Jessie's Expecting

Jessica Chandler was alone on this late-July morning, but she didn’t want company, be it male or canine. The very last thing she wanted was company.

Hello, everybody! Bet you didn’t know I was here, did you? But I am. Nobody’s talking about me yet, so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’ve been here for a little while now, feeling pretty good, making myself at home.

That lady you just met? Jessica? That’s my mom.

You still don’t know what’s going on, do you? I do. There’s a real mess going on, that’s what. But don’t worry. Where I come from, there’s no such thing as an unhappy ending. I promise.

Stick around. This should be fun.

The Chandler mansion—the mellow brick building was much too large to call it a house—sat in the western suburbs of Allentown, Pennsylvania, one state and a few hours northwest of Ocean City, New Jersey.

Jessica lived there, along with her brother, Ryan, their grandmother, assorted staff and, until almost two months ago, her baby sister, Maddy.

Now Jessica’s sister was married. Married to Joe O’Malley, the man she’d left outside a Las Vegas wedding chapel nearly two years earlier, a man who had come back nearly on the eve of Maddy’s marriage to Matthew Garvey.

Maddy and Joe had purchased the sprawling house next door to the Chandler mansion. They had just returned from a ridiculously long honeymoon, and they were just as happy as they could be—because the only thing that would make them happier would be if Jessica had been there to welcome them home.

“I don’t get it,” Maddy Chandler O’Malley said, hooking her legs around a kitchen stool as she watched her grandmother spoon butter-brickle ice cream into three bowls.

“I don’t think that’s a requirement, my dear,” Almira Chandler purred, licking the metal scoop as she handed the tub of ice cream to Joe O’Malley and pointed toward the double-door freezer on the opposite side of the room. “I really do adore Mrs. Hadley’s day off. Ice cream for lunch. Could anything be more decadent? At least at my age,” she said, winking one expertly resculpted eyelid—just one example of the several cosmetic surgeries that had Almira Chandler looking twenty or more years younger than nature and the passing of the years had ever intended.

She might be a grandmother, Almira had decided years ago, but that didn’t mean she had to look like one!

Almira had been in charge of the three Chandler children for more than a dozen years, since their parents had died. And she took her responsibilities seriously, when she remembered raising children was supposed to be a serious venture.

Mostly she enjoyed life and enjoyed her grandchildren, believing that they were intelligent beings and were probably smart enough to raise themselves. They just needed her around to point them in the correct directions.

She’d pointed Maddy in Joe’s direction. Oh, goodness, hadn’t she ever! She did not consider her actions to be meddling, however. She considered them to be more in the way of nudging.

Of course, Almira Chandler’s nudges could end up sending the nudgees reeling….

“Nice try, Allie,” Maddy said, giving her grandmother a jaunty salute. “Now, ice cream to one side—and I mean that figuratively only, so pass over my dish, if you please—why has Jessica gone to Ocean City? She never goes until August, when all that fiscal-year stuff is over and she says she can’t look at another figure unless it’s wearing a bathing suit.”

“Besides,” Joe said, leaning down to kiss the top of his wife’s head, “Maddy expected Jessica to be here to hear all about our honeymoon. Isn’t that right, honey?”

Maddy, the baby of the family, with eyes as green as her sister’s were blue, and with hair as black as Jessica’s was light, leaned back against her husband’s strength and stuck her tongue out at him. “You love it when you’re right, don’t you?” she said, then pulled him down for a kiss.

They made a perfect couple: two gorgeous physical specimens who complemented each other in every way. They looked young and in love and happier than might seem humanly possible. Handsome Joe, with his shaggy, sandy hair and cobalt-blue eyes; Maddy, with her wonderfully rounded figure that was such a perfect foil for Joe’s planes and angles.

She’d done well, Almira told herself, not for the first time or even the tenth. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t poke a little fun at the lovestruck pair.

“There goes the appetite,” Almira teased, taking another bite of butter-brickle, closing her eyes as the confection melted on her tongue.

Joe laughed as he disengaged himself from his bride and sat down on the stool beside her, then looked across the bar at the matchmaking woman to whom he owed much of his current happiness. “Ah, you love it and you know it, Allie,” he said, reaching for his own dish of ice cream. “Mostly because you love being right. Otherwise, Maddy and I would still be pretending we didn’t love each other, and Maddy would be married to—”

“No,” Maddy interrupted, shaking her head. “No, I wouldn’t. Remember, darling, Matt was going to call off the wedding even before I told him I was still hopelessly in love with you, just as I was working up my courage to tell him I couldn’t marry him. We never would have gotten to the altar.”

“True enough,” Almira seconded. “And now, since I arranged all this newfound happiness you two seem determined to shove under my nose, I think it’s a good time to remind you that I’ll be old and doddering someday and expect you two to take care of me.”

“A villa in Spain, high in the mountains of Spain. Are there mountains in Spain? Ones with nearly inaccessible roads?” Maddy asked quickly, looking at Joe.

“Is that far enough away from here?” Joe just as quickly responded. “With full-time keepers, of course, to make sure she doesn’t find her way back.”

