The Marriage Pact (Hqn) (28 page)

Boone ruffled both dogs’ ears, straightened, looked Hutch in
the eye again. Neither of them spoke, but it didn’t matter, because they’d been
friends for so long that words weren’t always necessary.

Boone was worried about bringing the boys back to his place for
anything longer than a holiday weekend, and Hutch knew that. He clearly cared
and sympathized, but at the same time, he was pleased. There was no need to give
voice to the obvious.

Kendra returned almost right away, moving pretty quickly for
somebody who could be accused of smuggling pumpkins. She carried a bulging brown
paper bag in one hand, holding it out to Boone when she got close enough.
“Turkey on rye,” she said. “With pickles. I threw in a couple of hard-boiled
eggs and an apple, too.”

He took the bag, muttered his thanks, climbed into Hutch’s
truck and reached through the open window to hand over the keys to the
rust-bucket he’d driven up in. Some swap that was, he thought ruefully. His old
buddy was definitely getting the shitty end of
this
stick.

“Give Molly and Bob our best!” Kendra called after him, as
Boone started up the engine and shifted into Reverse. “If there’s anything we
can do—”

Boone cut her off with a nod, raised a hand in farewell and
drove away.

After a brief stop in Parable, to get some cash from an ATM,
he’d keep the pedal to the metal all the way to Missoula. Once there, he and
Molly would explain things, together.

God only knew how his sons would take the news—they were always
tentative and quiet on visits to Parable, like exiles to a strange new planet,
and visibly relieved when it was time to go back to the city.

One thing at a time,
Boone reminded
himself.

* * *

T
ARA
K
ENDALL
STOOD
in front of her
chicken coop, surrounded by dozens of cackling hens, and second-guessed her
decision to leave a high-paying, mega glamorous job in New York and reinvent
herself,
Green Acres
–style, for roughly the three
thousandth time since she’d set foot in Parable, Montana, a couple years
before.

She missed her small circle of friends back East, and her
twelve-year-old twin stepdaughters, Elle and Erin. She also missed
things,
like sidewalk cafés and quirky shops, Yellow
Cab taxis and shady benches in Central Park, along with elements that were
harder to define, like the special energy of the place, the pure
purpose
flowing through the crowded streets like some
unseen river.

She did not, however, miss the stress of trying to keep her
career going in the midst of a major economic downturn, with her ex-husband, Dr.
James Lennox, constantly complaining that she’d stolen his daughters’ love from
him when they divorced, along with a chunk of his investments and real estate
assets.

Tara didn’t regret the settlement terms for a moment—she’d
forked over plenty of her own money during their rocky marriage, helping to get
James’s private practice off the ground after he left the staff of a major
clinic to go out on his own—and as for the twins’ affection, she’d gotten that
by
being there
for Elle and Erin, as their father so
often hadn’t, not by scheming against James or undermining him to his
children.

Even if Tara had wanted to do something as reprehensible as
coming between James and the twins, there wouldn’t have been any need, because
the girls were formidably bright. They’d figured out things for themselves—their
father’s serial affairs included. Since he’d never seemed to have time for them,
they’d naturally been resentful when they found out, quite by accident, that
their dad had bent his busy schedule numerous times to take various girlfriends
on romantic weekend getaways.

Tara’s golden retriever, Lucy, napping on the shady porch that
ran the full length of Tara’s farmhouse, raised her head, ears perked. In the
next instant, the cordless receiver for the inside phone rang on the wicker
table set between two colorfully cushioned rocking chairs.

Hurrying up the front steps, Tara grabbed the phone and said,
“Hello?”

“Do you
ever
answer your cell?” her
former husband demanded tersely.

“It’s charging,” Tara said calmly. James loved to argue—maybe
he should have become a lawyer instead of a doctor—and
Tara
loved to deprive him of the satisfaction of getting a rise out
of her. Then, as another possibility dawned on her, she suppressed a gasp. “Elle
and Erin are all right, aren’t they?”

