Baby Blues and Wedding Bells

by Patricia McLinn

  “You don’t… I want you to know I understand. Coming home, your family, finding out about Nell. All of it. I understand.”

  “What are you talking about?” He kissed her forehead, then under the hair at her temple.

  “And if you’re grateful because I’ve helped out in any way…”

  He cupped her jaw, slid his hand into her hair. “Just once, could you be a little less reasonable, a little less calm.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Shh.”

  Zach held her gaze for a heartbeat, then slowly looked down at her mouth. He dipped his head and kissed her.

  It wasn’t like the first kiss. She knew what he intended this time. There should have been no shock.

  There was. Shock of joy and heat and longing.

  His mouth covered hers with slow, sweet persuasion. She parted her lips, wanting the deeper connection. He answered her wanting with long explorations of taste and texture. The stroke of his tongue against hers strummed a moan from her.

  Her fingers felt the soft hair at the back of his neck, sliding into the thickness.

  They were both breathing hard now. He placed his palm on her collarbone, as if to calm her breathing. It did the opposite. The top buttons of her shirt had opened somehow…his hand slipped lower.

  She was in some strange divided place. Wherever he touched her or she touched him, nerves and flesh pulsed with hypersensitivity, the sensation like a fist at the base of her belly that opened and closed. Yet languor claimed the remainder of her, body and mind.

  “Fran…Fran…”

  She put her arm farther around his shoulders, holding him to her. But he was soothing her, easing her away.

  Oh, God, what had she done? What had she wanted to do?

  She turned her face away, and he stroked her cheek.

  “Fran, this isn’t—”

  “No, of course not. I didn’t—I understand. Good night, Zach.”

  Holding her jacket together at her throat, she was up and inside in a second. But she forced herself to walk at a normal pace to the stairs, not looking back.

  To Fran’s hazy, waking mind, her bed seemed to be on fire. The mists rose quickly and she knew it wasn’t the bed at all, but the memories of last night stirring in her body that generated the heat.

  She hurried into a cool shower.

  She’d have to assure Zach that she wouldn’t jump him.

  But first she had work to do. This was the day they would move the trees descended from Bliss House’s original plantings. No wonder her adrenaline was rushing.

  After making the bed and dressing in record time, she pulled on her navy sweater over a striped shirt.

  She turned to the mirror and stilled.

  Was Kay right? Did she dress to hide? With a fistful of material at her waist, she pulled the sweater taut. She released the fist, then pulled the right seam wide so the left side snugged against her. Her right arm was almost straight out.

  The material cupped around her breasts and emphasized the difference between them and her midriff.

  She’d been late to develop. But when she’d started, she’d developed quickly. Overnight, it had seemed, because she hadn’t paid attention with her mother dying that fall and winter.

  The first warm day of spring, eight days after her mother’s funeral, she’d worn a knit top from the year before.

  Even through the numbness of grief, the reaction of the boys at school had penetrated. It shoved her onto center stage, when she had craved invisibility.

  The next day she had worn one of Rob’s shirts.

  She supposed she’d found a more durable solution by gaining weight. Although what she’d told Zach was true—feeding and eating with Rob and their father had packed on pounds.

  But even when she’d lost the extra weight, she’d continued wearing clothes that were too big for her.

  This had nothing to do with Zach, only with her feelings about herself.

  She shed the sweater and shirt, then pulled out a turtleneck she usually wore under sweaters.

  The image in the mirror had her digging in a drawer for a pullover. Then she caught another image—her holding the sweater in front of her like a lifesaver.

  She dropped the sweater on the chest and walked out.

  Steve muttered a curse from the other side of the root ball they were wrapping in burlap.

  Zach looked over his shoulder to see what had got the rise out of Steve, when he noticed Fran coming from the house, where they’d sent her to talk to the lady donating the trees. That diversion hadn’t lasted nearly long enough.

  Fran wore an outfit he’d never seen her in before. A dark green turtleneck that followed her curves and tan slacks that, instead of flapping around her legs, skimmed their contours.

  Not ordinarily a sight to cause any man to curse, except she’d been driving them all nuts for the past three hours with her calm questions and just-to-be-sure reminders. She’d been driving Zach nuts for considerably longer for different reasons.

  Last night…last night he’d been an idiot. Maybe it was partly excusable, because she’d been so damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead about her list of wants. As if she wasn’t likely to get them, but she refused to pretend she didn’t want them.

  What the hell could he do but kiss her after that? And what chance did he have of not wanting more once he’d kissed her? He’d wanted more all right. If there’d been the least doubt it ended when she did that automatic slowing of the porch door with her backside on her way inside.

  Yeah, he’d wanted it all. All of her and all her dreams.

  But the one thing she didn’t want, and sure as hell didn’t need, was a bad boy, possibly reformed or not, but definitely screwed up.

  “Max, go talk to her and keep her from coming over here,” Steve said.

  Zach held an edge of burlap in place while Steve prepared to secure it. Max’s section was fastened, so he was free.

  “Tell her we need her to go ahead to Bliss House and make sure everything’s set,” Steve added. “Tell her we’ll convoy the trees and we’ll be right behind her.”

