The Divorcee Said Yes!
Autor
Sandra Marton
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Chapter 1
IT WAS HER DAUGHTER’S wedding day, and Annie Cooper couldn’t seem to stop crying.
“I’m just going to check my makeup, darling,” she’d told Dawn a few minutes ago, when her eyes had begun to prickle again.
And now here she was, locked inside a stall in the ladies’ room of a beautiful old Connecticut church, clutching a handful of soggy tissues and bawling her eyes out.
“Promise me you won’t cry, Mom,” Dawn had said, only last night.
The two of them had been sitting up over mugs of cinnamon-laced hot chocolate. Neither of them had felt sleepy. Dawn had been too excited; Annie had been unwilling to give up the last hours when her daughter would still be her little girl instead of Nick’s wife.
“I promise,” Annie had said, swallowing hard, and then she’d burst into tears.
“Oh, Moth-ther,” Dawn had said, “for goodness’ sake,” just as if she were still a teenager and Annie was giving her a hard time about coming in ten minutes after curfew on school nights.
And that was just the trouble. She was still a teenager, Annie thought as she wiped her streaming eyes. Her baby was only eighteen years old, far too young to be getting married. Of course, when she’d tried telling that to Dawn the night she’d come home, smiling radiantly with Nick’s engagement ring on her finger, her daughter had countered with the ultimate rebuttal.
“And how old were you when you got married?” she’d said, which had effectively ended the discussion because the whole answer—“Eighteen, the same as you, and look where it got me”—was not one you wanted to make to your own child.
It certainly wasn’t Dawn’s fault her parents’ marriage had ended in divorce.
“She’s too young,” Annie whispered into her handful of Kleenex, “she’s much, much too young.”
“Annie?”
Annie heard the door to the ladies’ room swing open. A murmur of voices and the soft strains of organ music floated toward her, then faded as the door thumped shut.
“Annie? Are you in here?”
It was Deborah Kent, her best friend.
“No,” Annie said miserably, choking back a sob.
“Annie,” Deb said gently, “come out of there.”
“No.”
“Annie.” Deb’s tone became the sort she probably used with her third-graders. “This is nonsense. You can’t hide in there forever.”
“Give me one good reason why I can’t,” Annie said, sniffling.
“Well, you’ve got seventy-five guests waiting.”
“A hundred,” Annie sobbed. “Let ’em wait.”
“The minister’s starting to look impatient.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Annie said, and dumped the wet tissues into the toilet.
“And I think your aunt Jeanne just propositioned one of the groomsmen.”
There was a long silence, and then Annie groaned. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“All I know is what I saw. She got this look on her face—you know the look.”
Annie clamped her eyes shut. “And?”
“And, she went sashaying over to that big blond kid.” Deborah’s voice turned dreamy. “Actually I couldn’t much blame her. Did you see the build on that boy?”
“Deb! Honestly!” Annie flushed the tissues down the toilet, unlocked the stall door and marched to the sink. “Aunt Jeanne’s eighty years old. There’s some excuse for her. But you—”
“Listen, just because I’m forty doesn’t mean I’m dead. You may want to pretend you’ve forgotten what men are good for, but I certainly haven’t.”
“Forty-three,” Annie said, rummaging in her purse. “You can’t lie about your age to me, Deb, not when we share a birthday. As for what men are good for—believe me, I know what they’re good for. Not much. Not one damn thing, actually, except for making babies and that’s just the trouble, Dawn is still just a baby. She’s too young to be getting married.”
“That’s the other thing I came in to tell you.” Deb cleared her throat. “He’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“Your ex.”
Annie went still. “No.”
“Yes. He came in maybe five minutes ago.”
“No, he couldn’t have. He’s in Georgia or Florida, someplace like that.” Annie looked at her friend in the mirror. “You’re sure it was Chase?”
“Six-two, dirty-blond hair, that gorgeous face with its slightly off-center nose and muscles up the yin-yang...” Deb blushed. “Well, I notice these things.”
“So I see.”
