“I’m offering you what you said you wanted.”

“You’re a few years too late, and that situation was nothing like this one.”

“No, it wasn’t. Now I have a life to offer you. Now we have a daughter together. Now we just might have another—”

“I think we need to stop talking about what might be and think about what is.”

Marsh leaned in on her again, so close that Tory felt his warm breath on her face, so close that the pull of attraction between them seemed a magnetic force, charging the air around them. “What might be is what matters. You had my baby once without me. I hate that it happened that way. I’m not going to let it happen that way again. Damn it, I will be what I never had—a good father. If you’re pregnant, you will marry me….”

The Marriage Agreement
Christine Rimmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Barbara Ferris, my e-mail pal, who loves a good romance, sends me great jokes and is always checking in just to see how I’m doing.

Thanks, Barb.

CHRISTINE RIMMER

came to her profession the long way around. Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been an actress, a salesclerk, a janitor, a model, a phone sales representative, a teacher, a waitress, a playwright and an office manager. She insists she never had a problem keeping a job—she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day. She lives with her family in Oklahoma.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

Summoned.

There was no other word for it.

Marsh Bravo had been summoned—by the father he hadn’t set eyes on in ten full years, the father he’d thought he’d put behind him as surely and completely as he had the Oklahoma town of his birth. As surely as he had turned his back on Tory.

Tory.

He’d trained himself not to think of her. And he rarely did anymore. There was no point. And besides, even after all these years, just thinking her name caused a tightness in his chest, a pained echo of longing in the vicinity of his heart. Putting Victoria Winningham behind him had not been easy. In fact, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.

Leaving his father behind? Well, that had been a relief, pure and simple. It had been walking away from murder before it had a chance to happen.

On the hospital bed, Blake Bravo stirred. He turned his head, opened sunken, unfocused eyes. Eyes of a gray so pale they seemed otherworldly. Eyes that would have looked just right staring out of the head of a mad wolf.

Marsh had his mother’s dark-brown eyes. He’d always been glad of that. The last thing he needed was to see his father’s eyes staring back at him every time he looked in the mirror.

The old man on the bed sucked in a wheezing breath. They had him on oxygen. He raised a veined, mottled hand with IV lines taped to the back of it and batted at the plastic tubing attached to his nose, letting his hand drop to the sheet again before he’d managed to dislodge anything.

The old man…

It was more than a figure of speech now. Blake Bravo was only fifty-eight, but he looked much older. He could have been seventy. Or even eighty.

The pale eyes narrowed as they focused on Marsh. “You came.” The voice was low, a whispered rasp, like the hiss of a snake.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Nice suit.”

“I like it.”

Blake grinned a grin to match his eyes—feral, wolfish. “Made it big after all, up there in the windy city. Didn’t you?”

“I’ve done all right.”

Blake let out a low, unpleasant chuckle. “I know you have. I know everything about you. Don’t think that I don’t. I know the name of that dinky college where you managed to get yourself a four-year degree, slaving away at those books and running that company you started at the same time. I’ve kept track of you. I could have come after you anytime I’d wanted to. You’d be surprised the tricks your old dad has up his sleeve.”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

The eerie eyes narrowed further and Blake’s wrinkled slit of a lip curled in a sneer. “I don’t like your attitude, Mr. Big Shot.” He let out a ragged sigh. “But then, I never did…” He lifted that skeletal hand once more, waved it weakly and turned his face away again.

Marsh waited. He had a number of questions he might have asked. But he didn’t ask them. He knew his father. A decade would not have changed the nature of the man. Blake Bravo loved it when people asked him questions. It gave him the opportunity to withhold answers.

Marsh looked beyond the wasted figure on the bed and out the room’s one tall, narrow window. They were on an upper floor. All he could see was a section of gunmetal-gray sky. Oklahoma in May. Sunny one minute, storming the next, always the possibility that a cold front would slam up against a warm one and a funnel cloud would form.

But probably not today. The clouds rose up, dark and high, when tornadoes threatened. Today’s sky was one even, uneventful expanse of gray.

The pale eyes were on him again. “I’m dying.”

Marsh gave the smallest of nods. His father had said that already. On the phone less than twenty-four hours ago. The surgeon Marsh had spoken with before he entered his father’s room had told him that Blake’s prognosis was hopeful. But looking at Blake now, Marsh decided that the doctor had either been kind—or a liar.

“Heart attack,” Blake whispered in that snake-hiss voice of his. “A bad one. And another one coming on soon. I can feel it. I know it—but I told you that, didn’t I?”

“Yes. On the phone.”

“I’m slipping. Repeating myself.”

Marsh shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“The hell it is.”

They looked at each other, a long look, a look with challenge in it. And stubbornness—coming from both sides.

Then Blake spoke again. “It’s my heart that’s failing me. But my brother died of a stroke. Massive cerebral hemorrhage. It’ll be thirty years ago come November. Thirty years…” The low rasp faded off. Blake sucked in a breath through the oxygen tube and went on, “He was only thirty-three, can you believe it?” He arched a gray and grizzled brow. “Freak thing, really. He’d been…how should I put it? Under a hell of a lot of stress in the months right before his…unfortunate demise.”

Marsh still said nothing. What good would it do? He knew his father’s sick games. Let the old man play it out by himself this time.

Blake wheezed. “Have a little trouble…getting air.” Then he prodded, “Well. Don’t you want to know about your uncle?”

Marsh didn’t. Why should he? He doubted there even was an uncle. “You’ll say what you want to say—whatever it is I guess you got me here to say. No point in my interrupting.”

There was more chuckling. The low laughter made Blake cough. The cough had an ugly sound. It also dislodged the oxygen tube, which Blake slowly and wearily hooked back in place.

“Ugh,” he said, when the thing was anchored in his nose again. “Disgusting, this dying…” He shot his son another look. “Admit it. You never knew I had a brother, did you?”

“You’re right. I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“There are lots of things you don’t know.”

“I’m sure you’re right about that, too, Dad.”

“Damn right, I’m right.” Blake wheezed some more. He closed his eyes.

The room was silent again. Marsh watched the clear liquid drip from the IV bag into the tube hooked to the back of his father’s hand. Out in the hall he heard someone with squeaky shoes striding by.

“So damn tired,” said the old man on the bed. “And the meds they give me mess with my mind. And you…you’re slowing me down, Mr. Big Shot. You’re not asking the questions.”

Marsh almost smiled at that, though it would have been a smile completely lacking in warmth. And then he let the dying man have what he wanted. “All right, Dad. Why did you ask me to come here?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You’re right. You’re always right. Why did you demand that I come here?”

Blake’s lip curled again, in a smirk of weary amusement. “Dying’s expensive. Somebody’s got to pay the damn hospital bill.”

“No problem. I’ll cover it.”

“It’s nothing to you, huh? Big shot like you?”

“I said, I’ll cover it.” Marsh spoke with more irritation than he meant to.

“Well, well,” said his father. “All got up in a pricey suit. But you’re not so changed, after all. You never did like me calling you big shot. You still don’t like it, do you?”

Marsh decided to ignore that question. “So that’s all? You needed someone to pick up the tab.”

“You wish.”

“Why am I here, Dad?”

“That’s the third time you’ve asked.” The pale eyes gleamed at the petty triumph. “And I was just razzing you about the bill. I can cover it. You’ll find out. I have…various hidden assets, shall we say?”

