Jennifer Greene: The Soon-To-Be-Disinherited Wife

“The thing is, knowing about the trust fund always affected how and why I live the way I do. I love my gallery, but I always chose what to display, what to sell, not based on a profit but on what I wanted to give to the community. I tried to pick what I thought was beautiful. What I thought added to us all. Not just what would bring me in the mortgage payment.”

Garrett didn’t interrupt her this time, only listened. But she caught the faintest smile-not patronizing but gentle. When he touched her cheek, she could almost see the opinion in his mind-that she was a hopeless idealist. And that he liked the quality in her.

“It’s not just that gallery. But all the volunteer work I do. The projects I take on at the country club are more about my parents than me. Likewise, the hostess chores I do for my dad. But what I do for the kids-I’ve always volunteered a lot of hours because I never had to worry about income, you know? I always knew I had this tidy little fortune coming in.”

“Pretty obviously,” he said quietly, “that changed. Somehow.”

She sat up, nodded vigorously, wishing she could shake the lump from her throat. “What my parents never told me-until yesterday-was that I had to be married by the age of thirty to inherit that money.”

“Say what?” The sudden crease on his forehead registered his confusion. He sat up, taking an immediately more serious posture. It stopped being a snuggle-on-the-pillow conversation once he realized she had a serious problem.

Or that’s what she thought was happening. She sat up, too, reached for a long-sleeved shirt of his. She didn’t mind being naked with him. In fact, for the first time in her life she felt free to be herself in every way. But the subject was so troubling that she could feel a heart chill settling in.

They both ended up in his tiny kitchen. She curled up in a chair with a fresh mug of tea. He leaned against the counter, looking oddly distant-probably because the sun was behind him at the window, and his face looked more austere and shadowed. “I don’t understand. Why would your grandmother have set up the trust that way?”

“It seems that my grandmother-as well as my parents-heard me talk against getting married from the time I was little. To be honest, my parent’s marriage was enough to scare anyone away from the institution. And it just seemed so many marriages in Eastwick were about money. Mergers. Conglomerations. Bringing businesses and dynasties together.” She swept back her hair with a fretful hand. “I didn’t want that.”

“Hell, neither did I.”

“Anyway…” She sipped, willing the tea to start bracing her. It felt good to get this out in the open. To share the problem with Garrett. To have someone she could tell. “I think the idea was to blackmail me into marriage and kids.”

“Which is fine-only how was that supposed to work if you didn’t know it was a condition of the trust?”

Something in his voice caught her attention. Something off. Cool. But when she lifted her head to study him, his expression just seemed…neutral. She assumed she’d imagined that sudden odd tone.

“According to my parents, once I started seeing Reed a couple years ago, they believed we’d end up married. They thought they’d never have to tell me.” She shook her head at the black humor of it all. “It’s so ironic, because they couldn’t wait to tell me yesterday. They wanted me to call Reed immediately. Make up with him. They were very, very positive a few million dollars would motivate me to do anything to get him back.”

Garrett fell silent.

She didn’t know what she expected him to say. Nothing, really. Only his silence seemed to stretch out for an odd length of time. Maybe it was just too much to take in at one time, she thought. But then he asked, “When is your thirtieth birthday?”

“August thirty-first.”

“So let me see if I’ve got this right. If you’re not married before August thirty-first, you lose those millions?”

“I don’t actually know how much it is. It was three million when my grandmother established the trust. But you know how money well invested can add up.” She squeezed her eyes closed for a minute. “I’m having the hardest time just…grasping it. Not the loss of the money so much. But how I’m now facing quite a disaster because I so totally took that inheritance for granted. I never saved, never questioned my financial choices. Spent too much on cars and clothes and anything else I wanted. And now it’s a shock. Not just to give up my gallery but not to be able to do all the volunteer work with kids-”

Garrett turned around, plunked his mug down on the counter hard enough to make a slapping sound. “I guess the answer to that is easy enough.”

“Pardon?”

“All you have to do is marry before you’re thirty, right? Reed wasn’t right for you, but it’s not like he was your only choice. You had me hooked before you kicked him out of the running.”

“Pardon?” she said again, this time more softly.

“I’ll marry you, Emma. If you want that money, it’s yours. No big sweat.”

His voice was as cool as a cucumber on a hot summer day. Dripping cool. Tangy cool. When she didn’t immediately respond-at that precise instant, she couldn’t get her tongue to form a word if her life had depended on it-he said, “I’m no idealist about money. It’s not pretty or romantic to be poor. There’s no reason to be embarrassed about wanting to live well. No one throws away a fortune, Emma, it’s stupid. You’d be crazy to throw away your independence, your security. Besides, why would you want to do that?”

From one second to the next, she felt as if she’d aged half a century, because she stood up on shaky knees and halting balance. “I wasn’t asking you to marry me,” she said quietly.

“I know that. But it’s a perfectly reasonable solution to your problem. God knows we get along between the sheets. Always did have a click together-” His phone rang. At the same time, his fax started exuberantly frothing out waves of paper. He stepped toward the phone but said to her first, “No reason in hell we can’t be married before your birthday.”

As he walked across the room, took his business call, for a good sixty seconds she fought for calm. She felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. She couldn’t seem to recover.

She even wanted to laugh. For the first time in her entire life she really did want a marriage proposal. The biggest dream her heart ever had was a proposal specifically from Garrett.

But not like this.

Not because he thought she’d marry him for money.

The funniest, saddest part of it was that Emma had thought-she’d really, really thought-that Garrett cared for her. Even loved her. That he knew her, the real Emma, the Emma she rarely showed to anyone, and that that was the woman he’d taken to bed. And maybe even fallen in love with. At least, he’d said he loved her.

But that, of course, was under the covers.

Now she knew better.

He was still on the phone, still talking-in French she thought, without really registering what he was saying. But then, she wasn’t registering what she was doing either. Taking steps like a sleepwalker, she strode barefoot toward the door, wearing his shirt, her hair not brushed, her clothes and shoes still somewhere around his place-probably strewn every which way.

She couldn’t remember ever doing anything improper in public.

It wasn’t that she cared so much what others thought of her but that she never willingly exposed herself that way. Yet she walked out his door and down the sidewalk toward Color dressed like that. Or undressed like that, depending on one’s point of view.

Right then, she didn’t seem to have a point of view. She just had to get out of Garrett’s presence before that punch in the gut caught up with her. The pain was going to hit good. She knew it. But she didn’t want him or anyone to see it.