The Stranger: The Heroes of Heyday (Harlequin Superromance No. 1266) (12 page)

She leaned her head back against his leather seat with a sigh.
God, Mallory. Aren't you ever going to learn?

Tyler wasn't her boyfriend. He wasn't even a real friend, although he'd been very good to her this past week, and she appreciated that.

But the generosity wasn't a gift. It was a loan. He was going to want something in return. She tried to make herself remember that. He was just putting goodwill in the bank, so that when the time came, he'd have the right to make a withdrawal.

It was a half-hour trip to Grupton, where Dan now lived, and the perfect weather after all those days of rain made driving a joy. And being physically well, after spending the past week recovering from the flu, was heavenly.

After about fifteen minutes, Mallory realized she felt almost buoyant. She could even laugh at her earlier overwrought worries about Mindy, who was undoubtedly out doing nothing more dangerous than shopping for clothes she couldn't quite afford.

Not even Mindy could manufacture a crisis on a day like this.

Above them, the sky was like a bolt of blue cotton embroidered with knobby white clouds. On either side of the car, fields of periwinkle, phlox and chicory swept past in blurred rainbows of pink and purple.

Mallory smiled and breathed deeply. This was exactly what she needed. A day out of the house, out of the store…enjoying the beauty of a Shenandoah Valley spring morning.

“I really appreciate your coming along,” she said after a few moments of comfortable silence. “I could have done it alone, but it would have been awkward. I won't know much of anyone there but Dan, and if I remember correctly the groom is usually pretty busy.”

“Especially
that
groom,” Tyler said, smiling but keeping his attention on the road. “He'll probably be busy putting the make on the maid of honor.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “He's not that bad. We were having problems before the Heyday Eight, you know. I wasn't exactly the model wife. I was disappointed in him, and not very…warm. You can't blame him for everything.”

Tyler laughed. “Sure I can.”

“Tyler—”

“I mean it. He was a bozo to let you get away. He must have been blind, deaf and dumb. Especially dumb.”

Finally she laughed, too. Even after all these years, it felt good to hear Tyler stick up for her. It had meant
even more back during those lonely days, when she'd had no idea where her husband was or even if she still wanted him to be her husband.

“Even so, you don't really think Dan could be the blackmailer, do you?” She glanced over at him. “Just because he's incapable of fidelity doesn't mean he's capable of extortion.”

“No, not really. I've done a background check on him, and he's stayed clean since his episode with the Eight.” He shifted, putting one arm up on the seat back. “I don't know him well, but I'm not sure Dan's got the right personality quirks. Our blackmailer has serious self-esteem issues. He needs to feel powerful, in control. As I remember him, Dan Platt is just emotionally stunted, in love with himself, and always looking for the next ego fix.”

“Wow.” She shook her head at how well Tyler had nailed it. “Makes me seem pretty stupid for marrying him, doesn't it?”

“I don't think so. When you got married, he was what…twenty? Maybe he acted a little young for his age, but that would just make him seem lighthearted and fun.”

“Right again,” she said. “Dan was always the life of the party. Everybody loved him.”

“Sure. A twenty-year-old man who acts eighteen isn't going to raise any red flags. A thirty-year-old man with the emotional needs of a teenager isn't quite as cute.”

No, it wasn't. She could certainly vouch for that.
She wished she could have five minutes alone with Jeannie Soon-To-Be Platt. But, sheepishly, she remembered the minutes her mother had spent gently trying to coax Mallory into reconsidering her own engagement to Dan. That had gone nowhere.

Apparently Dan Platt was a lesson every woman had to learn for herself.

Once they reached Grupton, it took another five minutes to find the Ye Royal English Wedding Garden, which Jeannie and Dan had chosen for their ceremony.

Mallory spotted it from a block away. In keeping with the pink-flowered wedding invitations, the gardens were a jumble of everything pink. Ribbons, bows, bells, flowers, streamers. Even the carpet, which led to the rose-covered trellis where Jeannie and Dan would exchange their vows, was pink.

