The Soon-To-Be-Disinherited Wife

Ten

Emma kept having the strangest dream-she knew it had to be a dream because she was naked except for a string of pearls.

The dream was the opposite of a nightmare. She was walking out of an ugly tunnel-a dark place where she knew she’d been trapped and anxious and never able to see sunlight. Yet in the dream, the answer was so simple. She followed the path out of the tunnel into another world, a beautiful world, where aspens shivered in the wind, revealing leaves of real gold. The sun bathed down warmth but was never so hot as to burn.

She felt strong and happy and loved…

And then she suddenly opened her eyes. Garrett had pulled a chair next to the bed, was sitting there with a mug between his hands, staring intently at her. “Hey, beauty,” he murmured. “I was starting to worry.”

“Worry?” she asked groggily.

“I’ve talked to London twice. Paris once. Switzerland three times. Handled over four million in securities and investments. Had breakfast-”

“Good grief. What time is it?”

“Take it easy.” A royal finger ordered her head back down to the pillow. “It’s only eight o’clock.”

“How could it only be eight, if-”

“No big sweat. All those places are on a time zone that works early in the morning here. If I need to call Tokyo, it’s a whole different story.”

That was interesting information, she thought. Even fascinating. But the crazy thing was she hoped he’d keep on chitchatting. Just like this. For another few time zones or two. Waking up to him was even better than the dream. How corny was that?

“Note that I didn’t climb back into bed with you,” Garrett said. “For which I think you should give me at least seventy-five brownie points.”

“Because?”

“Because I knew you were exhausted. In fact, you were sleeping so deeply that I kept checking to make sure your heart was still beating.”

“That’s the most creative excuse I’ve heard for feeling a girl up.”

He nodded solemnly. “It’s the best I could come up with on a moment’s notice. But if it were up to me, I’d stand guard so you could sleep all day. This kind of tired isn’t fair, cookie. You’ve been carrying too heavy a load. But I wasn’t sure if I could let you sleep much longer, because I didn’t have any idea what commitments you had today or when they started.”

She closed her eyes. “I’ve got a project I’m involved with for Lily Cartright this afternoon. You know Lily, don’t you? She married Jack Cartright, partner in that big law firm? And since Lily’s pregnant now-” A cup of tea seemed to have made its way into her hands. She took a sip, found it hot, strong, sweet. Perfect. “She’s been farming out projects whenever she can find a-”

“Sucker.”

“Exactly. Anyway, she’s got a group of troubled kids. Teenagers about age thirteen and fourteen. Not in trouble with the law yet but aiming there-truants, cutting class, that kind of thing.”

“Don’t tell me you finger paint with them,” he teased.

“No. I’m doing a wall with them. A mural. Free-form. Not art exactly but using colors and shapes that work for them. It’s their therapy room, so they’re creating the whole thing, from floor to ceiling.”

“So you get to work with a handful of ornery, belligerent, smart-mouthed defiant teenagers for-”

A bowl of dewy-fresh raspberries lightly sprinkled with sugar appeared on her lap. “A couple hours a week. But Lily needs the help. And they love it, Garrett. How could I say no?”

“You frame your mouth like this.” He demonstrated. “It’s just a one-syllable word. You used to be great at saying it. Especially to me.”

She had to laugh. “That was a different issue, you devil. The kids are great to me. They’re no trouble at all.”

“I didn’t want to be trouble for you when we were teenagers either. I just wanted to get in your pants.”

“Well, sheesh. The last couple days, I’ve let you do anything you wanted. You just had to wait a couple of years before I changed my vote.” She added thoughtfully, “Come to think of it, I was stuck waiting a couple of years, too.”

“So what do you think? Was the wait worth it?”

“It was more-more-than worth it, Mr. Keating. In fact, if you’ll climb back under the sheets with me for a couple of minutes, I just might show you how worth it it was. I might even show you what I can do with a fresh raspberry.”