“It’s Chase, all right. I don’t know why you’re so surprised. He said he’d be here for Dawn’s wedding, that he wouldn’t let anyone else give his daughter away.”
Annie’s mouth twisted. She wrenched on the water, lathered her hands with soap and scrubbed furiously.
“Chase was always good at promises. It’s the follow-through he can’t manage.” She shut off the faucet and yanked a paper towel from the dispenser. “This whole thing is his fault.”
“Annie...”
“Did he tell Dawn she was making a mistake? No. He most certainly did not. The jerk gave her his blessing. His blessing, Deb, can you imagine?” Annie balled up the paper towel and hurled it into the trash can. “I put my foot down, told her to wait, to finish her education. He gave her a kiss and told her to do what she thought best. Well, that’s typical. Typical! He could never do anything that wasn’t just the opposite of what I wanted.”
“Annie, calm down.”
“I really figured, when he didn’t show up for the rehearsal last night, that we’d gotten lucky.”
“Dawn wouldn’t have thought so,” Deb said quietly. “And you know that she never doubted him, for a minute. ‘Daddy will be here,’ she kept saying.”
“All the more proof that she’s too young to know what’s good for her,” Annie muttered. “What about my sister? Has she shown up yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
Annie frowned. “I hope Laurel’s okay. It’s not like her to be late.”
“I already phoned the railroad station. The train came in late, or something. It’s the minister you’ve got to worry about. He’s got another wedding to perform in a couple of hours, over in Easton.”
Annie sighed and smoothed down the skirt of her knee-length, pale green chiffon dress. “I suppose there’s no getting out of it. Okay, let’s do it... What?”
“You might want to take a look in the mirror first.”
Annie frowned, swung toward the sink again and blanched. Her mascara had run and rimmed her green eyes. Her small, slightly upturned nose was bright pink, and her strawberry blond hair, so lovingly arranged in a smooth, sophisticated cap by Pierre himself just this morning, was standing up as if she’d stuck her finger into an electric outlet.
“Deb, look at me!”
“I’m looking,” Deb said. “We could always ask the organist if he knows the music from Bride of Frankenstein.”
“Will you be serious? I’ve got a hundred people waiting out there.” And Chase, she thought, so quickly and so senselessly that it made her blink.
“What’s the matter now?”
“Nothing,” Annie said quickly. “I mean...just help me figure out how to repair some of this damage.”
Deb opened her purse. “Wash your face,” she said, taking out enough cosmetics to start her own shop, “and leave the rest to me.”
Chase Cooper stood on the steps of the little New England church, trying to look as if he belonged there.
It wasn’t easy. He’d never felt more like an outsider in his life.
He was a city person. He’d spent his life in apartments. When Annie sold the condo after their divorce and told him she was moving to Connecticut, with Dawn, it had damn near killed him.
“Stratham?” he’d said, his voice a strangled roar. “Where the hell is that? I can’t even find it on a map.”
“Try one of those big atlases you’re so fond of,” Annie had said coldly, “the ones you look in when you’re trying to figure out what part of the country you’ll disappear into next.”
“I’ve told you a million times,” Chase had snapped, “I have no choice. If I don’t do things myself, they get screwed up. A man can’t afford that, when he’s got a wife and family to support.”
“Well, now you don’t have to support me at all,” Annie had replied, with a toss of her head. “I refused your alimony, remember?”
“Because you were pigheaded, as usual. Dammit, Annie, you can’t sell this place. Dawn grew up here.”
“I can do what I like,” Annie had said. “The condo’s mine. It was part of the settlement.”
“Because it’s our home, dammit!”
“Don’t you dare shout at me,” Annie had yelled, although he hadn’t shouted. Not him. Never him. “And it’s not our home, not anymore. It’s just a bunch of rooms inside a pile of bricks, and I hate it.”
“Hate it?” Chase had repeated. “You hate this house, that I built with my own two hands?”
“You built a twenty-four story building that just happens to contain our particular seven rooms, and you made a million trillion bucks doing it. And, if you must know, yes, I hate it. I despise it, and I can hardly wait to get out of it.”
