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Everything but a Husband
Karen Templeton
At thirty-one, widow Galen Granata was a veteran of such an unhappy marriage that she had never dared to long for what every woman dreamed of. Like a man to love… and children. So she' d built a wall around herself that no one had even tried to penetrate.Until Del Farentino. And then Galen found herself face-to-face with the enormously attractive widower– and his deaf little girl. Wendy might not be able to talk in the conventional way, but she– and her sexy single father– were speaking to Galen in a way that no one else ever had. Could she find the courage to accept everything they offered?
It was by far the most intimate experience she’d ever had.
This man, this…stranger, with a few words, had opened himself up to her more than any other human being Galen had ever known.
“Sorry,” she heard Del whisper, his voice gruff.
She lifted her eyes again, meeting his, her heart pounding. “For what?”
She saw him suck in a fast, deep breath, shake his head. “Nothing.” Another breath, a ghost of a smile. “Nothing. Forget it.”
And when she let herself, for the dozenth time, drift in those incredibly honest eyes, she thanked God she wasn’t going to be around for more than a few days. Because she knew, on some level so deep and so pure that the knowledge fairly hummed inside her, she could lose herself in those eyes.
Dear Reader,
The year is ending, and as a special holiday gift to you, we’re starting off with a 3-in-1 volume that will have you on the edge of your seat. Special Report, by Merline Lovelace, Debra Cowan and Maggie Price, features three connected stories about a plane hijacking and the three couples who find love in such decidedly unusual circumstances. Read it—you won’t be sorry.
A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues with Carla Cassidy’s Strangers When We Married, a reunion romance with an irresistible baby and a couple who, I know you’ll agree, truly do belong together. Then spend 36 HOURS with Doreen Roberts and A Very…Pregnant New Year’s. This is one family feud that’s about to end…at the altar!
Virginia Kantra’s back with Mad Dog and Annie, a book that’s every bit as fascinating as its title—which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite titles. I guarantee you’ll enjoy reading about this perfect (though they don’t know it yet) pair. Linda Randall Wisdom is back with Mirror, Mirror, a good twin/bad twin story with some truly unexpected twists—and a fabulous hero. Finally, read about a woman who has Everything But a Husband in Karen Templeton’s newest—and keep the tissue box nearby, because your emotions will really be engaged.
And, of course, be sure to come back next month for six more of the most exciting romances around—right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.
Enjoy!
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
Everything But a Husband
Karen Templeton
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to all those parents who daily face,
and meet, with grace, courage and a never-ending sense of
humor the challenge of raising “special” children;
and to Jack, who has, for more than twenty years,
tirelessly supported my quest to be everything I want to be.
KAREN TEMPLETON
is the mother of five sons and living proof that romance and dirty diapers are not mutually exclusive. Her first book for Silhouette appeared in 1998; just two years later, she was thrilled to see her work make the Waldenbooks series bestseller list. A transplanted Easterner in serious denial, she spends far too much time coaxing her Albuquerque, New Mexico, garden to yield roses and something resembling a lawn, all the while fantasizing about a weekend alone with her husband. Or at least an uninterrupted conversation.
She loves to hear from her readers, who may reach her by writing c/o Silhouette Books, 300 E. 42
St., New York, NY 10017.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
Chapter 1
“Because you had a choice.”
Brow knotted, Galen dropped onto the rush-seated ladder-back chair in front of Gran’s desk. That’s all it said, the note wrapped around the large brown envelope, one of those old-fashioned kinds that tied in the back. That, and her name, marching across the front in her grandmother’s distinctive angular scrawl.
She’d had to pry it out of the top right-hand drawer of the desk, wedged as it was behind a cache of loose change and old receipts, a wad of tangled gumbands and at least two dozen long since dead pens. The old woman had refused to let her touch any of her personal stuff. Just because she couldn’t walk so good anymore—or see, or hear, Galen had silently added—didn’t mean her mind was gone, she’d said. Long as she was still breathing, she could handle her own damn finances. Except “damn” came out “dumb” in her thick Slovak accent.
Well, Gran had stopped breathing a week ago, twelve days short of her ninety-first birthday, leaving Galen to sort everything out. And find things, too. Like long brown envelopes with her name printed on them.
The phone—an antique of sorts, left over from the late forties—jangled on the back of the desk. Galen answered it, tucking a stray hank of hair back behind her ear as she distractedly informed the hyper telemarketer that she seriously doubted her grandmother needed another charge card.
She rattled the receiver into its cradle, stared again at the envelope.
“Because you had a choice.”
