The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (114 page)

“You’ll know when the time is right. Besides, you’re going to raise him with love, and he’ll be a confident, strong boy because of you. He’ll understand that what you did was the right thing.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Of course I am.” She forced a smile. “And look at it this way. The worst has happened and it’s behind you. You met Robin’s biggest fear and you and Austin survived. Now you can start your new life in Connecticut.”

“I need to talk to you about that.” His phone began to ring in his pocket and he pulled it out to check the caller ID. “It’s Dallas,” he told Stef.

“Hey, Dal … what? Oh. Right. I can explain that.” He looked slightly chagrined. “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes and I’ll tell you all about it. Just … stop shouting, okay?”

He disconnected and slid the phone back into his pocket.

“Hal just called the house and told Dallas that Austin was asking for his daddy and while he—Hal—didn’t
mind keeping him, he just thought I should know that Austin was getting antsy,” Wade said. “Needless to say, she wanted to know why Austin was at Hal’s and what the hell was going on and if I needed someone to watch Austin, why didn’t I ask her.”

“I guess you should go get him and take him home.” Stef glanced at the wall clock. “It’s late anyway, past Austin’s bedtime, I guess. You go on. I’ll close up here and—”

“You’re coming with me,” he told her. “We’ll get Austin and put him to bed. And then maybe later you can put me to bed.”

“Would you like to explain why you took that baby to Hal’s instead of leaving him here with us?” Dallas demanded.

Stef and Wade had arrived with a sleeping Austin at the house on River Road, and Dallas had met them at the front door.

“For one thing, you weren’t here when Austin and I got in today from Connecticut. I drove past the house and there were no cars in the driveway, so I went straight to Scoop. Then Hugh showed up and everything sort of snowballed from there.”

“Hello? Phone?” Dallas reached across the kitchen table for her cell. “And who is Hugh?”

“Austin’s birth father.”

“What …? You mean the guy who embezzled …”

Wade nodded. “Things happened so fast, Dallas. One minute, Stef and I were sitting there and Austin was eating ice cream; the next minute, Hugh was coming through the door,” he explained. “When I
stopped back here this afternoon, Berry was here alone with Cody and she wasn’t sure what your schedule was. Besides, if something had gone terribly wrong, I didn’t want you or Cody or Berry to be caught in the cross fire. Besides, I thought he’d be safer at Hal’s. It was bad enough that Stef was—”

“What are you talking about? What cross fire?” Dallas interrupted. “Damn it, Wade, start from the beginning.”

Still holding Austin, Wade sat on the edge of a chair and told his sister everything.

“You’re telling me this guy wanted five million dollars to just go away and never come back?” Dallas stood and began to pace the length of the kitchen.

“Right.” Wade kept his voice low, with Austin asleep in his arms. “But Beck and Grady thought the chances of him not coming back were—”

“You didn’t even tell me about this? Someone is threatening to take Austin and you don’t even tell me?” Dallas appeared to be just winding up.

“What would have been the point?” Wade frowned.

“The point would have been that I’d have gone to the bank and requested the withdrawal, which would have taken more than a day because you can’t walk into a bank and say give me that much money and have them just hand it over and you walk out with it. There are regulations about such things. There’d have been an investigation. And he’d be behind bars right now.”

“Behind bars and demanding a DNA test to prove that he’s Austin’s birth father,” he whispered his
reply. “He’d have taken us to court, Dallas. Jesse said there’s a very good chance he’d win.”

“I could call on a posse of lawyers who could—”

“Who could have pounded on their chests all they wanted, and he still probably would have won. He has the matching DNA and has not surrendered his parental rights. He held the cards, Dallas. Grady said he could have made allegations that Robin and I conspired to withhold the knowledge that he had a son—which frankly, we did.”

She sat as if stunned, as if it had never occurred to her that “this guy” had any rights or any points in his favor.

“The only way to get around him was to get him to sign the waiver of his rights and make him leave town. The only way to do that was to muscle him with his own criminal past. And I could not have done that without Beck and Grady,” Wade explained. “Grady had a friend of his from the FBI run Hugh backward, forward, and sideways through the system, and they found enough on him under different names that he was facing a lifetime behind bars. I had to make the decision to let the two of them set him up. Hugh had to make the decision to walk.”

