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“And you still haven’t talked to this Hector Tyson?” Ry asked.
“He’s been out of town this whole time. I understand he gets back on Monday, so it looks like it’ll be up to you, Marti. Ry will be on his way to Missoula right after the wedding to take care of business there, and I’ll be on my honeymoon. Do you think you can handle it?”
Marti knew her afternoon dizzy spell had them thinking she couldn’t but she wasn’t about to accept that. “Of course, I think I can handle it,” she said as if it were ridiculous for him to ask. Then, because she wanted them to know that everything should be business as usual, she returned to the subject of their grandmother. “And Ry, you have a meeting with the lawyers to see if there are any legal options for restitution from the sale of the land, right?”
“Right,” Ry answered.
“Then you and I will take it from here while Wyatt lies on the beach,” she concluded.
Her brothers exchanged a glance that she would have been able to read even if they weren’t triplets and inordinately in tune with each other.
“Knock it off,” she ordered.
“Knock what off?” Wyatt asked.
“This whole can-I-handle-it, is-Marti-all-right thing. Because I am all right. Yes, Jack’s death hit me hard. Yes, maybe it’s a little over the top to decide to have a baby on my own. But seriously, I’m okay.”
“You didn’t look okay sitting on the ground this afternoon,” Ry said, never one to mince words.
“Dizziness—no big deal. I also sometimes throw up if I so much as get a whiff of breakfast sausage—it just comes with the territory.” That seemed like something Wyatt would know, since his first wife had been pregnant when a household accident had taken her life and the life of the baby. But she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “I’ve been to the doctor, I’m healthy as a horse, the baby is doing fine and having it is a sure sign that I’m moving forward. That I’m putting Jack’s death behind me.”
“It took Wyatt two years after Mikayla died to give in to his feelings for Neily,” a clearly concerned Ry put in. “It’s only been nine months—”
“Nine and a half, actually,” Marti corrected.
“Okay, nine and a half months since you lost the guy you’d been madly in love with since you were both kids,” Ry persisted. “The love of your life, Marti. The guy we all thought was your other half. Come on, if you were in our shoes, wouldn’t you be worried that you’re acting out of some kind of grief mania and maybe not thinking straight or handling anything well?”
“I know how it looks,” Marti said calmly. “It looks like I’ve gone a little nuts. But I haven’t. In spite of the dizziness and the rest of the pregnancy annoyances, I feel good about this baby. I feel better than I’ve felt since Jack died and I can’t believe that’s anything but positive, so that’s how I’m going to look at it. If you have qualms—”
“Keep them to yourself,” Wyatt advised.
“I was going to say get over them, but that’s good, too,” Marti said. “And as for staying in Northbridge a while to be with Gram, and checking out the site Wyatt found for the new store here, I’m as capable of doing all of that now as I was before I was pregnant. End of discussion!”
Neither of her brothers looked convinced. They both just sat there with worried expressions on their faces.
“I appreciate that you guys care. I really do. But I haven’t gone off the deep end. It was just meant to be that I have a baby at this point—with Jack or without him,” she said, pushing on to get through this. “Yes, it’s sad that it isn’t Jack’s baby or that he isn’t here to have it with me and make up the family we thought we’d have…” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with this new path. It’s just a new path.”
And with that she couldn’t possibly have said another word on the subject without breaking down. So she stood and said she was tired and was going to bed.
She’d made it to the bottom of the stairs when she heard Ry say to Wyatt, “I told you, ever since the Expo she’s been different.”
Marti pretended she hadn’t heard and went up the creaky old stairs, maintaining her air of confidence until she was behind the closed door of her current bedroom.
The first floor was beginning to show signs of im provement and after the wedding Marti intended to move into the downstairs den. But until then she was staying upstairs in what had been her grandmother’s room as a girl, and almost nothing had been done to that. While the room was clean, it showed its age in the canopy bed that was missing its canopy due to decay, an ancient, scarred bureau and matching dressing table and a large cheval mirror that was cracked in one corner.
