The Marriage Pact (Hqn) (7 page)

Hard to tell. Jim, like many men of his generation, tended to keep his own counsel when it came to matters he regarded as personal, and he was the sort to listen a lot more than he talked.

Melody, good friend that she was, refrained from pointing out the obvious. “What are you going to do?” she asked instead, acknowledging Muggles with a casual but fond pat on the head when the retriever joined them on the return trip to the kitchen. Since the dog came and went constantly from Earl’s place to Hadleigh’s, her presence was nothing unusual.

Melody regarded her as part of the household.

“Do?” Hadleigh echoed. Then she giggled in a strangled sort of way and went on. “Well, let’s see now. What to do, what to do.” She paused, snapped her fingers. “I know. I could enter a convent. Or sign up for the Foreign Legion, provided they’re accepting women nowadays. Failing that, I suppose I could take to the high seas, become a merchant marine—dangerous work, but I hear the money’s good.”

Melody laughed, but the expression in her eyes remained pensive. “Stop it,” she said. “This is serious. We might have to scrap the whole marriage pact thing, start over from scratch.”

They’d reached the kitchen by then, and before Hadleigh could come up with a response, Bex Stuart peered through the oval window in the back door, rapped on the glass and let herself in.

There was something vaguely musical about the way Bex moved; Hadleigh could almost hear the tinkling chime of distant bells.

“Have you heard?” Bex blurted, breathless with excitement the second she’d crossed the threshold.

“Tripp Galloway’s back in town,” Melody and Hadleigh answered in perfect unison.

This inspired a brief ripple of nervous chuckles.

Bex, disappointed that the big story had already broken, put down her purse and a box from the local bakery, then wriggled out of her puffy nylon coat, which Hadleigh took from her.

She retraced the short trek to the coat-tree, this time with Bex and Muggles as part of the caravan, Melody along for the ride, Bex spouting questions.

Déjà vu all over again.

It was comical, really.

“Will everybody please take a breath?” Hadleigh said, while two women and a dog studied her curiously there in the foyer.

“I couldn’t get a thing out of her,” Melody confided to Bex, as though Hadleigh were suddenly absent.

Bex’s chameleon eyes, sometimes a pale shade of amber, sometimes green, widened with rising interest.

“Not only that,” Melody went on, still ignoring Hadleigh, “but he was
here.
”

“Wow,” Bex marveled. She glanced upward. “And the roof didn’t fall in.”

“You’re not breathing,” Hadleigh told her friends.

They
were
breathing, of course, just not in the calming way she’d meant. On either side of her, Melody and Bex each took one of Hadleigh’s elbows and firmly propelled her back to the kitchen. They even sat her down in a chair, as though she’d been yanked from the jaws of certain death and might still be in shock.

Muggles, tail sweeping back and forth, tagged along, cheerfully fascinated by all this moving from room to room.
Strange creatures, these humans,
she must’ve been thinking
. No matter where they are, they want to be someplace else.

Nothing was said, but Hadleigh’s two best friends went into action, as if they’d choreographed the scene beforehand.

Bex slid a step stool in front of the refrigerator and climbed up to open the cupboard above, reaching past an
I Love Lucy
cookie jar and groping around for a lone and very dusty bottle of whiskey, last used to spike the eggnog at Christmas. It was still three-quarters full.

Melody, meanwhile, took a trio of squat tumblers from another cupboard, carried them to the sink, then rinsed them carefully and dried them with an embroidered dish towel.

Hadleigh watched, bemused, as did Muggles. The whole drill reminded her of the syncopated routines in the black-and-white movies her grandmother had loved to watch on TV, the ones performed in sparkling pools by bathing beauties in sleek one-piece suits and rubber swimming caps.

With a flourish, Melody poured a double shot into each of the glasses, handed one to Bex and one to Hadleigh, with an appropriate flourish, and finally raised her own high, prepared to offer a toast.

Hadleigh’s whirling brain suddenly snagged on a memory. They’d been supermarket premiums, those glasses, she recalled, with a pang of nostalgia, and Gram had collected them eagerly, one by one, until she had a set of eight.

