Wife in the Mail

by Marie Ferrarella

  A court order, courtesy of an artful lawyer, had denied him visitation privileges. Her lawyer’s justification: his visits, sporadic at best, would disrupt the flow of their young lives.

  The one time he’d actually flown out to see his kids, Barbara had called the police. He hadn’t even been able to broach the subject of having them come to visit him to Barbara, let alone the squadron of lawyers she’d employed to keep him away. Not wanting to pull the children into the center of the battlefield, and with no funds of his own to hire representation that even remotely approached the caliber of lawyers she had at her disposal, Shayne had retreated.

  No, “surrendered outright” was more like it. But he’d never stopped loving them. His surrender had only had one term attached to it: that Barbara regularly send him photographs of the children. She’d reluctantly agreed.

  The result: he had two children at home who didn’t know him. Children he had to somehow incorporate into his life now that their mother was dead.

  He didn’t need to be out here, hunting for some woman who’d been foolish enough to believe Ben’s silver-inked lies.

  Didn’t need to be out here, except that Ben had left him a note, asking him to do this “one last favor” for him. He supposed that he felt sorry for this woman and, in some remote way, responsible. Perhaps, if he had found a way to knock some sense of responsibility into Ben when they were growing up, instead of letting him slide, Ben wouldn’t have done something this unpardonably thoughtless and cruel. Only three years older than Ben, Shayne had been no more prepared for the role of fatherhood at eighteen than he was now at thirty-four. But that was no excuse. He should have done a better job.

  With an annoyed sigh, Shayne dragged a hand through his wayward black hair and looked around, feeling as if he was on a fool’s errand.

  People hurried by him. He looked at their faces, trying to make out features. He’d give this search half an hour, no more. There were far more pressing things waiting for him to tend to than looking for a woman who in all likelihood wasn’t even here.

  Part of him hoped she wasn’t. He didn’t relish having to explain this to her.

  Shayne pulled out the photograph his brother had left with the note. Glancing at it again, Shayne shoved it back into his pocket, wrinkling it.

  She wasn’t here. He’d lay odds on it.

  To be honest, Shayne had to admit a part of him had entertained the small hope that this woman Ben had been corresponding with would have a settling effect on his younger brother.

  He should have known better.

  There was no changing Ben. Not even medical school had tamed him. Why should a woman who was thousands of miles away make any difference to his brother?

  But if that were the case, why had he asked her to marry him? What the hell had Ben been thinking?

  That was just it. Ben hadn’t been thinking. He’d just gone along with what had felt right at the moment. Running off with Lila had probably seemed right to him at the moment, too.

  Ben’s abrupt departure had squelched the last of Shayne’s optimism. Not to mention removed the one buffer he’d had between him and his children. Ben had been the one highlight in their young lives since they’d been transplanted here two months ago. Mac and Sara both adored their uncle. He made them laugh and they could talk to him. Shayne didn’t know what to say to them.

  Shayne’s mouth twisted into an ironic smile. When he and Ben were growing up, everyone had always depended on him, but it was Ben they had adored. Shayne had made his peace with that a long time ago.

  So here he was, cleaning up another one of Ben’s messes. The last one, if he was lucky.

  Hers were the last two suitcases left on the carousel that displayed the disembarking passengers’ luggage as it came off the conveyor belt. Instead of taking them, Sydney’d watched them go around and around as passenger after passenger subtracted pieces of luggage from the collection. It had given her an excuse to stay here, waiting in full view.

  Her excuse was gone now. Everyone else had taken their luggage off. She couldn’t just continue to stand beside the carousel, watching her suitcases move slowly around in a circle, only to appear time and again like the last two remaining wallflowers who hadn’t been asked to dance.

  Waiting until they reached her again, she took the suitcases off one at a time and debated what to do next. The logical thing was to remain in the airport until Ben appeared, or sent someone to get her. But she wasn’t the type to stay put. She didn’t like to wait, she liked to do, to move.

  She thought of trying to locate a bush pilot who would be willing to fly her to Hades.

  But what, if in doing that, she missed Ben? He could very well be on his way here right now. The idea of playing hide-and-seek between here and Hades was less than appealing.

  They should have discussed an alternate plan, she thought. Too late now. Besides, it had never occurred to her that Ben wouldn’t be here when she stepped off the plane. Everything he had ever written to her pointed to how reliable he was. Even the way he worried about his older brother, Shayne. He felt that Shayne had lost the ability to enjoy life, had allowed Alaska to deplete him rather than enhance him. It had begun early on, he’d written. Shayne had raised him after their parents had both died in an avalanche. His time to be young had abruptly ended. Ben’s concern for Shayne was part of the reason she’d fallen in love with him. It just went to show her how large and caring a heart he had.

  There had probably been an emergency for Ben to deal with, she finally decided. The clinic took up a great deal of his time and when he wasn’t there, he was a bush pilot, flying supplies to people who lived and worked in even more out-of-the-way places than Hades. It would be just like him to put his own life on hold for someone else. In the short eight months that they’d corresponded, Sydney had felt that, with the exception of her late father and Marta, she had gotten to know Benjamin Kerrigan better than anyone she’d actually interacted face-to-face with.

