The Marriage Contract

“Sit down. I’ll join you in a cup of coffee. We’re not too busy right now.”

“Mrs. Franklin, I can’t let you do anything more for me.”

“Selina. And I want you to do a few things for me. When we finish our talk, I’ll show you my back garden. It’s a jungle.”

Clair stared in dismay at the third cup of caffeine Selina had poured for her. “That lovely garden?” she said. “I used to think it was a playground.”

“It looked like one. The judge had more time to work with it back then, but his taste ran to the gauche.” Selina crossed her legs. “And I’m being generous. Since he took office, I’ve hauled away the candy-striped poles. I took down the birds and the wires he used to make them look like they were flying. I even got rid of that horrible birdbath sculpture his mother insisted we keep in front of her window. You remember the Furies in stone? They were most indecent—looked like snake women writhing all over each other, but then, you know the judge had to get his taste from somewhere.”

“Are you asking me to work on your garden?” Excited, Clair forgot her caffeine buzz and sipped the coffee. “I’d love to, but like Paul said, I can’t do much more than clean and plant bulbs for the spring.”

“Cleaning.” Selina sighed in overstated relief. “Just what I need back there. You do what you can after your work with Paul, and I’ll give you a room until you find a place to live.”

“I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to.” A garden she’d loved as a child proved irresistible. “You have a deal.”

“Great. Take today to rest. You can start tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” She set her napkin on the table and broached an uncomfortable subject. “Can I ask you one more favor, Selina?”

“Ask away. I’ll do what I can.”

“I appreciate your help, but I remember how this town works. Please don’t make me some sort of a…community project. I’d like to start fresh.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t told anyone else I had any part in bringing you back here. As far as they’ll know, you decided to come home.”

“They? I don’t think I want to know who else was in on your plan all these years.”

Selina’s mouth quivered, but she wound her arms around Clair. “You’re going to be all right now.”

Clair hugged her back. Maybe coming home really was the right decision.

Clair unpacked the rest of the things from her car and then checked Selina’s gardening shed for tools. She made a list of things she’d need and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans to take to Bigelow’s General Store.

As she shopped the garden section at Bigelow’s, she found herself circling flats of pansies. Her mom’s crocuses had heralded the end of winter every spring. In fall, she’d planted pansies in her favorite flower bed by the front door.

Clair wanted to go home and tell her parents about today, that she’d met Nick Dylan and survived, that she’d found a way to stay in Fairlove if she got the job with Paul Sayers.

Maybe she couldn’t tell them in spoken words. Maybe she hadn’t been able to force herself to look inside the house, but she could do something about the way the outside looked. Purple had been her mom’s favorite, so Clair added purple pansies and soil nutrients to her purchases.

She parked at the end of the driveway again, got out and followed the path she’d made earlier, marked by the bent grass.

Taking tools, plants and bucket up to the house required a couple of trips, but contentment stole over her. She forgot about time as she pulled weeds and restacked the bricks that had fallen away from the retaining wall in a dry puddle of crumbled mortar.

She hummed to herself while she blended the nutrients into the black earth. She ought to leave this flower bed for another day or two, but she couldn’t. One of the Dylan attorneys might turn up at Selina’s and tell her to stay off Dylan property.

She planted the pansies, then brought water from the stream that ran behind the house to thoroughly moisten the bed. At last she stood back to admire her work.

The sad, chipped house paint nagged at her, but the past twelve years had taught her not to dwell on what she couldn’t change. Her pansies gave The Oaks an air of hope again. She felt foolish about being too afraid to look inside earlier.

Clair marched around the house to the kitchen window and scrubbed at the glass until she could make out the white enamel sink. Because dirt filmed the other side of the window, too, she still couldn’t see anything in the shadows.

“Clair?”

She recognized his voice. Slowly, she turned and found he’d taken control of his emotions, and he’d inherited the Dylan ability to gaze arrogantly at the rest of the world as if he understood its relation to him. Patience stalked behind his gaze. He could wait for what he wanted.

Would this Dylan know how to grind the family ax against her?

“I’m surprised to find you here,” he said.

“Surprised I’d trespass?” He gestured at the house. “Seeing this place has to hurt you.”

Ashamed of the way she’d fled without looking back earlier, she put on some arrogance of her own. “It looks better now, with the pansies. They’re trespassing, too.”

“How much have you missed this house?” His unexpected question suggested he’d stumbled upon the solution to a mystery.

Uneasily, she headed back to the front of the house to collect her tools. “I’ve missed it enough that I won’t promise not to trespass again.”

“I didn’t ask you not to come here.” His voice came from close behind her.

His changed mood signaled a shift in the balance of power between them. She picked up her things in one armload for the return trip to her car. Nick stood behind her again when she turned. He nodded toward the house.

“Do you want to go inside?”

Her breath caught. She wanted to go in. More than anything. But he was Nick Dylan. The son of the man who’d taken hearth and home from her. She couldn’t make herself beholden to him.

“I have to leave.” Immediately, she cursed her foolishness. He was the one person who could let her into her old home. She turned back. “Maybe some other time, I could come to your office and pick up the key?”

“You know where I work?” He seemed surprised that she would have talked to anyone about him.

“It’s a small town.”

“Come to my office. I’ll have the key for you.”

She held back, feeling suddenly vulnerable. To think she would walk into her house again, touch the walls and floors her mother and father had loved, dispel her nagging sense of having dreamed her first fourteen years.

But how much of Nicholas Seton Dylan’s character rose out of his father’s gene pool? He must have ulterior motives.

She forced herself to take measured steps back to her car. In case he was watching her as his father had watched her mother…

CHAPTER THREE

CLAIR HAD BEEN WORKING with Paul every day for a week when she stood at his shoulder as he tossed a quarter into the air.

“Heads, you aerate, tails, I go across the street and try to sell our services to Mrs. Velasco,” he said.

Clair clamped her hand around one of the aerator’s handles. “You think I don’t notice you’re sticking me with this bone-shaker either way?” She turned it toward the front of the lawn. “How do you know Mrs. Velasco’s name?”

“I read her mailbox.” Paul’s sheepish grin was infectious. Friendly and open, he lacked Nick Dylan’s intensity. He shrugged. “I can’t afford mailing lists, but she’ll see you over here, giving me your all, and she’ll beg us to help her.”