The Marriage Agenda: The Marriage Conspiracy / The Billionaire's Baby Plan. Allison Leigh

Joleen. Now she stared into her coffee cup, her mouth drawn down at the corners, as if there might be something in there that shouldn’t be.

      Joleen, who needed to get to the cleaners and make a quick stop at WalMart before she headed over to one of the major beauty supply houses to pick up a few popular products they had run low on, couldn’t keep herself from making a small, impatient sound in her throat.

      Camilla heaved a deep sigh and shook her head at her coffee cup. “I find I don’t quite know how to say this.”

      That suits me just fine, Joleen thought. “It’s okay. We can talk later.” She started to stand. “Tonight, after—”

      “No, you don’t.” Camilla’s hand closed over her arm. “You are not escapin’ me.”

      Joleen stared at her mother’s hand, which was soft and slim, the smooth square-filed nails polished a shimmery bronze. It did not look like the hand of a fifty-year-old woman, not by a long shot. Joleen wished her own hands looked half that good. But Joleen still did hair. And she had no shampoo girl, so she spent a lot of her working life knuckle-deep in lather. Very hard on the hands.

      Camilla said. “I have been awake half the night worryin’ over you.”

      “Why?”

      “Sit back down.”

      Joleen dropped into the chair again. “All right, Mama. I’m sitting. Talk.”

      “I am just going to ask you directly.”

      “I sure wish you would.”

      Camilla let go of Joleen’s arm and threw up both hands. “What on God’s green earth has possessed you to think a marriage between you and Dekker is a good idea?”

      Joleen felt pure indignation. She decided to let it show. “Mama! I love Dekker. And he loves me.”

      Camilla smacked one slim, soft hand on the table and waved the other one in the air. “Yes, and I love your uncle Foley. But I never would marry him.”

      “Uncle Foley is your brother, Mama.”

      “Exactly. And that’s how I love him. Like a brother. The same way that you love Dekker Smith.”

      Oh, this was getting sticky already. As Joleen had known it would, as she’d tried to get Dekker to understand it would.

      Half-truths and evasions, she though glumly. Comin’ right up…

      “Well?” said her mother on a hard huff of breath.

      “I love him,” Joleen said again, and she stared her mother straight in the eye.

      Her mother stared right back. “You don’t love him the way a woman loves a man,” she accused. “And he doesn’t have that soul feelin’ for you, either.”

      “You do not know that,” Joleen said. “You do not know what we feel.”

      “Oh, yes I do. I know my baby. And I know Lorraine’s boy. I also know that you both deserve better than to marry a person who does not set your heart on fire. You both deserve it all. Passion and excitement. And magic. I want those things for you—and I want them for Dekker, too.”

      Joleen wrapped her hands around her cup. The warmth felt comforting against her palms. She said honestly, “Both Dekker and I had those things once, Mama. They didn’t last.”

      “Bobby Atwood and Stacey?” Her mother made a low, scoffing sound.

      Joleen’s indignation level rose again. “Yes. Bobby Atwood. And Stacey. You know how Dekker was about Stacey.”

      “There were terrible problems in that marriage, baby.”

      “I know that. I am not saying they didn’t have problems. I am only saying he loved her. In a passionate way. A soul way. And Bobby, well, it shames me to have to admit it now, but I was long gone in love with that man.”

      “Oh, that is so not true.”

      “Mama—”

      “You thought you were long gone in love with that man. You wanted to be. You were waiting for your knight in shinin’ armor to thunder in on a fine white horse and sweep you away. You waited a long time. When that young Atwood showed up, with his smooth talk and his fancy car and winnin’ smile, you were like a nice, ripe peach, just ready to drop off the tree. And you did drop. You dropped good and hard. But that was not—”

      “Mama—”

      “Pardon me. I believe that I was still speaking.”

      “Fine. Speak. Finish.”

      “What I’m saying is—and you are listening, aren’t you?”

      Joleen gritted her teeth. “I am, Mama. I am listening.”

      Camilla’s eyebrows had a skeptical lift—but she did continue. “What I’m saying is that what happened with Bobby Atwood was not it—was not love. And Dekker and Stacey, well, that was certainly something, but it wasn’t it, either. Not the real, true, deep lifelong passion I am talking about. Not what I had with your daddy. Not what DeDe has with Wayne.”

      “Mama. Some people never find that kind of love.”

      “We are not talking about some people. We are talking about you. And Dekker. My first baby. And my best friend’s little boy.”

      “Well, maybe you have to stop thinking of us that way—as your baby and Lorraine’s little boy. We are grown people now. We have a right to make our own decisions about life. And about who we will love.”

      “I never said that you didn’t. I just don’t like this.” Camilla looked into her cup again—and then sharply up to snare her daughter’s gaze. “Something else is goin’ on here. I know it. I can feel it.”

      Joleen kept her face composed—and told some more lies. “Nothing is going on, Mama. I don’t know what you mean.”

      “Oh, you do. You know. There is something.…” Camilla pushed her cup to the side and leaned across the table. “Is it…those Atwood people? You went off alone with them, didn’t you, before they left the wedding Saturday? I saw you go inside with them.”

      Joleen opened her mouth to let out more lies. And then shut it. Camilla would have to hear the truth about the Atwoods sooner or later.

      “Yes,” Joleen said. “They wanted to talk to me.”

      “About…?”

      Sam was too quiet. Joleen stood.

      “What is it now?” muttered her mother. But Camilla had had three children of her own. She nodded. “Go on. Check—and then get right back in here.”

      Joleen went through the dining room. She found her little boy sitting on the hooked rug near the big window at the front of the house, playing with the wooden blocks one of the uncles had given him for his first birthday six months before.

      Sam looked up. “How,” he said, beaming proudly at the crooked stacks of blocks in front of him.

      “Yes,” said Joleen, her chest suddenly tight. “A very fine house.” She would do anything—anything, including telling her dear mama a thousand rotten lies—to keep her boy safe, to be there whenever he needed her. To get to see his face now and then when he smiled like he was smiling now.…

      She took in a deep breath to loosen those bands of emotion that had squeezed around her heart. Then she asked slowly, pronouncing each word with care, “Come in the kitchen? With Grandma and me?”

      He shook his head and loosed a string of nonsense syllables.

      “You mean, you want to stay here?”

      “Pway.”

      She wanted to scoop him up hard against her heart, to hug him until he squirmed to get down. But no. He was content, sitting on her