“Chance, I’m thirty-one years old. I’m not dating anyone and I have no plans to marry, but I want a child.” She raised her chin as her dark gaze held his and in the depths of her dark eyes he saw her strength. The same strength he’d always found attractive in her in years past.
“Lana—”
“Think about it, Chance,” she continued, her low voice ringing with a surprising boldness. “It would be perfect. We get married. You get your ranch and I get pregnant. Once we both have what we want, we divorce. No strings attached, no messy emotions.”
Chance shook his head, trying to reconcile the woman before him with the shy, sweet young girl who’d been his confidante in one of the most difficult years of his life.
“Lana, I appreciate the offer, but I think working for my father these last few months has made you plumb loco. I can’t marry you.” He didn’t intend to marry anyone. Again anger tore at him—anger at his father, who was, even from the grave, attempting to pull strings to control his life.
“It’s a crazy idea and this is the end of this discussion.” Without waiting for her reply, he stalked toward the house and the waiting guests.
She was crazy, she must be crazy to have even suggested such an idea. Lana’s cheeks burned hot with humiliation as she followed Chance toward the house.
What had she been thinking? What had possibly possessed her to suggest such a thing? Chance disappeared into the front door of the house, but Lana stopped on the porch, not wanting to return to the crowd inside until she was completely composed and the warmth of her embarrassment wasn’t shining on her cheeks.
She sank down into one of the two wicker rockers. She knew what she’d been thinking when she’d made the offer. She’d been thinking of the sweet baby scent of her niece, of the cuddly warmth of her in Lana’s arms. Since the time of Marissa’s birth, Lana had been filled with a yearning for her own baby.
Being over thirty and with no man in her life, she had heard the faint ticking of her biological clock more than once on a lonely night.
Before she’d heard about the terms of Tom Reilly’s will, she’d been thinking about artificial insemination. Becoming a single parent didn’t frighten her. In the best of worlds, she would have met and married a man who loved her and whom she loved, but in the real world, there was no hint of any prospective husband on the horizon.
The moment she’d heard about Chance’s problem, she’d gotten the idea of a temporary marriage with him. She wanted desperately to be a mother, and who better to be the father than a man like Chance, a man who would never settle down, never demand an active role in the baby’s life. Chance would be a perfect sperm donor.
She tried not to think about how many nights in her youth she had dreamed about Chance Reilly, how many hours of those youthful days she’d wasted fantasizing about the handsome brown-haired young man whose green eyes had burned with the fierce intensity of tumultuous emotions.
Silly dreams and ridiculous fantasies, she now thought. She’d long ago outgrown the crush she’d once had on Chance Reilly. Chance was every teenage girl’s heartthrob but he was not the material for everlasting love.
She stood, knowing she needed to get back inside. Before she’d left the house to seek out Chance, she’d been serving as an unofficial hostess. And if she knew her mother, Inez Ramirez would be in the kitchen, washing up after everyone and replenishing the food on the dining room table.
Shoving aside her conversation with Chance, she went back inside the house. Chance stood near the dining room table, talking with several of the other ranchers in the area who had shown up to pay their respects.
There was no denying that time had only increased the man’s attractiveness. His brown hair was now sun-streaked with gleaming blond strands, the variegated color only appearing to deepen the hazel green of his eyes. Time had only seemed to better define the lines of his square face, his strong nose and full lips. The shoulders that had seemed broad before now seemed impossibly so.
She consciously tore her gaze from him and headed for the kitchen. Sure enough, her mother was there, standing at the sink with her arms half-buried in soap suds.
“Mama, you don’t have to do this,” Lana protested.
Inez flashed her daughter a warm smile. “I don’t mind. Chance has nobody else to help out.”
Lana picked up a dish towel and took a plate from her mother to dry. For a moment, the two women worked in a companionable silence.
Lana fought the impulse to tell her mother what she’d just offered Chance. She knew instinctively that her mother would never understand. Lana’s parents had married for love, and that love had not weakened through the years, but had rather strengthened. Inez would never understand her daughter settling for less than true love.
“And so your work here is done,” Inez said as she finished the last of the dishes.
Lana nodded. “I’ll pack up my things and move back to my apartment this evening.” The sooner the better, she thought to herself. She wasn’t particularly eager to face Chance again. Funny, but she wasn’t particularly eager to move back to her silent, empty apartment, either.
Within thirty minutes her parents had left and Lana excused herself from the remaining crowd to go to the room she had called home for the past six months.
It was a small room right next door to the master bedroom. It had been Jim Hastings, one of the local doctors, who had set up the arrangement for a home nurse for Tom Reilly.
Despite the fact that a series of strokes had left him partially paralyzed, Tom refused to be hospitalized, and also refused to call his only son home to take care of him.
She lost track of time as she folded clothes and carefully placed them in her suitcase. No matter how difficult the patient, there was always an edge of sadness inside her when one finally succumbed to death.
When she had all her clothes packed, she remembered she’d left a book she’d been reading in Tom’s bedroom where she’d spent long hours sitting by his bedside.
As she walked down the short hallway between the small bedroom and the master, she realized the house had grown silent and night had fallen completely.
A small lamp burned on the table next to the bed. No ghost of Tom Reilly haunted the room. Tom had been hospitalized the day before his death. Lana had remained here, hoping he would rally and be returned to his home, but it had not been so.
She grabbed the book from the stand and stood for a moment, staring at the bed as she said a silent prayer for Tom Reilly’s soul. He had not been a pleasant man and she had a feeling he could use all the prayers that were offered on his behalf.
“I’ll bet he’s barking orders in hell right about now.”
Lana jumped in surprise and whirled toward the window, where she spied Chance sitting in the shadows of the room. “You scared me half to death,” she exclaimed and clapped the paperback book over her breast to still her thudding heart.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I just came in for my book,” she explained. “I’m all packed, so I guess I’ll just say goodbye.” She turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway as he softly called her name.
