by Diana Palmer
Nelson shook his head. “No good. The social worker’s name is Georgiana Rees, and Ms. Rees is going to want to hear that this love affair, of which she has not been apprised, was rock solid before there was even the hint of a custody battle. In fact it will send your attorney into paroxysms of joy to learn that you two have been meeting on the sly for a considerable time, say months or even years. Not that I’m advising you to lie, but if Chase visited Nick over the years…”
Chase shook his head.
“…or perhaps Nettie has traveled to New York…” Nettie gestured in the negative. “Or overseas…”
“No. Sorry.”
Nelson tapped an index finger against his lips and looked at his client. “When did you propose?”
“This afternoon. You know that.”
“What I am aware of is that you announced your engagement today. I imagine you proposed…” he waved a hand “…a week ago?”
Chase glanced at Nettie. She took a breath and nodded. After all, if the purpose of the engagement was to protect Colin, what difference did it make when they got engaged?
Though his distaste for lying couldn’t have been more clear, Chase agreed. He rubbed his eyes, clasped his hands on top of the dining-room table and looked at Nelson. “Why don’t you tell us about our engagement.”
“How come I hafta wear a tie?”
Standing in front of his father, Colin tugged on his too-tight collar and made faces into the mirror. Chase attempted to put a part in his son’s impossibly thick hair, but the comb barely made an impression.
“Because we’re having a guest. It’s a gesture of politeness.”
“We already had guests. We didn’t hafta wear ties for them.”
Chase smiled. Tempting logic. His own tie felt like a noose. “This guest is different,” he said, smoothing a hand over Colin’s hair. He’d had hair like this, too, at Colin’s age, hair that stuck out all over even with the shortest cut. It had driven his ultra-conservative parents crazy.
“Why’s this guest different?”
Chase hadn’t told Colin about the custody dispute. He hoped he never had to tell him. The last thing he wanted to give his son was more instability.
Speaking quietly, while Colin continued to experiment with the myriad shapes a mouth could make, Chase explained, “Nettie and her family are our friends, so we don’t have to be formal with them. But Ms. Rees is sort of a…business acquaintance. She’s coming over to help us.”
“How?” Colin stuck out his tongue and tried to see if he could curl it up at the edges.
“She’s going to make sure I’m taking good care of you. She’ll probably ask you some questions. You okay with that?”
Colin’s tongue retracted quickly, like a lizard’s. He stared solemly at Chase’s reflection in the mirror. “You take good care of me.”
Simple words, but Chase had to consciously remind himself to speak. “Think so?”
Colin nodded. “How come you keep holding my head?”
Chase looked down. His palm still capped Colin’s thick hair. Hmm.
Because it feels good. Chase thought to himself. It feels right to be your parent, to touch and protect you. And because I don’t ever want to stop holding and protecting you…my son. Suddenly Chase remembered all the ways in which he’d tried to measure up when he was a kid—the parent-approved clothes, tamed hair, impeccable manners, the achievements. His achievements had been his defining characteristic.
“What do you want to wear to meet Ms. Rees?” he asked.
Colin mulled it over. “My ‘N Sync T-shirt…no, maybe my purple sweater?” The purple V-neck pullover was a new purchase, not a bad choice at all.
“Go put it on.”
“No tie?”
“No tie.” Chase felt like he’d actually scored a major parental success when Colin whooped and began digging through a dresser drawer. “One more thing,” he said. Colin looked over, and Chase put his hand once more on Colin’s head. This time he mussed up his son’s hair. “That’s better.”
Colin looked in the mirror and grinned up at his dad.
With hugs for good luck, Sara, Lilah, Nick and finally Nelson left the cottage, intending to wait at Nick’s place till the coast was clear. Nettie knew she should talk to Chase alone before the social worker arrived. Trying to calm herself had been an uphill battle all afternoon. The knot in her stomach felt like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Prepping for their interview, Nettie slicked on lipstick, although “slick” was a misnomer. She dabbed her lips with the tube whenever her quaking hand got close enough to make contact.
