“Sorry,”

Cass mumbled.

“For?”

“Acting like a weepy broad.”

Blake nuzzled the top of her head, his chuckle in her hair as soft and seductive as a summer breeze. “Broad seems apt, at the moment,” he murmured, gently patting her belly.

She turned away, couldn’t back up quickly enough from the flash fire his touch ignited.

“Cass.” When she refused to turn towards him, he touched her again, this time gently hooking two fingers underneath her chin. “Cass, look at me.”

She glanced up, blinking, and saw the remnants of all the hope and promise of so many years ago. Was she seeing what was in his eyes, though, or a reflection of what was in hers?

“Whatever goes on here goes way beyond the wreck we made of our marriage,” he said. “I never stopped caring about you. About what happens to you. Even now, if there’s anything I can do…”

To Gail, still and again, for your constant support and encouragement. Not to mention giving this book a second chance and finally, a home. I literally couldn’t have done any of this without you.

And to my family, who may yet learn what the Do Not Disturb note on the office door means…although I’m not holding my breath.

I couldn’t have done this without you guys, either.

KAREN TEMPLETON,

a bestselling author and RITA® Award nominee, is the mother of five sons and living proof that romance and dirty nappies are not mutually exclusive terms. An Easterner transplanted to Albuquerque, New Mexico, she spends far too much time trying to coax her garden to yield roses and produce something resembling a lawn, all the while fantasising about a weekend alone with her husband. Or at least an uninterrupted conversation.

She loves to hear from readers, who may reach her online at www.karentempleton.com.

Dear Reader,

After writing nearly twenty books, Marriage, Interrupted, was my first for Cherish…and I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to be included in this group of wonderful authors. For those of you who have read and enjoyed my family-oriented stories for Sensation, trust me – nothing’s changed. For those readers who might be sampling one of my stories for the first time, I hope you enjoy this tale of second chances, of good-hearted people who, being human, have made mistakes…and learned from them. And of course, about the kind of love strong enough, and stubborn enough, to withstand those mistakes.

I truly feel as though I’ve come home, and I hope, as you laugh and cry along with Cass and Blake and their anything-but-ordinary family, that you will, too.

Karen Templeton

Marriage, Interrupted

KAREN TEMPLETON

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter One

On the other side of her swollen belly, Cass was reasonably sure she still had legs. Under normal circumstances, which these definitely were not, she would have waited until after the baby’s arrival to become reacquainted with her phantom appendages. However, in less than two hours, she had a funeral to attend. In a dress. Which meant pantyhose…which meant she had to shave her legs.

Through the eight-foot-tall yucca standing guard outside the window, the low-angled Albuquerque spring sun cast a spiky shadow across the master bath as she stood considering her options, her bellybutton straining the snaps on her cotton robe. They weren’t pretty, any of them. If she got in the tub, she’d never get out. If she attempted it in the shower, she’d probably break her neck. And if she sat down, she could neither bend down nor get her foot up.

Which left the sink. Cass dimly remembered performing this little trick when she’d gone into labor with Shaun a million years ago, while Blake dashed around the house doing whatever it was that had kept him out of her hair until she was ready to leave for the hospital. So this was doable. Or at least it had been when she’d been twenty and a lot looser-hipped than she was now.

Cass filled the sink, shoved the belly to one side, and heaved, grabbing at the towel rack before she toppled over. Her balance regained—physically if not mentally—she pretzled herself in order to perform her task, furious tears pricking her eyes.

God help the next man dumb enough to ask her to trust him.

First leg mowed and once again consigned to oblivion, she hauled up the other one, nicking herself above the ankle with the first swipe of the razor. Swearing, she wadded up a piece of toilet paper into a little square and smacked it against the wound.

For more than ten years, she’d resisted remarriage. To anyone. Between raising a child on her own, holding down a succession of retail jobs and finishing up her marketing degree, there’d been no time, let alone interest or enthusiasm. Loneliness, when she acknowledged it at all, was that nameless, faceless stranger standing on the corner as she zipped from day care to work to school, forgotten before the image even had a chance to fully register. Then she meets a charming, respectable, seemingly sane man at a chamber of commerce dinner, they hit it off, they start dating, she hears him offering her the few things she still occasionally allowed herself to believe she needed. Wanted.

Safety. Security. A full-time father for her son, drowning in adolescent angst. And the opportunity to have another child. Unbridled passion hadn’t been part of the deal, but, frankly, that had been fine with Cass. She no longer had the energy for passion, unbridled or otherwise, she didn’t think. Let alone all the garbage that went along with it.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

The bleeding had stopped. Cass quickly finished up before her hips permanently locked in that position, then, on a groan, lowered the second foot to the floor. The baby kicked; her hand went to her tummy, soothing and stroking.

Well. She’d gotten the child, at least.

Copious, angry tears surged from what she’d thought was a dry well. She slammed the heel of her hand against the sink, then dropped onto the toilet lid, stifling her sobs in her stinging palm. How could she have made virtually the same mistake a second time? How? Other women could see beyond the surface, past the charm and the promises and the compliments. Why couldn’t she?

“Cassie, sweetheart—is everything all right?”

Cass yanked off a yard or two of toilet paper to blow her nose. Talk about your major ironies. Despite everything, Cass adored Alan’s zany, exuberant mother, who had been in residence long before the marriage. Not even the louse’s deception could change that.

And to your left, folks, we have the grieving widow.

Yeah, well, she somehow doubted she was the first woman since Eve to link the words louse and dead husband.

Cass swiped at her face with the heel of her hand, willing her voice steady enough to call out, “Yeah, Cille. I’m fine.”

“And I’m one of the Olsen twins,” she rasped through the closed door. “So open the door before I break it down.”

At four-foot-something, and maybe ninety pounds after a full meal, eighty-year-old Lucille Stern would be hard put to break down a doggy gate. Cass struggled to her feet, then waddled over to the bathroom door, opening it to a sight guaranteed to obliterate self-pity.

Reeking of mothballs and Joy perfume, Lucille stood with fists planted on bony hips swallowed up inside a hooker-red satin dress, complete with a mandarin collar and side slits. A tilt of her head made rhinestone earrings the size of manhole covers flash in the streak of sunlight knifing down the hall. She squinted up at Cass through stubby, mascara-clumped lashes.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetheart, but you look like hell.”

Cass was still blinking from the dress. Not to mention the rhinestones. “Gee, thanks,” she finally managed as they moved into her bedroom. “But, hey—my legs are shaved.”

The old woman fiddled with a red satin bow jutting out from the nuclear-blast-resistant whorls of short, improbably red hair. “Terrific. So we’ll tell everyone to look at your calves.” Then she turned around, jabbing one thumb over her shoulder at the open back of her dress. “This meshugah zipper and my arthritis are a lousy combination. Zip me up, there’s a dollbaby.”

“Cille.” Cass weighed her words carefully as she zipped the dress over a black lace bra. Even for Lucille, this was extreme. “You don’t think this dress is a little—” Gaudy? Flamboyant? Tacky? “—bright?”

That got a phlegmy sigh. “This is not exactly the best day of my life, you know?” Futzing again with her hair, the former Brooklynite turned, lifting disillusioned green eyes to Cass. “So I could use a little cheering up. So I’m wearing red. So what are they going to do, kick me out of the funeral home?”

Cass scraped her lip between her teeth. Alan had been Lucille’s only child, dutiful in his own way, she supposed, but not exactly a joy to his mother’s heart from what Cass had observed over the past year or so. If Lucille was mourning anything, most likely it was for a relationship that had soured long before the man’s death.

And Lucille didn’t know the half of it.

But they were tough broads, the pair of them. They’d both get through this. “No one’s kicking you out of anywhere, Cille. Not without getting by me first—”

“Mom?”

Sweeping her uncombed hair away from her face, Cass shifted her gaze to the doorway, where her son stood awkwardly attired in some friend’s sports jacket and khakis—a startling contrast to his normal uniform of frayed jeans and oversize T-shirts. What a stunner to glimpse the adult Shaun would one day be. If she didn’t strangle him first. She supposed their mother-teenage-son relationship was no more fraught with problems than usual—and probably less, if she thought about it—but there were times…

Times she wondered if he’d ever understand.

“My God!” Cille craned her neck to look up at him on her way out of the room. “The boy has ears.”

With a self-conscious grin, Shaun touched his right ear, revealed by dint of the ponytail into which he’d pulled his shoulder-length blond hair. Even though all his friends wore their hair short, he had to do things his own way. Including the trio of open-ended loops in one ear, courtesy of some galpal with a hot needle and an ice cube a few months back. The only thing keeping Cass from killing him that time was the nasty infection that had nearly done the job for her. “Cool, huh?”

“Literally,” Cass agreed, deciding to be grateful Shaun had shown no desire to pierce other body parts. Or dye his hair chartreuse. “Now that they’ve made contact with the air…what?”

Shaun had held up one hand, angling his head into the hall. When the door to Lucille’s bedroom clicked shut, Shaun turned back, fidgeting with one of the jacket’s pocket flaps. The grin had vanished, replaced with an expression of uneasy concern. “How’re you doing?”

He’d asked her that a hundred times since Alan’s death. She’d yet to be truthful. “I’m managing—”

“Dad’s here.”

“What?” She dropped, hard, onto the edge of her bed. “Why?”

A mixture of defiance and guilt flashed through all-too-familiar hound dog eyes. “I called him, yesterday morning.”

Shock jolted a million nerve endings, leaving her slightly dizzy. “You asked him to come down?”

“I…uh…” He wriggled his shoulders underneath the jacket, stuck his hand in the coat pocket. Took it out again. “I just told him what’d happened, is all. I didn’t know he was coming.”

But he obviously knew that’s what Blake would do. Cass swallowed her immediate reaction—that none of this had anything to do with her ex-husband and why the hell was he here, invading their privacy?—when she remembered that Shaun had been jockeying for his father’s attention all his life. Why should it come as any surprise, then, that he should want Blake here now? Especially when this past year had turned out to be such a colossal disappointment.

“Mom?”

