The Marriage Contract

“That was politics. I’m his son. You know this doesn’t compare.”

“What about me? I care what happens to his name. I don’t want anyone to know Jeff the way we did. And what about the house? Do you want to lose everything?”

He didn’t put a comforting arm around her shoulders. They never touched each other that way. “You and I will be all right.” But could he just let Hale take over?

Leota grabbed his arm, her gaze haunted. “Promise you won’t contest your father’s will. I couldn’t stand facing any more reporters. And Hale—he’ll turn our home into an amusement park.”

Wilford’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward. “Let’s get back to Jeff. I don’t understand what you’re trying to hide about him.”

Leota tightened her hand on Nick’s arm as she met the attorney’s gaze, a sheen of moisture lighting her eyes. “Jeff and Nick and I were a family. Our lives are no one else’s business.”

“You can’t expect Nick to marry someone in the next twelve months just so he can keep the property and money?”

“I can.”

She dropped smoothly into her pattern of subservience to Jeff’s wishes, as if she were a drowning woman who’d grabbed a rope. She didn’t know any other way, and Nick feared what it would do to her if he forced the issue.

“I don’t expect my son to marry just anybody,” she said. “We know plenty of suitable women. He’ll fall in love with a woman of good breeding and quality who would have made his father as proud as she’ll make me.”

Nick’s concern for his mother overwhelmed his urge to break free of Jeff, but he had to point out the obvious. “You want me to just pick a woman and fall in love with her?”

“I want you to do what your father asked.” Leota lowered her voice to a hiss. “For once, carry out one of his dreams for you.”

Dreams, hell. He refused to allow Jeff to turn his life into a nightmare. His father’s idea of a suitable woman piled insult on injury. “I never made a choice he liked. Now would be the worst time to start.”

Wilford stacked the pages of Jeff’s will. “One thing I think Leota’s right about, Nick. Are you sure you’d want to go over this in front of a courtroom? Whatever drove your father to make these demands would come out. Do you need to ruin his reputation? He was, after all, a United States senator.”

“And how about my reputation?” Leota said.

Her broken tone reached him. Hadn’t she suffered enough at his father’s hands? “Why do you still care?” he asked, more honest with her than he’d ever been.

“He was my husband.”

She lifted her chin, perfectly formed through expensive surgery she’d undergone because she’d never looked good enough for Jeff. In his eyes or, consequently, her own. Nick’s knowledge of her pain weighed much more than his concern for name or money.

“I can’t decide this now.” But he was pretty sure he’d already decided. To help Leota he would force himself to give in to Jeff. “I’ll call you, Wilford, to schedule a time so we can go over the rest of the will.”

He didn’t look at Leota again as he unlocked the office door and stepped into the anteroom. As soon as he closed the door behind himself, another woman rose from a straight-backed chair.

“Nick?”

“Mrs. Franklin.” Selina Franklin and her husband, Julian, known around Fairlove as “the judge” ran Franklin House, an upscale bed-and-breakfast. “Can I help you? Are you sick?”

She shook her steel-gray head. “I have a question to ask you.” She opened her purse and plucked out a yellowed piece of paper. “Read this first. I received it almost twelve years ago.”

What now? Barely holding on to his patience, Nick took the paper. The writer had typed the words and hadn’t signed the note.

“If you value your husband’s career,” it read, “you’ll stay out of my plans for the girl. And if you tell anyone about this, it’s your word against mine. I’ll enjoy ruining the judge while we find out I’m more credible.”

Nick didn’t need a signature. He knew the tone intimately. “What girl?” he asked.

“Clair Atherton. After her mother, Sylvie, died, I tried to get her out of foster care and adopt her. Someone kept blocking me, no matter what I or my husband tried. When I realized who was behind our problems, I spoke to a few other people in town. After I visited with Mayor Brent, I received this note. I knew the mayor and every other man your father owned would line up to say I’d typed it myself.”

She was right. Mayor Brent and Jeff had fished, hunted and apparently practiced extortion together. Jeff’s eulogy at Brent’s funeral had won him his fourth term in the Senate.

“Where is Clair Atherton?” Anger produced a note in his voice he didn’t even recognize. He didn’t want to believe Jeff could hurt a child.

Selina didn’t answer. He’d known her most of his life, but since he’d come home, she’d treated him with icy deference. Now he understood why.

