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“He’s married, Lucky,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”
Lucky, the good listener, sniffed the side of her face, whiskers tickling.
“Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t he tell me?” The shock had begun to wear off, but she still felt as if she’d swallowed a hot brick. She was in love with a married man. The bold fact of that statement went against everything she believed in. Wanting someone else’s husband was a sin, a direct violation of the Ten Commandments.
And Lord help her, she didn’t know how to stop.
Zak stared into the face of his past, stomach churning, sweat beading and wished he could run out the door and follow Jilly. He wanted to be anywhere but here with Crystal.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, incredulous. “You left me a note. You said you had filed for divorce.”
“I meant to.” She shrugged. “But you know how I am. I got busy and things happened…”
He recalled the helpless girl who couldn’t remember to pay her electric bill, but a marriage dissolution was a tad more important. She’d wanted Tank Rogers, not Zak Ashford. That should have been enough to help her remember.
At the time, he’d been embarrassed by her betrayal, humiliated to have been duped by her pretty face and the way she’d wrapped him around her finger with her sob stories. He’d felt sorry for her. She’d been raised in the foster system, had no one to turn to, and Zak’s ego was stroked by being her savior, the go-to guy who could make everything better. So much so that he’d followed her to the courthouse and married her to, as she’d put it, “give her baby a name.”
The memory struck terror in him. “Your kids?” The chatter in the dining room made him lower his voice. “Whose—” He didn’t know how to ask if his name was on their birth certificates. “Do you still use my name?”
“It’s my name, too, Zak, so yeah, sometimes.” Zak could hear the “when it’s convenient” behind the words. That’s the way Crystal had done everything. Whatever was easy and convenient. “But Brandon and Jake have Tank’s last name—Rogers. He insisted.”
Zak nodded, so relieved he thought he’d slither off the couch. “Good.”
“Bella has yours.”
An electric shock went through him. “What?”
She shrugged again and smiled, a glimmer of the charming-as-sin young woman she’d been coming through. “I had to put something.”
“What about her father?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t sure. He wasn’t around. I wanted her to have someone good—”
Zak grabbed his head with both hands to keep it from exploding. “Whoa, Crystal, this is insane.”
“I didn’t think it mattered. You wouldn’t know.”
“You didn’t think it mattered?” This woman was a nut job. And he was married to her!
“I wouldn’t have come to you now if I hadn’t been desperate.”
He’d heard that before. The day she’d showed up at his apartment with bruises on her cheek crying that Tank had left her for good. He’d fallen for it then, but he was older and wiser now.
“Okay,” he said, heart leaping around like one of Jilly’s terriers. “Let’s deal with this and get it over with. I’ll pay for a divorce.” He wrestled with that for a moment but won. As a man of faith, he didn’t believe in divorce but this was different. Wasn’t it? “An annulment would be better. We weren’t married that long. What, a few weeks? A month?”
“Nearly ten years now.”
“Stop it, Crystal. We’re not married, never were. We had a piece of paper, and I gave you a place to stay and a sympathetic shoulder. We weren’t in love. I filled a need until Tank wanted you back.” He felt like a jerk for saying these things to her, but they’d been in the back of his head since the day he’d come in from class and found a note propped with a banana against his pillow.
“I never meant to hurt you, Zaky.” The old, juvenile endearment grated on him. He’d fallen for it back when he was a boy, but he was a man now.
This was the way with Crystal. Charming and manipulative in an innocent way, she never intended any of the foolish things she did.
Zak studied her ravaged body, a shell of the vibrant, self-seeking kewpie doll that had crooked her finger and had him running. Zak searched his heart, his conscience, and prayed. Had he loved her? He’d been eighteen. He didn’t know. He’d been in…well, not in love. Playing the knight in shining armor had made him feel like an adult, a man.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I told you. I’m dying.”
That tiny niggling in the back of his brain started up again. Something buzzed around like a gnat, pestering, warning. “And you wanted to clear your conscience?”
“That’s not why I’m here, Zak. I don’t have time.”
“What if I’d gotten married to someone else, Crystal? Do you realize what that would have made me?”
“No one would have ever known.” She frowned, clueless. “I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t think about it.”
She never had.
“Why didn’t you contact me a long time ago? I would have dealt with this.”