Cass’s head jerked up, her heart aching for the child still hovering underneath the fragile, easily punctured surface of new adulthood. She’d done her best, had only wanted something better for him when she’d married Alan. That it hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped wasn’t anyone’s fault, but still—and again—her son had gotten the short end of the stick.

“It’s okay? That I called Dad?”

In his frown, she could still see the toddler seeking Mommy’s approval. She pushed herself off the bed and crossed to him, slipping her hand into his. How odd, she thought, to be pregnant with her second child when her first was already several inches taller than she. “Of course, honey. You…he…” Her shoulders raised, then dropped. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

Underneath the unfamiliar clothes, the boy’s entire body let out a sigh. “Okay. Well. I think he wants to talk to you.”

Just when you think things can’t get any worse…

“Tell him I’ll be out in a minute,” she said.

They say it takes a big man to admit when he’s made a mistake. In which case, Blake thought as he sensed more than heard Cass enter the room, he should be at least twelve feet tall by now. His feigned interest in the ostentatiously large impressionistic landscape over the stone fireplace immediately abandoned, he pivoted, his breath catching in his throat.

He’d never seen her look worse.

Her gold-tipped bangs catching in her lashes with each blink, she stood at the edge of the step leading down into the brick-pavered living room, one hand propped on her lower back. Despite her above-average height, she seemed dwarfed by the tedious expanse of chalky white wall, soaring fifteen feet to the beamed ceiling overhead. A bank of clerestory windows slashed the top of the wall, choking the air with sunlight, but even so, the room seemed cold. Inhospitable.

A smile flitted over her lips, as if she wasn’t sure what was appropriate, under the circumstances. “Well. This is a surprise.”

His pulse involuntarily quickened at the sound of that crème-de-menthe voice. He used to tell her she could make ordering breakfast in a truck stop sound like a seduction. And she would laugh, right before she’d give him a smile that made the laugh seem childlike by comparison.

She wasn’t smiling now. Instead, she’d obviously been crying. Well, what did he expect? She’d just lost her husband, for God’s sake—

Breathe, Carter. Breathe.

There was nothing he could say that would make any sense, or make things any easier. He hadn’t been sure, when he’d decided to come down from Denver, what he thought he could possibly do. What a shock to discover that all he really wanted was to pull her into his arms. “How are you holding up?”

She carefully stepped down into the room. “I’ll let you know when the Prozac wears off,” she quipped, just as he would have expected. For a second, irritation prickled his skin. Cass had always used humor as a cop-out to mask what was really going on in her head. Blake had never been sure what, exactly, had destroyed their marriage, since Cass had too often substituted wisecracks for honesty. Oh, the obvious reasons were, well, obvious enough. What fed those reasons, however, was something else again. Now, twelve years later, the relationship was undefined, ambiguous. Not friendship or love or hate or even mutual disinterest colored their forced conversations. At least with good old-fashioned animosity, you knew what you were dealing with.

With an unmistakable grimace, she lowered herself onto a ladderback chair in front of a bare window, next to a carved table littered with carefully arranged knickknacks. Blake remembered the posture well—legs apart, one hand still on her back, the other absently rubbing against her thigh. The memory slashed through his heart, catching him off guard. He didn’t let on. “I thought Shaun said the funeral was at eleven?”

“It is.”

“But you’re not dressed yet.”

Tropical blue eyes lifted to his, more weary than sad, he thought. Hoped. “I didn’t expect company this early on the day of my husband’s funeral.”

Point to her.

Cass cocked her head at him, her hand wandering over her swollen middle, instinctively massaging the child within. Another man’s child.

Another slash. Irrational and petty as it was.

“You didn’t have to come down,” she said.

“I got the feeling Shaun was asking me to.”

She nodded, then looked away, letting a silence slip between them so profound it was practically visible.

For a second he scrutinized her. She’d lightened her hair a little, he thought, the shag cut softly framing those high cheekbones, her long neck, in wispy strands of shimmering red-gold. Her smooth skin, pulled taut across model-worthy cheekbones, a square-edged jaw, was nevertheless etched with a tracery of worry lines, around her mouth, her eyes, between her brows. She seemed thinner, too, despite the pregnancy. That, he didn’t like. Her eating habits had always been atrocious; when she’d been pregnant with Shaun, they’d nearly come to blows over her diet. Olives for breakfast, he remembered. And French fries. But only Burger King’s, no one else’s. The one time he’d tried to sneak a package of McDonald’s fries past her…

Blake forced his attention elsewhere, again fighting the insane urge to hold her, to comfort her. As the friend he’d once been, if nothing else.

“Did you drive down?” The question echoed in the vast room.

“Yes. Figured I’d rather have my own car.”

She nodded again, slipped back into the silence.

She reminded him so much of the overwhelmed college freshman who’d tripped up his heart seventeen—no, eighteen—years ago. He’d been a senior, working part-time in UNM’s bookstore, when she’d come in, all huge eyes and tremulous smile, and he’d fallen so fast he didn’t even feel the bruises from landing for weeks afterward. A soft ache accompanied the memory of how hard she’d fought not to let him, or anyone else, know how petrified she was that first day. She wore exactly that expression now, overlaid with an edgy exhaustion that brought out a keen protective streak—for himself almost more than for her.

Hands in pockets, Blake’s eyes flicked again over the living room he’d never seen before today. Hadn’t been able to face. Shaun had flown up to Denver a few times since Cass’s marriage, but Blake hadn’t once returned to Albuquerque. His business had provided a convenient excuse.

Oh, yeah. She’d done well. The house, set high in the Foothills on the east side of the city, screamed money. Fairly new money, Blake thought, tempered by good taste. Sleek, contemporary furniture in blacks and grays, richly patterned Navajo rugs, gallery-quality artwork. Impressive. And not a trace of the Cass he’d known—or thought he’d known—anywhere.

“Nice place,” he managed.

A slight wince preceded her shifting as she tried to find the mythological, more comfortable position. She had narrow hips; the final months of pregnancy weren’t easy for her. Irrationally—again—Blake hated this guy, for being her husband, for making her pregnant. Even for dying on her. For leaving her with that frightened-little-girl look in her eyes. Hell, not even Blake had done that.

Or had he?

“Thank you,” she replied at last. “The view at night—” he followed her gaze to the expanse of glass that led out to an upper level deck “—is really something. You can see the whole city from up here—”

Her voice caught. He was intruding, he knew. But leaving wasn’t an option. Not until…

Until what?

Cass was watching him, he realized with a start. “What?” he asked.

“Is it me, or is this incredibly awkward?”

His lips cracked a little when he tried to smile for her. “Probably not all that unusual, though. With so many step-families nowadays…” His heart rate kicked up as her brows hitched underneath her bangs. “I’m still our son’s father. That didn’t change because you remarried.”

Heeling one hand on the end of the table, she pushed herself out of the chair. “The limo’s coming for us at ten-thirty,” she said, her words clipped. “Now I do need to get dressed.” She seemed to hesitate, worrying her knock-your-socks-off solitaire with the fingers of her right hand. He found himself wondering what she’d done with the plain gold band he’d given her. “Do you…you could ride with us, if you want.”

“Thanks, but no.” He smiled, a little. “That would be awkward.”

That got a quietly assessing look for a moment. “Yes, I suppose so.” She started out of the room, then turned back. “I didn’t thank you for coming.”

“Please, forget it. You’re a little preoccupied, I’m sure.”

Understandably, there was no joy in her smile. “I hope I don’t reach the point where I ever forget my manners, Blake. No matter what the circumstances. Besides, I know how busy you are, with your business and all—”

“This is still family, Cass. That always takes precedence.”

Accusation flared in her eyes, reminding him of his less-than-sterling reputation in that particular area, before she finally left the room. It struck him, as it had so often since the divorce, how badly he’d failed her.

“Dad?”

And that he’d failed his son even more.

Like tangled barbed wire, guilt lodged in Blake’s chest as he glanced over at the unwitting victim of his own pain and disappointment, standing on the opposite side of the room.

The boy’s grin seemed shy. “You look really weird in that suit.”

As in, Shaun had rarely seen Blake in anything other than jeans. With a grin that was in all likelihood equally timorous, Blake reciprocated. “Not nearly as weird as you do.”

“Dork-city, right?”

“Hardly. Just different. Good different, though.”

In the mildly uncomfortable silence that followed, Blake thought again how much he’d missed his child every day they were separated—far too many days for his comfort. But stuff got in the way, didn’t it? If only…

A sharp gasp of realization caught in his throat, as even the blood chugging through his veins came to a screeching halt. Blake wasn’t a religious man in the traditional sense, but he liked to think he knew an epiphanous moment when one smacked him upside the head. And this one was a pip:

He wanted his family back.

And if that didn’t earn him a deluxe, all-expenses-paid trip to the booby hatch, he didn’t know what did. As if…what? He could somehow pick up the widely scattered pieces from the last dozen years and glue them back together, good as new? As if Shaun—as if Cass—would let him?

Well, you could scratch that epiphany right off the list, boy, ’cause this one had No Way in Hell written all over it.

“So, anyway,” Shaun tried again, as if Blake had been the one to let the conversation die, “Towanda wants to know, you wanna cup of coffee?”

His brain buzzing, Blake covered the distance between them, drawing his son into a quick, one-handed hug around shoulders at nearly the same level as his. “Coffee sounds great.” If there was ever a Maxwell House moment, this was it. “But who’s Towanda?”

Catching the startled “What the heck is this?” look on Shaun’s face, Blake released his grip. After they both tugged at their jacket hems, neither seemed to know where to look or what to do with their hands. “You’ll see,” Shaun said, still eyeing Blake with suspicion.

As he followed Shaun down a short, tiled hall to the kitchen, a series of revelatory aftershocks rattled his skull (since clearly his brain hadn’t gotten the memo about scratching the epiphany off the list). It isn’t too late, came the thought. At least, there might still be time to forge a relationship with his son, to repair the inadvertent damage inflicted by total cluelessness.

But the epiphany had said family. Not son. Family. As in Cass.

Forget it, Blake mentally yelled at whoever was in charge of these things.

