Libby thought back to her own home-ec class and asked with a wince, “You mean the requisite white sauce made you want to be a chef?”
He laughed and lifted the lid off a garlic pot. He made a disgusted sound when he found it empty, then scanned a spice rack for minced garlic. “No. Mrs. Morden was more creative than that. We made toffee bark, cheese enchiladas and scampi that was to die for. I even continued to love cooking when a few self-important members of the football team decided it wasn’t cool and locked me in the pantry on a Friday night.”
Libby looked at him in concern as she pulled spoons out of the utensil drawer and began to set the table. “When did you get out?”
“Sunday afternoon.”
“No! Your mom must have been frantic.”
Darren grinned as he forked minced garlic into a cube of butter. “You might say that. Particularly since she’d just had to bail Jared out of jail. He was hanging Willy Goldbeck by his feet off a cliff at North Head.”
She couldn’t help an answering grin. “Willy Goldbeck, I suppose, was one of the kids who locked you up?”
“Right. Bane of my existence all through school. Jared’s very touchy when people don’t tell him what he wants to know.”
Yes. She knew that.
“I used to resent him a lot when we were kids because he was more athletic than me, better in school, more popular with the other kids. But about the time of the pantry incident, I began to realize that all those things came naturally to him. But except for the usual sibling persecution stuff, he supported and defended me in any and every way. He lent me money to start the restaurant. He waited tables and did dishes for me several times those first few months until I got staff problems ironed out. I even think he hired Justy when she quit the restaurant, so that she wouldn’t move away. He brought Mom to stay with him for two months when our father died, and found someone to help her regular clerk in the shop.”
That only confirmed what she was already beginning to recognize. “Well,” she said. “He’ll make good father material.”
“The best.”
That was wonderful for Savannah and Zachary, but for her—well…damn it.
Chapter Nine
Darren left shortly after lunch and came bursting back into the workshop just before four. He had a khaki raincoat on over his tux and looked as if he’d swallowed plastique and was about to blow.
Jared was examining four timber brackets he was considering keeping for himself, when Darren’s index finger suddenly wagged threateningly in his face.
“I don’t care if she has bubonic plague!” he roared, pointing that finger in the air, then striding across the workroom as though his pants were on fire. Jared assessed the situation and guessed that maybe they were. A hundred people in his dining room couldn’t fluster Darren, but one young woman could.
“You’ve been to see Justy.”
Darren wheeled on his heel and strode back to him, hands in his pockets, eyes hot enough to melt marble. “I have been to see the meanest, sorriest-natured, beastiest woman on the face of this Earth, and if I’m ever—ever!—tempted to put aside my instinctive inclination to keep my distance, to extend the hand of Christian kindness…” He picked up a turned oak baluster off the sanding table and extended it toward him. “Hit me with this until I come to my senses.”
Jared took it from him and put it down again. “She didn’t like the soup?”
Darren raised both hands out to his sides in a gesture of profound exasperation. “She wouldn’t even let me in to give it to her! She said she didn’t want my soup—she wanted my baby. And if I wasn’t willing to give it to her, we didn’t have anything to say to each other.” Darren fell into a Gothic bishop’s chair that was missing the finials on each side. “What is wrong with her? What’s wrong with everyone? Mom’s planning to move to Puerto Rico to get married! You’re adopting two little kids! And I’m…” Darren rested his head against the high back. “I’m thinking about giving Justy what she wants.”
Jared moved the brackets aside and came around the table to lean a hip on it and frown at his brother. “Darren…do you think you can do that? Make a baby and walk away?”
“No,” he replied, without needing time to think. “But I’ll lay down a stipulation of my own, and if she’s willing to comply, I’ll do it for her.”
Jared was reluctant to ask. “What stipulation?”
“That we live together through conception and until she delivers.”
That sounded like trouble. “Presuming that during that time she’ll see that you’re nothing like her father, that she loves you after all and that she can’t live without you.”
Darren nodded approvingly. “Well done. See? You could have a criminal mind, too, if you worked at it.”
“You’re playing with fire, you know.”
“Sure I do. But man needs fire. And it’s a critical element in my work. I’m accustomed to dealing with it. Don’t worry about me.”
“Right.” Jared rolled his eyes. “I foresee a weekend in a high-school pantry—metaphorically speaking.”
Darren grinned. “Come on. Have faith.” Then he sobered again and linked his hands across his stomach. “What’s with Libby today?”
Jared felt something inside him start in reaction. He was going quietly crazy where she was concerned. “Why? What do you mean?”
Darren seemed to be measuring his expression. “I don’t know,” he finally replied. “She’s behaving a little differently. Despite her energy, she usually seems so serene. But today she’s…I don’t know. A little nervous. Superficially cheerful, but with an undercurrent of some emotional…something that seems serious. Did you quarrel? Is that why Justy was supposed to watch the kids today?”
Jared straightened away from the table, picked up the balusters and carried them across the room to a crate where he’d stored others. He heard Darren follow him.
“We decided it wasn’t working out after all,” he said matter-of-factly, hoping to turn off his brother’s curiosity. He should have known better.
