Wes’s eyes came up, measured Laney’s for honesty, and found it.
Amy seemed satisfied with that. She turned back to her father. “And why do you want to marry Laney?”
Wes kept his eyes on Laney’s for a long moment, and he seemed to search himself for the same honesty. “Because she smells good,” he said. Laney’s heart caught in her throat, and her face grew warm.
Amy wrinkled her nose. “Daddy, that’s no reason.”
He laughed nervously and considered the question again. When he brought his eyes back to his daughter, they held a gentle yearning, a subtle sadness. “Because I get lonely sometimes, baby.”
“And because she’s pretty?” Amy prodded, determined to find some logical root to their decision, some root that she could understand.
Wes smiled. “That doesn’t hurt any.”
Laney found herself matching his smile, despite the fulminating nature of the moment. Their eyes collided, drew apart.
“She’s not prettier than my mommy.” The words came out on a note of belligerence, and Laney’s heart tightened. Wes glanced at Laney, then back at his daughter, obviously at a loss for the right thing to say. “Your mommy was the most beautiful woman in the world, Amy,” he said softly.
The child’s eyes welled with tears, and she got up and went to the window, staring out into the night. “Sometimes I can’t remember what she looks like anymore. I have to go find a picture.” She wiped at her tears and turned back to her father. Her words came out quickly, high-pitched and fragile. “Is that why, Daddy? Do you want to marry Laney because you can’t remember Mommy?”
Wes got up and grabbed his daughter. Picking her up, he hugged her fiercely. Both of their eyes were closed, but tears still rolled down both their cheeks. Laney watched, frozen and excluded. “Honey, I’ll never forget your mommy. Never ever. She was my best girl.”
“Then why?” Amy cried harder.
“Because …” he whispered. “Because the hardest thing for your mommy was that she knew that when she died, you wouldn’t have a mommy, and I wouldn’t have a wife. She wanted us to have somebody, sweetheart. She never meant for us to be alone. If she could have stayed with us, she would have, but God needed her home in heaven with him. So he sent us Laney …”
Amy buried her face in her daddy’s neck and wept. Wes clung to her, allowing her the time to cry out her heart. When a few moments had passed, he whispered, “We want you to be in our wedding, sweetheart. We’ll buy you a beautiful dress, and you’ll look like a princess. It’s going to be good, honey. You’ll see. You have to trust us. OK? Can you trust us?”
She nodded slowly, wiping her eyes as he put her down and kissed her cheek. “Can I go to bed now?” she asked.
“Sure. I’ll come tuck you in.”
“That’s OK,” she whispered. “Good night.”
Laney got to her feet, feeling a little unsteady, as the little girl walked hurriedly toward her bedroom. “Wes, can I go talk to her just for a minute?”
He thought about it, then nodded reluctantly. “Be careful.”
She hurried after Amy. The little girl hadn’t bothered to disrobe. Already, she had curled up on her bed and lay in a fetal position clutching her teddy.
“Amy?” she asked softly, going to sit beside her on the bed.
The little girl didn’t answer.
“Amy, I just wanted to tell you that … I know how much you loved your mommy. And you know, your mommy is still with you. Her love didn’t die with her. It’s still here. All around you. And I don’t want to take her place or make you forget her. I just want to love you, too.”
Amy didn’t answer.
“Amy, when you were a baby, I wanted to keep you then. But I was just a teenager, and I didn’t have a husband, and my father took you away …” Her voice broke, and she tried to go on. “I don’t want you to think that I gave you away because I didn’t love you. God gave you to the best parents in the world. Your mommy and daddy were so happy to get you. And when your mommy died, I know that her biggest fear was that she would be leaving you without a mother.”
Tears rolled out of Amy’s eyes, and she closed her eyes to hold them back.
“Amy, I’m not religious like your daddy. I don’t really know a lot about God. But I do know that I’ve prayed over the years that somehow you would be happy and taken care of and that you’d have two parents who loved you. And I’ve prayed that somehow my pain would go away. Since I’ve found you, I’ve believed that God might be answering those prayers. Maybe it really is what your mom would have wanted. Maybe God has worked it all out.”
Amy’s eyes remained squeezed shut as tears oozed out and rolled across her face.
“Amy, all I know is that I love you more than anything in this world. And in the short time that I’ve known your daddy, I’ve come to love him, too. He’s a good, kind, sweet man, and I couldn’t have picked a better father for you. I want to take care of you both, Amy. I want to keep you both from being lonely, and I want to help you when I can. I want to make your life better, because you’ve already made my life better. Do you think … that maybe you could give me the chance to do that?”
Amy opened her eyes and looked up at Laney. It was hard for her, Laney thought, but she was trying. “Do you really think it’s OK with Mommy?”
“I think Mommy would have had the idea herself,” she whispered. “She knew that no one could love you as much as she could except for your other mother.”
The fact that she didn’t call herself Amy’s “real” mother seemed to help, and Amy thought that over for a moment, sniffing and wiping her eyes. Finally, she whispered, “Do I get to carry flowers at the wedding?”
Laney smiled through her tears. “Yes. Of course.”