Uh…no, Whoever calmly replied. Which is when Blake came to the mildly depressing realization that there’s apparently an iron-clad No Return policy on epiphanies. Who knew?

All well and good. Except how the hell was he supposed to heal a breach with someone who regarded him as though he were carrying a contagious disease, hadn’t even buried her second husband yet, and—oh, yeah—was pregnant with said dead husband’s child? The timing wasn’t exactly ideal here.

Tough. Deal with it.

Yeah, well, there was also the minor detail of his still, to this day, having no idea how to fix something that had at one time seemed so right and yet had gone so horribly wrong.

Then maybe it’s high time you get off your lazy butt and figure it out.

Right about now, Blake thought as they reached the kitchen, a lobotomy wasn’t sounding half-bad.

“Well now…” The generously bosomed black woman in the monochrome kitchen, her prodigious figure encased in a geometric-pattern shirt and polyester pants with permanently stitched-down creases, rose from a stool behind the granite island and walked over to Blake, clapping a firm hand on his arm. The dark eyes that met his were warm and fearless and unapologetically judgmental. “I take it you’re this boy’s daddy.”

Blake met her confident grin with a slightly less certain one of his own. “Last time I checked.”

“Well, I’m Towanda, and the rule around here is don’t give me any guff and we’ll get along just fine.” With that she returned to whatever she’d been doing, her crepe-soled oxfords making no sound on the gray-tiled floor. “Coffee’s over there,” she said with a twitch of her head, her dark blond waves remaining suspiciously rigid. “Help yourself.”

In business, Blake mused as he filled a mug, he’d gloried in a succession of triumphs. In life, he’d bombed, big-time. After the divorce he’d dated, some, when he could fit it in, but none of the budding relationships ever caught fire. Nor had he cared overmuch that they hadn’t. No other woman had ever gotten to him the way Cass had, and he suspected no other woman ever would. And if that sounded sappy and overly sentimental and improbable, so be it. He hadn’t purposefully closed himself off to loving again, but since it hadn’t happened, or even come close, in all this time…

Blake took a sip of the best coffee he’d ever tasted, mulling this over.

For way too long, he realized, he’d dwelled on what had gone wrong with his marriage, an exercise which had done little more than leave him with a nagging, burning sensation not unlike chronic heartburn that he’d somehow let the ball drop. That he’d given up too easily. Well, now…maybe, just maybe, it was time to remember what had been right. And with time—lots of time, considering the woman’s husband had just died—with patience, and with a lot of prayer, maybe Cass would remember, too.

Of course, there was also the definite possibility that he was on the brink of making a total ass of himself.

He took another sip of coffee, then grunted.

Which would make this not exactly a venture into new territory.

By midafternoon, the crowd had begun to thin, as more and more people slipped out the front door and back into the stream of their normal lives. The funeral, the burial, 1001 nameless condolence givers had all—mercifully, Cass decided—become an indistinct blur.

Except for Blake.

She sat on one of the sofas in the living room, Lucille next to her, close enough for the older woman to occasionally squeeze Cass’s hand. That is, when she wasn’t talking off the ear of whoever came over to offer his or her sympathy. Cass didn’t know ninety percent of these people, a fact that made it much easier to keep her emotional cool.

Except about Blake.

His nearness, both through the services and now, back at the house, tormented her no less than the too-hot-for-March noonday sun that had seared her skin through her black silk maternity dress. Had she been deluding herself these past dozen years? Cass really had believed she’d broken Blake’s almost mesmeric hold on her heart, her mind. Her soul. But the truth was, she now realized with a mixture of embarrassment and horror, the attachment had never truly been severed. Like stretching a rubber band thin enough to give the illusion of separation, if you increase the tension even a little too far—twannnng! Right back where you started.

Like now. Her mental and emotional resources stretched to the max, all it took was Blake Carter’s reappearance in her life, and…twannnng!

And, boy oh boy, did it smart.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” said yet another pleasant-looking middle-aged stranger, grasping Cass’s hand. Cass gave the woman a brave little smile and murmured her thanks, wondering which one of them was more relieved at having gotten through the requisite contact. That done, now whoever-she-was could scarf down the catered hors d’oeuvres with a clear conscience, while Cass could return to obsessing about her ex with anything but.

All she knew was this absurd attraction was inappropriate at best and sheer, stark-raving, just-lock-me-up-now-and-throw-away-the-key idiocy at worst. All she knew was, whatever was going on in her head had to stay there, where no one could see, or know how seriously flawed she was. All she knew was, she was a brand-new widow, almost seven months pregnant with her second husband’s child, but she would have spilled state secrets to feel her first husband’s arms around her. So damn Blake Carter for reappearing in her life to remind her of what she’d lost, of what she’d missed, of what she would never have again. Not with him, at least. And judging from her abysmal track record thus far, not with anybody else, either.

Speak of the devil. Cass glanced up to catch Blake approaching her, his brows dipped in an undecided expression somewhere between pity and confusion. His nearly black hair was still too long, she noticed, the threads of silver at his temples the only thing making him look any older than when they’d been married. She knotted her hands together at the memory of gliding her fingers through those thick waves when they—

The tiny moan just sort of slipped out. Yet someone else she didn’t know gave her a funny look. “The baby kicked,” she said with a shaky smile.

The woman smiled back and returned to her conversation while Cass went back to studying the only man who’d ever rocked her world. In rapid, profound and heart-stopping succession.

Okay, she really had to stop this.

Mercedes Zamora, one of her business partners, had snagged him with a tray of something or other. Blake politely took one, obviously trying to extricate himself from Mercy’s rapid-fire monologue. Thank God for small favors, Cass thought, trying to shift her weight on the sofa. Maybe by the time he made it over here, her heart rate would be back to normal.

Right. Now she noticed the fine webbing at the corners of his eyes, which made him look more distinguished, as did the creases bracketing a mouth she remembered with a clarity vivid enough to make her squirm in her seat. And not because of the baby, either.

Having escaped Mercy’s clutches, Blake was back on course toward Cass…and the fantasies vaporized in the heat of those hound-dog eyes, eyes that seemed to plead with her to explain what had happened between them. On the surface, the answer seemed simple enough—that he’d broken one too many promises for her to ever be able to trust him again. But in truth, the answer was anything but simple. God knows, she would have given anything to untangle the myriad reasons why their marriage had sizzled, then fizzled, at least enough to lay them out in order of importance. But the more she tried to sort out the jumble of disappointment and heartache left in the wake of their divorce, the less she understood. Two things, however, she was absolutely sure of: She could never forgive him for virtually abandoning their child, and she could never forgive herself for still, after all this time, wanting him so much.

Even now, as he lowered himself onto the sofa beside her—since, after loudly announcing she had to pee like a racehorse, Lucille had abandoned her—where she sat staring at a plate full of food she couldn’t get past her throat if she tried, she still yearned to feel his touch, to hear his soothing voice when he’d kid her out of a bad mood or comfort her when she was legitimately upset. For so long, he’d been her best—and often, her only—friend. That their marriage had destroyed their friendship hurt almost more than anything else.

“How’re you holding up?” she heard at her elbow.

She shrugged, shook her head. Refused to look at him, to react to that soft, Oklahoma-tinged voice that had always turned her insides to warmed honey.

There had to be a logical reason for this. Hormones. Exhaustion. Misdirected grief.

Insanity.

Yes, let’s go with that, shall we?

Blake seemed to hesitate, then cautiously took her hand in his, sending trickles of warmth to places she’d just as soon forget existed. Yep, she was seriously messed up, all right. As if to compensate, a shiver slalomed down her spine.

“You’re freezing,” he said, his brows taking a dive. “Here…” He pulled an ivory wool throw off the back of the sofa, tried to spread it over her lap. But she pushed it away, as if accepting his ministrations somehow indicted her.

“It’s just my hands,” she insisted. “I’m not cold. Really.”

“But you have been under a helluva lot of stress, ho—” She watched as he swallowed back the endearment. “Maybe you should go lie down.”

“I will. Soon,” she promised before he launched into his Poppa Hen routine, before she remembered far more than she wanted to. Before she forgot the one thing she most needed to remember. Finally she met his gaze, only to immediately wish she hadn’t. “I’ll rest in a bit. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”

His expression was unreadable. “I understand.”

But he didn’t, of course, since she barely understood herself. She didn’t want to be alone, to think about her situation, to worry about how she was going to get through this mess, to wonder why Blake’s presence was so thoroughly discombobulating her, especially after all this time. Especially today.

She hadn’t noticed when he’d risen. He now stood in front of her, his hands slouched in his pockets as usual, although the navy jacket and tie were anything but. However, unlike her son, who looked about as natural in his get-up as he might have wearing chicken feathers, Blake seemed right at home. But then, she supposed these days he wore suits, even formalwear, pretty regularly. After all, Blake Carter was a millionaire now, an entrepreneur who’d beaten the odds and rocketed to the top of his industry. Idly, Cass wondered if money and success had changed him.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll get back to the hotel—”

“Like hell you will,” Lucille squawked right behind Cass, making her jolt. The woman had a habit of popping up, prairie-dog fashion, at remarkably inconvenient moments. She sidestepped the arm of the sofa to snag Blake’s forearm in red talons. “With six bedrooms, you should stay at some hotel?” She vigorously shook her head, the rhinestone earrings flashing like a blitz of paparazzi flashbulbs. “Forget it.”

“Cille, really, I don’t think that’s such a good idea—” Cass put in, but Lucille had pressed her crimson lips together in her you-can-talk-but-I-won’t-hear expression.

“The man should be with his son. And the son should be with his mother. So maybe this isn’t the most ideal situation in the world, but since when does life play along? Besides, sweetheart…” She nailed Cass with her green gaze. “I know you wouldn’t push my buttons at a time like this.” Tarantula lashes swallowed up her eyes as she squinted. “Would you?”

“I believe this is called emotional blackmail, Cille.”

“Whatever works. Besides, Blake would be happy to stay.” The tarantulas veered in his direction. “Right?”

