by Nella Tyler
“Did I ever tell you that I did all my chores on the day Addie was born?” I watched as Cade shook out the blanket and laid it down under the tree. Tuck picked up both the basket and the big thermos full of iced tea, giving me a quick wink.
“Addie is one thing,” Cade said. “Her little brother-to-be is another. I don’t want you working so hard.” I sighed and sat down on the blanket, and Addie threw herself down next to me with all the enthusiasm she could muster. My little toddler was almost old enough to start pre-school, and Cade and I had an appointment later in the week to visit the few options in town to decide which would be the best for her.
It felt weird, but perfect that Cade was so involved in Addie’s life; even if he’d only entered it when she was almost a year old, he had taken over his fatherly duties in such a way that anyone who saw them together would think that he’d been there from the moment of her birth.
“Working so hard is how she ended up pregnant, if I recall correctly,” Tuck joked. Addie had asked questions about where her brother had come from, and we had tried to answer them accurately, but not exactly in graphic terms. Mom, Dad, and Tuck had found out about the explanation, and it had become a family joke—with comments about my “work ethic” and Cade’s “hard labor” flying right over my daughter’s head.
Tuck went to work emptying the basket; it was early in the growing season yet, so I’d been busy clearing out the pantries for the bounty to come. There was a beet salad, some chicken salad, fresh bread that I’d baked off that morning, some cheese and hard-boiled eggs, and a few other odds and ends from the pantry—even some hand-pies with the leftover strawberry-rhubarb filling mom and I had put away the year before.
All the while, Tuck and Cade were chatting about the problem they’d been working on when I’d arrived. I shook my head, smiling to myself. Everything seemed to have come together right about the time that Tuck and Cade had discussed—and gone through with—jointly investing in the farm. It had made it possible for Dad to buy up a little more land to expand the fields, which would mean that Cade and I could get half of the property one day, and Tuck would get the other half. Of course, my brother and my lover were going to work the lands together, but splitting up the farm meant that everyone had a little bit of space.
But as I watched two of the most important men in my life chatting like old friends, I couldn’t help feeling amused. “You know, Cade, we should probably just go ahead and go to the justice of the peace,” I said, cutting into their conversation as I nibbled on some bread with chicken salad.
“What? I thought you wanted a big wedding,” he said, frowning in confusion. I grinned.
“Well you and Tuck are already acting like brothers, so we’re practically married already,” I pointed out. “We just need the paperwork done.” We’d talked a few times about a wedding, especially once I’d gotten pregnant with our future son months before. Cade had wanted to plan the wedding as soon as possible, mindful of my reputation, but I’d already had one child out of wedlock. Having another with the man I loved—the man who was staying by my side—wasn’t going to damage my reputation.
When I’d insisted that I was not going to walk down the aisle with a big, pregnant belly straining at the front of my wedding dress, Cade had backed off of the idea. At that, I was starting to think that I wanted as simple a ceremony as possible, maybe not even at the church.
“We’re going to have a proper wedding, as soon as that guy is out of your belly and you’re recovered,” Cade said, nodding at me. I smiled.
“Fine, fine,” I said. “We have to do that paperwork, too.” I didn’t say what paperwork in particular, but Cade and Tuck both knew. Cade had decided to formally adopt Addie, and we’d agreed amongst all of us that she didn’t need to know that there had ever been another father in her life other than him.
That reminded me of Titan. The last I’d heard about him in town, he’d moved to the west coast, somewhere in Oregon, chasing after yet another woman after the last one dumped him.
I hadn’t heard from him in person in more than a year. He had tried to get in touch once more, insisting that he really did want to have a part in Addie’s life, but I had stood firm, and I’d talked to his parents about the fact that I wanted them to encourage Titan not to try again. He wasn’t interested in his own daughter as anything other than a bargaining chip with me. I’d had his parents mail him the paperwork to renounce any parental rights to Addie, and I’d gotten them back about two months later.
From then on, I’d considered Titan out of my life permanently, and out of my daughter’s life, too.
“So how’s the planning going on the new house?” Tuck sat back on the blanket, sipping his iced tea. Cade looked proud at the question.
“It’s coming along really well,” he replied. Since Cade had worked in construction for so many years before coming to work for my dad, he knew more than enough people to help him build us a new house. It was going to be on the other end of the property, the new addition Dad had bought a year and a half before, the part that I was slated to inherit with Cade.
We had agreed that we wanted our own place—a real place, not just a guest house, somewhere we could raise Addie and her coming little brother. Cade had been meeting with friends for weeks, explaining what he needed. Since he had a stake in the farm’s profits instead of taking a regular salary, and I had my own stake as well, we’d gone in on the cost of it together and we could afford to get exactly what we wanted.
“They think it’s going to be done by the time harvest is here,” I told my brother. “The architect did the design at a discount as a favor for Cade, and the foreman is giving us a good rate on the building.”
