The Marriage Pact (Hqn) (14 page)

“And I told you I was married,” he finished for her.

“Yeah.” She paused. “I was a dumb kid with stars in her eyes,” she continued, letting the hurt rise to the surface, so she could finally release it. “But you were my brother’s best friend, Tripp. You grew up in Mustang Creek, and weddings are the kind of thing people talk about in places like this—
a lot.
That being the case, I guess I thought I would have heard about your plans a little sooner.”

“I’m sorry, Hadleigh. I could have handled that better.”

But she shook her head. “Don’t you see? You didn’t hurt me. I hurt myself by having all these crazy expectations. You were a grown man, Tripp, with every right to marry whomever you wanted,
do
whatever you wanted.
I
was the one living in a dreamworld. I was a kid, as you so bluntly pointed out—”

“You were a kid,” Tripp confirmed. “A smart,
beautiful
kid with a future. One that was way too good to be wasted on Oakley Smyth.”

Just then, Ridley ambled over, rested his muzzle on Hadleigh’s right knee and gave a sympathetic whine. She laughed and stroked the dog’s gleaming head, touched by his efforts to cheer her up. After a moment, though, she met Tripp’s gaze.

“You knew? That I was hoping you’d show up at my wedding, I mean?”

Tripp hesitated a fraction of a second too long, then shook his head. “No,” he said, and his voice was so hoarse, he had to clear his throat. “I didn’t know—not then.”

But he’d figured it out since, obviously.

Hadleigh, exhausted now, decided not to pursue the subject any further until she’d had time to mull things over.

“I think I’m all talked out—for tonight, anyway,” she said, trying to smile.

Tripp nodded, looking both confused and relieved.

“Guess I’d better get you back to town,” he told her, “before Melody decides I’ve kidnapped you for real this time and calls in the FBI.”

As Tripp helped her into her coat, Hadleigh suddenly felt light, fatigue notwithstanding, as though a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders, one she hadn’t fully realized she was carrying.

Was she ready, at long last, to leave all those worn-out, dusty dreams behind, to stop being haunted by her eighteen-year-old self and get on with her life?

She knew one thing for sure: it was time to make some changes—some
big
changes.

Chapter Eight

N
EITHER
ONE
OF
them said a word during the drive back to town, and since Tripp wasn’t in the mood to chat, that was fine with him. Still, the road would have seemed a lot longer and lonelier than it was if Ridley hadn’t come along for the ride and kept him company.

Physically, Hadleigh was right there in the truck with him and the dog.

Mentally, though, it seemed she’d gone off somewhere in her head, where he couldn’t follow. Or maybe she was just asleep.

Tripp reminded himself that Hadleigh had told him she didn’t want to do any more talking that night, and he could definitely see her point. She’d made her big confession, and it followed that her batteries were low.

The thing was, women didn’t usually mean it when they claimed they didn’t want to talk, not in his experience, anyway. What they
wanted,
99.9 percent of the time, was tender and preferably poetic inquiries about their feelings.

Same when there was a domestic shit storm brewing on the horizon—they’d get suspiciously quiet and radiate hostility, but ask them what was wrong, and they’d inevitably say, “Nothing.”

A man couldn’t win for losing when it came to getting a straight answer out of a pissed-off female, but he’d damned well better keep trying anyhow, no matter how hopeless the effort seemed, if he knew what was good for him.

With all these thoughts roiling in his head, Tripp glanced over at Hadleigh. She was as beautiful in profile as she was from the front, and the rear view wasn’t bad, either.

Maybe she was playing possum or she’d actually dozed off; he couldn’t tell. The sweet and slightly wicked little smile resting on her mouth both intrigued and troubled him. If Hadleigh
was
asleep, she was having a dream that pleased her. And if she was awake, she was thinking some pretty happy, even sensual, thoughts.

What was going on in that brain of hers, waking or sleeping?

Right around then, Tripp would have given just about anything to know that he figured into this particular equation somewhere, because if that smile meant she had a man on her mind, he damn well wanted it to be
him.

Tripp had kept one eye on the road while he was checking Hadleigh out, but the next time he risked a glance in her direction, it wasn’t her dreamy expression that caught his attention. It was her breasts.

Damn, but Hadleigh had herself a fine pair of breasts, perfect ones, in fact, and the way that clingy pink top emphasized their contours made Tripp’s heart go skittering like a bucking bronco on a patch of ice. And the need to free those breasts from the confines of Hadleigh’s shirt and bra, look at them, cup them in his palms, was like a swift, sharp stab.

He damn near went off the road.

Muttering a swear word, he turned the wheel just in time and kept his gaze straight ahead, but even then, Tripp could see her at the periphery of his vision, and clearly.

Hadleigh’s breasts, he reflected miserably, were neither too big nor too small, but just right—anything more than a handful being a waste, as the old saying went.