“You could have told me.”

“It all happened so fast. He only gave us a few hours. You weren’t around when I got back here today and I didn’t know if you were in meetings or something, and I didn’t want to tell Berry.”

“I don’t know how he thought anyone could have gotten their hands on that much cash in a few short hours,” she said, “unless it was in a wall safe or under a mattress.”

“I don’t think he was thinking of the logistics. All he was thinking was ‘Hey, rich movie-star aunt will fork over the money.’ ”

“Rich movie-star aunt would have.” Dallas gently stroked the sleeping boy’s back. “In a heartbeat. No one’s going to take him away from us. He’s our little guy.”

She patted her brother’s shoulder and said, “We’ve missed you this week. You and Austin both. It’s not right around here without you. Cody’s been very unhappy.”

“We’ve missed you, too. As a matter of fact …” Wade appeared about to say something else, but Austin stirred in his arms. “I’m going to get this guy changed and into bed. Stef, want to give me a hand?”

Stef, who’d wisely kept out of the family discussion, nodded. “Sure,” she said, and followed Wade up the stairs.

“He sleeps in here.” Wade pointed to the door, three down from the second-floor landing. Wade changed Austin and got him into his pajamas by the faint light of a lamp on Wade’s bedside table. When Austin stirred, Wade picked him up and held him for a moment to settle him, then placed him in his crib and covered him.

He turned to find Stef sitting on the side of his bed.

“You didn’t need me for that,” she whispered.

“I needed you to be here with Austin and me so I could just savor the fact that we’re together. I came very close to losing him. It’s just starting to sink in how close. This day could have ended in a total nightmare, but instead, I’m here with my girl and my son,
and I can’t remember ever feeling that my life was more right than it is at this moment.”

“I can make it righter.” She played with the buttons on his shirt.

“I’m counting on it.” He pressed his lips to her throat.

“But not here,” she said.

“No, not here. Dallas will be in to check on Austin, and when Berry gets home from her dinner date, she’ll check in.”

“Berry has a date?”

“Archer Callahan. Her old boyfriend.”

“I know that name. Archer Callahan.” Steffie sat up. “The book. Alice wrote about them in her book.”

“What book? Who’s Alice?” He frowned.

“Alice Ridgeway. She lived in Vanessa’s house for about a hundred years and she left these journals.” Stef caught herself before elaborating. Did she really want to get into all that?

“What kind of journals?”

She debated whether or not she should tell him about Alice.

Nah.

“Just journals about people she knew in St. Dennis back in her day.”

“Like a diary?”

“Sort of.” If one kept a diary full of spells and a list of names one taught them to.

“And she wrote about Aunt Berry and Archer? What did she say?”

Stef shrugged and tried to appear nonchalant. “I don’t remember the particulars. I just remember that I noticed the names there.”

“So Alice knew Berry before she went to Hollywood? I’m intrigued. Where are those journals now?”

“I think Ness gave them to Miss Grace.”

“I’ll ask her about them the next time I see her.”

Since Wade was moving to another state, Stef didn’t think this was likely to happen anytime soon. But that reminded her to ask, “So I guess you’ll be moving this weekend.”

“That’s something we need to talk about.” He took her hand. “I think Dallas is in for the night, and she’s good about listening for Austin, though he almost never wakes up at night. Any chance we could go to your place? I don’t want to wake up Austin, and we have a lot to talk about.”

“If Dallas is okay with it, sure.”

Wade was softening her up for the news, Stef could feel it. Well, she supposed it had to be done. Sooner was better than later, and she did want one more night with him. He’d say something like,
We can still see each other. You can come visit us, and we’ll be home from time to time. We’ll be back for holidays. Blah blah blah
. Nothing he hadn’t said before.

And then she’d say—

“Stef?”

She looked up and he was standing at the side of the bed, holding his hand out to her.

“Oh.” She took his hand and he pulled her up and put his arms around her. They were a step away from Austin’s crib, his breathing sweet and even in sleep.