“I want to carry daisies,” Amy whispered. “They were Mommy’s favorites.”
“We’ll get you the prettiest bouquet of daisies anybody ever saw,” Laney whispered.
From the hall, Wes listened to what he could hear of the conversation. She was reaching Amy. He leaned back against the wall and thought of what she’d just told Amy about loving him. Some emotion he hadn’t expected welled in his throat, and he swallowed it back.
In a moment, Laney came out of Amy’s room. She saw Wes standing there and looked up at him. She was crying. “You heard?”
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“She’s gonna be all right with this,” Laney said softly. “She wants to carry daisies.”
He smiled painfully as tears sprang to his eyes. He started to speak, but his mouth quivered, and he gave up. Nodding at her to follow, he led Laney out onto his back patio where they could talk without being overheard.
The stars were just beginning to make their debut, and a warm breeze skittered across the yard, bringing with it the scent of freshly mowed lawns and summer flowers.
Except for a child-sized lawn chair, the only other piece of furniture there was a padded swing that seated two. Wes sat down and waited for Laney. She hesitated.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “We’re going to have to get used to being close to each other.”
Close to each other. Did he know, she wondered, that being close to him made her a nervous wreck?
Laney sat down. Their thighs and shoulders brushed, and her heart pounded like an adolescent’s. Years had passed since a man had had such an effect on her, and she had believed those nervous feelings were a thing of the past. The swing rocked back and forth with a rhythmic squeak, and Wes leaned his head back.
“The things you said to her … they reached her. I think they made her feel better.”
She remembered what she’d said about loving Wes and felt awkward. She hadn’t known he was listening. Now it hung there between them, like a secret unveiled, an embarrassment they couldn’t mention.
“You were right, Laney,” he said finally. “This will give her the best of both worlds.”
“I know it can,” she said.
“She wasn’t for it, exactly,
but she wasn’t against it,” he went on.
“I won’t push things,” she said. “I want to make friends with her first, before I try to be her mother.”
“You’ll be fine,” he whispered.
The masculine scent of his cologne drifted to her senses, and she closed her eyes and savored it. It would be all right, she thought. Marriage to Wes would even be good.
“You realize I want us to live here,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “I know your house is bigger and you just moved back, but this is Amy’s home. It’s mine too. I’m not ready to turn my back on it yet.”
Laney knew what he really meant was that he wasn’t ready to turn his back on Patrice. “I understand,” she whispered.
“Do you?”
She met his gaze in the darkness. “Yes. And I’ll try to make it easy on you.”
His eyes canvassed her face gently, and the swing continued to squeak. His green eyes glistened, not with regret this time, not with grief, not with anger or sadness. This time she felt them glisten for her. “And who’s going to make it easy on you?” he asked after a while.
Laney caught her breath at his unexpected question. “I never expected it to be easy.”
He assessed her for a moment longer, his eyes probing, searching, and then he moved his gaze out over the small lawn. So much was between them, he thought. He felt drawn to her, but that pull made him hold back. They were getting married, yet she knew very little about him. It didn’t take a genius to see that she walked on eggshells around him. He had asked her questions bordering on cruelty. She had asked him nothing.
He shifted a little to face her and lifted a strand of her hair, brushing his thumb pensively across the ends. The swing stopped. The wind stilled.
“We found out Patrice had cancer about two years ago,” he said in a gravelly voice that told her the words didn’t come easily. “When they tried to do surgery they realized it had spread too far. We tried chemotherapy, radiation … None of it really helped. It was hard on Amy.”
What about him? she ached to ask. Was it hard on him? Was it still hard? Laney kept her eyes on him, and he stared down at the hair sliding over his finger. “How long were you married?” she asked.
“Twelve years,” he said.
“Twelve years,” she repeated in awe. “To love someone for that long …” Her voice faded wistfully, dying on a note of bewilderment.
“It isn’t so long,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t long enough.”
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t suppose it was.”
His hand continued stroking her hair, growing more familiar with the softness. “Have you ever loved anyone like that? A man, I mean?”
“That only happens to the lucky ones,” she whispered.
“And you aren’t lucky?”
She gave a tiny shrug and looked at Amy’s bike leaning against the fence.
“Why?” he asked. “Why haven’t you married?”
“I couldn’t,” she said.
“Couldn’t?” He wasn’t going to let it go at that. There must have been chances. “Were you afraid?”
She kept her gaze distant, fighting the ghosts that didn’t have to be a part of her life anymore. “You don’t understand.”
“No,” he agreed. “But if you felt you couldn’t marry anyone until me, I’d like to understand. I want to know what makes a woman want to give up any chance she has for that kind of love by tying herself to a man she hardly knows.”
Laney took a deep breath and narrowed her eyes against the pain. Her voice was hardly louder than that breath. “Ever since I had Amy it was like I’d put my life on hold. Like a big piece of it was missing, and I couldn’t move ahead until I’d found that piece.” She looked at him, searching for understanding. “You can’t know what it’s like. Every time I saw one of those missing children on television or heard of a case of child abuse or saw a mother neglecting a child in a store, I wondered if she was mine. I bought her things, then gave them away. I wrote her letters, then burned them. It almost drove me crazy.”
