To Wear His Ring (42 page)

“Mm, gettin’ there.” She rubbed the hairs she’d pulled. Then more seriously she added, “If the women were willing, who can fault you?” Nettie was thinking of herself, no question. To a rag magazine like
Star
she supposed she’d be considered just another one of Chase Reynolds’s women. The thought poked a finger of jealousy right in her sternum. Jealousy and possessiveness. She didn’t even want to explore that and was relieved when Chase claimed her attention.

“A court can fault me,” he answered her question and Nettie heard the frown in his voice. “Grandparents can fault me. Social services—”

“Now wait a minute. Aren’t you being overly harsh? You didn’t even suspect you were a father until a few weeks ago.”

There was a pause. “Before you let me off the hook, there’s more you need to know. I never wanted kids, Nettie.” Rather than shifting to see her better, Chase stayed where he was and Nettie understood it was easier for him to get this out without looking at her. “That’s an understatement. Any lawyer with the competence of Daffy Duck will be able to wallpaper the courthouse with evidence of my position on commitment. And for awhile there, I was pretty vocal about being opposed to fatherhood.”

“All right, I understand your concern. Maybe I can even understand Colin’s grandparents’ concern—because they don’t know you. But judges are mandated to be impartial. A couple of gossipy articles from your past can’t mean that much.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed. “But one really stupid comment I made a few weeks ago could do us in.”

Chase sounded sick with remorse. This time Nettie wriggled
out of his arms to face him. He looked at her, but his eyes held a faraway, unhappy expression. She waited.

Scraping a hand through his hair, he shook his head, then swore beneath his breath, damning himself.

“Julia’s boyfriend in Florida was the first person to contact me about Colin. When he told me Julia had a son who was seven and that I was the father, I said—” Chase closed his eyes, wincing at the memory. “I said, ‘Bullshit. The kid isn’t mine.’”

When he reopened his eyes, he looked like a condemned man so filled with guilt he would refuse his own pardon. Nettie’s heart reached out to him. Whatever had made him reject the idea of fatherhood so vehemently, clearly a lot had changed in a few weeks. “Are you afraid Julia’s boyfriend will be a witness for her parents?”

“Their lawyer has already spoken to him. I don’t think he cares one way or the other who gets custody as long as it’s not him. But if he’s subpoenaed, it won’t be good for us.”

“You and Colin have so much to handle right now. Becoming a family is challenging enough without all this hanging over you.”

“I just don’t want Colin to suffer because his father shot off his stupid mouth.” Restless, Chase stood and paced the room. “I came to North Dakota to elude the press as long as I could, but my lawyer tells me the story broke in England today, and it’s bound to hit a few papers in the states. That means photographers and pictures of Colin.” He swore again, but more mildly. “It’s weird, all these feelings I’ve never had before. I just want to protect him, Nettie. I want to make life…
everything
…better for him, not worse.”

The impulse to rush to Chase, to hold and reassure him was so strong Nettie almost gave in. Exerting all her willpower, she stayed where she was. “Lilah said you mentioned something about travel plans. I imagine you’ll be leaving…” Traitorously, her voice wobbled. “Leaving soon,” she said. To prove she was fine, perfectly fine, with whatever he had to do, she added, “It makes sense. School will be starting in a little while. You’ll have to register Colin, and I’m sure you want to be near your lawyer. And your family. We haven’t even talked about your family and how they feel about Colin. They must be so excited. When…” Her hands were clutched so tightly on her lap, she feared she
might cut off the circulation to her wrists. “When do you leave?”

Standing at the fireplace, Chase looked at her quizzically. “I’m not leaving. I made travel plans for my lawyer, Nelson, to come out. Besides, Colin’s grandparents want to meet him, and I’d rather have that happen here than in New York. For the time being, we’re staying put. We’re staying in North Dakota.”

T
he relief was dizzying.

Why bother to deny it, Nettie thought as the tension she hadn’t even realized she was carrying began to drain from her neck and shoulders. The news that Chase was staying—even temporarily—acted on her like a good antihistamine: all at once she could breathe again.

Outwardly, she strove to present a calm and serene front while she considered the best response. “Gee, that’s nice,” “Anything I can do to help?” and “North Dakota’s glad to have you” all exemplified the poise she wanted to possess.

