The Marriage Pact (Hqn) (18 page)

“I don’t know what I would have done,” Hadleigh admitted, feeling stupid and, at the same time, thinking she could have used a little more understanding and support from her dearest friends. “Obviously, I wasn’t exactly in touch with my authentic self.” She lent just the faintest note of mockery to the term
authentic self,
not sure she possessed any such thing.

“I can’t believe you told him,” Melody reiterated.

“Were you listening before, Melody, when I said it seemed to me that Tripp already knew the truth anyhow?” Hadleigh retorted, turning snappish now. Both Melody and Bex were making her feel like a witness in a courtroom, testifying against herself.

“I really wish you hadn’t said anything,” Melody moaned.

Bex shifted her attention from Hadleigh to Melody. “Breathe,” she commanded. “It’s not as if the world is ending.” She took a moment to do some breathing of her own. “Besides, what does any of it matter now? Hadleigh’s
over
Tripp—she just said so. She’s ready to move on. And that
is
a good thing. Isn’t it?”

Melody sat up very straight and her eyes shot blue-green fire as she glared at her friends. “It would be
very
good,” she said pointedly, “if our scorned bride here hadn’t just crowned herself the new Queen of Denial.”

“I beg your pardon?” Hadleigh countered, out-and-out indignant now.

“You’re doing it again!” Melody wailed, waving her hands wide as she spoke. Startled, the three cats shot off the bookshelf like furry bullets, headed in all different directions, and Muggles, finally surfacing from dreamland, gave a whimper of concern.

Chagrined, Melody had the belated good grace to lower her voice. “Hadleigh,
don’t you see?
You’re fooling yourself again—you’re
not
over Tripp. You’re scared as hell, and you’re hoping if you pretend you don’t care about him anymore, this whole thing will go away and you won’t get hurt.”

Hadleigh rose to her feet, trembling a little. “Don’t you think you’re assuming an awful lot?” she asked very quietly. “Do you actually believe you know me better than I know myself?”

Melody sighed, and she seemed to deflate before their eyes. “No,” she said, her voice a sad whisper, her expressive eyes reflecting a deep sadness. “I don’t think I’m assuming anything, Hadleigh. And,
yes,
I
do
know you better than you know yourself, at least right now, in this moment. You’ve lost so much in your young life, my friend—your parents, your grandmother, your brother—and it’s perfectly natural that you wouldn’t want to risk losing still another person you love.”

“Hey, you two,” Bex inserted, alarmed “let’s not—”

On a rational level, Hadleigh knew, of course, that Melody meant well, and that she was as true a friend as she’d ever been. Hell, she might even have a point—to a degree. But sometimes her blunt statements and firm conviction that she was always right were difficult, if not impossible, to take—and this was one of those times.

“We all need some space,” Hadleigh said instead of goodbye, snatching up her shoulder bag and scrambling awkwardly into her coat, in a major hurry to get out of there before she burst into tears of frustration and sorrow and heaven knew what other mixed-up emotions.

Muggles watched her curiously.

“Hadleigh,
wait,
” Bex protested when Hadleigh turned on her heel and marched across the studio toward the outside door, Muggles trotting behind her. “Hadleigh, please don’t—”

“Let her go,” Hadleigh heard Melody say, sounding defeated.

Because she didn’t want Muggles to be any more alarmed than she probably already was, poor dog, Hadleigh denied herself the zing of pure satisfaction she would have gotten from slamming the studio door so hard it rattled on its hinges.

She stormed around the side of the house, through the gate and onto the sidewalk, fists bunched in the pockets of her coat. Muggles, though oddly hesitant, kept pace with her long strides.

Steaming like a boiler on overload, Hadleigh got all the way back to her place before she remembered her car was still parked in Melody’s driveway.

For now, she decided, it could just stay where it was.