  It was time, she told herself, to do something before she grew roots in this airport terminal. Tucking her carry-on under her arm, and slinging her purse over her shoulder, she picked up her suitcases, ready to go in search of the information booth.

  “Are you Sydney Elliot?”

  The suitcases almost dropped from her fingers as her heart leaped to her throat.

  Finally!

  Sydney spun around in response to the gruffly voiced question, fully anticipating to see Ben standing behind her. As far as she knew, no one else here would know her name.

  Her smile froze a little around the edges as a tinge of confusion took hold of her heart. The man standing in front of her resembled the man in the photograph she had in her purse, but in only the most cursory way. The man was a little older-looking, and…She supposed “harsher” would be the word she was looking for. His jaw appeared to be more chiseled than the one in the photograph, although that could be because of his expression.

  The greatest difference was in the eyes. There was no laughter in this man’s eyes. Instead of being the color of shamrocks in the morning, his emerald-green eyes were piercing, commanding. And troubled.

  Something was very wrong here.

  Sydney set her suitcases down, her eyes on the man’s. “Yes?”

  She wasn’t as pretty as her photograph, Shayne realized. She was prettier, with hair like a golden sunset, eyes the color of the sky in the middle of summer, and skin the color of honey.

  What was she doing here? he wondered again. Why would she want to live out her life in a place where most of the young inhabitants bailed out as soon as they reached the legal age of eighteen?

  Sydney could feel his eyes boring into her, studying her dispassionately, as if she were an object rather than a person. The uneasiness within her grew a little greater.

  She cleared her throat, hoping, too, to clear away her nervousness. “Did Ben send you?”

  Even as she asked, she looked behind the man, praying that she’d see Ben walking t
oward her. But there was no one.

  “Yes, he did.” Damn it, Ben, this was irresponsible, even for you. The awkwardness of the situation chafed Shayne. There was no easy way to break this to her, and he’d never been much for talking. That, too, was Ben’s gift, not his. “I didn’t know how to reach you. By the time I found your address, you were already on your way here.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she tried to glean information from words that were just sailing past her without leaving an impression.

  “I don’t understand. Reach me about what?” She looked at him. “Who are you?”

  “Shayne Kerrigan.” As if in afterthought, he put out his hand. “Ben’s brother.”

  The premonition she’d been sparring with scored a major hit and secured a huge toehold. Snatches of utterly opposing scenarios crowded her brain—Ben, taking the nearest dogsled out of Hades, escaping before her plane touched down. Ben, single-handedly fighting off some dreaded ebola virus. Ben—

  She had to stop this. She couldn’t keep speculating, not when there was a perfectly good way to access the information she sorely needed to calm her nerves.

  “Why isn’t Ben here?” She moved closer, searching Shayne’s face. “Has something happened to him?”

  Damn it, Shayne hated being put in this position. “Not exactly to him. But, yes, I’m afraid that something has happened.”

  The way he said that froze her heart. Iciness slipped completely over her, coating her skin with a thin layer of frost. Unwilling to let her imagination go any further, she placed her hand imploringly on his arm.

  “What?” She wanted to know. “What’s happened? Why isn’t Ben here himself to tell me?”

  Because he’s a coward.

  The words hovered on his lips, but Shayne didn’t say them. He was loyal to the end, he supposed. Or maybe he was just stupid.

  Shayne banked his annoyance. Ben wasn’t bad, he just had this wild streak, a streak that refused to recognize that he was a grown man now and a grown man didn’t propose to one woman, then run off with another. A grown man remained to sort things out and make them right.

  When had Ben ever done that? The thought mocked Shayne. Ben had always relied on him to clean things up for him. Which then made this woman’s dilemma his fault. If he’d instilled Ben with a better sense of responsibility—

  But, damn it, no one had taught him that, Shayne thought. He just was.

  Shayne looked at the woman in front of him, sympathy elbowing its way to the foreground. His tongue felt like a lead weight. “Ben can’t be here himself,” he said again.

  Why was he toying with her like this? Sydney wondered. “Has he been detained?”

  “No. Ben went to get married.”

  She smiled at Shayne then. The man was pulling her leg All right, she could enjoy a joke with the best of them. “Yes, I know. Ben’s getting married to me.”

  But Shayne shook his head. “Look, there’s no polite, easy way to tell you this. Ben left a note for me early this morning.” Shayne recited the essence of the note the way he would recite symptoms of frostbite to one of his patients. Quickly, dispassionately. “His old fiancée returned to Hades to look him up. The long and the short of it is, they patched up their differences and they’re getting married. Might already be married, for all I know. He asked me to tell you.”

  Sydney could only stare at him in disbelief.

  Chapter Two

  Shayne faltered when he saw the look of abject distress enter her eyes. And then her eyes began to shimmer with welled-up tears.

  She wasn’t going to cry, was she? Shayne felt something twist in his gut as he cursed Ben’s thoughtlessness again. He’d never known what to do when a woman cried. Ben was the one with a talent for making them smile again, not him.

  Shayne’s inclination was to turn around and walk out of the airport as fast as he could. But he knew he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. One irresponsible coward to a family was enough.