Now what on earth d’you suppose she meant by that? Well. There was only one way to find out, wasn’t there? Yet…a perverseness not unlike Gran’s stilled her fingers, kept her from untwisting the thin string, opening the envelope.
Or maybe it was more than perverseness?
Galen sighed, squinting out the naked paned window at the flanneled November sky, absently worrying a loose thread dangling from the hem of her sweatshirt. Never could convince her grandmother to splurge on curtains in her bedroom, the old woman insisting the vinyl roller shade was perfectly adequate. Odd how they’d always done that to each other, her grandmother and her. Goaded each other. Driven each other batty. Peculiar way of showing they cared, when she thought about it. Still, all they’d had was each other, for the last three years, a pair of widows keeping each other company in the tiny South Side Pittsburgh house her grandmother had lived in her entire married life.
Now Galen didn’t even have that.
A small, tight knot of anxiety twisted in her stomach.
She dropped the envelope, pushed herself up from the desk. Her hands lifted to the back of her neck, where she released her thick, straight hair from its tortoiseshell barrette, only to immediately finger-comb it back, reclip it. Her gaze lit on the sagging double bed in the center of the room, still shrouded in its yellowing chenille bedspread. Tears pricked behind her eyelids.
Maybe she’d returned to the house where she’d spent so much of her childhood because it seemed she had no choice. Because, after Vinnie died, his medical bills had eaten up whatever there might have been, leaving her flat broke. And without the opportunity she’d naively assumed would be hers. But she’d stayed because she’d wanted to. Somehow, Gran had mellowed in Galen’s absence, allowing a gentleness and sense of humor to rise to the surface of an otherwise dour personality Galen had sure never seen during those interminable years of living with her grandparents after her parents’ deaths. Had Gran’s iron-handedness simply been a reflection of her grandfather’s? She supposed so. After all, most women of her grandmother’s generation and cultural bent felt it their duty to defer to their husband’s decisions. And together, they’d certainly done all they could to clip a young girl’s wings. No makeup, no dating, no going off by herself… To this day, she wasn’t sure how she managed to talk them into letting her take that job at Granata’s, one of Pittsburgh’s most popular Italian restaurants. Four evenings a week, waiting tables. Which was where she met Vinnie, the youngest of the four Granata brothers, already thirty to her sixteen.
Another twist to the gut, this one sharper. Colder. To be sure, he’d courted her slowly. Sweetly. Secretively. Never touched her, except for the occasional stroke of her cheek, a squeeze of her hand, when no one else was around, and not even that the first year. Blinded by the dazzling glare of first love, Galen had been living a dream, hardly daring to believe that this handsome, older man really wanted her. That he might rescue her from the prison of her grandparents’ over-protectiveness. But he did. Enough to keep their secret for two years. The morning of Galen’s eighteenth birthday, they eloped.
He’d cheated her out of a wedding. Too.
A sharp breeze rattled the windows; with a sharp sigh, Galen turned back to the desk, saw the envelope.
“Because you had a choice.”
Yes, it was true. After all, she could have gotten a job—any job—and tried to make a life of her own. After all, it wasn’t as if there were any children—Galen shut her eyes, waiting out the tug of self-pity.
So. She could have refused her grandmother’s offer to come live with her. Just until she got on her feet, Gran had said. Except that within five minutes of moving back, Galen realized the indomitable woman she’d feared so much as a child had somehow turned into a frail and needy old lady. Still domineering, still set in her ways, to be sure, but now someone Galen could love.
But. Now Gran was gone, and Galen found herself back at square one. All she had, besides this house and a couple of not-exactly-impressive bank accounts, was a neurotic terrier-mix who piddled whenever she got too excited, and whatever was inside this envelope. She couldn’t imagine what it might be: Gran had insisted on putting Galen’s name on everything some time ago, insisting she didn’t want any “rigamarole”, as she put it, with the government, when the time came. Said there’d be little enough as it was, no sense making things complicated on top of it.
The old chair squawked as she sank back onto in it, began untwisting the strings on the suddenly blurred envelope. She knuckled away a tear, supposing when your very last relation dies on you, when, at thirty-five, you find yourself childless and husbandless and careerless and lifeless, it’s hard not to feel a little down in the dumps.
Steam hissed from the radiator squatting underneath the window, startling awake the walking mop. Speaking of personal effects. Eyes bulging, the tiny dog hopped out of her basket and clicked over the bare wooden floor to Galen, whimpering to be picked up. Gran’s dog, Baby, a cross between a Chihuahua and a Yorkie. Maybe. Not an attractive animal. For several seconds, dog and woman stared at each other.
With a weighty sigh, Galen scooped the raggedy thing into her lap, then finally undid the envelope, pulled out the contents. Oh. A life insurance policy, looked like. She scanned the first page. Blinked. Heard her heart begin to pound in her ears.