Shouting “Thank You, God…Thank You, God…Thank You, God!” while throwing her arms around Chase’s neck would be more genuine.

In the end, she compromised, walking to him as calmly as she could and circling his waist in a gentle hug while the giddy smile inside her bubbled to the surface. “I’m glad.”

Tension drained from him, too, as he hugged her back, resting his cheek on the top of her head.

In the kitchen, the back door opened and closed. Sneakered feet raced noisily across linoleum and over the hardwood, skidding
to a stop in the living room. More languidly, feet shod in sandals clicked across the floor.

Lilah halted next to Colin and, like him, stared at the scene in front of the fireplace. “If this were Christmas, I’d turn you into a postcard.”

Her wry comment pulled the couple slightly apart. Still with their arms around each other’s waists, they glanced over. Nettie was flushed and happy.

“Told you,” Colin said in a stage whisper to his new partner in dirt digging. “They kept huggin’ like that while I was trying to eat breakfast.”

Lilah nodded. “Speaking as a professional actor, I can tell you this doesn’t look a bit like ‘good-bye.’”

Chase’s lawyer, Nelson Dale, was booked on a flight from New York to Minot for the following week. In the meantime Chase accepted Nick’s offer to move into the two-bedroom cottage that sat on its own patch of fallow land about a half mile from the barley fields. Nick’s father had built the stone-and-stucco bungalow for his second wife—Nick’s beloved stepmother, Bea—who had moved to North Dakota from the countryside of England. It was the house Nettie had told him about.

“The enchanted cottage,” Chase muttered darkly as he and Nettie stood outside, assessing the work they needed to do. Warned by Nick that the place had been neglected for years, Chase had requested Nettie’s expertise in returning it to a state of hominess, but he hadn’t expected quite so much disrepair.

“Looks more like the house on haunted hill,” he grumbled, hands resting on his hips as he wondered if renting a place in town might be a better option. His lawyer had stressed the importance of presenting a picture of home and hearth.

Chase shook his head. If this place had a hearth, he seriously doubted their ability to locate it. Weeds and a tangled vine that should have been eulogized a long time ago shrouded the exterior of the cottage. A thick crust of dirt covered the windowpanes. Chase could imagine the condition of the interior…but wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“If I’d known it looked like this, I never would have asked you to help,” he told Nettie, who was already attempting to peer
through the grime encasing the window. Some hot date he’d turned out to be.

Swinging around from her preliminary fact-finding mission, she faced him with shining eyes.

Dazed, he surmised. Probably in shock. Wants to tell me to stuff it, but isn’t quite certain how. “Nick’s description of the place leaves a lot to be desired.”

Nettie nodded in agreement. “I don’t think he ever appreciated it the way we girls did.” She made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Chase simply stood there, wondering if he heard her correctly. “’Scuse me?”

She stepped off the porch to examine the perimeter. “When Bea was alive she kept an English garden. No one knew how she could nurture so many gorgeous flowers with our harsh weather. The ladies at church suspected she imported dirt from England!” Rubbing her palms with enthusiasm, she urged, “Let’s go in.”

“You want to see the inside?” he asked incredulously. “After lunch? If the mess is bigger inside than out, I, for one, am in danger of tossing my cookies.”

“Don’t be silly,” Nettie laughed. “This is a great challenge! Wait’ll you see the fireplace, you’ll love it. This sweet old girl deserves to be returned to her former glory.”

Chase withheld comment on her definition of “glory” and produced the key Nick kept on a hook in his kitchen. “I bet he hasn’t tried this key in years,” he said as he made his first attempt at wriggling it into the lock.

“Probably not. Nick never came here much, anyway. It was Bea’s haven. She shared it with the women in town and with us girls. We had the best sleepovers here. I loved it.”

“Sleepovers,” Chase mused. Good idea. He glanced at the eager woman beside him. If she promised to sleep over he’d work from sunup to sunup making the cottage presentable.

Would he have chosen to remain in North Dakota if not for Nettie? Doubtful. Very doubtful.

