His Chosen Wife: Antonides' Forbidden Wife / The Ruthless Italian's Inexperienced Wife / The Millionaire's Chosen Bride. Susanne James

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СКАЧАТЬ “But he wasn’t.”

      “And so you had to track him down! How romantic is that?” Martha was clearly pleased.

      Cristina thought PJ was the romantic. Martha thought she was.

      “Eddie! Ack, no. Don’t put that in your mouth!” Martha swooped down and scooped her son up, taking whatever he’d been about to eat and tossing it into the water. “Kids! What will I ever do when I have two of them?” she moaned.

      “Are you …?”Ally looked at Martha’s flat stomach doubtfully.

      But Martha nodded happily. “Not till January, though. What about you guys? Have you talked about kids?”

      “Not … much.”

      It wasn’t exactly a lie. They had talked about children—the ones she hoped to have with Jon, the grandchild she wanted to give her father.

      But now in her mind’s eye she didn’t see a child she might have with Jon. She saw PJ as he had been with Alex that evening at his house in Park Slope or, for that matter, PJ now. He had one of Elias’s twins on his hip while he tossed a football with his brothers.

      Martha’s gaze followed her own. “Well, it’s early days yet. You will.”

      Ally didn’t reply. Her throat felt tight. The glare of the sun made her eyes water. She swallowed and looked away.

      As a child, Ally had been a reader.

      From the time she had first made sense of words on a page, she’d haunted the library or spent her allowance at the bookstore, buying new worlds in which to live. And invariably the worlds she sought were the boisterous chaotic worlds of laughing, loving, noisy families who were so different from her own.

      Oh, she was loved. She had no doubt about that.

      But the everyday life of her childhood had been perpetually calm, perennially quiet, perfectly ordered. When her mother had been alive, there had, of course, been smiles and quiet laughter. And even her normally dignified taciturn father had been known to join in. But after her mother’s death, after the number of chairs at the table had gone from three to two, mealtimes had become sober silent affairs. After her mother was gone, there had been no more light conversations, no more gentle teasing. There had actually been very few smiles.

      Never a demonstrative man, after his wife’s death Hiroshi Maruyama became even more remote.

      “He is sad,” her grandmother had excused him.

      “So am I,” Ally had retorted fiercely. “Does he think I don’t miss her, too?”

      “He doesn’t think,” Ama had said. “He only hurts.”

      Well, Ally had hurt, too. And they had gone right on hurting in their own private little shells, never reaching out for each other, for years. Hiroshi’s way of dealing with his daughter was to give her directions, orders, commands.

      “They will make your life better,” he told her stiffly, if she balked.

      But they hadn’t.

      Marrying PJ and running away from her father’s edicts was what had made her life better. Doing that had freed her, given her scope for her talents, new challenges that she could meet and, eventually, a life she loved and determinedly filled with her art and her work.

      In the fullness of that life, she’d forgotten about the warm, boisterous families she’d read about and envied, the closeness she had yearned for all those years ago. She hadn’t really realized anything was missing until she’d come home after her father’s heart attack.

      Then, forced to take a break, to slow down and look around during those long days in his hospital room, she had seen cracks in her well-developed life begin to appear. A chasm of emptiness opened up before her.

      She was back with her father—in subdued silence. And longing for something more. That was why she’d been so glad to find Jon.

      He was as addicted to work as she was. For his entire adult life he had been filling the empty spaces in his life with patients and professional demands on his time. Now he was thirty-five. It was time to marry, to have a family.

      “One child,” he said. “I have time for one child.”

      “Two,” Ally had responded instantly. “I want at least two.” There was no way she was going to subject a child of hers to the same loneliness she’d experienced.

      Jon had looked doubtful and skeptical and as if he thought she was being irrational and irresponsible.

      “Two,” Ally had repeated. “Or three,” she’d added in a moment of recklessness.

      “No more than two,” Jon had stated firmly. “We don’t want chaos.”

      But a part of Ally did.

      And tonight on the deck of PJ’s parents’ house, she was reminded of it.

      The whole day, from the moment she’d got out of the car to be swept into the embrace of his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and assorted relations, she had felt a sense of déjà vu that was odd because she knew she’d never experienced anything like it before.

      It wasn’t until after dinner, when she’d sat on a bench on the deck listening to Martha and Tallie compare toddler notes while in the kitchen the aunts discussed recipes, and in the dining room PJ’s father, Mr. Cristopolous and several friends compared golf swings and on the lawn little boys toddled about and bigger boys tossed footballs, and on the sand where PJ’s brother Lukas was deep in conversation with Connie Cristopolous and PJ and Elias were starting up a bonfire in the rock fire pit that Ally recognized what she was seeing—the families she’d read about in her books.

      They were real—at least this one was. And for the moment—for this one single weekend—they were hers.

      She smiled. Not just on her face, but all the way down to the depths of her soul.

      “Come on, then, Ally.” Martha broke into her realization. “I’ll show you guys the mural I’m doing in Ma’s sewing room.”

      And happily, willingly, Ally went with Martha and Tallie. She ran her hand along the oak banister as they climbed the stairs, certain that the wood beneath her fingers had been worn smooth by PJ and his brothers sliding down it. She paused to look at the family photos that lined the upstairs hall. They stretched back for generations, right to a couple of fiercely scowling men with bushy moustaches who looked as if they’d just got off the boat.

      “My great-grandfather Nikos and his brother, right after they emigrated,” Martha said when she noticed the direction of Ally’s glance. “I want to do a mural of the whole family—” she waved her hand to encompass the myriad photos on both the walls “—sometime. Show all the generations. I did something like it out in Butte as a local history project. You would have loved this photo of a traditional Chinese bride one of the students brought in.”

      Martha rattled on happily about that, while Ally and Tallie admired the ongoing mural in Helena’s sewing room. Martha had done small vignettes of children—the Antonides children. Here was Alex throwing a ball, Eddie taking his first steps, the twins СКАЧАТЬ