“My God. You are trouble.” He took the tea, stashed it on the table and then dived for her. Raspberries spilled everywhere. The bowl tipped on the carpet. His arms went around her and he kissed her, winding her on top of him, then beneath. As if all that teasing had been lots of fun…but not half as much fun as the reality of touching her.

Emma hadn’t realized any of those truths before. Such as when a man needed to touch his woman, the rest of the world didn’t need to exist.

And when a woman needed to touch her man, it was exactly the same.

They tussled and romped and played, until the friction and heat under the sheets caused a spontaneous combustion.

He’d seduced her with infinite patience and sensuality and tenderness the night before, but this morning was a hot, wild ride.

Power outages should have occurred from the amount of sizzling bright lightning between them.

Eventually she crashed against the pillow, all sweaty, an insanely beatific smile on her face, and he crashed on his back, one arm still thrashed over her, as damp as she was, the same beatific smile on his face.

Until his telephone rang.

They both ignored it. Eventually it stopped ringing. Garrett never acted as though he’d even heard it, never stopped looking at her for even a moment.

But the jangling sound slapped her back to reality. For hours she’d completely forgotten the shock and panic of her real reality. “Garrett, I need to tell you something serious.”

“Okay.”

“I tried to tell you yesterday.”

“I know you did. And I never meant to cut you off, Em. I just honestly thought you needed some rest. You’ve had nonstop stress.”

He carved a hand around her temple and cheekbone, smoothing away her damp hair. “It wasn’t hard to figure out what you were going through yesterday. I know Eastwick. The whole town found out about your broken engagement and was on your back all day to get the details.”

“That’s true. In fact, it was the reason I couldn’t get time to talk to you yesterday. But that’s not the problem I need to share.” She took a breath, intent on gathering her thoughts, but he went on, as if believing she needed soothing and reassuring.

“Reed’s going to be on your mind for a while. You care for him, cared for him. The town isn’t going to let you forget his name right away even if you wanted to. I promise I’m not going to add to that problem for you.”

“I didn’t think you would-”

Again, he interrupted. “If we come out publicly as a pair right now, the town will think you left Reed for me. I know how they are, believe me.” Clearly he’d worried about the kind of issues she had to live with in Eastwick. “So I realize we’ll have to be discreet for a while. But I can’t imagine either of us wanting to be anything but discreet anyway.”

“That’s true.” She hadn’t even thought that far ahead. Garrett obviously had. When she ducked her head, though, his knuckles gently chucked up her chin so their eyes were meeting again.

“Emma. I’m in love with you. It’s a new feeling for me. Terrifying and terrorizing. But I know this is right.”

A lump filled her throat. A lump both of joy and dread. “I never expected to feel anything like this, either. It was good when we were kids, Gar. But nothing like what I feel for you now.”

He nodded. “Still, we can take this as slow as you want. I don’t know how to do this courtship thing. So I’ll have to learn. I want to do it right. I admit, I’m a slow developer, but honest to Pete, I’ve got a decent IQ. So if you’ll just be patient and not freak out if I do something wrong now and then-”

She sat up, shook up now. “Garrett.”

“What?”

“Hush.”

“Okay.”

“Something happened yesterday. My parents-I knew they wanted to see me. I knew they wanted answers about why I’d broken the engagement to Reed, so I went there.” She sighed, then just blurted it out. “I found out I’m going to lose everything.”

“Lose what? What do you mean?”

God. It was so good to talk to someone who wasn’t going to heap judgments on her head, who wasn’t so close to Eastwick society that he’d be influenced by anything beyond…well, beyond her. “All this time, Garrett, I thought I had a trust fund, set up by my grandmother, that I’d inherit when I was thirty.”

“Okay.”

“It’s hefty. Several million dollars.”

“So. That’s great.”