  “It’ll take a couple of hours,” Zach said.

  “In a couple of hours,” Max repeated.

  “No!” Steve and Zach chorused.

  “Don’t tell her that long,” Steve warned, “or she’ll stay here.”

  Max chuckled, and headed for Fran.

  She looked amazing. When she’d come into the kitchen this morning, Zach had nearly choked on his coffee. That had turned her cheeks pink, brought a frown to Rob’s face and a smile to Kay’s. But Fran hadn’t met his eyes.

  “Max seems like a good guy to have as a brother-in-law,” Zach said, mostly to take his mind off the view and the memories.

  “The best.”

  “But he wasn’t happy that you and Annette were going to get married before she finished school eight years ago.”

  “No. And he was a hell of a lot less happy after what happened at the wedding,” Steve said dryly. “I went to try to talk to Annette and he punched my lights out.”

  Zach winced. A punch from Max was not to be taken lightly.

  “But after a while, crossing paths around town, we reached a truce. Now, all he wants is for Annette to be happy, and that puts us on the same team.”

  “He should give you credit—you never stopped loving Annette.”

  “Not really. Until this spring, I had myself pretty well fooled I was over her. Hell, for a while, I was on a campaign to find a wife and…”

  Zach pretended he didn’t notice Steve stop short of the word mother.

  “Couldn’t find anyone brave enough to face Lana as a mother-in-law?”

  “Didn’t get that far. I only talked to one person about the idea of marriage, and if Fran hadn’t been wise enough to see—”

  “Fran?”

  Steve gave him a hard-eyed look. “You think you’re the only one who sees how great Fran is?”

  “You and Fran? She said…�
� What exactly had she said?

  There was never anything between Steve and me. The idea is laughable. He’s Steve Corbett, for heaven’s sake.

  “That she turned me down flat? Gently, but still flat. Said we didn’t love each other, and a marriage that lacked the foundation of love was wrong for Nell. And she was right.”

  “You asked her to marry you.” Zach wrenched the last corner of burlap into place and nodded for Steve to wrap the closure around it.

  “Didn’t have a chance. She cut me off, made me see I was asking for the wrong reasons.”

  What would Fran consider the right reasons? If she turned down Saint Steven, what kind of guy would Fran ever say yes to?

  He tuned back in to Steve to realize his brother had just finished a long speech and Zach had missed all of it except for the final four words: “…too hard on her.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You’re too hard on Mother.” Steve gave him the grim-older-brother look. “I know that growing up she gave you a hard—”

  Zach emitted a sarcastic “huh.” “I didn’t grow up here. Didn’t grow up until I left. When I was here, I was just a puppet to Lana’s ambitions. That’s all anyone is to her.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. Annette’s made me see things differently—that maybe in her own way Mother wanted the best for us. If Annette can see this from a different angle, I figure I can try, too.”

  “Not me. Now let’s get this thing in the truck and start on the next one or Fran will have our hides.”

  Fran walked to the end of the driveway and looked both ways. No sign of a convoy carrying precious trees.

  Where was he? They—where were they?

  She paced back to the seat built into the patio’s brick wall where Miss Trudi sat. The rest of the committee and a half-dozen volunteers were inside cleaning.

  “They should be here by now,” Fran muttered.

  “My dear, I’m certain they are all safe,” Miss Trudi said.

  Safe? She hadn’t been thinking about safety. At least not of Zach and the others. The safety of the trees was another matter.

  “You think—?”

  “No,” Miss Trudi said firmly. “That is precisely what I said. I do not believe there is any reason to be concerned for their safety. They are three remarkably responsible young men.”

  Well, two of them were. But Zach…? Had he truly changed? Was she letting other factors cloud her judgment? Perhaps she had from the first. There was no denying now that she was physically attracted to him.

  “If there were a problem of any consequence,” Miss Trudi continued, “they would most certainly contact you.”

  “I don’t know Zach’s cell number or I’d call.” She’d restrained herself from calling Steve’s or Max’s cell numbers. So far. “I don’t usually worry like this.”

  “Indeed you do, my dear.”

  That snapped her head around. “What do you mean?”

  “A few short weeks ago you were quite concerned about the growing relationship between your brother and Kay, were you not?”

  “Well, yes. Naturally, I was concerned. Rob was afraid of getting hurt again, and—”

  “I saw no indication of such a fear from Rob. Was that his fear or yours?”

  Fran felt as if she’d received a mild electrical shock. Had she transferred her own feelings to Rob’s relationship with Kay? And that question led to an even more soul-searching one: Was she afraid of being hurt again?

  Was she afraid of making another mistake about a man the way she had with Tim? Was that coloring her reactions to Zach?

  But if an ordinary guy like Tim could use her and be so dismissive, wasn’t there more danger of that with Zach?

  “They’re here, my dear. You need to clear the drive.”

  Fran moved aside quickly, standing next to the Bobcat that would carry the trees to their new homes around the property. Max, the trees in the bed of his pickup, backed in.