Oh, yeah, Chase thought, shuffling uneasily from one foot to the other and wishing, for the first time in years, that he hadn’t given up smoking, oh, yeah, she’d gotten out of the condo, all right. Fast. And then she’d moved herself and Dawn up to this—this pinprick on the map, figuring, no doubt, that it would be the end of his weekly visits with his daughter.
Wrong. He’d driven the hundred-and-fifty-plus miles each way every weekend, like clockwork. He loved his little girl and she loved him, and nothing that had happened between Annie and him could change that. Week after week, he’d come up to Stratham and renewed his bond with his daughter. And week after week, he’d seen that his wife—his former wife—had built herself a happy new life.
She had friends. A small, successful business. And there were men in her life, Dawn said. Well, that was fine. Hell, there were women in his, weren’t there? As many as he wanted, all of them knockouts. That was one of the perks of bachelorhood, especially when you were the CEO of a construction company that had moved onto the national scene and prospered.
Eventually, though, he’d stopped going to Stratham. It was simpler that way. Dawn got old enough so she could take a train or a plane to wherever he was. And every time he saw her, she was lovelier. She’d seemed to grow up, right before his eyes.
Chase’s mouth thinned. But she hadn’t grown up enough to get married. Hell, no. Eighteen? And she was going to be some guy’s wife?
It was Annie’s fault. If she’d paid a little less attention to her own life and a little more to their daughter’s, he wouldn’t be standing here in a monkey suit, waiting to give his little girl away to a boy hardly old enough to shave.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. Nick was twenty-one. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t like the kid. Nick—Nicholas, to be precise—was a nice enough young man, from a good family and with a solid future ahead of him. He’d met the boy when he’d flown Dawn and her fiancé to Florida to spend a week with him on his latest job site. The kids had spent the time looking at each other as if the rest of the world didn’t exist, and that was just the trouble. It did exist, and his daughter hadn’t seen enough of it yet to know what she was doing.
Chase had tried to tell her that, but Dawn had been resolute. In the end, he had no choice. Dawn was legally of age. She didn’t need his consent. And, as his daughter quickly told him, Annie had already said she thought the marriage was a fine idea.
So he’d swallowed his objections, kissed Dawn, shaken Nick’s hand and given them his blessing—as if it were worth a damn.
You could bless the union of two people all you wanted, but it didn’t mean a thing. Marriage—especially for the young—was nothing but a legitimate excuse for hormonal insanity.
He could only hope his daughter, and her groom, proved the exception to the rule.
“sir?”
Chase looked around. A boy who looked barely old enough to shave was standing in the doorway of the church.
“They sent me out to tell you they’re about ready to begin, sir.”
Sir, Chase thought. He could remember when he’d called older men “sir.” It hadn’t been so much a mark of respect as it had been a euphemism for “old man.” That was how he felt, suddenly. Like an old, old man.
“Sir?”
“I heard you the first time,” Chase said irritably and then, because none of what he was feeling was the fault of the pink-cheeked groomsman, he forced a smile to his lips. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got the father-of-the-bride jitters, I guess.”
Still smiling, or grimacing, whichever the hell it was, he clapped the boy on the back and stepped past him, into the cool darkness of the church.
Annie sniffled her way through the ceremony.
Dawn was beautiful, a fairy-tale princess come to life. Nick was handsome enough to bring tears to whatever eyes weren’t already streaming, though not to his former guardian’s, who stood beside him wearing a look that spoke volumes on his handsome face.
Chase was wearing the same look. Her ex was not just dry-eyed but stony-faced. He’d smiled only once, at Dawn, as he’d handed her over to her waiting groom.
Then he’d taken his place beside Annie.
“I hope you know what in hell you’re doing,” he’d muttered, as he’d slipped in next to her.
Annie had felt every muscle in her body clench. How like him, to talk like that here, of all places. And to blame her for—what? The fact that the wedding wasn’t being held in a church the size of a cathedral? That there wasn’t room for him to invite all his big-shot clients and turn a family event into a networking opportunity?
