скачать книгу бесплатно
The Marriage Agreement
Christine Rimmer
YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE IT–THE REDHEAD'S SURPRISE.His dying father's wickedly whispered words sent memories spinning in Marsh Bravo's mind…. He and Victoria Winningham learning about love in the back seat of his old Plymouth Duster. The final bout with his old man that left him hell-bent on leaving Oklahoma–and his sweetheart–behind. Now he'd returned home to hear his father's final wish. Yet in the years he'd been away, his only regret was a redhead. A woman whose secret, he soon discovered, was of Bravo blood. A woman and child who would bear the Bravo name….
“I’m offering you what you said you wanted.”
“You’re a few years too late, and that situation was nothing like this one.”
“No, it wasn’t. Now I have a life to offer you. Now we have a daughter together. Now we just might have another—”
“I think we need to stop talking about what might be and think about what is.”
Marsh leaned in on her again, so close that Tory felt his warm breath on her face, so close that the pull of attraction between them seemed a magnetic force, charging the air around them. “What might be is what matters. You had my baby once without me. I hate that it happened that way. I’m not going to let it happen that way again. Damn it, I will be what I never had—a good father. If you’re pregnant, you will marry me….”
The Marriage Agreement
Christine Rimmer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Barbara Ferris, my e-mail pal, who loves a good romance, sends me great jokes and is always checking in just to see how I’m doing.
Thanks, Barb.
CHRISTINE RIMMER
came to her profession the long way around. Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been an actress, a salesclerk, a janitor, a model, a phone sales representative, a teacher, a waitress, a playwright and an office manager. She insists she never had a problem keeping a job—she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day. She lives with her family in Oklahoma.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Chapter One
Summoned.
There was no other word for it.
Marsh Bravo had been summoned—by the father he hadn’t set eyes on in ten full years, the father he’d thought he’d put behind him as surely and completely as he had the Oklahoma town of his birth. As surely as he had turned his back on Tory.
Tory.
He’d trained himself not to think of her. And he rarely did anymore. There was no point. And besides, even after all these years, just thinking her name caused a tightness in his chest, a pained echo of longing in the vicinity of his heart. Putting Victoria Winningham behind him had not been easy. In fact, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.
Leaving his father behind? Well, that had been a relief, pure and simple. It had been walking away from murder before it had a chance to happen.
On the hospital bed, Blake Bravo stirred. He turned his head, opened sunken, unfocused eyes. Eyes of a gray so pale they seemed otherworldly. Eyes that would have looked just right staring out of the head of a mad wolf.
Marsh had his mother’s dark-brown eyes. He’d always been glad of that. The last thing he needed was to see his father’s eyes staring back at him every time he looked in the mirror.
The old man on the bed sucked in a wheezing breath. They had him on oxygen. He raised a veined, mottled hand with IV lines taped to the back of it and batted at the plastic tubing attached to his nose, letting his hand drop to the sheet again before he’d managed to dislodge anything.
The old man…
It was more than a figure of speech now. Blake Bravo was only fifty-eight, but he looked much older. He could have been seventy. Or even eighty.
The pale eyes narrowed as they focused on Marsh. “You came.” The voice was low, a whispered rasp, like the hiss of a snake.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Nice suit.”
“I like it.”
Blake grinned a grin to match his eyes—feral, wolfish. “Made it big after all, up there in the windy city. Didn’t you?”
“I’ve done all right.”
Blake let out a low, unpleasant chuckle. “I know you have. I know everything about you. Don’t think that I don’t. I know the name of that dinky college where you managed to get yourself a four-year degree, slaving away at those books and running that company you started at the same time. I’ve kept track of you. I could have come after you anytime I’d wanted to. You’d be surprised the tricks your old dad has up his sleeve.”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
The eerie eyes narrowed further and Blake’s wrinkled slit of a lip curled in a sneer. “I don’t like your attitude, Mr. Big Shot.” He let out a ragged sigh. “But then, I never did…” He lifted that skeletal hand once more, waved it weakly and turned his face away again.
Marsh waited. He had a number of questions he might have asked. But he didn’t ask them. He knew his father. A decade would not have changed the nature of the man. Blake Bravo loved it when people asked him questions. It gave him the opportunity to withhold answers.
Marsh looked beyond the wasted figure on the bed and out the room’s one tall, narrow window. They were on an upper floor. All he could see was a section of gunmetal-gray sky. Oklahoma in May. Sunny one minute, storming the next, always the possibility that a cold front would slam up against a warm one and a funnel cloud would form.
But probably not today. The clouds rose up, dark and high, when tornadoes threatened. Today’s sky was one even, uneventful expanse of gray.
The pale eyes were on him again. “I’m dying.”
Marsh gave the smallest of nods. His father had said that already. On the phone less than twenty-four hours ago. The surgeon Marsh had spoken with before he entered his father’s room had told him that Blake’s prognosis was hopeful. But looking at Blake now, Marsh decided that the doctor had either been kind—or a liar.
“Heart attack,” Blake whispered in that snake-hiss voice of his. “A bad one. And another one coming on soon. I can feel it. I know it—but I told you that, didn’t I?”
“Yes. On the phone.”
“I’m slipping. Repeating myself.”
Marsh shrugged. “It’s all right.”
“The hell it is.”
