Contract Bride

“Neither of us was thinking straight after Rachel died,” she told him. “Now that we’ve had these months to put things into a more moderate perspective, I think we both have doubts about going on together.”

There. She’d got it said and the world hadn’t come to an end. The minor softening of Reece’s stony expression had vanished, but he was still silent. She tried not to fidget while his dark eyes bore into hers like twin drills.

There was something in the way he stared over at her that compelled her to go on, something that suggested he needed to hear more to be convinced. Leah made a try at doing just that.

“As I said, we made the decision to marry at a time when we weren’t quite ourselves,” she said calmly, careful to keep her tone mild, though she couldn’t keep the tremor out of it. “Lately you’ve seemed…unhappy. In a different way than before, so I…thought it was time to discuss what might need to change, even though the change that probably seems most sensible is divorce.”

The booming silence that followed was as much a sudden assault on the room as a thunderclap would have been. It had impacted with such power that it was difficult, even in the aftermath, to decide if an actual clap of thunder had sounded around them, or if it had truly been a silent shockwave.

But maybe it had been an actual thunderclap, because the storm was suddenly visible in Reece’s harsh face. His dark eyes snapped with angry surprise, and the ruthless line of his mouth now seemed more promise than vague threat.

“Are you asking for a divorce?”

The blunt question wasn’t unexpected, but his gravelly tone of voice carried a steeliness that warned how rigidly he controlled himself. Leah felt her heart skip faster, and forced herself to shake her head.

“There’s a difference between asking for a divorce and offering one.”

The moment the words were out of her mouth she wondered why she’d put it that way. She should have simply answered “yes”. The huge tide of hurt and unhappiness that rose up added to her alarm and she mentally scrambled to show none of it.

Oh, God, don’t let him see, don’t ever let him find out…

“I’ve made the offer,” she said coolly, so relieved that her tone was calm and practical that she blundered into undermining her purpose even more. “What you do with it is up to you.”

She’d somehow stood to her feet without being fully aware of it until she felt the back of her knees brush the front of the chair. But whether her body had taken action to help her assert herself or to flee, she didn’t know. At least she could see that her more temperate answer to Reece’s question had gotten her message across just as clearly as a more definitive one.

Reece’s weather-tanned face was like a granite monolith. A ruddy flush she recognized as fury had crept into his lean cheeks, but she knew by his iron silence that he wouldn’t inflict it on her.

“I’ll look in on Bobby before I go to bed. Goodnight.”

Leah turned and moved around the chair to walk as normally as possible to the door then into the hall. Her knees were rubbery and her legs felt heavy and weak, but she managed to make a dignified exit.

She’d got the job done and except for that part near the end, she’d managed it fairly well. Though she might have delivered it all a bit less stiffly, she’d survived and Reece hadn’t guessed anything of her real feelings about either the divorce or him.

The need to spend time with Bobby was overwhelming, so she hurried down the hall to the bedroom end of the large, single-story ranch house. The child’s room was next to the master bedroom, and both rooms were linked by a connecting door.

Leah had never shared the master bedroom with Reece, much less shared his bed. He hadn’t offered and she’d certainly never asked. Given her pick of bedrooms, she’d chosen the one on the other side of Bobby’s. Reece had noted her choice and for her convenience, he’d had another connecting door put in the shared wall between her room and the baby’s.

As Leah slipped silently into Bobby’s room, the arrangement struck her as even more telling. At first, it had been understandable that she and Reece wouldn’t share a room or a bed, and she’d completely agreed. Rachel’s death had been too fresh and agonizing for them both, and it was scandalous enough that they’d married so soon after.

But as the months had gone by without so much as a hint of real closeness between them, Leah had reminded herself that she couldn’t reasonably expect more. Except for the baby, there was nothing between them but a marriage certificate and the same last name.

Reece had bargained for a woman to help raise his son and he’d wanted to settle a life that had been shattered by death and shock and upheaval. He’d also been determined to prevent his son from ever being raised and exploited by his maternal grandparents, if something should happen to him.

Leah had been a means to get an adoptive mother he trusted for his infant son and to keep his home life in order. He’d meant for Leah to be a fail-safe protection for Bobby if he was no longer around. He apparently hadn’t been thinking much about the wife he’d have to live with to get all that. And after what she’d sensed in him these past weeks, he’d surely awakened to the fact that having a wife had created almost as many problems for him as getting one had solved.

Bobby’s room was dimly lit, thanks to the ceramic puppy lamp she always left on. The house was so quiet that she could hear the child’s soft baby breaths almost from the moment she walked into the room.

She crossed to the baby bed and looked down blurrily into the sweet face of the sleeping child. His dark silky hair lay in charming disarray, and his long, black lashes fanned out thickly on chubby, sleep-flushed cheeks.

Leah put out a hand to tenderly touch his open fingers, marveling at his beauty, her heart breaking with love. She couldn’t love this baby more if she’d given birth to him herself. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Not even the love she felt for Reece was as powerful as the love she felt for this dark-haired cherub.

Eventually, she eased the light blanket higher on his chest and turned to go to her room. She left the door between her room and his partway open, as always, so she could hear in case he woke up during the night.