“Are you like your father?” she finally asked.

“What are you talking about?” He wanted to tear someone apart, not stand around discussing whether he would persecute little girls. Clair Atherton must be in her twenties now. Surely old enough to take care of herself.

“I’m going to invite Clair back to Fairlove. If she comes and you try to harm her, you’ll face all of us who had to let her go. We were afraid we couldn’t protect her any better than we protected her parents, but you don’t have your father’s political clout.”

Deep in Selina Franklin’s eyes burned guilt as strong and relentless as Nick’s own. He felt her start of surprise as she also recognized his secret shame. Turning away from her, he started toward the door on legs that felt as stiff as iron pokers.

He glanced over his shoulder, but didn’t allow himself to meet Selina’s gaze. “Clair Atherton has nothing to fear from me,” he said.

TWO DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN, Clair turned off the interstate at the Fairlove exit. Immediately, the trees seemed more lush. She rolled down her window to breathe in the crisp air of home. A small green sign directed her toward town. Within seconds, she came upon Shilling’s Gas ’n’ Go.

It looked pretty much as it had the day she’d left. The same sign displayed gas prices in bold black letters. Twelve years ago, she’d stared at that sign through the back window of a social worker’s van.

She didn’t need a map to find her way from here. She could have driven to Franklin House with her eyes closed. This hour of the day, breakfast cooking in Selina Franklin’s kitchen lured anyone with a sense of smell.

Clair suffered from even stronger appetites. Mrs. Franklin’s invitation had answered a longing Clair had never satisfied. Her mother’s old friend had said she’d found her through the “white pages” on the Internet, and she’d wondered if Clair ever thought of the old town.

Clair hardly ever forgot. The house she’d lived in might have fallen into ruin after all these years of neglect. Often, she’d dreamed of Jeff Dylan demolishing it with a big yellow crane and a wrecking ball. But she couldn’t forget the place where she’d known love, unconditional and ever-present, love whose memory made her hungry for the place she’d felt it.

But she was no longer a naive child, and she had to wonder why Selina Franklin had suddenly remembered her. Her parents’ dearest friends, Mrs. Franklin and her husband, an ambitious attorney whom Clair’s father had nicknamed the Judge, hadn’t been the only ones to look the other way when Social Services had cast around for someone who might take Clair in. None of the people she’d thought were like family had found room for her.

Which made Mrs. Franklin’s invitation all the more suspect. She’d asked for whatever time Clair could spare. Clair reminded herself to be wary. People rarely made such generous offers without an ulterior motive.

She slowed her car at the small elementary school, and memories assaulted her, of books and paper, overheated children who played hard outside at recess. Her memories had never left her, had, in fact, grown more important to her, because they formed a lifeline back to Fairlove.

The bell at Saint Theresa’s began to peal, a call to morning prayers, and Clair turned her car toward the sound. Those deep chimes had punctuated so many moments of her first fourteen years. She was glad she’d broken her trip from Boston in D.C. the night before. She’d wanted to arrive with the morning bells.

As soon as she rounded the corner into Church Street, she saw him. Nick Dylan. The man whose father had destroyed her family. Tall, lean and prosperous-looking in a dark suit and a long black overcoat, he was carrying what appeared to be shirts from the dry cleaners.

Clair began to shake as she saw him approach a Jeep and open the door. The long dry-cleaning bags twined around his body. She slowed as he tucked his laundry in his back seat.

Good. With any luck, he was on his way somewhere else. Since the cleaners was closed on Sunday, he must have brought the shirts from his house. Maybe Fairlove wouldn’t keep him now that his father had died.

He straightened, and the wind lifted his jet-black hair. She glimpsed his sharply etched, aristocratic Dylan face, dark eyes that met hers and instantly flared. Clair looked away, but she couldn’t help looking back at him. His pale, shocked expression struck her as she passed him.

Barely three feet separated them, a space poisoned by years of family enmity. Clair clamped her teeth together, to keep from shouting her frustration. How could she have prepared herself for a Dylan mundanely packing his shirts in a car?

Rattled, her heart pounding, she drove twice around the square. People stared, but no one else recognized her. To push Nick Dylan out of her mind before she saw Mrs. Franklin, she concentrated on the buildings.