Tripp groaned inwardly. Why had he thought taking Hadleigh out on what, by Mustang Creek standards, constituted a date, was such a good idea?

The answer surfaced almost immediately, and it wasn’t flattering. He’d believed, arrogantly enough, that if the two of them could spend an evening together, share a meal in the least romantic place available—that being Billy’s—he’d be able to win Hadleigh over, find his way around all those booby traps and barriers she’d spent a decade building around herself.

As if.

Thinking back over the early part of the evening, he knew all those genial interruptions hadn’t helped, but these were old friends and longtime neighbors, along with a few well-meaning acquaintances stopping by to say hello and ask about his dad. Sure, they’d been curious, but they genuinely cared about Jim and wanted to make sure Tripp felt welcome. They were good people, people he couldn’t and
wouldn’t
have brushed off for anything, not if he wanted to look in the mirror ever again.

Years away from home—college, and then air combat in Afghanistan, followed by a job he loved captaining 787s for a major airline and building his own company after that, hadn’t changed who or what he was: a Wyoming wrangler who was happier on the open range than anywhere else. Early on, he’d believed he wanted to get away from the hard work and frequent difficulties any rancher or farmer had to deal with, day after day, year after year. Now, looking back, Tripp wondered if he hadn’t done all that just so he
could
come home for good, when the time was right, and not spend the rest of his life wondering if he could have made it in the outside world.

If he’d stayed on the ranch, he figured, he would have been happy enough. But he might have spent more than a few restless nights staring up at the bedroom ceiling and asking himself what he’d missed out on, what he could have accomplished if he’d only taken the risks.

No, Tripp had no real regrets about the choices he’d made, with the possible exception of marrying Danielle instead of just sleeping with her for a while. That way, they could have gotten each other out of their systems and maybe even parted as friends.

Grimly, Tripp put all that out of his mind, believing as he did that what’s done is done and hashing it over wasn’t going to change a damn thing. And anyway, right here and right now wasn’t such a bad place to be, for all the sudden and completely unfamiliar things going on in his heart as well as his brain.

He wanted Hadleigh, he knew that now, for sure and certain, not just in his bed, but in the whole of his life. He was intoxicated by the spicy-floral scent of her skin, the silken shine of her hair, the ripe curves of her body—the whole package.

And his gut told him it wasn’t going to be easy.

Tripp couldn’t have said how he knew, but he was convinced Hadleigh had gone through some changes that night, and the road she was headed down might well lead her
away
from him for good.

The irony of that might have amused him if it hadn’t struck his middle like the blow of a sledgehammer.

And what about that kiss he’d laid on her, right there in the middle of Billy’s place, with practically the whole town looking on? What the hell had he been trying to prove?

Okay, so Hadleigh hadn’t hauled off and punched him for it or walked out or done any of a million other things she would have been justified in doing. In fact, she’d kissed him back.

It had been a stupid move on his part, just the same, Tripp thought, and damned arrogant, too.

Same with that caveman crap he’d pulled next, hustling Hadleigh out to the truck and then not taking her home, as she’d asked him to, but out to the ranch.

True, if Hadleigh hadn’t
wanted
to go with him, she wouldn’t have, but that didn’t justify what he’d done. He owed her an apology at the very least.

Yet she’d seemed happy enough when they got to his place, and when Jim showed up on the side porch, she’d been so kind, so engaging, that within a few moments, the old man was lit from within, glowing like a happy jack-o’-lantern with hair.

Finally, when Jim had gone to bed and Tripp and Hadleigh had the kitchen to themselves, she’d overridden her considerable pride to say she’d realized that she’d never wanted to marry Oakley Smyth, that she’d been hoping all along that he, Tripp, would swing into the church like Tarzan on a vine and carry her off.

A crazy idea, yes—but Hadleigh had been
eighteen
at the time, and a very sheltered eighteen at that, since Will had run almost constant interference between his kid sister and the big, bad world after their parents had died, and so had their grandmother. Alice, down to one chick in the nest after Will’s death, and probably figuring her granddaughter had already endured enough reality for one lifetime, might as well have swathed the girl in cotton batting or locked her up in an ivory tower with nothing to do but read fairy tales and watch animated movies filled with princes, princesses and singing bluebirds.

Now, as the town limits of Mustang Creek twinkled into view, Tripp concluded sadly that Hadleigh must have met with considerably more opposition that he’d thought once she’d taken up with Oakley Smyth.

Alice surely hadn’t approved of the match—no sensible person would have, knowing anything at all about the potential bridegroom—and the woman must have said and done just about everything she could to stop Hadleigh from seeing Smyth, let alone
marrying
him.