“The thing is, knowing about the trust fund always affected how and why I live the way I do. I love my gallery, but I always chose what to display, what to sell, not based on a profit but on what I wanted to give to the community. I tried to pick what I thought was beautiful. What I thought added to us all. Not just what would bring me in the mortgage payment.”

Garrett didn’t interrupt her this time, only listened. But she caught the faintest smile-not patronizing but gentle. When he touched her cheek, she could almost see the opinion in his mind-that she was a hopeless idealist. And that he liked the quality in her.

“It’s not just that gallery. But all the volunteer work I do. The projects I take on at the country club are more about my parents than me. Likewise, the hostess chores I do for my dad. But what I do for the kids-I’ve always volunteered a lot of hours because I never had to worry about income, you know? I always knew I had this tidy little fortune coming in.”

“Pretty obviously,” he said quietly, “that changed. Somehow.”

She sat up, nodded vigorously, wishing she could shake the lump from her throat. “What my parents never told me-until yesterday-was that I had to be married by the age of thirty to inherit that money.”

“Say what?” The sudden crease on his forehead registered his confusion. He sat up, taking an immediately more serious posture. It stopped being a snuggle-on-the-pillow conversation once he realized she had a serious problem.

Or that’s what she thought was happening. She sat up, too, reached for a long-sleeved shirt of his. She didn’t mind being naked with him. In fact, for the first time in her life she felt free to be herself in every way. But the subject was so troubling that she could feel a heart chill settling in.

They both ended up in his tiny kitchen. She curled up in a chair with a fresh mug of tea. He leaned against the counter, looking oddly distant-probably because the sun was behind him at the window, and his face looked more austere and shadowed. “I don’t understand. Why would your grandmother have set up the trust that way?”

“It seems that my grandmother-as well as my parents-heard me talk against getting married from the time I was little. To be honest, my parent’s marriage was enough to scare anyone away from the institution. And it just seemed so many marriages in Eastwick were about money. Mergers. Conglomerations. Bringing businesses and dynasties together.” She swept back her hair with a fretful hand. “I didn’t want that.”

“Hell, neither did I.”

“Anyway…” She sipped, willing the tea to start bracing her. It felt good to get this out in the open. To share the problem with Garrett. To have someone she could tell. “I think the idea was to blackmail me into marriage and kids.”

“Which is fine-only how was that supposed to work if you didn’t know it was a condition of the trust?”

Something in his voice caught her attention. Something off. Cool. But when she lifted her head to study him, his expression just seemed…neutral. She assumed she’d imagined that sudden odd tone.

“According to my parents, once I started seeing Reed a couple years ago, they believed we’d end up married. They thought they’d never have to tell me.” She shook her head at the black humor of it all. “It’s so ironic, because they couldn’t wait to tell me yesterday. They wanted me to call Reed immediately. Make up with him. They were very, very positive a few million dollars would motivate me to do anything to get him back.”

Garrett fell silent.

She didn’t know what she expected him to say. Nothing, really. Only his silence seemed to stretch out for an odd length of time. Maybe it was just too much to take in at one time, she thought. But then he asked, “When is your thirtieth birthday?”

“August thirty-first.”

“So let me see if I’ve got this right. If you’re not married before August thirty-first, you lose those millions?”

“I don’t actually know how much it is. It was three million when my grandmother established the trust. But you know how money well invested can add up.” She squeezed her eyes closed for a minute. “I’m having the hardest time just…grasping it. Not the loss of the money so much. But how I’m now facing quite a disaster because I so totally took that inheritance for granted. I never saved, never questioned my financial choices. Spent too much on cars and clothes and anything else I wanted. And now it’s a shock. Not just to give up my gallery but not to be able to do all the volunteer work with kids-”

Garrett turned around, plunked his mug down on the counter hard enough to make a slapping sound. “I guess the answer to that is easy enough.”

“Pardon?”

“All you have to do is marry before you’re thirty, right? Reed wasn’t right for you, but it’s not like he was your only choice. You had me hooked before you kicked him out of the running.”