  Feeling awkward as hell, Shayne mumbled, “I’m sorry,” then mentally fumbled, knowing that wasn’t enough. He really didn’t feel like having her make a scene here, not with him in it. But more than that, though she was a stranger to him, he didn’t relish being the cause of her pain.

  He wasn’t, he reminded himself. Ben was.

  “Ben isn’t the most reliable of people,” Shayne added after a beat.

  “No,” Sydney agreed, the words leaving her lips slowly. “I guess not.”

  She felt as if she were in a dream. A horrible, suffocating, recurring dream where she was moving in slow motion through a thick haze, waiting for things to become clear again. Except they weren’t. And they wouldn’t, not after what Shayne Kerrigan had just told her.

  First Ken, now Ben.

  Sydney blinked, desperate to keep the tears back. Served her right for putting her heart on the line again, she chided herself. Hadn’t she learned her lesson the first time?

  Obviously not. Well, she certainly learned it this time.

  Damn you, Ben, Shayne thought. Why can’t you do your own dirty work? And why can’t you ever try to live up to expectations?

  Shayne dug into his front pocket and held out a handkerchief to the woman. The flash of a smile she offered in return seemed to pierce right through him. He thought of Ralph Teager. He’d treated the man for the flu last week. Maybe he’d picked up the bug himself. There was no other explanation for the sudden quickening of his heartbeat.

  Shayne shifted, glancing around the airport. No one seemed to be paying any attention to them. He wanted to keep it that way. Shayne looked again at the woman in front of him.

  She looked a great deal more stoic than he knew Ben’s Lila to be. Birds of a feather, Ben and Lila. Both wanting to drain all the fun out of something, then move on. He hated to think of the kinds of kids they’d raise, if they managed to stay together long enough to have any.

  But then, how stable could this woman actually be, he asked himself, dropping everything to fly out here to marry a man she’d never met? That certainly didn’t bode well in the common sense department as far as he was concerned.

  Oh, damn, she was going to cry. Helplessness seared through him, skewered him.

  Shayne winced inwardly at the tears glistening in her eyes. He could see the struggle she was waging to not let them fall. Admiration whispered through him, quelling the helpless feeling. He admired control. Seeing it affected him far more than vulnerability. It was easy to go to pieces, to hysterically throw up one’s hands and give up, the way Barbara had with life in Alaska. It was a great deal harder not to.

  The woman Ben had abandoned went up a notch in Shayne’s regard. She shouldn’t have to put up with this.

  He wasn’t impulsive by nature, yet Shayne found himself sliding his hands beneath his faded royal blue parka and digging a worn and cracked wallet out of his back jeans’ pocket.

  “Look, why don’t I buy you a plane ticket back to…” Shayne paused, waiting for her to fill in the destination. All he knew about her was that she had come from one of the other states.

  “Nebraska. Omaha.” Even as she said it, the city felt a million miles away from here. She’d left it all behind her in more ways than just physically.

  “Omaha.” Shayne nodded.

  A nice, sane place. The woman should have had more sense, coming from the heart of the country. It made him think of grounded people, people with their feet firmly planted and their heads a long way away from the clouds. It seemed to him that someone there should have talked to this woman.

  Opening his wallet, Shayne took out all the money he had on him and realized that it wouldn’t be enough to cover a ticket. Resigned, he took out a small, folded piece of beige paper tucked behind the bills. It was a blank check that he kept strictly for emergencies. Unfolding it carefully, he told himself he should have known he’d use it someday to take care of one of Ben’s problems.

  Shayne glanced at “Ben’s problem” again and couldn’t help but wonder if she had no family, n
o one with brains enough to insist that she stay where she belonged instead of flying off to a place that probably seemed as alien to her as the moon.

  “Why don’t I buy you a ticket back to Omaha,” he offered, “and you can put this whole ugly thing behind you?”

  It definitely seemed like a plan to him. And this way, his conscience would be clear. But when he turned to go, he realized that Ben’s mail-ordered fiancée wasn’t beside him. Turning, he looked back at her, raising a brow in a silent question. Now what?

  He struggled to not sound impatient. He’d taken precious time off he couldn’t afford to lose just to be here. “Aren’t you coming?”

  It was tempting—oh, so tempting, Sydney thought, to take this man up on his offer, cut her losses and run back to familiar surroundings. But even though she’d left her best friend behind, familiar surroundings weren’t enough. They wouldn’t do this time. What she needed was a fresh start in a fresh place. That didn’t include Omaha.

  Sydney shook her head. “No.”

  He blinked, certain he’d heard wrong. “Excuse me?”

  She took a deep breath. It was easier this time. “I said no.”

  Shayne thought he understood what the problem was. She was probably suspicious of the offer. After what she’d been through, he supposed he couldn’t blame her.

  He held his position, waiting for her to come to him.

  “Maybe you don’t understand.” He held the blank check out to her. “I’m giving you your fare home. No strings attached. It’s the least I can do after what Ben put you through.”

  It was also the most he could do because money was not something he had a great deal of. Enough for comfort, not enough for luxuries, and paying for a plane ticket for a strange woman came under the heading of luxuries.