After a moment—a very long moment—Blake replied, “If you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

“Listen to him. Like it would be trouble to put up my stepgrandson’s father. Besides, have you looked in the kitchen recently? There’s enough food to feed Yonkers in there. All these people on these weird diets…nobody eats real food anymore. Towanda’s been kvetching for the last half hour about how the hell is she going to stuff it all in the Fridgedaire. We won’t have to cook for a week.”

“This has got to be a bad dream,” Cass muttered, but Lucille pretended not to hear her.

“This is no time for Cassie and me to be sitting around, depressing each other. So, for a few days, you’ll stay. Be a father to your son. Regale us with stories about the ice cream business. Keep our spirits out of the toilet.”

Apparently convinced the matter was settled, Lucille left to see out the last of the guests, except for one set of distant cousins, who seemed to have bonded with the buffet. And Mercy was still here, too, having a set-to with Towanda, if the raised voices coming from the kitchen were any indication. Suddenly, the argument stopped—which led Cass to wonder whether the two women had come to terms or killed each other—leaving the house ominously quiet.

Blake hesitated before asking, “Is this okay with you?”

“Oh, right. As if I have any say in the matter.”

His mouth tilted. “I’m not afraid of an old lady.”

“Yeah, well, I am. And if you had any sense, you would be, too.”

“Nope, sorry. Although Towanda’s another story entirely.”

Cass glanced away before she was tempted to smile. “In any case, please don’t feel obligated to stay if you don’t want to.”

“Actually…I wouldn’t mind hanging out more with Shaun. While I’m here.”

“I’m…sure he’d like that.”

They could have hung laundry on the tension strung between them.

“Well, then,” he said, jangling his car keys, “I suppose I’ll go back to the hotel, get my things. If that’s okay.”

Propping her elbow on the arm of the sofa, Cass let her head drop into her palm, her eyes drifting closed. “Blake, please. Don’t make me think. Or make decisions. Or even react. Just do whatever you need to do, okay?”

“Only if you’re sure…”

Now her eyes popped open. “Blake!”

The ambivalence in the gentle brown eyes that met hers tied her insides into a million little knots. And she knew, at that moment, that he hadn’t changed. Not really. Not enough to matter, at least.

Why, God? Why are you doing this to me?

She straightened, folding her hands primly in what was left of her lap. “I’m going to be miserable, no matter what you do. So if it makes Lucille a little happier right now…” Her breath gripped her throat, and she realized how perilously close she was to falling apart. “And I’m sure Shaun really would appreciate your being here,” she got out. “He’s got some activities planned I’m not going to be up for. If you could stick around and take him, I’d be very grateful.”

At that, she saw some of the tension ease from her former husband’s shoulders. “I’d be happy to help,” he said with that smile that used to…

Never mind what that smile used to do. She couldn’t let it do it now. Or ever again. And that’s all she needed to remember, she thought as she watched Blake leave the room, recalling how she used to cuddle up to those broad shoulders on chilly mornings.…

N’uh, uh-uh…

All she needed to remember was that remembering was not an option.

Chapter Two

Blake found Shaun doing a bad impression of a skateboarder in the cul-de-sac in front of the house. The kid had changed into a pair of droopy jeans with shredded hems, topped by three layers of shirts in varying degrees of grunge. For a split second, Blake considered whether he even wanted to be seen with the kid.

“I’m going back to the hotel to get my stuff,” he called over. “Wanna come?”

The skateboard went flying in one direction, Shaun in another, as he came to a halt. Panting, he took off his hat—its original color anybody’s guess—shook out his now-unconfined hair, then pushed the hat back on his head. Backward. “You staying here?” he asked as he snatched the skateboard up off the pavement, then ambled toward Blake, board dangling from his knuckles.

“Appears so.” Blake waited until the boy reached him before continuing. “Lucille’s idea.”

Shaun nodded, a half grin tugging at his lips as he hissed out a breath. “What’d Mom say?”

“Not much,” Blake said cautiously. “Although she did mention that you had some plans for the next few days and maybe I could play shuttle service.”

Another nod. “Yeah, that’d be cool. I s’pose.” Now he gave Blake’s Range Rover the once-over. “Not bad,” he pronounced, skimming one hand over the hood. “New?”

“The Bronco gave up the ghost last winter.” For some reason, Shaun’s nonchalance was making Blake antsy. “So. You want to come with me or not?”

“Yeah. Sure. C’n I put the board in back?”

“Yeah. Sure,” Blake echoed, opening the door.

The skateboard duly deposited, they both climbed into the car. Shaun immediately asked if he could turn on the radio; Blake, assuming the kid wasn’t thinking along the lines of an easy listening or classical station, not so immediately agreed. Two button clicks later, the glove-leather interior of his car pulsed with mind-numbing, quadrophonically enhanced hip-hop. Blake glanced over at his son, who was drumming the dash in time to the…music. He sucked in a deep, deep breath, then let it out very, very slowly.

It was a start.

Cass blew a puff of air through her bangs and considered the plate of food in her hands, still uneaten, still unwanted. Right on cue, reminding her she wasn’t the only one who needed to eat, the baby delivered a swift kick to her right kidney. With a sigh, she lifted something unrecognizable to her mouth and began to nibble, only to quickly dispose of it in her napkin. Whoever had put the chicken liver on her plate had an obvious death wish. Liver, in whatever form, from whatever animal, was still something’s innards, and Cass did not eat innards. Ever.

Tears sprang to her eyes.

“Hey, honey…you okay?”

Cass immediately reined everything in as Mercy plopped herself down beside her, wiping her sapphire-blue-tipped fingers on a napkin. The nails were a perfect match to the petite woman’s fitted suit. Her lips, thankfully, were not.

“Sure,” Cass answered. “I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So if you’d already made up your mind how I was, why’d you ask?”

“Because that’s what friends do.”

“Ask? Or predetermine the answers?”

“Whatever works.”

Cass settled farther into the sofa, the plate precariously balanced on top of the mound that contained her unborn child. “Well, consider this. If I was okay, they probably really would come take me away.”

“Good point,” Mercy said. “But with the baby coming and everything? Dana and I are just worried about you, you know?”

Dana Malone, the third partner in their business venture, was—thank God—not in evidence at the moment. “Don’t be. Please. You know hovering makes me crazy.”

“Tough. If we didn’t bug you, you’d probably starve to death.” Yards of ebony corkscrew curls, only minimally tamed by a narrow, blue velvet headband, tangled with the collar of her suit as she shook her head. “For someone so savvy about running a business, you’re pathetic when it comes to taking care of yourself.” Teak eyes settled on Cass’s plate. “Why didn’t you eat the liver?”

“Because I’d rather cut out my own. So live up to your name, Mercy, and show me some.”

“Liver’s a good source of iron, which you need for the baby—”

“So bring me a bowl of Total. Get off my case.”

Mercy humphed, then scanned the room and the dwindled-to-almost-nothing crowd. “Your ex left?” she asked, making Cass jump.

“Only temporarily,” she said, trying to sound blasé. “Lucille got her claws in him and invited him to stay over.”

“Stay over? As in, here?” One sapphire nail jabbed downward. “In this house?”

The soft leather cushioned Cass’s aching neck muscles as she leaned back against the sofa and faced her partner. “Does that mean I’m not the only one who thinks this is a little strange?”

Her brows now dipped, Mercy leaned over and snitched a taquito off Cass’s plate. Crossing her legs, she propped her elbow on her knee as she munched, waving the truncated taquito around for emphasis. “I think…I think I don’t know what I think. Except… Dios mio, he’s a hunk and a half. Oh, God—” Five long fingers clamped around Cass’s wrist. “That was really stupid.”

“Forget it. Besides, you’re right.”

Up went the brows again.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Merce. Look. If someone lets you borrow something—like, I don’t know, a beautiful piece of jewelry or something—it’s no less beautiful when you have to give it back, right?”

Mercedes considered that for a moment, then said, “Well, all I have to say is, what you gave back is serious Harry Winston material.” She shook her head, then picked a cheesy something or other off Cass’s plate and popped it into her mouth. Mercedes Zamora, Cass had decided a long time ago, epitomized the word spitfire. Petite, pretty, vivacious, adorable figure, just quirky enough to keep you on your toes. “So what happened? Why’d you two break up?”

And deadly.

“Geez, lady. Anybody ever tell you your timing stinks?”

Mercy pinned her with a look that could intimidate a Mafia goon. “Maybe. But you have this nasty habit of holding things in, and that’s not good, you know? Very bad for the blood pressure.”

Cass closed her eyes, hoping against hope the woman would go away. “I’d rather think of it as keeping my personal life, well…personal.”

But going away was clearly not on Mercy’s to-do list. From two feet away, Cass could hear her chewing. “The guy’s history, right?”

The mantel clock chimed during the several seconds that passed before Cass replied, her eyes still closed. “Ancient, even.”

“So?”

“So…” So she would toss her friend a scrap and maybe then she’d go away. “We got married too early. We couldn’t handle it. End of story.” The baby squirmed again; Cass absently rubbed the little elbow or knee or whatever it was. And through the anger and the confusion and all the dreck that threatened to turn her into a raving nutso, floated the love she felt for the little guy who knew nothing of any of this.

“And…you’re not going to say anything more.”

Tired as she was, Cass opened her eyes, looked her friend straight in hers and lied. “There’s nothing else to say. Really.” She shrugged. “Just one of those things.”

Mercy rolled her eyes and stuffed another taquito into her cute little mouth.

* * *

Blake’s head was still softly buzzing, like overhead power lines, from his far-too-close encounter with current pop culture. More than his humming head, however, he’d regretted that the noise had precluded conversation. Now, as he tossed his overnight bag into the car before returning to the house, he decided to get the conversation going before his son made any musical requests.

“So…how’s school?”

The sardonic smile seemed far too old on a fifteen-year-old’s face. “Dude—” he buckled up, adjusted his shoulder strap “—you sound like every lame father in every lame movie, you know, when the father is, like, trying to ‘relate’ to his estranged kid.”

Blake tried not to tense. Or get defensive. Or ask if Shaun wanted the music back on. “I see. Well, unfortunately I really am interested in how you’re doing in school. Lame though that may be.”