Marsh could believe that. When he was growing up, his father had never held a job that Marsh could remember. Sometimes Blake would disappear for months on end. Maybe he worked then, though he never said anything about a job. Marsh’s mother was the one who worked. Tammy Rae Sandovich Bravo had labored long and hard at an endless string of dead-end jobs, in order to support her family. Marsh had assumed that his mother earned what little they had. But then she died when he was sixteen. And somehow there was still food in the rundown shack where they lived. Somehow the electric bill always got paid before OG&E cut off their service.

His father was still talking, the snake-hiss voice weighted now with self-satisfaction. “Uh-huh. Hidden assets. Assets safely tucked away, you might say. And as my son and chosen heir, it’ll all be yours when I go.”

Marsh went ahead and asked, though he knew he wouldn’t get an answer. “What’ll be mine, Dad?”

“You’ll find out. Soon enough. You have a big, glittery surprise in store, I’ll tell you that much. A girl’s best friend, as they say. But in this case, it’s a boy’s best friend, a big shot’s best friend, now isn’t it?”

Marsh only looked at him.

Blake grinned his death’s head grin. “You haven’t got a clue, have you? And I like that. You know I like that. That’s where the fun is. Thirty years’ worth of fun—and they’ll never catch me now. They’d have to track me down in hell.” He started to laugh, but didn’t have the strength for it. The laugh became little more than an exhausted, wheezing sigh. “Damn. Tired…” He swore, low and crudely. “Always tired now…”

The mad eyes drooped shut—then popped opened again. “So that’s why you’re here—or at least half of it. Your big surprise. Your…legacy, why don’t we call it? But you can’t have that till I’m gone.”

Marsh could feel his patience giving way. “Leave it to charity, whatever it is. I don’t want it.”

Blake clucked his tongue. “Always the big shot. Never needed a damn thing from your dear old dad…. Just remember, when the time comes. Start where I never let you go. I’ve made it easy for you, once you start looking.”

Marsh said nothing. He didn’t like what he was feeling. He’d spent ten years recreating himself. And all it took was ten minutes of conversation with his father and he was eighteen again, his hands balling into fists.

“Suck up your guts, Mr. Big Shot,” Blake taunted. “Hold that killer instinct in check.” He lifted his right hand, the one free of IV lines, and raked the lank, thinning gray hair off his heavily lined forehead. Marsh saw it then: a small white starburst of scar tissue right over where the blue pulse throbbed at his father’s temple.

“See that?” the old man hissed. “Were you wondering? Well, there it is, what you did to your dear old dad that last time.”

Marsh stared at the scar, remembering things he’d just as soon have forgotten. He breathed deeply, ordered his fists to relax, reminded himself that he was a grown man now. He’d gotten beyond all this old garbage. He didn’t have to play Blake Bravo’s sick cat-and-mouse games anymore.

Blake dropped his hand, so that the hair hid the scar again. But he wouldn’t shut up. “Let nature do it for you,” he suggested in that papery whisper of his. “It’s not going to be that long.”

Marsh dragged in one more long, slow breath. The deep breaths were working, to a degree. His heart rate had slowed, his hands had relaxed.

He said in an even tone, “Dad. It’s been an experience, getting in touch again.”

Blake winked at him. “That it has, my boy—and do you think you’re leaving town now?”

It would have given Marsh great satisfaction to answer, I don’t think I’m leaving. I am leaving.

But he wasn’t going anywhere—except to find himself a decent hotel. Evidently, Marsh still possessed some shred of filial emotion. He would stay, for a few days. He would be there if the end did come.

“No,” he said. “I’ll stay in town for a day or two.”

“That’s right, you will. They cut me open, cracked my chest bone like a pecan shell—did I tell you?”

“You did.”

“Three days ago, that was. Quintuple bypass. And a little plastic valve. I can hear that valve, whooshing open, swinging shut, when it’s quiet, when I’m alone…. All that cutting they did, all those fancy repairs. They won’t be enough. I’ll be dead. And soon.”

Marsh just shook his head, even as a soft voice inside him whispered that his father was right.

“Shake your head all you want,” Blake said. “You’ll see if I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Your doctor said otherwise.”

“Doctors.” Blake let out another gutter expletive. “What the hell do they know?” The question was purely rhetorical. Without waiting for an answer, Blake switched to the next item on his personal agenda. “And now, for your other surprise…”

Marsh simply did not want to hear it. “I think you should rest now.”

“Rest. Hah. Fat lot of good rest’ll do me.”

Marsh turned for the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“To find a place to stay.”

“You can stay at the house.”

An image of the dreary shack hidden among the oaks and hickories down a dirt road out east of town flashed through Marsh’s mind. “No, thanks.”

“No great love for the old homestead, huh?”

“I’ll see you later, Dad.”

“Wait.”

Marsh shouldn’t have, but he paused, his hand poised on the doorknob.

“You’ll need my keys. Even having a heart attack, I had the sense to lock up what was mine.” The whispery voice had pride in it now. “I called the ambulance and locked up and went out to wait on the front step. By the time they got there, I was curled up on the ground. But I locked up what was mine, you can count on that.” He tipped his head in the direction of a tall cabinet near the door to the bathroom. “Keys’re in my pants. In there—and you remember the rules. I know you do. You won’t go nosin’ around in my things till I’m gone for good, will you?”

“I said I’m not staying at the house.”

“Take the damn keys, anyway. I’m never going to be using them again.”

Marsh turned the steel doorknob.

“I’m not finished,” his father said.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me later.”

His father went on as if Marsh hadn’t spoken. “That girl,” he whispered. “That pretty redhead. The doctor’s daughter…”

Marsh stood absolutely still, his face a mask. Whatever the mention of Tory did to him, he wouldn’t give Blake Bravo the satisfaction of seeing it.

Blake was grinning again. “You call her. You remember the number, don’t you? It hasn’t changed.”

Marsh pulled open the door. “I’ll be back to check on you. Tonight, probably.”

“Call her,” his father commanded again. “You’ll see. You’re going to love it, the redhead’s surprise.”

Marsh gave his father no chance to say more. He stepped out into the hall, drawing the door shut in his wake.

Five minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his rental car. He left the hospital parking lot and drove south until he came to Gray. Then he turned west. Without even having to think about it, he worked his way over to Main at the point where Main became a two-way street.

Norman, Oklahoma. His hometown. It all looked…bigger. More prosperous. The streets were more crowded than he remembered. But in a basic sense, it was the same. He still recalled which way to turn to get where he wanted to go—which was toward the interstate, where he knew he’d find a large hotel.

He passed the high school, noted that they were putting a new front on it. The wooden statue still stood at Main and Wylie. Somebody’s ancestor, a Union soldier in the War Between the States, carved from a tree trunk by a chainsaw artist, if Marsh remembered right.

A couple of blocks past the statue was the first street he might have turned on, if…

Marsh did not turn onto that street. Nor did he turn at the one after it, or the one after that, though any one of those three would have taken him quickly to the handsome brick house where his high school sweetheart—the girl he’d sworn to love forever, the girl who’d sworn the same to him—had lived.

His father’s raspy whisper echoed in his brain.

Call her. You’ll see. You’re going to love it, the redhead’s surprise….

Marsh told himself he was ignoring that whisper. There was no surprise. His father was just doing what his father always did: trying to stir up trouble wherever he sensed an opportunity.

