“Well, yes…” he said, sounding confused. Then she was suddenly seized by the shoulders and hauled around to face him.
“Goddamnit,” he said between gritted teeth, “why do I always allow you to do this to me? That wasn’t what I came to say at all.” He stared down at her, his stark features filled with emotion.
“Why did you leave your job with the Freedom?” he demanded.
“I wanted a change of scenery, warmer weather,” Jennifer said evasively. “What business is it of yours?”
“I’ll tell you what business of mine it is,” Lee said grimly. “I think you left because of me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Jennifer said, trying to shrug free of his viselike grip.
“I think you wanted to be gone before I reported back to camp next fall. You didn’t know I would be starting school, and you resigned so as not to see me again,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
“You think I would give up a job I worked years to get just to avoid a few uncomfortable moments with you?” she said scornfully. “I’ve heard of giant egos, but yours must be the size of an airplane hangar.”
“That’s not the reason,” he said calmly, holding her fast despite her fruitless efforts to wriggle free. “You gave up the job because you’re in love with me and you couldn’t stand to be around me and not have me.”
Jennifer stared at him, dumbfounded.
His beautiful eyes became lambent and full of feeling. “At least, I hope so, because I came here to tell you I love you and want to take you back with me.
The silence was deafening.
“I said I love you,” Lee repeated. “Do you love me?” It was issued like a challenge.
No response.
Lee shook her gently. “Aren’t you speaking English today?”
Jennifer burst into tears.
Lee sighed and released her. “Look, something is wrong here. When I say I love you, you’re supposed to say ‘I love you, too’ and smother me in an ardent embrace.”
Jennifer sat on an orange crate and bawled.
“Oh, fine,” Lee said, throwing up his hands. “What am I supposed to derive from this?”
When she continued to cry, he sat down next to her and waited for the storm to pass, surveying her with an expression of mixed exasperation and tenderness. As she subsided to an occasional sniffle, he said, “Does that mean you love me, or not?”
Jennifer wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Of course I love you, you jackass.”
She didn’t see his long, deep, silent sigh of relief. In a voice that was not quite steady he said, “I see. Don’t you think it would be more appropriate to say, ‘Of course I love you, my darling’? You jackass’ hardly seems the proper form of address.”
She looked up at him from under long, spiky lashes matted with tears. “Are you going to pick a fight about that, now? Besides, anybody else but you would have realized it long before this.” She hiccuped.
His eyes widened. “Oh, is that so?”
Jennifer took the bandanna off her head and mopped her cheeks with it. “Yes, that’s so.”
He took the kerchief from her and finished the job. “Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to tell me how I was supposed to detect your mad passion for me when you were throwing me out of your apartment This was followed, as I recall, by your packing up and moving 1,300 miles away without even a goodbye. I emerged from the hospital to find that you had vanished.”
“After you convinced me there was no future for us.”
Lee dropped his eyes. “Forgive me, Jen. I was wrong. I had a lot of time to think while I was laid up, to reevaluate everything. I guess the scare made me realize what really mattered to me.” He paused. “Joe and Dawn told me how you came to the hospital.” He looked up again. “Nothing is as important as you and me, and our love.”
“Are you sure, Lee? I know what your roots mean to you.”
“I’m sure. I guess I finally see that having you doesn’t mean that I have to give them up. Don’t you think we can work it out?”
“I haven’t been able to think since I opened that door and saw you.”
He knelt before her and took her tenderly in his arms. She sought his mouth blindly with hers.
A long while later he said, “There won’t be as much money, with me in school, but I’ve saved quite a bit, and the condo and the car are free and clear. We can live in the condo after we’re married, if you like, it’s only forty minutes to the school from there, and I’m sure Harry will take you back at the Freedom, that is, if you want to work . ..” He hesitated. “And I’d like you to think about going back to Montana with me after I finish school. It’ll be our decision, of course, but please say you’ll consider it.”
Jennifer smiled. “Could they use another lawyer in Cawassa, Montana?”
Lee hugged her tighter. “In Cawassa, Montana, they could use another everything.” He drew back to look at her. Something was wrong. “Jennifer, what is it?”
“Nothing.”
But he knew. “The hell with your ex-husband, may he crash and burn and dwell in Hades forever.” He turned her to face him. “I’m not him, honey. Just because your first marriage was a disaster, doesn’t mean ours will be.” He pressed her face against his shoulder. “Indians are loyal, don’t you know that? Loyal, brave, thrifty, clean, and reverent.”
“I think you’re talking about the Boy Scouts,” Jennifer mumbled into his sweater.
“Same thing,” he said above her head. “Indians, Scouts, Indian scouts. I can see that you were never a fan of ‘Wagon Train.’”
She clutched him tighter, wanting desperately to believe. “Lee, I hope you’ve thought this out It’s a lot to handle, medical school, a new wife and...” She almost said baby, but caught herself in time.
“As long as you’re with me, I can handle anything.”