His lawyer had advised him to transform his image. A whitecarpeted, chrome-and-leather-trimmed apartment in Manhattan with neighbors whose names he doubted he’d ever known, did not seem like a route to that goal. At this point, Chase had no
idea where he and Colin would wind up permanently, though he knew he could have chosen someplace less rural for their temporary abode. Connecticut, for instance, or upstate New York. But then they would have been alone.

He looked again at Nettie and found himself thinking the word
home.

Why fight it? A smile pushed his cheeks into grinning-fool mode as he opened the rough-hewn door and watched her rush inside, as thrilled with the dark, dust-laden interior as if he’d just opened the door to Buckingham Palace.

Chase filled his lungs with the stale, musty air and echoed her sigh. Yep, he’d toil from sunup to sunup. While visions of sleepovers danced in his head…

Three days later, the “enchanted cottage” was…

“Cute,” Chase observed, kicking back on the living-room sofa, whose overstuffed cushions and garden floral upholstery managed to seem stylish twenty years after their purchase.

“Cute?” Nettie echoed indignantly. Arranging knickknacks on the mantel, shifting their positions to satisfy herself, she grumbled, “Three days of slave labor and the best he can do is ‘cute.’”

Chase gladly took the bait, hoisting his tired bones from the couch to come up behind her, and Nettie squealed when he grabbed her around the waist, tipping her back into a dramatic dip.

“Slave labor,” Chase chided. “Is that what you call yesterday?”

“Yesterday?”

“Whisking the mattress in the master bedroom?”

Nettie’s eyes darkened. He referred, of course, to what had taken place after the mattress whisking…when they were supposed to have been putting linens on the bed and wound up in it, instead. Her lips parted unconsciously as she remembered the moment, and he almost carried her into the bedroom for an instant replay. Although, he assured himself, feeling his body respond faithfully, it wouldn’t be so “instant.”

“How,” Nettie asked insouciantly, “does the, um, ‘mattress whisking’ negate my allegation of slave labor?”

“You were richly rewarded,” Chase growled low in her ear.

Slowly, deliberately she wagged her head. “
You
were richly rewarded.”

“Sassy.” He grinned, taking advantage of her position to rain kisses down her neck. “Sassy and sooo right…”

Some time later, they resurfaced to begin dinner preparations in the newly cleaned brick and copper kitchen. Chase suggested that dinner out would be a fitting reward for all their hard work, but Nettie insisted on christening the cottage with a simple home-cooked meal around the carved oak dining table. She’d barely won the argument before the doorbell rang.

Lilah, with Colin in tow, stood on the porch, a huge picnic basket in her hands. “There’s more in the car,” she tossed over her shoulder at Chase as she breezed by. “Place looks spiffy,” she added on her way to the kitchen.

“Yeah. Spiffy.” Colin trotted happily after his babysitter, lugging a small Igloo ice chest. He wore, Chase noticed, a brand-new pair of sunglasses—like Lilah—and had mousse in his hair.

Lilah had been a great help the past few days, sometimes pitching in to set the house aright, sometimes baby-sitting Colin when it was clear the child needed a break from housecleaning. So if she had his son looking like a pint-sized Hollywood producer, oh well. What was the harm?

Agreeably, Chase went to the car, the same huge clunker Nettie drove, and hefted a box filled with covered baking dishes from the open tailgate. “Whoa! What the heck…”

How much food had she brought? He wondered, taking several steps backward under its weight.

“Unless you’re psychic,” he said to Lilah upon entering the kitchen, “something tells me this is not an impromptu home-cooked meal.” He set the box on the small center island, pulled out a large slow cooker and lifted the lid to inhale the savory aroma of barbecued beef. “You can cook,” he complimented.

“An Owens trait.” She shrugged to suggest it was really no big deal.

“What about Sara? Can she cook, too?” Somehow, he couldn’t fathom it.

“No. But I can buy.” As if on cue, the sheriff of Kalamoose strolled into the kitchen with a stack of pink boxes.

“Ooh, baby! What kind did you get?” Lilah hurried over to peek inside.

“I dunno. Whatever Ernie had. It’s all good.”

“Hi, Sara! I’ve been practicing my quick draw.” Colin raced toward the uniformed woman. Miming a holster and pistol, he “drew” three times in quick succession.

