Shoreline Drive (19 page)

With a guilty start, Merry fumbled the phone before she managed to get it back up to her mouth. “Yes! Sorry, Mom. I’m here—but we’re feeding Alex, and he’s determined to get the sweet potatoes all over everywhere except into his tummy.”

“You and Ben are in the same room together! But it’s the day of the wedding, it’s bad luck,” Jo fretted.

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Merry said, “Mom, it’s not like that with us. And anyway, Ben doesn’t believe in luck. Don’t worry about it, we’ll be fine.”

As she said it, she realized that she actually believed it. Lighter in heart than she’d been in days—maybe in months or years—Merry breathed out a long sigh, and with it, all her doubts and worries.

“And Mom. Thank you for everything you’re doing. I know you don’t completely approve of how fast this is all happening, or my reasons for saying yes to it—and yet you’re still working like crazy to help me make it happen. That means a lot to me.”

There was a charged silence on the line, full of emotion. Jo cleared her throat, but it didn’t help. Her next words were husky and thick. “I wasn’t there for you when you were younger. But I’m here for you now. I hope you know that.”

The sincerity in her mother’s voice made Merry’s chest hurt. “I do know that. And this marriage—it’s not about getting away from you. I hope
you
know
that
. All I want is the chance to have a real relationship with you that isn’t about the past, and isn’t about me relying completely on you in the present. I don’t think I can be a good daughter—or a good mother—unless I take this step toward independence. Does that make sense?”

Jo sniffed wetly, making Merry smile. “It does. Darn it. I loved having you and the baby around the house—but I understand that you need your own life, and if you think Ben will make you happy, then I’m nothing but glad for you, sweetie.”

“Our lives are intertwined now, no matter who gets married,” Merry pointed out. “Ben and me, Grady and Ella, you and Harrison—we’re still family. We’re all here for each other.”

“Like when Taylor got in trouble and called you, and you knew you could call me.”

A vise of guilt tightened around Merry’s chest. “I know she was mad that I called you instead of showing up myself.”

“Maybe at first, but she understood,” Jo reassured her. “And even if you hadn’t been dealing with Ben’s concussion, it was the right thing to do, notifying Harrison and me.”

“You’re her parents,” Merry said softly. “And after everything that’s happened, all the changes Taylor’s had to adjust to, she needed to know that when she was in trouble, you and her dad would drop everything to come and help her.”

“Shoot, I hate this stupid phone!” Jo’s voice was choked, bringing an answering ache to Merry’s throat. “I wish you were right next to me so I could hug the life out of you.”

“Me, too,” Merry whispered, and for the first time since Alex was born, she meant it. This was the right thing to do. Already, things were better with her mother. “I’ll see you at the courthouse in … gosh, only a couple of hours now. I’d better start getting ready.”

She glanced at Ben, who blinked up at her with a stripe of sweet potato under one eye like a dash of war paint, making his clear gray eyes brighter than she’d ever seen them.

“And goodness knows,” she said huskily, never taking her gaze off Ben. “It’s going to take me the full two hours to scrub my boys clean.”

Merry hung up to the sound of her mother’s soft chuckle, her gaze trained on the two men in her life. “What a mess you both are,” she said, oddly out of breath.

Ben grinned, his teeth bright white in a face tanned by working outdoors in sunny paddocks and pastures. “Are you volunteering to wash us off?”

A pleasurable tingle sparkled through her. It reminded her of flirting with her first crush, the fun and freedom of banter before everything got so heavy. “To take you outside and hose you down, maybe.”

“Do you hear that, Alex?” Ben addressed the cooing, bouncing baby in his high chair. “Your mama is a hard-hearted woman. Threatening you with the hose! What do you think we ought to do about that?”

Alex bounced, banging his open palms on the high chair’s tray, blue eyes wide with the joy of Ben’s full attention.

Ben nodded as if Alex had replied. “I couldn’t agree more. You’re a scholar and a gentleman.”

And before Merry could do more than blink, Ben had plucked Alex out of his high chair and swooped him toward her, both of them covered in sticky sweet potato puree and grinning with manic glee.

Shrieking in half-pretend horror, Merry darted away, leading them on a chase through the house before finally letting herself be caught, strategically, outside the bathroom where they’d set up Alex’s baby tub.