Marsh told himself a few other things: that he would not call her. That he had set her free of him years ago, that she probably would only slam the door in his face if he showed up out of nowhere right now. That he’d come back to his hometown because his father was dying and for no other reason.

That bygones needed to remain bygones.

Sleeping dogs should be left to lie.

Water under the bridge must just keep flowing on its way.

That she was probably married with children by now. Married, a mother—and happy. With a good life that didn’t include the bad boy she’d loved in her foolish youth. That she deserved the best and he sincerely hoped she had found it.

Still…

He had loved her with his whole heart and soul—desperately. Completely. There had been no one else in the past ten years who even came close to taking her place.

Marsh blinked.

Damn. He’d already crossed the interstate and driven right past Sooner Mall. He was well beyond the area where he could look for a place to stay. Swearing under his breath, he swung into the left lane, executed a U-turn and told himself to pay attention to the task at hand.

He found a hotel a few minutes later. It wasn’t until after he’d checked in and called his office in Chicago to see how things were going there that thoughts of Tory crept into his mind again.

He ordered those thoughts away. The hotel had a small gym. He went down there and worked out for an hour. Then he spent some time sweating in the sauna. And after that, he cleaned up.

By then it was a little after six. And he was thinking of Tory again. What, he wondered, was her life like now?

Had the old man been telling the truth? Did she still live in that big brick house on that wide tree-lined street in Westwood Estates, with her parents?

Bygones and sleeping dogs, he thought.

Let her alone. She would not want to see you….

Still, he got the phone book out of his sitting-room desk drawer and turned to physicians in the yellow pages. He found no listing for a Dr. Seth Winningham. He flipped to the white pages. No Seth or Audra Winningham there, either. It could have been, of course, that they had merely decided to go unlisted.

But then he saw it: V. J. Winningham. V for Victoria. J for Justine. Same address, same phone number. Just as the old man had said. The doctor and his wife had probably retired, moved down to Florida or out to Arizona and left the house to their only child.

And her last name was still Winningham. She hadn’t married—or at least, it appeared that way. But then, you could never tell for certain by a name. Some women kept their maiden names even after they’d said, “I do.”

Marsh sat for a long time with the open phone book in his lap, staring at the number he remembered so well and coming to grips with the inevitable.

He wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from giving that number a try.

Chapter Two

“Tory?”

That was all the voice on the other end of the line said. Just her name. Cautiously. On a rising inflection.

Just her name.

And the sound sent Tory Winningham’s world spinning into chaos.

She would know that voice anywhere. Even after ten years.

Her stomach churning, she cast a frantic glance at the table a foot away.

“Tory?” His voice in her ear again, more insistent now. “Hello? Tory?”

Kim was watching. And she picked up on her mother’s distress. The pixie face scrunched into an apprehensive frown. “Mama. Who’s that? What’s the matter?”

Tory spoke into the phone. “Just a minute, please.” She wrapped her hand around the receiver, so the man on the other end couldn’t hear. Then she summoned every ounce of will and self-control she possessed and mustered a reassuring smile. “It is just an old friend of mine, honey. No one you know. Eat.”

For a split second that felt like infinity, Kim stared at Tory, still frowning. Then her expression relaxed. She shrugged and picked up her fork again.

Turning her back to her daughter, Tory spoke to her caller. “Yes.” Her windpipe clamped shut. She had to swallow to make it open, to get air. At last she managed to fill her lungs. “This is Tory.”

“It’s Marsh,” he said. Then he added his last name, “Bravo,” as if she might have—or even could have—forgotten.

Stay calm, girl, she thought. Don’t let your voice go giving you away. “Yes. Yes, I know.”

After a taut, agonizing moment, he spoke again. “This is pretty crazy, I realize. After all this time…” His deep voice was hesitant, hopeful.

“Yes.” She kept thinking, Breathe. Relax. Speak calmly. Her throat felt so terribly dry. “Crazy,” she said. “That’s the right word for it.”

“You’re not…” He paused. She could hear him, doing what she kept doing. Breathing. Slowly. Deliberately. With such painful care. Finally he spoke again. “I don’t know how to ask, except to just say it. Are you married?”

Why? she longed to demand. What do you care? It is too late now, Marsh Bravo. You made your choice ten years ago.

“Tory?”

“No,” she said, very softly. “No, I am not…” She let her voice trail off rather than say that dangerous word: married.

Another silence. Behind her, Kim had just taken a gulp of milk. Tory knew this because she heard the clink of her glass as she set it back on the table.

“Is it…a bad time?” he asked, his tone suddenly hushed.

She didn’t like the hesitancy of his question or the lowered tone. What did it all mean? Did he…? Was it possible that he knew?

“Tory, are you still there?”

She sent a swift glance over her shoulder at her daughter, who, thank the good Lord, was concentrating on her tuna casserole. “As a matter of fact,” she said into the phone, “I am eating dinner now.”

Yet another silence, but this time a brief one. Then he said, “Look. I know I’ve got no damn right to ask you. I know I told you to forget all about me. But I…Tory, I’d really like to see you. Can you meet me somewhere? For a drink, maybe?”

He does know, she thought. He must know. That’s why he’s called. He probably talked to his father and that awful old man has finally told him.

Tory closed her eyes—and saw Blake Bravo’s face. Grinning at her, that ugly, mean grin of his. She shook her head to banish the image—and found herself wondering why, if Marsh knew, he didn’t just say so.

“Listen,” she said, “is there a number where I can call you back a little later tonight?”

“You mean you can’t talk now.” It was a statement, and a grim one.

“Yes, that is what I mean.”

“Let me give you my cell phone number.”

Those words caused faint hope to rise. Maybe he wasn’t even in town yet. Maybe he was miles away, in another state. Maybe it was all just talk, and he would never come at all. Maybe—

But then he spoke again. He mentioned the name of a certain hotel, and an address less than two miles from her house. Her dread returned full force, making her heart thud loudly and bringing a faint taste of copper to her mouth. He said something about his father. About a heart attack.

Still painfully aware of Kimmy behind her, she gave out a bland expression of sympathy. “I am so sorry to hear that.”

“Why?” he asked dryly. “I don’t think anyone else is.”

“Is he—”

He answered before she completed the question. “He’s still alive. As of now. But it doesn’t look good. They’ve got him over at Norman Regional.”

She wanted to cry out, What did he say about me? Did he tell you? Is that it? Is that why you’ve called?

She asked, very carefully, “Have you…talked to him yet?”

“I saw him a couple of hours ago.”

“And?”

“He’s very sick. Other than that, he hasn’t changed a bit. What time will you call?”

She bit the inside of her lip and accepted the fact that if Marsh did know about Kimmy, he wasn’t going to talk about it now.

Which was a good thing. She couldn’t afford to talk about it now, anyway.

She glanced at the stove clock—6:23. After dinner Kim would be busy with homework. “In an hour?”

“Good enough.”

She hung up, gave herself a few seconds to compose her features, then turned back to the table and slid into the chair across from her daughter.

Kimmy, always a good eater, had finished her casserole and her salad. She’d started in on a drop biscuit. The biscuit was giving her trouble, breaking apart as she tried to butter it.

“Here.” Tory held out her hand—which surprised her by not shaking one bit. Kim passed the biscuit across. Tory buttered it. Kim watched the process with great interest. “Jam?” Tory asked.

“Um. Yes, please.”

Tory spooned a dab of strawberry jam onto each crumbly biscuit half. “There you go.” She set the halves back on Kim’s plate.