  Zach swung out of the passenger side of Max’s truck and strode toward her.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded. “It’s way past—”

  “There was a wreck on the Interstate—”

  “The Interstate? I told you to take the back roads.”

  “We did, Fran,” said Max. “But so did everybody else trying to get away from the wreck on the Interstate.”

  She’d been an idiot. She glanced at Zach. He was fiddling with the Bobcat’s controls, with no effect that she could see.

  “And what with being delayed, we took the rental equipment back first so we wouldn’t be charged an extra day,” Max added. “We tried to call, but you weren’t answering.”

  “My phone never rang. Miss Trudi can verify that. And the battery’s fine, so—” Extending the phone to demonstrate the battery’s state, she noticed it had a black stripe down the side rather than blue. “Oh, God. This is your phone, Zach. I must have grabbed it off the counter this morning. Mine must still be there. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped. I was…” She would not make the excuse of being worried about trees. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked up to find Steve, Max and Miss Trudi watching her and Zach.

  He’d made her a promise, and she’d made it clear she hadn’t trusted that promise. He knew it, she knew it and the others sensed it.

  “Well,” Max said. “Let’s get these trees in the ground.”

  Steve passed Zach, still focused on the contraption’s controls, and said something. Zach looked up. Able to see only Steve’s face, Fran was still certain the brothers had made full eye contact. Not in anger or challenge or assessment, but in full accord for the first time since Zach’s return.

  Great. She’d given the Corbetts something to bond over—finding her a pain in the ass.

  Chapter Nine

  With the trees in place, Zach took a break to wolf down a sandwich and water.

  He was sitting on Bliss House’s front steps when the door opened behind him. Annette and Nell came across the porch.

  “Hi, Zach,” Annette said. “Mind if we join you for a while?”

  He moved the sandwich wrapping. “Be my guest.”

  Nell sat on the same step, but at the opposite end. Annette stood at the bottom, stretching her arms and waggling her hands. “Whew, my fingers are cramping from getting every speck of dust up.”

  She chatted about the schedule remaining before Friday’s opening. “Well, I’d better get back in and get started on the windows.”

  Nell didn’t budge.

  “Annette,” he protested. Steve had made his rules clear.

  “It’s okay, I’ll be right inside.”

  At least he would stick to Steve’s commandment about leaving it up to Nell to talk. They could sit in silence for a month. Fine with him.

  “Do you hate Grandmother?” Nell asked abruptly.

  Yeah, a month of silence definitely would have been fine with him. But the kid deserved honesty.

  “No, I don’t hate her.” He’d been sure he hated her when he left, but that was a long time ago.

  “But you’re angry at her.”

  “She does—she’s done things that make me angry, yes.”

  Nell nodded.

  He was starting to hope this line of questioning was over when she spoke again. “Why don’t you like Grandmother?”

  This one he couldn’t deny, either.

  He thought about the people he liked, those he felt more than liking for. An image of Fran’s face, before he’d kissed her last night, formed in his head. That wasn’t the liking Nell was asking about.

  “With people you like, you usually have things in common. The same things are important to you and you respect the other person. If you don’t have that, a lot of times you don’t like the person much. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t help them if they were in trouble, but they’re not someone you want to spend a lot of time with.”

  “But she’s your mother.”

  “Sometimes that doesn’t change thin
gs.”

  Her eyebrows knitted. “I don’t know if I like my mother, because she’s dead. But sometimes I’m mad at her. She was a bad mother.”

  He couldn’t imagine Steve saying that to a child; Nell must have gotten it from another source. “Why do you say that?”

  “I was too little to remember her, but people told me. Sometimes I just heard.” She slanted a look at him, and Zach figured she was checking if he knew she’d heard things last night, too. He let her see that he did. She gave a tiny shrug. “She ran off when I was little, and she took drugs.”

  “I don’t know about all that, Nell. I wasn’t here.”

  “But Grandmother didn’t do those things. She’s not fun, not like Miss Trudi, but she’s not bad. Maybe you should get to know her. Then you wouldn’t be so angry at her. Because I don’t think you’re going to get another mother like I did.”

  She looked up at the window to Annette, who smiled at her.

  “You’re lucky, Nell, to have a mother like Annette.” He swallowed. “And a father like your dad.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, as if he’d said she was lucky to live in a world with gravity. “I gotta go. See you later.”

  Fran closed the dishwasher. Zach flipped off the light, and they started up the stairs. It had been a long day.

  The trees were planted. Rob was on his way back to Chicago. Kay was at Miss Trudi’s “to keep her company,” although she would be back frequently to be with Chester and the puppies. Zach had cooked a pork roast for dinner, and they’d cleaned up together.

  And if Fran didn’t say something she would explode.

  “Zach. I’m sorry.” She stopped at the base of the stairs. “You said you’d get the trees to Bliss House safely. I should have trusted you.”

  “Why should you trust Tobias’s bad boy, Fran?”

  “Because you’re not that boy anymore.”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but his eyes revealed more complicated reactions.

  “I was glad to see you and Steve talking,” she said abruptly.

  “Yeah, we talked.” He gave her yet another look she didn’t understand, and gestured for her to go up.