The Chisholm Brothers:Friends, Lovers... Husbands?
Page 56
“Did you say something, honey?”
Blaire slapped a hand over her heart to keep it from leaping from her chest. “Mama! I didn’t know you were there.”
“Sorry.” Nancy Harding laughed. Then she glanced out the window of Blaire’s office and her eyes widened. “Oh, look! There’s Justin.”
“Yes.” Blaire swallowed around the knot of nerves that rose in her throat. There was no way she could talk to Justin with her mother hanging on every word. “I was just going out to say hi. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Oh, but don’t you want to invite him in? I’ve got a full pitcher of tea, but I could make coffee if he’d prefer that.”
“Never mind the tea and coffee.” Blaire brushed past her mother and headed for the front door. “I doubt he’ll be staying.” In fact, it would be Blaire’s mission to see that he didn’t want to stay. That he didn’t want to return, or call or anything else.
She squared her shoulders, screwed up her courage, and marched out to the parking lot, where she met him before he’d made it five feet from his pickup.
“Hi.” He smiled and pulled off the cowboy hat he’d been wearing.
“Hi.” She resisted the urge to wipe her sweaty palms on her jeans. “Justin, I—”
“Sunday after church the whole family eats at Lucille’s,” he told her. “I was hoping you’d join us this Sunday. It’s public, so you’d be able to get up and leave any time you wanted. I thought that might make your first meal with the whole clan a little less stressful.”
“Justin, this isn’t going to work.”
“What isn’t going to work?”
“None of it,” she said earnestly. “You and me. We’re not going to work.”
He stared at her so long that she shifted her weight several times from one foot to the other.
“We’re not?” he asked.
“No.” She swallowed again. “I’m sorry. But I can’t marry you, and I won’t change my mind.”
He moved a step closer to her. “You don’t care that I’m in love with you? It means nothing?”
“It might, but I don’t think you do love me, Justin, and I don’t trust myself enough to be able to tell. I can’t risk it.”
“You can’t risk it? This is our lives we’re talking about. Our child’s life. Life doesn’t come with guarantees.”
“I know that,” she cried. “I’m not asking you for one. I just have to feel it, down deep inside. Feel that I can trust myself, trust you, and I don’t feel that. To be honest, I think I’m too scared to feel it.”
“Scared of what? Of me?” he cried, incredulous. “You think I would ever knowingly hurt you? I couldn’t, Blaire. I simply couldn’t. I love you.”
She shook her head hard and backed away from him. “Justin, please.”
“Please what? Please don’t love you?”
“Don’t push me. The harder you push, the more I want to resist.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said harshly. “I supposed now you’re going to run.”
“Run?”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it? When things get uncomfortable. Which cousin will you go see this time?”
The fact that she had been contemplating doing just as he accused sent heat rushing to her cheeks.
“Aha!” He pointed a finger at her face. “I’m right, aren’t I? It’s right there on your face.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If I want to go visit my cousins, I’ll go, and you don’t have anything to say about it. Go home, Justin, and don’t call me anymore. The baby’s not due until September. I’ll let you know when it comes.”
“September?” His eyebrows rose at least an inch, his voice at least an octave. “If you think for one minute I’m going to stand back and not involve myself in your life until after the baby is born, you’ve got another think coming.”
Blaire closed her eyes and tried to pull her hair out with both hands at her temples. “I didn’t mean that we wouldn’t have any contact. I didn’t mean it like that. You make me crazy. I won’t go out with you, I won’t date you, I won’t spend the night with you. I won’t marry you. I will talk with you, about the baby, but I don’t want you calling me every day, or even every week.”
“Sometimes, sweetheart, we don’t always get what we want.”
Blaire would have demanded to know what he meant by that, but for a moment she was too astounded by his words to speak. By the time she found her voice and her wits, he was back in his pickup and pulling out into the street.
By the time Justin got home he had a red mark on the outer edge of his hand from pounding his fist against the steering wheel in frustration.
How could he have been so stupid as to push her the way he had? And that stupid parting comment of his—Sometimes, sweetheart, we don’t always get what we want. Where the hell had that come from?
But he knew the answer there. It had come from his gut. She said she didn’t want him. For one knife-edged moment, he had believed her, and that knife-edge had sliced deep.
Then he’d seen the lie in her eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him, it was that she was afraid to trust. Not him, but herself. She still had it in her head that the two of them would end up bickering for the next thirty years the way her parents did.
Justin shuddered at the thought. It couldn’t happen, because he wasn’t a man to bicker. He had never played the blame game, or griped about his problems. He was more into practical jokes and tending his cattle and horses.
But Blaire didn’t know that about him. She didn’t know much of anything about him, he realized. How could he expect her to simply take his word that things would work out between them?
Before that would happen, she had to believe that he truly loved her.
You could take out a sign with two-foot letters and I wouldn’t believe it.