Kim picked one up and brought it to her mouth. Before she bit into it, she asked, “Who was that you were talking to?”

Tory’s smile felt like something glued onto her face. “Just an old friend.”

Kim set the biscuit half down again. “You said that before. What old friend? Who?”

“No one you know.”

“You said that before, too.”

Tory faked a warning frown. “And that is all I am going to say, Miss Nosy Pants.”

Kimmy groaned. “Mama. Pants can’t be nosy.”

“Eat that biscuit. And finish your milk.”

“Then can I have a Ding-Dong?”

“The milk and the biscuit. Now.”

Tory spent the next hour trying not to let her daughter see her distress, and seesawing back and forth between acceptance of the fact that she would have to meet with Marsh and frustrated fury that such a thing should be necessary.

After all this time.

After she’d accomplished what she would once have called impossible—letting go of her lovesick dream that Marsh would someday return to her, would go down on one knee and beg her to marry him, would swear he couldn’t live another minute without her at his side.

It hadn’t been easy, but lately Tory had managed to achieve a pleasant, peaceful kind of balance in her life. Her parents, in their forties when she was born and now both nearing seventy, had retired to New Mexico. They had left their roomy ranch-style house to Tory and their beloved granddaughter. Tory owned her own business and enjoyed her work. Her daughter was beautiful, healthy, bright and well adjusted.

Things were going great.

And now this.

Marsh Bravo—back in town.

His return could shatter everything, could turn her peaceful life upside down—just as his leaving had done a decade before.

Still…

Marsh Bravo was her daughter’s father.

That fact remained, undeniable. He had a right to know his child.

And Kim did ask about him. More and more often of late. In the end Tory really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, and she knew it. She would have to meet with him.

When Tory called Marsh back, she did it from the privacy of her bedroom, with the door closed. She’d already gotten hold of Betsy, the high school girl who lived three doors up the street. As a general rule, Tory used Betsy Tilden whenever Rayanne Pickett, next door, was unavailable.

Rayanne Pickett was like a member of Tory’s family. She was a dear friend to Tory’s mother and as good as an extra grandma to Kim. Tonight, though, Tory didn’t want to take the chance that Rayanne might question her about where she suddenly had to get off to, after nine on a weeknight. Rayanne, like Tory’s parents, would not be thrilled to learn that the boy who had gotten Tory in trouble had returned to town.

True, chances were that Rayanne would have to know eventually.

But “eventually” was not tonight.

So Tory had asked Betsy first. And Betsy had agreed to come over at nine-fifteen, after Kim went to bed.

Tory kept the second phone conversation with Marsh brief. “I’ll meet you in the lobby of your hotel,” she said after a terse exchange of greetings. “About nine-thirty?”

He didn’t try to keep her talking, only said, “That’s fine—and Tory?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks. For agreeing to see me.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything, just quietly set the phone in its cradle.

Tory agonized over whether or not to tell Kim that she was going out. As long as Kim stayed in bed where she belonged, she didn’t have to know. But then, if Tory said nothing, and Kim woke up and found her gone—no. That wouldn’t do.

So when bedtime came, Tory told her daughter that she had to go out for a while, that Betsy would be there if Kim needed anything. Kim asked the logical question, the one Tory had been dreading.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s grown-up business,” Tory said, choosing evasion over an outright lie.

Kim got the message. “You mean you won’t tell me.”

“That’s right. But I promise. I won’t be gone too long.”

A crafty light came into Kimmy’s big dark eyes—eyes she’d inherited from the father she’d never met. Yet. “You know what? I think I should stay up. I can keep Betsy company and wait for you to get home.”

Tory cut that idea off at the pass. “Uh-uh. Betsy will have homework to keep her busy. And you can wait for me just fine—right here in your comfy bed, with the lights out.”

“Aw, Mom…”

“Give me a kiss.”

“Oh, all right.”

Betsy arrived at exactly 9:15. Tory thanked the girl for coming on such short notice, invited her to help herself to anything in the refrigerator and promised to return by eleven at the very latest. Betsy waved a hand and told Tory not to think she had to rush.

Tory went out to the garage and got into her car. It was then, as she slid behind the wheel, that her heart decided to start racing and her hands began to shake.

She flipped down the visor and lifted the cover on the lighted mirror built into it. “Calm down. Take it easy. Everything is going to be all right,” she whispered to her own reflection.

It didn’t seem to do much good. Her heart still pounded too hard and her hands kept on quivering.

She shut the mirror, flipped the visor up and started the car.

The drive was a short one. And the closer she got, the faster her heart seemed to beat. She was nothing short of a nervous wreck by the time she nosed her car into an empty space about twenty feet from the hotel’s front entrance.

Was this really happening? Somehow it didn’t feel real. Would she even recognize him? Would he recognize her? And what, if anything, did he know about Kim? What should she say if he did know? And what if he didn’t?

Lord. It all went around and around.

And at the center of it was Kimmy.

Tory had never lied to her daughter about Marsh. Kim knew that Tory had loved Kim’s father with all of her heart. Tory had explained how he had had to go away suddenly, how she had tried to get in touch with him, but never knew where he had gone and so could not find him.

The story, which was the truth, had been enough until just recently. But lately Kim’s questions kept getting tougher.

“Don’t you think we better look a little harder now?” she would ask. “Don’t you think he needs to know he has me? Don’t you think it’s something that he would really want to know?”

“Yes,” Tory always answered, a catch in her throat. “Of course he would want to know. And we will start looking. Very soon.”

That kind of reply wasn’t going to work for much longer.

And now, well, maybe it wouldn’t have to.

That would be good.

Wouldn’t it?

Tory got out of her car. The wind was up and a light, misty rain had started falling. The wind plastered her skirt to her thighs and blew her hair across her face. Absently Tory raked her hair back out of the way and made for the wall of glass that led to the hotel lobby.

The automatic doors swung wide as she reached them. Tory stepped between them, entering a vestibule. She felt windblown and a little soggy and more nervous than ever. Just keep moving, she thought. And she did, taking big, determined strides. Another set of doors swung open for her and she entered the lobby.

She saw him immediately.

He stood near the marble-topped check-in desk.

Oh, God. Her silly heart was flopping around in her chest like a landed trout.

He was different—and yet not different. The square-jawed, full-lipped, wonderful face—a face she’d always thought belonged on a poet or a priest—was the same. So was the thick brown hair, though it was cut somewhat shorter now. And those eyes—deep-set, heavily lashed. Those eyes had not changed at all.

He had filled out. He was broader in the shoulders, deeper in the chest.

No trace of boy left, she thought with a sinking feeling that might have been dismay. All man, now…

And his clothes…expensive clothes. Good slacks, a high-dollar polo shirt with a tiny designer monogram on the pocket. And his shoes…

Fine, beautifully made shoes.

Shoes that looked as if they cost a good sight more than the 150 baby-sitting dollars she had pressed into his hand on the night he left her—money he did pay back. She’d found it tucked into the only letter he sent her three months later, the one that said she should forget him, that he was no good and she could do better and he wasn’t coming back, after all.

He was never coming back….

For some crazy reason, looking at him now, Tory felt the heart-stopping pain of that letter all over again. Standing in that hotel lobby, windblown and rain-damp, her gaze locked with his, she was spinning back in time.

