Read Online Truly Madly Yours by Rachel Gibson - Free Book Online Page A

and property and prestige, but he hadn’t had time. He’d been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He’d known he was going to die.
    “Just pick a woman,” Henry had ordered several months ago after barging into Nick’s downtown offices. “You should be able to get someone pregnant. God knows you’ve practiced enough to get it right.”
    “I’ve told you, I’ve never met a woman I’d consider marrying.”
    “You don’t have to get married, for God’s sake.”
    Nick wasn’t willing to produce a bastard for anyone, and he hated Henry for suggesting it to him, his bastard son, as if the consequences were unimportant.
    “You’re doing this to spite me. I’ll leave you everything when I’m gone. Everything. I’ve talked to my attorney, and I’ll have to leave Gwen a little something so she won’t contest my will, but you’ll get everything else. And all you have to do is get a woman pregnant before I die. If you can’t choose someone, I’ll pick the girl for you. Someone from a good family.”
    Nick had shown him the door.
    The cell phone chirped on the seat next to him, but he ignored it. He hadn’t been all that surprised when he’d learned the cause of Henry’s death had been a gunshot wound to the head and not the fire. He’d known Henry was getting worse, and Nick would have done the same thing.
    Sheriff Crow had been the one to tell Nick that Henry had killed himself, but very few people knew the truth. Gwen wanted it that way. Henry had gone out on his own terms, but not before he’d created one hell of a will.
    Nick had figured Henry would pull something in his will, but he’d never expected Henry to place the condition on what Nick did or didn’t do with Delaney . Why her? A real bad feeling tweaked the base of his skull, and he feared he knew the answer. It sounded perverse, but he had a feeling Henry was trying to pick the mother of his grandchild.
    For reasons he didn’t want to examine too closely, Delaney had always spelled trouble for him. From the start. Like the time she’d been standing in front of the school bundled up in a fancy blue coat with a furry white collar, her blond hair a mass of shiny curls about her face. Her big brown eyes had looked into his, and a little smile had tilted her pink lips. His chest had grown tight and his throat closed. Then before he’d realized what he was doing, he’d picked up a snowball and nailed her in the forehead. He hadn’t known why he’d done it, but it had been the one and only time his mother took a belt to his behind. Not so much because he’d hit Delaney, but because he’d hit a girl. The next time he’d seen her at school, she’d looked like Zorro, with twin black eyes. He’d stared at her, feeling sick to his stomach and wishing he could race home and hide. He’d tried to apologize, but she’d always run away when she’d seen him coming. He guessed he didn’t blame her.
    After all these years, she still had a way of getting to him. It was the way she looked at him sometimes. Like he was dirt, or worse, when she looked through him as if he didn’t even exist. It made him want to reach out and pinch her, just to hear her say ouch.
    Today he hadn’t meant to hurt or provoke her. Well, not until she’d given him that “you’re scum” look. But listening to Henry’s will had provoked him . Just thinking about it pissed him off all over again. He thought about Henry and Delaney, and that real bad feeling tweaked the back of his neck once more.
    Nick reached for the ignition key and headed back toward town. He had a few questions, and Max Harrison was the only person who knew the answers.
    “What can I do for you?” the lawyer asked as soon as Nick was shown into a spacious office near the front of the building.
    Nick didn’t waste time on idle conversation. “Is Henry’s will legal, and can I contest?”
    “As I told you earlier when I read the will, it’s legal. You can waste your money on a contest.”