Maybe he thought Dawn’s gown was too old-fashioned, or the flower arrangements—which she, herself, had done—too provincial. It wouldn’t have surprised her. As far as Chase was concerned, nothing she’d ever done was right. She could see him out of the corner of her eye, standing beside her, straight and tall and unmistakably masculine.
“Isn’t Daddy gorgeous in formal wear?” Dawn had gushed.
A muscle twitched in Annie’s cheek. If you liked the type, she supposed he was. But she wasn’t a dumb kid anymore, to have her little heart sent into overtime beats by the sight of a man’s hard body or equally hard, handsome face.
There had been a time, though. Oh, yes, there’d been a time that just standing next to him this way, feeling his arm brush lightly against her shoulder, smelling the faint scent of his cologne, would have been enough to—would have been enough to—
Bang!
Annie jumped. The doors at the rear of the church had flown open. A buzz of surprise traveled among the guests. The minister fell silent and peered up the aisle, along with everybody else, including Dawn and Nick.
Somebody was standing in the open doorway. After a moment, a man got up and shut the door, and the figure moved forward.
Annie let out a sigh of relief. “It’s Laurel,” she whispered, for the benefit of the minister. “My sister. I’m so relieved she finally got here.”
“Typical Bennett histrionics,” Chase muttered, out of the side of his mouth.
Annie’s cheeks colored. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.”
“I most certainly did, and—”
“Mother,” Dawn snapped.
Annie blushed. “Sorry.”
The minister cleared his throat. “And now,” he said in tones so rounded Annie could almost see them forming circles in the air, “if there is no one among us who can offer a reason why Nicholas Skouras Babbitt and Dawn Elizabeth Cooper should not be wed...”
A moment later, the ceremony was over.
It was interesting, being the father of the bride at a wedding at which the mother of the bride was no longer your wife.
Dawn had insisted she wanted both her parents seated at the main table with her.
“You can keep your cool, Daddy, can’t you?” she’d said. “I mean, you won’t mind, sitting beside Mom for a couple of hours, right?”
“Of course not,” Chase had said.
And he’d meant it. He was a civilized man and Annie, for all her faults—and there were many—was a civilized woman. They’d been divorced for five years. The wounds had healed. Surely they could manage polite smiles and chitchat for a couple of hours.
That was what he’d thought, but reality was another thing entirely.
He hadn’t counted on what it would be like to stand at the altar, with Annie standing beside him looking impossibly young and—what was the point in denying it—impossibly beautiful in a dress of palest green. Her hair had been the wild cluster of silky strawberry curls she’d always hated and he’d always loved, and her nose had been suspiciously pink. She’d sniffled and wept her way through the ceremony. Well, hell, his throat had been pretty tight there, once or twice. In fact, when the minister had gone through all that nonsense about speaking up or forever holding your peace, he’d been tempted to put an arm around her and tell her it was okay, they weren’t losing a daughter, they were gaining a son.
Except that it would have been a lie. They were losing a daughter, and it was all Annie’s fault.
By the time they’d been stuck together at the head of the receiving line as if they were a pair of Siamese twins, he’d felt about as surly as a lion with a thorn in its paw.
“Smile, you two,” Dawn had hissed, and they’d obeyed, though Annie’s smile had been as phony-looking as his felt.
At least they’d traveled to the Stratham Inn in separate cars—except that once they’d gotten there, they’d had to take seats beside each other at the table on the dais.
Chase felt as if his smile was frozen on his face. It must have looked that way, too, from the way Dawn lifted her eyebrows when she looked at him.
Okay, Cooper, he told himself. Pull it together. You know how to make small talk with strangers. Surely you can manage a conversation with your ex-wife.
He looked at Annie and cleared his throat. “So,” he said briskly, “how’ve you been?”
Annie turned her head and looked at him. “I’m sorry,” she said politely, “I didn’t quite get that. Were you talking to me?”
Chase’s eyes narrowed. Who else would he have been talking to? The waiter, leaning over to pour his champagne?
Keep your cool, he told himself, and bared his teeth in a smile.
“I asked how you’ve been.”