“And with Mrs. Ballantine installed as head warden, most definitely,” Maddy finished on a giggle, referring to the Chandler housekeeper, a woman Almira swore she detested—when the two weren’t plotting together to run all three of the Chandler grandchildren’s lives, that is. The fact that, so far, they’d been outstandingly successful was probably enough to make Jessica and Ryan more than a little nervous. Because if Almira’s schemes had worked once…well, what was to keep her from trying to improve upon her own perfection?

Not the Chandler grandchildren, that was for certain.

“Not far enough?” Maddy repeated, frowning. “All right. I guess we’ll just have to do it, then. The South Pole it is!”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Almira said, glaring at the two of them, happy children that they were, friends as well as lovers, and all because she, Almira Chandler, had poked her finger square in the center of their prideful lives and given it a less-than-gentle shake. “Well, isn’t it wonderful, then,” she said in satisfaction, “that I don’t ever plan on growing old.”

“Or doddering?” Joe asked, grinning. “You’re really going to have to take back that doddering bit, Allie. Especially when you can still beat Maddy at tennis.”

“Mrs. Ballantine could beat Maddy at tennis, darling. Blindfolded. But all right. Especially not doddering,” Almira said, finishing off her butter-brickle and letting the spoon drop into the bone-china dish with a sharp clink. “Now, if we’re all done sparring, maybe you’ll tell me how the honeymoon really was—and not just a recap of those totally uninformative postcards you sent us for the seven weeks. Let’s see, which was my favorite? Oh, yes. ‘Having a wonderful time. So glad you’re not here.’ Hardly inventive, but I suppose you were otherwise involved and couldn’t strain yourselves enough to be original. Let’s adjourn to the morning room, and you can tell me everything.”

“We’re not going to the morning room, Allie. We’re not taking so much as a single step until you tell us why Jessica is at the New Jersey house,” Maddy said stubbornly. “You’re much too happy she’s there and not here, and I want to know why.”

Almira smiled secretly. “You don’t have to know, darling. And the one who does have to know anything at all already knows, and the information is probably burning a hole in his brain, straight through his forehead, so that he’ll have to tell the other single person who has to know. You two are neither of those two people, but I assume you’ve guessed that by now. There, now that I have you both thoroughly confused, my work here is done. If you don’t want to talk about your honeymoon, I do think Julie could fit me in for a manicure. Toodle-oo, children.”

“But—”

“Give it up, Maddy,” Joe said, taking all three bowls to the sink and running water in them. “She’s obviously up to her old tricks again. Aren’t you, Allie?”

“Me?” Almira exclaimed, pausing on her way out of the kitchen and looking about as honest as a card player with the ace of spades hanging out of her sleeve. “Of course I am, darlings. I’m only surprised you had to ask.”

Matthew Garvey laid the last signed paper down on the conference table, leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Congratulations, Ryan, old friend. By paying off this loan two years early and floating that new floor plan account, you’ve just made the bank’s shareholders very happy. Not to mention making yours truly look pretty damn smart in the bargain.”

Ryan grinned at his friend, although he couldn’t bring himself to quite meet Matt’s eyes. Doing that gave him the damnedest, most unexplainable headache. “So, then, I guess you wouldn’t want me to diversify. You know, not keep all my eggs in your bank’s basket? Divvy up a few of the accounts among the other banks that keep wining and dining me, trying to steal me away from you?”

“Give me their names,” Matt growled halfheartedly. “I’ll call them myself with your regrets.”

Ryan got up from his chair, put his hands flat against either side of his spine, stretched. “Man, one more all-nighter and I’ll feel like I’m back in grad school. Jessie sure did pick a rotten time to go find herself.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Ryan winced, and not because his back muscles put up a stink at being cramped in a chair for the past few hours. He counted to three, feeling that flash of headache again, hoping to be able to get to at least five before Matt picked up on his stupid, revealing statement. What were such things called? Something close to Freudian slips, he was sure.

And it was all Allie’s fault, taking him aside, telling him things he wished he didn’t know and then leaving him to do battle with his conscience, wondering if it would be wrong to tell or the greater wrong to keep silent.

The slip of his tongue sort of settled that for him, he decided, still counting silently.

He only got to four before Matt said, “Find herself? That doesn’t sound like Jessica, Ryan. She’s just about the most complete, controlled person I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed quickly. “Yeah, she sure is. Competent…a workaholic here at the plant. She’s smarter than I am, in case you haven’t noticed. I don’t know what we’d do without her.”

“But she’s gone off to find herself,” Matt said, knowing Ryan wanted to change the subject, but holding on to this one small bone of information with all the tenacity of a bulldog.

Jessica had been avoiding him ever since Maddy’s wedding—ever since Maddy and he had called off their own wedding, that is, and eloped with J. P. O’Malley, newest king of the computer software world.

He’d called. He’d e-mailed—the communication of choice in his set these days, it seemed. He’d stopped over at the house without notice, on the pretext of seeing Ryan, hoping to find her at home.