Mallory started to say it reminded her of a
Cat in the Hat
book she'd read as a child, where naughty little creatures explode pink all over the house and snow. But she stopped herself. She didn't want to sound petty. Pink was perfectly fine. Pink was very pretty.

They hadn't hurried, and consequently they arrived just in time to take the last two pink-cushioned folding chairs.

Dan was already standing under the pink trellis, quite handsome in a black tux with a pink-ruffled shirt. He winked at Mallory when he saw her come in, a breach of good taste she pretended not to notice.

Taped music filled the air, and then a stream of six
teenage bridesmaids filed in and lined up to the side, as fuscia and frothy as strawberry ice cream floats.

And then the bride herself, starry-eyed, nineteen-year-old Jeannie. Pink from head to toe. Even her veil.

Mallory heard Tyler clear his throat, but she didn't dare look at him. She had no intention of laughing at this poor girl. Weddings were personal. Mallory knew she'd probably wince if she watched her own wedding videos now. That hairdo, for instance, had definitely been questionable.

Of course, she
couldn't
watch the videos, because she'd burned them all the day Dan was arrested for soliciting a prostitute, right there in her café, in booth eleven. The bum had never even paid for that sandwich and fries.

Somehow Mallory made it through the ceremony, although when they came to the vows, which the couple had written themselves, she had to fake a cough herself, just to cover a helpless sputter.

Jeannie had apparently found a sale on similes. She likened their love to angel wings, and bridges over troubled waters, and rain on the desert, and fire in the winter, and meat when you're hungry, and fertilizer on the flowers.

“Now that one,” Tyler whispered when she got to the fertilizer part, “I can actually believe.”

Mallory squeezed his hand, warning him to hush. He subsided obediently, but he threaded his fingers through hers comfortably and didn't let go.

When the groom had kissed the bride, the guests
moved to the pink-satin-draped tables and toasted the new Mr. and Mrs. Dan Platt with, of course, bubbly pink champagne.

The whole experience could have been much worse, Mallory thought, especially since every single guest obviously knew she was the infamous ex. Several people said they admired how civilized the divorce must have been.

Yeah, right.
But wasn't that the impression she'd been determined to project? She could have pleaded an earlier engagement and skipped the wedding. No one would have blamed her. But she had decided she couldn't bear to have Dan feeling smug, believing she was still too emotionally torn up to face the sight of him marrying another woman.

It helped that she'd brought along such a handsome, attentive date. When she walked by, people whispered behind their champagne flutes, but they weren't gossiping about her. Their curious gazes were always on Tyler.

He was a natural socializer, mingling easily with total strangers. Ten seconds after introducing himself, he'd have any group of people laughing like old friends. He even eased her through the meeting with Dan's parents, who had blamed Mallory for Dan's downfall.

But the nicest part was how Tyler kept one arm always around her waist, as if he adored her, as if they were infatuated lovers, as if they were Bryce and Lara, or Kieran and Claire. Standing inside the charmed em
brace, Mallory realized for the first time just how sweet such a partnership might feel.

Once, out of the corner of her eye, she even saw Dan scowling in Tyler's direction. She smiled to herself, surprised at how little she cared. When Tyler had offered to accompany her here, she'd thought it might be gratifying to make Dan just a little jealous.

But, now that it had happened, she found that she didn't really give a damn. Dan seemed like a stranger, and not an attractive one at that. Though he was only thirty, his drinking and womanizing were catching up with him, his character stamping itself hard on his once-charming face. When he stood next to Jeannie, he looked old enough to be her father.

Finally it was time to cut the cake. Relieved, Mallory realized that soon she and Tyler could leave without being rude. She was already tired. Maybe she should have stopped at one glass of champagne. Obviously she hadn't yet recovered one hundred percent of her strength.

Five more minutes, a piece of cake, and then she'd give Tyler a sign.

As the photographer knelt before the wedding couple, ready to capture the moment, Dan carved out two pieces of cake and handed one to Jeannie. Smiling, they twined their forearms, posing for the traditional shot.

