by Raye Morgan
His voice broke and it was a moment before he could go on.
“The nanny tried to call us all day, but my cell phone wasn’t working right and Jan didn’t pick up because she was in a meeting hall until late in the afternoon. When she finally got home, Lisa was burning up and the nanny was hysterical. She tried to call me, but the cell still wasn’t working and my secretary was out for the afternoon. So she packed Lisa into the car and went racing off to the hospital. She ran a red light. And got hit. She lived another twenty-four hours, but Lisa was killed in the original impact.”
“Oh, Grant. Oh, I’m so sorry.”
He pulled away and just shook his head.
“But it wasn’t your fault. How could you…?”
“Don’t patronize me, Callie,” he said harshly. “Of course it was my fault. If I’d been a proper father and husband, the accident would never have happened. Of course it was my fault. And I’ll pay all the days of my life.”
She refused to be cowed by his anger at himself. Following him into his room, she shut the door and made him face her. “You listen to me, Grant Carver,” she said sternly. “You are a wonderful, caring man. You may have been careless in the past, but you’re older now, more mature. You won’t let family needs slide ever again.”
“How do you know? What makes you so sure?”
“I know you. I’ve seen you in action. And most of all…” She walked into his arms. “I love you.”
His face registered shock. He hadn’t expected that. She was playing against the rules again, coloring outside the lines. He didn’t have an answer, but she didn’t care. Stepping forward, she rose on her toes and put her arms around his neck.
“Make love to me, Grant,” she whispered. “If you can’t love me, at least make love to me. That’s all you ever promised, and I’m holding you to it.”
“I will, Callie,” he agreed, cupping her cheek in his hand. “If you promise to stay with me all night. Can you do that?”
She looked up at him, surprised. “Of course. Are you sure you want me to? I thought…well, I know you still consider Jan your real wife and I thought…”
“Oh, Callie.” He crushed her in his embrace. “ You’re my wife. Don’t you ever doubt it. I’ve been aching to have you where I can hold you all night long.”
Tears welled in Callie’s eyes. “Grant,” she whispered. “I’d be honored to share your bed.”
He pulled her down onto the velvet comforter and she knew she had a home there at last.
Grant sat down in the plane, ready for his flight to San Francisco, and stared at his briefcase. He had put a large manila envelope inside. Though he hadn’t opened the envelope yet, he knew what it contained. The detectives he’d hired were finally giving him a report on all Molly’s living relatives. This was what he’d been waiting for. He planned to peruse the document while in his hotel room, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.
He had enough to think about for now. For the entire flight, he agonized over all his missteps and misstatements in his recent relationships. He wondered how Callie had put up with him all this time. She was wonderful and he was so lucky to have found her.
When he got to the hotel, he put his bag on the bed, worked the lock and snapped open the case. He began to pull clothes out and very quickly, he noticed something strange. Someone had added something to the clothes he’d packed. The more he dug, the more he found. Red lollipops were stuffed in every crevice of his suitcase. It looked as though a lollipop-loving squirrel had been at work.
And then the coup de grace. The fine wool suit-coat he was planning to wear to a very important meeting had a half-eaten lollipop stuck to the lapel. Stickiness courtesy, he was sure, of little Molly.
He stared at it for a long, long moment. He waited for the anger to explode in his chest and build in his head. But it didn’t happen. Instead he started to laugh.
“Molly, Molly,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, Molly.”
He laughed until tears filled his eyes.
That night he had a dream and the little dark-haired girl whose face swam into the picture was Molly, not Lisa. And she was smiling.
He woke up and lay staring at the ceiling, thinking. He was on edge, restless. He wanted something. He was aching for someone now, and it wasn’t Jan. It was Callie.
Callie. Beautiful, sexy, sensible Callie. What a fool he’d been not to notice.
Rolling out of bed, he went into the bathroom and took a long hot shower, thinking things through. When he came out, he was decided.
He was going home.
The first thing he did was to pull the manila envelope out of his briefcase and tear it to shreds without opening it. Then he called the office where the meeting was to be held and canceled. He lugged his suitcase, lollipops and all, down to the lobby and called for reservations on the next available plane. He was going home to the woman that he loved—and the little girl who thought she could buy love with lollipops.
When he walked into his penthouse apartment, Molly was the first to see him.
“Da Da!” she cried, racing to him.
Pulling the little girl up into his arms, he hugged her. “Thank you for all those lollipops, Molly,” he said. “That was a big surprise.”
She giggled and was suddenly shy. He hugged her close and kissed her cheek just as Callie walked into the room.
“Grant!” she cried, her face filled with candid joy. “What are you doing here?”
He put Molly down gently and she ran off. Turning to Callie, he shook his head, looking her over from top to toe.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, suddenly anxious. “Did I do something?”
“You sure did,” he claimed, a slow smile growing on his handsome face. “You made a family for me, Callie. And I didn’t even have the intelligence to notice.”
She smiled. “Oh, is that all?”
“No. There’s something else.”
He took her in his arms, looking down with all his love filling his gaze. “You made me love you.”
Callie’s tiny gasp gave him shivers. “Do you really mean that?” she asked, her dark eyes luminous, “or are you just singing a song?”
“Both,” he said. “Will you marry me, Callie?”
“I already did, silly.”
“I know. But I just wanted to ask you again.”
“Okay. I’ll marry you anytime, Grant. Anytime at all.”
“Good. Because time is the greatest gift. And I promise, my time will always be yours.”
EPILOGUE
M OLLY loved it at the ranch.
She loved the dogs and the horses and the cows. She loved to make the chickens run. She loved finding where the cat had hidden to have her kittens. She loved all the nice people who seemed to love her right back.