James remained irritable. “Oh, they’re
fine,
” he said scathingly. “They’ve just chased off the fourth nanny
in three weeks, and the agency refuses to send anyone else.”

Tara bit back a smile, thinking of the mischievous pair. They
were pranksters, and they got into plenty of trouble, but they were good kids,
too, tenderhearted and generous. “At twelve, they’re probably getting too old
for nannies,” she ventured. James never called to chat, hadn’t done that even
when they were married, standing in the same room or lying in the same bed. No,
Dr. Lennox always had an agenda, and she was getting a flicker of what it might
be this time.

“Surely you’re not suggesting that I let them run wild, all day
every day, for the whole summer, while I’m in the office, or in surgery?”
James’s voice still had an edge to it, but there was an undercurrent of
something else—desperation, maybe. Possibly even panic.

“Of course not,” Tara replied, plunking down in one of the
porch rocking chairs, Lucy curling up at her feet. “Day camp might be an option,
if you want to keep them busy, or you could hire a companion—”

“Day camp would mean delivering my daughters somewhere every
morning and picking them up again every afternoon, and
I
don’t have time for that,
Tara.” There it was again, the note of
patient sarcasm, the tone that seemed to imply that her IQ was somewhere in the
single digits and sure to plunge even lower. “I’m a busy man.”

Too busy to care for your own children,
Tara thought but, of course, didn’t say. “What do you want?” she asked
instead.

He huffed out a breath, evidently offended by her blunt
question. “If that attitude isn’t typical of you, I don’t know what is—”

“James,” Tara broke in. “You
want
something. You wouldn’t call if you didn’t. Cut to the chase and tell me
what that something is, please.”

He sighed in a long-suffering way.
Poor,
misunderstood James. Always so put-upon, a victim of his own nobility.
“I’ve met someone,” he said.

Now
there’s
a
news flash,
Tara thought. James was
always
meeting someone—a female someone, of course. And he was sure that each
new mistress was The One, his destiny, harbinger of a love that had been written
in the stars instants after the Big Bang.

“Her name is Bethany,” he went on, sounding
uncharacteristically meek all of a sudden. James was a gifted surgeon with a
high success rate; modesty was not in his nature. “She’s special.”

Tara refrained from comment. She and James were divorced, and
she quite frankly didn’t care whom he dated, “special” or not. She
did
care very much, however, about Elle and Erin, and
the fact that they always came last with James, after the career and the golf
tournaments and the girlfriend du jour. Their own mother, James’s first wife,
Susan, had contracted a bacterial infection when they were just toddlers, and
died suddenly. It was Tara who had rocked the little girls to sleep, told them
stories, bandaged their skinned elbows and knees—to the twins, she was Mom, even
in her current absentee status.

“Are you still there?” James asked, and the edge was back in
his voice. He even ventured a note of condescension.

“I’m here,” Tara said, after swallowing hard, and waited. Lucy
sat up, rested her muzzle on Tara’s blue-jeaned thigh, and watched her
mistress’s face for cues.

“The girls are doing everything they can to run Bethany off,”
James said, after a few beats of anxious silence. “We need some—some
space,
Bethany and I, I mean—just the two of us,
without—”

“Without your children getting underfoot,” Tara finished for
him after a long pause descended, leaving his sentence unfinished, but she kept
her tone moderate. By then she knew for sure why James had called, and she
already wanted to blurt out a yes, not to please him, but because she’d missed
Elle and Erin so badly for so long. Losing daily contact with them had been like
a rupture of the soul.

James let the remark pass, which was as unlike him as asking
for help or giving some hapless intern, or wife, the benefit of a doubt. “I was
thinking—well—that you might enjoy a visit from the twins. School’s out until
fall, and a few weeks in the country—maybe even a month or two—would probably be
good for them.”

Tara sat up very straight, all but holding her breath. She had
no parental rights whatsoever where James’s children were concerned; he’d
reminded her of that often enough.

“A visit?” she dared. The notion filled her with two giant and
diametrically opposed emotions—on the one hand, she was fairly bursting with
joy. On the other, she couldn’t help thinking of the desolation she’d feel when
Elle and Erin returned to their father, as they inevitably would. Coping with
the loss, for the second time, would be difficult and painful.