He picked her up and stretched her gently on the floor amidst the chaos, dropping next to her and cradling her in his arms, his hands roaming her body. Jennifer held her breath as he touched her rounded belly.
He chuckled. “We’d better put you on a diet, paleface. I think you’re gaining weight” Then he seemed to freeze for a moment, recovering to sit up quickly and examine her more closely, lifting her shirt to take in the stretch bra and the elastic waist of her pants. She saw the realization dawn on his face.
“It’s mine,” he said wonderingly.
Jennifer punched him. “Baboon. Who else could it belong to?”
He hugged her to him fiercely, saying in a strangled voice, “You’d better stop calling me names, paleface, or I might forget that you’re supposed to be crazy about me.” He set her down again and slid along the floor to press his cheek against her belly, his eyes closing luxuriously. Jennifer caressed his soft hair, holding his head, too full to speak.
“When?” he asked hoarsely.
“May.”
He smiled. “That first time. I knew it, I felt it, even then.”
Jennifer was amused. “Oh, really?”
Color seeped into his face. “I meant, I knew we had…set some force in motion. About this…well, I guess I thought you would take care of it.”
Typical male, Jennifer thought “Wrong again, Beaufort.”
“Oh.”
She sat up. “You know, that’s really an insult Assuming that I would just be prepared under any circumstances. I was living alone when I met you, and I wasn’t exactly entertaining the Eighth Army on a regular basis. And our first encounter was, uh, rather spontaneous, if you recall.”
“I recall. Spontaneous as in combustion. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.”
“Thanks a lot.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “Don’t be dense, counselor. You know what I mean.” He smiled and sang softly, “‘What a lady, what a night.’”
Now it was Jennifer’s turn to blush.
He laughed. “Don’t be embarrassed, little mother. I’m looking forward to many more of the same.” He cupped h
er chin in both of his hands and looked into her eyes. “I can’t believe you weren’t going to tell me.”
Jennifer shook her head. “I didn’t want to get you that way.”
He looked away. “But you didn’t have to go through with it You could have—”
“No,” Jennifer interrupted him, not letting him finish the thought. “I love you, Lee. I wanted your baby. If I couldn’t have you, then I wanted something of yours to keep.”
He turned aside, blinking rapidly and brushing his eyes with the back of his arm. “That settles it,” he said firmly. “We’re getting married in ten minutes.”
Jennifer giggled. “I don’t think so, Lee. There are licenses, and blood tests, and things.”
“Well, then, as soon as possible.” He drew her to him swiftly. “And in the meantime,” he murmured, unbuttoning her overblouse, “we’ll have to think of something to do.”
“Any ideas?” Jennifer said, sliding her hands under his sweater.
“I’ve got a few,” he said thickly, and then stopped. “Is it all right? I mean, is it safe?”
Jennifer smiled indulgently and pressed into him, feeling his quick response. “Unless you plan on bursting into flames, or otherwise becoming a health hazard, it will be ‘safe’ for some time yet.”
“Exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said, taking off the rest of his clothes. “I don’t suppose there would be such a thing as a bed?”
“I’m afraid not It’s in pieces in one of those boxes.”
“Then we’ll rough it,” he responded, spreading his garments on the floor and pulling Jennifer down with him. “A man whose ancestors made do with packed dirt ought to be able to handle it,” he added, nuzzling her. “God, you smell wonderful.”
“You must be in love,” Jennifer answered. “After the work I did today, I probably smell like the Freedom’s locker room after a game.”
“You know what?” he said, his words muffled by her flesh.
“What?” she groaned, arching under the touch of his lips.
“You talk too much.”
And that was the end of the conversation.
– THE END –
MARRIAGE IN NAME ONLY
Doreen Owens Malek
Published by
Gypsy Autumn Publications
P.O. Box 383 • Yardley, PA I9067
Copyright 1995 and 2012
by Doreen Owens Malek
www.doreenowensmalek.com
The Author asserts the moral right to
be identified as author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the author or Publisher.
First USA Printing: 1995
First Canadian Printing 1995
First German Printing 1995
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author.
Chapter 1
As soon as Ann stepped off the plane, she knew she was in Florida.
She had not been home for eleven years, but the combination of humid air, salt smell and intense, direct sunlight was still as familiar to her as her own hands. She did not need to see the palm trees or sapodillas, the hibiscus or jacaranda, to know that the Keys were once again exerting their spell, even though the last time she left she fully expected never to be back again.
She stopped off in a restroom at the airport before picking up her rental car, and the mirror showed her a pretty but tired woman with striking features and circles under her wide green eyes. She brushed out her long blonde hair, delicately dabbed powder on her nose and chin, and replenished her lipstick. No wonder she looked exhausted. She had been on the phone with her half brother’s lawyers until the wee hours for several days—since she’d been in Europe she’d had to accommodate the time difference—and once she had returned to New York, she’d booked a flight to Florida immediately.
The problem could not wait.