She was sixteen again, and four months’ pregnant, barely a child herself, about to have a child—a girl who had waited with longing in her heart. A girl who had trusted. A terrified girl who loved with fierce abandon, a girl who was going to have to get used to the idea that she and her unborn child would be facing the future alone.

That had been the lowest point, the worst for her—reading that letter. Worse even than that last night—the night he finally turned on his father and gave Blake Bravo a large taste of his own bitter medicine.

He had cried in her arms that night.

And there had been blood—most of it dried by then.

She remembered that so clearly, how black bloodstains can look in the moonlight.

When she sneaked out to meet him and saw the blood smeared all over him, she’d had to put her hand over her own mouth to keep from crying out.

He saw her fear for him in her eyes and shook his head. “It’s not my blood—not most of it, anyway. It’s his. My dad’s blood…” With a low, anguished moan, he reached for her.

And she went into his arms, held him, though she feared that the blood would smear on her, too, that later she would have to hide that pair of pajamas in the bottom of a drawer until she could sneak them outside and bury them deep in a full trash can.

He whispered to her between ragged sobs. “I hit him. Hard. More than once. And when he finally went down, he cracked his head on the side of the table. God, Tory. I think I killed him….”

She held him tighter, stroked him with soothing hands, murmured tender lies—that it was okay, that everything would be all right.

He said, “I called the ambulance. And then I hid, in the trees, until they came. They took him out. He was so still, but maybe…he could have been alive. There were cops, too. They looked around the property, but they didn’t find me. Tory, I have to get away. I have to get out of town….”

She begged him to stay. But he said he couldn’t. He’d end up in jail if he stayed. So she said she would go with him.

“You can’t. You’re sixteen. How would we live? It would never work. But I’ll come back, Tory. I swear. Someday…”

Someday.

She hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Someday could be forever. Someday could mean years.

But what could she do? She sneaked back into the house to get what money she had there, and then came out again and gave it to him. And after he left, in the house once more, she tiptoed to the hall bathroom, locked the door and turned on the light, expecting to find dark stains all over herself.

There was nothing. Her eyes looked wide and haunted in the big bathroom mirror, but her blue pajamas bore not a single dark smear. The blood had all dried on him before he came to her.

Before he left he had asked her to find out what she could about Blake. He promised to call. In a few days…

And he had called. Once. Three days after that terrible night. He called in the late afternoon, when her father was still at his clinic and her mother was at the beauty shop.

By then Tory had thought that everything would be all right. Because Marsh’s father had not died. Blake was out of the hospital and back on his feet. She told Marsh the news, bursting with joy that it would all work out, after all.

“You can come home now, Marsh. Your father didn’t die, and it’s safe to come back.”

“No, Tory. I can never go back there. He’ll kill me if I do. And if he doesn’t kill me, I’ll kill him….”

He’d sounded so very far away. And so desperate. A fugitive from justice. He’d actually called himself that. He wouldn’t tell her where he was calling from. He said he had to keep moving, he couldn’t let Blake find him.

“You don’t know him, Tory. You don’t know how he is. Nobody gets the better of him….”

She was crying when she hung up the phone, thinking she’d go crazy waiting for Marsh to call again.

But she hadn’t gone crazy, though sometimes in the weeks to come it had felt like she was. And as it turned out, he never did call again. That was the last time she ever spoke to him—until a few hours ago, when she’d picked up the phone and heard his voice saying her name.

A dark-haired woman wearing too much perfume brushed past her murmuring, “Excuse me,” as she went.

“Oh.” Tory blinked. “It’s okay…”

A black leather wing chair waited a few feet from where Tory stood. She ordered her numb legs to move, to take her there. Once she reached it, she sank stiffly into it.

Marsh came toward her. So strange. Her heart was breaking all over again. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t feel like this, not after all these years.

He stopped just a foot from her chair. Concern had turned those dark eyes to velvet. “God. Tory…”

Almost, she lifted up her arms to him.

Almost, she surged from that chair and into his embrace.

Almost.

But not quite.

She hesitated, thought, Do I really want that—his arms around me? And how can I be certain that he will welcome me there?

Then she realized it didn’t matter whether she wanted him to hold her, whether he wanted her body pressed close to his. Somehow, while she hovered on the brink of throwing herself at him, the dangerous moment had passed.

Tory stayed in the chair and stared up at him. “Why now?” The hushed words seemed to come out all on their own. “Why now, after all this time?”

“Tory, I—” He cut off his answer before he even said it. “Please. I think we’d better go somewhere more private. To my room, all right?”

She probably should have said no to that. But she didn’t. People kept strolling by them, and there were three clerks behind the check-in desk. She didn’t need any of those people witnessing her distress, let alone hearing whatever she and this man ended up saying to each other.

She stood on shaky legs and smoothed her rumpled skirt. “All right.”

For a moment she thought he would take her arm. She didn’t know if she could bear that—his touch, right then.

But then he only gestured. “This way.”

She fell in step beside him. They strolled across the lobby and down into a central court area paved in stone. Then up three carpeted steps to the elevators. He pushed a button. They waited. She didn’t look at him. It seemed better not to.

A set of doors opened. They got on with two men in business suits. The elevator had glass walls. They rode up with a view of the open court area retreating below them.

The two businessmen were arguing, speaking in tight, hushed tones. Tory ignored them. It wasn’t hard. Most of her energy was taken up in painful awareness of the man beside her—the man she still would not look at. She stared blindly down at the courtyard as it moved away beneath them.

The businessmen got off on the fourth floor, leaving Tory and Marsh alone the rest of the way. Marsh didn’t speak. And Tory felt that she couldn’t speak, that if she’d opened her mouth only a strangled, crazy moan would come out.

At last, they reached his floor—the top floor. The car stopped, the doors slid open.

He said, “This way,” for the second time. She walked beside him, down a hall that was also a long balcony overlooking the courtyard below. When they reached his door, she stepped back as he used his key card. The green light blinked. He turned the handle and signaled for her to go in ahead of him.

It was a suite, she noted with some relief. She wouldn’t have to try to talk to him in a room that was more than 50 percent bed.

They entered a small entrance hall that opened onto a living area done in forest-green and maroon. Soothing colors, she thought, though the last thing she felt at that moment was soothed.

He gestured at the forest-green sofa. Obediently she lowered herself onto one end of it.

“Can I get you a drink?”

Her stomach rebelled at the thought. Yet she heard herself answer, “Plain tonic water?”

“I can do that.”

He turned for the bar, which had a mirrored wall behind it, and got busy fixing the drink she’d asked for that she really didn’t want. Once he’d poured the tonic water, she watched him mix himself a whisky and soda.

She couldn’t help staring at his hands. Very fine hands, long-fingered and strong. They appeared much better cared for than in the past, the nails filed short and buffed smooth.

She found herself thinking how they used to hold hands all the time, thinking that she could still recall exactly the way his hand had felt in hers—warm and firm and rough.

And then she thought what she should not have allowed herself to think.

But holding hands wasn’t what got us into trouble…

What got them into trouble had happened out by the river at Ten Mile Flat, in the back seat of that old Plymouth Duster he used to drive. They would lie all wrapped up together, clothes unbuttoned, but never fully undressed—after all, someone might come along. Surprising, the trouble a couple of kids can get into, and all without ever taking off all their clothes.

As if he were touching her now, she could feel them—those long hands on her skin…

Tory blinked. Gulped. Cut her eyes away.