Wes’s hand closed over hers. “How did you find her?”
“There was a searcher—a private investigator who specialized, illegally, in this type of thing. I paid him a lot of money, and he got me the records. Once I had your names, the rest was easy.”
He took her hand and laid it palm up in his, straightened out her fingers, and stroked the inside of her fingers with his fingertip. She watched, wondering why she wasn’t terrified of the contact that was so foreign to her. “What would you have done if Patrice had still been alive? Would you have stopped at just seeing Amy?”
“Yes,” Laney admitted adamantly. “At least until she was grown up. But I wanted to be in the same town to be able to watch her from a distance. No one would ever have known.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but, thankfully, kept his hand over hers. “It all seemed so easy when we adopted her. Everybody was a winner, we thought.”
“You should have thought that,” she said. “I wouldn’t have wanted Amy raised by people who felt guilty for loving her.”
Turning her hand over, she laced her fingers with his. He opened his eyes. “Wes,” she whispered intently. “Thank you for working with me on this.”
“I’m not working with you, Laney,” he said. “I’m marrying you.”
The words settled like a soothing caress over her senses, and when he took her chin with his finger and beckoned her closer, she went.
Their lips met tentatively, then withdrew. When the terror in both of them passed, they tested again. He was warm, warmer than she’d ever imagined a man could be. Her hand slowly rose between them to touch his chest. She felt his heart sprinting as the kiss bonded their lonely souls, offering them something more than a child to share.
But that bond through its very warmth was frightening to Laney. She’d never felt that warm. That protected. And it couldn’t last. Even his anger had been easier for her to accept. She pulled away and caught her breath. Standing up, she looked nervously down at him. “I have to go now,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, rising too. “I didn’t—”
“Don’t,” she said, stopping him. “It’s OK. I’m just—”
“It’s getting late,” he cut in.
“A little tired,” she finished.
“There’s so much to do.”
“Yeah.”
They stared at each other for a tense moment, then Laney started back into the house. Wes followed her to the door. “Are you OK?”
“Fine,” she said too exuberantly. “Yes, fine.” She started out the door.
“See you Thursday, then? Or before?”
“Thursday,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll see you Thursday.”
And then, before her heart flew right out of her chest, she got in her car and drove away as fast as the speed limit would allow.
Wes stood in the doorway watching her car lights disappear in the distance. A faint smile softened his features for a moment, the first in a very long time, and he thought that marriage might not be so bad after all. He had kissed her against his judgment, against his own warnings, against every spark of wisdom within him, and he’d been as nervous as a sixteen-year-old kid. It had been a long time since his heart had had such a workout. The last time was …
His smile faded as memories of Patrice washed over him like a reprimand. It was too soon for him, he told himself. He had no right. Slowly he closed the door and went to his bedroom.
That night he slept with Patrice’s picture clutched against his chest.
Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t the wedding that Laney had dreamed of as a child, but it was a wedding, and as surely as if she were in a cathedral with two thousand guests instead of two witnesses and a little girl who wasn’t sure how to react, she was pledging the rest of her life to Wes Grayson and his daughter.
Alan Caldwell did his best to make the no-frills ceremony seem more significant, but the lawn
mower next door and the radio playing by her other neighbor’s pool robbed it of some of its charm. Laney had chosen to wear white, simply because she had never considered a wedding in any other color, but she had neglected things like flowers and candles when she had prepared for this, except for the spray of baby’s breath tucked in one side of her hair and the bouquet of daisies Amy carried in her mother’s honor.
Laney had dreaded seeing Wes’s sister and facing up to her so-you’ve-trapped-him scrutiny, but the woman had surprised her. With a flip of her flirty blond curls, she had said, “So here’s where Amy got those eyes to die for.” And then she had taken Laney’s picture with the enthusiasm of a proud sister-in-law. Laney had loved her immediately.
Clint Jessup, Wes’s best friend since college, had been another story. When they were introduced, he had barely managed a smile. Laney was left with the distinct impression that the man had done his best to talk his friend out of this nonsense but had grudgingly agreed to be a part of it when he failed. Wes had explained that Clint was soon going to marry Sherry’s best friend, the love of his life. The idea of feeling less than total commitment to the institution of marriage had, no doubt, given him reason for concern.
And then there was Amy. Laney had bought her the little white lace dress she wore and had it delivered to Wes’s house. She hadn’t been sure if Amy would like it or if it would fit, but the fact that Amy had worn it meant everything to Laney. In her hair was a lace bow, lovingly tied, but slightly crooked, and she carried the daisies like a fragile treasure. She was still withdrawn, still quiet, still unsmiling. But she was no longer openly hostile.
Wes was a warm, quiet presence at Laney’s side. Their kiss the other night had done a number of things. It had made her heart flutter in anticipation of the marriage itself instead of just motherhood. Laney realized she would have a husband to contend with, and she didn’t know if she could deal with that. Why had he kissed her? she had wondered over and over. He barely tolerated her.