The Marriage Agenda: The Marriage Conspiracy / The Billionaire's Baby Plan

“Joleen—”

“That is all. That is it. You won’t get my baby, don’t think that you will. And I want you out of my mother’s house.”

Right then the door to the front hall swung inward. It was Dekker, all six foot three and 220, or so, very muscular pounds of him. “Joleen. Everything okay?”

The sight of her dear friend calmed her—at least a little. She said quietly, “Everything’s fine. The Atwoods were just leaving.”

“You’ll be hearing from my attorney,” Robert Atwood said.

“Fine. Just go. Now.”

Apparently, he’d said all he came to say. At last. With great dignity he guided his wife toward the door.

Which Dekker was blocking. “What’s this about a lawyer?” he demanded.

Robert Atwood spoke to Joleen. “Tell this thug to step out of my way.”

Joleen longed to tell Dekker just the opposite—to ask him if he would please break both of the Atwoods in two. But, no. It wouldn’t be right to kill the Atwoods. Not on DeDe’s wedding day, anyway.

“It’s okay, Dekker. Let them go.”

* * *

Dekker, who had a fair idea of what had been going on in Samuel’s study, stepped aside reluctantly. The Atwoods left the room. He followed them, just to make certain they got the hell out.

Once they went through the front door, he shut it firmly behind them. Then he returned to Joleen.

She was standing by her father’s desk, a pretty woman in a long dress that was not quite pink and not quite red. Her heart-shaped face was flushed, her full mouth tight. A frown had etched itself between those big brown DuFrayne eyes.

Dekker quietly closed the door.

Her mouth loosened enough to quiver a little. “Please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”

Just to make sure he had it figured out, he said, “They want to take Sam away from you.”

He hoped that maybe she would tell him it wasn’t so. But she didn’t. She picked up a brass paperweight of a Yankee soldier on a rearing horse from the edge of Samuel’s desk. “I thought about smashing Robert Atwood in the face with this.”

Dekker shook his head. “Bad idea. And, anyway, violence is not your style.”

“Right now I feel like it could be. I feel like I could do murder and never think twice.”

“You couldn’t.”

She clutched the brass figure against her body and looked at him with fury in her eyes. “He called my mother promiscuous, Dekker. He said Mama and DeDe and Niki weren’t fit to take care of Sam. He raised a shallow, sweet-talkin’ lowlife like Bobby—God forgive me for speakin’ ill of the dead—and he has the nerve to come in my mother’s house and say that my people are not good enough to do right by my child, that I am not good enough, that—”

In two long strides, he was at her side.

She looked at him with a kind of bewildered surprise—that he had moved so fast, or maybe that, in moving, he had distracted her from her rage. “What?”

“Better give me that.”

She only gripped the paperweight tighter. “He offered me money, Dekker. Money for my baby. Five hundred thousand dollars to let them have Sam.”

Dekker swore. “I’m sorry, Jo. You shouldn’t have had to listen to garbage like that.” He put his hand over hers. “Come on. Put this thing down.…”

She allowed him to pry her fingers open. He set the paperweight back in its place on the desk. Then he took her by the shoulders.

“What else?” he asked, when she finally met his eyes.

She swallowed, shook her head as if to clear it of so much hot, hurtful rage. “When I…when I told him no, that I wouldn’t take his money and he could not have my child, he started talkin’ lawsuits, how he would not have any trouble convincing a judge that Sam would be better off living with him and Antonia.”

Predictable, thought Dekker. He said, “Anything more?”

Those big eyes narrowed. “He knew. About how Niki got picked up for shoplifting last year. And he seemed to know about DeDe, about her little joyride in that stolen car.”

In fact, it was one of Niki’s friends from the bad-news crowd she’d been hanging around who’d actually tried to walk out of the department store with a cashmere sweater under her coat. But Niki had been there. She had known of the attempted theft and done nothing to stop it. And before that, there had been a series of incidents at school, bad grades and detentions, minor vandalism of school property and truancies, too.

As for DeDe, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, she had been a true wild child. She went out with bad boys, she drank, she experimented with drugs. She’d ended up before a judge after the incident with the car, when she’d hitched a ride with a boy she hardly knew. The boy had shared his bottle of tequila with her and taken her down I-35 at a hundred miles an hour.

She’d gotten off easy, because it was her first arrest and because she hadn’t known that the car was stolen and because, by some miracle, the judge had believed her when she swore she hadn’t known. But she’d come very close to doing some time. After that, she’d cleaned up her act.

The problem with Niki and DeDe, the way Dekker saw it, was losing their father—and not getting enough attention and supervision from their mother. Camilla loved her girls with all her heart, but she’d been sunk in desperate grief for the first year or two after Samuel’s death. And since then she was often distracted by all the boyfriends. She also worked long hours at the salon that she and Joleen now operated together.

Joleen had done her best to pick up the slack, to be there for her sisters, to offer attention and to provide discipline. She’d taken a lot of flack from both DeDe and Niki for her pains. They’d acted out their resentments on her; they’d fought her every time she tried to rein them in.

But recently things had started looking up. Niki had left the bad crowd behind. She took school seriously, was getting As and Bs rather than Ds and Fs. And DeDe had really settled down, as well. Joleen had dared to let herself think that the worst part of raising her own sisters was behind her.

Not that the reform of the Tilly girls would matter one damn bit to a self-righteous bastard like Robert Atwood.

“Oh, I cannot believe this is happening.” Joleen pulled away from Dekker’s grip and sank to one of the faded easy chairs. For a moment, she stared down at her lap, slim shoulders drooping. Then she pulled herself up straight again. “When I asked him how he knew those things about my sisters and my mother, he said he had his sources. Dekker, that man has had someone snooping around in our lives.” She said it as if it were some sort of surprise. “Why, I would not put it past him to have hired someone, some private detective…”

“You mean someone like me?”

She let out a small, guilty-sounding groan. “Oh, Dekker, no. I didn’t mean it that way.…”

“It’s okay. I did. I’m damn good at what I do. When I dig up the dirt on someone for a client, I get it all. I’m sure whoever Robert Atwood hired has done the same.”

She put up a hand to swipe a shiny golden-brown curl back from her forehead. “Dekker, it won’t work, will it? He couldn’t get Sam by claiming that my mother and sisters are unfit. Could he?”

Dekker wished he didn’t have to answer that one.

Joleen picked up his reluctance. “You think it could work, don’t you?” Her shoulders drooped again. “Oh, God…”

He dropped to a crouch at her feet. “Look. I’m only saying it might work. Your sisters and your mother all pitch in, to take care of Sam when you can’t.”

“So? Good child care costs plenty. If I had to hire someone, I couldn’t come close to affording the kind of care I can get from my family for free.” She leaned toward him in the chair, intent on convincing him of how right she was—though somewhere in the back of her mind, she had to realize she was preaching to the choir. “They are good with him, Dekker, you know that they are. And as for Niki and DeDe, it’s been a long time since there’s been any trouble from either of them. And Mama—well, all right. She likes men and she loves to go out. Is that a crime? I don’t know all her secrets, but I know she is not having affairs with all of them. She is no bed hopper. She loves the romance of it, that’s all. She loves getting flowers and going dancing. But then, after way too little time with each guy, she can’t pretend anymore. She admits to herself that the latest man is not my father. So she moves on to the next one—and what in the world does that have to do with how she is with Sam?”

“It’s got nothing to do with how she is with Sam. The truth is, Camilla is a fine grandma. You know it and I know it. But I’m trying to get you to see that it’s not the truth that matters here.”