyway, there I was, spinning dreams in my head of a table for two, candlelight, music, a diamond ring that would shine like your beautiful eyes.” He frowned. “And wham, bam, we walked right into Sharon.”
Devon smiled tremulously as she linked her hands behind his neck.
“I hated her,” she whispered. “She was so beautiful. So smug.”
“She never meant anything to me, Devon. No one did, until I met you.”
“Oh, Ryan, I love you so much.”
Ryan kissed her, long and deep. Then he drew back and took a little box from his pocket.
“Open it,” he said softly.
Devon did, with trembling fingers. An amethyst ring, as deep and dark as her eyes, the stone encircled by sparkling diamonds, winked back at her.
“Ryan? Oh, Ryan...”
“I thought I would buy you a diamond,” Ryan said as he slipped the ring on her finger. “But all I could think of was that your eyes were more beautiful and more mysterious than any diamond.”
“Miss Franklin! What is going on here?”
Devon gasped. “It’s Mr. Nelson,” she muttered. “The manager.”
Ryan let her break free of his embrace but he kept one arm firmly around her shoulders. He smiled at the tall, thin man in the shiny black suit who was striding toward them.
“How do you do, Mr. Nelson?” Ryan extended his hand. “M
y name is Kincaid.”
The manager took Ryan’s hand cautiously. “Is there a problem here, Mr. Kincaid?”
“No.” Ryan smiled. “No, there’s no problem.”
Nelson frowned and looked pointedly at Devon.
“Miss Franklin? Have you an explanation for your behavior?”
“Well,” Devon began, but Ryan’s voice cut across hers.
“The explanation’s simple.” His arm tightened around Devon’s shoulders. “I’ve come to take my wife home.”
“Your wife?”
“That’s right. You see, Mr. Nelson, this young woman’s name isn’t Devon Franklin. It’s Devon Kincaid.”
Devon’s heart filled with happiness. She smiled and looked into her husband’s eyes.
“Actually,” she said, “it’s Mrs. Ryan Kincaid.”
And then she was back in Ryan’s arms, where she had always belonged.
EPILOGUE
“NINETY-FIVE candles on a birthday cake,” James said irritably. “It’s enough to burn the place down!”
Agnes Brimley Kincaid shot her husband a look of disapproval.
“Blow out the candles, James, and be quick about it, please.” Her stern face softened as she looked at the child in Ryan’s arms. “Little Jamie wants a bite of birthday cake, doesn’t he, snookums?”
Little Jamie, eleven months old and as beautiful as any baby had ever been, bounced with delight. Ryan shifted his son’s considerable weight and tried to sound stern.
“You’re spoiling him, Agnes,” he said.
Agnes Kincaid leaned toward her step-grandson, widened her eyes, waggled her hands behind her ears and blew a noisy gust of air over her pursed lips. Little Jamie crowed with laughter.
“Is dat what gram-mums is doing to her pwecious widdlle man?” she asked in a singsong lisp.
Ryan’s eyes met his grandfather’s over Agnes’s gray head. The two men grinned at each other, and then James leaned forward, took a deep breath, and blew out all the candles on his cake.
“There,” he said, “it’s done, and I’ll probably die of cardiac arrest in the next thirty seconds.”
“Complaints, complaints, complaints,” his wife said crossly, but she turned away from the baby, bent down and kissed her husband soundly on the mouth. “Happy birthday, you old curmudgeon, and many, many more.”
A Proper Wife Page 14