Wishing and Hoping

The foyer became incredibly quiet. They spent the next few seconds staring at each other and it sunk in for Tia that she was marrying the guy she’d dreamed about from the day she’d met him when she was fourteen. Unfortunately, the wedding wasn’t happening anywhere near the way she’d envisioned it. And, even more unfortunately, Drew Wallace wasn’t the Prince Charming she had imagined in her teenage fantasies. In fact, he was pretty much the opposite of the sweet, sincere gentleman she had pictured him to be.

Drew suddenly turned and grabbed his Stetson from a peg by the door. “Let’s go tell your parents.”

Her gaze jerked back to his. “Now?”

“If we don’t do this now, we’re both going to lose courage. Or we’ll try to talk ourselves out of it. Trust me. When it comes to ugly situations like this, I know exactly how to get out of them.”

A quiver of misgiving shuddered through Tia. She wasn’t so naive as to think that a man as handsome and sexy as Drew got to be thirty-six without being involved with other women. Maybe even lots of women. But she’d never thought of him as needing to “get out of things.” Worse, she’d never thought far enough ahead to consider that he might actually be involved with somebody right now.

She rose from the step. “I’m not about to be confronted by an angry woman for stealing her man, am I?”

With his hand already on the doorknob, Drew let out a gust of air and faced her. “You’re not stealing anybody’s man.”

“Because you don’t have somebody?”

“Because we’re not staying married.”

“So this marriage won’t even be a bump in the road for you?”

Drew looked at her as if she were crazy and she said, “Never mind.” She stepped out onto the porch ahead of him and ran down the steps to the sidewalk, knowing that for the next several months, maybe even year, she was stuck with the grumpiest man on the face of the earth. “This is going to be fun.”

“It doesn’t have to be fun. It doesn’t have to be much of anything since we only have to spend enough time together that your parents don’t suspect the marriage is fake.”

“As I said, sounds like a barrel of fun.”

After crunching across the gravel to the big black truck he had parked in front of his garage, Drew opened the door to the cab and gestured for Tia to climb inside. “And as I said, it doesn’t need to be fun. Only official.”

Tia walked past him. She was pregnant with his baby and had conspired to enter into a fake marriage with him, yet he was barking orders as if he still saw her as a child.

“I’ll take my own car, thanks,” she said, her voice prim and proper. “There’s no reason for me to drive back here just to pick it up.”

He slammed the truck door. “Good point.”

“Whatever,” she said, and marched to her little red sports car.

She got inside, closed her door with enough force to rattle the windows and had her vehicle roaring down the lane toward the main highway before Drew turned to walk to the driver’s-side door.

Anger ricocheted through Drew. He kicked both front tires of his truck on his way around each fender and slammed his door, too.

His only consolation was that he knew Tia wasn’t really driving too fast. Her sports car had a big engine that would roar anytime anyone hit the gas even slightly. But occupying his brain with anger about her driving was much better than thinking about telling his mentor and friend that his daughter was about to have a baby. His baby….

Drew paused and, dropping his head, let his forehead bump against the steering wheel. His baby.

Dear God. He was going to be a father.

Even as the thought filled him with an emotion that made his heart feel as if it was surrounded by warm oatmeal, it also struck pure terror in that same heart. Not because he thought he couldn’t handle being a dad, but because he knew he could not handle being married. One incredibly ugly divorce had taught him that lesson. His ex-wife had bled him dry. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was discovering, after he’d literally sold his share of his first business to his partner to pay her settlement, that she just happened to be having an affair with that same partner.

Drew squeezed his eyes shut, angry with himself for thinking of things so far in the past, but he couldn’t stop the memories. Sandy hadn’t been his first love. He’d had girlfriends, been in love, and even lived with someone for a few months before he’d met Sandy, so he wasn’t naive. But Sandy had been special. She was funny, interesting, smart and one of the most wonderful women he had ever met. He remembered some nights just watching her sleep, totally grateful that she was his.

Her request for a divorce had come out of the blue and had blindsided him. When he had opened the envelope from the process server he was sure he and his partner were being sued by one of their contractors. That would have been stunning enough. But to see in print Sandy’s name and his name and the word divorce on the same page, when he hadn’t even known there was trouble in paradise, had paralyzed him.

Figuring that it might be a joke or a mistake, he had raced home to talk to Sandy, but she had coldly assured him that it was neither a mistake nor a joke. He had begged her to let him make it up to her—though he hadn’t really understood what he’d done wrong. She had handed him a suitcase, told him she was changing the locks and escorted him to the door.

And he’d stood there. On the front stoop of the brand-new house they were supposed to share. Probably for a half hour. Numb and confused.

After the divorce, he had wished he’d stayed numb. Because when he had learned his wife had kicked him out so she could marry his former partner, he had gotten so angry he’d punched Mac Franklin. That cost him a night in jail.