Marti went to the bed and collapsed in a heap, letting a long sigh deflate that phony facade she’d been keeping up for the last few days since she’d invented the artificial insemination story for her brothers. The facade she’d had to kick up a notch since that afternoon when yet another curveball had been tossed at her in the form of Noah Perry.
“Am I the only one you can knock around?” she muttered to whatever unseen forces seemed to be at work in her life for the last nine-and-a-half months.
Regardless of how she was presenting everything to her brothers, underneath it all she was a wreck.
She’d hoped never to go through anything more stressful than the death of her fiancé. But the last few weeks had rivaled it.
Pregnant. She’d done one dumb thing in her life and had she been allowed to just get away with it? No. She’d gotten pregnant!
It wasn’t as if she’d planned to go to Denver that last weekend in March and sleep with a stranger. It wasn’t as if it had even crossed her mind. She’d volunteered to oversee the Hardware Expo just to escape for a few days. To escape the constant reminders of Jack everywhere she looked, everywhere she went, every which way she turned. To escape all the well-intentioned sympathy and pity of friends and family. To escape the awkward position of being a sort-of-but-not-really widow.
She’d just wanted a few days without anyone tiptoeing around her or being overly solicitous of her. A few days of not needing to assure everyone she spoke to that she was okay. A few days to interact with people who didn’t know her or Jack or what had happened. People who were just going about their lives the way they always had.
Which was exactly what she’d found and for the whole three days of the Expo she’d felt as if at least half of the weight on her shoulders had been lifted. It had actually been easier to endure the bouts of grief without all the coddling and fussing.
Bouts of grief—she realized as she thought that that’s what the grieving was becoming. That it wasn’t the constant, ever-present entity that it had been at the beginning. That now she was doing what Wyatt had said she would—that the times when she felt better and more able to cope, more as if she really was going to get through it, were increasing. That the times when she was blinded by it were becoming fewer and further between.
And the Expo had helped that along.
And so had Noah Perry…
She’d encountered him on several occasions over those three days. Not that she’d known his name. Until the night in the coffee shop he was just another face among the gazillion faces that had passed through Home-Max’s displays or visited the hospitality suite.
And yet here she was, having his baby.
Overwhelmed by that all over again, she lay on her side on the bed with her feet still on the floor.
The image of Noah’s face had stuck with her at least, she thought in a feeble attempt to somehow make this seem less awful than it did. He was memorably handsome, though. Which was why she’d noticed him even among the crowd at the Expo and amid a sea of other faces in the suite when he’d passed through.
He had rugged good looks—a sharply defined bone structure that gave him a square brow, high cheekbones, a razor-sharp nose and a jawline that was strong and prominent.
But it was his hair and eyes that had really stuck with her. There was nothing common or ordinary about them.
He had great hair. Dark and thick and wavy. And although he wore it a little longer than she’d liked Jack to wear his, it suited this guy. Full and carelessly combed away from that chiseled face, it touched his collar in the back and gave him an untamed, bad-boy air.
And his eyes—they were the color of melted bittersweet chocolate, shining and penetrating and patient. Eyes that looked as if they had intelligence behind them. That seemed to see past the surface.
She’d already thought that if her baby was born with its father’s hair and eyes it would be beautiful…
But she hadn’t just taken one glance at the man and said, “take me, I’m yours,” because he looked good…well, better than good, great. Still, that hadn’t been enough for her to spend the night with him. No, that had come out of a combination of things, including a few cocktails too many and an apparent weakness for the cute guy she’d repeatedly seen around the trade show.
Would she have agreed to join him for a bite to eat if her inhibitions hadn’t already been compromised?
Probably. Because in a way, by then the man she’d been thinking of for three days as The Cute Guy had become a part of the reason she’d gone to the Expo in the first place. He’d treated her normally.
He’d joked with her. He’d been friendly. He’d been funny and charming and clever. And yes, he’d even flirted with her a little.
