Adding Up to Marriage (16 page)

“Liar!” she said, keeping her voice low, knowing how easily children could hear the grownups arguing. “That's not all it was for you! Was it?”

He didn't react. Not outwardly, at least. Instead all he did was stand there, his gaze probing. She tore hers away, but not before she saw that knowing, gentle smile curve his mouth.

“Maybe not. But is that really why you're upset right now? Or because…that's not all it was for
you?
”

Heat flooding her face, Jewel rammed her arms into her sweater, muttering, “Noah said the house is ready, I think it's best I go back there tonight. You'll…” Oh, brother. “I don't know when I'll be here tomorrow. Is that a problem?”

Instead of replying, he walked over to take her face in his hands and kiss her. Long. Slow. Sweet. With just enough
You're mine now, baby
in there to make her knees wobble. Because, dammit, she wanted to be his. To be
somebody's.
Even though she knew it was stupid.

“We'll be fine, honey,” he said, silently opening the bedroom door for her. “And so will you.”

Not so sure about that,
she thought, grabbing her boots from the floor and her glasses off the table, her qualms scurrying to catch up with her again as she fled.

H
er arms tightly crossed over the raggedy Betty Boop nightshirt she'd left behind when she moved into Silas's, Jewel stared at her cell phone, vibrating on the kitchen table in front of her. She didn't answer it, even though she knew she should. Even though she knew it was Silas—he'd already phoned and texted her a dozen times since 7:00 a.m.—and if she didn't answer he was likely to show up on her doorstep. Because that's the kind of man he was.

The kind of man who made love like it was his mission to make her happy, who had no problem asking exactly what it would take to accomplish that. And then thanking
her
after he did what she asked and her head exploded. Among other things.

The kind of man to make a girl go and fall in love with him, even though she'd made it more than clear
she didn't want to do that.

Bzzzzt.

She snatched the damn phone off the table, her heart whomping against her sternum as she read the succinct text.

You okay?

Leave it to Silas to actually write both words out, she thought on a sigh, then texted back,
yes. fine. c u later

An inevitability, alas, since she still had small boys to tend for another few days at least. Drat.

She jumped up to toss on a pair of jeans and a cropped sweater, then stomped into the living room to crash onto the sofa, hauling
Holistic Midwifery
—also left behind—into her lap. Nope, focusing not happening.

Not on midwifery, anyway. Not while every molecule that made up her being was still doing the happy sigh thing. Traitors.

The outside world beckoned. As did Evangelista's homemade cinnamon rolls and a breakfast burrito. Her stomach growling in agreement, Jewel stuffed her feet into her boots and the book into a backpack and practically ran out of the house, embracing the slimmest of slim hopes the two mile trek down the mountain would at least lull all those happy-sighing molecules to sleep.

Right. Like she was gonna walk this off?

Frowning, hands stuffed in jacket pockets, she marched along the side of the road, occasionally blinking against the flashes of sunlight darting through the yellowing trees. Yes, she could've walked away. Could've stayed in control. After all, nobody'd forced her into the man's bed. That things hadn't gone the way she'd deluded herself into thinking they would wasn't anybody's fault but her own.

And maybe—just maybe—that's not such a bad thing?

Jewel stopped dead in her tracks, dust blowing in her face as an old Chevy pickup roared past. So falling for
Silas—for anybody—hadn't been part of her game plan. So what? Was she really that afraid to take the next step, to simply see where things went after this?

And that would be a resounding
You betcha, sister.

Right there in the middle of the road, Jewel let out a frustrated screech, pounding her forehead with the heels of her hands. Then, feeling marginally better, she continued down the mountain.

“Hey there, baby doll!” Evangelista Ortega called out when Jewel shouldered through the door thirty minutes later. The bosomy proprietress of the only decent restaurant in town—okay, the only restaurant in town—waddled over to engulf Jewel in a hug. “Haven't seen you in a while. How's things going?”

To hell,
Jewel thought, even as she said, “Oh. Fine,” extricating herself from the woman's embrace before she suffocated. Then she grinned, even if it felt more like a grimace. “I'm delivering babies myself now!”

“Oh, yeah?
Felicitaciónes,
chica! I also hear you've been doing the nanny thing for Silas Garrett, no?”

Yep, definitely a grimace. “Uh, yeah. So. Busy. Um…you mind if I hang out here and study?”