They looked at each other, a long look, a look with challenge in it. And stubbornness—coming from both sides.
Then Blake spoke again. “It’s my heart that’s failing me. But my brother died of a stroke. Massive cerebral hemorrhage. It’ll be thirty years ago come November. Thirty years…” The low rasp faded off. Blake sucked in a breath through the oxygen tube and went on, “He was only thirty-three, can you believe it?” He arched a gray and grizzled brow. “Freak thing, really. He’d been…how should I put it? Under a hell of a lot of stress in the months right before his…unfortunate demise.”
Marsh still said nothing. What good would it do? He knew his father’s sick games. Let the old man play it out by himself this time.
Blake wheezed. “Have a little trouble…getting air.” Then he prodded, “Well. Don’t you want to know about your uncle?”
Marsh didn’t. Why should he? He doubted there even was an uncle. “You’ll say what you want to say—whatever it is I guess you got me here to say. No point in my interrupting.”
There was more chuckling. The low laughter made Blake cough. The cough had an ugly sound. It also dislodged the oxygen tube, which Blake slowly and wearily hooked back in place.
“Ugh,” he said, when the thing was anchored in his nose again. “Disgusting, this dying…” He shot his son another look. “Admit it. You never knew I had a brother, did you?”
“You’re right. I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“There are lots of things you don’t know.”
“I’m sure you’re right about that, too, Dad.”
“Damn right, I’m right.” Blake wheezed some more. He closed his eyes.
The room was silent again. Marsh watched the clear liquid drip from the IV bag into the tube hooked to the back of his father’s hand. Out in the hall he heard someone with squeaky shoes striding by.
“So damn tired,” said the old man on the bed. “And the meds they give me mess with my mind. And you…you’re slowing me down, Mr. Big Shot. You’re not asking the questions.”
Marsh almost smiled at that, though it would have been a smile completely lacking in warmth. And then he let the dying man have what he wanted. “All right, Dad. Why did you ask me to come here?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You’re right. You’re always right. Why did you demand that I come here?”
Blake’s lip curled again, in a smirk of weary amusement. “Dying’s expensive. Somebody’s got to pay the damn hospital bill.”
“No problem. I’ll cover it.”
“It’s nothing to you, huh? Big shot like you?”
“I said, I’ll cover it.” Marsh spoke with more irritation than he meant to.
“Well, well,” said his father. “All got up in a pricey suit. But you’re not so changed, after all. You never did like me calling you big shot. You still don’t like it, do you?”
Marsh decided to ignore that question. “So that’s all? You needed someone to pick up the tab.”
“You wish.”
“Why am I here, Dad?”
“That’s the third time you’ve asked.” The pale eyes gleamed at the petty triumph. “And I was just razzing you about the bill. I can cover it. You’ll find out. I have…various hidden assets, shall we say?”
Marsh could believe that. When he was growing up, his father had never held a job that Marsh could remember. Sometimes Blake would disappear for months on end. Maybe he worked then, though he never said anything about a job. Marsh’s mother was the one who worked. Tammy Rae Sandovich Bravo had labored long and hard at an endless string of dead-end jobs, in order to support her family. Marsh had assumed that his mother earned what little they had. But then she died when he was sixteen. And somehow there was still food in the rundown shack where they lived. Somehow the electric bill always got paid before OG&E cut off their service.
His father was still talking, the snake-hiss voice weighted now with self-satisfaction. “Uh-huh. Hidden assets. Assets safely tucked away, you might say. And as my son and chosen heir, it’ll all be yours when I go.”
Marsh went ahead and asked, though he knew he wouldn’t get an answer. “What’ll be mine, Dad?”
“You’ll find out. Soon enough. You have a big, glittery surprise in store, I’ll tell you that much. A girl’s best friend, as they say. But in this case, it’s a boy’s best friend, a big shot’s best friend, now isn’t it?”
Marsh only looked at him.
Blake grinned his death’s head grin. “You haven’t got a clue, have you? And I like that. You know I like that. That’s where the fun is. Thirty years’ worth of fun—and they’ll never catch me now. They’d have to track me down in hell.” He started to laugh, but didn’t have the strength for it. The laugh became little more than an exhausted, wheezing sigh. “Damn. Tired…” He swore, low and crudely. “Always tired now…”
The mad eyes drooped shut—then popped opened again. “So that’s why you’re here—or at least half of it. Your big surprise. Your…legacy, why don’t we call it? But you can’t have that till I’m gone.”
Marsh could feel his patience giving way. “Leave it to charity, whatever it is. I don’t want it.”
Blake clucked his tongue. “Always the big shot. Never needed a damn thing from your dear old dad…. Just remember, when the time comes. Start where I never let you go. I’ve made it easy for you, once you start looking.”
Marsh said nothing. He didn’t like what he was feeling. He’d spent ten years recreating himself. And all it took was ten minutes of conversation with his father and he was eighteen again, his hands balling into fists.
“Suck up your guts, Mr. Big Shot,” Blake taunted. “Hold that killer instinct in check.” He lifted his right hand, the one free of IV lines, and raked the lank, thinning gray hair off his heavily lined forehead. Marsh saw it then: a small white starburst of scar tissue right over where the blue pulse throbbed at his father’s temple.
“See that?” the old man hissed. “Were you wondering? Well, there it is, what you did to your dear old dad that last time.”
