Free Custody by Nancy Thayer Page A

even to make her laugh. Perhaps this was all a kind of game for him, another kind of adversarial event, Kelly thought, one grand challenge: Jason Gray vs. The Grim Reaper .
    Still, she was grateful, and in gratitude and a kind of exhaustion, she finally gave in and went to bed with Jason. She enjoyed it, and didn’t feel guilty for the pleasure she took. She knew that the presence of death sharpened all the appetites of the living. She knew she was forcing back the sights and smells of the sickroom with those of the bedroom. She was not the first person to use the heat of sex as an antidote to the looming chill of the grave.
    She’d assumed that was all it meant to Jason, too. She assumed she was a conquest for him or that he stayed around out of courtesy.
    When Jason proposed marriage to her at her mother’s bedside, Kelly accepted with genuine gratitude for the smile this brought to her mother’s face. What a brilliant theatrical move, she thought! What a star he was!
    She hadn’t actually believed he meant it, even when he brought, from his jacket pocket, a small turquoise Tiffany box, and inside it a small black velvet box, and inside that, a rather enormous diamond ring.
    She said, “Yes, I’ll marry you,” but she nearly said, “Well done!”
    After her mother’s death, Kelly offered to return the ring to him. Jason was horrified. He’d meant it, he insisted. He wanted to marry her. Didn’t she want to marry him?
    The truth was that she really didn’t know. She told him so. Things were all coming at her far too fast—her mother’s sudden return to her life and then, as suddenly and so finally, her departure. On the heels of the funeral, the nomination for the judicial position and all that entailed.
    “Anyway,” she said to Jason, speaking as honestly as she could, “I don’t understand why you want to marry me.”
    “Why, because you’re beautiful, and you’re intelligent, and you take the law seriously, and you laugh at my jokes,” he told her.
    “But I’m not—how can I put this? I’m not part of your world, Jason.” Her frankness exposed her insecurities. “I didn’t go to private schools. I only recently learned to play tennis. I don’t know how to sail.”
    “I realize that, but it doesn’t matter. Or rather, it does—it makes you rather glamorous.”
    “Glamorous?”
    “Yes. Mysterious. An unknown quantity. You didn’t see me stumble over my feet at dancing class or vomit when I was learning how to hold my liquor. You didn’t go wild at any of the painfully memorable house parties of my college years.”
    “Ah,” Kelly said. “You mean I haven’t slept with any of your friends.”
    Jason waggled his eyebrows. “Well, yes. There’s that, too.”
    Now Jason continually pushed her to choose a date for the wedding. Kelly kept putting it off.
    She couldn’t put a word to the cause of her reluctance. This afternoon, rushing through the bright air, she didn’t want to try. She was full of energy. “Slow down!” Jason ordered, more than once, but she couldn’t , somehow; she needed to move , so she circled around him, nipping at his heels like a puppy, shrieking with laughter.
    “You’re in good spirits,” Jason remarked.
    “Yes, I am,” she agreed, darting away from him in a burst of speed and then zipping back. Jason thought her good mood resulted from her recent appointment to the Massachusetts judiciary—and it did, really. Mostly. She was proud of the appointment and excited about it; it was the most important thing in her life, something she had dreamed of achieving. But it was a serious thing, and right now , for some reason, she was simply buoyant with a kind of giddy happiness.
    She thought of falling that morning in the cemetery and of the man who’d offered his hand, so easily helping her up. “I thought an angel had fallen off her pedestal,” he’d said.

    The taping had been exhilarating for Anne, but as she drove home her mind moved relentlessly to