It was hard for me to believe, but by the time that harvest came, I was going to have a new life, a new baby, and a new house. On top of it all, I was going to have a man who loved me to share it all with. Even a few years before, when I’d first met Cade, I never would have imagined that my life could change in such a short time; I hadn’t even thought that I would be in a serious relationship before my daughter was in school.
I had seen a lot of good things come out of the ground at the farm, but this year’s harvest was going to be a particularly good one.
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COACH – THE COMPLETE SERIES
By Nella Tyler
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Nella Tyler
VOLUME I
Chapter One
Natalie
I tried not to fidget while I waited at the table inside Greentree Café, looking around to spot my date as soon as he arrived. It was almost like a blind date—but I knew we wouldn’t end up in some kind of relationship, or ever end up sleeping together, even if it went well. It was practice. My “date” was actually a client by the name of Zeke Baxter, a 30-year-old bachelor who had finally come to the decision to take time away from wheeling and dealing to get back into the dating world; maybe he was getting into the dating world for the first time.
I had a lot of sympathy for my clients; I had actually taken my job as a dating coach with a company that coached clients before setting them up on real dates because I wanted an excuse to meet people, to go on dates. Based on the profile that my boss had given me, Zeke was an all right guy: tall, with decent taste in fashion, groomed, and well-to-do. He didn’t have that many interests listed on his chart, but I figured that we could find something that would be fun to do on our dates together in the future.
The first meeting with a new client always made me a little nervous. It was like an actual date and a job interview all rolled up into one. I glanced around the café once more, resisting the
urge to check the time for another minute or so. I’d arrived early to make sure I could scope out the place—it was closer to Zeke’s office, somewhere I’d only been once or twice before. It seemed like a decent place, and glancing at the menu, I’d noticed that it was slightly higher-end than I would have picked for myself, but then, I didn’t have to worry about the tab at the end of the night. One of the conditions of my contract was that the client paid for all dates—but then, of course, the client had final say in what the dates would be and where they would be.
I heard my phone vibrate in my purse and snatched it up, wondering if it was Zeke texting to tell me that he was late or my boss contacting me to let me know that the client had backed out, gotten cold feet, or decided to put practice dating on hold. Instead of either of those options, the text had come from my babysitter, and I opened the message eagerly. Brady is doing great! Just wanted to check in. Attached to the message was a picture of my son playing with his favorite stuffed animal lobster toy. We’ll start getting ready for bed soon, Alicia added. I smiled to myself; though I missed my son when I had to be away to work, I didn’t have much choice—and I knew that he was in good hands with Alicia.
I replied to the messages quickly, feeling a stab of guilt at the fact that I had my phone out when I was supposed to be waiting patiently for my coaching client to arrive. Looks like you’re having a great time! I will definitely be home on time this evening, so let my sweetie know that if he’s good and takes his bath, I’ll bring a treat home for him as a bedtime snack. I tapped send and then locked the screen, putting the phone back into my purse. Unless something happened to Brady, I didn’t think I’d hear from the sitter for the rest of the evening, which was as it should be.
I told myself that it was just another date with just another client. Zeke Baxter was like any one of a dozen clients I’d worked with since I had taken the job on, and I would be just as capable of steering him in the right direction as I had with every other client. I would smooth off his rough edges, get his confidence up, and in next to no time—a few months, tops—I would discharge him and he’d be out in the world, asking women out, finding a girlfriend and maybe a wife. After about two years on the job, I knew what to expect; I knew how to handle almost any client my boss could throw at me.
It had started shortly after my son Brady had turned one. When I’d had Brady, my life had been completely and totally different to what it was now. I’d been married, thinking that I was starting a life and a family with the man I loved. I had actually believed when I’d gotten pregnant with my son that I was going to be with Alex for the rest of my life, that we’d grow old together.
Brady hadn’t exactly been an accident, but he had been sort of a surprise. Alex and I had talked about having kids, and I had stopped taking birth control, but we’d thought that it would take a few months for my cycle to clear out, for the hormones to get fully out of my system. That was what the doctor had told me. So when I’d gotten pregnant less than two months after stopping birth control, it had been kind of a shock—but one I was ready to embrace. At first, Alex had been, too; he had told me again and again how glad he was that we were getting it over with, getting started right off the mark. He had told me that he wanted to have two more after the first one, as long as I was ready for them. And of course, when we went to the ultrasound appointment where they told us Brady’s sex, he’d spent the entire week afterward beaming and bragging to all of his friends and coworkers that he was having a boy.
And then Brady had arrived. I’d had what they called an easy labor—and having heard all the horror stories myself, I had to admit objectively that it could have been a lot worse—and after six hours of waiting, and waiting, and holding back, and then pushing, Brady had come out of me: perfect, tiny, with a fuzzy head stained with blood from my body and ten tiny fingers and toes. He’d been just over seven pounds, and when he screamed out his first breath, I was immediately in love. I almost couldn’t make myself put him down, even though I knew I should. I nursed him, and loved him, and cared about him more than I had cared about anything or anyone else in my life.