Her half brother was bankrupt and had run the family business into the ground. Ann’s family, the Talbots, had once been among the richest and most influential on Lime Island. Now the Talbot company, a computer software supplier called ScriptSoft, was on the ropes, filing for Chapter Eleven. Her half brother Tim owed money to casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, and Monte Carlo. He could no longer borrow from company funds to pay his debts, since there was nothing left. In desperation, the filing attorney had tracked Ann down in Italy, where she was doing research for a new book, to tell her what was happening.
And now she was in Florida to deal with the crisis.
Ann had wanted nothing to do with the family business. She had not spoken to her father since she’d left, and so when he’d died he had transferred the company to Tim. But Ann still held a large portion of the stock, even though it was now it was almost worthless, and as Tim’s sole sibling she had been consulted on the resolution of the problem.
Ann’s half brother had just been arrested in Miami on federal charges of stock manipulation. He was being prosecuted for misrepresenting the financial status of ScriptSoft by issuing falsified quarterly reports in previous years. As a result of these reports the company stock went up temporarily, allowing Tim to cash in his personal shares at a large profit. But when the company’s true status was later revealed, the reconciliation by the accounting team brought in by the board of directors drove the company into bankruptcy.
Ann knew that Tim had lost the money gambling; he had a long standing habit for which he had gone through rehabilitation several times to no avail. Now, apparently, there wasn’t even enough money left to pay his bail.
Ann put her comb back into her purse and sighed. She loved Tim for their shared childhood, for the memories she had of the shy, lonely little boy who would visit Florida from his mother’s home in New England for the summers. But since his college days she’d known he’d had a gambling habit. She had closed her eyes to his problem, never questioned him about the company or his handling of it, all to obliterate from her mind the painful connection with her father. Now both her parents were dead, Tim was in serious trouble, and she could not ignore the situation any longer.
Ann zipped her purse closed and went out into the busy corridor to claim her car.
* * * *
The breeze coming in through the car window was heavy with salt, sticky against her skin, but Ann left the window open, enjoying the change from November in New York. There the post-Thanksgiving shoppers had thronged the blustery streets and the roads were clogged, as usual, with noisy traffic. Here the streets were empty except for a few pedestrians, senior citizens walking dogs or younger people jogging lazily past the bursting shrubbery. The change in pace was jarring, especially since Ann had not experienced it for so long. But it brought back memories of still, lazy days and breathless starry nights, the endless summers on Lime Island when she was a girl.
But Ann had promised herself she wouldn’t think about that. She turned purposefully down a side street, away from the business district, heading toward the water.
She had some time before her business appointment and she wanted to see her old house again. It had been sold five years earlier when her mother had died, and at the time she had let Tim handle everything and never questioned what he’d done with the money. She hadn’t cared. Now she assumed that the profit from the house had gone into his gambling. She probably should have paid more attention to his dealings, but her grief had been such that she’d wanted nothing to do with the house, the company, or anything else that had issued from her father’s life. Perhaps she had been foolish because she’d always known that Tim was weak, but her e
motional survival had dictated that she cut herself off from everything in the past and start fresh. After college she had carved out a career writing historical fiction. She had been content to support herself by living in the fictional past, until the summons from Tim’s lawyer had brought her rudely back to the present.
Ann glided to a stop at the curb and stared up at the house, a white stucco Colonial with dark blue shutters set back from a wide expanse of green lawn, no mean feat to maintain through the blistering heat of a south Florida summer. Her father had installed automatic sprinklers to keep his property a verdant emerald, and one of her most vivid memories was of being awakened in the simmering summer dawns by the hiss and rush of the sprinklers outside her window. Now they were silent. She studied the expertly cultivated lush foliage, the neat brick path leading to the front door, the clapboard boathouse to the left of the main dwelling, the blue waters of the canal running behind the rear patio and leading to the intracoastal waterway. A Miami millionaire owned the Talbot place now and used it only occasionally for a getaway.
Except for the ancient gardener snipping desultorily at a kudzu vine growing along the edge of the crushed stone driveway, it looked like nobody was home.
Ann put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. She had met Heath in that boathouse, and that meeting had changed her life forever.
She gave the car gas and drove away, recalling how she had lived in that mansion with her father, Henry Talbot, and his second wife, her mother.
Ann had been the daughter of privilege, sent to the best private schools, coming home to the Keys to spend the summers with her half brother Tim, the child of her father’s brief first marriage. She had never given a thought to the servants, the nannies, the summer home in Maine, the condo in the Bahamas, until she had turned her back on it all when she was seventeen. Her life since then had been very different, but she hadn’t missed any of the niceties associated with her father’s success just as she hadn’t missed the man himself. When he’d died, she had attended his funeral in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, but had left without speaking to anybody. When her mother had died a few years later, Ann had brought the body north to bury her in New Jersey with the rest of her family. And except for occasional phone calls and visits from Tim, she had buried the past along with her mother.
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