Baby Blues and Wedding Bells

by Patricia McLinn

  His eyes were still that sparkling blue that had often startled her. But now they lacked the burning anger that had been another of Zach Corbett’s hallmarks.

  She shook her head at herself. She didn’t have time for this.

  Even if Zach didn’t reach the front door of Corbett House, Steve and Annette needed to know he had come back. Needed to know he was alive. Not only to clear the worry and pain she knew Steve, especially, had carried all these years since Zach had left, but for Nell’s sake.

  Oh, God—Nell.

  Would Zach’s appearance make it easier or harder for Steve and Annette’s young daughter in the long run? No matter what, it made things infinitely more complicated for both Nell and her parents.

  Fran grabbed the phone. She tried Steve and Annette Corbett’s house first. She got their machine. This was not news Fran was going to leave in a message.

  Steve’s cell phone didn’t go through. Annette’s went directly to her messaging service. Next Fran tried Steve’s Town Hall office. Steve’s assistant said he was at Bliss House, checking a detail on the renovation of the nineteenth-century mansion into a crafts center. If he called in, she’d be sure to have him phone Fran.

  Fran looked at the clock on the stove. Nell should be home from school by now. But maybe she’d gone to Bliss House to meet Steve or to visit Miss Trudi, who served as Nell’s guide in her diverse interests. Miss Trudi, a retired art teacher, had donated Bliss House to the town when she could no longer keep up the crumbling seventeen-room structure. In exchange, snug, modern quarters had been built for her on the property.

  But on the chance Nell had gone home to tend to her dog, Pansy, Fran went out the back door and through the screened porch with no more than a wave in response to the hello yip from Chester and her pups there, then started across the deep backyard. Like the yards of the other four houses in this oversize block, hers ran from Lakeview Street in the front to Kelly Street in back. Steve and Annette’s house faced her backyard from the opposite side of Kelly Street.

  They were her neighbors, they were fellow members on the committee renovating Bliss House, and they were her friends.

  She knocked and called out. Pansy barked from inside. “Sorry, girl,” Fran said. “I didn’t bring my key.”

  She had started to leave when Steve’s SUV turned into Kelly Street. She was at the driver’s door when it opened and Steve got out. Annette emerged from the passenger side.

  “Hi, Fran,” Steve greeted her. “Bonnie said you called. Sorry my cell wasn’t working. Maybe the battery’s out.” He shot a look at Annette, and they both grinned.

  Fran had a fair idea why she hadn’t been able to reach either of them. She couldn’t blame them, married just three months after eight years apart. But there was no time now for implausible explanations.

  “Steve, where is Nell?”

  “Mother’s. Part of our campaign to get Nell and her grandmother to spend more time together, and Mrs. Grier promised brownies, so—”

  “Fran?” Annette interrupted as she came around the front of the SUV. “What is it?”

  Fran looked from one to the other. She didn’t know how to make this easy or smooth. With Nell at Corbett House, fast was most important…unless Zach hadn’t knocked on the door after all.

  “Zach’s here. He was heading for—”

  “Zach?” Steve grabbed her arm, hard enough to hurt. “He’s— Are you sure? Somebody who looked like him—after all these years—”

  She answered the question he’d been afraid to ask ever since Zach left. “It’s Zach. He’s alive.”

  “Thank God.” Annette’s hands covered Steve’s, easing his hold on Fran. Tears came into her eyes as she looked at her husband’s face.

  Fran wished she could let them feel the relief, and only the relief. Just for a little while. But there was no time.

  “He was going to Corbett House, Steve. He was heading for the front door. I don’t know if he made it, or if he left. But he might—”

  Steve interrupted with one word. “Nell.”

  Zach contemplated the figure on the other side of Corbett House’s front threshold. A girl with dark blond hair and intense blue eyes stood in the opening, looking him over.

  He judged her age, based on height and weight, to be between eight and eleven. Probably the younger end of that scale. Countries where the nutrition wasn’t as good, he’d have said older.