“Blaire Harding, you’re gonna eat those words.”
In less than an hour, Justin had a full-fledged plan for convincing Blaire that his feelings were true. But he wouldn’t be able to do it alone. He enlisted both of his brothers and his two sisters-in-law. His grandmother agreed to take care of Janie and Libby for the night.
On the Internet he found the company he needed, located in Oklahoma City. He called in a rush order, then drove to the city to pick it up. When he got home late that night, that’s when he would need his brothers and their wives.
It was going to be a long night.
His entire future rested on the outcome.
He was scared spitless that it wouldn’t work, but he’d be damned if he could think of anything else to do.
Blaire cried herself to sleep that night. If she had been uncertain before, there was no question left now in her mind or heart. She was in love with Justin Chisholm.
He said he was in love with her. Why couldn’t she take him at his word and accept his proposal? Why did she have to think up all these damn problems that might not ever arise between them? Why did she work so hard to convince herself that he didn’t really love her?
What did she think, that he was lying? Simply trying to get her to marry him so he could get his hands on their child?
What kind of sense did that make?
Sure, she knew family was the most important thing to a Chisholm, but would he really go to the trouble of lying to her and marrying her just to have a family of his own?
The only other alternative to support her theory that he didn’t actually love her, if he wasn’t outright lying, was that he didn’t know his own mind and heart.
That was much more likely, to her mind. Both of his brothers had married in the past few months. He was wrapped up in the romance of weddings and babies and thought he was in love with her.
That wasn’t enough for her. She would not take advantage of his kind heart and his sense of family. Those two things were not enough upon which to build a marriage.
She was going to prove him right, much to her shame. She was going to show her cowardice by leaving town, just
as he had predicted. If not for the health insurance coverage she enjoyed by working for her father, she would leave town permanently. But she could not afford to lose her insurance with a baby on the way. She wasn’t that big a fool.
When dawn came the next morning her eyes were red streaked, red rimmed and swollen. Her morning sickness attacked with a vengeance.
She was growing to hate that toilet. When she was good and done with morning sickness she was going to have it replaced. Maybe she’d get a pink one this time instead of the utilitarian white she’d been hugging every morning lately.
A new duffel bag—maybe even an actual suitcase —would soon be in order if she continued to travel so much. She was going to Gayle’s in Stillwater this time. She had called her last night to make sure her cousin would be home and could accommodate her.
Telling her parents she was leaving had been difficult. Like climbing Mount Everest might be difficult.
Insurance or no insurance, Blaire had some serious thinking to do about how she was going to raise her child out from under the influence of her parents. She wanted them to be a part of her child’s life, but not every day, and not in a way that gave them the idea that they had some sort of say over the baby. She had no intention of fighting that battle every day of her life, and knowing her mother, it would be a battle royal.
But first things first, and that meant getting out of town long enough to let her parents and Justin know that she meant business.
She was putting the last of her things into her duffel when her phone rang. Surprised, she glanced at the clock. It was barely 8:00 a.m. No one she knew would call that early, except family. Or maybe Justin, she thought with a frown.
She thought about letting her answering machine get it, but finally grabbed up the receiver. “Yes?”
“Blaire, is that you? It’s Nadine. Nadine White.”
“Nadine?” They’d been in the same class in high school. Nadine now ran a beauty shop on Main near the grocery store. “What’s up?”
Nadine laughed. “That’s what I want to know. Have you been outside yet this morning?”
“Outside? No, why?”
Nadine shrieked something into the phone that Blaire didn’t quite make out.
“What? Did you say something about a banner?”
“On Main. Go! Get your butt out the door and down the street, girlfriend. You won’t believe it! Or maybe you will, but it ’bout knocked my socks off.”
“Nadine, what are you talking about?”
“I’m taking about the banner strung across Main Street. Get out there and have a look. Then call me back and tell me what the devil’s going on that I’ve been missing out on.”
Before Blaire could comment, Nadine had hung up. No sooner had Blaire replaced the receiver than the phone rang again. This time it was Blaire’s mother.
“Bunny Gonzales just called.”
“And?” Bunny Gonzales worked at the hardware store and had been her mother’s best friend for years. A call from Bunny didn’t usually cause the quiver of excitement Blaire heard in her mother’s voice, nor did it require that Blaire’s mother report to Blaire.
“Before you leave town,” her mother said breathlessly, “you need to drive east down Main until you can see the water tower.”
Blaire frowned. “Whatever for?”
“Just do it! And take your camera!”
“Mama, what are you talking about? I’m not going to drive around looking at the stupid water tower.”
“You will if you know what’s good for you. There’s not a girl alive who won’t be pea green with envy of you. Now you go look, and then you come back here and tell me what you think.”
As with Nadine, the phone went dead in her ear.
What was the matter with everyone? Had they all gone crazy? What could they possibly be talking about?
