Christine Rimmer - The Marriage Agreement

“You’re a few years too late, and that situation was nothing like this one.”

“No, it wasn’t. Now I have a life to offer you. Now we have a daughter together. Now we just might have another—”

“I think we need to stop talking about what might be and think about what is.”

Marsh leaned in on her again, so close that Tory felt his warm breath on her face, so close that the pull of attraction between them seemed a magnetic force, charging the air around them. “What might be is what matters. You had my baby once without me. I hate that it happened that way. I’m not going to let it happen that way again. Damn it, I will be what I never had—a good father. If you’re pregnant, you will marry me….”

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Barbara Ferris, my e-mail pal, who loves a good romance, sends me great jokes and is always checking in just to see how I’m doing.

Thanks, Barb.

came to her profession the long way around. Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been an actress, a salesclerk, a janitor, a model, a phone sales representative, a teacher, a waitress, a playwright and an office manager. She insists she never had a problem keeping a job—she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day. She lives with her family in Oklahoma.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Summoned.

There was no other word for it.

Marsh Bravo had been summoned—by the father he hadn’t set eyes on in ten full years, the father he’d thought he’d put behind him as surely and completely as he had the Oklahoma town of his birth. As surely as he had turned his back on Tory.

Tory.

He’d trained himself not to think of her. And he rarely did anymore. There was no point. And besides, even after all these years, just thinking her name caused a tightness in his chest, a pained echo of longing in the vicinity of his heart. Putting Victoria Winningham behind him had not been easy. In fact, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.

Leaving his father behind? Well, that had been a relief, pure and simple. It had been walking away from murder before it had a chance to happen.

On the hospital bed, Blake Bravo stirred. He turned his head, opened sunken, unfocused eyes. Eyes of a gray so pale they seemed otherworldly. Eyes that would have looked just right staring out of the head of a mad wolf.

Marsh had his mother’s dark-brown eyes. He’d always been glad of that. The last thing he needed was to see his father’s eyes staring back at him every time he looked in the mirror.

The old man on the bed sucked in a wheezing breath. They had him on oxygen. He raised a veined, mottled hand with IV lines taped to the back of it and batted at the plastic tubing attached to his nose, letting his hand drop to the sheet again before he’d managed to dislodge anything.

The old man…

It was more than a figure of speech now. Blake Bravo was only fifty-eight, but he looked much older. He could have been seventy. Or even eighty.

The pale eyes narrowed as they focused on Marsh. “You came.” The voice was low, a whispered rasp, like the hiss of a snake.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Nice suit.”

“I like it.”

Blake grinned a grin to match his eyes—feral, wolfish. “Made it big after all, up there in the windy city. Didn’t you?”

“I’ve done all right.”

Blake let out a low, unpleasant chuckle. “I know you have. I know everything about you. Don’t think that I don’t. I know the name of that dinky college where you managed to get yourself a four-year degree, slaving away at those books and running that company you started at the same time. I’ve kept track of you. I could have come after you anytime I’d wanted to. You’d be surprised the tricks your old dad has up his sleeve.”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

The eerie eyes narrowed further and Blake’s wrinkled slit of a lip curled in a sneer. “I don’t like your attitude, Mr. Big Shot.” He let out a ragged sigh. “But then, I never did…” He lifted that skeletal hand once more, waved it weakly and turned his face away again.

Marsh waited. He had a number of questions he might have asked. But he didn’t ask them. He knew his father. A decade would not have changed the nature of the man. Blake Bravo loved it when people asked him questions. It gave him the opportunity to withhold answers.

Marsh looked beyond the wasted figure on the bed and out the room’s one tall, narrow window. They were on an upper floor. All he could see was a section of gunmetal-gray sky. Oklahoma in May. Sunny one minute, storming the next, always the possibility that a cold front would slam up against a warm one and a funnel cloud would form.

But probably not today. The clouds rose up, dark and high, when tornadoes threatened. Today’s sky was one even, uneventful expanse of gray.

The pale eyes were on him again. “I’m dying.”

Marsh gave the smallest of nods. His father had said that already. On the phone less than twenty-four hours ago. The surgeon Marsh had spoken with before he entered his father’s room had told him that Blake’s prognosis was hopeful. But looking at Blake now, Marsh decided that the doctor had either been kind—or a liar.

“Heart attack,” Blake whispered in that snake-hiss voice of his. “A bad one. And another one coming on soon. I can feel it. I know it—but I told you that, didn’t I?”

“Yes. On the phone.”

“I’m slipping. Repeating myself.”

Marsh shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“The hell it is.”

They looked at each other, a long look, a look with challenge in it. And stubbornness—coming from both sides.

Then Blake spoke again. “It’s my heart that’s failing me. But my brother died of a stroke. Massive cerebral hemorrhage. It’ll be thirty years ago come November. Thirty years…” The low rasp faded off. Blake sucked in a breath through the oxygen tube and went on, “He was only thirty-three, can you believe it?” He arched a gray and grizzled brow. “Freak thing, really. He’d been…how should I put it? Under a hell of a lot of stress in the months right before his…unfortunate demise.”

Marsh still said nothing. What good would it do? He knew his father’s sick games. Let the old man play it out by himself this time.

Blake wheezed. “Have a little trouble…getting air.” Then he prodded, “Well. Don’t you want to know about your uncle?”

Marsh didn’t. Why should he? He doubted there even was an uncle. “You’ll say what you want to say—whatever it is I guess you got me here to say. No point in my interrupting.”