But even that wasn’t the worst. The worst had been loving somebody who didn’t love him. The worst had been living in the same town when the woman he loved and the partner he admired got engaged, then married. The worst had been looking at her happy pictures in the newspaper and wondering where the hell he had gone wrong. Wondering why she had fallen out of love, and when. Wondering what was wrong with him that she didn’t want him. Going over every second of their two years together that he could remember and coming up empty. Feeling he hadn’t done anything wrong and wishing, almost begging God to let him have done something—even something small—so he would know not to do it again. So he’d have some hope for the future.

But that mythical “thing” he might have done never materialized. He was the victim, the guy who had been wronged, yet he was still the one who had lost everything. And maybe that was the reason the whole deal never really settled itself for him. There was no lesson to be learned except that he wouldn’t ever trust anybody with so much of his life again.

And Isabella—Tia—had already tricked him.

Not intentionally, Drew reminded himself. As she’d told him after they had made love, she’d lost weight and cut her long brown hair immediately after she had graduated from college. It was her first step in trying to get people to see her as more mature, but Drew didn’t know that. Because she didn’t look like the Isabella who had gone off to college, and because she had been introduced as Tia, and because they were so far away from home that he wasn’t thinking about anybody from Calhoun Corners, let alone somebody he hadn’t seen in six years, he had never suspected she was his former neighbor.

The whole situation was a jumble of confusion, but it was a manageable jumble. What wasn’t manageable—or predictable or even something he wanted—was a long-term involvement with a woman. But just because he and Tia were parents, that didn’t necessarily mean they had to be “involved.” If he could endure being married for eight short months, all he had to worry about were the times he dropped off or picked up their child. And as he’d already pointed out to Tia, she lived in Pittsburgh. At best, throughout this marriage they’d see each other on weekends.

Everything would be fine.

He drove down her parents’ tree-lined lane, very much like his own, to the Capriotti horse farm. His house was a white French Colonial, built as a gift to himself for finally succeeding financially the way he had always known he could, but Tia’s parents lived in a redbrick farmhouse that had been updated and renovated several times. Long and regal, it somehow managed to look more like a home than any house Drew had ever seen.

But even as the site comforted him, Drew’s stomach knotted. Ben Capriotti had saved his sanity. After losing his half of the architectural firm to his wife, Drew wasn’t going into architecture again because he was sure that profession was bad luck for him. When he had explained that to Ben, Ben had laughed and agreed to teach Drew everything he needed to know about breeding horses, and getting involved in something so complex hadn’t left Drew time to think about his ex-wife or his ex-partner. Ben had kept his promise and helped Drew every step along the way, and Drew had repaid him by getting his only daughter pregnant.

If he could take one thing back in his life, it would be making love to Tia that night in May. But since he couldn’t, he would at least do the right thing.

He shoved open his truck door and joined Tia on the front porch. Apparently over her anger with him, or maybe because she knew they needed to present a unified front to her parents, she quietly said, “Ready?”

Without hesitation or thought, he took her hand and caught her gaze. Bad move. The combination of those pretty blue eyes and the smoothness of her skin shot arousal through him. But Tia didn’t seem to have the same problem. She didn’t gasp or shiver. Her eyes didn’t darken with desire or even simple awareness. Instead, her expression grew puzzled.

Thanks. That was great for the ego.

He sighed and raised their joined hands. “If we’re going to get away with this lie, there are a couple of things we’ll have to do.”

He tried to ignore the electricity sizzling between their clasped hands, but he couldn’t. Though it had been more than a month since they’d been together, the heat they had generated that night was alive and well and giving him the kinds of thoughts that could get a man arrested in some states, reminding him of something he’d forgotten to even consider. How the hell did he expect to be married to this woman without sleeping with her?

Through sheer force of will. Tia was the only daughter of his mentor, which meant Drew had only one real concern. Making sure he didn’t push Ben Capriotti over the edge of his stress limit. To do that Drew only had to pretend to like Tia. He did not actually have to like her. When it came to common sense and sheer force of will, Drew knew he was the best. There would be no problem with his self-control.

“Holding hands is the easiest way to immediately clue them in that we’re more than friends.”

When Tia’s tongue came out to moisten her lips and she gazed into his eyes for a few seconds too long, Drew almost groaned. Not because the sexy gesture reminded him of just how difficult ignoring her was going to be, but because the lip-moistening demonstrated that she wasn’t nearly as unaffected as he had thought.

Well, whatever. He hadn’t met a woman he couldn’t cause to dislike him. Even Tia had kicked him out of her house the night they’d made love. In a few weeks he could have her absolutely hating him. And he would. Right after they convinced her parents they were crazy in love and getting married.

“Don’t take anything I say in here personally,” he said, then turned and opened the front door, leading her into her parents’ house.

When they entered the foyer, Tia called, “Mom? Dad?”

“In the den, honey,” her mother answered. “Come on back.”