“You did the right thing,” Stef whispered. “There’s no way you could have let Hugh take him, regardless of what the law might have said.”

Wade nodded and reached a hand into the crib to cover the sleeping child, and Stef’s heart melted.

“Come on.” She tugged at his hand. “Let’s go see if Dallas feels like babysitting …”

“Stef, we need to talk.” Wade had his hand on her bare back.

She tried to pretend to be sleeping, but he apparently wasn’t buying it. He’d been trying to have his say all night and she’d been finding ways to divert him. When they arrived at her apartment, he’d headed for the living-room sofa—she assumed for “the talk”—but she pulled him straight into the bedroom before he could get a word out and she’d kept him well occupied for most of the night, attacking him with a fervor that had probably had his head spinning. She knew hers had been.

When he said, “Stef, we need to talk,” she’d mumbled, “Later. I’m exhausted.” and he’d let her sleep, or pretend to.

Now, with dawn closing in, she couldn’t keep him at bay any longer. She rolled over, braced herself for what he was about to say, and said, “Okay. I guess you want to talk about your move to Connecticut.”

He nodded.

“Everything sounds so perfect.” She sat up and pulled the sheet with her and tried to be supportive. “The job. The child care. And you found a house, right?” She tried to brighten. “You found a house that’s as perfect as the job and the child-care situation?”

Wade nodded. “Actually, I saw several I liked, but I did find one that would be perfect.”

“Tell me about it. What’s it look like?”

“It’s light gray clapboard and it has black shutters and a red door. The previous owner did a lot of renovation and it’s just been painted inside and out. Even the hardwood floors have been refinished and it has a new deck. It’s in that terrific neighborhood I told you about on the phone.”

“It really does sound perfect.” Even to herself, she sounded wistful.

“That’s exactly what I thought the minute I first walked through the front door. We went into the backyard and Austin ran around for a while. Then we went back inside and went from room to room, just trying to get a feel for the house, and all the time I was thinking, ‘This could be it. This could be home.’ And it almost was. It was almost home, Stef. But there was something missing, and as soon as I realized what it was, I knew if I bought that house and moved there, it would never be more than
almost.
”

“So what was missing?” She frowned.

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. “You were.”

She tilted her head to one side, not sure she was understanding.

“If you’re not there with us, any place is always going to be
almost
. That’s not good enough for me, and it’s not good enough for Austin.”

For a moment Stef was certain that her heart had stopped beating. Had he just said …?

“What exactly are you saying?”

“I’m saying that there’s no home for me—not there, not here in St. Dennis—without you.”

She took a deep breath and tried to slow the rapid
beating of her heart. “Just because I helped you today doesn’t mean that you have to change your plans. You’re not obligated to me because of anything that happened here tonight.”

“I changed my plans before I left Connecticut, Stef. I already told Ted that I was passing on the job.”

“Huh?” She wished her response had been more gracious, more eloquent, but her mind had gone mostly blank. She recovered enough to protest, “But … but it was all so perfect for you there.”

“The perfect job for me is having my own brewery. I can start over. It won’t be KenneMac, but it can be damned good. Actually, it can be great. Clay mentioned he was interested in working with me if I ever wanted to start up again. I called him last night to see if he still thought it was a good idea, and he does. He’s got the fields to grow whatever we need and he has a large unused barn that can be retrofitted with equipment. Clay’s interested in organics, so we talked about what he’d have to grow next year—barley, hops, and so on—and what we’d need in finances. Then I called Dallas because she’d said once before that if I wanted to go into business for myself, she’d fund it as an investment, so we talked that out.”

“So you’ll be back in business?”

“It’s going to take a while to get set up, but yes, I’ll be back in business.” He nodded happily, then added, “But the best part is that I’ll be back in business right here in St. Dennis.”

“That’s really good. Great. I’m sure Dallas and Berry will be happy to hear that you’re staying.”

“And how ’bout you, Stef. Are you happy that we’re staying?” He pulled her to him.

“Oh, well, yeah. Sure. If that’s what you want, if you’re sure. But you’re passing up on a lot. I mean, what about Angela Lansbury? And the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood?”