Jeannie touched her piece of cake lightly to Dan's lips, laughing a little when a few crumbs spilled down into the ruffles of his fancy shirt. Mallory remembered
doing the exact same thing nearly ten years ago. She wondered if she'd looked as young and innocent as Jeannie. As full of hope.

Now it was Dan's turn. He moved the cake toward his bride's smiling, half-opened mouth. And then, without any warning, just as it touched her lips, he shoved it forward, smashing it into her teeth.

Everyone laughed and clapped as the poor girl recoiled, choking slightly, her makeup now smeared with pink icing and crumbles of cake. Dan laughed loudest of all, as if he'd done something very original and witty.

Mallory felt herself going oddly numb. She looked at Jeannie, who was struggling to laugh, to pretend she thought it was funny. But Mallory knew that, in her heart, Jeannie was stunned…and wounded, pricked with a sudden, troubling fear of her new husband.

Mallory wasn't guessing about these complex emotions. She
knew.
She remembered feeling that way herself. But when?

“Let's go,” she said to Tyler suddenly. He didn't look surprised. Maybe he understood.

But what was she remembering? The cake episode at her own wedding had been uneventful. And through the years, Dan hadn't ever hit her, or been physically abusive. All the way home, a quiet ride with little conversation, the memory eluded her. She really had overdone the champagne. Her thoughts seemed fuzzy.

It wasn't until they were almost home, when Tyler was parking his car in the access lot behind the book-shop building, that it finally came back to her.

One night, after they'd been married about a year, Dan had arrived to pick her up at the café. They'd had lots of “campers,” customers who hung around for hours without ordering anything new, and it had taken forever to coax them all into going home. She'd kept Dan waiting nearly twenty minutes.

He'd been annoyed. He thought she'd been insensitive to waste his time like that. But instead of simply saying so, as a mature man might have done, he'd taken his pound of flesh another way.

He'd waited until she'd opened the door of the car and begun to step in. Then he had hit the gas, causing the car to lurch away from her. Just a couple of feet, but enough to make her nearly lose her balance.

He'd done it twice, then three times, until finally he had collapsed against the wheel in raucous laughter, apparently finding it hilarious that she had continued to fall for it.

She remembered how she'd tried to laugh, too. She had to accept that it was just a joke. If she'd let herself see it for what it really was—the power trip of a petty sadist—she might never have been able to go home with him at all.

She remembered, too, the strange tenderness he'd shown her in bed that night, the fake concern for the bruises on her shin. The confusing seduction that had followed too smoothly after the nasty teasing.

“Tyler,” she said suddenly. She reached out and touched his arm.

He turned off the motor and looked over at her. “I
thought you were sleeping.” His voice was low. “How are you holding up?”

“I'm fine. There's—there's something I have to tell you.” She kept her hand on his arm. “It's something I should have told you years ago.”

“Mallory, you don't have to tell me anything.”

“Yes, I do. It's important. It's about Dan.”

He frowned. “I don't think I want to talk about Dan.”

“Not Dan, exactly. Dan and me. It's just that in my heart I've always blamed you for exposing Dan's cheating. Even though I knew it was Dan's fault, I blamed you for the breakup of our marriage. I kept telling myself that somehow we might have made it work if you hadn't come along and ruined everything.”

“I know,” he said. “I wondered if you'd ever forgive me.”

“But don't you see? That's what I've finally come to understand. That marriage was a horror, from beginning to end. I don't need to forgive you. I need to
thank
you.”

He stared down at her for a long minute. A muscle in his forearm twitched under her hand. “Mallory, I—”

He bit off whatever he'd been going to say. Instead, he took her hand and pulled her toward him. She
had
drunk too much champagne, she realized suddenly. The movement made her feel dizzy, and the car smelled of pink roses, as if they'd carried the perfume of the gardens all the way home.

“You don't need to thank me,” he said, his voice oddly harsh. “As you've always pointed out, I didn't do it to save you from Dan. I did it for myself, for my story.”

“But you did save me,” she said. She was losing her train of thought. Being this close to him was unsettling. He had unknotted his tie, and she could see the pulse beating in the curve of his throat. “You helped me find my way free. It was a very—”