Not that she’d wanted someone to flirt with her, but when he had, it had felt good. It had also felt good to discover that she could even flirt back—something she hadn’t known she could do with anyone but Jack. So she’d opted to allow herself one last brush with that before returning to reality in Missoula and had had a sandwich with The Cute Guy.
And she’d enjoyed herself.
Yes, she’d felt guilty. A part of her had felt as if she were being unfaithful to Jack.
But like her brother Ry, Jack had always been about living life, about grabbing it and shaking every last drop out of it. He’d said again and again after Wyatt’s wife had died that the living had to go on living. He’d even said that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted Marti to jump right back on the bandwagon, that he didn’t want her wasting any time wallowing.
Easier said than done.
Maybe her less-than-sober state that night in the coffee shop had also been a factor, but when The Cute Guy had asked her to go to the bar for a nightcap and she’d debated whether or not she should, in her mind she’d heard Jack’s voice urging her to go ahead…
So she had.
She’d gone to the hotel bar for more drinking. Some dancing. For some fun.
And when it should have been over, she hadn’t wanted it to be…
That was the last clear thing she remembered. The rest was far, far more fuzzy. A complete blur, actually. The kissing. His room. His bed. Clothes coming off in the dark. Letting herself just go with feeling good, with what she wanted at that moment…
The next thing she’d known, morning sunshine was coming in through the windows, she wasn’t drunk anymore and she was appalled by what she’d done. So she’d dressed in a silent hurry and slinked out of his room.
She hadn’t told a soul about that night and the further she’d gotten away from it, the more she’d begun to see it merely as something that had helped her turn a corner in her grieving for Jack. And she’d viewed that as a good thing because it had made her realize that she was going to survive losing him, that she just might be able to go on without him after all.
And then she’d missed her period.
For a few days she’d told herself it was just late, that it would start any minute.
For a few days after that she’d told herself there could be any number of reasons to miss a period—stress had caused her to miss the first one after Jack’s death.
By the time she was two weeks late she’d bought a home pregnancy test. When it had come up positive, she’d rushed to her doctor, hoping it was a false positive.
It wasn’t.
Shock, horror, fear, panic—she’d gone through them all since then. But when she’d been able to calm down and think it through, she’d decided that maybe the pregnancy, and the baby, were signs that she really did have to push on. To go forward. To leave the past behind. And so she’d decided to do just that. By having the baby.
She’d considered how she might track down The Cute Guy whose name she thought was Norm. She didn’t know anything about him other than he was a contractor from somewhere in southeast Montana and what floor of the hotel his room had been on. Still, those were starting points and she’d thought she might be able to use them to persuade the hotel to give her his full name and address. But for what? she’d asked herself.
She didn’t need financial help. She had no idea who he really was or what his background might be, or if he might have a family. She had no idea what kind of damage could be done if she pursued him with this, or what sort of reaction or response she’d be met with. So it just seemed better to leave things the way they were. To consider the baby hers and hers alone, to have it and raise it on her own and to leave the-Cute-Guy-from-the-Expo none the wiser.
So she’d concocted the artificial insemination story.
And even if it wasn’t true, she still liked the message it gave—that she’d taken control of her life again and was moving forward, albeit unconventionally. Plus, since telling her brothers and a few friends the tale and presenting it as something she’d actively gone after and achieved, it almost felt as if that’s what she’d done.
Then she’d looked up into the face of The Cute Guy again that afternoon…
Since then, relief was certainly not what she’d been feeling.
She rolled onto her back, flung her arms wide and let out a huge groan.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she asked the heavens.
No answer was forthcoming.
But seeing Noah again changed things and she knew it. She was going to have to rethink what to do from here.
“Only not right now. Tomorrow,” she said to herself, shying away from it because at that moment it just felt like more than she could deal with. Besides, wasn’t it better to wait to think about it all after a night’s sleep?
Of course it was. Especially when she was too tired to even trade the sweats she’d put on after her posttravel shower for pajamas or move up to the pillow.
