toward the door, he held out his hand. “You must be Christina’s mother. Welcome to Scotland, Mrs. Murray. I’m Ian Douglas, a neighbor.”
“Thank you.” She took his hand for the briefest of exchanges.
I had known her long enough to understand what she was up to. In the most subtle and ladylike way, she was expressing her disapproval. Only an idiot would misunderstand her message, and Ian was no idiot. The tiny seed of antagonism that was inevitably present when my mother decided to turn unreasonable sprouted into a desire to defend Ian. I found my voice. “Ian was proposing to me, Mother.”
“Really?” The blond eyebrows lifted. “Proposing what?”
“Marriage.”
“Oh.” She was definitely not happy.
“Why are you looking at me like that and why are you so surprised that someone wants to marry me?”
“I’m not at all surprised,” she said coolly, seating herself on the couch beside me. “You are a lovely, intelligent woman, Christina. What surprises me is that anyone would be foolish enough to consider such a commitment after only a brief period of acquaintance.” She poured herself a cup of tea. “Unless I’m mistaken, the two of you just met, didn’t you?”
“We did,” Ian interjected smoothly. “Was yours a long engagement, Mrs. Murray?”
I stared at Ian. How had he known?
Mother’s voice was strained when she answered. “I knew my husband only two months, Mr. Douglas. But I had not been recently divorced, and I was not at all vulnerable to the first man who showed an interest in me.”
“I don’t believe Christina is all that miserable over her divorce,” replied Ian. “I’m not exactly a fortune hunter, you know, and even if I were, her father acting as her lawyer could assure that I would have no access to her inheritance. I believe it’s called a prenuptial agreement.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that at all,” Mother said so hastily that I knew he’d pinpointed exactly what she’d been thinking. “The mistake would be just as devastating for you if Christina decided she’d made a mistake.”
“I’m willing to take that risk.”
I could see the white caps of her knuckles as her hands clenched the handle of the teacup. She was losing the argument, and there was nothing that made Susan Murray angrier than someone who disagreed with her and won.
“Why not wait?” she asked. “Surely, six months or a year isn’t too long to decide if marriage is in your best interests.”
I looked up and found Ian’s eyes on my face. We stared at each other for a long time. I knew exactly what he was asking. Finally, I sighed and nodded. He smiled, a brilliant, blinding smile of relief that altered my breathing and made everything else in the room dim in comparison. When he spoke, his words were exactly the ones I needed to hear. No one, not even my skeptical, suspicious parent, could doubt that he was sincere.
“I’ve loved your daughter from the very first moment I saw her, Mrs. Murray. If we waited six months or ten years to marry, it would make no difference to me. My feelings won’t change. But the fact is, Christina and I are going to have a child and I very much want my name on his birth certificate.”
Until now, I believed that I’d experienced every reaction possible from my mother’s considerable repertoire of disapproving emotions. I’d expected anger and disgust, even outrage. At best, I’d hoped for coldness and long telephone silences across the Atlantic when I broke the news. Nothing, in all the years of our relationship, prepared me for what happened next.
Her hands shook as she set her cup and saucer on the tea tray. She placed both palms against my cheeks and looked at me. Then she swallowed, looked away, and then looked back again, searching my face with a look of yearning hunger that I couldn’t begin to explain. I watched her color come and go and her eyes fill with tears. She tried to speak and couldn’t and then tried again. “Are you sure, Chris?” she asked haltingly, brokenly, as if afraid to hope.
“Yes.”
“How did it happen?”
For the first time in that entire tension-filled afternoon, I laughed. No one, with the exception of a woman who’d reconciled herself to never becoming a grandmother, would have posed such a leading question. From across the room, Ian grinned at me. I decided to lighten the mood.
“The usual way,” I said. “Ian and I—”
“Never mind,” she interrupted in a voice much closer to her normal tone. “I didn’t mean