“Yes.” James stopped, cleared his throat. “You’ll do it? You’ll
let the twins come out there for a while?”

“I’d like that,” Tara said carefully. She was afraid to show
too much enthusiasm, even now, when she knew she had the upper hand, because
showing her love for the kids was dangerous with James. He was jealous of their
devotion to her, and he’d always enjoyed bursting her bubbles, even when they
were newlyweds and ostensibly still happy. “When would they arrive?”

“I was thinking I could put them on a plane tomorrow,” James
admitted. He was back in the role of supplicant, and Tara could tell he hated
it. All the more reason to be cautious—there
would
be a backlash, in five minutes or five years. “Would that work for
you?”

Tara’s heartbeat picked up speed, and she laid the splayed
fingers of her free hand to her chest, gripping the phone very tightly in the
other. “Tomorrow?”

“Is that too soon?” James sounded vaguely disapproving. Of
course he’d made himself the hero of the piece, at least in his own mind. The
self-sacrificing father thinking only of his daughters’ highest good.

What a load of bull.

Not that she could afford to point that out.

“No,” Tara said, perhaps too quickly. “No, tomorrow would be
fine. Elle and Erin can fly into Missoula, and I’ll be there waiting to pick
them up.”

“Excellent,” James said, with obvious relief. Not “thank you.”
Not “I knew I could count on you.” Just “Excellent,” brisk praise for doing the
right thing—which was always whatever he wanted at the moment.

That was when Elle and Erin erupted into loud cheers in the
background, and the sound made Tara’s eyes burn and brought a lump of happy
anticipation to her throat. “Text me the details,” she said to James, trying not
to sound too pleased, still not completely certain the whole thing wasn’t a
setup of some kind, calculated to raise her hopes and then dash them to
bits.

“I will,” James promised, trying in vain to shush the girls,
who were now whooping like a war party dancing around a campfire and gathering
momentum. “And, Tara? Thanks.”

Thanks.

There it was. Would wonders never cease?

Tara couldn’t remember the last time James had thanked her for
anything. Even while they were still married, still in love, before things had
gone permanently sour between them, he’d been more inclined to criticize than
appreciate her.

Back then, it seemed she was always five pounds too heavy, or
her hair was too long, or too short, or she was too ambitious, or too lazy.

Tara put the brakes on that train of thought, since it led
nowhere. “You’re welcome,” she said, carefully cool.

“Well, then,” James said, clearly at a loss now that he’d
gotten his way, fresh out of chitchat. “I’ll text the information to your cell
as soon as I’ve booked the flights.”

“Great,” Tara said. She was about to ask to speak to the girls
when James abruptly disconnected.

The call was over.

Of course Tara could have dialed the penthouse number, and
chatted with Elle and Erin, who probably would have pounced on the phone, but
she’d be seeing them in person the next day, and the three of them would have
plenty of time to catch up.

Besides, she had things to do—starting with a shower and a
change of clothes, so she could head into town to stock up on the kinds of
things kids ate, like cold cereal and milk, along with those they tended to
resist, like fresh vegetables.

She needed to get the spare room aired out, put sheets on the
unmade twin beds, outfit the guest bathroom with soap and shampoo, toothbrushes
and paste, in case they forgot to pack those things, tissues and extra toilet
paper.

Lucy followed her into the house, wagging her plumy tail.
Something was up, and like any self-respecting dog, she was game for whatever
might happen next.

The inside of the farmhouse was cool, because there were fans
blowing and most of the blinds were drawn against the brightest part of the day.
The effect had been faintly gloomy, before James’s call.

How quickly things could change, though.

After tomorrow, Tara was thinking, she and Lucy wouldn’t be
alone in the spacious old house—the twins would fill the place with noise and
laughter and music, along with duffel bags and backpacks and vivid descriptions
of the horrors wrought by the last few nannies in a long line of post-divorce
babysitters, housekeepers and even a butler or two.