Tomorrow was another day.
And who knew? Maybe she’d wake up and she wouldn’t be in such a mess.
Chapter Three
Saturday was hectic. There were last-minute wedding preparations for Sunday evening’s ceremony, rearrangement of the furniture to accommodate the reception, decorating to be done, deliveries of food and flowers and tables and chairs and other necessities. There was the rehearsal and the dinner, and the introduction of Neily’s sister, five brothers and their spouses and dates to Wyatt’s family.
Because of the commotion at the house, Noah Perry’s work on the remodel was suspended for the weekend. And while he wasn’t a member of the wedding party and so wasn’t included in the rehearsal or the dinner afterward, he was still on Marti’s mind almost constantly through Saturday and Saturday night. All without coming to any better conclusion than she had on Friday—she needed to do some fact-finding before she decided how to proceed.
Then Sunday evening came, and guests finally began to arrive for the seven o’clock ceremony.
Once Marti had carefully styled her hair in a French twist, applied her makeup and dressed in her curvehugging, short black dress, she stood at the window of her upstairs bedroom watching for Noah. And trying to make her stomach stop doing somersaults at the mere thought that she was going to see him again.
He arrived early because he was providing the transportation for his grandfather, who was the former town reverend and was performing the ceremony in the absence of the current, vacationing, minister. As Noah helped the elderly man get up to the house, Marti couldn’t keep from taking stock of her baby’s father.
Noah had been dressed casually at the Expo and he’d been in work clothes on Friday, but now he was wearing a navy blue suit over a cerulean blue shirt and a darker blue tie. The suit fit him so well he could have been an endorsement for the good tailoring to be found in Northbridge—his broad shoulders filled the jacket to perfection before it tapered to just hint at his narrow waist, and the pants whispered down long, long legs to break exactly where they should.
His hair still had that devil-may-care look to it, offsetting the clothes any Wall Street executive would have been proud to wear, and combined it made for a picture Marti just couldn’t take her eyes off of.
But tonight is just about getting some background in formation, she reminded herself of the only thing she’d come up with after two nights of not very restful sleep and a full day of consideration in between. She was going to take things in small steps, hoping that way she could handle it better and arrive at a rational, intelligent, best-for-everyone plan of action.
When it came time for the ceremony it was Ry who persuaded the agoraphobic Theresa to go down the back stairs and into the kitchen with Mary Pat where she could watch Wyatt and Neily say their vows without seeing or being seen by any of the guests.
Because Wyatt had wanted both Ry and Marti to be his grooms-people, as he called them, Neily had chosen her sister Mara and oldest brother Cam to give balance to the attendants. Standing with her brothers, her back to the onlookers, Marti wondered if Noah Perry was watching her the way she’d watched him on his way into the house. And just assuming that he might be did not help those stomach somersaults one bit.
His grandfather performed a stern but gracious ceremony that only lasted twenty minutes, and when it was over, Mary Pat slipped Theresa back upstairs to her bedroom and the reception began.
That was when Marti lost all awareness of anything or anyone other than Noah Perry, whose gaze was definitely trained on her as she congratulated Wyatt and Neily.
Noah didn’t approach her, though. He just kept an eye on her as the music began to play and guests started to mingle. And even when she caught him watching her, he didn’t cover it up by glancing away. He just went on looking at her, studying her, until she pretended that something else had caught her attention.
Go on, go over and talk to him, she told herself.
But instead she went upstairs to make sure her grandmother wasn’t too agitated in the aftermath of her foray to the kitchen.
The food was being served buffet-style and by the time Marti returned almost everyone was eating. Only a few stragglers were going through the line and Noah was at the end of it.
Maybe now’s the time, she thought. After all, she could step up behind him, fill a plate and say hello—belatedly, but exactly as she had with everyone else tonight. Then maybe she could nonchalantly sit with him to eat and use small talk to get into her fact-finding mission to learn about him before she made her decision as to whether or not to admit the baby was his.
