The Soon-To-Be-Disinherited Wife

five, and the two four-year-olds were Elisabeth and Pops.

“Is he gonna paint with us, Ms. Dearborn?”

“I keeping telling you, you can call me just plain Emma, honest. And yes. His name is Garrett Keating. And believe it or not, he’s never finger painted in his whole life.” Because he looked stunned and scared at the door, she hooked his arm.

“You’re kidding.” Pops, the pint-size blonde with the twinkly-light tennies, took his other arm. “You’re really old.”

“Thanks,” Garrett said.

“What’d you do when you were a kid? Like, if you never finger painted?” Elisabeth wanted to know.

“He probably doesn’t remember. He’s old,” the pint-size blonde volunteered again.

Emma steered them past the open kitchen, past the central meeting place. The rooms were constructed in a wagon-wheel fashion.

Older teenagers were given a room with easy chairs and cuddling blankets. Preteens had a room with games and walls they could write on. The little ones, though, were hers.

Her room could be hosed down-or that equivalent. Good thing, because the art projects she got the squirts into invariably involved paint or clay or something that got on everything. Before handing out aprons-including one for Garrett that made her babies all laugh-she hid the phones from harm’s way.

When she set her cell phone next to Garrett’s on a safe top shelf, she noticed immediately that she’d missed a half-dozen calls since last night-three of them from her mother. She gulped. But not for long.

Later today she’d deal with her mother and all the other realities related to her broken engagement. This morning was about something else. The kids…and Garrett. Garrett, who made tons of money and took tons of responsibility. Garrett, who’d been so tender and passionate with her. Garrett, who never played.

There wasn’t much she could give back to him, but she could darn well teach him to play. She just wanted these moments of magic to last as long as they could. For her. But for him, too.

“Now, stop looking at Mr. Garrett. He has to wear my apron because we don’t have one his size. We don’t laugh at other people, do we?”

“No,” Garrett said pitifully and got the kids laughing again.

She gathered them around the table as she set out supplies. “Okay. I want everybody to close your eyes. I know you’ve all felt sad lately. But this morning I want you to concentrate. I want you to think about something happy. Something beautiful. And that’s what I want you to paint. Colors that you think are beautiful. Colors that make you happy to look at.”

“I don’t know. Is he too old to be happy?” Pops cocked her head toward Garrett.

Emma intervened before Garrett needed to come up with an answer. “No one’s ever too old to be happy. But sometimes things happen that make us sad. We can’t make that feeling go away. But it can help if we remember what makes us happy. So…are you all ready to try?”

“I’d better help him.” Again Pops cocked her head at Garrett with a sigh, as if the job were so weighty she was tired already.

A little more than an hour later, the last urchin had been picked up. Another age group was occupying rooms at the center when Emma and Garrett left the building. Emma had to tease him. “I’ve never seen a four-year-old flirt before. What a femme fatale.”

“Flirt? Flirt? She was a four-year-old curmudgeon. Nothing I did was right. And she laid it on damn thick about my being old, old, old.”

“She fell in love with you on sight. Couldn’t you tell?”

“Was that before or after she finger painted a red heart on my sleeve?” He motioned to the eloquent red paint on his sleeve. “Does this come out?”

“It should. But if it doesn’t, I’ll bet you can afford another shirt.”

Before they reached her van, she hooked his hand, then lifted up on tiptoe and framed his face with her palms. “I hate to tell you this…”

“Uh-oh. Nothing good ever follows ‘I hate to tell you this’-”

“But you’re smiling to beat the band. You’re relaxed. You had a fabulous time with the kids,” she said smugly.

“I’m not admitting anything. How could I possibly have had a good time finger painting with a bunch of hellions?”

“It beats me-but you were right in the thick of it all. I think you made a bigger mess than they did. That seems like headline news to me. In fact, if Bunny were still alive, I could call her, put it in the infamous Eastwick Social Diary. No one would believe this huge a scandal unless they saw it in print.”

His eyes narrowed. But he hadn’t moved, didn’t seem to mind her pinning him with her hands. “You’ve got an evil side to you, Emma Dearborn.”

“Oh, thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in years and years.”

She wasn’t sure how it happened, but somehow she’d ended up in his arms again. In fact, he’d seemed to quite arrogantly lean against the shady side of her van and nestle her right into the V of his thighs. “You want to hear nice things?” he questioned.

She sobered, because he’d suddenly dropped the easy, teasing tone. Her eyes softened. “What I want…is for you not to regret last night.”

“That’s my line, Em. When you woke up this morning, I was afraid you’d think I took advantage of you.”

“The way I remember it, I jumped you. So I should get the credit for taking advantage, not you.”

But he wasn’t buying that. And though he was holding her close, his gaze kindled more than desire. “You’d just been through a really emotional situation. You were upset, vulnerable. I came over because your lights stayed on so late… I just got worried, thought you might need someone to talk to, vent on. But I swear, I wasn’t trying to cause an awkward complication in your life.”

She said quietly, honestly, “Garrett, you are a complication for me. You have been ever since you came home.”

He went still. Wary-still. A car pulled into the center’s parking lot. Noisy kids spilled out. He never noticed, never looked away.

She took a nervous breath. “I think a lot of people would judge my making love with you yesterday as wrong. Wrong because I was so recently engaged, wrong because it looked like a rebound thing. But I want you to know…it wasn’t like that. What you’ve done since you came home was bring out feelings in me that I didn’t know I had. All kinds of feelings. Not just sexual ones. If I’d married Reed, it would have been wrong. That’s the truth.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I’m absolutely positive. I love Reed the way you love a wonderful close friend. But I never loved him…sexually. Intimately. To be totally honest, I thought the feelings I had for him were all there was. For ages I just thought I’m not a particularly sexual person-”

“You can’t be serious.”

She felt his thumb nudging a strand of hair on her cheek that had loosened from its chignon. His touch was so tender she wanted to shiver. “I’m very serious. It was always easy for me do the celibate thing. In principle, for darn sure, I never wanted to be courted because I was an heiress to the Dearborn money, didn’t want to be part of some merger. But now, I realize that it was easy to hold tight to those principles…because I was never really tempted.”

“The guys growing up here used to be so smart. They must have gotten a lot stupider in the years I was away.”

She smiled because he wanted her to. “You’re going to think this is mighty Pollyannaish, but…”

“But what?”

“But I wanted making love to be beautiful or I never wanted it at all. In the grand scheme of things, I realize beauty doesn’t rate up there as seriously important. It’s hardly world peace or curing world hunger or anything. But I always felt…beauty does matter. It can make a difference. Beauty around us can give us peace and hope and…” She started to laugh at herself…“And all that nonsense.”

“That’s not nonsense, Emma.”

“Well, I realize it’s hardly a realistic view of the world. Which, God knows, my family is always telling me. But