Evangelista gave her a funny look, but jerked her thumb over her shoulder at an empty table all the way in the back. “Jus' cleaned that one up, it's yours. You wan' breakfas'?” she said as Jewel unloaded her backpack and settled in.

“Do I want breakfast? Juice, breakfast burrito and two cinnamon rolls. Oh, and I have money, I can actually pay—”

“Don'
even
go there!” the other woman said with a swat, then laughed. “Although the way you eat? It's probably a good thing you don' come in more often than you do!”

Jewel slouched in the chair, sparing a grin for the young waitress who brought her order, stuffing a chunk of warm
warm, fragrant, gooey cinnamon roll into her mouth before the gal turned her back. Bliss. Fifteen minutes later, her tummy appeased and finally absorbed in the textbook, she'd finally started feeling almost normal again.

Until the restaurant's front door opened and her mother cried out, “There you are, baby!” and she felt like she'd swallowed the fifteen-hundred-page hardcover whole.

The moon,
Jewel thought.
Maybe that would be far enough away….

Bedecked in a flippy skirt, fuzzy sweater and a fake fur vest, Kathryn glided through a dozen tables to plop herself across from Jewel…and thrust a diamond the size of Nebraska in her face.

“I'm in love and I'm gettin' married!” her mother sang out, which earned her a smattering of applause from the other patrons.

Just…no,
Jewel thought, stunned. Her mother, signaling for a cup of coffee, appeared not to notice.

“It only happened last night, but I couldn't tell you over the phone. I had to do it in person.” Then she snatched her hand back to wriggle it in the sunlight dancing across the table. “Isn't it
gorgeous?
” Kathryn glanced over, glowing more than the diamond. Than the sun, for that matter. “Well, come on, sugar—aren't you going to congratulate me?”

The coffee arrived. “Tell me first who my new daddy is and I'll think about it.”

Giggling, her mother tore open a package of fake sugar, upended it. “Why Monty, of course! Who else?”

“Monty. The Monty who broke up with you a few weeks ago?”

Mama batted her hand. The diamond encrusted one, naturally. “Oh, that was just a silly lover's tiff. He's the sweetest man, baby.” Holding out her hand again to admire
the ring, her mother sighed, then took a delicate sip of her decaf. “The
sweetest
man.”

“I wouldn't know,” Jewel said dryly, even as the cinnamon rolls and burrito rebelled in her stomach. “Having never met him. Come to think of it, I don't even know his last name.”

“James. Montgomery Hamilton James. He's a businessman with a biiiig—” this demonstrated by her mother's stretching out her arms so wide she nearly clipped Christine, the waitress “—ranch in Texas.”

Jewel felt a headache coming on. “And exactly how did you meet a Texas businessman-slash-rancher in Albuquerque?”

“Actually we connected online. Through one of those Internet dating sites?”

Jewel opened her mouth only to clamp it shut again, especially since her mother immediately launched into a soliloquy about the whens/wheres/hows of the wedding and how she wanted Jewel to be her maid of honor and how Monty was going to let her redecorate the ranch house…and, oh, he was making her sign a prenup but that was only a formality, but he had to be careful because his last two wives had taken him to the cleaners—

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Last
two wives? Out of how many?”

“Um…let's see…”

“You don't
know?
”

She might've screeched that last part.

Kathryn's brow crinkled. Slightly. “Of course I know. But…you're probably not going to take this well—”

“You're probably right. Well?”

“Four.”

“You're about to marry a man who's been married
four times before?
”

She definitely screeched that.

“Well, shoot, baby, I've made the trek up the aisle three times myself. What's the big deal?”

And God help her, she means it,
Jewel thought, something like rage boiling up from her gut. Because she looked into her mother's glittering, lovestruck eyes and saw the same delusional soul behind them that had made Jewel's childhood about as stable as a skateboard on ice. Granted, when this marriage crashed and burned like all the others at least it wouldn't affect Jewel, except it would because she'd be the one left to pick up the pieces of her mother's shattered heart. Again.

“And what on earth makes you think this time will work when it never has before?” she said, slamming shut her book and cramming it back into her backpack.

“Jewel! Why would you say that? Everybody needs hope, sugar—”

“No, what you need is
some
grip on reality! Taking a leap of faith is one thing, but you'd think by now you'd at least open your eyes before you jump!”

Instead of getting mad—which even Jewel admitted her mother had every right to do, she was truly talking smack to the woman—Kathryn pouted. “You don't think I know what I'm doing?” she asked in a small voice.