“Don’t lie to me. You fired her? Will you forget those damn things and explain this to me?”
Darren caught his arm and yanked him upright. Jared regretted the years he’d sparred with the puny kid to help him develop muscle.
“Remember that I told you there was something about her that made me suspicious?”
“Yeah.”
He related the events of the previous evening, high-lighting Libby’s friends’ visit and skipping over the embraces he and Libby had shared on the sofa before they’d arrived.
Darren digested that, then followed him back to the sanding table. “So, she lied. But it was because she loved the children. Doesn’t that excuse it somewhat?”
“It’s still a lie.”
He tried to look implacable to ward off more questions, but Darren, apparently having come to peace with what he intended to do with his own life, seemed determined to bring him to the same enlightenment.
“It’s the fact that you thought she was falling in love with you, but now you think that was all an act for her to be able to stay with the kids. Same elements as the problem with Mandy. That last month, you thought her love was all for you, and she was seeing Frank on the side.”
Jared heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I—am—over—Mandy.”
“Horsesh—” Darren’s commentary was interrupted by the buzzer on the intercom.
Jared went to the switch. “Yeah?” he asked.
Libby’s disembodied voice said, “John Miller is here, Jared. He’d like to see you.”
That surprised him. He thought they’d settled everything to get the adoption under way. Obviously, there was some detail they’d missed.
“I’ll be right there,” he replied.
He went across the room to the sink and washed his hands. “Frank and Mandy’s lawyer is here,” he said over his shoulder to Darren, standing in the middle of the room. “Sorry to cut your analysis short.”
“No problem,” Darren said. “I’ve already diagnosed you.”
Jared, drying his hands on a shop towel, went toward him. “Lay it on me.”
“You’re a paranoid man in love, suffering from a fraidy phobia and a tendency to tediousness.”
Jared walked past him to the door. “Thank you. I like you, too.”
Darren followed him. “I didn’t say I didn’t like you. I said you’re tedious. And scared!” He shouted the last as Jared began to lope toward the house.
JOHN MILLER placed his briefcase on the coffee table next to Zachary’s carrier. The baby inside reacted with a broad smile and the flailing of his ring of plastic keys when the attorney leaned over him and smiled.
“He looks wonderful,” Miller said, letting the baby take hold of his index finger. He looked at Libby, who had Savannah clinging to her skirt. “And how are you, Savannah?”
“You remember Mr. Miller?” Libby asked her. Savannah had several of the pieces from her beauty shop clutched in her arms, waiting for a hapless victim. “He saw you a few times in the hospital.” Savannah studied him. “I’m not sick now.” “No,” he agreed. “You look very beautiful.” “Please sit down, Mr. Miller.” Libby gestured to the sofa behind him and took the big chair opposite, Savannah leaning against the arm.
Miller did, and said in renewed astonishment, “I know I said this when you answered the door, but what a surprise it is to find you here, Libby. Though this is a convenient arrangement, I must say. As the children’s nanny, you can help raise them without having to be responsible for their support, their education, all those details that would have been so hard for you without Mr. Ransom in the picture.”
Libby thought it was very much to Miller’s credit that there was nothing in his tone or manner to suggest that any other arrangement had occurred to him. He’d taken her explanation that she’d been hired on as the children’s nanny with apparent personal pleasure in that outcome.
“I’m delighted. I’ve thought about you often since the day you got out of the hospital and called me. I was afraid that you’d be out in the cold where the children were concerned, but good for you. You took charge of your own destiny. I’m proud of you. And happy for you.”
Libby accepted his sincere praise without revealing the pain it caused her. She’d taken charge of her own destiny, all right. She’d screwed it up. She didn’t bother trying to explain that it looked as though she’d be gone tomorrow. He seemed so pleased with how he thought things had turned out, and she was pleased to live the fantasy for whatever time was allowed her.
“Thank you, Mr. Miller.”
He opened his briefcase, shuffled a few papers, then closed it. He cleared his throat and sat back.
He looked nervous, Libby thought. But before she could analyze why that could be, the front door opened. Savannah shot toward it.
“Daddy! I want to curl your hair!” Savannah greeted Jared at the door with a plastic make-believe blow-dryer in one hand and a large purple hair clip in the other.
He lifted her onto his hip, warmed by her bright-eyed excitement. She pressed the clip to reveal lethal-looking teeth and stretched up to place it in his hair. He knew he was devoted to his new role as father when he didn’t shrink from wearing the insultingly feminine thing.
But Libby stopped her before she could decorate him with it. She took the child and the clip from him. “Daddy wants to talk to Mr. Miller now, Savannah. Come on. We’ll go make some coffee.” She smiled worriedly at him. “I’ll be right back for Zachary.”
He noted the carrier on the coffee table. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
He wondered about her concerned expression as he strode into the living room.
Miller stood to shake his hand. “Good to see you, Mr. Ransom.”
Despite the smile, there was a reluctance in the man, a nervousness Jared didn’t like. But a smile lightened the look suddenly.