“Maybe it was fate.”
Even for a guy who remained laid-back and calm when fighting a raging fire, he wasn’t particularly surprised when sweat rolled down his back. “It wasn’t fate, Crystal. There is no fate. There are only people making dumb decisions.”
Crystal sagged back again, expression wounded. “I’m sorry. This is not going the way I’d hoped. I’m so tired. Sometimes I say things wrong.”
Instantly contrite, Zak wanted to kick himself. She had cancer. She’d told him she was dying. What kind of jerk berated a dying woman?
Crystal’s three children trailed in from his kitchen, munching on his Chips Ahoy! He looked at the little girl, dismayed and bewildered to know she bore his surname. His name was on her birth certificate. Was that even legal?
Crystal closed her eyes, a hand to her forehead. He hoped she didn’t pass out again. But whether she did or not, he had a responsibility—not because they were still legally married, if that was even true, but because he wasn’t the kind of man who could live with himself if he didn’t offer aid to a dying soul.
“Let’s start again,” he heard himself saying. “Tell me what you need, Crystal. Is there some way I can help?”
Her eyes opened, still as blue as summer but without the spark of energy that had melted him years ago. She looked old and haggard. “That’s why I’m here. I knew you’d help me.”
“Help you what? I know a good doctor. Some nurses. I have some money put back. What do you need?”
“My kids.” The three settled around her on the couch, painfully alert to the serious adult conversation. Weakly, she stretched an arm to each side like wings and covered them, a hen sheltering her chicks.
“When I die,” she said, “I want you to take my kids.”
Chapter Three
Zak wanted to say she was crazy. He wanted to yell, “No way!” He wanted to rewind to that blissfully ignorant time when he’d been admiring Jilly’s jaunty lawn mower grit and Tim Lincecum’s earned run average. If he could pitch like that he’d be in the majors.
Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to get himself under control while praying for a quick and easy resolution. None was forthcoming.
“This is sudden,” Crystal said.
“Sudden” was a major understatement that left him gaping. Sudden was when the runner on first took off for second. Sudden was when he’d pitched a no-hitter and his teammates dumped the ice bucket over his head. This wasn’t sudden. This was catastrophic.
“I wish I didn’t have to spring it on you this way, but…” The remainder trailed away, lost in the facts. Crystal was running out of time. He wasn’t cynical enough or cruel enough to question that part of her story. All he had to do was look at her ashen color, the black circles under her eyes and her emaciated body.
He tried to get a grip, tried to ignore the rampaging elephants in his chest and the shock ricocheting through his head to focus on the most important portion of this bizarre conversation. Crystal was dying. “The doctors can’t do anything?”
“They’ve done a lot. More than two years’ worth. Nothing worked. I waited too long.” She lifted one very thin shoulder, puckering the dragon logo on her pink pullover. “I thought the lump would go away. Instead the cancer spread.”
He could see her doing that. Crystal didn’t want anything to be wrong, so she pretended it wasn’t. This time, ignoring the problem would cost her everything.
“That’s why you have to take my children. They’re sweet kids, Zak. Not perfect, but you know what will happen if I don’t find them a home.”
“Foster care.” He knew how much she’d hated growing up in the social system and how she’d wished for a family she’d never gotten. Now, she had one, in these children, and she was losing them. “What about Tank?”
She rolled her eyes. “I haven’t seen Tank in a long time.”
That figured, but still. “They’re his boys.”
“He’s mean. He hit Brandon a lot.” Probably Crystal, too, from what Zak recalled of Tank Rogers. “I left him after Jake came along. I’ve made a mess of my life but I love my kids. They deserve better.”
The middle boy began to sniffle. The older one scowled and stared at the wall, a robot of a boy.
“Maybe the kids should go outside and play while we talk?” Zak suggested.
“Sure.” Weakly, she pushed at Brandon. “Take Jake and Bella outside. Stay in the yard.”
The stiff-backed boy trudged out, gripping his sister’s hand. Jake trailed them, sucking his thumb.