Chase glanced at Nettie, who was smiling at his son and her sisters while she unpacked their dinner. “Did you bring the drinks? Oh, good!” From the picnic basket, she withdrew four bottles, two of champagne and two of sparkling cider.

Chase felt a warm glow deep in his chest as realization dawned. Nettie had set up a kind of housewarming. Stowing the drinks in the refrigerator for the time being, she turned with a satisfied look in his direction. The cottage could have fallen down at that point, and he wouldn’t have been able to look away.

“Did you do potato and pasta salad?” Sara asked, while she dangled her handcuffs in front of Colin.

“Yes.” Lilah answered with her head in a pie box. “Peach! Oh, Ernie, you doll, you!”

“How about baked beans?”

“Of course.”

“Hey, Sara, can I handcuff myself to the doorknob?”

“Sure, squirt. I’ll come unlock you in a minute.”

Conversation eddied around them. Chase and Nettie continued to stare at each other. “Thank you,” he mouthed.

“You’re welcome.” Her smile broadened—just for him—and Chase knew in that moment he could have said much more than “Thank you.” And meant it.

Four days later, Nelson Dale arrived to brief Chase on what was now officially his custody case, and Chase began to understand for the first time in his life what “family” felt like.

It wasn’t silence, polite or contentious, while silverware clinked on bone china and classical music underscored an abundance of good taste.

It wasn’t white carpets, empty apartments, travel that seemed never-ending.

And it wasn’t muscling through every challenge in life totally
on one’s own because to ask for help might be perceived as weak by the people who were supposed to love you.

No.

“Family” was laughter, raucous and tolerant, when your son chose dinnertime to practice his new skill—voluntary belching.

Family was braided rugs that hid dirt, homes with too many people and not enough privacy, and towns where everyone knew your name and too much of your business.

Most of all, he realized that family was, indeed, not asking for help…because by the time you got around to it, help had already arrived.

The news that Colin’s grandparents had already decided to pursue custody hit everyone like a thunderbolt. Nelson Dale felt terrible bearing the bad tidings. He closeted himself with Chase for several hours at the cottage while Nettie took Colin for the day.

“You seem…I don’t know…content here,” Nelson commented, looking comfortable in a leather wingback. “Present circumstances aside.”

The two men were holed up in the “library,” a small room lined with recessed bookshelves and appointed in rich leather and dark wood. Nelson, a small, wiry fellow with glasses and a hairline more recessed than the bookshelves, eyed his client and friend over the rim of his coffee mug. “If I didn’t know better, I could almost believe you planned to stay.”

“In Kalamoose?” Distracted, Chase brushed the notion aside without giving it any consideration. “What would I do here?”

“Mmm. That is a point, of course. But still, it’s too bad.”

“What? Why?” Chase gave Nelson more of his attention. He’d known Nelson since college, had retained him as a lawyer for the past eight years and in all that time, whether they met in a business or social setting, Chase had never seen his friend relax. Not that Chase had ever really noticed before, but clearly the man was wired for city living. Even today, where no one knew him and his only client was wearing jeans, Nelson wore a suit and tie, gold cufflinks and a pocket watch. A pocket watch, for crying out loud. “Since when have you appreciated rural life?”

“Since you became the defendant in a custody suit. When the court assigns a social worker to your case, you could be treated
to a drop-in visit.” He scanned the room behind his glasses. “This place makes a persuasive presentation. As does your friend.”

“Nettie?” Nelson nodded and Chase frowned. He didn’t like hearing his “friend” or his home—even if it was only his borrowed, temporary home—described like something from a movie set. He didn’t like feeling compelled to orchestrate his life; he just wanted to live it. Most of all, he detested and resented like hell the hovering sense of fear that he could lose his son.

“I’m not a custody attorney,” Nelson said, concern puckering his brow.

“You’ve told me.”

“Yes, but you don’t seem to be listening. Soon—very soon—you will have to engage an attorney who specializes. In the meantime,” he raced on when Chase opened his mouth to swear (he’d been doing a lot of that this morning), “I’m going to advise you the way I believe a custody attorney would. You have somehow placed yourself in the midst of a lifestyle that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the life you formerly led. In your present situation this is a very good thing. It could, however, also be construed as a ploy to appease the courts. Nothing more than a well-constructed fiction. Needless to say, that would not be good.”