When she looked back, he was watching her in the mirror over the bar. She became certain, in that instant, that he could see inside her mind, that he knew what she had been thinking, about those nights out at Ten Mile Flat.

She felt defiant, then. And angry. That she should still remember so vividly. That this man who had left her to have his baby alone could still call forth such a powerful response in her.

He turned, a glass in each hand, and came to sit in the armchair nearest her end of the sofa. He passed her the tonic water. The glass was cold, beads of moisture already sliding down the sides. She took one sip. Her stomach lurched.

No. Better not try to finish it. She set it on the coffee table in front of her. He drank, the ice cubes clinking together in his glass.

She found herself staring at his watch. A Rolex. Unbelievable.

She said what she was thinking. “It looks like you are doing well.”

He lifted one of those broad shoulders in a half shrug. “I own a business. Boulevard Limousine of Chicago. I started it eight years ago, with one twelve-year-old Cadillac limousine and one chauffeur—me. Originally, it was just a way to support myself while I was earning my degree.”

His degree? Marsh Bravo, who had barely managed to graduate from Norman High, now had a college degree?

He chuckled. “Hard to believe, huh? Me, a college graduate. But I have to confess. It’s not from any college you would have heard of. You went to OU, I suppose.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Figured you would. Dean’s honor list, right?”

She nodded. “And…how is your business doing now?”

He brought his glass to that sensual mouth again, sipped, shrugged once more. “Revenues this year should top five million. I have 250 employees and a fleet of 85 limousines.”

Tory could hardly believe what she was hearing.

I’m no good, he had written. You can do better….

Eight years ago, he’d said. Eight years ago, in Chicago, he had started his business. And since then, he must have been making a living at least, must have been doing all right.

Yet he had never called. Never written. Never made the slightest effort to see her, until now.

That hurt. That hurt way too much.

She couldn’t afford that—to start hurting for this man all over again. Couldn’t. And wouldn’t.

She had to remember. This meeting was not about her. It was about Kim. For Kim. Kim was the one who mattered now. And if Kim’s long-lost daddy owned a fleet of limousines, well, that was all to the good.

Marsh looked into his glass, and then back up at Tory. “What about you?”

She stared at him blankly, still trying to accept the fact that the poor boy she had so passionately, utterly loved, the poor boy who had turned his back on her because he had nothing to offer her, had spent the past decade becoming a rich man.

At last, his question registered. He wanted to know what she did for a living. “I’m a florist. I have my own shop. The Posy Peddler. On Gray.”

“A florist.” He smiled.

Did he find florists amusing? She pulled her shoulders back. “That’s right.”

He gave her a long, nerve-racking look. Then he spoke gently. “You said on the phone that you weren’t married. Is there…someone special, then?”

Someone special? Why did he ask that? What difference could it make to him, now, after all this time?

It was too much. She stood, then didn’t know what to do next. She started to sit again, but changed her mind about that. She stayed upright, and wrapped her arms around her stomach, which felt as if someone had tied it into a ball of hard knots. “I don’t— Marsh. Why are you here? Why now?”

Marsh looked up at her, wondering what he’d said that had made her so angry all of a sudden, recalling how crushed she had looked at the sight of him down in the lobby, how he’d wanted to grab her and hold her close and plead with her to forgive him for not coming back—to swear to protect her, to never hurt her again.

But he hadn’t grabbed her. And she hadn’t thrown herself into his arms.

And since then, things seemed to have gone seriously south. This pretty stranger glaring at him now was not the same innocent girl he had once loved so much. Once, when he looked at her, he could feel his whole heart opening up, reaching out to her.

He didn’t feel that way now. He felt—interest. She was a good-looking woman. And he liked the way she carried herself, liked the sound of her voice, the cute smattering of freckles across her slim nose.

It was…attraction. Yes. That was the word for it. But he didn’t think it was love. Not anymore.

Could it grow into love again?

As if he would ever find out the answer. The woman glaring down at him now didn’t look especially eager to try again.

But then, what had he expected? He was, after all, the one who broke it off, even if he had done it for her own good, even if he had known, deep down, that it could never have worked out for them.

And probably even more damning in her eyes than his breaking it off, were those letters she had sent him. The ones that had taken months to reach him, he’d moved around so much there in that first year. The letters he’d returned unopened, though it nearly killed him to do it. He’d spent a lot of nights wondering what she might have written in those letters.

“Why are you here?” she demanded again, openly angry now.

“I told you. My father—”

“Oh, you stop that. I’m not talking about your father right now and you know it. I want to know why you called me.”

“I just…” Damn. He wasn’t even sure he knew the answer to that himself. Curiosity, maybe. About what had happened to the girl he left behind. Curiosity—and a kind of longing. A longing not so much for the girl he had loved as for the heat and tenderness he’d known with her. A longing that had faded over the years, but that had never completely left him.

And then there had been the old man. Prodding. Taunting him to look Tory up.

“You just what?” she demanded.

“I wanted to see if—”

“Look,” she said, cutting him off, apparently deciding she didn’t want to hear what he had to say, after all. “This is a…well, it’s a shock for me.” Those beautiful blue eyes had taken on a panicked gleam. “I don’t seem to be handling it real well. I didn’t know…I didn’t expect—”

She looked pale again, as she had in the lobby. Worse than she had in the lobby—as if she might be sick.

Sick at the sight of him.

Hell. He deserved the Biggest Heel on the Planet Award, to have hurt her all over again this way.

It had been a stupid idea, to call her. He should have had sense enough to consider the source when the old man started in on him about her. Even on his deathbed, Blake Bravo wouldn’t give up his petty mind games.

And now, for your other surprise…

Right.

The surprise wasn’t much of a surprise, after all. Tory couldn’t forgive him and wanted nothing to do with him.

Big news.

“I don’t…I’m sorry,” Tory stammered, her stomach still churning, all her senses on overload.

She kept thinking, He doesn’t know. But he is Kimmy’s father. And she wants to know him. And he has a right to know her. I will have to tell him, somehow….

But it was all just too much, right then. Seeing him. Remembering things that were better forgotten.

She couldn’t do it. Not tonight.

She needed…a little time. To pull herself together, to get her stunned mind around the fact that he really had come back.

“I don’t…I’m sorry.” She sucked in a breath, swallowed. “I have to go now. Later, I can…”

He was watching her as if she was mentally deranged—and maybe she was at that moment. She sure did feel like it, like a woman who had gone clean out of her mind.

She edged out from behind the coffee table, between his chair and the sofa. “I’ll talk to you later…” She was already halfway to the door. He stood, took a couple of steps toward her. She flung out a hand in a warding-off gesture. “I’ll call you. I will. Tomorrow, all right?”

She fled—there was no other word for it—leaving Marsh staring at the door she had shut in his face.

Chapter Three

Marsh’s instinctive reaction was to follow her.

But he held instinct in check. She clearly wanted out of that room—and away from him.

Who was he to try to hold her there?

He went back to the bar and poured himself another drink—a double that time. He sipped it slowly, thinking that he should probably get over to the hospital. He should check on his father one more time tonight, as he’d planned to do.

But no. He felt a little too edgy for a visit with the old man right now. What had just happened had been too unsettling.

Tory had acted so strangely.

If she hadn’t wanted to see him, couldn’t she have just said so, on the phone, right up front?

Why even agree to meet him? Why come up to his room with him? Why put herself through that? It didn’t make any damn sense.

