Rebecca Winters: Another Man's Wife

Nate rubbed his face. He badly needed a shave. Rick looked like he could use one, too.

“Okay.” He nudged his brother’s shoulder. “Let’s have it.” They’d left Colorado Springs and were headed for Copper Mountain on Highway 9. The road was one continuous ribbon of black ice, but Nate never worried when Rick was at the wheel. “I’m assuming Natalie didn’t take the news well. How soon will she be joining you?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t invite her along.”

He turned in his brother’s direction. “Why not? I thought you two were destined for something serious.”

“So did I at first. There’s a strong attraction between us, but—”

“But it never did feel right,” Nate finished the thought.

“No. What about you and Kari?”

“She’d never be happy in the U.S. It just wouldn’t have worked for us.”

“It’s the ‘feel right’ part neither of us has found yet,” Rick muttered.

Nate glanced at him, nodding. “We’re quite a pair, you know that?”

He expected some sort of response from his brother, but nothing was forthcoming. “Rick? You’ve kept me in suspense long enough.”

His brother’s solemn gaze swerved to him. “It’s Dad. When was the last time you talked to him?”

“Two weeks ago, before our wing was deployed on a mission. We didn’t return until yesterday.”

“What was he like on the phone?”

“Preoccupied more than anything.”

“At least you talked to him. After my race last Wednesday, I called him from England. There was no answer so I called the ski shop. Jim said he’d gone to Denver and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the week.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“I asked him the same question. He claimed to have no idea. I sensed he was being evasive about something.”

Jim Springmeyer had worked for their parents ten years. “That means he was covering for him. Not a good sign,” Nate said. “In Dad’s frame of mind—”

Rick broke in. “Since I couldn’t reach you, I decided to fly home from London early. I thought I’d give him a surprise.”

Nate’s patience had run out. “And?”

A strange sound escaped Rick. “I’m afraid I’m the one who got the surprise. You could say I received the shock of my life.” His voice was unsteady.

“You’re not about to tell me he’s turned to drinking—” The facetious comment wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. It disturbed him that he couldn’t get his brother to lighten up a little more.

Rick shook his head. “Sorry. You’re not even close.”

Nate’s chest tightened. “Just spit it out!”

“When I walked through the house, I found our father in the kitchen. He wasn’t alone….”

Nate noticed his brother’s strong grip on the steering wheel. His knuckles had gone white from the pressure.

“Rick—”

“He had this woman in a clinch by the sink.”

A clinch? What?

Nate blinked.

“They were so far gone, they never saw or heard me. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to tiptoe back to the living room before calling out to Dad that I was home.”

The picture those words conjured up plunged Nate into a different realm of pain than he’d ever experienced before. The kind only a parent can inflict on his child.

“This soon after Mother?” he whispered.

“It gets worse. After dad brought her into the living room and introduced us, he announced that they’re engaged to be married. They’d gone to Denver to pick out her ring.”

Nate felt like he’d gone into an inverted dive and had waited too late to pull out of it.

“Dad said he was glad I’d decided to come home for a surprise visit because that saved him having to phone me with the news.”

“If this woman is someone Mom and Dad knew before the accident, I don’t wa—”

“Noooo. She’s a Texan who came to Colorado a month ago because of a friend’s wedding reception. Apparently she’s never been on a pair of skis. While she was shopping for sunglasses in the ski shop, Dad challenged her to get out on the slopes and try it. He gave her a few lessons, and things went from there.”

At fifty-three, their father was still an attractive man—and he could still outski the best skiers in the area. As early as sixteen he’d been on the U.S. ski team. By the time he’d met their mother five years later, he’d garnered many wins. They were married soon after, and within a year she was pregnant with Nate. People commented on their devotion to each other.

She’d been gone such a short while, it simply hadn’t occurred to Nate that his father would be interested in another woman. Not this soon anyway. The idea of his marrying again…

“Are you still with me?”

“Yes,” Nate murmured, utterly staggered by the news. “Is she divorced, widowed, what?”

“Ms. Pamela Jarrett has never been married. She lives and works on a ranch outside Austin, Texas.”

“What I’m hearing doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does to Dad. Hell, Nate—she’s only eleven years older than I am.”

With a little calculating, Nate realized she was fourteen years younger than their mother had been when she’d died.

“Dad looked so different from the man we saw at the funeral, it’s like another person’s inhabited his body. It made me feel…weird. You know?”

Nate understood exactly what his brother was trying to say. They’d been so busy establishing their own careers, neither of them had settled down to marriage for the first time. Yet their father was already jumping into a second marriage with a younger woman he’d barely met.

“Does Ms. Jarrett know Dad doesn’t have any money except what’s tied up in the business?” Nate’s flare of anger couldn’t be held back. He was stunned to think his father could replace his mother with another woman this quickly.

“I asked him that in private. He told me not to worry about it. She lives on her own piece of the Jarrett ranch.”

His head jerked toward his brother. “What the hell could he be thinking?”

“It’s gone beyond thinking. Our father has the hots for her.” Rick sounded as embittered as Nate felt.

The hots. It was a term younger guys used all the time. But when it was applied to their own father, a man Nate had loved and revered all his life, it sounded crude, distasteful.

“If it’d been anywhere but our home…”

Rick seemed to be reading his mind. “That’s what we get for planning to surprise him,” Nate told him.

“Sorry, man, but I never thought the day would come when I wouldn’t feel free to walk into the house where we were born and raised.”

“You forget we grew up and went away. Isn’t there an old saying that you can never go home again?” Nate was still trying to process these painful new facts. “What’s she like?”

“As different from Mom as you can get.”

His eyes closed tightly. What had happened to love everlasting? “Go on. I’d rather hear it all now and get it over with.”

“Pamela’s a petite brunette. She’s got that Texan drawl.” He shrugged. “She’s nice enough I suppose.”

Anja Soderhelm Hawkins had been a tall, beautiful, athletic blonde. Sometimes when their dad had teased him or Rick because they hadn’t found the right women to marry yet, he’d comment that their mother was probably a difficult act to follow. They’d have to look long and hard to find anyone as perfect.

Interesting how it had only taken him six months to find perfection again.

Texans flocked to Colorado in the winter. When Nate and Rick were growing up, they’d always found a Texan accent amusing, especially on the women who seemed to stuff more words into one minute than any other female they’d encountered. Since neither of their parents were verbose people, Nate couldn’t imagine his dad with a fast-talking Texan.