“It was a nice surprise to find Libby Madison here,” Miller said, sitting down. Jared took the tall chair by the fireplace. “She wanted the children so much. She’d even set up a meeting with me to discuss adoption just before you got back in the country. But she had the accident and never made it.”
So that had been true. He was both pleased and unhappy to learn that. It proved that her explanation was genuine, but that only created problems for him.
Yet it didn’t touch the matter of her having preyed upon his affections in the interest of working her way more deeply into the children’s lives.
“It’s very enlightened of both of you to have worked out such an amicable arrangement so that she can also take a hand in the children’s development.”
Enlightened. That was a word he wouldn’t have thought to attach to their situation.
Jared simply smiled. “We’re coping well,” he said, then asked directly, “what brings you to Cranberry Harbor?”
Miller sighed as though reluctant to admit the reason for his visit.
Jared braced himself for bad news, although he couldn’t imagine what it could be. Except that it had to relate to his adoption of the children.
“Mandy’s sister has appeared,” he said in a rush, as if eager to get it out. “And she wants custody of Savannah and Zachary.”
Jared felt a cold, dragging dread, and right alongside it a hot, blind anger. He fought to suppress both so that he could think clearly. He struggled to remember what Mandy had told him about her sister when they’d been going together.
“She left the family when Mandy was nine. She joined a cult or something. She was sixteen or seventeen.”
Miller nodded. “Yes. Her Search Period, she calls it. Well, it seems that her search for personal fulfillment led her to Fiji and marriage to Jeffrey Donner, now Lord Barmont, a member of the English peerage. They have an estate outside of London, one in Kent, and he’s on the boards of several international corporations.”
Jared swore, about to abandon his grasp on reason and succumb to the dread and fury trying to overtake him. He’d had the children such a short time, but already he had no idea what he’d do without them. He struggled to hold on.
“And never in all that time tried to make contact with Mandy?”
Miller inclined his head, accepting his disbelief. “I know. Seems unlikely. But she says she knew she’d abdicated any hold she’d had on her family and felt it better simply to stay away.”
“And what, in God’s name, makes her think that reveals her as the woman who should raise her niece and nephew? Her history is abandonment and complete loss of contact.”
“I agree. I’m on your side.”
“You couldn’t even locate her when you were searching for family. How did she find out about Frank and Mandy?”
“Her husband subscribes to the New York Times because of his business connections. Frank’s and Mandy’s obituaries were in it along with a short article because of Frank’s restoration work on the Met.”
That was eerily coincidental enough to be true. Anger was flickering. Dread was growing.
“So, how serious a threat are they to me?”
Miller sighed. “I’ve been trying to evaluate that, and I’m not sure. The biggest advantages she has, I would say, besides a rather staggering wealth, is that she has a husband. The children would have two parents. She’s also a blood relation.”
Oh, God. “But I’m Savannah’s godfather.”
“Technically, that’s a provision to guide a child’s spiritual development, not the physical person. I don’t want to encourage panic, but I think we definitely need a strategy, particularly since there was no will. I’ve heard from the Donners’ attorney, and he has a court date for the Friday before Thanksgiving.”
Jared tried to put a date on that.
“Nine days away,” Miller clarified for him. “And you have a visit from your caseworker the Tuesday before.”
Jared groaned.
“Precisely,” Miller said. Then he grinned thinly. “A wife would help you a lot. You
weren’t planning a stroll down the aisle in the foreseeable future, were you?”
“We found cookies from Uncle Darren!” Savannah preceded Libby into the room, skipping as she carried a plate of cookies. She came straight to Jared. “Mr. Miller gets one first ‘cause he’s guessing.”
“Because he’s the guest,” Libby amended quietly.
Jared watched as she placed a tray on the coffee table that bore two bone-china cups and saucers in a shamrock pattern he never used, and the sugar and creamer that matched. His mother had bought him the tea set at an auction because she said the green matched his kitchen.
He turned Savannah around and indicated Miller. “All right. Go offer him one.”
She complied, and he watched her grave courtesy as she held out the plate, told him the ones with the “white stuff in the middle” were the best, then plopped down beside him to test them out herself, little legs sticking straight out in front of her.
Libby held out a hand to her. “This is a private conversation, sweetie. Come on back to the kitchen with me. I saved you some cookies.”
Savannah went along with a minimum amount of grumbling.
“You’ve done well,” Miller praised, taking up a cup. “The day we picked her and Zachary up at the hospital I wasn’t sure how well this was going to work. She was so quiet and withdrawn.”
Jared nodded, remembering the terror of his first day alone with the children, of that afternoon before Libby arrived.
“Savannah relaxed the moment she saw Libby,” he said, almost to himself. “It helped a lot that they already knew her. She got Savannah out from under the bed and…”
“Under the bed?”
Jared ignored the puzzled question because his mind had suddenly become distracted by a thought almost too bizarre to contemplate.
If marriage on its own would help his cause, then certainly marriage to a woman with a degree in education who understood children well enough to have a publisher interested in her book should give him an added edge.
The Comeback Mom Page 16