When the back door snapped closed, Zak held out his palm as an olive branch. He intended to be kind but firm. “I’ll help you in some other way, Crystal, but I can’t do this. I don’t know anything about raising children, especially a little girl.” The daddy word gave him cold chills. Maybe she’d see the folly of her suggestion if he laid out the facts about himself. “First of all, I’m single. They need a mother. And I’m gone a lot. My firefighter job comes with a crazy schedule. Plus, I play a lot of baseball.”
“Still?”
What did she mean “still”?
“Dreams die hard.” Hey, he was only twenty-seven. Roger Clemens won a Cy Young Award when he was forty-two. The majors could still come calling.
“The job, baseball, being single, none of that matters, Zak. My kids need you.”
All those things mattered to him! “They need a caring family, Crystal. There are people out there who will adopt three cute kids. A family, not some single guy without a clue about raising them.”
“Who? Name one person who would adopt three kids all at once.”
“I don’t know,” he said, exasperated. “Someone.”
If he told her to call child welfare, she’d go ballistic. He wouldn’t do that anyway. But what could he do? He was not the daddy type.
“You’re the only person I’d trust with them.”
Oh, man. She was killing him. He wished like crazy Jilly was here to help him out. She’d know what to say. “Ask me for something else, but not this. I can’t.”
Crystal pressed shaky knuckles to her mouth but didn’t cry. For that he was grateful. A crying woman was a powerful force.
On wobbly legs she rose, and with more dignity than he’d imagined she said, “I’m sorry to have bothered you. You aren’t the man I remembered, after all.”
Jilly heard car doors slam. She pushed off the grass, scratched at the itch on the back of her leg and carried Lucky to the corner of the house. From there she could see Zak’s driveway. She rubbed Lucky’s velvet ear and watched as Zak reached into his pocket, took out his wallet and offered Crystal some money. She must have refused because he leaned into the window to say something and tossed the bills inside.
The battered Chevy backed down the drive, children’s faces pressed against the windows, and left Zak standing with arms dangling at his sides as they drove away.
Had there been some sort of ghastly mistake? Was she Zak’s wife or not? If they were married, where was she going? And why was he tossing money into her car?
Hope sprang up like a tenacious weed. Maybe they weren’t married. Maybe she’d misunderstood the conversation. After all, she’d been in the kitchen with three talking children. She’d made a mistake. Thank goodness.
Or maybe the woman was a nightmare from Zak’s past and he’d paid her to go away. Maybe she’d come to extort money. Maybe…
Curiosity getting the better of her, she put Lucky and the other rabbits back in the hutch and went inside to wash her face and hands. She had to know. Yes, she was nosy, but Zak was her best friend. He needed her.
And she’d go crazy if she didn’t know the truth.
Please let the conversation be a misunderstanding on my part. Zak could not be married.
“You look better.” Her mother stood in the laundry room, folding towels into a green plastic basket. The smell of lavender fabric softener, moist and hot from the dryer filled the narrow space.
“I’m going over to Zak’s. Don’t get too hot back here. I can fold these later.”
Mom, who worried less about her blood pressure than her daughter did, said, “I saw that woman leave. I wonder who she was. All those children.”
“You had three children.” Jilly snagged a clean washcloth.
“Mmm. Didn’t seem that many back then.” Mom kneed the drier shut with a metallic bang. “You don’t think she’s Zak’s girlfriend, do you?”
Jilly’s stomach lurched. She fisted the washcloth into a wad. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Did you watch that movie on cable last night? The one I told you about?”
“Yes, Mom.” She’d watched the DVD a long time ago. The movie, about a girl who was always a bridesmaid and never a bride, could have been the story of Jillian’s life. Except for the part about finding the guy of her dreams. Or rather him finding her. Jilly had found hers five years ago when Zak bought the house across the street. Beyond sharing pipe wrenches and hamburgers, he hadn’t bothered to notice.
“That could happen to you if you’d stop jumping every time he calls.” Mom handed her a stack of clean, fragrant towels. “Zak likes you. That woman is the first one I’ve ever seen over there other than his mother and you.”
“Mom, let it go.” Jilly hid her reddening face behind the stack of terry cloth. “Guys don’t find me attractive in that way. Zak likes me for a friend.”
“Maybe he’d like you for more if you played hard to get. Men are intrigued by a woman they can’t have.”
Jilly chanted her mantra, the one she’d used since she was sixteen. “When the time is right, the Lord will send someone.”
