“Thank you, Palmer,” Jonas said.
The butler left them.
“I want to see Mandy,” Emma Lynn said.
“She’s asleep.”
“I’m not going to wake her up. I just…I have to see her.”
“Why?”
“I meant what I told you, Jonas. I have been making up my mind.”
“Fine. Why is it necessary for you to see my sister?”
She seemed at a loss for a reason, only looked at him, an urgent kind of look, through those troubled green eyes.
He left the window and approached her. Her eyes widened as he got close, as if she feared his nearness. But she didn’t step back.
He went past her. “This way.”
Emma followed Jonas out to the entry hall, with its ebony-inlaid walnut floor and its coffered and arched cathedral ceiling rising three stories high. The grand foyer, Blythe had always called it.
Jonas began to climb the curving staircase. Emma fell in step behind him.
Mandy’s rooms were on the second floor. Jonas went past the dark playroom and entered the bedroom. Lightning flashed once, bright and hard, outside. For a split second, the yellow and blue walls stenciled with dragonflies and dancing frogs were cast into sharp relief.
Then the room plunged into shadow again. The rain drummed away outside, a low sort of sighing sound.
Mandy had graduated from her crib to a big white four-poster several months ago. She lay in the center of the roomy bed, on her side, the quilted yellow and green comforter covering her to her waist, both hands tucked beneath her plump chin. Her thick, silky curls looked very dark against the yellow pillow.
Emma tiptoed to the bed and stood looking down, painfully aware of Jonas, so silent and watchful, in the shadows behind her.
Mandy yawned, then let out a small, contented sigh. She rolled to her back, flopping her arms up and out, so that her hands lay palms-up on the pillow at either side of her head. Her little fists tightened, then went lax again.
As Emma stared at those small, perfect hands, it almost seemed she could hear Blythe’s voice in her mind….
“Am I crazy, Em? Am I totally irresponsible, to want a baby so much at this time in my life?”
“No, you are not crazy. Not crazy at all.”
It had been a Saturday. The Saturday after Thanksgiving. They’d been Christmas shopping. And they’d stopped in at a Mexican restaurant on Melrose for lunch.
Blythe had leaned toward Emma across their table, her face earnest, her voice low. “I want…I guess I want a chance to do right by a child, to help someone grow up and to do a good job of it. I wasn’t there, when it mattered, for Jonas.” She sat back, her eyes suddenly far away and dark with pain. “And with my other baby, I never even had a chance.”
Emma was the one leaning closer then. “Blythe, don’t do this to yourself. What happened was not your fault. Not in any way.”
But Blythe shook her head. “I could have been stronger. I should have been stronger. Jonas needed me then. And I failed him terribly.”
Emma had said what Aunt Cass would have said. “You can’t live in yesterday. You can only live right now.” Then she’d added what she really thought. “And right now, today, you would make a wonderful mother.”
“Oh, do you think so?”
“You bet.”
Blythe looked so young at that moment, sitting back in the booth, a soft smile on her face—but then, she had always looked years younger than her real age. And she’d been blessed with lots of energy. Until the illness that claimed her so suddenly, she was a person who just brimmed with life.
Emma asked, “But could you? I mean, aren’t there laws about how old you can be?”
Blythe picked up her water glass and raised it, as if in a toast. “Money and influence do have their uses.” She set the glass down without drinking from it. “However, there is no getting around the problem of Jonas. He would be furious.”
Emma dipped a chip in salsa and popped it into her mouth. “Well, fine. Let him be furious. It is not his decision.”
“But if anything happened to me in the next few years, he could end up being the baby’s guardian.”
“Blythe. Nothin’ is going to happen to you.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But if something did happen, you and I both know that Jonas is not emotionally equipped to bring up a child. He would need help, Emma.”
Emma crunched another chip. “Now, come on. You weren’t listenin’ to me, were you? I said that nothin’ is going to happen to—”
“Would you be there? That is what I’m asking you, Emma. It’s a great deal to ask, and I know it. But it’s very important to me. To think that I could count on you to help out, to give Jonas a little…guidance, if something happened to me.”
On the bed, Mandy sighed again and turned her darling little face toward the far wall. Emma stared at the curve of her beautiful cheek.
Would you be there?
Emma had looked across the booth at her friend and said, “Yes. You know that I would. If it ever comes to that—which it will not—I will be there to help out.”
Emma had said yes. Yes, after all, is what a person should always try to say to a friend. It had been a promise. A promise she’d been foolishly certain that she would never have to keep…
Emma turned from the sleeping child. Jonas was waiting for her in the shadows. She nodded. He gestured for her to go ahead of him. She did, as far as the upstairs hall. Then he took the lead again. They went back the way they’d come, down the curving stairway, through the grand foyer, along another hallway to the room the butler had called the study, with its beautiful rugs, inviting velvet-covered chairs and pretty jewel-paned windows.
Jonas shut the door. “Take off your coat. Have a seat.”
“No. I won’t stay long.”
He stared at her, a probing, knowing look that caused her stomach to go all jittery. She shivered.
One corner of his mouth lifted the tiniest bit in the Jonas Bravo version of a smile. “You are nervous.”
Why deny it? “You bet I am.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Lord, give me strength, Emma thought.
She wrapped her raincoat closer around herself, yanked her shoulders back and announced, “All right, Jonas. I’m willin’ to do what Blythe wanted me to do. I will marry you. For one year.”
Chapter 6
Jonas found, surprisingly, that he was relieved. It wasn’t the best decision she could have made. He would have liked it a lot better if she’d simply agreed to stay the hell out of his and Mandy’s lives.
But it could have been worse. At least this way, in a year when they divorced, there would be no doubt that Mandy would stay with him.
“No more stalling,” he said. “We’ll get married right away.”
Those eyes, moss green at that moment, widened. She didn’t speak, but she did nod.
Fine. He’d take that nod as a yes. “And another thing…”
She frowned. “What?”
Jonas did not