“Very well, thank you. And you?”
Very well, thank you... What was with this prissy tone?
“Oh, I can’t complain.” He forced another smile, and waited for Annie to pick up the ball. She didn’t, so he plunged into the conversational waters again. “Matter of fact, I don’t know if Dawn mentioned it, but we just landed a big contract.”
“We?” she said, in a tone that could have given chilblains to an Eskimo.
“Well, Cooper Construction. We bid on this job in—”
“How nice,” she said, and turned away.
Chase felt his blood pressure shoot off the scale. So much for his attempt at being polite. Annie was not just cutting him dead, she was icing the corpse, craning her neck, looking everywhere but at him.
Suddenly a smile, a real one, curved across her mouth.
“Yoo hoo,” she called softly.
Yoo hoo? Yoo hoo?
“Hi, there,” she mouthed, and waved, and damned if some Bozo the Clown at a nearby table didn’t wave back.
“Who is that jerk?” Chase said before he could stop himself.
Annie didn’t even look at him. She was too busy looking at the jerk, and smiling.
“That ‘jerk,’” she said, “is Milton Hoffman. He’s an English professor at the university.”
Chase watched as the professor rose to his feet and threaded through the tables toward the dais. The guy was tall, and thin; he was wearing a shiny blue serge suit and he had on a bow tie. He looked more like a cadaver than a professor.
He had a smile on his face, too, as he approached Annie, and it was the smile, more than anything, that suddenly put a red film over Chase’s eyes.
“Anne,” Hoffman said. “Anne, my dear.” Annie held out her hand. Hoffman clasped it in a pasty, marshmallow paw and raised it to his lips. “It was a beautiful ceremony.”
“Thank you, Milton.”
“The flowers were perfect.”
“Thank you, Milton.”
“The music, the decorations...all wonderful.”
“Thank you, Milton.”
“And you look exquisite.”
“Thank you, Milton,” Chase said.
Annie and the Prof both swung their heads toward him. Chase smiled, showing all his teeth.
“She does, doesn’t she?” he said. “Look great, I mean.”
Annie looked at him, her eyes flaming a warning, but Chase ignored it. He leaned toward her and hooked an arm around her shoulders.
“Love that low-cut neckline, especially, babe, but then, you know how it is.” He shot Hoffman a leering grin. “Some guys are leg men, right, Milty? But me, I was always a—”
“Chase!” Color flew into Annie’s face. Hoffman’s eyes, dark and liquid behind horn-rimmed glasses, blinked once.
“You must be Anne’s husband.”
“You’re quick, Milty, I’ve got to give you that.”
“He is not my husband,” Annie said firmly, twisting out of Chase’s embrace. “He’s my ex-husband. My former husband. My once-upon-a-time-but-not-anymore husband, and frankly, if I never see him again, it’ll be too soon.” She gave Hoffman a melting smile. “I hope you’ve got your dancing shoes on, Milton, because I intend to dance the afternoon away.”
Chase smiled. He could almost feel his canine teeth turning into fangs.
“You hear that, Milty?” he said pleasantly. He felt a rush of primal pleasure when he saw Hoffman’s face turn even paler than it already was.
“Chase,” Annie said, through her teeth; “stop it.”
Chase leaned forward over the table. “She’s a wonderful dancer, our Annie. But if she’s had too much bubbly, you got to watch out. Right, babe?”
Annie opened and shut her mouth as if she were a fish. “Chase,” she said, in a strangled whisper.
“What’s the matter? Milt’s an old pal of yours, right? We wouldn’t want to keep any secrets from him, would we, babe?”
“Stop calling me that!”
“Stop calling you what?”
“You know what,” Annie said furiously. “And stop lying. I’ve never been drunk in my life.”
Chase’s lips curved up in a slow, wicked smile. “Sweetheart, come on. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the night we met.”
“I’m warning you, Chase!”
“There I was, a college freshman, minding my own business and dancing with my girlfriend at her high school’s Valentine Day dance—”
“You were never innocent,” Annie snapped.
