A Marriage of Convenience Read online

  A Marriage of Convenience

  Doreen Owens Malek

  Gypsy Autumn Publications

  PO Box 383

  Yardley, PA I9067

  www.doreenowensmalek.com

  Copyright 1989 by Doreen Owens Malek

  The Author asserts the moral right to be

  identified as author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the author or Publisher.

  First printing: 1989

  Second Printing: 1998

  Third Printing: 2003

  Digital Release 2012

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  "Tell him I'll be there around five, if he can wait for me," Sharon Philips said into the phone. She listened to the response and nodded.

  "Okay," she answered, concluding the conversation, and hung up thoughtfully, staring out the window at the full, newly blooming trees.

  The appointment was to discuss her father's will with his probate lawyer. Her father had just died on the West Coast, leaving instructions forbidding a funeral or memorial service of any kind. His passing seemed unreal to Sharon, who had never had a chance to say goodbye.

  The house line buzzed on her phone. She picked it up distractedly.

  "How about dinner tonight?" Pete Symonds said.

  "Pete, I can't," Sharon replied. "I have to go over to Charlie Crawford's office and discuss my father's estate. Charlie's being very mysterious, refusing to talk about it over the phone." Sharon had been dating Pete, her colleague in the Philadelphia district attorney's office, for several months.

  "Maybe your dad left you an emerald mine in South America," Pete said lightly.

  Sharon smiled. "I wish it were that simple. I'm sure it concerns the ranch, and what I'm going to do about that, I haven't a clue."

  "You'll resolve it," Pete said confidently. "Selling it is probably the answer."

  Sharon didn't reply.

  "How's the trial going lately?" Pete continued. "Still think you haven't got a chance?''

  Sharon sighed. "No chance at all. Closing arguments are day after tomorrow, but it's over right now. I'm certainly not helping Desmond's reelection campaign with this debacle."

  "Nobody could have won that case," Pete said consolingly. "Desmond knows the score, he won't blame you." John Desmond was the district attorney for whom they both worked; she and Pete would be out of work in the fall if Desmond lost his bid to remain in his job.

  "I know he won't blame me, but that doesn't make me feel any better," Sharon replied. "This one was a nightmare from the beginning. A dead body but no evidence, no witnesses, and a defendant with a distinguished service record in the navy. Why do I always get the stinkers?"

  "Because you're good at your job," Pete answered.

  "Look, don't talk to me. The offer to go into real estate with my dad still stands. Just say the word."

  "The temptation is growing," Sharon said dryly. Her outside line began to buzz. "Pete, I have to go. The other phone is ringing."

  "Okay," Pete said. "I'll call you tonight."

  Sharon switched lines and took the call, then hung up and grimaced at the pile of paperwork awaiting her. At this point her summation consisted of an assortment of scattered index cards with notes like "point out defendant's recent history of psychiatric treatment" and "remind jury of previous threats against victim's family."

  Sharon made a face. This would never do. She instructed her secretary to hold all further calls and settled down to prepare for the court presentation.

  But her mind kept wandering back to the subject of her father. Sharon's parents had divorced when she was twelve, and her father had moved to California and bought a horse ranch. Six years later he had remarried. When her stepmother died, her father had remained in California on his ranch with his stepson as the foreman. Her father visited Sharon in Philadelphia regularly, but she had not been back to California since the summer after she graduated from high school.

  Ten years, she thought. During that time she had gone to college and law school, taken a job as an assistant district attorney in a major city and performed with notable success.

  But somehow when she thought of California she was always eighteen again.

  At quarter to five Sharon gave up on the summation, deciding to keep her appointment with Crawford and then spend a couple of late nights getting the oral presentation ready. She packed her briefcase and walked the four blocks to Charles Crawford's office, enjoying the late spring afternoon.

  Mary, Crawford's secretary, waved her inside.

  "Hi, Charlie," Sharon said, dropping wearily into the lawyer's conference chair and setting her briefcase on the floor.

  Crawford looked at her over the tops of his glasses. "Bad day?" he said.

  "Kind of."

  He sighed. "I'm afraid I'm not going to improve it."

  Sharon surveyed him. Charlie Crawford was one of her father's oldest friends and she'd known him since she was a child.

  "What's the matter, Charlie?" she said easily. "Didn't the papers come through?"

  "Oh, they came through, all right, but you're not going to like what they say.''

  "What do they say?"

  "You'd better sit down."

  "Charlie," Sharon said, staring at him, "I am sitting down."

  "Get a grip, then."

  Sharon leaned forward. "Tell me," she said tersely.

  "Well, your father left you half the ranch in Glendora on one condition," Crawford said cautiously.

  "Half?" Sharon asked, bewildered.

  "Yes."

  "What's the condition?" She had no idea what to do with a horse ranch, half or whole, in the first place, and couldn't think of any reason why her father would place a condition on her receipt of it, in the second.

