Anna Adams - The Marriage Contract

She recognized his voice. Slowly, she turned and found he’d taken control of his emotions, and he’d inherited the Dylan ability to gaze arrogantly at the rest of the world as if he understood its relation to him. Patience stalked behind his gaze. He could wait for what he wanted.

Would this Dylan know how to grind the family ax against her?

“I’m surprised to find you here,” he said.

“Surprised I’d trespass?” He gestured at the house. “Seeing this place has to hurt you.”

Ashamed of the way she’d fled without looking back earlier, she put on some arrogance of her own. “It looks better now, with the pansies. They’re trespassing, too.”

“How much have you missed this house?” His unexpected question suggested he’d stumbled upon the solution to a mystery.

Uneasily, she headed back to the front of the house to collect her tools. “I’ve missed it enough that I won’t promise not to trespass again.”

“I didn’t ask you not to come here.” His voice came from close behind her.

His changed mood signaled a shift in the balance of power between them. She picked up her things in one armload for the return trip to her car. Nick stood behind her again when she turned. He nodded toward the house.

“Do you want to go inside?”

Her breath caught. She wanted to go in. More than anything. But he was Nick Dylan. The son of the man who’d taken hearth and home from her. She couldn’t make herself beholden to him.

“I have to leave.” Immediately, she cursed her foolishness. He was the one person who could let her into her old home. She turned back. “Maybe some other time, I could come to your office and pick up the key?”

“You know where I work?” He seemed surprised that she would have talked to anyone about him.

“It’s a small town.”

“Come to my office. I’ll have the key for you.”

She held back, feeling suddenly vulnerable. To think she would walk into her house again, touch the walls and floors her mother and father had loved, dispel her nagging sense of having dreamed her first fourteen years.

But how much of Nicholas Seton Dylan’s character rose out of his father’s gene pool? He must have ulterior motives.

She forced herself to take measured steps back to her car. In case he was watching her as his father had watched her mother…

CLAIR HAD BEEN WORKING with Paul every day for a week when she stood at his shoulder as he tossed a quarter into the air.

“Heads, you aerate, tails, I go across the street and try to sell our services to Mrs. Velasco,” he said.

Clair clamped her hand around one of the aerator’s handles. “You think I don’t notice you’re sticking me with this bone-shaker either way?” She turned it toward the front of the lawn. “How do you know Mrs. Velasco’s name?”

“I read her mailbox.” Paul’s sheepish grin was infectious. Friendly and open, he lacked Nick Dylan’s intensity. He shrugged. “I can’t afford mailing lists, but she’ll see you over here, giving me your all, and she’ll beg us to help her.”

“Giving you my what?” Clair asked.

“Your all to make a more beautiful lawn for her neighbors.”

At his prim spiel, Clair had to smile. “I guess her leaves need mulching.”

“I’ll promise her the industrious young lady across the street will do the job.”

He moseyed over, and Clair fired up the aerator. At the end of her first row across the lawn she peeked at her employer in his salesman persona.

“Mrs. Velasco” turned out to be a man of dignified years. His white hair floated in the cool breeze. He looked frail enough to rustle like the leaves that glided across his yard. He lifted a hand to Clair, joining Paul in a wave. She waved back, but then latched onto the aerator before it took off without her.

Its tendency to act independently forced her to keep her mind on her task, but when she finished, she turned to find Paul leaning against his truck, his feet crossed at the ankles. Silence echoed in her ears after the aerator’s roar. She worked her way around Paul to hoist the equipment back onto the trailer.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“You’re a strong woman. You remind me of my wife before she told me she couldn’t work with me anymore.”

“Thanks.” She tied the machine down with safety straps, guessing she could offer insight into Mrs. Sayers’s reasoning. “But what I meant was, am I safe to work on my own, or are you afraid I’ll single-handedly bring down the Fairlove Lovelies empire if you turn your back on me?”

“Every time you say our name I think you’re making fun of my business.” Paul jabbed at her forearm. “Don’t mock the company that feeds you.”

“Have you decided it’s going to feed me?”

“You have some real authority issues, Clair, but you work hard.” He held out his hand. “Congratulations. You’re official. Probation’s over.”

“Thank you.” She shook his hand and walked around him again to open the passenger door. “I can use the paycheck.”

“How do you feel about Mr. Velasco?”

“You promised me to him?” Paul didn’t care whose soul he sold to lock down new work.

“You closed the deal when you tossed that branch. No man can resist a woman who can whip him in a wrestling match.”

“Get in the truck, Paul.”

“Could you come back and work up a design for him?”

She let honesty get in the way of her ambition again. “I’d work like crazy at it, but remember, I’m not professionally trained to draft a plan.”

“I don’t care about this college degree that seems to be sticking in your craw. Can you do the work?”

His confidence pleased her. “You bet I can. Will you go over it with me before I show it to Mr. Velasco?”

Instead of answering, Paul took a tape measure from his pocket. “I told him we’d look over the yard before we left. He’s especially interested in reclaiming the back from nature.”

Clair fell into step beside Paul. “I’d better warn you, I tend to be on nature’s side.”

“I figured that out already.”

She enjoyed working with him. He’d quickly sized up her skills, and she’d learned from him during her probation period. They thought alike, and their working association had quickly become a friendship Clair valued. That afternoon, when they returned to the office, the others had gone home for the day. Clair took over Paul’s drawing table and lost herself in her work.

BY PLANTING FLOWERS in her old yard, Clair had shown Nick a way out of his problems. Maybe he could offer her what she wanted and persuade her to help him. He’d just have to make her forget who he was. For a year.

He’d hired a detective to find out where and how she’d spent the past twelve years. Two weeks later, he’d come home from his volunteer shift at the Staunton clinic and found the detective’s report in his mail.

The number of foster homes she’d gone through surprised him, and they’d all been in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. How had she felt, living within a couple of hours of the town she’d left after her parents died?

After high school, Clair had won a scholarship to Wellesley, which she lost after the first year. The detective reported rumors of an affair with one of her professors. Nick dropped the report, frowning at the list of jobs she’d held before she settled down to work at landscaping.

She’d been troubled. Maybe she still was. Even if she wasn’t still changing jobs, she’d left her home in New England to make her way back here. How stable was she?

The detective reported she’d known several men besides the professor. Nick assumed the “known” was a euphemism. He tightened his mouth. Had she tried to replace the love she’d lost because of his father’s need to hurt a former lover?