“’S’okay,” the kid allowed, and Blake felt a muscle or two relax. “I made Honor Roll last nine weeks.” He leaned forward, index finger poised to send Blake over the edge. Blake caught his wrist.

“Forget it. My brain cells are still staggering around in my head, thudding into each other. They need some time to recuperate, okay?”

Shaun was giving him that odd, pitying look again. Then he scrunched down in his seat, his arms folded over his chest. “Yeah. Whatever.”

They pulled out onto I-40, headed back toward Albuquerque’s Far Heights. “Good for you. About the Honor Roll, I mean.”

“Yeah, but like, Mom is still on me about everything.” The words tumbled out in a rush. “Where am I going? Who am I going to be with? Crap like that.”

The reprimand fell out of Blake’s mouth before he could catch it. “Watch your mouth, Shaun.”

“God.” The word came out on a groan. “Not you, too.”

“Yep. Me, too.” Blake checked his side mirror before pulling into the left lane to pass a truck. “A regular tyrant. In any case, your mother has every right to know where you are and what you’re doing. In case you missed it, you’re not legal yet. She’s responsible for you. If you screw up, she gets blamed.”

Shaun shifted in his seat, his brow beetled. “Why does everyone assume I’m going to screw up?”

Remembering what it was like to be his age should have helped. Instead, thinking about the Dark Ages of his youth only made Blake feel old and tired and woefully inept. For a split second he envied his partner, Troy, and his three-year-old twins. Three-year-olds, even those three-year-olds, he could deal with. A Happy Meal and the zoo and you were good to go. Teenagers…?

His heartfelt sigh earned him yet another of Shaun’s looks. “No one does,” he said quietly. Hopefully. “But kids do mess up, you know. And she—and I—just want you to be careful.”

“Geez, man…” The lanky arms twisted more tightly across his chest. But there were no further comments. Blake wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or not.

“So…” Fool that he was, Blake refused to let the silence gain a foothold. “Next lame question…” That got a sideways glance and a cocked eyebrow. “Any girls in your life?”

“You mean, like a girlfriend?” Shaun gave a sharp, short laugh. “Uh, no. Chicks are way too expensive. Besides, with no wheels, it’s like, pointless. I mean, whuttami s’posed to do? Ask Mom to drive me on a date?”

He decided not to go anywhere near the “wheels” topic. “Whoa. Chicks?”

Bam! Up went the wall again. “Hey. Lighten up. It’s not like they care or anything.”

“Well, I care. And your mother would probably boot you clear into next week if she heard you say that. Let me fill you in, if you expect to get anywhere with the female sex, ever. ‘Girls’ is okay until they reach about seventeen. After that, they’re ‘women.” ’

Silence. Then, “You going to criticize everything I say?”

Damn.

“That wasn’t my intention, Shaun. Look, I didn’t come down here to argue with you—”

“Why did you come down, anyway?”

Puzzled, Blake flicked his son a glance. “Because I thought you wanted me to.”

“Oh, right. Like that made any difference before.”

Careful…

“Meaning?”

“Meaning…” The kid hit the automatic window button, lowering the tinted glass. Raised it again. Lowered it. Slouched even farther down in his seat. “Meaning how many times did I ask you to come down this past year, and you were too busy? Now, suddenly, Alan’s dead, and look who’s here.” The boy punched his knee with his fist. “Oh, hell, man…this really, really sucks.”

His own stomach churning, Blake spoke without thinking. “Shaun. Language.”

“Oh, come on, man. This is way kids talk nowadays. Get with the program, geez.”

“I’m not naive, Shaun,” Blake snapped, angry that they were skirting the issue. Angrier because he wasn’t sure what the issue was. “This is the way kids have always talked. Around each other. Not around their parents.” He leveled his gaze at his son. “Got it?”

A sullen glare was his only response.

Several seconds passed before Blake spoke. “I apologize. I didn’t come all this way to hassle you about your language. But I guess…I’m not very good at this.”

He caught Shaun’s frown. “Good at what?”

One hand on the steering wheel, Blake gestured ineffectually with the other. “Knowing what to say when someone dies. To make them feel better.” At the boy’s blank stare, Blake pushed on, “About Alan’s death. I imagine you’re upset about it—”

Shaun’s harsh laugh startled him. “Why would I be upset about that? I mean, yeah, it was a shock and all, but upset?” He shook his head.

Now it was Blake’s turn to look blank.

The kid blew a disdainful “pffh” of air between his lips. “The man didn’t care Jack about me. Oh, he made noises at first like he was going to, I don’t know, fill some gap in my life or something…” Shaun propped one foot up on the dashboard, banging his fist against his knee. “Give me a break.”

Blake didn’t know what to say to that, although a vague anger suffused his thought. “I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

Shaun rubbed his hand over his thigh, then picked at a loose thread from a hole in the denim. “It had nothing to do with you. No big deal.”

“But it does have something to do with you, which makes it a very big deal.”

The boy’s sad shrug made him feel like slime. But his confession sparked more than a few other questions in his brain, all of which centered on Cass’s relationship with her second husband, none of which were any of Blake’s business.

He told himself.

“I really am sorry I wasn’t able to come down before,” Blake said quietly, needing to justify himself somehow while still skirting the truth. “But it wasn’t as if we didn’t see each other. Besides, I thought you enjoyed coming up to Denver. Getting way from the house.” He glanced over. “Going to Broncos games.”

The boy went through his hat-off, shove-fingers-through-hair, hat-back-on routine. “Yeah, I guess. It was okay.” Since that’s what you want to hear, Dad, his expression said, that’s what I’ll give you.

“But it wasn’t what you wanted.”

That merited a grunt.

“I told you,” Blake persisted, “I was busy. Getting away this past year wasn’t easy. The business—”

“You own it, for crying out loud. You can do anything you want.”

“It doesn’t work that way, buddy.” At Shaun’s not-buying-it glare, Blake added, “Just because I don’t punch a time clock doesn’t mean I have more free time. If anything, I have less. And this year was a killer in terms of expansion—”

“Dad, please. You make ice cream.”

Blake’s hand squeezed the steering wheel, hard. Anger hissed through his veins, at Shaun for his insolence, at himself for creating the situation that created the insolence to begin with. “Yeah. I make ice cream. By myself, in my kitchen, one gallon at a time.”

Again, no response.

“Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but in ten years Troy and I have set up three processing plants around the country and sold more than a 150 franchises in thirty-seven states. That didn’t happen by working nine-to-five.”

He could feel duplicates of his own deep-brown eyes scrutinizing the side of his face. “And was it worth it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re rich, right?”

Wondering where this was heading, Blake carefully replied, “Let’s just say it’s been a long time since I’ve worried about meeting the monthly bills.”

“And, like, what has all that gotten you, exactly?”

Ah. They’d pulled into the wide driveway fronting the three-car garage at the side of Cass’s house. Blake cut the engine, then leaned back, one hand on the steering wheel. Typically for this time of year, the wind had picked up, hazing the air with dust and pollen. But the clog in his throat, he guessed, had little to do with the sudden jump in the pollen count. “I’ve been able to provide jobs for a lot of people, Shaun. You won’t have to worry about college—”

“Dammit, Dad! Can’t you give a single straight answer?”

His heart pounding, Blake met his son’s angry gaze. “Give me a straight question, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Fine,” Shaun retorted. “Are you happy?”

Blake squinted out the windshield, jabbing a hand through his hair in a gesture that echoed his son’s. “No. Not really.”

“So what’s the freakin’ point?” Shaun said with such vehemence Blake whipped his head back around. “What is it with grown-ups and their fixation with success? So you’ve, like, buried yourself in this business. And now you’ve got all this money, right? But, what else do you have?”

An early season lizard darted up the adobe wall as Blake stared out the windshield, trying to figure out what to say. “Are you talking about us, Shaun?” He turned to face his son. The lowermost earring in Shaun’s lobe glinted dully. “About my not being here for you?”

“Man, you just don’t get it, do you? Dude—I’m not talking about you and me! I’m talking about—”

“Oh! Oh! Come quick!”

They both looked up to see Lucille frantically waving from the second-story deck, the fringed ends of a gold-and-purple scarf she’d tied around her head plastering to her face in the wind. “It’s Cassie!” she yelled, clawing at the scarf. “She fell, now she’s having contractions, and she won’t let me call anyone—”

Blake was out of the car like a shot, aware of Shaun’s car door slamming a split second behind his as he bounded across the driveway and up the stairs into the house.

Her mouth set in a grimace, Cass adjusted the pillows behind her back, then leaned up against the black lacquer headboard. “They’re just Braxton-Hicks. They’ll pass.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than Blake saw her lips thin even more in an attempt to mask the contraction. He instantly leaned over, placing his hand on her abdomen. Obeying an instinct for which he’d long since had no need, he sneaked a glance at his watch, breathing out a small sigh of relief when he felt her muscles relax after barely twenty seconds. He caught her glower, the bright-blue eyes faded to almost the same gray as her sweater and maternity pants. In that outfit, she was practically invisible against the muted-plaid bedspread covering the enormous bed. She swatted at his hand, which he posthaste removed.

“If I’d needed my midwife, I’d’ve called her.”

“I doubt it.”

She shot him a look, then levered herself higher up, lacing her hands together over her middle. “I’m not having this baby, Blake. Not today, at any rate.”

He gave her thigh a friendly pat. “That’s my girl. As much of a pain as ever.”

Her eyes flitted briefly to his, then away. But he saw the smile twitching her lips. “A gal’s gotta maintain her reputation, after all.”

Blake sat on the edge of the bed, carefully palming the knot her hands made over her tummy. “What happened?”

He could see her struggle to remain aloof as she contemplated their layered hands. “I can’t see underneath me,” she said softly, like a child trying to downplay an errant deed. “I was on my way into the living room and misjudged where the step was, that’s all. And my sandal twisted out from under me.” One shoulder hitched. “So Mommy went boom.”

“And then the contractions started—”

That got a sigh of pure exasperation. “I told you. They’re not contractions. Not real ones, anyway. I’ve been having these for the last month.” A fierceness out of all proportion to the situation blazed in her eyes. “They do seem to come on when I’m particularly stressed. And I think the last few days would qualify, wouldn’t you?”