“Pardon?” she said again, this time more softly.

“I’ll marry you, Emma. If you want that money, it’s yours. No big sweat.”

His voice was as cool as a cucumber on a hot summer day. Dripping cool. Tangy cool. When she didn’t immediately respond-at that precise instant, she couldn’t get her tongue to form a word if her life had depended on it-he said, “I’m no idealist about money. It’s not pretty or romantic to be poor. There’s no reason to be embarrassed about wanting to live well. No one throws away a fortune, Emma, it’s stupid. You’d be crazy to throw away your independence, your security. Besides, why would you want to do that?”

From one second to the next, she felt as if she’d aged half a century, because she stood up on shaky knees and halting balance. “I wasn’t asking you to marry me,” she said quietly.

“I know that. But it’s a perfectly reasonable solution to your problem. God knows we get along between the sheets. Always did have a click together-” His phone rang. At the same time, his fax started exuberantly frothing out waves of paper. He stepped toward the phone but said to her first, “No reason in hell we can’t be married before your birthday.”

As he walked across the room, took his business call, for a good sixty seconds she fought for calm. She felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. She couldn’t seem to recover.

She even wanted to laugh. For the first time in her entire life she really did want a marriage proposal. The biggest dream her heart ever had was a proposal specifically from Garrett.

But not like this.

Not because he thought she’d marry him for money.

The funniest, saddest part of it was that Emma had thought-she’d really, really thought-that Garrett cared for her. Even loved her. That he knew her, the real Emma, the Emma she rarely showed to anyone, and that that was the woman he’d taken to bed. And maybe even fallen in love with. At least, he’d said he loved her.

But that, of course, was under the covers.

Now she knew better.

He was still on the phone, still talking-in French she thought, without really registering what he was saying. But then, she wasn’t registering what she was doing either. Taking steps like a sleepwalker, she strode barefoot toward the door, wearing his shirt, her hair not brushed, her clothes and shoes still somewhere around his place-probably strewn every which way.

She couldn’t remember ever doing anything improper in public.

It wasn’t that she cared so much what others thought of her but that she never willingly exposed herself that way. Yet she walked out his door and down the sidewalk toward Color dressed like that. Or undressed like that, depending on one’s point of view.

Right then, she didn’t seem to have a point of view. She just had to get out of Garrett’s presence before that punch in the gut caught up with her. The pain was going to hit good. She knew it. But she didn’t want him or anyone to see it.

All Emma wanted was to hide out and lick her wounds in private, but life just refused to cooperate. She couldn’t let down the teenagers for the afternoon mural project. The gallery still had to be opened and operated. Her telephone never stopped ringing, and although she could have turned off the darn thing, that only avoided problems rather than solved them. Unless she faced people and spoke to them, people could well believe that Reed was responsible for their engagement breakup-especially since the man had apparently disappeared from sight-and it wasn’t right having people blame him. And on top of all that, she had a dozen prewedding plans that needed immediate canceling.

So she sucked it up and did the day and tried her hardest to keep her mind off Garrett. But by late afternoon she’d had it. Maybe you could glue a cracked eggshell back together temporarily, but no way could that glue hold forever.

“Josh, you can man the place for a couple hours, can’t you? I know Jeremiah isn’t here, but I need to disappear in the workshop for a while, get some things ready for the July show.”

“Sure, Emma. You want me to tell everyone you’re gone for the day?”

Bless Josh. He never asked a personal question. He just seemed to want a job where people left him alone about being gay. In so many ways, she could count on him for discretion. It helped to be able to close the door on the shop and focus on cleaning canvases and frames and organizing display concepts.

She wasn’t concentrating well, couldn’t pretend to, didn’t try.

She just wanted to fill the day’s hours and do her damnedest to wear herself out. Barely fifteen minutes passed before there was a knock on the door, though, and it wasn’t Josh.