As Leah began to get ready for bed a dozen doubts about her talk with Reece began to pick at her sense of accomplishment, but the important thing was that she’d got the subject into the open.

As a successful rancher and businessman, Reece was comfortable making decisions, and he’d learned better than most how to quickly determine and evaluate all the facts of a situation, and then to identify his options. His decision to marry her was probably the only truly bad decision of his adult life. And that had only happened because he’d been blinded by grief over Rachel and worry about his infant son’s future.

Deciding to divorce her wouldn’t require much thought. For Reece, it wouldn’t be a “yes” or “no” answer as much as it would be a “how soon?” one. He’d probably reached his decision before she’d gotten a handful of steps down the hall from the den.

Her obligation had been to put the subject before him and to signal her permission and approval. He’d probably confirm his decision to divorce her first thing in the morning at breakfast. After that, the only wrangling there’d ever be between them—over Bobby—would begin.

And even that was nothing to lie awake and fret about. Leah had been the baby’s main caregiver, and she’d naturally be responsible for the majority of his care, at least while he was so young. The rest they could work out as Bobby got older.

She had no fear that Reece would somehow banish her from Bobby’s life, particularly since part of protecting Bobby had meant that Leah had had to adopt him. She had as many parental rights as Reece did, and since they were both mindful of Bobby’s best interests, they would both play major parts in the boy’s life whether they stayed married or not.

As she lay in the dark, her sense of accomplishment and relief slowly gave way to a heavy heart. What she’d done tonight had virtually sealed the death of her fondest, most impossible dream. Though it had taken a secretly agonizing eleven months to finally kill it, what she’d done by offering Reece a divorce was to acknowledge that the dream of openly loving him and being loved by him was well and truly lost.

And it was only right that she would never see that dream fulfilled. She’d fallen in love with Reece years ago, long before he’d ever dated her best friend, but she hadn’t been able to stop loving him, not even when he’d married Rachel. She’d suffered tremendous guilt over that, but never enough to overcome her feelings.

Then she’d compounded the wrong of being in love with a married man by grabbing the chance to marry him after he’d been widowed, at perhaps the only time in his life that he’d ever been vulnerable. The guilt and heartache she’d suffered and might continue to suffer over her selfish feelings for her best friend’s husband, were fitting punishments that she accepted.

At least Rachel had never suspected. Hopefully Reece would never find out, either.

Leah turned onto her side and stared into the dark for a long time. She must have dropped off to sleep sometime before it got too late, because she never heard Reece’s bootsteps as she usually did when he passed her room on the way to his own.

CHAPTER TWO

REECE’S first impulse had been to go after Leah and drag her back to the den to have it out. His second had been to walk over to the liquor cabinet and pour himself a double Scotch. Once he’d done the latter, he tossed it back like a man on fire trying to douse the flames.

But the conflagration of anger and surprise and guilt wasn’t so easily put out. The hell of it was, he was overdue to have his meek wife stand up to him. Though she’d used softly polite, tactful words, she’d nonetheless given him a sound thrashing and called him to account.

Leah Gray Waverly had turned out to be the perfect mother, calm and competent, as loving as she was gently patient and wise with the boy. She made certain Bobby saw him in the morning before he left the house, she timed the baby’s schedule to his to maximize their time together, and she arranged nightly for him to spend time alone with his son.

She’d also been the ideal wife. After his housekeeper had retired just after their sudden marriage, Leah had cooked his meals, washed his clothes, and single-handedly kept his large, six-bedroom house virtually dust free in the middle of a ranch headquarters where dust hung in the air around the clock. In between all that, she ran his errands, took his phone calls when he was out, and generally made his home life an aggravation-free island of pleasantness and serenity.

But whatever he’d thought about Leah’s quiet temperament, what she’d done just now reminded him that the lady had a backbone. Tonight she’d shown a steely pride that was no less formidable than his own.

As Reece poured himself another drink, he did so more thoughtfully this time. He hadn’t meant to be so indifferent to her, he hadn’t meant to take everything she’d done for him and give her nothing personal in return.

He’d given her his son, the most precious person in his life, but what woman who thought anything of herself would have been content to love and help raise her best friend’s child and put up with being an unpaid servant to a husband who, as far as she’d be able to tell, hadn’t appreciated any of it?

For weeks his conscience had been dogged by the things he’d neglected with Leah. He’d put her name on his bank accounts, but she’d never spent so much as a dollar of his money on herself. He had yet to take her out to a nice restaurant or a social function. The only time he’d attended church with her had been on the Sunday she’d had Bobby dedicated. Hell, he hadn’t even remembered her birthday until four months after it had passed.

After being married to a near hermit for the past eleven months, it was no wonder she’d informed him that she meant to go to the barbecue, with or without him.

Rachel had told him things about Leah that he hadn’t thought about for years. About her nomadic childhood, the many abandonments by both her father and mother, her eventual ordeal in a series of foster homes. According to Rachel, Leah’s biggest dream had been to someday have a family and a home.

She had a legal son in Bobby and she lived in one of the finest homes in the area. But his preoccupation with Rachel’s loss had cheated her out of the complete family she must have wanted and had probably left her feeling like a slave instead of a marriage partner. Hence her solemn little bombshell tonight.