Lowering the lipstick, she rested her palms on the bathroom sink and took a deep breath. She’d been extra jittery for days, which seemed pretty normal under the circumstances, but she knew there was something more tweaking her emotions. It was hard to concentrate on anything lately. She felt sad and clingy, and several times this week she’d wanted to cry for no obvious reason.
Nettie examined her eyes in the mirror. Red and puffy. Maybe she was coming down with something or it was time for her period or…
Oh.
“It’s August fourteenth.” The awareness hit her like a moving freight train. Tucker’s birthday was on the sixteenth.
“How could I have forgotten?” She thumped the heel of her hand on the porcelain sink. What kind of mother simply forgot? What kind of mother didn’t even think about her child’s birthday until she was practically right up on it?
Each year Nettie picked out a gift, something small, something Tuck would have liked at the age he would have been. Should have been. All at once the memory of putting the photo of herself and Brian into the desk drawer came rushing back.
“It’s our baby’s birthday,” she whispered, wishing that somehow, somewhere Brian could hear her. Closing her eyes, she tried to picture a heaven in which her husband and son would be together on Tuck’s birthday, eating Tuck’s favorite cake and remembering how birthdays used to be. And maybe thinking of her for a few minutes and feeling how much she loved them.
Opening her eyes again, she wondered what Brian would think of her current situation. Pretending to be engaged for the sake of a child. Infatuated with the father. Living a temporary fantasy.
“You always said I overcomplicated things.” She smiled, but an uncomfortable heaviness grew in the pit of her stomach.
She tried to put a name to the feeling. It wasn’t guilt. Brian would never begrudge her the chance to be happy. He’d been an uncomplicated man, incapable of severe judgment or blame. She might think the dance of hello and goodbye had the most intricate steps, but he would have said the pattern was simple: just listen to the music and don’t fight the beat.
The doorbell rang. Nettie jumped, sending the tube of lipstick clattering into the sink. She checked her watch. Seven on the dot. The boulder in her tummy transformed into a hundred fluttering butterflies. Ms. Georgiana Rees, MSW, had arrived.
Plump and no-nonsense, with a striking resemblance to Julia Child, Georgiana Rees shook hands with Chase, nodded brusquely to Nettie and boomed down at Colin, “Hello, young man. Show me your room.”
Perfectly amenable to the request, Colin displayed his books and several toys while Nettie and Chase watched anxiously from the doorway. Bored with a Buzz Lightyear doll that had seen better days, Colin announced, “I got better stuff at our other place. We didn’t bring it all over here, yet.”
“Your other place?”
“Yep.” Colin tossed Buzz onto the bed. “We used to live at Nick’s.”
“Ah. Do you like your room?” Ms. Rees queried, looking at a framed print of a very British foxhunt. Not exactly Disney memorabilia.
But Colin nodded. “My dad’s getting me a bed shaped like a car.”
Dad. The three adults in the room all noted the name. Only Chase, though, feared his legs would no longer support him.
Dad.
Feeling her fiancé’s body tremble beside her, Nettie looked up. She
saw the tears in his eyes and remembered the first time Tuck had called her Mommy. Shakespeare, bless him, was dead wrong on that “rose by any other name” issue.
With one word, a seven-year-old boy had just given a grown man his place in the world. Forevermore.
Chapter Seventeen
“My what a yummy, yummy fudge sauce.” Ms. Rees—Georgiana—licked the back of her spoon, wiped a drip of chocolate from the rim of her dessert glass and sucked her finger. She made a loud smacking sound. “Is it purchased?”
“Ah, no. I made it.” Try as she might, Nettie could not reconcile the stolid Ms. Rees with a word like yummy. Georgiana had spent an hour with them and had done little more than chat thus far. Nettie’s nerves were tight as piano wire, and Chase appeared to be ready to jump out of his skin. Lilah had called to ask how things were going and even she sounded nervous and tense. Only Colin and Georgiana were able to concentrate on their ice-cream sundaes.