Mary Duvall poked her head in. “Your employee said you were busy and didn’t want to be interrupted, Emma.”

“It’s all right.” It wasn’t, but Mary was already inside now. And any other time, she’d have been glad to see her old friend.

Mary lifted a satchel of canvases to explain why she’d intruded. “You told me to bring some work if I wanted it in your show. Especially that I needed to bring it before the end of June. So I was afraid if I didn’t get around to showing you these, it might be too late for you to even consider them.”

“You’re so right. Come on in, let’s have a look.”

Mary stepped in tentatively, studying Emma’s face as if unsure if she were really welcome. Emma wanted to shake her head. The Mary Duvall she’d known in school had lots of brass attitude and spunk-of course, life and age changed everyone. But this Mary was wearing a subdued denim skirt and basic blouse, no style in sight, and seemed shyer than a wren.

Man, though, her work wasn’t remotely shy. As Emma slowly examined the portfolio, she felt distracted for the first time all day. She saw striking colors. Emotion. Vision. Paintings that offered something fresh and thoughtful and deep.

“My God. Why didn’t you give me stuff to display before?” Emma scolded her.

“You do want them then?”

“And anything else you’ve got. I’d love to give you your own show, but right now the best I can do is include you in the July program.” She didn’t say that she may well need to close the gallery after that. “After that…I don’t know, but I’ll help you find places to display whatever you have, hook you up with the best dealers. You’re wonderful.”

They chatted a bit longer. Without thinking, Emma insisted Mary attend the next Debs lunch. Mary had been to one, but Emma sensed she needed more coaxing to feel part of the Eastwick fold again. The words came out of her mouth so easily that she suddenly had to gulp.

Obviously she shouldn’t be igniting the old friendship or playing welcoming committee to Eastwick for Mary when she no longer had any idea where she was going to be or what she was going to do-and those decisions were going to slap her in the face awfully fast. Mary had no reason to know about her personal crises, but possibly her expression gave something away, because her old friend’s voice turned gentle.

“I expected this would be a bad day to visit, but that’s partly why I did, Emma. I’m sure you know that everyone’s buzzing about your sudden broken engagement. And it seems like you must be bearing the brunt of the talk alone. I don’t know if Reed holed up on his ranch or just plain disappeared for a while, but word has it that he’s completely out of sight. Unfortunately that’s made the gossipmongers cackle even more.”

When Emma didn’t respond, Mary said softly, “I don’t want to add to all that. I just thought you might need someone around who wasn’t going to ask you questions or bug you. It may have been years since I lived in Eastwick, but it’s not like I’ve forgotten how the grapevine works-Aw, hell. Don’t, Em. Don’t.”

Emma wasn’t crying. She never cried in public. She knew people thought of her as idealistic, but no one had a clue she’d grown up with an alcoholic parent or anything else that was personally difficult. She’d learned at a young age to keep vulnerability out of sight. It was just…

Nothing seemed important right now. She couldn’t care less about gossip and Eastwick. Running the gallery and canceling wedding arrangements and all the other life chores she’d done that day had seemed beyond irrelevant. She couldn’t even garner any interest in facing the major life challenges and changes she had to because of losing the trust she’d counted on for so long.

“Oh, Emma…” Mary surged toward her and tried to pull her into a hug. “I understand. It hurts. It doesn’t matter who caused the breakup. Breaking up is always horrible. Whatever happened between you and Reed…”

“It’s not Reed,” she choked out.

“Yeah, right. Like your heart’s not broken?”

God, what a mess. Her heart was broken, for damn sure. But not over Reed.

Over Garrett.

Everything else might be life-altering and awful and painful. But the one thing she couldn’t imagine getting over was how completely she’d misjudged Garrett. She’d never fallen in love before. Never felt love. Not the way she did for him.

And to have him believe she’d pursued him to get an inheritance?

How could he know her so little? How could he think so little of her?