Chase grinned. “You should know, babe. Anyway, there I was, doing the Mashed Potato, when I spied our Annie, tottering out the door, clutching her middle and looking as if she’d just eaten a bushel of green apples.”
Annie swung toward Milton Hoffman. “It wasn’t like that at all. My date had spiked my punch. How was I to know—”
A drumroll and a clash of cymbals drowned out her voice.
“...and now,” an oily, amplified voice boomed, “Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Babbitt will take their very first dance as husband and wife.”
People began to applaud as Nick took Dawn in his arms. They moved onto the dance floor, gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes.
Annie gave Milton a beseeching look.
“Milton,” she said, “listen—”
“It’s all right,” he said quickly. “Today’s a family day, Anne. I understand.” He started to reach for her hand, caught himself, and drew back. “I’ll call you tomorrow. It was...interesting to have met you, Mr. Cooper.”
Chase smiled politely. “Call me Chase, please. There’s no need to be so formal, considering all we have in common.”
Annie didn’t know which she wanted to do more, punch Chase for his insufferable behavior or punch Milton Hoffman for being so easily scared off. It took only a second to decide that Chase was the more deserving target She glared at him as Hoffman scuttled back to his seat.
“You are lower than a snake’s belly,” she said.
Chase sighed. “Annie, listen—”
“No. No, you listen.” She pointed a trembling finger at him. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
Did she? Chase shook his head. Then, she knew more than he did. There wasn’t a reason in the world he’d acted like such a jerk just now. So what if Annie was having a thing with some guy? So what if the guy looked as if he might faint at the sight of a mouse? So what if he’d had a sudden, blazing vision of Annie in bed with the son of a bitch?
She could do what she wanted, with whom she wanted. It sure as hell didn’t matter to him.
“Are you listening to me?” she said.
Chase looked at Annie. Her face was still shot with color. It arced across her cheekbones and over the bridge of her nose, where a scattering of tiny freckles lay like sprinkles of gold. He remembered how he used to kiss those warm, golden spots after they’d made love.
“I know what you’re up to, Chase. You’re trying to ruin Dawn’s wedding because I didn’t do it the way you wanted.”
Chase’s eyebrows leaped into his hairline. “Are you nuts?”
“Oh, come off it!” Annie’s voice quavered with anger. “You wanted a big wedding in a big church, so you could invite all your fancy friends.”
“You are nuts! I never—”
“Keep your voice down!”
“I am keeping it down. You’re the one who’s—”
“Let me tell you something, Chase Cooper. This wedding is exactly the kind Dawn wanted.”
“And a damn good thing, too. If it had been up to you, our daughter might have ended up getting married on a hillside in her bare feet—”
“Oh, and what that would have done to Mr. Chase Cooper’s image!”
“—while some idiot played a satyr in the background.”
“Sitar,” Annie hissed. “It’s called a sitar, Cooper, although you probably know a lot more about satyrs than you do about musical instruments.”
“Are we back to that again?” Chase snarled, and Annie’s color heightened
“No. We are not ‘back’ to anything. As far as I’m concerned—”
“...the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chase Cooper.”
Annie’s and Chase’s gazes swung toward the bandstand. The bandleader was smiling benevolently in their direction, and the crowd—even those who looked a bit surprised by the announcement—began to applaud.
“Come on, Annie and Chase.” The bandleader’s painted-on smile widened. “Let’s get up on the dance floor and join the bride and groom.”
“Let’s not,” Chase growled, under his breath.
“The man’s out of his mind,” Annie snapped.
But the applause had grown, and even the wild glance for help Annie shot toward Dawn, still swaying in the arms of her groom, brought only an apologetic shrug of her daughter’s shoulders.
Chase shoved back his chair and held out his hand.
“All right,” he said grimly, “let’s do it and get it over with.”
Annie’s chin jerked up. She rose stiffly and put her hand in his.
“I really hate you, Chase.”
“The feeling, madam, is entirely mutual.”
Eyes hot with anger, Annie and Chase took a couple of deep breaths, pasted civilized smiles on their lips and swung out onto the dance floor.