  "You must marry your father's stepson, Taylor Brad- dock," Crawford said, wincing.

  Sharon's ivory skin became even paler, and her fingers closed around the leather padded arms of her chair. Taylor Braddock. The name brought a flood of unwanted memories and her mouth became a grim line.

  "I will not marry that man under any circumstances," she announced flatly.

  "Read it and weep," Crawford replied, shrugging, and tossed a file into Sharon's lap. "You get half the place and Braddock gets half. To keep it together and hold it as joint tenants, you have to get married."

  Sharon flipped through the pages, reading intermittently, and then clipped the file together, replacing it on Crawford's desk carefully.

  "Charlie, this is preposterous," she said. "Estates on condition of marriage went out with the last century, you know that. The will would never hold up in court, the condition would be struck."

  Crawford pursed his lips. "I told your father as much. I said that if you contested it the condition would fail, but he insisted."

  "So what am I supposed to do now?" Sharon demanded, frustrated.

  "Are you asking my advice?"

  "I imagine I'd better hear it," Sharon answered wearily.

  "Contesting this will take forever," Crawford said. "The probate docket is backed up into next year. I know what your situation is at work. You're up against a tough thing there, and you don't need to be suing your father's estate at the same time. My a
dvice is to take a leave of absence when your current case closes, go out to California and marry this Braddock. The fall election will take place in your absence and things will settle down one way or another. If you allow this will to go through, the estate will be probated in a few months and you can divorce the guy."

  "Charlie, you can't be serious," Sharon said, dumbfounded.

  "Why not? Take a vacation in California. Your leave will be approved, I'll speak to John Desmond about it. God knows you haven't had a day off in four years. Go through a civil ceremony with the stepson and cut him loose when you get clear title. You and he can sell the place and split the money, or he can buy out your half."

  "You will not say a word to Desmond because I'm not going to do it," Sharon replied, outraged.

  "Is it something about this man, Braddock, that's bothering you?" Crawford asked mildly, watching her face.

  "Why do you say that?" Sharon asked sharply,

  "Your father gave me the impression that you knew him."

  "I knew him once," Sharon answered distantly, avoiding the lawyer's gaze. "I spent the summer out there ten years ago when my father married his mother."

  "Can you think of any reason why your father would force you to do this?"

  Sharon was silent. Then, "He was old-fashioned, as you know. He thought I needed a husband. He was always after me to get married, and over the years he grew very fond of Tay." Sharon shifted in her chair, choosing her words carefully. "In the beginning, when Dad first married Tay's mother, Tay had some... problems. A lot of people wrote him off, I think, but Dad always seemed to understand him. After Tay's mother died five years ago, Dad sort of lost interest in the place and Tay really ran the ranch himself. Dad came to rely on Tay more and more, like a son. He had a great deal of respect and affection for him."

  "But you don't have any affection for him."

  "I haven't seen him in a long time," Sharon replied shortly, aware that she wasn't exactly answering the question.

  Crawford let it slide. "What kind of problems did Tay have when you knew him?" he asked.

  “My father told me that Tay was a sergeant in Vietnam, then a prisoner of war when the Americans pulled out. He'd only been home for a couple of years when I met him. He was still pretty disturbed, I guess—fighting, disappearing for days at a stretch, drinking."

  "Really?" Crawford said, getting worried. "Was Braddock dangerous?''

  "Not to me," Sharon replied softly, her expression changing.

  Crawford nodded slowly.

  "I guess my father thought he would be taking care of both of us, tying things up all neat and tidy this way," Sharon offered resignedly.

  "He tied you up all right. You've got two parcels on the ranch, sitting side by side. Yours has the water rights and stream, Braddock's has the road access, neither one much good without the other. They have to go together, and in order to get them together you have to marry Braddock."

  "What happens if I don't marry him, if I don't contest the will but just refuse to comply with it?"

  Crawford looked pained. "I guess you didn't read that part. The whole place reverts to charity, becomes a wildlife refuge."

  Sharon stared at the floor morosely. The ranch was Tay's life, as it had been her father's before her stepmother's death. She hated to be pushed into this, but to deprive Tay of his home and livelihood was cruel when all she had to do to prevent that was follow Crawford's advice.

  She had to admit that her father had known exactly what he was doing.

  ''Marry him," Crawford said again. "Why is that such an awful prospect? You can handle it in friendly fashion, can't you?"

  Friendly fashion. Sharon didn't know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

  "Charlie, I have to think about this," she finally said. "Let me have my copy of the will and I'll study it. I'll call you in a few days."

  Sharon left Crawford's office with the estate papers in her briefcase. She got her car from the lot behind the district attorney's office and drove home slowly, her mind whirling, the past intruding on the present like old photographs superimposed upon more recent ones.