Someone who didn’t mind her freckles or red hair, someone who saw the real Jillian Fairmont. Not some jerk like Clay Trent who’d called her “Spotty” in front of the entire junior class. “Men don’t find me attractive.”
“You’re too hung up about your looks, Jillian. You’re a beautiful woman.”
Even though her mother repeated the words often, Jilly didn’t believe a word. Years of playground torment had told her the truth. Boys weren’t attracted to her. They wanted to be her friend, her pal, but not her date to the prom.
“Bye, Mom.”
“Take some of those muffins. The way to a man’s heart…”
Jilly made a rude noise but dumped the towels in the linen cabinet and grabbed the muffins as she threaded her way around a pair of squirmy dogs.
With Mugsy and Satchmo at heel, she jogged across the street, her mother’s words ringing in her head. She wanted to believe Zak found her attractive, but he’d never treated her as anything but a pal.
She hammered on his front door. “Hey, open up. I brought Mom’s muffins and two of your buddies.”
The dogs alone usually brought Zak roaring to the door to engage in a mock battle with the terriers.
“Come on in. I could use a friend.”
Uh-oh.
Jilly gave the door a push and stepped in. Sprawled on the couch, a dejected-looking Zak took a gut full of rat terrier as both dogs leaped aboard. He shoved them off. The dogs plopped on their bottoms, heads tipped to the side in a comical questioning expression. Clearly, their friend did not want to play, an unusual turn of events.
“You don’t look too happy.” Jilly shoved his sneakered feet aside and scootched in at the end of the couch. She set the muffins on a lamp table out of the dogs’ reach. “Who was that? What happened?”
Zak dropped his feet to the floor and sat up. “I need to talk to you about something. Promise you’ll hear me out before you tell me how stupid I am.”
She’d never seen him look this worried. The hope that she’d misunderstood dwindled away. “So, is it true? You’re married?”
Shoulders bumping hers, Zak swiveled his long, lanky body in her direction. Green eyes stood out against a summer tan, bewildered. “You heard what she said?”
“If you mean Crystal, yes, most of it. At least, I think I did.” Sickness rose in Jilly’s throat. She fought it down, although every hope she’d ever had, every dream that Zak would wake up and see her as a woman instead of a pal died a quiet death. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t I know?”
“Because I didn’t know.” He rubbed the back of his neck, kneading tight muscles. She’d done that for him before, after a hard ball game when his muscles ached and his arm stiffened up.
Before she knew he had a wife.
“Please,” Jilly scoffed, even though nothing amused her. “Give me some credit here. She didn’t give you one of those drugs that make you forget, did she? You married her. A man doesn’t forget something that momentous.”
“I knew I had married her. I just didn’t know we are married.” He slammed his fist onto his thigh. “This can’t be happening.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Tell me about it. Nothing makes sense right now except I have a problem I don’t know how to solve.” He gripped the neck of his T-shirt and pulled, exposing the tanned skin below his throat. Jilly wanted to make him feel better, but how did a woman comfort another woman’s husband?
Mugsy, the empathetic one, lifted both paws lightly to Zak’s knee and cocked his head. Zak absently rubbed the pointed ears. Satchmo, not to be left out, leaped easily into Jilly’s lap, dog tags jingling.
“From the top,” Jilly said. “Explain this before I call your mother and tell her you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
“Whatever you do, don’t call my parents.”
“They don’t know?” This was worse than she’d thought.
“Not everything. I was in college, away from home, on baseball scholarship. Crystal was one of those girls who hung around college guys even though she wasn’t in school. Kind of a groupie type. She’d come to the ball games and jump up and down, all excited. After a good game, she’d rush up, gushing about how I was sure to get a call from the scouts.”
“She stroked your ego.”
“I guess. What did I know? I was barely eighteen and green as a frog.” He made a huffing noise.
“So what happened?”
“You know that old song about the candle in the wind? That was Crystal, blowing through life at the mercy of anyone and everything. She had problems and I felt sorry for her.” He shrugged, chagrined. “She was cute, too. Put the two together and I didn’t stand a chance when she asked me to marry her for the sake of her baby.”
“Her baby?” Even though the hated red blush crept up her neck, Jilly had to know. “Or yours, too?”