He gently squeezed her hand, then removed it, tamping down the irrational, absurd surge of jealousy. He’d left her, for God’s sake—what did he expect? That she’d stay alone for the rest of her life?

“Yes,” he finally said. “I imagine they would.”

“You okay, Mom?”

They both looked over at Shaun, who’d come a few feet into the room, wearing that hopeful, frightened look of a kid desperately seeking reassurance.

“Yes, honey, I’m fine,” Cass replied with a tired smile. “Lucille just went a little nuts, that’s all.”

“A pregnant woman lands flat on her tuchus four feet in front of me, I’m going to go nuts,” came from the doorway. “It’s an old lady’s prerogative.” Lucille stomped into the bedroom—or she would have stomped if she’d weighed more than a feather and the room hadn’t been so thickly carpeted—sweeping the scarf’s tails over her shoulders with a gesture worthy of Greta Garbo.

“Well?” she directed at Blake, though her eyes remained pinned on her quarry. “Did you talk some sense into her?”

Reluctantly, Blake stood. “I…” He caught Cass’s warning glare. “Actually, I think she’s probably fine. The contractions seem mild and short and she’s not in any pain.” He frowned at her. “Are you?”

She shook her head. Blake lowered his voice, although he decided against wagging his finger at her. Since he wasn’t really keen on the idea of having it bitten off.

“But she will stay in bed. Won’t she?”

On another sigh, she nodded, then said, “Only if everyone will quit obsessing about me.”

A brief tremor of familiarity swept through him. At about the same point in Shaun’s pregnancy, Cass had slipped off a ladder while hanging curtains in the nursery. She’d started contractions that time, too. And she’d refused to get herself checked, just like now. And Blake had bullied her into staying in bed, just like now.

That time, though, she had accepted his railroading with good humor, love shining in her eyes. Now her acceptance seemed tainted with bitter resignation. She clearly didn’t want him here. Yet her very resistance had set off a faint, persistent alarm—illogical though it was—way at the back of his brain that her not wanting him around was exactly why he needed to stay.

“You want something to eat, sweetheart?” he heard Lucille ask, jarring his thoughts. “Some juice, maybe?”

“Nothing, thanks,” Cass said with a hint of a smile. She slid down into the pillows, then over onto her side, shoving one pillow underneath her bulging middle. “I think maybe—” she yawned “—I’ll just take a little nap…”

Her eyes closed the instant the words were out of her mouth. Blake looked up to catch Shaun looking from one of them to the other, and he instantly surmised what Shaun had been about to say when Lucille’s screams had interrupted him. No, he hadn’t been talking about Blake’s relationship with him. He’d been talking about Blake’s relationship with Cass.

Oh, God, he thought on an exhaled breath after Shaun and Lucille left the room. Blake wasn’t the only one who wanted his family back. Which meant—maybe—he had an ally.

Of course, this also meant that Cass had an adversary—since somehow he suspected she’d rather give birth while riding a galloping camel than get back together with him—but, hey. Sometimes the odds are in your favor, sometimes they’re not. Such is life, right?

On his own way out, though, he glanced around the bedroom his wife had shared with another man, at the mottled tan walls and thick taupe Berber carpet and lifeless chrome-and-glass nightstands. He caught himself wondering if the baby Cass carried had been conceived in that bed, then sharply reminded himself he was being juvenile.

Just as he reminded himself that she didn’t owe him a damn thing. And certainly not a shot at something he’d forfeited so long ago.

His gaze once again swept the room. For all its lack of charm or warmth, nothing in here had come cheap. A study in minimalist extravagance. And again, very un-Cass, who adored chintz and frills and lace. And cats. The woman was crazy for cats, he remembered suddenly. When they’d been married, they’d had four, not counting the outside strays Cass would “secretly” feed.

He looked back at her, then crossed over to the beige tweed chaise in the corner of the room, pulling a gray mohair throw off of it. That’s what was wrong, he decided, gently covering the obviously unhappy woman who still held his heart in her hands. There were no cats in this house. No goofball kittens, no swaggering toms, no prissy longhairs to climb up in your lap and leave a veritable fur rug in their wake. He skimmed one knuckle over the soft pile, shaking his head.

No wonder she was so miserable.

Finally.

Once she was positive Blake was gone, Cass opened her eyes, tucking one hand underneath her cheek, only to choke with the effort not to cry when she smelled his scent on her hand.

This wasn’t going to work, his being here. She wished he’d go away, leave her alone to sort out what was left of her life in peace. Okay, sure, when push came to shove, he’d made a rotten husband and father. And yet, she mused as she hitched the throw higher on her shoulders, she’d never known a kinder human being. When he was around, anyway. And she didn’t need, or want, kindness. Kindness was dangerous, made you believe in things that shouldn’t be believed in.

And pity was even worse. And that’s what it would become, wouldn’t it? When he found out? She didn’t think she could stand that. So what was this nearly overwhelming, idiotic urge to beg him to stay and make it all better?

Well. Apparently, she hadn’t changed any more than Blake. At least, not as much as she’d wanted to believe. Not on the inside, at least. But then, perhaps growing up wasn’t as much about conquering your weaknesses as it was about seeing them for what they were. And then never, ever letting them get the upper hand.

She was exhausted was all, she told herself. And the contractions had given her more pause than she’d let on. Still, her sadness had gone beyond weeping, to a sort of not-quite numbness a millimeter short of despair. She’d like to think it was nothing more than hormone-induced moodiness, exacerbated by recent events, but she’d given up lying to herself for Lent. And for however many days on earth she had left after that.

In all this, the baby was the only thing that seemed to make any sense. Not that Cass loved this child more than Shaun—as if that would have been possible—but by virtue of Shaun’s being first, she spent so much time worrying about him and fussing at him that sometimes love got lost in the shuffle. She’d made lots of mistakes with Shaun, more than she liked to admit. So maybe she was being a Pollyanna, but somehow she hoped this child would give her an opportunity to make things, if not right, at least better. Even if, once again, she was doing this all on her own.

Such was obviously her lot in life, one with which she should have long since made peace. Because being on her own was good for her, made her stronger. Lord, she thought on a tight smile. The life-as-spinach philosophy. Hey—she could write a book, go on Oprah.

She lay there, feeling the little one squirming inside her, watching the pine tree outside her window shudder noiselessly in the wind—the triple-glazed windows allowed no sound. After a year, she still hadn’t adjusted to the airless silence. But Alan couldn’t stand outside noises. Or dust.

Weenie, she thought irritably, clutching the pillow. How would he have dealt with the noise and mess and dirt of a child?

Well. Moot point now, wasn’t it? Fifty years old, no spare tire, no predilection for junk food, no history of heart disease, and the man drops dead while jogging. Major coronary, gone within minutes, the paramedics assured her. He didn’t suffer, they said.

No. He wouldn’t.

Her eyes squeezed shut again as she realized she couldn’t move. Didn’t want to. Her brain felt cluttered—so many decisions to make so quickly, none of them easy. But there was one thing, if nothing else, Cass knew—fish would play strip poker before she’d ever marry again. Not for her sake, not for the child’s sake, not for anyone’s sake. Two unmitigated disasters were quite enough for one lifetime, thank you. Especially as she’d be paying, literally, for the second mistake for the rest of her life. So from now on, she was relying on nobody but herself. God knows, she wasn’t perfect, but at least she wouldn’t give herself a broken heart She didn’t think, anyway.

A tear dribbled down her cheek, tickling her nose; she irritably swiped at it, despising herself for feeling like a whiny toddler who couldn’t have a cookie before dinner. But after all, she reminded herself, cookies weren’t good for you.

Spinach, however, was.

She should write that down.

Chapter Three

Since Shaun missed his bus the next morning, Blake drove him to school. To his combined relief and annoyance, the boy wasn’t in a talkative mood, yet Blake still felt as though someone had played basketball with his brain by the time he returned to the house to find Lucille on the second-story deck, madly planting pansies in assorted pots and tubs. Still, the sight—the idea—of someone planting flowers was reassuring somehow. And at this point, he’d take whatever tidbits of reassurance he could get.

“Got enough flowers, here?” he asked the industrious little figure whizzing about like a dazed parakeet.

“I bought them before—” She cut herself off, shaking her head, then shoved her sunglasses back up onto the bridge of her nose. “If I don’t get them into the dirt, they’ll all die.”

His eyes narrowed, Blake scanned the horizon, waiting for the awkward moment to dissipate on its own, like an unpleasant aroma. “Cass still asleep?” he asked after a moment.

“Far as I know.” Speaking of unpleasant aromas, enough perfume for an entire chorus line wafted over to him on the stiff breeze. Blake casually moved upwind of her, squinting from the glare bouncing off the rhinestone trim of her electric-blue sweatshirt. She lifted her head, peering at him from the south side of a floppy-brimmed straw hat with chiffon ties securely anchored beneath a wattled chin. “You get Shaun to school okay?”

“We just made it,” he said to mirror-coated sunglasses. “If I’d known he was supposed to catch a bus, I would have hustled him out a lot sooner.”

Crimson lips spread out into an amazingly wide smile. “Wouldn’t have done you a bit of good, cutie. Kid misses the bus every single day. And every single day Cass chews him out for it.” The hat quivered as she nodded toward a white wrought-iron patio chair with a plastic floral cushion lashed to it. “So sit. Enjoy your coffee while I putz.”

So he sat, occasionally offering a comment in response to one from Lucille as he nursed a cup of Towanda’s miraculous coffee, staring toward the west at white-capped Mt. Taylor glittering against an endless sky. As warm as it had been yesterday, the temperature had dropped again overnight; he flipped up the collar of his denim jacket against the breeze. At least the March sun still listed southward enough to splash a few welcome rays across the western-facing deck, taking the chill off the air. Still, it was a magnificent spring morning, at such odds with the understandable tension in the house.

Suddenly aware he was being eyed, he smiled. Her brow knotted, Lucille didn’t return it. Tension coiled at the base of Blake’s neck, as if he sensed what was coming.