“Okay, you’ve got me.” She panted, thrilled down to her bones at how fun it was simply to play with someone this way. “Now what are you going to do with me?”

Without warning, heat flashed through Ben’s gray eyes, turning them to molten silver. The blaze of very adult desire burned away the teasing, childlike playfulness like a bonfire.

Hands trembling with something Merry couldn’t name—though she knew it wasn’t fear—she reached for her gurgling, clapping baby. “Here, I can do bathtime, if you want to start getting ready.”

But Ben only curled Alex closer to his chest. Alex’s tacky fingers tangled in the overlong waves of his hair. “No way. I got this thing dirty, I’ll clean it up. That’s the kind of values we want to teach Alex in this house. Right, kid? Right.”

It was funny. Merry had never been a baby-talk person. She didn’t like it when adults talked down to children, even very small ones, as if they were lower life-forms incapable of understanding.

She knew all too well that kids understood and took in much more than the adults around them believed.

But now that she had her own baby, she understood where the baby-talk impulse came from. Confronted with that perfect, round, innocent face, her voice seemed to jump into the breathy upper registers without conscious volition. She still tried to use real words instead of the nonsense syllables she’d heard other mommies coo at their little ones, but it wasn’t always easy.

For Ben, though, it appeared to be completely natural to speak to Alex as if he were a rational person, capable of understanding. And Alex, for his part, listened with the kind of rapt attention that made Merry’s heart swell with pride, his dark blue eyes tracking Ben’s expression and the movement of his mouth.

“Thanks. You’re really wonderful with him,” she said. “I’m not sure what we did to deserve this chance at being a happy family with you—but I’m thankful for it.”

*   *   *

Merry’s words hit him like a swift kick to the temple, the utter wrongness of it enough to make him dizzy.

“Don’t thank me.” The words came out harsh and stark, and Ben tried to modulate his tone. “I mean it. I’m the one who should be thanking you. These past weeks with the two of you living here … this house has never felt so much like a home.”

She ducked her head as if she didn’t totally believe him, but he could tell she wanted to. He didn’t know precisely what fear or self-doubt held her back, but he could guess.

In that moment, Ben vowed to himself to do everything in his power to make her feel so safe and wanted at Isleaway Farm that she’d never even consider leaving.

“Okay, well. I’m going to go get showered and figure out what to wear. Since, you know, the traditional white dress isn’t really an option.” She gave a half laugh, combing her slender fingers through the unruly curls of her naturally dark hair. When he first met her, Ben remembered, she’d had it dyed magenta, the deep, dark pink at the heart of a rose.

“Wear whatever you want,” he told her. “Whatever makes you feel most comfortable. Wear a white dress if you want to, and I’ll make mincemeat out of anyone who looks at you sideways.”

“You’re sweet to me,” Merry murmured, eyes wide as if it still surprised her.

Feeling as uncomfortably exposed as if he’d unzipped and dropped his pants in the hallway, Ben scowled. “I’d marry you in a white dress, black leather pants, or in pajamas. I really couldn’t give a crap what you wear.”

Interestingly, instead of increasing Merry’s tension, the sharpness of his retort caused her shoulders to loosen and her blue eyes to sparkle.

“Gee, thanks,” she said with a wry twist to her mouth, but Ben could tell she meant it.

This was the kind of thing that made him want to give up on trying to understand women. When he made an attempt at niceness, she tensed up. But when he was his usual jerky self, she relaxed.

Ben did the only thing he could. He retreated.

“Women,” he whispered to Alex as he carted the orange-spackled kid into the bathroom and started the water running over the small, shallow plastic tub they’d set up in the deep sink. “I’m relying on you to help me decode your mother, buddy. Deal?”

Alex, who’d learned that if he smacked his hands together, everyone around him smiled and laughed and generally acted as if he’d cured cancer, clapped. Ben took it as an acknowledgment of their gentlemen’s agreement. He stripped Alex out of his sticky onesie and dipped him, toes first, into the warm, shallow water.

“Fifty weeks from today, you’ll be my kid for good. Alex Hollister Fairfax. S’got a certain ring to it, yeah? I think so.”

