Marriage, Interrupted

“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.