“Jiminy Christmas,” she said on a long, slow whisper, only to yelp like she’d been goosed, the mutt flying off her lap, when the phone rang again.
Galen managed a strangled “Hello?” as the dog made her stiff-legged way back to her basket, into which she flopped with a little doggy groan.
“Galen, baby? It’s Cora. You know, you’ve been on my mind so much the past couple of weeks, and it’s been way too long since I’ve heard from you, so I finally figured I’d better just go on ahead and call before I drove myself crazy. What’s going on, honey?”
The rich, soothing voice of her mother’s old friend swept over her. Just like that, Galen saw the frown pleating the coffee-brown forehead, remembered long-ago Saturday mornings in Cora Mitchell’s base housing living room in Norfolk, playing dress-up with Cora’s daughters to the comforting hum of their mothers’ conversation a few feet away.
Tears swam in Galen’s eyes, as her throat went dry and tight. She’d been out so seldom during the three years she’d spent with her grandmother, she’d lost touch with what few friends she had. Other than the parish priest and a few neighbors who’d hesitantly inquired about her grandmother, she’d talked to no one this past week. Not that she’d ever exactly been a party girl, but still—
“Oh, Cora!” spilled out on something between a sob and a sigh.
“Galen! What is it? What’s happened, baby?”
So she told the only real friend she had left in the world about her grandmother’s passing, about how things had changed between them, about how much she missed the old bat—this said on one of those crying laughs that happens when your emotions get all tangled up in your head like that wad of gumbands in Gran’s desk—which brought the expected moans of commiseration and sympathy. Galen honked into a stiff, scratchy generic tissue—Gran never would pay extra for the good stuff—then pointed out that Gran had been nearly ninety-one, after all.
“Still,” Cora said, and Galen could feel the hug. “Things had really changed that much? Between you?”
“Amazing, huh?”
“A blessing, is what I’m thinking.”
Barely eight years old, Galen had been staying overnight with Cora while her father, home on leave after six months at sea, whisked Galen’s mother off to New York for a quick second honeymoon. It was Cora, tears tracing silver tracks down dark cheeks, who’d gently told her that her parents had died because some drunk had run head-on into them, just on the other side of Dover, Delaware, on their way back. And, ultimately, it had been Cora and her husband who’d delivered Galen to her never-before-seen grandparents in Pittsburgh. Her father’s parents, they of the stoic, strict Slovak extraction, her mother’s Irish parents having both passed away some time before.
Now, if anyone had bothered to ask Galen her druthers about who she wanted to live with, she would have chosen Cora—who was more than willing—over her grandparents any day. The court, however, ruled in favor of blood over druthers, and that was that. Cora had stayed in touch anyway, even after her husband retired from the military and they moved back to her native Detroit, figuring she was still Galen’s honorary aunt.
Hearing Cora’s voice…well, it was a Godsend, is what it was. Not just because Galen was still getting over her grandmother’s death, but because—it all came back to her, now—there was the little matter of just having discovered she was the sole beneficiary of a life insurance policy worth a quarter of a million dollars.
She burst into tears.
“Oh, hell, honey…Oh, shoot, I wish I was there! Talk to me, baby. Get it out, that’s it, get it all out.”
So, between assorted choked sobs and blubbers, she did.
Cora went understandably, if uncharacteristically, silent for several seconds. Then she said, “And you had no idea?”
“N-none. And I have no idea how she did this, why she did this, where she got the money to make the payments on the policy…” Galen shook her head, pushing that stray wisp behind her ear. “I suppose I’ll never know, now. Thing is, though, I keep thinking I’m reading it wrong.”
“Okay. Tell me what it says. Word for word.”
She did.
“You’re not reading it wrong,” came the dry pronouncement across the wire. “So can I hit you up for a loan? This house I bought’s about to bleed me dry.”
Good old Cora.
“So…what’re you going to do with all that money?”
Galen blew out a sigh, stared again at the policy. Heavens. She was rich. Well, maybe not rich. But certainly not poor. She realized she was shaking. And that her head felt like a fly was caught inside it. “I have no idea,” she said over the buzzing. “Buy some new underwear, I suppose.”
“Don’t knock yourself out, now.”
Galen felt a smile twitch at her mouth.
“Hey! How about blowing some of it on a plane ticket?”
“To?”
“Here. For Thanksgiving.”
Thanksgiving? Oh, yeah…that was next week, wasn’t it? Galen’s stomach knotted. “Oh, goodness, Cora. I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it.”
“Now, don’t you tell me you were planning on spending the day alone?”