But she was sort of scared of Granpa. He sat upstairs in that big chair and growled at her, all his whiskers quivering. Mommy said he was laughing, but it didn’t sound like laughing to Molly. He was like the bear in the book Daddy read to her. Scary. And she had to walk past that room to get to the room where the baby was.
The baby!
She knew she was supposed to love the baby, but she wasn’t sure yet. She tried to talk to him but he didn’t talk much. Not like Molly. Molly was a big girl now. Next week she would be two and she was going to have a big birthday party.
She had been living at the ranch ever since the baby was born with her mommy and daddy—she used to call them Callie and Grant, but those names were too hard to say. Anyway, she liked calling them Mommy and Daddy better.
“Good baby, good baby,” she said, patting him on the stomach.
“Don’t pat too hard, honey,” Mommy said, pulling her hand back.
Molly felt hurt. She wasn’t patting too hard. She didn’t want to hurt the baby.
“We have to be extra special careful of the baby,” Mommy told her, giving her a hug at the same time. “Babies are easy to break. They can get hurt so easily—things we don’t even think of
can hurt them. So we have to touch very softly.”
She nodded. She understood. Babies were precious and special. But she looked up quickly at Callie’s face. Did her mommy love the baby better than her?
She didn’t have time to find out because Daddy swooped her up in his arms and gave her little baby kisses on the top of her head.
“G’illa, g’illa!” she cried.
“You want gorilla kisses?” he said, laughing at her. “Okay, here goes.”
He planted a few loud, rumbling, smacking kisses on her cheeks and her neck and she shrieked with happiness.
“Shh, the baby,” Mommy said, and Daddy put her down.
Molly frowned. People said that all the time. “Don’t wake the baby, don’t wake the baby.” The baby was always asleep. What fun was that? Maybe he didn’t even know about fun stuff yet.
Daddy was kissing Mommy. Mommy was kissing him back and that made Molly feel warm and happy.
Daddy seemed to feel the same way, because he said, “I never knew a man could be this happy. I bless the day you tried to kill me with your orchid pot.”
Mommy laughed and said, “Me, too. Since that day we’ve gained a marriage, a daughter and now a son.”
“Grant Carver the Seventh,” Grant said with satisfaction, looking down at the baby. “We done good.”
Mommy and Daddy were happy. That was good. She had a vague sense of missing someone. Mommy told her all the time about Tina, who was her first mommy. Tina went to heaven because God needed her up there. But she would see Tina again someday. She loved Tina, too. She remembered her a little bit and Mommy always showed her pictures.
Molly was getting bored. She thought she heard the cat meow, so she slipped out of the room and headed toward the landing.
She held her breath as she started across the open doorway to where Granpa was sleeping in his chair. But then she saw something. She stopped. There, on a shelf right beside him, was a box with a red lollipop sticking out of it.
Her little heart jumped. She remembered red lollipops. She used to love red lollipops, but Mommy said they weren’t good for her. She hadn’t had a red lollipop for a long time. And now, there was one right there next to Granpa.
But he was scary. What if he woke up? What if he reached out and grabbed her and growled? Her heart was beating very fast. She crept into the room and reached out. There. The lollipop was in her hand. It was different from the ones she used to have, but…
“What have you got there, young’un?”
She gasped and started to run, her heart in her throat. She couldn’t stop. If she stopped, he would take it away from her, and she needed it. Running down the hall, she came to the baby’s room and dashed inside. Mommy and Daddy were gone, but the baby was awake.
She pulled on the paper around the candy. It came off easily. Then she climbed up on the chair next to the cradle and leaned down. He had big blue eyes and he stared at her very hard.
“Here, baby,” she whispered to him. “Here. Eat.”
Suddenly someone was yelling. She jerked back, startled. The maid named Ana was calling out and people were running toward the room.
Ana pulled the lollipop from her hand. “No!” she cried. “You can’t give that to the baby. No!”
Molly was scared. She wasn’t bad. Didn’t they understand? She wanted to give the baby something fun. She wanted to give him the thing she had always loved best. But the faces seemed angry.
Then Daddy was there and he pulled her up into his arms. “You and your red lollipops,” he said, holding her close.
“Don’t yell at her,” Mommy was saying. “She was doing it out of love.”
“You can’t do it, though,” Daddy told her, being very serious. “You can’t give things like that to the baby. He’s not ready.”
Tears were popping out and running down her fat cheeks and her lower lip was trembling.
“You love the baby, don’t you?” Daddy said.
Did she? She looked down at where he was watching. And suddenly, she saw something in his big blue eyes. He was her brother. He was hers. Maybe she did love him. She nodded and gave a big sniff.
“Of course you do.”
“Tell you what,” Mommy said, tousling her hair. “You wait just a second. I have an idea.” She reached in and rummaged in the big bag of baby care items she took with her everywhere these days.
“Here.” She pulled out a bright red pacifier and showed it to Molly. “What do you think? Do you want to be the one to give it to him when he’s ready?”
Molly’s eyes lit up and she nodded, smiling through her tears.
“Only when I say it’s a good time, okay? But you will be the keeper of the red pacifier. I’m going to trust you.”
“And you know what?” Daddy said. “Next week at your birthday party, you’re going to have all the red lollipops you can handle. Okay?”
Molly nodded again and threw her little arms around his neck. She was a big girl now. She was learning lots of things. And that was good, because that little baby was going to have a lot to learn from his big sister and she wanted to be ready.
“We love you, Molly,” Daddy said.
She nodded. She knew that. She loved them, too.
Even the baby.