The Unexpected Wedding Gift

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“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 undertaking even for people born to the life. We survived those early years only through the generosity and pity of neighbors who came to our rescue an embarrassing number of times.”

“But, in the end, they made a go of things?”

“In the end, they lost everything, including their lives. I was ten at the time, and winter was particularly vicious that year. To try to keep the house warm, my clueless father overloaded the woodstove and burned the place to the ground. The neighbors came running—again—but there was nothing anyone could do. The place went up like a rocket.”

He’d swung himself to a sitting position and hunched forward over his knees so that she couldn’t see his face, and his voice had been hoarse with emotion when he’d continued, “I’d been sent out to bring in more wood, and I’ll never forget the noise or the heat as that pathetic shack literally exploded into a ball of fire, or the hiss of sparks landing on frozen snow.” He’d drawn in a long, shuddering breath. “Or the screams of my parents trapped inside.”

Julia had wrapped her arms around him and warmed the back of his neck with her tears. “Oh, Ben!” she’d murmured brokenly. “I’m so sorry.”

He’d shaken his head, impatient with himself and with those poor people who hadn’t lived long enough to see what a fine man their son had become. “My mother’s dreams of happy-ever-after were slapped down time and again by my father’s inability to provide for his family. He was a dreamer, a poet, as unsuited to that corner of the world as a palm tree is to an iceberg, and unwilling to adapt. Yet she loved him regardless and would have been lost without him. It was just as well they both went together.”

“But what about you? You were just a child. Who took care of you?”

“The same people who’d taken care of us all from the day we set foot in the area. For the next six years, I was passed around from one family to another, depending on who had a bed to spare and who could afford to feed another mouth.”

“Weren’t there any relatives who could have taken you in?”

“No. And it was a matter of pride in that kind of tight-knit group for people to look after their own, without interference from government agencies or the like.”

Desperate to find some sort of silver lining to the story, she’d stroked his hair and murmured, “But that was good, wasn’t it? Better than being sent away to live with strangers?”

“I guess. But for all that those good people tried, I never fit into their stalwart Norwegian community. Blue eyes and lanky height notwithstanding, I was as much an alien as if I’d landed from Mars, marked with my father’s genes and because of my resemblance to him, tarred with the same brush of incompetence. No matter how hard I tried, whether it was working from dawn to dusk on the land or scoring the winning goal for the local ice hockey team, I was still the son of that impractical fool Carreras, who’d been too busy writing rhyming couplets about the northern lights to learn the rudiments of survival.”

He’d turned around and looked at her long and seriously then. “I dropped out of school when I was sixteen, Julia. One day, I left Saskatchewan on a Greyhound bus, bound for wherever I could get for the price of the ticket I could afford, and ended up in Vancouver. I don’t come from old money, with a university education and enough influential relatives to ensure my automatic entry to the best clubs. Sure, I’m CEO of my own company, but I seldom wear a business suit and until recently, I didn’t drive a fancy car. So I understand why your folks think I’m not good enough for you. But I promise you this. I’ll never let my wife go short of anything—not food, or shelter, or decent living conditions. If I have to work the clock around, seven days a week, to provide a good life for my family, I will. I’ll prove myself worthy of you and I swear I’ll never give you reason to regret marrying me.”

He’d spoken with such heartfelt sincerity but words, she now realized, were cheap when they weren’t backed up by actions. Before she’d had time to grow used to the feel of his wedding ring on her finger, he’d broken his most sacred promises. How could he have done that, if he loved her the way he claimed he did?

Weary from going over the same ground time and again, but too strung up to sleep, she turned off the light and opened the window. The night sky was so clear that she could see all the way to Washington State and the ghostly shape of Mount Baker, snow-covered year round, riding the horizon to the east. To the southwest, the waters of Semiahmoo Bay lapped quietly against the shore.

The scent of roses drifted on the warm air, and night-scented stocks. There was a sliver of moon casting a rippled path of light over the sea. If she leaned out far enough, she could just catch the glimmer of lights from the sidewalk restaurants lining Marine Drive. There’d be music and laughter down there; the clink of wine-glasses, the flickering glow of candles throwing shadows over the flowers spilling from the planters and hanging baskets outside each establishment.

It was a night made for lovers, for honeymooners; for lying beside one’s new husband in the moon-splashed darkness and discovering what true intimacy was all about. But she had never felt more alone. Ben was only a few yards away, yet the distance between them was such that he might as well have been on the other side of the world.

Thinking about it, about him, brought the disappointment and hurt surging back with a vengeance, enough that it might have overwhelmed her all over again if another sound hadn’t penetrated the quiet.

She stopped in the act of turning away from the window and listened. It came again, from somewhere in the house, the thin heart-rending wail of a very new baby. Ben’s baby.

She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to know why it was crying. But nor could she ignore it. An only child herself, she hadn’t been exposed to infants. Her experience with them was so slight, it was negligible. Yet she knew instinctively that the poor little mite was missing its mother and she couldn’t bear it.

Turning on the light again, she rummaged through her overnight case for something with which to cover herself since she had no intention of venturing forth in her undergarments. The only item she found was the satin nightgown and matching peignoir—white, of course—that had been a trousseau gift from her mother. It was a lovely thing, lavishly embroidered with lace inserts, too frivolous and romantic by far for the present situation, but it would have to serve.

The upper floor was in darkness when she stepped into the hall but there was light showing below. Silently, she made her way to the top of the staircase, not daring to think too far ahead, not knowing if she could do anything to soothe the baby, knowing only that she could not ignore its pitiful cries.

She was halfway down the stairs when a stream of light from the kitchen flooded into the lower hall. A moment later, she froze as Ben appeared.

He’d removed his dinner jacket, left his bow tie hanging loose around his neck and had undone the top button of his dress shirt. He had a tea towel slung over his shoulder and was holding the baby as if it were a football, resting its head against the fingertips of his right hand and its little bottom on his palm of his left hand, with its legs tucked into the crook of his elbow.

He was humming to the child and jiggling it much too energetically. Her heart jumped with fear as he negotiated the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Another inch or two to the right, and he’d have banged the baby’s head.

Be careful! she wanted to cry out. Watch where you’re going and don’t toss him around like that unless you want him to get sick to his little stomach. Hold him so that he can hear your heart beat, not as if you’re about to try for a touchdown!

Perhaps she made a sound, or perhaps she moved because Ben suddenly stopped in his tracks and glanced up, trapping her as she hovered with one foot extended toward the next stair. She wanted to look away, to run back the way she’d come, but he would not release her from his gaze.

The seconds spun out, marked by the quiet tick of the Vienna clock hanging opposite the front door. At length, Ben said, “He threw up all over me but he’s asleep finally.”