baby’s crying,” she said.
Astonished, he looked over at the little scrap of life that was his son and saw movement beneath the blanket, heard a mewing that sounded more like a kitten in distress than a human being. What was he supposed to do? He knew next to nothing about babies except that they needed attention at both ends rather often, yet it seemed to him that removing the child from the safety of the baby carrier wasn’t smart. What if the car swerved suddenly, or slammed to a stop? What if he dropped the baby on its head?
“I guess whatever’s bothering him can wait,” he muttered. “We’ll be at the house in another five minutes or so.”
She tilted her head, as though to say, Suit yourself. He’s your son, and continued to stare unblinkingly at the back of the driver’s head.
By the time they finally drew up outside the house, the mewing had escalated into an irate squawk. Leaving him to deal with that as he saw fit, Julia stepped out of the car and stalked to the front door. The driver followed with their luggage. Ben brought up the rear with the baby shrieking at the top of his tiny lungs.
“How do I make him stop?” he asked, once they were inside.
“Don’t ask me,” Julia said. “I’ve never had a baby. But I’d imagine whatever’s in the bag your lady friend left with you might provide some answers.”
“She’s not my lady friend, Julia,” he said edgily.
“Your former lover, then.” Turning to the mirror hanging above the hall table, she ripped off her wedding veil and tiara. “It’s been a long, not to mention devastating day, and I’m tired. I’ll take one of the guest rooms and leave the master suite for you, since you’ll be requiring extra space.”
“Julia—!” he began. But he was drowned out by the baby’s crying and even if he hadn’t been, she wasn’t interested in listening to anything he had to say. Deftly hoisting her skirt over her arm, she disappeared up the stairs.
He couldn’t blame her. Outwardly, he might appear to be functioning on all eight cylinders but inside he was a mess. How she must be feeling he could only begin to imagine. And the devil of it was, he couldn’t make consoling her his first priority.
Picking up the baby, he tried to soothe it by propping it against his chest. Its head flopped forward as if it hadn’t been properly connected to the neck. The hand he’d placed under its little rear end felt suddenly wet and clammy. Something smelled.
“Cripes!” he muttered as some sort of drool bubbled down the front of his shirt. “You’d better have come with a book of instructions, kiddo, or you and I are in for a rough ride.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE house had five bedrooms. Julia chose one at the other end of the upstairs hall, as far away from the master suite as possible. Fortunately, the renovations had almost been completed and although the furnishings were minimal, they’d do. Anything was better than being in the same room with Ben and the baby. That she could not have endured. She’d have slept in the garage first.
The room smelled of fresh paint and lemon oil. There were no pictures on the walls, no knickknacks on the dresser, no reading lamps, nor even sheets on the bed. The windows were bare and the only light came from an antique brass fixture in the middle of the ceiling.
It showed her stark reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe door. She looked like the bride of Frankenstein—wild-eyed and as white as her wedding dress.
Almost everything about the wedding had been white—the flowers, the cake, the limousines. Even her bridesmaids had worn white. It had been her mother’s idea. “Why not?” she’d said, when Julia had questioned the need for quite such an extreme fashion statement. “It’s not only chic, it’s a proclamation of your innocence. You’re entitled to be married in white, unlike most brides in this day and age. Call me old-fashioned if you will, but to my way of thinking, women who’ve behaved like alley cats before marriage have no business parading down the aisle and trying to pass themselves off as virgins when they finally decide to settle down with one man.”
Just as well Ben had worn black. At least it matched his morals.
A sob caught Julia off guard and as another wave of misery overtook her, she tugged frantically at her dress. She could not bear its smothering softness a moment longer. She heard the pop of tiny buttons pulled roughly free, the tear of fine silk. Heard the ping of hand-sewn seed pearls and crystal bugle beads rolling across the polished oak floor. And didn’t care. The dress and everything it signified were a farce.
“Julia?” Ben’s voice, right outside the door, had her swallowing her sobs. “May I come in?”
And witness her standing there in nothing but her stockings and the strapless merry widow that showed more of her breasts than it concealed? With her hair standing on end and her face streaked with mascara and her eyes all puffy and red from crying? “You may not!”
“I’ve brought up your overnight bag. I figure you’ll be needing it.”
“Leave it outside the door.”
She heard his sigh, loaded with frustration and even a hint of annoyance. As if she was the one who’d ruined everything! “Have it your way.”
I wish I could, she thought, listening to his footsteps fade down the hall. If I had my way…
But what was the use in thinking along those lines? In a few weeks’ time, she’d turn twenty-four. She’d stopped believing in fairy godmothers years ago. No one was going to come along and change things back to the way they’d been yesterday. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.
How could she and Ben possibly make their marriage work when the trust she’d believed in so completely was based on a myth? Her mother was right: she didn’t know him. The outward trappings might not have changed. He was still six feet, three inches tall. His eyes were still blue, his smile as heart-stoppingly sexy as ever. But inside, where it counted, he was a stranger.
She’d thought she knew everything about him. They’d spent hours, days, exchanging life histories. She knew he’d inherited his black hair and olive skin from his Texas born Spanish-American father, but that his blue eyes and rangy height came from his Canadian mother’s Norwegian ancestry.
She knew he’d been born on a train stranded halfway across the Canadian prairies in a January blizzard; that his parents had left Texas and come back to his mother’s homeland to start a new life on a farm in northern Saskatchewan, left to her by an uncle she never knew.
“Trouble was,” he’d told Julia, lying stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace in his apartment, with his head in her lap, “they hadn’t the first idea what they were taking on. They thought they were coming to a pretty log cabin beside a lake ringed by majestic evergreens. What they got was a tar-paper shack with an outdoor privy, a well whose pump should have been retired years earlier, the closest body of water a slough frozen solid eight months of the year, and summers plagued with mosquitoes and black flies.”
“But they were happy,” she’d said hopefully, because she found their story so touchingly romantic.
“Hardly! They had no concept of the bone-cracking, deep-freezing cold of the Canadian north, and no idea at all how to work a farm, which is a tough
