A Rancher To Trust. Laurel Blount

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       Chapter Two

      He couldn’t have heard that right. “A what?”

      “A divorce,” Bailey repeated.

      “But we’re not still...” He stalled out, searching her face. “I mean, didn’t you...?” He watched as a flush heated Bailey’s cheeks. “Bailey, are you telling me we’re still married?”

      “Yes.” There was a little muscle twitching in her cheek, but she held her ground. “I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised. You were there.”

      “But that was years ago.” He stopped and shook his head. “I figured you’d have dealt with it, had it annulled or whatever people do. In fact, I was pretty sure that was the first thing you’d have done after I...left.”

      The flush in Bailey’s cheeks deepened. “Better late than never.”

      Dan searched his mind for something to say, but he came up with nothing. “Maybe I was a little quick on the trigger with that no-questions-asked thing. Is there someplace we could sit down while we talk this over?”

      Bailey hesitated then nodded reluctantly. “We can sit on the porch if you want, but there’s really not much to talk about. The whole thing should be very straightforward.”

      Straightforward wasn’t the word Dan would have picked. He’d been trampled by bulls and walked away feeling more clearheaded than he felt right now.

      All these years, he’d been married to Bailey Quinn? It was more than he could take in. The feelings he’d kept corralled in the deepest part of his heart were stampeding in fifty different directions. The dust was going to have to settle some before he could make sense of all of this.

      He hadn’t even wrapped his mind around the fact that the woman standing in front of him was really Bailey. She looked so different from the girl he remembered.

      Back in high school she’d carried a few extra pounds that softened her figure, and her front teeth had been a little crooked. She’d always worn a pair of dark-rimmed glasses that had slid to the end of her nose about every five minutes. She was forever pushing them back up with an impatient finger, and he was forever plucking them off so that he could steal a kiss.

      All those things had just made Bailey cuter.

      He could think of a lot of words to describe Bailey now, but cute wasn’t one of them. This new Bailey was lean and fit, with perfectly straight teeth and a don’t-mess-with-me way of looking straight at you.

      She was beautiful, sure. No man alive would dispute that. But it was a whole different kind of beauty than he remembered.

      Now this woman he barely recognized was telling him she was his wife?

      The man he’d spoken to back in town had told him Bailey had just bought this place. The closer Dan and Bailey got to the farmhouse, the more he wondered why. Bailey had her work cut out for her, all right. The house had good bones, but it needed lot of repairs.

      There were no chairs on the porch, so he settled carefully on the splintered steps. After an awkward pause, Bailey joined him. She positioned herself against the sagging wooden handrail, leaving a generous space between them. The shadow of the overhanging roof blocked the thin warmth of the January sun, but the sudden chill Dan felt had little to do with the weather.

      In the old days Bailey would have cuddled close to him, settling her head in the gap between his shoulder and his neck. He could still remember exactly how that had made him feel at nineteen. Fiercely protective and defiantly happy, at a time in his life when happiness had been pretty hard to come by.

      Now the very same girl was treating him like a stranger. He’d earned the coolness in those beautiful brown eyes, every bit of it.

      But, man, oh man. The pain of seeing it there was almost more than he could stand.

      Dan cleared his throat. “Okay. First off, how is this even possible?”

      Bailey cocked her eyebrows. “We eloped, Dan. To Tennessee, remember?”

      Yeah, he remembered. He’d just gotten dinged by the county sheriff for underage drinking again, and Bailey’s long-suffering parents had handed down an ultimatum. If he wanted to attend church with them, fine. That much they’d allow, although they didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the idea. But they made it clear that their daughter wasn’t to spend any more time alone with him. He wouldn’t be allowed to drive Bailey anywhere or take her out to dinner. It was plain enough that Mr. and Mrs. Quinn were more than ready to put a stop to a relationship they’d never really approved of in the first place.

      The idea of being separated from Bailey had sent Dan into a tailspin. She was the one good thing in his out-of-control life, the only person in the whole town who hadn’t heard his last name and shied away from him. But her parents, along with everybody else in Pine Valley, seemed sure that he and Abel would turn out to be drunks and thieves, just like their dad and uncles had been, and their granddad before that.

      And deep down, he’d been scared that—in his case, anyway—they were dead right. СКАЧАТЬ