Truly curious now, Blaire pulled on her coat, then grabbed her duffel and overnight case. There was no sense coming back upstairs just to get them after she’d seen the stupid water tower.
She was halfway down the outside stairs when she glanced at her car and noticed someone had stuck a piece of white paper beneath her windshield wiper.
It gave her a shiver to think that someone had been right there at the foot of her stairs during the night and she hadn’t been aware of it.
For that matter, she thought, coming to an abrupt halt at the foot of the stairs, someone had done a whole lot more than put a piece of paper under her wiper blade. A row of signs, about two-foot square, each on a wooden stake about three feet tall, marched from the foot of her stairs, along the edge of the parking lot, clear out to the street.
There must have been…six. She counted six signs, all white with red lettering, all saying the same thing:
JUSTIN LOVES BLAIRE
Blaire’s heart gave a little leap in her chest. Justin had done this? He had come to her apartment during the night and planted these signs like a teenager trying to impress his girl?
She slapped a hand over her mouth and blinked.
Oh, Justin.
With knees trembling, she walked around her car and set her duffel and overnighter on the ground. Her fingers weren’t as nimble as they should have been when she plucked the paper from beneath her wiper blade and unfolded it.
BLAIRE, I REALLY DO LOVEYOU. JUSTIN
She pressed the note to her lips and looked around frantically, wondering if he was there, somewhere close, watching her reaction to his outrageous deeds.
“Oh, my God, the banner! The water tower! He wouldn’t!”
Scrambling in her purse for her keys, Blaire jumped into her car and tore out of the parking lot, completely forgetting the belongings she’d left sitting in the gravel.
“Justin,” she muttered to herself, “what have you done? What are you doing, you crazy man?”
She was three blocks from the center of town when she saw the banner. Strung across the intersection three blocks ahead, it was three feet high and white, with giant purple letters.
JUSTIN LOVES BLAIRE
Blaire braked to a halt in the middle of the street and stared, her mouth hanging open. Someone drove by and honked, but she couldn’t look away from the banner to see who it was.
What had she said to him that day of the picnic? You could take out a sign with two-foot letters and I wouldn’t believe it.
“Oh, my God.” Justin had done her one better. Those letters had to be taller than two feet.
“The water tower!” Oh, good heavens! She stomped on the gas pedal and ran the red light without a care. There were sometimes more important things than obeying traffic laws, and this was one of those times. Besides, she looked first and there were no cars coming from either direction. This was Rose Rock, after all, not the big city.
Neither the water tower nor Justin Chisholm let Blaire down. Way up there on the tank at the top of the town’s only water tower, in three-foot purple letters painted over the silver tank:
BLAIRE, WILL YOU MARRY ME? JUSTIN
“Oh!” She sat in the middle of the side street that gave her the best view of the tower and felt tears stream down her cheeks. She couldn’t stop them and didn’t try. If ever there was a time for tears, this was it.
“Oh, Justin.” How could she possibly think he wasn’t really in love with her now? What was a woman to do with a man like him? She must have hurt him terribly yesterday when she’d essentially told him to get lost.
“Oh, Justin.” From her purse she pulled out her new cell phone and called the Cherokee Rose Ranch. Emily, Sloan’s wife, answered.
“This is Blaire Harding.”
“Blaire! Hello. It’s so good to hear from you. I’ve been meaning to get into town to visit you, but haven’t been able to get away lately. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine. I’m looking for Justin. Is he around?”
“No, he’s out and about somewhere. I notice his pickup is gone, so there’s no telling where he is. Did you try his cell?”
She didn’t give Emily time to say anything. She had to find Justin.
But he wasn’t answering his cell. She left him a message and asked him to call her back.
With nothing else to do but wait to hear from him, Blaire drove home, astounded to find her duffel and overnight case sitting in the gravel, where she’d left them. She parked her car and carried her bags back upstairs.
When a half hour went by and Justin hadn’t called, she tried his cell number again. Still no answer. “Call me, Justin. Please?”
But another half hour went by and he didn’t call.
Suddenly Blaire couldn’t wait around any longer. She knew what she had to do.
She went outside and crossed to the warehouse. From there she loaded the items she needed into her trunk.
“If Justin calls or comes by,” she called to her father in the warehouse, “tell him I’ve gone on a picnic.”
“A what?” her father yelled back.
“A picnic!”
“Now?”
“Now,” she called back. “Just tell him.”
Blaire pulled up at the spot where Justin wanted to build a house and felt her chest tighten. He wasn’t there. She’d been so sure, after she’d driven out of town, that this was where she would find him. That he would be waiting here for her to come and say she was sorry she hadn’t believed him when he’d said he loved her.
Well, there was no sense sitting around feeling sorry for herself. He wanted to make her sweat, that was his right. She had turned him away how many times?
She tugged on an old pair of leather work gloves, popped open her trunk, and got to work.