let you down again. I don’t have any confidence in myself as a wife.”
“I was happy.”
“But that was the only real big issue our marriage was even tested with. What if something bigger came along?”
He wasn’t sure there was anything more momentous than not being able to get his wife pregnant when she wanted to be. “I think I see what you’re getting at. I felt the same way about not being able to give you something you desperately wanted. But just for the record, I didn’t have any complaints.”
“No, you didn’t. It was all my fault. I was the one who wanted children, and that destroyed our marriage.” She sighed and pulled slowly from his arms. “I caused us pain.”
“I have to shoulder my share of responsibility, Maddie. I shouldn’t have told you to choose between our marriage or the continual merry-go-round of fertility heartache. Those are words I can’t unsay, no matter how much I wish I could. Of course, I was expecting you to pick me.”
Maddie shook her head. “If I’d been any other woman, I would have. That’s the whole problem. I’m selfish.”
“You’re sweet, too. A man’s got to take the bitter with the sweet. Vinegar and sugar is probably a good recipe for something, isn’t it?”
“Salad dressing.” She crossed her arms thoughtfully, before meeting his gaze. “Not much nutrition in that.”
She was talking about nurturing their marriage. Sam nodded. “Guess nothing in life is perfect, Maddie. I like you just the way you are.”
“Yes, but you’re a better person than me, Sam, really. You want to have a marriage again. You’d want to try to make a baby with me. All this because I didn’t tell you I was trying to conceive without you here. It isn’t right if you’re the one who always does the compromising.”
“I’m just thinking what’s best. We’ve got two little babies to consider, and I want us to give them a good family. Two happy parents.”
“You’ve given up France, and your wine company,” she pointed out. “You’d looked for the right deal for a long time.”
“I think my life will be better in the long run if we merged Sam with Maddie in Texas. All I can think about right now is babies who need their father as well as their mother.”
“It’s so uneven,” she murmured. “Like the new shutters on the house. They’re lopsided, Sam, but only because Mom and Dad didn’t agree on what was even. She’d say up a little, he’d say no, they should be down a little, and the house ended up a little off balance.” She gave him a pain-filled glance, her delicate brows drawn together. “A little here, a little there all adds up. Somehow I think we’d end right back at square one.”
“You need some time to yourself,” Sam said softly, “and I think you said a shower might be relaxing. So I’m going out to visit with the extended family. Try to get some rest.”
She nodded slightly, her lower lip quivering, her eyes big and haunted as she watched him close the door behind him.
Outside, he hesitated, thinking about what they were doing. About what they weren’t doing.
She had never planned on him returning for good.
He wished that didn’t bother him as much as it did.
“IT’S NOT THAT WE DON’T want you here, Sam,” Sara Winston told her son as she walked him over to see her rented house. “We just aren’t set up for company. We’ve been spending all our time helping Maddie with her house. And in the final months of the pregnancy, she didn’t feel so well. In fact, she was housebound. Severn and I thought you’d want us here in Austin to help in any way we could.”
“I’m hardly company.”
She glanced away for an instant. “You know what I mean, surely. The only bed in this house is ours.”
Hard to argue with that. He was their only child, so it wasn’t like they’d ever plan for extended visits from farflung children. Except him, and clearly they had neither planned for nor expected his return. That didn’t make him feel one bit better. “You could have mentioned that your new address was next door to my ex-wife. I thought you were retiring to the coast.”
His mother adjusted her pearls. “Maddie told us this house had come up for rent, and Severn suggested we take a short lease to see how we liked the area. We weren’t certain, you know, if Maddie would get tired of having us around. To tell you the truth, Sam, it’s so much nicer being close to her. Otherwise we would be spending our time in hotels or hauling up and down the highway to visit. This way we avoid a great many sleepless nights and purposeless worrying from not knowing what was happening here. And we’ve had the time of our lives getting to know Maddie and the Bradys better. In fact, your father is seriously considering purchasing the house for our permanent retirement residence.”
“That doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me.”
“Maddie didn’t want us to, and we agreed, Sam. You can be angry if you like, but we did what we thought was best for you and Maddie.”
“Unfortunately, there is no Maddie and me.”
“Certainly there is. They’re named Henry and Hayden, and that’s all your father and I care about. We didn’t choose sides. We chose to live near our grandchildren and their mother.”
He kissed his mother on the cheek. “Thanks for looking after Maddie.”
“You should be next door with the children, anyway. Not over here with us.”
That wasn’t the way Maddie wanted it, and he’d decided to do things her way—for now. “It’s all going to work out, Mom. I’ll see you later.”
He left the house, intending to go back to Maddie’s.
“Sam!”
He straightened at the carrying sound of Franny Brady’s voice. “Yes, Franny?”
She gestured from the porch of what had last been the Reefers’ house. “Let me hug your neck, Sam. You haven’t given me a proper greeting.”
“Let me make up for that at once.” He sprang up onto the porch and gave her a sound, grateful hug.
“Now, you bad boy. You come inside and tell your old mother-in-law what was so pressing in France that you had to run off and leave us all in the lurch.” She went inside the comfortable one-story dwelling, leaving him to follow.
“Maddie and I agreed to separate,” he began in self-defense as she pointed him to a chair in her mahogany-paneled kitchen. “She wanted it just as much as I did.”
Franny put a paper plate on the table in front of him, loading it up with brownies and butterscotch cookies, then thumped down a glass of tea beside his plate. She stared at him from under iron-gray curls tumbling over her broad, lined forehead. Franny was from sturdy farm stock and didn’t tolerate guff in anyone. Her daughter had inherited a great deal of her head-on attitude. “You knew when you married my daughter that she wasn’t like any other woman. You always said that. Said she was original. That you wouldn’t