Zak’s eyes darkened to the color of rich moss, eyes that usually made her heart flutter. She couldn’t let that happen anymore. Even though it did.
“You have to believe me, Jilly. Those kids aren’t mine. None of them. Crystal and I were married about fifteen minutes. Shoot, most of the time I was at ball practice. I barely saw her.”
The unbidden vision of Zak and Crystal together stirred in the pit of her stomach as powerful as a canine virus. She hoped she didn’t throw up on Zak’s tennis shoes. “How could your parents not know?”
“I was working my way up to sharing the news.”
“They weren’t going to be happy about it?”
“Not even close. I was on scholarship, shooting for the big leagues. My dream was theirs, too. They would have been crushed.”
Jilly understood the feeling. She was crushed. Decimated. Shove a stick of dynamite in her heart and light the fuse.
“Her old boyfriend, the baby’s father, came by one day while I was in class and away she went. Her note said she’d filed for divorce to be with her soul mate.” He made a grim face. “Some soul mate.”
Jilly straightened, a fragile glimmer of hope flaring. “Then you aren’t married.”
“I don’t want to be. Never intended to be. At the time, I was too busy and dumb to consider she might not follow through.”
Jilly’s hope crashed and burned. “She didn’t.”
“No.” Zak let out an agitated sound. Mugsy licked his hand in consolation. “Looking back, I should have known. Crystal wasn’t the kind of girl who followed through with anything. Ever.”
“Oh, Zak,” she moaned. “You have a wife. You’re married.”
“No!” He slapped both hands to the sides of his head, fingers digging into his short brown hair. Surprised by the vehemence, the two dogs leaped to the floor. Zak dropped his arms, shoulders sagging, and on a long sigh said, “Yes. Technically, I guess I am.”
Jilly wondered if God believed in technicalities, but figured now was not the time to ask. Zak was more than freaked out. She gripped his forearm with her fingers. He was trembling. Or was that her?
“Okay, let’s think about this rationally,” she said. Yeah, right, and while we’re at it, let’s fly to Mars. “Why is Crystal here now? What does she want? A divorce? Like in that movie, Sweet Home Alabama?” Please Lord, let that be it. If Crystal divorced him, Zak would be free. Then another, much worse thought hit her. “Or did she change her mind after all this time and want you back?”
Jilly hated the thoughts running through her head. Ways to get Zak out of a marriage when marriage was ordained by God. What was wrong with her?
She knew the answer to that one. She loved a married man. She wanted him for herself. What kind of horrible person was she?
“Crystal has cancer,” he said flatly. “She doesn’t have much time left.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Guilt rushed in. The woman was dying and all Jilly could think about was how to steal her husband. “She’s so young.”
She wanted to ask what Crystal’s illness had to do with Zak, but guilt wouldn’t let her. “Why did she come to you? For money? Or what?”
“I don’t even know where she lives,” he said numbly. “Or what she’s been doing for the last ten years. It’s obvious she doesn’t have much. She’s broke and sick and alone.”
Compassion, usually welcome, rose in Jilly. As much as she disliked the words, she forced them out. “If she needs your help, you have to give it.”
“I know, but I can’t do what she asked. I just can’t.” He took her hand, a casual gesture.
“Tell me. Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t think so.” He lifted her fingers one by one, traced a spray of freckles across the back and then gripped her hand with such force that she knew he was about to say something momentous. As if having a wife wasn’t momentous enough. “She asked me to take her kids—” he hesitated “—after…”
Jilly frowned. What was momentous about that? Crystal was desperately ill with little time left. “Until her family comes for them?”
He released her hand and sat back. “There is no family, Jilly. No one. She doesn’t have a single person anywhere to turn to. No one except me—the long-lost husband who didn’t even know he was one.”
Zak’s meaning seeped in, slow and deadly as arsenic. He not only had a wife, but he was also about to become a father.
Zak watched the color drain from Jilly’s face. Her freckles popped out like rust stars against a porcelain sky. She had beautiful skin, a fact he noticed every time she blushed, which was often. She made a tiny noise of distress and Zak resisted the urge to toss his arm over her shoulders and give her a hug. He didn’t like seeing Jilly upset, especially when he was the cause.