Sandra Marton - The Divorcee Said Yes!

“You kick that chair, Chase Cooper, and I swear, I’ll kick you!”

Chase swung around. His ex-wife stood in the entrance to the room. She’d exchanged her mother-of-the-bride dress for a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and from the way her hair was standing on end and her hands were propped on her hips, he had the feeling her mood wasn’t much better than his.

Too bad. Too damned bad, considering that she was the one had gotten them into this mess in the first place. If only she hadn’t been so damned permissive. If only she’d put her foot down right at the start, told Dawn she was too young to get married—

“It deserves kicking,” he grumbled, but he stepped aside and let her swish past him, snatch up the chair cushions and plump them, as if that might remove any sign he’d sat there. “How’s Dawn?”

“She’s asleep.” Annie tucked the cushions back in place. “How’s Nick? I assume he’s still here?”

“Yes, he’s here. He’s asleep, in the living room.”

“And he’s okay?”

“As okay as he can be, all things considered. Has our daughter told you yet just what, exactly, is going on?”

Annie looked at him. Then she ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing the curls back from her face.

“How about some tea?” Without waiting for his answer, she set off for the kitchen. “Unless you’d prefer coffee,” she asked, switching on the overhead fluorescent light.

“Tea’s fine,” Chase said, blinking in the sudden glare. He sank onto one of the stools that stood before the kitchen counter, watching as Annie filled a kettle with water and put it on the stove. “Has she?”

“Has she what?” Annie yanked open the pantry door. She took out a box of tea bags and put it on the counter. “Would you like a cookie? Of course, I don’t have those hideous things you always preferred, with all that goo in the middle.”

“Just tea,” he replied, refusing to rise to the bait. “What did Dawn say?”

Annie shut the pantry door and opened the refrigerator. “How about a sandwich? Swiss? Or there’s some ham, if you prefer.”

“Annie...”

“You’d have to take it on whole grain bread, though, the kind you always said—”

“—that I wouldn’t touch until somebody strapped a feed bag over my face and a saddle on my back. No, thank you very much, I don’t want a sandwich. I don’t want anything, except to know what our daughter told you and what it is you don’t want to tell me.” Chase’s eyes narrowed. “Has Nick mistreated her?”

“No, of course not.” Annie shut the refrigerator door. The kettle had begun to hiss, and she grabbed for it before it could whistle. “Hand me a couple of mugs, would you? They’re in that cupboard, right beside you.”

“He doesn’t seem the type who would.” Chase grabbed two white china mugs and slid them down the counter to Annie. “But if he’s so much as hurt a hair on our daughter’s head, so help me—”

“Will you please calm down? I’m telling you, it isn’t that. Nick’s a sweetheart.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

Annie looked at him, then away. “It’s, ah, it’s complicated.”

“Complicated?” Chase’s eyes narrowed again. “It’s not—the boy isn’t...”

“Isn’t what? Do you still take two sugars, or have you finally learned to lay off the stuff?”

“Two sugars, and stop nagging.”

Annie dumped two spoonfuls of sugar into her ex’s tea, and stirred briskly.

“You’re right. You can wallow in sugar, for all I care. Your health isn’t my problem anymore, it’s hers.”

“Hers?”

“Janet Pendleton.”

“Janet Pen...” He flushed. “Oh. Her.”

Annie slapped the mug of tea in front of him, hard enough so some of the hot amber liquid sloshed over the rim and onto his fingers.

“That’s right. Let your fiancée worry about your weight.”

“Nobody’s got to worry about my weight,” Chase said, surreptitiously sucking in his gut.

He was right, Annie thought sourly, as she slid onto the stool next to his. Nobody did. He was still as solid-looking and handsome as he’d been the day they’d married—or the day they’d divorced. Another benefit of being male. Men didn’t have to see the awful changes that came along, as you stood at top of the yawning chasm that was middle age. The numbers that began to creep upward on your bathroom scale. The flesh that began to creep downward. The wrinkles that Janet Pendleton didn’t have. The sags Chase’s cute little secretary hadn’t had, either.

“...make him normal. That’s not what happened with Dawn and Nick, is it?”

Annie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Reality, that’s what. I was telling you that I just heard about this guy, married a girl even though he knew he was a switch hitter, hoping that having a wife would make him normal—”

Annie choked over her tea. “Good grief,” she said, when she could speak, “you are such a pathetic mate stereotype, Chase Cooper! No, Nicholas is not, as you so delicately put it, a ‘switch hitter.”’

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well, it might not hurt to ask.”

“Nick and Dawn have been living together, the past three months. And Dawn hasn’t so much as hinted at any problem in bed. Quite the contrary.” Annie blushed. “I dropped in a couple of times—not in the morning, or late at night, you understand—and I could pretty much tell, from the time it took them to get to the door and the way they looked, that things were perfectly fine in that department.” She looked down at her tea. “I don’t drop by without calling first, anymore.”

“What do you mean, they’ve been living together?”

“Just what I said. Didn’t Dawn tell you? They took an apartment, in Cannondale.”

“Dammit, Annie, how could you permit our daughter to do that?”

“To do what? Move in with the man she was going to marry?”

“Didn’t you tell her no?”

“She’s eighteen, Chase. Legally of age. Old enough to make her own choices.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, ‘so’?”

“You could have told her it was wrong.”

“Love is never wrong.”

“Love,” Chase said, and shook his head. “Sex, is more like it.”

“I asked her to take her time and think it through, to be sure she was doing the right thing. She said she’d done that, and that she was.”

“Sex,” Chase said again.

Annie sighed. “Sex, love...they go together.”

“Yeah, well, they could have had the one and still waited for the other, until after the wedding.” Chase glowered into his tea. “But I suppose that’s too old-fashioned.”

“It was, for us.”

Chase looked up sharply. Color swept into his face. “What we did, or didn’t do, has nothing to do with this situation.”

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