So why didn’t she budge?
Because she was a great big fat chicken!
Maybe he didn’t really want to know if the baby was his, she thought. After all, he hadn’t made a beeline to her to ask—he could have come to the house just to see her yesterday if he was dying to know, and even tonight he could have cornered her immediately after the ceremony.
Or maybe he was obtuse and it hadn’t even occurred to him that the baby might be his. Maybe he’d accepted the artificial insemination story at face value. Maybe she could just go on the way she’d planned even though their paths had crossed again…
Or maybe not. Because when he reached the end of the serving table he turned to look out over the room, spotted her and headed toward her.
Marti was inclined to run again. To make a dash for the stairs and take refuge in her grandmother’s room as if she hadn’t noticed Noah’s beautiful brown eyes locked onto her with single-minded intent.
But she didn’t run. She forced her feet to stay planted right where they were. She breathed deeply. She told herself to act as if nothing was going on. She even managed a small smile—although she cut that short when she felt her lips quiver nervously.
“I took enough for two,” he said when he reached her, motioning upward with his plate. “I thought maybe we could share.”
Then he leaned in and said for her ears only, “If we can share that night in Denver, we can share a plate, can’t we?”
Openly referring to that night sent a wave of panic through her. “I’m not very hungry—”
“Sit with me anyway,” he countered, not allowing her any out.
Oh, he’s suspicious, all right…
But this was something she needed to do and he’d just initiated the process for her. She knew she had to push through, so she conceded, nodding over her shoulder at the entryway behind them. “Want to sit on the steps?” she asked hesitantly.
“Sure.”
It was quieter in the entry, away from everyone else gathered in the living room. Marti went to the large staircase that rose to the upper level and sat on the second step, hugging the wall so Noah could sit, too, but not too closely.
He took the hint, positioning himself at an angle with his back to the newel post. Then he set the plate on the step between them and handed her one of the two forks and two napkins he’d brought.
“I took some of everything since I wasn’t sure what you might like,” he said then, stabbing a small parsleybuttered potato for himself.
As he ate, he looked at her again the way he had been all through the evening, as if he were cataloging what he remembered and what he didn’t.
Marti pretended to be more interested in the cherry tomato she was trying to skewer than in him.
“How are you today?” he asked.
“Fine,” she was quick to assure him. “That was just a little dizzy spell yesterday. I’d been sitting in the car for so long and it was low to the ground and I got up fast—” That was all more information than he needed and she cut herself off before it went any further and said, “Today I’m fine,” and popped the tomato into her mouth.
Noah continued to look at her for a moment after she’d stopped babbling. Then, in a completely conversational tone, he said, “So. Pregnant, huh?”
He was definitely suspicious.
“Mmm-hmm, pregnant,” she confirmed as if it were no big deal. But that was as far as she was willing to go and she volleyed with, “So. Northbridge, huh?”
His agile mouth twitched with a tiny smile at her deflection but she had the distinct impression that he was going to let her set the pace, that he wasn’t going to force the issue. And he didn’t. Instead he merely said, “Northbridge, yeah. Born and raised.”
“You didn’t tell me that in Denver, did you? Didn’t you just say that you were from a small town in southeast Montana?”
“I think so. I didn’t think you would know Northbridge by name. Would you have?”
Marti shook her head. “No. I’d never heard of it before Gram showed up here.”
Noah glanced in the direction of the bedrooms on the upper level. “You couldn’t get her to come down tonight?”
“She was hidden in the kitchen during the wedding itself but not even Ry could get her to do more than that—and if anyone can ever talk her into anything, it’s Ry. She keeps saying she can’t face anyone here, that she’s too ashamed, but we don’t know what that means.”
Noah nodded and ate a bite of ham, again leaving the ball in her court.
Marti knew that while talking about her grandmother might seem like a safe subject, it wasn’t getting her the information she needed. So she didn’t take it any further, seizing something she hoped might. “The reverend is your grandfather?”