from his, near enough to lay her hand on his wrist. “Cassie doesn’t know that I know this, so don’t say anything, but, see, I had figured out a couple months ago that things weren’t exactly hunky-dory between them. So I wasn’t all that surprised when Cassie seemed more stunned than grief stricken when Alan died. But then, the day after he dies, after the lawyer leaves the house…” One eye squinted shut as she wagged a gardening-gloved finger. “Then she’s upset. Like someone had yanked the rug out from under her. So I call the lawyer myself, only he starts giving me this song and dance about how there’s nothing to worry about. As if I wouldn’t know telling me there’s nothing to worry about is always the first clue that there is. So I told him to cut the bull, already, and tell me what the hell was going on.” She shrugged. “So he did.”
Maddeningly, she chose that moment to have a sneezing fit that ate up the better part of two minutes. Finally, after another minute of indelicate nose blowing, amid profuse apologies about it being pollen season, she turned to Blake. “To cut a long story short, my son decides, a month after his marriage, to liquidate almost his entire estate and invest in some little up-and-coming computer technology company that, unfortunately, up and went.” She sneezed again, then sighed. “On top of that, there were credit cards. Had he lived, maybe he would’ve landed on his feet. But he didn’t. Which means his estate is worth, as that little Mercedes would say, nada—”
“Lucille!”
They both spun around—Blake snagging Lucille’s spindly arm before she fell off the arm of the chair—to catch Cass standing at the French door, her face ashen but her eyes sparking with embarrassed fury. Every instinct he possessed told him to get his butt out of there and let the two women duke it out. But one look from Cass told him if he so much as moved an eyelash, she’d knock him clear to the Arizona border.
* * *
Her cheeks stung with humiliation. This was her problem. Hers. The only thing in this whole stinkin’ mess she’d been able to control had been who knew and who didn’t. Now, thanks to her mother-in-law, she didn’t even have that.
“Cille, how could you?” Huddled into herself against the morning chill, Cass crossed to the older woman, refusing to look at Blake, to see the pity in his eyes. The baby was kicking her mercilessly this morning, so hard she felt bruised in spots. “How could you go behind my back, discussing family business—” She pressed her hand to her mouth, then lowered it enough to push out, “This was personal, for God’s sake. Is that so hard to understand?”
“And if Blake isn’t family, I’d like to know who is.” Never easily buffaloed, Lucille wagged the trowel at her. “He’s Shaun’s father. Anything that affects Shaun will ultimately affect him. So I thought he should know. And God knows we’d all be taking vacations to Mars before you got around to it.”
The lack of even a hint of remorse in her mother-in-law’s eyes made Cass’s voice—and undoubtedly, her blood pressure as well—rise several notches. “Well, I’m Shaun’s mother, and what and who I tell is my decision. Not yours.”
“Bubelah, calm down. It’s not good for the baby…”
“She’s right, Cass. You’re getting yourself in a state—”
“You stay out of this!” She hurled this in Blake’s direction quickly, so she didn’t really see him, then back at her mother-in-law. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Cille. I’m pregnant, my husband just died, and, as most of Bernalillo County probably knows by now, I am, as they say, financially embarrassed. A little hissy fit isn’t going to raise my blood pressure any more than it already is.” She looked around, saw the flowers. For some reason, that nearly took her over the edge. “And why are you planting flowers? It’s still freezing at night.”
“They’re just pansies, Cass,” Blake said in that even, reasonable tone of voice used on people who live in padded rooms. “They can live through cold weather, remember? We used to plant them in March all the time. So they’ll be fine. Which is more than I can say for you.”
“I am fine, Blake,” she retorted, wrapping her sweater more tightly around her protruding midsection. Her teeth were chattering, the baby was kicking, and right now life was about as far from good as she ever wanted it to get. “B-back off.”
“No, Cass. I’m not going to back off.” Stunned, she met an expression in those deep brown eyes she knew only too well. The this-is-for-your-own-good look. “You just admitted how much stress you’re under—”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t handle it.”
“Why are you being so hardheaded, woman?”
Because my very survival depends on it. “Because I didn’t ask for your interference, Blake,” she said, thinking that only a crazy person would attempt to reason with one being so unreasonable. Except, at the moment she wasn’t too sure which one of them was which. “Besides, after all this time, why are you suddenly so hot to stick your nose in my business?”
“Because maybe I can help, for crying out loud!”
“I don’t need or want your help! So you can tell that idea to go take a hike!”
Inside, the phone rang. After a moment Towanda stuck her head out the door. “It’s for you, Miss Lucille. Your sister in Florida.”
With a sigh, Lucille took off her gloves and tossed them onto the tempered glass table, along with the trowel, which landed with an overloud clatter. “Well. The comments I could make about what I just heard.… All I can say is you should be grateful I’m the kind of woman who knows when to keep her thoughts to herself.” She started into the house, then hesitated, looking from one to the other. “You think you two could manage not to do each other in while I’m gone?”
After a moment they both nodded. Curtly.
For a full minute after Lucille’s departure, neither spoke. Still seething, Cass walked over to the edge of the deck, unsuccessfully ignoring the buzz of energy behind her. She grasped the railing, wincing at the sting of cold metal against her palms as she sucked in several deep breaths, trying to calm down. Trying to think, to ready herself for Blake’s attempt to take charge, to play macho man coming to the rescue. It would be just like him to try to exploit her current situation as a means to appease his own guilt for giving up when she’d really needed him. Wanted him.
Well, too damn bad, she thought sourly. A day late and a penny short, as they say.
And dammit, she thought on another tidal wave of emotion, why was it always all or nothing with this man? Why hadn’t he ever been able to find that middle ground between suffocating her with his protectiveness or ditching her completely?
Brother. Could she get herself in deep, or what?
The house. She would think about the house. Under other circumstances, she might have loved it, with its sweeping views of the city, the way the rooms seemed to endlessly flow into each other. But it was huge and a pain to keep up, and the idea of a baby toddling around with all these stairs scared the hell out of her. Selling it wouldn’t be such a horrible thing. As long as she could unload it before the bank foreclosed on the loan.…
Her fingers found their way to the crease between her brows. Almost immediately, she felt Blake’s arm slip around her shoulders.
Not good. Especially for someone whose grip on her emotions was as precarious as a car hanging off the edge of a cliff in some action movie, the seagull perched on its end the only thing that kept it from going over. With Blake’s touch, the seagull flew away.
And she crashed.
With a soft sob, she turned into the chest that had sheltered her when she was young, that she’d believed would always shelter her. Her bad, most definitely. Still, he smelled the same, felt the same, stroked her back as he always had, his fingertips massaging that spot between her shoulder blades that always tensed up. Like magic, the baby quieted as Blake stroked and soothed and gently rocked her.
It