  On a level untouched by professional training, he wondered what the hell a kid was doing in Corbett House. Lana had never particularly liked her own children, so why would she have this one around?

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She glared. “I don’t hafta tell you that. I don’t hafta tell you anything. Who are you?”

  He grinned. The kid had spirit, that was for sure. “Fair enough. I’m Zach—Zach Corbett.”

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  How could a kid this young sound so disapproving?

  As fast as the question came, the answer formed. This was Tobias, Wisconsin, where the urge to gossip about the Corbetts was piped in along with the drinking water. Before he’d left he’d been the favorite Corbett to discuss. Sometimes he’d given people cause, sometimes they hadn’t let facts stand in the way of a good story.

  He gave the kid the cocky grin he’d used so often in Tobias. It felt a little rusty.

  “Of course you’ve heard of me. I’m the no-good black sheep of the Corbetts and I used to live here.” He looked past the kid into the wide hall with the polished wood stairway. He wasn’t sure how much he could actually see of the dim interior, and how much came from memory. “A long, long time ago.”

  “Eight and a half years ago.”

  His gaze snapped back to the girl. Something in her voice sounded sharper than gossip, something personal.

  “That’s right. How’d you know that?”

  “I know a lot of things. I know who you are. I’ve seen your picture. You left seven months before I was born—because I’m Nell Corbett. And you’re my no-good black-sheep father.”

  Steve took off at a run on the most direct path to Corbett House.

  Annette and Fran followed, but he’d already disappeared inside the back door when they reached the steps. Annette stopped Fran with a hand on her arm.

  “Does he know? Does Zach know about Nell?”

  Nell, who had been told this past spring that Steve was not her biological father, as she had believed.

  Nell, who had just started to fully absorb the knowledge that the man she’d never met but thought of as her Uncle Zach was her biological father.

  Nell, who had come to Fran asking questions about Zach and Lily, her biological parents, because, as the child had said with concern, “I can’t ask Dad and Annette or they might worry I don’t want to be their daughter. I’m just curious.”

  But there was no just about her curiosity.

  “I don’t think so. He didn’t… No. I’m sure. He doesn’t know.”

  Annette sucked in a breath with a half-swallowed sob. A woman who feared for her family, because that’s what Annette and Steve and Nell were—a family.

  Fran stopped. She had no right to be part of this.

  But at the top of the steps, Annette turned back. “Please.” That was all she said, but Fran understood.

  Annette was asking her not only to come in, to enter into what would be a tense, emotional family scene—even if Zach never found out Nell was his birth daughter, there were plenty of other currents running through the Corbett family—but also to do what she could to calm the waters.

  As a lifelong friend and neighbor, while at the same time an outsider to the family, Fran might be able to help. She’d been told so many times how calm and peaceful she was to be around, she had accepted that it had to be the truth—no matter how uncalm and unpeaceful she might feel inside.

  She fell in behind Annette as they entered the kitchen. Eyes wide, Mrs. Grier, Lana Corbett’s housekeeper, silently directed them to t
he hallway door that still swung back and forth with the force of Steve’s push.

  Zach had changed. The cocky swagger was gone, and along with the filled-out shoulders there’d been a new groundedness to him. His family would see that, and that could change everything….

  They reached the front foyer, and Fran’s hopes evaporated.

  “What does she mean I’m her father?” Zach demanded, looking at Steve.

  Steve had his arm around Nell’s shoulders, holding her against his side. Behind the defiance blazing out of Nell’s blue eyes, so like Zach’s, Fran also saw confusion. Nell squirmed—not away from Steve, but in front of him, still with his arm around her, so she could see everything that was going on except Steve’s face. Which also meant Steve couldn’t see his daughter’s face.

  Oh, yes, Nell was his daughter. Steve had been this girl’s father from the day she was born, and he would be forever.

  Annette stepped beside Steve, her arm against his, and Fran saw him shift his weight to deepen the contact. Even Lana, whose face seemed frozen in expressionless shock, stood beside Steve, though with a two-foot gap between her and her older son’s family.