“I shouldn’t have insisted you stay here,” she said, returning to her task. Silver gecko earrings swung in dizzying circles as she poked and prodded in the soil, a three-inch-wide silver-and-turquoise cuff smothering a wrist that looked far too frail to support it.

His fingers tightened around the mug’s handle. “What makes you say that?”

“Because you still have feelings for Cassie.”

Blake allowed the breeze to carry away a brittle chuckle. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

“At my age, what’s the point? So, am I wrong?”

He tapped a finger against the edge of the mug. “No,” he admitted quietly.

“And does Cassie know?”

“What do you think?”

The old woman sighed, her expression unreadable behind the huge sunglasses. Then she heaved herself to her feet, clumping in red plastic gardening clogs over to the tempered-glass patio table where she’d left the rest of the flowers.

“So tell me something…Cassie and Shaun have been living here for more than a year. How come this is the first time I’ve seen you?”

The swallow of coffee in his mouth turned acrid. “It seemed the more prudent course of action, considering Cass was married to another man and all.”

“Yeah, but your son wasn’t.” Before he could figure out what, if anything, to say to that, she said, “Which would lead to one of two conclusions. A, that you’re a slimeball. Or B, that you didn’t want to risk seeing her. So which is it?”

“You forgot C. All of the above.”

She batted at the air. “Nah. Believe me, I know from slime-balls. You don’t even come close. So I’m going with B. Okay, next subject—I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t seem more broken up over my son’s death.”

Blake doubted he had enough caffeine in his system to keep up with the woman, but as she didn’t appear interested in slowing down, the best he could do was hobble along behind. “I hadn’t… It isn’t my place to…”

But she wasn’t listening. Now kneeling on a bright yellow foam pad, she gouged the soil with probably more vehemence than necessary. “You bring a baby into the world,” she muttered to the dirt, “you think nothing can go wrong…”

She jerked her head up to Blake, several strata of makeup insufficient to mask the mixture of bafflement, anger and profound sorrow etched in what had once been, he decided, a beautiful face. “Why am I telling you this? A stranger? Except, maybe, who else can I tell?” she went on without waiting for a reply. “To keep all this locked inside…” She pressed one fist to her sternum, wagging her head. “Maybe this is why you’re here, so an old lady can vent her spleen.”

Blake leaned forward, gently removing the sunglasses to see turquoise-lidded green eyes shimmering with tears. “Vent away.”

She removed a tissue from a pocket tucked into the sweatshirt, then dabbed with extreme care at her eyes. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Lucille let out a great sigh, then said, more to the pansies than to Blake, “Before Cassie, Alan had never married. Dated, yes, but never married. When he hadn’t settled down by thirty-five, his father and I, we figured maybe he was…well, you know.”

She lowered her voice, as if the neighbors might hear. “It was a disappointment, but what could we say? A person’s gotta follow his own path, right? Anyway, after Alan’s father died—we’d been out here ten years already, we couldn’t take those awful winters back east anymore—Alan asks me if I’d like to move in with him, so I wouldn’t be alone. So I figure, why not? I mean, Wanda came in to do for me, sure—I’ve got a bunch of medical problems, you don’t want to know, Wanda’s a practical nurse but she doesn’t like telling people ’cause then they all start asking her for medical advice—but being by myself at night didn’t sit so well, it was true.

“But then, once I move in? He barely talks to me. Acts like I’m invisible or something. Always too busy, always away on some trip or something, especially once he sold his dry cleaning business, four, five years ago. So I ask you, what was the point of my being here, since I was alone at night, anyway? Or worse, when he was around…” Her lips pursed. “He’d get this look in his eyes, like I was some kind of huge embarrassment to him, like he couldn’t figure out how I was his mother. Nothing but criticisms, every time he saw me. I didn’t talk right, dress right, think right. All I was, was some stupid old woman.…”

Her sentence left hanging in midair, she dug in her sleeve for a tissue, then blew her nose, while Blake felt as though someone had stepped on his chest. “And it finally dawns on me,” she continued, “this is why my meshugah son never married. Never in my life did I see a man more wrapped up in himself! So I figure, the hell with this—I’m outta here, as the young people say.”

Blake couldn’t hold back a smile. “And?” he prodded.

“So I make up my mind to move out into one of those whaddyacallits, those gated communities—except it’s criminal how much they want for rent in those places, so I wasn’t going anywhere—when suddenly Alan brings home this lovely young woman and announces they’re getting married. Out of the blue, just like that, with him pushing fifty, already. Me, I’m thrilled, thinking maybe my son’s finally got his head on straight, that this woman’s performed some kind of miracle. So now, maybe, things will be better.” She hunched her shoulders in a helpless gesture. “I should have known, right?”

A frown pinched Blake’s brow, waiting for her explanation. To his chagrin, however, she veered off on one of her tangents, leaving her thought in the dust.

“That Cassie is a keeper, let me tell you,” she said instead. “Always treated me like gold. And at my age, listen—a daughter-in-law I could get along with…what more could I ask? Oh, sure, it would have been nice if she’d been Jewish, but you can’t have everything, right? But you know something, I love that girl from the bottom of my heart, like she was my own.” She went back to stabbing the dirt. “If anybody deserves good things, it’s her.”

A draft of cold air wriggled up Blake’s jacket, making him shiver.

“Lucille,” he said, “I don’t mean to push, but…what do you mean, you should have known? About Alan?”

It took her a second to find the dropped thread, but then she said, “Oh. That it couldn’t last. That Alan could no more be a real husband than I could fly to the moon.”

“You mean, he was—?”

“No, no. Not that. I told you. Alan only loved himself.” Her lips drew into a tight line, like a vivid, fresh scratch across her face. “But he did want a child. And Cassie, for reasons known only to her, God bless her, agreed.”

Several moments passed before the pieces fell into place. “Are you saying…this was a marriage of convenience?”

“On my son’s side, at least,” Lucille said, rearranging a pansy she’d just planted. “I frankly don’t know…well, Cassie and I never discussed things, exactly…” She hesitated, while Blake’s heart played racquetball inside his chest.

“What?”

Lucille got to her feet again, then clomped closer, perching on the arm of the chair across from his, near enough to lay her hand on his wrist. “Cassie doesn’t know that I know this, so don’t say anything, but, see, I had figured out a couple months ago that things weren’t exactly hunky-dory between them. So I wasn’t all that surprised when Cassie seemed more stunned than grief stricken when Alan died. But then, the day after he dies, after the lawyer leaves the house…” One eye squinted shut as she wagged a gardening-gloved finger. “Then she’s upset. Like someone had yanked the rug out from under her. So I call the lawyer myself, only he starts giving me this song and dance about how there’s nothing to worry about. As if I wouldn’t know telling me there’s nothing to worry about is always the first clue that there is. So I told him to cut the bull, already, and tell me what the hell was going on.” She shrugged. “So he did.”

Maddeningly, she chose that moment to have a sneezing fit that ate up the better part of two minutes. Finally, after another minute of indelicate nose blowing, amid profuse apologies about it being pollen season, she turned to Blake. “To cut a long story short, my son decides, a month after his marriage, to liquidate almost his entire estate and invest in some little up-and-coming computer technology company that, unfortunately, up and went.” She sneezed again, then sighed. “On top of that, there were credit cards. Had he lived, maybe he would’ve landed on his feet. But he didn’t. Which means his estate is worth, as that little Mercedes would say, nada—”

“Lucille!”

They both spun around—Blake snagging Lucille’s spindly arm before she fell off the arm of the chair—to catch Cass standing at the French door, her face ashen but her eyes sparking with embarrassed fury. Every instinct he possessed told him to get his butt out of there and let the two women duke it out. But one look from Cass told him if he so much as moved an eyelash, she’d knock him clear to the Arizona border.

* * *

Her cheeks stung with humiliation. This was her problem. Hers. The only thing in this whole stinkin’ mess she’d been able to control had been who knew and who didn’t. Now, thanks to her mother-in-law, she didn’t even have that.

“Cille, how could you?” Huddled into herself against the morning chill, Cass crossed to the older woman, refusing to look at Blake, to see the pity in his eyes. The baby was kicking her mercilessly this morning, so hard she felt bruised in spots. “How could you go behind my back, discussing family business—” She pressed her hand to her mouth, then lowered it enough to push out, “This was personal, for God’s sake. Is that so hard to understand?”

“And if Blake isn’t family, I’d like to know who is.” Never easily buffaloed, Lucille wagged the trowel at her. “He’s Shaun’s father. Anything that affects Shaun will ultimately affect him. So I thought he should know. And God knows we’d all be taking vacations to Mars before you got around to it.”

The lack of even a hint of remorse in her mother-in-law’s eyes made Cass’s voice—and undoubtedly, her blood pressure as well—rise several notches. “Well, I’m Shaun’s mother, and what and who I tell is my decision. Not yours.”

“Bubelah, calm down. It’s not good for the baby…”

“She’s right, Cass. You’re getting yourself in a state—”

“You stay out of this!” She hurled this in Blake’s direction quickly, so she didn’t really see him, then back at her mother-in-law. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Cille. I’m pregnant, my husband just died, and, as most of Bernalillo County probably knows by now, I am, as they say, financially embarrassed. A little hissy fit isn’t going to raise my blood pressure any more than it already is.” She looked around, saw the flowers. For some reason, that nearly took her over the edge. “And why are you planting flowers? It’s still freezing at night.”

“They’re just pansies, Cass,” Blake said in that even, reasonable tone of voice used on people who live in padded rooms. “They can live through cold weather, remember? We used to plant them in March all the time. So they’ll be fine. Which is more than I can say for you.”

“I am fine, Blake,” she retorted, wrapping her sweater more tightly around her protruding midsection. Her teeth were chattering, the baby was kicking, and right now life was about as far from good as she ever wanted it to get. “B-back off.”

“No, Cass. I’m not going to back off.” Stunned, she met an expression in those deep brown eyes she knew only too well. The this-is-for-your-own-good look. “You just admitted how much stress you’re under—”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t handle it.”

“Why are you being so hardheaded, woman?”