Alex smacked the water in enthusiastic agreement, and Ben caught his breath at the spear of pure happiness that shafted through his midsection, so sharp and clean it was almost a physical pain.

He gazed down at the wet, slippery baby discovering the joys of splashing water everywhere, and tried to push through the ache of holding everything he wanted in the palm of his hand.

Well, almost everything. But Ben could be patient. He could wait for Merry to come to him.

Couldn’t he?

Chapter Fifteen

The entire town of Sanctuary may have been invited to celebrate this sudden surprise marriage between the irascible country vet and his friendly, vivacious bride. But for the wedding itself, Merry and Ben had decided to only bring a few witnesses down to the courthouse.

In a bright, airy room on the second floor of the red-brick building, surrounded by crumbling crown molding, threadbare lace curtains, and their closest friends and family, Merry and Ben signed the paperwork that made them husband and wife.

They’d opted out of the ceremony, deciding to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible. The justice of the peace, a middle-aged woman whose standard poodle Ben had treated for kennel cough last year, seemed disappointed not to get to read out her list of “Do you take so and so” type questions, but Ben was relieved Merry didn’t want to mess with it.

He was having a hard enough time keeping his runaway emotions in check without having to swear in front of legal representation and his new wife’s family that he’d love and cherish her till death did them part.

As it was, the entire surreal encounter with Judge Barrow took less than ten minutes, including the witnesses’ signatures, and before he knew it, the whole group of them were decanted out onto the front porch of the courthouse, blinking and dazed in the midday light.

Ben was surprised at how different he felt about being married this time around. Possibly it had to do with how long he and Ashley had dated before their wedding back on the mainland. This thing with Merry was still relatively new, even if they’d known each other for months.

It made sense that this time, he looked across the crowded porch at the woman he’d just pledged his life to, and all he wanted was to be even closer to her. The ink wasn’t dry on their license yet, and Ben already wanted more.

“Well,” Jo said, cradling her grandson high on her shoulder. “That sure was the fastest I ever saw two people get hitched.”

“Makes you wonder why anyone spends months and thousands of dollars planning a big, long church wedding,” Ella added stoutly, wrapping an arm around Merry’s shoulders. Grady raised his brows in a way Ben took to mean that Grady was skeptical that this whole experience had in any way let him off the hook for a big church wedding whenever he and Ella finally tied the knot.

From the way Ella was hugging her sister, Ben wondered if he were missing something important. Maybe Merry had always wanted to waft down the center aisle between pews lined with folks oohing and ahhing over her giant white-marshmallow confection of a dress. Maybe she was secretly sad and feeling deprived of her chance to fulfill some mysterious girlhood dream.

But when Merry glanced up and caught his eye, Ben saw only a deep contentment in her expression. “I guess some people get married for the wedding and the dress and the gifts and the party. Me … I’m looking forward to the actual marriage.”

The soft strength of her words hit Ben like a pillow to the solar plexus, a burst of feathers and all the breath left his lungs for a second. “Me, too,” he managed to say. “In fact, all things considered, maybe we ought to go on home with Alex and let y’all celebrate without us.”

“Oh oh oh, no you don’t.” Grady threw one of his big handyman’s hands around Ben’s chest and hustled him down the courthouse steps, laughing. “You’re not getting out of this that easily.”

“Whose side are you on?” Ben grumbled, shoving at his stupidly muscle-bound best friend. Ben was taller by a few inches and had enough muscle on him to wrestle a six-month-old calf to a standstill for shots, but Grady was even bulkier. He was broad, especially through the chest and shoulders, and easily weathered Ben’s halfhearted escape attempts as he navigated the two of them along the walkway toward the town square.

Against Ben’s hopes and wishes, the sky had cleared and brightened to a sparkling blue. Fresh, clean sunlight speared through the red and gold leaves of the tulip poplars dotting the square, dancing over the picnic tables spread with mismatched, multicolored tablecloths, steaming pots and casserole dishes.

At the end of the line of tables, right beside the white gazebo, stood a small folding card table. Ben felt his jaw drop. Sitting on that table was the tallest, most lopsided wedding cake he’d ever seen. It was at least five creamy white-frosted layers, and each one seemed to slant at a different angle and in a different direction.