Ensconsed on the couch, the formidable woman made one more swipe around her dessert glass while Colin, seated on the floor with his sundae in front of him on the coffee table, found a more interesting pursuit in lifting his spoon to create a mini waterfall of melted peach ice cream.
Nettie and Chase sat on side-by-side chairs facing the social worker.
“Well,” Georgiana said, dropping her spoon into the glass with a clatter and clapping her knees. “Let’s get down to business.” From her large handbag, she dug out a yellow legal pad and a pen. Balancing a pair of old-fashioned bifocals low on the bridge of her nose, she scribbled with strong stokes and made a bold slash beneath whatever she had written. She glanced up at them, smiling.
“I was surprised to hear you two were engaged. Rather sudden, was it?” Her voice was energetic, her gaze uncompromising.
Chase felt his hackles rise. Calm and cooperative, he reminded himself, realizing he’d gain little by suggesting she mind her own damn business. First, though…
“Colin, would you take your dish and Ms. Rees’s into the kitchen, please?”
“I’m not done.”
With a pointed glance at the melted sundae, Chase nodded. “Yeah, you are. Put the dishes on the sink and then run out back and rewind the hose for me. You can water Nettie’s flowers first, if you want.”
Because there was nothing Colin liked better than to spray the world with a garden hose, he was on his feet in an instant. “I know how to water them. Nettie showed me.” As carefully as he could given his haste to go outside, he transported the dishes to the kitchen.
Georgiana scribbled furiously.
Chase waited until the back door opened and closed. Then he said, “I’ve known Nettie three weeks. I’ve never been married or engaged before and never wanted to be. Whatever you’ve heard about my reputation where relationships are concerned is probably true, and I don’t know if I would have been smart enough to notice the diamond in my path if we’d met even a few months ago.” He looked at Nettie and his harsh gaze softened considerably. “I like to think I would have.” Turning back to the attentive social worker, he said, “I do know this—Whether or not Colin had turned out to be mine, I would have pursued my relationship with Nettie. With or without a custody hearing, I would have proposed.”
Georgiana raised a brow dyed I-Love-Lucy red. “What about you?” she questioned Nettie. “Would you have accepted? With or without a custody hearing?”
Chase knew he couldn’t hang on the answer, not in any obvious way.
Nettie appeared startled. Whether by Chase’s declaration or Georgiana’s question wasn’t clear, but it took her a moment to regroup. “Yes. Absolutely. With or without.”
Another note went down on the legal pad. Georgiana, however, was not smiling. Chase reached over to take Nettie’s hand and give it an encouraging squeeze.
“Your career is quite demanding as I understand it,” the social worker said to him. “How do you plan to address the demands of parenthood and a job that requires extended periods of travel to other countries?”
“I haven’t had time yet to work out the details, but there will be changes, of course.”
“Are you quite confident you can mother a seven-year-old boy?” Abruptly, Georgiana transferred her focus back to Nettie. “It certainly seems possible, given Mr. Reynold’s career choice—current career choice,” she amended when Chase started to speak, “that you will be called upon to be a so-called single parent at times. Tell me how you feel about that responsibility. In your own words,” she added sternly as again Chase attempted to interrupt.
Nettie pulled her hand away from Chase. She had not expected questions to be addressed to her, specifically. And questions about motherhood…
Clearing her throat, she answered, “I take motherhood very seriously. I understand the responsibilities.”
“How old are you?”
At least a hundred. “Twenty-five.”
“Do you have nieces or nephews?”
“No.”
“Would you like children of your own someday?”
Nettie’s tongue grew instantly thick. Her head felt fuzzy. “I—That…isn’t necessary. Right now I’m concentrating on Colin.”
Strategically, it was the wrong answer. She could see that in Georgiana Rees’s face. Nettie felt Chase’s gaze upon her, but refused to meet it.
“What, in your opinion,” the other woman pursued, “are the qualities that make a good mother?”
A horrid, prickling heat bubbled in Nettie’s veins. She couldn’t think. Dumbly, she stared.