  Opposite this family unit stood Zach, alone. His muscle-roped arms hung at his sides, his hands fisted.

  Fran saw confusion in his blue eyes, too. An added uncertainty that hadn’t been there when they had talked outside. Fran moved to the side, midway between him and his family.

  “Nell is my daughter,” Steve said. “Mine and Annette’s.”

  “But she said—”

  “Can’t this wait?” Annette asked. A tear tracked down her cheek as she looked from her husband to his brother. She put her hand on Nell’s shoulder, and Steve’s hand covered hers there. “Zach’s okay, and he’s come back—let’s enjoy that now.”

  But Fran could see that Steve’s relief over his brother had been swamped by protectiveness of his daughter.

  And Zach, staring back at Steve, wasn’t going to let this go. He never had let anything go.

  “Why would she think I’m her father?” he demanded.

  “Because you are,” Nell said. “You and Lily—”

  “Quiet, Nell.”

  But Steve’s order came too late. Zach had gone stone-still, confusion congealing into possibility. “Lily…”

  They all knew he’d had a relationship with Lily Wilbanks before he’d left town. Lily had been Steve’s high-school girlfriend. But by college, Steve and Annette were together and planning to marry, and Lily had set her sights on Zach, until he’d had a climactic fight with his mother and zoomed out of town on his motorcycle that long-ago spring.

  Zach shifted his stance, like a boxer trying to regain his footing after a blow. “So Lily can clear this up, and—”

  “Lily died more than six years ago,” Steve said. “I’m the father on Nell’s birth certificate, I’ve been her father since the moment she was born and I’m raising her, so you don’t have to worry about any of it. You’ve let us know you’re alive, and we’re glad for that, but you can walk away now without any—”

  “I’m not walking away until—”

  “You did it before, you can do it again.”

  “Until,” Zach picked up grimly, “I know what’s going on here.”

  “It’s none of your business.” Steve’s hold on Nell tightened. “This is my family. You left and chose not to have anything more to do with this family.”

  Fran saw the vein at Zach’s temple jump, as if touched by a live wire. But his voice was steady.

  “The girl said I’m her father. Is she lying?”

  Steve’s silence answered eloquently.

  “That makes it my damned business,” Zach said. “I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.”

  The two brothers, polar opposites when they’d been growing up, stared at each other with eerily similar carved-in-granite expressions.

  “We don’t have to do this now,” Annette said. “We can talk tomorrow. Let’s all take tonight to…adjust. That is, if you weren’t planning on leaving Tobias right away, Zach.”

  “I’m staying,” he said, not looking away from Steve. Fran wondered if anyone else noticed that his answer sidestepped any indication of what his original plan had been.

  “You won’t stay in this house, Zachary.”

  Fran flinched at Lana’s clipped, cold voice, the first words she’d heard Lana say to her younger son. Zach showed no reaction.

  “No problem,” he said. “I can find a room at—”

  “He can stay with me,” Fran heard herself say calmly. “I have plenty of room.”

  Chapter Two

  “I’m not going to stay here without paying rent.”

  Stopping on the staircase’s bottom step, Fran looked over her shoulder to find that Zach had advanced exactly one pace past the front threshold of her house before making that proclamation. He held the door open with one hand on the knob. Poised for departure.

  “That’s absurd,” she said. “All I’m giving you is a bed that’s otherwise going to waste. There are four empty bedrooms and enough space in this place for you and me and three more people to rattle around in.”

  He gave her a look that was in some language she couldn’t translate—possibly male.

  “I’m not staying here without paying rent.”

  Make that language stubborn male. Specifically, stubborn male intent on focusing on something—anything—other than the reason he was staying at all.

  She turned to face him fully, but didn’t descend the step. Better to deal with him at eye-level than look up.

  She should have remembered his stubbornness before she’d made her spur-of-the-moment offer. Great time to take the plunge into impulsiveness, Fran.