Marsh shook his head, sipped from his drink, decided that the remark about calling him tomorrow must have been something she’d said without thinking, without meaning it. She wouldn’t be calling him. He’d never hear from her again.

Which was probably for the best.

He certainly wouldn’t be idiot enough to try calling her again.

The past truly was another country, one he had no business trying to revisit. They were two different people now, with nothing to connect them except memories that were better left to fade, finally, into nothing.

Marsh finished his drink. Then he called the hospital. He spoke to the night nurse assigned to his father’s care. Blake Bravo was sleeping peacefully, the nurse said.

“If he asks, tell him I’ll see him tomorrow.”

The nurse said she’d be happy to pass on his message.

The misty drizzle had stopped by the time Tory got home. Betsy said she had checked on Kim fifteen minutes ago and Kim was sound asleep.

Tory paid Betsy and walked with her out the front door. The night air was moist and warm and the wind had died down. Tory stood on her front walk, watching Betsy stroll away up the street. The girl turned and gave Tory a carefree wave before she disappeared into her own house.

Betsy was fifteen. The same age Tory had been when Marsh first asked her out…

Tory shook her head. Better not get started down memory lane again. She turned and went back up the curving walk to the house. Inside, she locked up and turned off the lights.

She looked in on Kim before she went to her own room, creeping in and then waiting in the dark by Kim’s bed, until her eyes adjusted. Kim lay on her side, facing the wall, the yellow comforter she had chosen herself, when the two of them redecorated her room just last fall, pulled up close around her chin.

Mother love welled up in Tory. So sweet. And yet painful, too. A child grew so fast. Nine years took forever—and went by in an instant.

When Tory’s parents had learned that their daughter was going to have a baby, they had first tried to convince her to give the baby up. Tory had refused. And eventually her parents accepted the inevitable. In the end Audra and Seth Winningham had been honestly supportive, helping to take care of Kimmy in the first years, so that Tory could finish high school and even earn a business degree at OU.

And Norman, after all, was the third largest city in Oklahoma, a progressive university town with a population nearing ninety thousand now. Tory’s single-mom status may have been looked at askance by the people in her nice upper-middle class neighborhood at first. But over time she had found acceptance.

It had been rough, yes, in the beginning, being a mom at seventeen. All her high school friends felt sorry for her. They were out, running around, having fun. And she was home with a baby, longing, hungering, praying for Marsh to come back to her.

Kimmy stirred, sighing, pushing down the covers and flopping one arm out behind her. Tory resisted the urge to cover her again. The room wasn’t cold. And covering her might wake her.

Quietly Tory turned and tiptoed out.

Tomorrow, she thought, as she crossed the hall to her own room. I will call Marsh tomorrow, in the evening. I’ll make arrangements to meet with him again. And I’ll do a better job of it this time. This time I won’t run out without telling him what both he and Kimmy need for him to know.

“You get together with the redhead?”

Blake was sitting up in bed, looking considerably better than he had the afternoon before. The oxygen tube was gone from his nose. Though the old man still wheezed with each breath, Marsh was beginning to think that maybe the heart surgeon had been right. Blake Bravo wasn’t quite ready for the grave, after all.

“Well, Mr. Big Shot? Did you see her or not?”

“Feeling better, huh, Dad?”

“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”

“No. I’m not.”

“You didn’t see her.”

Marsh said nothing.

“Wait a minute,” Blake wheezed. “I get it. You saw her. But she held out on you. You didn’t get your surprise.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

“Either drop it or explain yourself.”

“Where the hell’s the fun in that? I’ll give you a hint—no. On second thought, I won’t. Go see her again.”

To keep himself from saying something he would later regret, Marsh stepped over to the window and looked out. Today the sky was a broad expanse of clear blue, dotted here and there with small, cotton-like clouds. Spread out below was a parking lot. And near the building, attractive landscaping: nandinas, a redbud tree, flower beds mulched with cedar chips.

He waited, looking out, observing the progress of a big black Buick as it rolled between the rows of parked cars and finally nosed into an empty space. A man got out and strode toward the building.

Marsh turned to his father again. “You are feeling better, aren’t you?”

Blake grunted. “Doctor said this morning that they’ll be sending me home soon—as long as I make sure there’s someone there to look after me.”

“I’ll see about hiring you a live-in nurse.”

“Forget that. I don’t want any stranger in my house.”

Marsh looked at his father levelly. “Don’t get any ideas about me taking care of you. It wouldn’t work.”

Blake closed his eyes, wheezed a sigh. “Don’t worry. I know it. You and I wouldn’t last twenty-four hours under the same roof.” He looked at Marsh again, pale eyes stranger than ever—far away. And far too knowing. “Doesn’t matter. Let it go. We’ll see how right that doctor is….”

Marsh shook his head. “You do feel better. You look better.”

“I don’t want a damn funeral, you hear what I say? Who the hell would come to my funeral anyway? I want cremation, and I want you to dump my ashes in Lake Thunderbird. Got that?”

“You’re not going to die now, Dad. Your doctor said so.”

“What the hell does a doctor know? What do you know? You’re dense as a post, you know that, Mr. Big Shot? You haven’t even figured out the secret that little redhead’s keeping from you.”

Marsh turned back to the window.

“Go see her again,” Blake commanded.

Marsh studied the redbud tree below. He’d always liked redbuds, liked the twisted forms the trunks could take and the pretty heart shape of the leaves.

Marsh stayed in his father’s room for another hour. It was a true test of self-control, and Marsh was pleased to find himself passing it. His father jeered and goaded, and Marsh looked out the window. Somehow the time went by.

Finally Blake dropped off to sleep again. Marsh sat in the chair in the corner and watched him for a while, listened to the labored, watery sound of his breathing, wondered what he was going to do about home care now that it looked as if Blake was going to cheat the devil, after all—at least for a while.

Marsh also wondered at himself. That he had come here, in the first place. That he found he felt accountable for the care of a hardhearted SOB who had made his childhood a living hell and driven his mother to an early grave. Evidently, some bonds were nigh on impossible to completely sever. A man felt a responsibility to a parent, period, even if that parent had always been a damn poor excuse for a human being.

When he got tired of sitting, Marsh left the hospital room. He hung around in the waiting area for a while, got out his cell phone and called Chicago.

He spoke with his second in command at Boulevard Limousine. Nothing going on there, other than the usual—drivers who didn’t report in when they were supposed to, one breakdown on a trip in from O’Hare. But somehow they always found another driver to cover, and breakdowns, with the fleet of top-quality new vehicles he owned now, were few and far between. This most recent one had caused a delay, but only a short one. They’d immediately dispatched a replacement vehicle, and the problem car had been towed to the shop.

It occurred to him that he wasn’t really even needed anymore at the company he had created. He’d put together a system that worked and now it could pretty much run without him. Soon it would be time to focus his energy on expanding. Or maybe to get into something else altogether.

He went back to Blake’s room, where lunch was being served. He sat in the chair and watched his father pick at his meal, tuning out the gibes and taunts, pleased to find that he was getting pretty good at not listening to things he didn’t need to hear.

As a child and a badly troubled teenager, he used to practice tuning out the old man. He never got a chance to get very good at it back then, though. At that time Blake hadn’t been confined to a bed. And if Marsh tried not listening to his harangues, Blake had no compunction about using whatever was handy—his fists, his belt, a baseball bat—to get his rebellious son’s undivided attention.