That hadn’t been like her grandmother, a nondrinker and a minimalist.

Hadleigh, in junior high at the time, had finally asked Gram why she’d wanted the glasses, since they were never used. Her grandmother had smiled and said she liked the way they caught stray beams of light sometimes, giving off an unexpected shimmer, thereby brightening many an otherwise dull day.

You
were the one who brightened up the dull days, Gram,
Hadleigh thought now.
You, with your love and your laughter and with that magical smile of yours.

Melody got Hadleigh’s attention with a loud “Ahem.” “To the marriage pact,” she said.

“To the marriage pact,” Bex repeated, with less certainty.

Hadleigh merely nodded and took a cautious sip from her glass.

The whiskey burned the back of her throat and then proceeded to sear its way down her esophagus.

Always a sport, Bex overcame her obvious hesitation, upended her glass, swallowed the contents in one gulp and immediately began to cough, choke and sputter.

Grinning, Melody crossed to where Bex stood and, with her free hand, administered half a dozen brisk whacks on the back.

Bex frowned at Melody, as though affronted, and said, “Geez, Mel, you don’t have to knock me over.”

“Sorry,” Melody said lightly.

“And,” Bex continued, “it probably isn’t smart to drink on empty stomachs. If we’re going to come up with a workable plan, we need to be sober, at least.”

“You’re right,” Hadleigh said resolutely, setting her glass on the table and rising from her chair to head for the fridge, where she’d stashed the pasta salad she’d made earlier in the day. Before Earl was taken away in an ambulance, before she’d inherited a full-time dog, before Tripp had shown up, materializing on the rainy sidewalk in front of her house in the middle of the afternoon. Needless to say, she hadn’t gotten around to baking the cake she’d planned to serve. “Let’s eat.”

The meal was simple, delicious and, from Hadleigh’s viewpoint, over much too quickly. There was virtually no washing up to be done—just the salad plates and the silverware, and Melody stowed those away in the dishwasher while Bex wiped the tabletop clean and Hadleigh let Muggles out for a few minutes, filled the dog’s bowl with fresh kibble and set it on the floor.

After a brief interlude, Muggles came back inside, and the three friends gathered around the table again, as in days of old.

“Since you couldn’t bring yourself to ask him straight out if he was still married, did you at least check for a wedding band?”Melody asked casually.

The truth? Hadleigh had been too rattled to think of that—or much of anything else.

Melody sighed when Hadleigh didn’t speak and then answered her own question. “You didn’t,” she said. “Well, don’t worry about it. Nobody else in town seems to know either.”

Just as Tripp’s return to Mustang Creek had apparently caught everyone off guard, so had his marriage ten years ago. News like that usually got around Bliss County in a flash, even if it was supposed to be a secret—
especially
if it was supposed to be a secret—but he’d somehow managed to keep that particular tidbit under wraps.

Until he’d sprung it on Hadleigh in Bad Billy’s Burger Palace...

“I...couldn’t think,” Hadleigh admitted, uneasy again, even though she’d firmly decided not to let Tripp Galloway get under her skin. All she had to do was stop remembering.

Fat chance she’d forget.

“You didn’t even ask Tripp why he came back?” Bex wanted to know. Being Bex, if she didn’t like an answer, she just kept asking, evidently hoping to get a better one through persistence.

“He grew up in Mustang Creek, just like the rest of us,” Hadleigh retorted. “And he doesn’t need to account for his whereabouts—not to me, anyway.”

Melody sat back in her chair, regarding Hadleigh thoughtfully. “Spare us the act, Hadleigh,” she said. “This is
us
you’re talking to, your closest friends. We see all—we know all. You’ve been in love with the man since forever.”

“I have not,” Hadleigh protested, with less conviction than she’d intended.

Okay, yes—she’d had a crush on Tripp once upon a time.

And, yes, she’d stuck to Tripp’s heels like a wad of gum from the first day Will brought him home from school, and she’d even shed a few tears over him.

None of which meant she was or ever had been in
love
with the guy
,
for pity’s sake.

Tripp was one of the last links to Will, that was all, a connection to the lost brother she’d adored. Except for Gram, of course, Tripp had remembered Will better than anyone, and, at least at first, he’d been willing to share those memories.