Chapter Ten

F
OR
THE
NEXT
week, Tripp made good on his decision to steer clear of Hadleigh Stevens at all costs, but the urge to see her—hell, to do a lot more than that—only got stronger, more primal. He did everything he could think of to distract himself, starting with an all-night poker game in Spence Hogan’s basement and progressing to marathon episodes of
Pawn Stars
viewed on his laptop, arguments with Jim over everything from the best way to scramble eggs to the current political situation and reading every word of every piece of junk mail as it arrived.

No doubt about it, Tripp was forced to conclude, he was falling apart, and his next career—as a stalker—seemed likely to commence at any moment.

At night, he slept in fits and starts, when he slept at all, and tossed and turned the rest of the time. Come the next morning, even coffee, buckets of the stuff, made in the fancy steel-clad megabrewer he’d bought online—following his discovery that all the merchants in town had to offer were updated versions of the one Jim already owned—failed to ratchet up his mood by so much as one notch on his inner pissed-off-ometer.

It would have represented real progress just to go from bone mean to reasonably civil, but that seemed beyond him. Jim declared him about as companionable as a bee-stung grizzly with a bad tooth, grumbled that it would take a NASA engineer to operate that miserable excuse for a so-called coffeepot Tripp had paid the earth for, and that was before the cost of overnight shipping was added on.

In the end, father and son, both of them testy as hell, managed to work out a grudging compromise. Jim’s machine reappeared in the kitchen, having been rescued from a dusty shelf in the cellar, but Tripp’s ultramodern number with the chrome spouts and the built-in grinder stayed, too.

That trip into town for breakfast had gone pretty well, since they were both hungry, but things started going downhill when they left the café and headed out to shop for what the old man snidely referred to as “cruise-wear,” having decided that his usual jeans and Western-cut shirts and boots would do just fine, and it was a waste of good money to buy a bunch of duds he’d never wear again.

By the time the dust settled, their haul from the shopping jaunt amounted to some toiletries, a modest supply of underwear and socks, dress slacks in black, gray and navy blue, one pair of lace-up shoes, which Jim claimed he didn’t need, and wouldn’t be caught dead in, any place he might run into somebody he knew.

And what the deuce was wrong with the boots he only wore for special occasions and could still polish to a respectable shine, he’d like to know?

A few presentable shirts, with buttons instead of snaps, two clip-on ties and a single dark suit jacket completed the travel wardrobe.

On the way to the checkout aisles Tripp suggested springing for a nice set of luggage, but Jim glowered and shook his head. There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with the suitcase he’d bought for his and Ellie’s honeymoon up at Yellowstone, and he could use that.

They’d bickered, matching each other stubborn for stubborn, during the whole drive back to the ranch, exchanged scowls and very few words through lunch and then supper, and they both did some door slamming, too.

Frankly, it had been a weight off Tripp’s mind, dropping the old man off at the airport in Cheyenne a few days back so he could catch a flight to Idaho Falls. From there, he’d made his connection to Seattle, spent the night there and finally boarded his Alaska-bound cruise ship first thing the following morning.

The cruise would take ten days, and Tripp sure was ready for that much peace and quiet. If not more...

It would be just him and the dog, the horses and a few cattle, none of which would give him backtalk or criticize his taste in coffeemakers.

The ever-present construction crews had slipped his mind in the beginning, but he’d soon figured out that he could stay out of their way most of the time by saddling up and heading out to the range.

Problem was, there were
more
crews there, replacing fences, putting up the new hayshed.

There was no rest for the wicked in the house or the barn, either, because the carpenters hammered and power-sawed and drilled holes all over both places, calling out to each other, asking questions or swapping jokes, all of which were unintelligible because every man there seemed to have a row of nails pressed between his lips from daybreak till quitting time.

When he couldn’t take it anymore, Tripp surfed the internet until he found an ad for a private livestock sale, over in the next county, loaded Ridley into the passenger seat of the truck and drove almost a hundred miles to a ranch called the Double-Sorry.

Hell of a name, he thought, pulling onto a driveway as long and rutted as the one back at Jim’s place. The field closest to the barn was lined with cars and farm trucks and a few horse trailers, but at least there weren’t any foreclosure notices posted, as far as Tripp could tell.

In fact, the house and barn looked sturdy and well maintained, and the fences seemed to be in good shape, too.