No easy matter, considering that her grandmother had been the only blood kin Hadleigh had left, and her approval would have meant a great deal, especially to a girl fresh out of high school. Still, Hadleigh had been brave enough to bust out and take a chance. She’d mapped out a game plan, however misguided it might have been, and she’d followed through, wagering everything on a chance at happiness, on the hope of a family of her own.

Finally, if all that wasn’t enough, Hadleigh had innocently handed her heart over to Tripp, that day at Billy’s, all a-froth in her wedding dress.
Take me with you,
she’d said.

What had
that
request cost her?

And how had he responded? He’d handed Hadleigh’s fragile heart right back to her—after fracturing it first.

Tripp thrust out an angry sigh, remembering. He hadn’t meant to be callous—he’d wanted to
help—
and while he didn’t know what he could have done differently under the circumstances, he wished he’d been kinder, gentler and a whole lot less blunt.

He stopped for a red light, as furious with himself as he’d ever been with anybody. Hindsight might be 20/20, but damn, it still sucked. Even after he’d cavalierly dismissed Hadleigh with the news that he had a wife, she’d loved him. He realized that now—and a fat lot of good it did this late in the game.

Okay, a case could have been made for what he’d done that day, but if he’d given the matter any real thought, he would’ve been kinder about it, taken the time to be sure she understood, even stuck around to lend moral support until the worst of the gossip died down.

Instead, he’d simply dropped Hadleigh off at home, once he knew Alice was there to pick up the pieces, and gone right back to his own well-ordered, big-city life. Thereafter, when he did think about Hadleigh, he’d smile, remembering her not as a woman, but as his best friend’s spirited kid sister—painfully young, vulnerable and, therefore, strictly off-limits.

In the interim, naturally, she’d grown up. Hadleigh was not only beautiful, she was smart and sexy, too. Some lucky bastard was bound to snatch her up, and this time around, she wouldn’t need—or want—rescuing. Nope, Hadleigh would find a good man, marry him, bear his children and make him glad to be alive every day of his life.

Tripp wanted Hadleigh to be happy, no question about it.

However, just the idea of her sharing someone else’s bed, giving birth to somebody else’s babies, was almost more than he could take.

Still, if his hunch was correct and Hadleigh was finally through waiting for him, finally ready to move on, there wouldn’t be much he could do about it, would there?

Just as Tripp came to that dismal conclusion, Hadleigh woke up, if she’d been asleep in the first place, sitting up straight, blinking, looking over at him with an expression that faintly resembled surprise.

To lend a little comic relief, Ridley chose that moment to stick his floppy-eared head through the gap between the front seats and run his wet, sloppy tongue the length of Hadleigh’s left cheek.

Startled, she laughed, wiped away the dog spit with a quick motion of one pink-sleeved arm and reached back to tug gently at Ridley’s ears. “Goofball,” she said, with a note of such tenderness in her voice that, on top of everything else, Tripp found himself envying his own four-legged sidekick.

“We’ll be at your place in a minute or so,” he told Hadleigh, and his own voice sounded, to him anyway, as though it were being piped in from somewhere far away.

Brilliant,
he thought. As if Hadleigh wouldn’t know that already, having lived in Mustang Creek her whole life, except during college.

“That’s good,” she replied distractedly, still focused on Ridley. She was stroking the critter’s head, bathing the mutt in the sunny glow of her smile.

In that moment, the hackneyed term “lucky dog” took on a whole new significance for Tripp.

He couldn’t think of anything to say, nothing that would raise his rapidly dropping stock with Hadleigh, so he just drove, and, pretty soon, they were pulling up at the curb in front of her house.

Most of the lights were on, and Melody’s car was still parked outside, though she’d at least had the courtesy to move the thing so it wasn’t blocking Hadleigh’s station wagon in the driveway the way it had earlier in the evening.

Tripp parked the truck, shut off the engine and left the dog in the backseat when he got out. He walked around and grabbed the door handle on Hadleigh’s side about a second before she shoved it open with so much force that she practically knocked him over. Yep, if Tripp hadn’t been quick on his feet, he figured, she’d have body-slammed him to the sidewalk.

“Oops,” she said with a tired smile.

In an alternate universe, Tripp thought glumly, Hadleigh would invite him in, and Ridley, too. At that point in the fantasy, her dog
and
his conveniently disappeared into another dimension—only temporarily, of course—and after some sweet talk, perhaps in front of a crackling fire, and maybe a few glasses of wine, Hadleigh, smiling a come-hither smile, would take Tripp by the hand and lead him into her bedroom—

Tripp brought himself up short.
Yeah, right.

Ridley, meanwhile, being stuck in the backseat, began to whine and trot back and forth, clearly unhappy that he’d been left behind instead of gallantly walking Hadleigh to her door and looking on with canine approval while Tripp kissed her good-night.

Get a grip,
Tripp muttered to himself.