“Have you given it much consideration yet?”
An awful urge to scream filled her throat. Every day. All day. And whatever else she came up with, Nettie always returned to the conviction that whatever the qualities were, she didn’t possess them. If she did, her three-year-old child would not have died without his mother there to help or to hold him. But those were the nighttime thoughts. The two-in-the-morning-whenyou’re-all-alone-and-can’t-push-them-away-anymore thoughts. Useless, useless thoughts that yielded neither to reason nor to compassion.
Was that what Georgiana Rees wanted to know? If Chase suspected how dark Nettie’s musings were when it came to motherhood or marriage, if he had any inkling of the fears that robbed her of her usefulness, he wouldn’t have asked her to be his fiancée, even as a ruse.
“Are you all right?” The man she had optimistically offered to help sat forward in his chair.
She had to speak. If she continued to sit dumbly like this, she might cost him the custody of his son singlehandedly.
“I—Yes. No,” Nettie confessed, “I’m not feeling very well.”
Chase left his chair in an instant. “I’ll help you to the bedroom. You can lie down.”
“No.” Unsteadily, Nettie rose. “Actually, I’d like to go home.” Belatedly, she realized she had no car here. She’d have to walk to Nick’s, where Sara and Lilah were waiting, and surely it would appear odd to Georgiana to see Nettie walk away from a cottage in the middle of a lonely field while her fiancé stayed behind.
Alternatively, she could call Nick’s and have one of her sisters come get her, but that option required more explanation. She began to feel trapped, which often led quickly to feelings of claustrophobia, which led to panic and the horrid, indefinable dread that accompanied an attack. She wanted to run. She wanted to run now and she wanted to run far.
Chase frowned at her, but with more concern than anger or disapproval. “I’d like you to stay,” he said in a low voice, as if she were the only other person in the room. “But if you definitely need to leave, I’ll take you.”
He was concerned about her. Let down by the woman he had counted on to help, his first concern was still for her.
Deep breaths, Nettie reminded herself. You are not a coward. It’s just anxiety. You can bear the discomfort until Georgiana Rees leaves. Then you’ll run.
With her head spinning and her stomach gyrating in the opposite direction, she tried to stand straight and give the illusion,
at least, of control. “No, that’s all right. I’ll stay.” But she wouldn’t answer any more questions. “Why don’t I make us some coffee?”
That’s it, she breathed, distract yourself. When in doubt, play Donna Reed.
Through sheer will, she sent a smile, albeit a brittle one, in Ms. Rees’s direction. The woman eyed her like a hawk. In fact, Nettie thought, I’d rather be eyed by a hawk. A hawk would not be in the position to destroy Chase’s happiness. A hawk would not tease the past out of Nettie in slow, tortuous nibbles. When hawks went for their pray, they were swift and unequivocal. No pretense.
She took two steps, but her legs felt like tubes of jelly. Breathe. You can relax your body and walk at the same time. She knew it was the truth, but lacked faith that a body reacting as strongly as hers was right now could actually make it all the way to the kitchen. What if Georgiana saw her stumble or start to shake? What if anxiety this extreme really could make a person go absolutely bonkers, and she fell apart in front of the social worker and Chase and even, heaven forbid, Colin?
The dread intensified. She was telling herself all the wrong things. Too many “what if” statements poured more adrenaline into her already sensitive system and within seconds she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to walk at all. Without thinking, she grabbed the back of the chair for support.
Chase reacted immediately. Her fiancé had no way of knowing, of course, that there was nothing physically wrong with her, that her body was reacting to a truckload of blame that turned into anxiety. So without another word, he swept her into his arms. There was no pretense in the action; his focus was Nettie. He was concerned. Even though she was supposed to be helping him, he was concerned.
Brushing aside her protest, Chase murmured to her soothingly as he strode to the bedroom. Guilty and ashamed, she looked into his face, but all she saw was love.
If a heart could swell and break at the same time, hers did.
Gently he laid her on the bed. Gently took her hand and asked if there was anything he could bring her.