I don’t know if things had gone bad between Alex and me before I even gave birth to Brady, but after I got home from the hospital, things started to go downhill faster and faster. Alex couldn’t understand why I was exhausted all the time; he came home and if I didn’t have dinner done and Brady quiet, he left right away, headed into town to meet up with his friends to grab a meal with them. He tried to paint it as an attempt to take the burden off of me, but I couldn’t help but resent the fact that he could come and go—and did—as he pleased, while I was more or less trapped under house arrest. And of course, Alex wanted to go back to having sex several times a week as soon as I had medical clearance to do so; but even though I felt more in control of my body, more sexual than I had in the last months before delivering Brady, I still needed warming up before I felt like actually having sex.
Everything went from bad to worse as the months went by, and it became obvious to me that Alex hadn’t actually been fully ready to have a son. Alex wanted everything to be the way that it was before Brady had been born, before I’d even gotten pregnant. He didn’t want to get up at night to feed the baby, he didn’t want to take care of Brady for a few hours so I could take a nap, enjoy a long bath, or maybe meet up with my friends for lunch or a cup of coffee. He barely even noticed Brady at all, in fact.
By my son’s first birthday, it had been obvious to me that it just wasn’t going to work. I’d been ashamed at first because I’d always thought that I’d have better taste, better discernment in picking someone to make a family with, and because I knew my family would think that it was at least partially my own fault. I wished that I could be what Alex wanted me to be, and what Brady needed me to be, at the same time, but when Alex barely even managed to show up for his own son’s birthday party, and barely paid attention to the party at that, I had known that I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to make a choice. And I chose Brady.
Alex didn’t cause much trouble in the family courts. He didn’t want more than token visitation rights and he was willing to pay child support. For my part, I’d told the lawyer that took my case that I wanted the bare minimum from Alex. I didn’t want to feel like I was taking advantage of him or that I was being given guilt money. I just wanted enough to support Brady. But of course, I wanted to support my own self. So I’d begun to look for a job.
One of my friends had suggested that since I was newly single, and since I was pretty and experienced in the world, I should sign up to be a dating coach. I’d thought she was out of her mind until I looked at the job posting; it was flexible hours, which of course I would need for taking care of my toddler son, and the pay was excellent. I’d studied psychology in college, though I hadn’t gotten my counseling license because I’d married Alex almost right after graduation and he’d had an excellent job that paid well, with good benefits, but I still knew the ropes.
After a questionnaire, four interviews, and a practice date with one of the other coaches and her client, I was onboard. I found that I actually liked the work. It was definitely better than working a call center or in retail, which at that point had been my only other options short of going back to school. After two years, I hadn’t found anyone that I personally wanted to date on my own—that was, my boss Katie had told me, one of the biggest dangers of the job—but I had gotten comfortable in my own skin and knew more than ever what I wanted in a man. As I settled in to wait for Zeke to arrive, I went over my standard first meeting questions in my mind and told myself that this would be the same as any assignment, maybe even a little better. Guys who knew how to take care of themselves were a lot easier to coach. I might even get a bonus if I could steer this businessman in the right direction faster than the projected timeframe.
That is, of course, if he takes it seriously. If he runs late, I’ll know he’s going to be the type that I have to be firm with from the beginning and lighten up later on. I
checked the time; he had all of ten minutes before he was officially late to his first session with me, and I would absolutely note that down on my report. If he was more than fifteen minutes late, I could cancel our appointment with no fault, and I would get to go home to my little man early and bring him the treat I’d promised.
Chapter Two
Zeke
I felt a little nervous when I got to Greentree Café, but I told myself that was normal; I hadn’t been on a date with anyone at all in years, and even if this was nothing more than a practice date, it gave me the same feeling I got when I had to make a presentation to a prospective client cold. Except you’d better keep in mind that you’re the client this time, Zeke, I told myself as I walked up and opened the door to the café. I’d agreed to meet with Natalie here because it was within walking distance of my office; even if I’d had to stay a little late to finish up a few things, I’d figured it would be easy to dash out for the forty-five minutes that the date would last and then get back into the office building after if I had to. Fortunately, I’d managed to get all the work off of my plate before the end of the day, so when six-thirty rolled around, I was ready to change out of my suit and into a pair of jeans and a casual shirt. I had a name—Natalie Leathers—and I figured that I would see what she looked like when I got to the table where she was waiting for me.
The hostess at the stand in front of the café was cute: blonde, skinny, wearing the black skirt and white blouse that made up the café uniform. “Good evening,” I said, inclining my head towards her. “I’m meeting someone here—her name is Natalie Leathers. Has she arrived?”