  Tay Braddock. She had managed not to think about him for a long time, even when her father mentioned him in connection with the ranch. She would listen to the story about how Tay had gotten a good price on feed for the horses or purchased an Appaloosa at a bargain in Texas, and she would smoothly change the subject without comment. She had never thought her father picked up on her reaction but maybe he had noticed something.

  Sharon parked her car in the underground lot of her Society Hill apartment building and took the elevator to the eighth floor. She had chosen her apartment for its view of the Penn's Landing waterfront, a view she'd rarely had time to appreciate. She took off her suit and shoes and made herself a cup of tea, then sat in her slip by the bay window in the living room, looking out at the craft in the boat basin.

  Dear old Dad, she thought grimly. Her grief at his loss was submerged in a welter of fury at this high-handed maneuvering, so typical of the arrangements he liked to make for his only child. He was still trying to control her life even after his death.

  As usual Sharon tried not to think about Tay. Over the years, she had perfected that art to such a degree that the very whisper of him in her mind triggered an avoidance response. But this time she let the image remain, remembering the man who had changed her life and spoiled her for anyone else.

  She recalled him as he'd looked that August when she was eighteen; it was how she always pictured him, since she had never seen him again after that summer. He'd been slim, almost lanky, with wide shoulders and the sort of hipless, long-legged physique best served by jeans, which he wore constantly. He had the blackest hair she'd ever seen, shaggy but luminously clean and radiant with bluish highlights, shining in the pitiless California sun like polished coal. He'd been tanned from hours of working outdoors, his skin golden brown with a sharp border at his hips when his Levi's rode low. When he hoisted bales of hay or lifted her down from a horse, the long ropy muscles stood out in his brown arms like cords of steel.

  Sharon recalled his face with a painful clarity that all the years of sublimation had not managed to dim: the deep set brown eyes, the heavy black brows, the long, straight Barrymore nose. But most of all she remembered his mouth, its surprising softness and...

  Her eyes filled with tears now as the bittersweet recollection washed over her. How could she have resisted him? Had an incubus been summoned by a spell to break her young girl's heart, it would have taken the form of Taylor Braddock.

  He was the reason she could never make a commitment to another man; he was the reason she had broken her engagement to a fellow law student just before graduation. For all her refusal to think about him, talk about him, acknowledge that he still existed on the earth, he had dominated her life all these years.

  Had her father sensed that?

  Sharon stood abruptly, sloshing cold tea over the rim of her cup and dousing her slip. She had promised herself long ago that she would never do this, and here she was, wallowing in painful memories like a despondent schoolgirl.

  She changed into slacks and a sweater and opened her briefcase, scanning her father's will again. She had to smile when she came to the wording about inheriting the ranch.

  That sly old fox. He thought he had come up with the perfect solution for the two people he cared about most, his daughter and his stepson.

  Sharon sat again with the document in her lap, thinking that the affection he had developed for Tay said a lot about her father's tolerance for difficult personalities. Overbearing and dictatorial he may have been, but he certainly gave Tay a chance when a lot of other men would have given him the boot .

  She felt the sting of tears behind her eyes again. She couldn't believe that her father was dead or that she was now in this ridiculous predicament. Why did all of this have to dredge up an experience she preferred to forget?

  But she knew now that she would not be able to forge
t it. Thanks to the will, her life was once again linked with Tay's, so she might as well deal with a past she'd been running from for the last decade.

  The papers slid from her lap to the floor as she looked out the window again, seeing herself at almost eighteen, arriving in California.

  Chapter 2

  Sharon looked at the clouds floating past the airplane window, listening to the pilot announcing the descent to Los Angeles. Her stomach was knotted with excitement. This was her first time away from home without her mother (thank God), her first time on a cross country flight and her first visit to her father's new house. She had just graduated from high school in Philadelphia the week before and she was on her way to her father's wedding.

  She'd never met her future stepmother, a widow with a grown son. Sharon's father knew his fiancée from the local rancher's association. She'd sold her own place when she decided to remarry; the couple planned to run the Philips ranch together. Sharon had seen a picture of her— a tall dark woman standing next to her father, who looked very happy.

  Which was more than anyone could say about him during the thirteen years he'd spent with Sharon's mother.

  The ground was rising up to the plane. Sharon could make out houses and cars below, miniaturized like Monopoly pieces. She sat back in her seat and closed her eyes, thinking about the ten weeks of freedom that awaited her. Her father was dictatorial about long range plans and given to scattered outbursts of parental concern, but on a day-to-day basis he was much less exacting than her mother, who practically required an hourly check-in from her only child.

  Sharon planned to make the most of her parole.

  The jet's engines reversed and Sharon felt their backward thrust, then the jolt as the landing gear touched ground. She lifted her overnight case onto her lap and shouldered her purse, intending to be the first person into the aisle when the seat belt light went off. She had brought three suitcases, every stitch of summer clothing she owned, and she felt outfitted for anything.