  “No handouts, Fran,” he added, as if he thought she intended the offer of a room to make up for that moment in Corbett House’s front hall.

  Zach hadn’t gotten any farther inside his childhood home than the front hall.

  You won’t stay in this house, Zachary.

  God, she’d wanted to shake Lana Corbett. Annette had looked stricken, Nell seemed even more confused, and Steve, as focused as he was on Nell, had winced.

  Zach had given no reaction at all.

  It was as if he’d expected his mother’s response. But he couldn’t have, or he wouldn’t have come back. Would he?

  “Being neighborly is not a handout,” Fran told him. “Besides, how long could you afford to sit here in Tobias and pay out rent?”

  That hit something in him she didn’t quite understand. Perhaps it was the prospect of an extended stay in Tobias, but maybe more.

  “I’m not going to be here forever. As soon as I figure out what the hell is happening and what to do about it, I’ll be gone.”

  “And you think that the best resolution to a situation that’s developed over all these years is going to happen at the snap of your fingers? Think again, Zach Corbett.”

  She half expected him to spout off or to take off. He did neither. He dragged in a slow, deep breath, as if his stubbornness shifted to a lower gear, the kind designed to drag him up a mountain if necessary.

  “I appreciate your offering me a place, Fran, but I’m not going to stay here on your charity. I’d get a job if I had to—”

  “Fine,” she said crisply. His stubbornness and his pride. Even as a girl she’d seen the trouble that pair had gotten him into. She’d also wondered if they had saved him from being crushed.

  From her childhood observation post, surrounded by the security of her loving parents, she’d watched the inhabitants of Corbett House next door and wondered why people were the way they were. Early on she’d come to the conclusion that being a Corbett required certain attributes. Wimps need not apply.

  “This isn’t ingratitude or—” Zach sounded defensive.

  “I said fine.” Because what was the alternative? Like he might back down? Besides, she had an idea. “So, do you want to work for your bread and board?”

 
He looked around the hallway, assessing. That gaze had a gloss of expertise about it. Maybe he worked in construction.

  That errant thought rocked her—like dozing in the passenger seat of a car until it stops with a slight jolt that brings you wide awake, and you have no idea where you are.

  What had he been doing during his years away? In all the emotions of his return, no one had thought to ask.

  And he hadn’t said.

  In fact, she realized, he had offered not one word about what he’d done or who he’d become since the spring day he’d shouted defiance at his mother, revved his motorcycle across Corbett House’s pristine front lawn and ridden due west.

  “Doesn’t look like you need any work done,” he said. “The place is in great shape.”

  In other words, don’t make up work for me. Oh, yes, stubbornness and pride.

  She knew better than to dent the one if she hoped to soften up the other.

  “That’s because Rob beat you to it.”

  His brows lifted. “Rob’s in Tobias? When you said it was the two of you, you meant living here? I was sure he’d be some big financial whiz.”

  “He was. Now…he’ll be moving to Tobias permanently at some point. But he’s going to be in Chicago for a while, at least during the week. It’s a long story. Let’s settle this first. I don’t need work on the house, but I do have a job for you, if you want it.”

  “As long as I’m staying in your house, I’ll do whatever work you say. But I’m going to take care of this as fast as I can. Don’t count on me for something long-term.”

  She didn’t argue again about how long it would take him to sort out the issues with his family; she responded only to his warning. “I won’t count on you for anything long-term.”

  A flicker of something rose in his eyes, then subsided as quickly. He produced a twisted grin.

  “Pure Fran Dalton. Cut to the chase, even if it draws blood.” Before she decided whether that called for an answer, he continued, “What’s the job?”

  “I’m in charge of renovating the gardens at Bliss House. I could use someone with muscles.” Now why on earth had she said that? She hurried on, hoping the heat she felt pushing up her throat would turn back south without revealing itself on her face. “And if I could find someone who can run one of those small front-end loaders, I’d be forever grateful because I could stop begging the construction crew for favors. I don’t suppose you can run one of those?”