The Marriage Contract

“Giving you my what?” Clair asked.

“Your all to make a more beautiful lawn for her neighbors.”

At his prim spiel, Clair had to smile. “I guess her leaves need mulching.”

“I’ll promise her the industrious young lady across the street will do the job.”

He moseyed over, and Clair fired up the aerator. At the end of her first row across the lawn she peeked at her employer in his salesman persona.

“Mrs. Velasco” turned out to be a man of dignified years. His white hair floated in the cool breeze. He looked frail enough to rustle like the leaves that glided across his yard. He lifted a hand to Clair, joining Paul in a wave. She waved back, but then latched onto the aerator before it took off without her.

Its tendency to act independently forced her to keep her mind on her task, but when she finished, she turned to find Paul leaning against his truck, his feet crossed at the ankles. Silence echoed in her ears after the aerator’s roar. She worked her way around Paul to hoist the equipment back onto the trailer.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“You’re a strong woman. You remind me of my wife before she told me she couldn’t work with me anymore.”

“Thanks.” She tied the machine down with safety straps, guessing she could offer insight into Mrs. Sayers’s reasoning. “But what I meant was, am I safe to work on my own, or are you afraid I’ll single-handedly bring down the Fairlove Lovelies empire if you turn your back on me?”

“Every time you say our name I think you’re making fun of my business.” Paul jabbed at her forearm. “Don’t mock the company that feeds you.”

“Have you decided it’s going to feed me?”

“You have some real authority issues, Clair, but you work hard.” He held out his hand. “Congratulations. You’re official. Probation’s over.”

“Thank you.” She shook his hand and walked around him again to open the passenger door. “I can use the paycheck.”

“How do you feel about Mr. Velasco?”

“You promised me to him?” Paul didn’t care whose soul he sold to lock down new work.

“You closed the deal when you tossed that branch. No man can resist a woman who can whip him in a wrestling match.”

“Get in the truck, Paul.”

“Could you come back and work up a design for him?”

She let honesty get in the way of her ambition again. “I’d work like crazy at it, but remember, I’m not professionally trained to draft a plan.”

“I don’t care about this college degree that seems to be sticking in your craw. Can you do the work?”

His confidence pleased her. “You bet I can. Will you go over it with me before I show it to Mr. Velasco?”

Instead of answering, Paul took a tape measure from his pocket. “I told him we’d look over the yard before we left. He’s especially interested in reclaiming the back from nature.”

Clair fell into step beside Paul. “I’d better warn you, I tend to be on nature’s side.”

“I figured that out already.”

She enjoyed working with him. He’d quickly sized up her skills, and she’d learned from him during her probation period. They thought alike, and their working association had quickly become a friendship Clair valued. That afternoon, when they returned to the office, the others had gone home for the day. Clair took over Paul’s drawing table and lost herself in her work.

BY PLANTING FLOWERS in her old yard, Clair had shown Nick a way out of his problems. Maybe he could offer her what she wanted and persuade her to help him. He’d just have to make her forget who he was. For a year.

He’d hired a detective to find out where and how she’d spent the past twelve years. Two weeks later, he’d come home from his volunteer shift at the Staunton clinic and found the detective’s report in his mail.

The number of foster homes she’d gone through surprised him, and they’d all been in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. How had she felt, living within a couple of hours of the town she’d left after her parents died?

After high school, Clair had won a scholarship to Wellesley, which she lost after the first year. The detective reported rumors of an affair with one of her professors. Nick dropped the report, frowning at the list of jobs she’d held before she settled down to work at landscaping.

She’d been troubled. Maybe she still was. Even if she wasn’t still changing jobs, she’d left her home in New England to make her way back here. How stable was she?

The detective reported she’d known several men besides the professor. Nick assumed the “known” was a euphemism. He tightened his mouth. Had she tried to replace the love she’d lost because of his father’s need to hurt a former lover?

He’d like to know more about how Clair’s father had lost their house. He hardly remembered David Atherton. Older than Sylvie by more than twenty years, his very existence had been an insult to Jeff Dylan. Jeff saw him as a less-virile man who’d stolen the one woman Jeff truly loved. Jeff liked to forget he’d told Sylvie she wasn’t good enough to marry.

After she’d moved on, Jeff’s second thoughts had nearly destroyed two families. Jeff had searched for revenge against David and Sylvie, who’d truly loved each other, until he wound up with the Atherton mortgage. And then he’d foreclosed.

Twenty at the time, preoccupied with premed, Nick had never asked for details. To Nick, Jeff’s anger at the woman he’d thrown away had been an insult to Leota and an emotional counterbalance to Jeff’s disappointment with the son he’d fathered on the rebound.

Clair had found the healthier response—contempt for his father’s “love.” But the past still held her as tightly as it did Nick. Like sought like when pain struck this deep, and he’d recognized how hurt she must still feel.

He pictured her, lithe muscles straining as she’d planted those flowers at her house. Humming a song as she reclaimed a small piece of her past.

Maybe he was crazy, but he thought Clair might be the perfect wife. She certainly wouldn’t want the position permanently, but she longed for the house only he could give her.

At a knock on his door he shoved the letter, report and envelope into a drawer before he opened the door to Hunter.

“Dr. Dylan, I’m just on my way to tell Mrs. Dylan dinner is ready. I was concerned you might forget to come down again.”

Nick felt a surge of warmth for the man who still treated him as the neglected child in a rich man’s house. “Making sure I eat isn’t your job.” Gratitude roughened his voice.

“I’m concerned about your mother, as well.” Hunter shrugged uneasily and pointed at the door. “May I come in?”

Nick stood aside. Frightened for Leota, he’d flushed the pills, poured out the brandy and told his mother he’d invite a therapist to live with them if she renewed her supplies. “What else has happened?”

“I don’t know whether I should talk to you about Mrs. Dylan. Telling you what I think is going on with her might be inappropriate, but you know my loyalty.”

“What is wrong, Hunter?”

“She stays in her rooms until lunch. She’s never hungry. I find this most difficult to say, but her maid suspects she’s begun to cry herself to sleep at night. Mrs. Dylan’s pillowcase is still damp when she makes the bed.”

Cold dread grabbed Nick low in the gut. He’d been reason enough for his parents to marry. He hadn’t made Jeff love Leota, and Leota always seemed to wish her son would try a little harder to make Jeff’s love possible.

But Hunter had been family to him when his own mother and father couldn’t help reminding him he’d failed as a son. Time he took the load off Hunter’s shoulders. And time he found out if he could be the son his mother needed.

“Thank you, Hunter, for telling me. I’ll bring Leota down for dinner.” But doubt hounded him as he went to his mother’s room. He could talk her into dinner, but could he persuade her to get help? Maybe—if he managed to keep their home.

ALONE IN THE OFFICE, Clair was working on her design when Paul came in to lock the company’s cell phones away. “You still here?” he asked. “Don’t stay any longer. Your idea’s almost ready to present.”