They’d warmed Hadleigh, those recollections, like a bonfire on a cold night. She’d considered Tripp a friend, almost a surrogate big brother. And while she could have forgiven him for making a circus out of the most important day of her life, the fact that he hadn’t bothered to tell her, or anyone else in Mustang Creek, that he had a
wife
tucked away somewhere—well, that had been a betrayal.

And she wasn’t over it.

“The point is,” Melody said, effectively bringing the informal meeting back to order, “Bex and I need to know where you stand on the pact.”

Ah, yes, the marriage pact.

They’d made a personal commitment, the three of them, one summer night at Billy’s, sharing an order of his fabled chicken-chili-and-cheese nachos, a year or so after Hadleigh had been carried bodily out of the church where she’d planned to marry Oakley Smyth.

After a few years, with no viable marriage prospects in sight, it had begun to seem that they were destined to be perennial bridesmaids rather than brides, and they were fed up with waiting around for their lives to start, plucking the strings of second fiddles. It was getting old, playing supporting roles in other people’s splashy, romantic weddings, attending bridal showers for everybody but each other and always, always putting on a brave face.

It wasn’t that they weren’t modern women, not at all. They’d gotten college educations. They had career goals, and they’d accomplished most of them.

But, deep down, they all knew something was missing.

They wanted husbands, homes, families.

Was that so wrong?

And, furthermore, they’d had their fill of dating little boys posing as grown-ups.

Damn it, they wanted
men.
The real deal, testosterone and all.

So they’d made the pact.

They’d written the tenets of the agreement on paper napkins emblazoned with Bad Billy’s distinctive horned devil logo—they would support each other in the search for their individual Mr. Rights. They would meet at least once a month as long as they all lived within a fifty-mile radius. Failing that, they would do video conferences. In this way, they figured, they could keep their minds focused on the objective—a full life, no settling allowed.

It was true love or nothing. That was the agreement.

So far, there had been none of the former and plenty of the latter.

But a cowgirl never gives up.

Hadleigh, Melody and Bex had certainly stuck to their guns.

If some of the monthly meetings had turned out to be shopping trips, dancing to the jukebox in some cowboy bar or marathon movie watching in one of their living rooms, rather than actual strategy sessions, well, so what? No plan was perfect.

On other occasions, especially after overexposure to TV, specifically the Oprah Winfrey Network, they’d renewed their efforts, gone so far as to light candles, compose affirmations, refine their intentions, really taken the New Age approach. Why, they’d even made “vision boards,” gluing magazine pictures to poster-size pieces of paper. They chose photographs of spacious houses; churches decked out for glamorous weddings; honeymoon destinations the world over; handsome men in tuxes; numerous healthy, beaming children anyone could see were of above-average intelligence; and, finally, a pet or two. They’d taped these creations to the insides of their closet doors and stared at them on a regular basis.

Their friends kept getting married.

Inviting them to serve as bridesmaids.

The edges of the vision boards had begun to tatter and, eventually, out of embarrassment, they’d burned the lot of them in a barrel in Hadleigh’s backyard.

Daunted but still determined, they’d signed up for an online dating service, the one boasting the most marriages.

Although their hopes had been high in the beginning, this idea, too, had quickly fizzled. When they were matched with any guys, they often discovered that they’d grown up with them, right there in Mustang Creek, and the reasons they’d never been keen to date them were all too obvious. The prospects from farther afield acted suspiciously married, or asked to borrow money, or expected sex right out of the chute.

Losers.

Still, the Three Musketeers had hung in there. While away at college, they’d attended every party, whether they felt like it at the time or not. They’d gone on blind dates with the brothers, cousins and ex-boyfriends of various friends, friends of friends and those of mere acquaintances, too, as advised by the find-a-man books they shared, devoured and discussed at excruciating length.

The results of all these efforts, though dismal, had at least left them with a few good stories to tell and a lot of things to laugh about.

While a less stubborn crop of females might have cut their losses and run, resigned themselves to the single life, Hadleigh, Melody and Bex were not quitters.