By one Marsh was ready for lunch himself. He considered giving the cafeteria a try, but then decided he’d just as soon get out of the hospital for a while. He drove down Porter, crossing Gray and Main and continuing on toward the university. He found a certain landmark restaurant he remembered, a place that was a little dark inside, but really nice out on the patio under the clusters of red-white-and-blue Cinzano umbrellas.

The lunch rush seemed to be winding down, so he didn’t have much difficulty getting a table to himself. The waitress settled him beneath an umbrella with an iced tea, a basket of chips and a menu. He crunched on the chips and considered his choices, thinking that later in the afternoon he’d start looking for that live-in nurse his father would be needing.

He glanced up from the menu to signal the waitress—and saw that he was being watched. By some character a few tables away, a guy with a broad, ruddy face and a salesman’s smile.

The character squinted. “Marsh? Marsh Bravo?”

Suddenly the face was familiar. Take away forty pounds and add long hair and—“Bob Avery.”

Bob nodded at the three other men at his table. “Be right back.” He got up and strode toward Marsh. “I don’t believe it.”

Marsh stood. “It’s been a long time.” They shook hands. “You’re looking good.”

Bob laughed. “I’m lookin’ fat. But you. Hey. Doing all right, huh?”

“Getting by.”

“What did you get into?”

Marsh told him. “What about you?”

“What do you think? Insurance.”

“Like your dad.”

“That’s right. I went in with him. Got my name on the door, two assistants and four clerks. He’ll be retiring in a few years, then I’ll be on my own.”

“Sounds good.”

“It’s a living—and I married Steffie.” Marsh remembered. Bob and Stefanie Sommers had been an item Marsh’s senior year.

Marsh asked the next logical question. “Kids?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

“What do you know? A lot can happen in ten years.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Bob was looking at him a little oddly now, it seemed to Marsh. “So,” he said, and coughed into his hand. “You married?”

“No. Still single.”

“Well. Ah. Have you stopped in to see Tory?” Something wasn’t right, something in Bob’s expression, in the hesitant, probing sound of his voice.

Marsh said in a flat tone, “I saw her briefly, last night.”

Bob’s rather small eyes got larger and his face got redder. “You did. Well. Great. That’s, uh, some little girl you got there.”

Marsh frowned. What was Bob getting at? Tory was far from little, and Marsh didn’t “have” her. Bob’s remark made no sense. “What was that?”

Bob gulped. Marsh watched his Adam’s apple bounce up and then slide down. He glanced at his watch. “Wow. Look at the time. Gotta go. It has been great seein’ you again. You take care of yourself, now.”

“Sure,” said Marsh, still wondering what the hell was going on. “You, too. My best to Steffie.”

Bob hurried back to his own table, but only paused there long enough to grab his check and announce, a little too loudly, that he had to get back to the office.

Marsh sank to his chair again. The waitress came by. He ordered and he ate. He was back at the hospital by a little after two, stopping in at the nurses’ desk to ask for a few referrals for home care. Then he went to his father’s room.

Blake started right in on him, razzing him about Tory, about the damn “surprise” she was supposedly keeping from him. And now, after the way Bob Avery had behaved, Marsh was beginning to wonder if there could be more to this thing about Tory than a mean old man’s crazy head games.

“You go on,” said Blake for about the fifteenth time that day. “Talk to her again. And this time don’t let her get away from you until she tells you the damn truth.”

About then, Marsh could easily have grabbed the old man around his scrawny throat and squeezed until the wolfish eyes popped right out of their sockets, until Blake gave in and blurted out the big secret, whatever the hell the big secret was.

But somehow he restrained himself. Mostly because he knew that strangling his father would get him nowhere. Blake would die with that ugly knowing grin on his wrinkled face.

Marsh said, “You know, Dad. You’re right. I’m going to see her. Now.”

“You be sure to tell her I said hi.”

He drove to her flower shop, figuring she’d have to be there at that time of day. It wasn’t difficult at all to find. He thought it looked charming, the windows sparkling clean, the displays attractive and eye-catching. He almost parked and went in.

But he didn’t. By then he’d had a little time to reconsider, time to think some more about the way she’d run out on him last night. After that, he doubted she’d be too thrilled to see him if he dared to drop in on her at her workplace.

Better to wait, now he thought about it. Wait until she closed the shop for the day. Call her at home, as he’d done last night.

How early could he call and reach her?

Well, how late did the shop stay open? He could see the hours printed on the door. But he couldn’t quite make them out from the street. And he didn’t dare get any closer. She might look out and see him.

Hell. This was ridiculous. He felt like a damn stalker—probably because he was behaving like one.

He drove on by the shop, turned left at the next intersection and then right on Main. Before long he was passing the statue of the Union soldier again. And this time, when he got to the street that would take him by Tory’s house, he swung the wheel to the right and turned into her neighborhood.

The streets near her house looked much the same as they had ten years ago: solid, comfortable homes, mostly of brick, lots of oaks and sweet gum trees and twisted evergreen yaupon hollies. Some of the mailboxes were out at the street, clematis vines thick with star-shaped purple flowers twining over them.

There were children, a number of them, strolling along on either side of the street, wearing backpacks and swinging lunch boxes, probably just getting out of the elementary school a few blocks away. They looked happy, those kids. Contented with the world and with their place in it. No doubt they had the kind of life he’d always envied when he was growing up. They were going home to the nice brick houses, where they’d do their homework, have their friends over, sit down to dinner at six—dinner cooked by a trim, pretty mom who smiled a lot and didn’t have to work her fingers to the bone just to make it from one day to the next.

He spotted it: Tory’s house. A block and a half ahead, on the corner, with that big sweep of lawn front and side. He used to cut that lawn, and the lawn of the house next door to it—Mrs. Pickett’s house—during those summers he worked for that gardening service. He’d cut a lot of lawns in this neighborhood, in those two summers, his sixteenth and seventeenth year.

He remembered he’d been running a lawnmower on Tory’s lawn the first time he ever laid eyes on her. She’d come out of the front door—fourteen, she must have been then, wearing shorts that showed off her pretty legs, that red hair pulled back with one of those scrunchy things. He’d almost run that mower right into the big oak in the corner of the lot.

That fall, he’d spotted her at school for the first time: a freshman. It had taken him until the following summer before he could drum up the nerve to ask her out.

Marsh drove very slowly—too slowly, probably. In this kind of neighborhood, where people kept their cars in their roomy garages and no one had the bad taste to hang out on the street, a lone man cruising a little too slowly could easily cause suspicion.

Again he felt slightly reprehensible, an intruder in the life of a woman he no longer really knew. Still, he didn’t speed up as he approached. He slowed even further, taking in all the details, noting small changes. Flowers grew close to the house now, instead of low juniper bushes in a bed of white river rock. And the big door with the beveled glass in the top of it, once white, had been painted a deep green.

A group of children—four girls dressed in jeans and bright-colored T-shirts—were passing Tory’s front walk just as Marsh turned her corner to drive by the front of the house. One of them, slim and dark-haired, wearing bright purple tennis shoes with thick white soles, waved at the others and started up the walk.

Marsh’s mouth went dry.

He slammed his foot on the brake, stopped the car, right there, in the middle of the street, not caring in the least that the other three girls had turned to stare at him. He had eyes only for the slim one in the purple tennis shoes—the one who strolled straight up the walk to the dark-green door and let herself inside.

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