All of which was encouraging. As badly as Tripp wanted to buy cattle, and plenty of them, along with a string of decent horses, he certainly didn’t relish the idea of taking advantage of somebody else’s misfortune, financial or otherwise.

After giving Ridley a chance to get out and stretch his legs, Tripp put the dog back in the truck, rolled the windows partway down so the air could circulate and headed toward the weathered fruit stand near the barn, intending to sign up for a bidder’s card. A ruddy-cheeked woman greeted him jovially, her eyes twinkling as she handed him a clipboard with a simple form attached, along with a pen that had bite marks on the shaft.

The auctioneer was already hitting his verbal stride somewhere inside the barn, and the spectators overflowed through the gaping doorway, some of them craning their necks in an effort to watch the ongoing sale. Others stood around chatting amiably, paying no more attention to the goings-on than if they’d met up in front of the post office, instead of an auction out in the countryside.

“Don’t you worry,” the bright-eyed woman said, when Tripp handed back the clipboard and the pen. He
hadn’t
been worrying, actually, but an explanation wasn’t required, so he didn’t correct her. “There’s a lot of folks lookin’ today, but not all that many buyin’.” That said, she turned halfway around on her stool and shouted, “Charlie, Roy, Beanie—kindly get yourselves out of the way and let this fella through!”

Tripp smiled to himself. Evidently, he was a hot prospect, somebody with money to spend and a serious interest in acquiring some horses and cattle. Which, of course, he was, although he hadn’t made any attempt to advertise the fact.

“Thanks,” he said, but he was thinking,
Beanie?

“My name’s Chessie,” the woman said, extending a hand reddened by hard work and passing years.

Tripp shook Chessie’s hand and found that she had a grip like a longshoreman’s. “Tripp Galloway,” he said, even though the information was right there on the form he’d just filled in.

Chessie studied him thoughtfully. “You any relation to Jim Galloway, over by Mustang Creek?”

“He’s my dad,” Tripp replied. He and the old man had gotten on each other’s nerves plenty of times lately, but the quiet pride he took in who Jim was and what he stood for hadn’t lessened one iota.

“He’s a good man.” Chessie smiled widely again, showing her dentures. “You tell him Chessie and Bert Anderson said howdy.”

“I’ll do that,” Tripp promised, ready to start for the barn where, thanks to Chessie’s brisk but kindly command, a gap had opened in the doorway.

“You don’t look a thing like him,” Chessie remarked, obviously in no rush to add another buyer to the mix, even after clearing the way for him. “Jim, that is.”

Tripp chuckled. “I get that a lot,” he said.

Chessie nodded, as though some long-held and cherished conviction of hers had just been verified. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’d best stop bending your ear and let you get in there for a look at the livestock. Bert and me, we decided we can’t take one more Wyomin’ winter, and it’s time we retired anyway. Don’t have any kids to pass the outfit down to, and we sure can’t take all these critters along with us when we leave.” She paused, drew a catchy breath, let it out again. “I don’t mind telling you, I’ll miss these four-legged hay-burners, though, and this place, too, once we’ve been wherever we’re going for a while and the novelty’s worn off.”

Tripp nodded in response. He waited, in case Chessie had more she wanted to say. Sometimes, he thought, with a pang of sympathy, it was easier to confide in a stranger than a friend, and it appeared that was the case here.

But Chessie really was
through talking. She smiled and made a shooing motion with one hand. “You go on now,” she said. “I’ve kept you long enough.”

Tripp took the woman at her word, smiled a goodbye and headed for the action. Turned out, the barn was considerably bigger than it looked from outside, and that was a good thing, because the place was packed to the walls.

A space had been cleared in front to show the livestock up for sale, and the auctioneer, a small man with a big voice, stood on a bale of hay, wearing a headset and chiding some onlooker, albeit humorously, for expecting to get something for nothing.