“No, Mama. I don't.” And Jewel realized, in this respect at least, she had a leg up on her mother. That she did know enough to open her eyes, to not take a leap without having at least some idea where, and how, to land.

Meaning, no—she couldn't move forward with Silas, no matter how besotted she was with him. How much thinking about him made her all warm and tingly inside. Because it wasn't fair to him, or to his boys, to be saddled with some clueless little twit who still had no idea how to make a relationship work.

Shaking, she got to her feet only to have her mother grab her wrist.

“I want your blessing, baby,” Kathryn said, pleading, her nails biting into Jewel's skin.

“You don't need it, Mama. What you need…oh, never mind,” she muttered, turning, only to wheel back, her brain finally releasing the question her mother's surprise announcement had temporarily obliterated. “How did you find me here, anyway?”

Kathryn lowered her eyes to her purse to pull out a couple of dollars for her coffee. “Does it matter?”

“Yeah. Because it's creepy, the way you keep popping up. My car's not out front, you had no way of knowing I was in here…oh, hell,” Jewel said, her stomach turning inside out. “You had a tracking application installed on the phone you gave me, didn't you? Because that's how Keith found Aaron, through some GPS thing on his phone—”

“Keith? Aaron? What are you talking about—”

“For heaven's sake, Mama!” Her face on fire, Jewel fumbled to get her phone out of her purse. “I'm not some wayward teenager you need to keep tabs on!”

“What else was I supposed to do?” her mother whined. “I have to know where you are in case I need you!”

Jewel stared into her mother's genuinely terrified eyes for several seconds before taking her hand and pressing the phone into it. “You have Monty now, you don't need me,” she said, then turned and walked away before her mother could see her tears.

 

“Sorry, didn't mean to be
this
late.” Obviously frazzled, Jewel brushed past Silas on her way into the kitchen. “I had to run into Santa Fe to get a new phone. The boys aren't here?”

“At my folks'. Mom said she needed a grandbaby fix
before she lost her mind. What happened to your old phone?”

He watched as she shucked her backpack onto the kitchen table, shoving her sweater sleeves up to her elbows. “Mama's getting married again,” she said, grabbing a bowl of cookie dough she'd made the day before out of the fridge.

“And…there's a correlation between those two things?”

“Yes.”

Thinking,
To hell with this,
Silas walked over and gently grasped her shoulders, turning her around. “Hey,” he said softly. “Spill.”

Conflict screamed in her eyes before, shaking her head, she pulled away. Her back to him, she clanged cookie sheets onto the counter, washed her hands, then began plucking chunks of dough out of the bowl and jerkily rolling them into balls. Then she stopped, gripping the edges of the counter, her shoulders up near her ears.

“Turns out she put this tracking thing on my phone, that's how she always knew where to find me. So she did, at Ortega's. Came in, announced her engagement to some man she found on the Internet, who she's known for God only knows how long—or not—who I've never even met. Oh, and she'll be his fifth wife.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.” She smacked the first glob of dough onto the sheet, smashing it down with the bottom of a glass like she was killing a bug. And oh, did Silas know where this was headed.

“Honey—”

“Don't, Si,” she whispered. “Please.”

Like hell. Again, he curled his hands around her
arms, angled her to face him. “You're not your mother, Jewel—”

“She asked for my blessing, Silas! My approval for something…” Her mouth thinned, she once more put space between them. “I know I'm not my mother. Which is precisely why I refuse to follow in her footsteps.”

Yeah, no surprise there. Then why did he feel like he'd just been eviscerated? “I know you need time—”

“And what's going to change a month from now?” she said, wheeling on him, her expression anguished. “A year? Ten years? I see that hope in her eyes, that…that belief she clings to so fiercely that
this
time won't be like the others. No, don't interrupt, I've got to say this.”

Her breathing ragged, she knuckled the space between her brows, getting cookie dough all over her glasses. On a strangled groan, she yanked them off and tossed them on the counter, where they skittered away like a scolded puppy. “I look in her eyes,” she said in a small voice, tears flooding hers, “and I see…oh, hell.”

Glancing at the ceiling, she let out a humorless chuckle, then faced him again. “I see exactly how loving you makes
me
feel,” she said, and Silas's heart stopped. “Amazed, and awestruck, and most of all, hopeful. Except, how on earth can I trust any of that? How…” She swallowed, then swiped away a tear. “How can I trust what I see in
your
eyes?”