The Marriage Pact. Linda Lael Miller

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      “If Oakley loves you,” he said, in a gentle rasp, “he’ll stick around. He’ll wait, Hadleigh, until you’re ready to be a wife.”

      Hadleigh looked away, and Tripp saw that she was crying again and didn’t want him to know it. Something clenched the pit of his stomach.

      “Tell. Me. Why.” She said each word distinctly and very slowly.

      Tripp hadn’t thought much further than getting Hadleigh out of that church before she became Oakley Smyth’s property and thereby wrecked her life, but now that it was all over but the shoutin’, he began to consider his options.

      Such as they were.

      He couldn’t take Hadleigh home to the little house she shared with her grandmother, not yet, anyway, because Alice Stevens was most likely still back at the redbrick church, trying to make the best of a tough situation and maybe put a lid on the inevitable gossip.

      God knew, there would be plenty of juicy talk as things stood, and Tripp wasn’t inclined to compound the problem by spending time alone with Hadleigh behind closed doors, not even for the few minutes it would take Alice to get home from the church.

      Folks might assume that if he’d gone to such lengths to stop Hadleigh from marrying somebody else, especially in such a high-profile way, and then taken her somewhere private, he could be doing more than just drying her tears.

      They had to have a difficult conversation, he and Hadleigh, and soon, but any old place wasn’t going to do. His stepdad’s ranch wouldn’t fit the bill, either, since it was several miles out of town and chances were that Jim wouldn’t be hanging around home at this hour, anyway. While there was daylight, a thing Jim viewed as a valuable commodity and spent carefully, like his money, he’d be out on the range somewhere, mending rusted fences or rounding up the few scrawny cattle that had survived the previous winter.

      “You,” Hadleigh seethed, “are not going to blow this off, Tripp Galloway. You’re not going to act as if nothing happened, because you just nuked the wedding of my dreams and I’m not about to forgive or forget!”

      Tripp didn’t take Hadleigh’s threat as an empty one, and a forlorn feeling settled over him. If this was the price he had to pay for doing what he flat-out knew was right, fine, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy.

      Then he spotted Bad Billy’s Burger Palace and Drive-Thru up ahead, and decided it would have to do as the site of further discussion. With luck, only the staff and a few tourists would be around—no curious mob. And the locals could state unequivocally, ever afterward, that there hadn’t been any monkey-business going on between Tripp and the bride he’d stolen right out from under Oakley Smyth’s aristocratic nose. Like as not, everybody else with even a remote interest in the recent spectacle was still back at the scene of the crime, a conglomerate of busybodies clucking their tongues and asking each other what this world was coming to, acting as if they hadn’t enjoyed the whole circus from start to finish.

      “I hear you,” Tripp said wearily, in his own good time, signaling for the turn. Come to think of it, he was a little hungry, since he hadn’t had a chance to grab either breakfast or lunch before fighting his way along California’s notorious 405 freeway to the hangar where he kept his thirdhand Cessna and scrambling for Wyoming like a one-man bombing raid. Alas, as it turned out, air traffic over L.A. had been almost as bad as the bottlenecks on the highway below.

      By the time he’d finally landed at the airstrip outside Bliss River, thirty-five miles from Mustang Creek, Tripp was beginning to question his own sanity.

      Jim’s rattletrap of a truck was waiting, per Tripp’s harried request by phone, with a full gas tank, keys in the ignition and a note scrawled on the back of a page from an old feed store calendar—April 1994, to be precise.

      Couldn’t hang around to wait for you, Jim had written in his curiously elegant handwriting. Got a couple of sick calves on the place, so I had Charlie—he’s the new hired man—follow me over here to drop off the rig and give me a lift straight back home. See you later at the ranch. P.S. Be sure to break the news to Hadleigh real gentle, now. She’s going to be mighty hurt and mad as a wildcat with all four paws caught in a vat of molasses.

      With that sage advice running through his mind, Tripp had raced over twisting highways and dirt-road shortcuts with his foot practically jammed into the carburetor of that old truck, desperate to get to the church before the preacher made it official with the customary words.

      I now pronounce you husband and wife.

      They were well past the danger point, but, in spite of that, Tripp shuddered at the thought of Hadleigh as Mrs. Oakley Smyth.

      The marriage could have been annulled, of course, but only if the wedding night didn’t happen first. Even then, Hadleigh would have needed some serious convincing, and there’d still be a lot of legal wrangling once she’d seen the light. In the interim, Oakley might just be able to charm her down the aisle all over again.

      Squinting through the dust-coated windshield, Hadleigh blinked, her expression one of baffled disbelief. “Bad Billy’s?” she asked, as Tripp swung the truck into the lot. “What are we doing here?”

      “I’m starved,” Tripp replied affably, gliding into a parking spot near the entrance. The lot was nearly empty, a good sign. “And I believe you wanted a few answers?”

      “I am wearing a wedding dress,” Hadleigh pointed out, pushing the words out between her perfect white teeth. Not so long ago, Tripp mused nostalgically, she’d been a “metal-mouth,” as Will used to put it, reluctant to smile, lisping through so much steel grillwork that she could have moonlighted as a blade on a snow plow.

      “So I noticed.” Tripp shut off the engine, setting the brake.

      “Can’t you just take me home?” Hadleigh’s voice was small now; her batteries were running down. A temporary condition, for his money. In another minute, unless Tripp missed his guess, she’d be trying to claw his eyeballs out of their sockets.

      “Think of your reputation,” he counseled benevolently. “How would it look if we were alone at your place after what happened? What would people say?”

      “As if you cared what anybody says,” Hadleigh said, rolling her eyes as she spoke. “Anyway, I’m trying not to think of my reputation,” she lamented. “Since it’s been thoroughly trashed.”

      Tripp grinned, got out of the truck, came around to Hadleigh’s side and opened the door while she was still searching, he supposed, for the lock button, probably planning to shut him out. In her state of mind, it might not occur to her that he could use his key to get in.

      “Do you want to walk,” he asked her with exaggerated politeness and a slight bow, “or shall I carry you?”

      Hadleigh sort of spilled out of the cab and onto the running board, in a shifting, glimmering cloud of fuss and fabric, and stepped awkwardly to the ground, refusing to let Tripp assist her in any way. The glittering hem of her resplendent gown dragged in the unraked gravel surrounding Bad Billy’s place, swishing among cigarette butts and discarded gum wrappers and drinking straws squashed flat.

      “Don’t you dare touch me,” she commanded loftily, every part of her bristling visibly. That said, Hadleigh swept regally past Tripp, like a queen about to make a grand entrance at court—or go to the guillotine with the dignity СКАЧАТЬ