The Marriage Agreement

Sick at the sight of him.

Hell. He deserved the Biggest Heel on the Planet Award, to have hurt her all over again this way.

It had been a stupid idea, to call her. He should have had sense enough to consider the source when the old man started in on him about her. Even on his deathbed, Blake Bravo wouldn’t give up his petty mind games.

And now, for your other surprise…

Right.

The surprise wasn’t much of a surprise, after all. Tory couldn’t forgive him and wanted nothing to do with him.

Big news.

“I don’t…I’m sorry,” Tory stammered, her stomach still churning, all her senses on overload.

She kept thinking, He doesn’t know. But he is Kimmy’s father. And she wants to know him. And he has a right to know her. I will have to tell him, somehow….

But it was all just too much, right then. Seeing him. Remembering things that were better forgotten.

She couldn’t do it. Not tonight.

She needed…a little time. To pull herself together, to get her stunned mind around the fact that he really had come back.

“I don’t…I’m sorry.” She sucked in a breath, swallowed. “I have to go now. Later, I can…”

He was watching her as if she was mentally deranged—and maybe she was at that moment. She sure did feel like it, like a woman who had gone clean out of her mind.

She edged out from behind the coffee table, between his chair and the sofa. “I’ll talk to you later…” She was already halfway to the door. He stood, took a couple of steps toward her. She flung out a hand in a warding-off gesture. “I’ll call you. I will. Tomorrow, all right?”

She fled—there was no other word for it—leaving Marsh staring at the door she had shut in his face.

Chapter Three

Marsh’s instinctive reaction was to follow her.

But he held instinct in check. She clearly wanted out of that room—and away from him.

Who was he to try to hold her there?

He went back to the bar and poured himself another drink—a double that time. He sipped it slowly, thinking that he should probably get over to the hospital. He should check on his father one more time tonight, as he’d planned to do.

But no. He felt a little too edgy for a visit with the old man right now. What had just happened had been too unsettling.

Tory had acted so strangely.

If she hadn’t wanted to see him, couldn’t she have just said so, on the phone, right up front?

Why even agree to meet him? Why come up to his room with him? Why put herself through that? It didn’t make any damn sense.

Marsh shook his head, sipped from his drink, decided that the remark about calling him tomorrow must have been something she’d said without thinking, without meaning it. She wouldn’t be calling him. He’d never hear from her again.

Which was probably for the best.

He certainly wouldn’t be idiot enough to try calling her again.

The past truly was another country, one he had no business trying to revisit. They were two different people now, with nothing to connect them except memories that were better left to fade, finally, into nothing.

Marsh finished his drink. Then he called the hospital. He spoke to the night nurse assigned to his father’s care. Blake Bravo was sleeping peacefully, the nurse said.

“If he asks, tell him I’ll see him tomorrow.”

The nurse said she’d be happy to pass on his message.

The misty drizzle had stopped by the time Tory got home. Betsy said she had checked on Kim fifteen minutes ago and Kim was sound asleep.

Tory paid Betsy and walked with her out the front door. The night air was moist and warm and the wind had died down. Tory stood on her front walk, watching Betsy stroll away up the street. The girl turned and gave Tory a carefree wave before she disappeared into her own house.

Betsy was fifteen. The same age Tory had been when Marsh first asked her out…

Tory shook her head. Better not get started down memory lane again. She turned and went back up the curving walk to the house. Inside, she locked up and turned off the lights.

She looked in on Kim before she went to her own room, creeping in and then waiting in the dark by Kim’s bed, until her eyes adjusted. Kim lay on her side, facing the wall, the yellow comforter she had chosen herself, when the two of them redecorated her room just last fall, pulled up close around her chin.

Mother love welled up in Tory. So sweet. And yet painful, too. A child grew so fast. Nine years took forever—and went by in an instant.

When Tory’s parents had learned that their daughter was going to have a baby, they had first tried to convince her to give the baby up. Tory had refused. And eventually her parents accepted the inevitable. In the end Audra and Seth Winningham had been honestly supportive, helping to take care of Kimmy in the first years, so that Tory could finish high school and even earn a business degree at OU.

And Norman, after all, was the third largest city in Oklahoma, a progressive university town with a population nearing ninety thousand now. Tory’s single-mom status may have been looked at askance by the people in her nice upper-middle class neighborhood at first. But over time she had found acceptance.

It had been rough, yes, in the beginning, being a mom at seventeen. All her high school friends felt sorry for her. They were out, running around, having fun. And she was home with a baby, longing, hungering, praying for Marsh to come back to her.

Kimmy stirred, sighing, pushing down the covers and flopping one arm out behind her. Tory resisted the urge to cover her again. The room wasn’t cold. And covering her might wake her.

Quietly Tory turned and tiptoed out.

Tomorrow, she thought, as she crossed the hall to her own room. I will call Marsh tomorrow, in the evening. I’ll make arrangements to meet with him again. And I’ll do a better job of it this time. This time I won’t run out without telling him what both he and Kimmy need for him to know.

“You get together with the redhead?”

Blake was sitting up in bed, looking considerably better than he had the afternoon before. The oxygen tube was gone from his nose. Though the old man still wheezed with each breath, Marsh was beginning to think that maybe the heart surgeon had been right. Blake Bravo wasn’t quite ready for the grave, after all.

“Well, Mr. Big Shot? Did you see her or not?”

“Feeling better, huh, Dad?”

“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”

“No. I’m not.”