Tripp smiled again. He’d never been to Chessie and Bert’s ranch before, but it was familiar territory just the same. As a boy, he’d tagged along with Jim to farm sales much like this one, and he’d learned, primarily because of the example his dad had set, to listen a lot and say very little, to check out the calves or bulls or cow ponies or whatever else was on the block very carefully, decide how much he was willing to pay and stick to that decision, no matter what. “Look these people straight in the eye, boy, and show respect,” he’d counseled, early on, as the two of them bumped over country roads like the ones Tripp had just traveled. “They’re not necessarily glad to be selling off their land or their horses and cattle or their hogs or equipment or whatever else. Some don’t have a choice, and leaving behind the place they’ve worked and struggled and prayed to hold on to, come hell or high water—like their parents and grandparents before them, often as not—well, that kind of thing’s not just hard on a person’s pride, having to be the one who finally had to let go. That kind of sorrow runs so deep, it becomes part of a man or
a woman.”

Now, glancing around the shadowy, hay-and-manure-scented barn, Tripp felt a brief but keen pang of pure sorrow because Jim wasn’t standing beside him, arms folded, watching the proceedings from under the brim of whatever hat he was wearing out at the time.

For a second, Tripp’s throat constricted and his eyes burned, and he missed his dad as surely and deeply as if Jim had died instead of sailing out to look at totem poles and glaciers and vast expanses of tundra for a week and a half.

A man led a black-and-white gelding up to the front, the horse turned its head to look right at him, and Tripp felt a subtle tug, followed by a swift wrench and the silent, instinctive certainty that he and this horse had established some inexplicable and unbreakable connection.

He kept his expression passive; like the man who had raised him, Tripp knew better than to let himself show anything beyond a mild interest, never mind the eagerness he actually felt. He waited for the bidding to begin, stayed silent as the auctioneer extracted a few tentative offers from the bystanders, but the blood was pounding in his ears and it was all he could do not to wave his bidder’s card like a flag.

“This is a fine cutting horse,” the auctioneer reminded the crowd in a tone of aggrieved surprise, implying that these folks, of all people, ought to know excellent horseflesh when they saw it. He sighed as he consulted the stack of index cards in his left hand, as though refreshing his memory, though Tripp would have bet he knew all about that paint, right down to the creature’s bloodline and the number of teeth in his mouth. A few beats passed before the man looked up. “Apache—” he put a slight emphasis on the name, as if he’d just made an interesting discovery “—Apache here can practically herd cattle all by himself. He’s just five years old, according to Bert, and he’s as sound as they come.” A beleaguered pause. “Now, who’ll give me—?”

The number he mentioned next got no response at all.

The auctioneer lowered the suggested price.

There was some foot shuffling and a few murmurs, but no one bid.

As much as he wanted to jump in, Tripp held his tongue. The price didn’t matter to him—he could afford to pay many times what the auctioneer was asking and was prepared to do that—but in some ways, buying at auction was like a sport, and there were some unspoken but time-honored rules, the first and foremost of which was
never seem eager.

So he waited, a little amused to realize how hard that was to do.

By now, the auctioneer was practically pleading.

Someone in the crowd finally took the bait, and the bidding picked up after that. When the moment was right, Tripp touched the brim of his hat.

The auctioneer saw him, shouted in recognition of the bid, jabbing an index finger in Tripp’s direction. Then, naturally, he asked for more.

Tripp was in no hurry—he could do this all day, he thought, provided he went back to the truck every so often to let the dog out for a few minutes—but it
was
surprisingly difficult not to bring the bidding to a close by doubling or even tripling the current offer.

More foot shuffling ensued, along with more murmuring.

But no one topped Tripp’s bid.

The auctioneer tried again, but nobody moved or spoke. Finally the man shouted, with all the excitement of a tent-show preacher selling salvation, “
Sold
to the gentleman cowboy in the custom-made boots!”

The good-natured gibe made Tripp grin, since he’d made a point of wearing the regulation brand of jeans and a cotton shirt purloined from Jim’s closet, but the boots—which were indeed custom-made—couldn’t be helped. He’d only brought the one pair with him from Seattle, and none of his dad’s well-broken-in shit-kickers would have fit him.