Because my very survival depends on it. “Because I didn’t ask for your interference, Blake,” she said, thinking that only a crazy person would attempt to reason with one being so unreasonable. Except, at the moment she wasn’t too sure which one of them was which. “Besides, after all this time, why are you suddenly so hot to stick your nose in my business?”

“Because maybe I can help, for crying out loud!”

“I don’t need or want your help! So you can tell that idea to go take a hike!”

Inside, the phone rang. After a moment Towanda stuck her head out the door. “It’s for you, Miss Lucille. Your sister in Florida.”

With a sigh, Lucille took off her gloves and tossed them onto the tempered glass table, along with the trowel, which landed with an overloud clatter. “Well. The comments I could make about what I just heard.… All I can say is you should be grateful I’m the kind of woman who knows when to keep her thoughts to herself.” She started into the house, then hesitated, looking from one to the other. “You think you two could manage not to do each other in while I’m gone?”

After a moment they both nodded. Curtly.

For a full minute after Lucille’s departure, neither spoke. Still seething, Cass walked over to the edge of the deck, unsuccessfully ignoring the buzz of energy behind her. She grasped the railing, wincing at the sting of cold metal against her palms as she sucked in several deep breaths, trying to calm down. Trying to think, to ready herself for Blake’s attempt to take charge, to play macho man coming to the rescue. It would be just like him to try to exploit her current situation as a means to appease his own guilt for giving up when she’d really needed him. Wanted him.

Well, too damn bad, she thought sourly. A day late and a penny short, as they say.

And dammit, she thought on another tidal wave of emotion, why was it always all or nothing with this man? Why hadn’t he ever been able to find that middle ground between suffocating her with his protectiveness or ditching her completely?

Brother. Could she get herself in deep, or what?

The house. She would think about the house. Under other circumstances, she might have loved it, with its sweeping views of the city, the way the rooms seemed to endlessly flow into each other. But it was huge and a pain to keep up, and the idea of a baby toddling around with all these stairs scared the hell out of her. Selling it wouldn’t be such a horrible thing. As long as she could unload it before the bank foreclosed on the loan.…

Her fingers found their way to the crease between her brows. Almost immediately, she felt Blake’s arm slip around her shoulders.

Not good. Especially for someone whose grip on her emotions was as precarious as a car hanging off the edge of a cliff in some action movie, the seagull perched on its end the only thing that kept it from going over. With Blake’s touch, the seagull flew away.

And she crashed.

With a soft sob, she turned into the chest that had sheltered her when she was young, that she’d believed would always shelter her. Her bad, most definitely. Still, he smelled the same, felt the same, stroked her back as he always had, his fingertips massaging that spot between her shoulder blades that always tensed up. Like magic, the baby quieted as Blake stroked and soothed and gently rocked her.

It felt too familiar, too right and, consequently, all wrong. She dug into her sweater pocket for a tissue, pulling away to blow her nose.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, looking back out toward the city, shoving her hair out of her face. A nagging wind blew it right back.

“For?”

“Acting like a weepy broad.”

His arm possessed her shoulders again as he nuzzled the top of her head, his chuckle in her hair as soft and seductive as a summer breeze. “Broad seems apt at the moment,” he murmured, gently patting her belly.

She couldn’t back up quickly enough from the flashfire his touch ignited, spitting out the only words guaranteed to make him retreat. “I loved Alan!”

A long second passed, during which his features seemed to ossify, his normally luminous brown eyes turn the color of dried mud. “I’m sure you did.”

Once again she turned away. That Blake was enough of a gentleman not to point out that the man she loved had just screwed her to the wall, only made her angrier. And more confused.

“Cass.” When she refused to turn toward him, he touched her again, this time gently hooking two fingers underneath her chin. “Cass, look at me.” Finally, as if facing a painfully bright light, she glanced up, blinking, and saw the remnants of all the hope and promise of so many years ago, tattered and battered and bruised beyond recognition. Was she seeing what was in his eyes, though, or a reflection of what was in hers?

“Whatever’s happening here goes way beyond the wreck we made of our marriage,” he said. “I never stopped caring about you. No, it’s true,” he added at her snort of disbelief. “About what happens to you. Even now, if there’s anything I can do—”

“There isn’t,” she said flatly. Even less than his pity, the last thing she wanted was insincere lip service about how much he cared about her. Please. Maybe he had, at one point, on some level. But instead of facing their problems, working with her to figure out how to solve them, he’d run. That she’d repeated her mistake with Alan…

Not once, but twice, she’d placed her trust in rainbows. She’d really be an idiot to let it happen again.

“I’ve already got it all figured out,” she said. “I’ll sell the house, and we’ll get a smaller place. Lucille has some income of her own, and I’ve got the shop.” She lifted her chin. “God knows I’ve had a lot less, Blake. This was a shock, true, but it’s not a disaster.”

“You are Woman, you are Strong, you can handle it, right?” he said with a slanted smile that, a lifetime ago, had repeatedly hoodwinked her into bed and out of facing reality. For Shaun’s sake she’d regretted, even been angry, that Blake hadn’t been around more since their divorce; for her own, she’d been immensely grateful he’d stayed away. Because, rather than their strengths complementing each other, their weaknesses had only dragged each other down. Even letting him touch her—especially letting him touch her—was like doing a jig on the edge of a snake pit. Blindfolded.

“Something like that, yes,” she agreed, then started back inside, needing to tear herself away from the insane yearning to seek comfort in Blake’s embrace. After all, there was more to Woman than being strong enough to field all the crap life flung your way.

“What about the charge cards?” she heard behind her.

Turning back, she managed a smile. “Lucille probably made things sound worse than they are. It’s only two or three. I can manage the payments. No problem.” His eyes snagged hers, just long enough for her to realize what she had to say. To do.

“Okay, look, you’re welcome to hang around, for Shaun’s sake. But I really think it’s best if we…well, if we stay out of each other’s way as much as possible. I’ve simply got too much garbage swimming around in my head to deal with anything more.”

A breeze blew a strand of inky hair across his knotted brow. “I thought we were still friends, Sunshine.”

She bit back a curse. He hadn’t called her that since the early days of their marriage, when some group or other had resurrected the old song. Blake used to sing it to her—really, really badly—usually while dancing around the apartment with her. He was a really, really bad dancer, too, she recalled, the memory like a bittersweet poison.

“Be real, Blake—our friendship died with our marriage, and you know it.”

The frown turned into a full-blown scowl. “My fault?”

“No. No, Blake. Nobody’s fault.” That much she did believe. “But the only reason you’re here is for Shaun. Not for me, remember? There is nothing between us. Not anymore. And there’s not going to be. If you really want to help me, you’ll remember that and respect my wish to be left alone.”

With that she quickly went into the house, before Blake could see how badly she was shaking. It would be so easy to accept whatever he had to offer—his friendship, his help, even his concern. But “easy” came with a price, one she’d already paid too many times. With this last time, she was going to pay enough for a thousand women.

She stopped just inside the door until a contraction passed, then continued into the granite-and-chrome kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. Towanda said something to her, but Cass only vaguely responded, and the woman went on about her business without further hassle.

She eased herself up onto a bar stool and palmed her forehead, her bangs spiked between her fingers. Lucille didn’t know the whole truth, thank God. Cass had threatened the lawyer within an inch of his life if he ever let on the extent of Alan’s—and now Cass’s—debt, let alone the nature of it. There had been no bad investment in some start-up company. True, the insurance had been borrowed against, his portfolio trashed, the equity in the house virtually tapped out. But there were more than three charge cards—each with a maxed-out credit limit greater than some people paid for their cars. Luxury cars. The truth was, no matter how hard she worked, she had no idea how she’d ever pay it all off.

Nor was she about to tell an eighty-year-old woman with a dicey heart that her son—her quiet, unassuming, ultraconservative son—had had a wee problem with gambling. That on his business trips, ostensibly to check out potential investments, he went instead to gambling meccas around the country. A string of good luck a few years back had made him far wealthier than his dry cleaning chain ever had, with the unfortunate effect of convincing Alan he was invincible. What Cass hadn’t known when they’d started dating was that his luck had begun a downward spiral—until he met her. He’d told her—after they were married, of course—that he liked to “dabble” in the market, and that since they’d started dating, he’d been doing very well. He called her his good luck charm; she hadn’t taken it seriously.

He must’ve thought she was one helluva rabbit’s foot.

And she must’ve been more worn-out than she’d thought to have taken him at face value, to have missed the signs of his sickness. Not to mention his true personality. He’d been a damn good actor, she’d give him that. Still, weren’t people who wore masks of their own supposed to be more adept at seeing through others’? In her case, apparently not.

The lies, the empty promises to get help, that came later, however—those, she couldn’t have missed if she’d been in a coma. If it hadn’t been for Lucille…

Cass kicked back the rest of her juice and slipped off the stool, then perambulated over to the sink where Towanda snatched it out of her hand and washed the glass, before hustling back to the other side of the kitchen. When Cass turned around, her heart somersaulted into her throat.

Blake blocked the kitchen doorway, his forearms bracing the frame. His right foot was thrust forward, the knee bent, accentuating the way his soft, worn jeans clung to thighs as muscled as they were during his college-track-team days. She forced her attention north, past his trim hips and waist, his chest, his shoulders, to a face locked in a determined grimace. The eyes fastened to hers glinted with anger and concern but not, she realized, pity.

She opened her mouth to say—Well, actually, she had no idea what she was going to say. Not that Blake was about to give her the chance.

“Now, you listen to me for a moment, Sunshine,” he started in, quietly, unaware of Towanda’s presence not ten feet away. “I know we’ve had our problems. And, God knows, we still do. But I’ve spent far too long taking out our differences on our son, staying away from him so I wouldn’t have to deal with you. I know what you’re going to say, so you can save your breath and let me fill in the blanks—yes, I took my sweet time figuring this out. And yes, I know I’ve screwed up big-time, especially with our son. No sense calling a skunk anything else. But I figure I can either let things go on the way they have been—and risk losing him altogether—or see if Shaun will give me a shot at coming up from behind. And since you’re Shaun’s mother, my trying to fix things with him and ignore you isn’t going to work. Which means you and I are both gonna have to finally grow up, decide exactly where we stand with each other and go from there.”

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