Rescued by a Wedding: Texas Wedding / A Marriage Between Friends

Zander started to bluster, but he must have noticed the tucked corner of Trent’s grin, because he ended up grunting and shaking his head.

“Jealous about Missy Snowdon? Hell, no. I wouldn’t dream of going barefoot into that particular mud puddle.” He slipped the phone back into Trent’s jacket with two fingers, as if Missy Snowdon had infected it with something disgusting. “And neither should you, my friend. Neither should you.”

“I don’t go barefoot anywhere.” Trent smiled. “Your generation might not have learned that, but ours has.”

Zander grunted again, clearly aware he wasn’t going to get anything but sardonic deflections, no matter how long he probed. Trent had mastered this technique in grade school. He could bat away Zander’s curiosity all day long.

The two men were friendly colleagues, as managers of adjacent spreads tended to be, but they weren’t confidants. Forty years stood between them, and so did Trent’s natural preference for emotional privacy.

Zander slapped his hands against his overalls, raising dust in the sunbeams that angled into the dim garage like transparent gold two-by-fours. “So go on, then. Light’s fading. Don’t you have some limbs to cut?”

He did. It was one of many chores that desperately needed doing around here. He had been spending a lot of time at Everly over the past few days, ever since Harrison’s weird warning about Peggy. He didn’t really believe Peggy could pose a threat to anyone, but still…he didn’t like the thought of Susannah here in this big old house, all alone.

Besides, the place could use an extra pair of hands, especially ones that came without a salary attached. He hadn’t noticed just how run-down the place had become since old man Everly had died.

He propped his ladder up against the first oak. This one had a couple of dead branches that, given the right amount of wind, could easily fall right on the east porch roof. As he snapped the ladder’s hinged stays into place, he noticed Eli Breslin over by the barn, slouching against the wall, staring at Trent.

Little bastard. He never did a lick of work around here, did he? He might as well be dipping his hand into Susannah’s wallet and lifting out the cash.

“Hey, Breslin,” Trent called. “If you’re not busy, why don’t you come cut some branches?”

Eli straightened, though the insolent look didn’t drop from his face. He shook his head, the blond curls catching the late-afternoon sunlight. “Can’t. Got to work on the shaker.”

And then, as if he’d been planning all along to do so, he sauntered toward the back drive, where the old machine had been dragged yesterday after it died in the south forty. He glanced back at Trent, then picked up a wrench and proceeded to peer under the open hood.

Well, that was at least half an hour’s work Susannah would get out of the brat today.

Trent went back to setting up his tools. Zander was right. The light was fading fast. He wouldn’t get much done today. The older man had been right about another thing, too. Trent should have waited until he could have borrowed a good extension ladder from the Double C. Though Everly probably owned about a hundred ladders, they were all in use for the thinning, which would continue right up until harvest.

This old stepladder—the only one Susannah had kept for private use—was a mess, with half-mangled feet that wouldn’t settle level on the root-braided ground.

But the branches were his excuse for hanging around Everly this afternoon, so he needed to cut a few. Susannah would have laughed out loud if he’d admitted that Harrison Archer’s comment had spooked him. She would have countered in her typical dry way that if she needed a guard dog, she’d buy one at the pound.

He looked toward the house. He could just barely make out Susannah’s silhouette at the window of the sunroom. She’d been in there for a couple of hours now, going over estate details with Richard Doyle, the arrogant twit who was the executor of her grandfather’s will.

Doyle might have been one of the reasons Trent had felt the need to stick around. Trent didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean much. Trent never liked guys like Doyle—guys who bought handkerchiefs to match their ties, which they’d bought to match their eyes, which they’d faked up with tinted contact lenses.

And he might as well be honest. He’d never liked any guy who dared to buzz around Susannah. It was habit, he supposed, but it clearly was a habit he wasn’t going to break. Not after twenty-one years, ten with her and eleven without her. He was more likely to break the habit of breathing.

He wondered if she had the same problem. He wondered, for instance, how she would react to the news that Missy Snowdon had just called him.

Not that he planned to tell her. Missy’s name was radioactive. It would burn his lips to say it and Susannah’s ears to hear it. Maybe it wasn’t fair. Missy wasn’t to blame for their troubles—the tragedy had been Trent’s fault, from beginning to end. But somehow Missy Snowdon had become more than just a trashy girl chasing another girl’s man. She’d become iconic. A symbol.

Doves meant peace, rainbows meant hope, roses meant love.

Missy Snowdon meant betrayal and death.

He hadn’t seen her in nearly a dozen years. He’d heard she was back in town, but, like Zander, Trent had assumed she’d know better than to call.

He and Susannah had little enough chance of making this marriage work without throwing Missy into the mix. You might as well dig up an old corpse, toss it onto the table, then ask everyone to enjoy their meal.

He bent over, set the choke on the chain saw. He gave the cord a yank, perhaps a little harder than necessary. Eli was watching him again, as if the boy hoped Trent would have trouble getting the tool started. But the chain saw zoomed into life, its teeth circling furiously, like a mad dog snapping, eager to chomp into something and tear it to shreds.

Trent climbed the ladder, careful not to ascend any higher than he needed to. Heights and chain saws didn’t mix. But the limb was farther up than it appeared from the ground. Mildly irritated, he put one foot on the fourth step, then reached out with the chain saw and let it sink into the brittle, sapless limb.

The wood cracked, split and tumbled to the ground before the blade sank even halfway through it. It had been ready to go, that was for sure. He needed to get all this dead wood out of here before the summer storms started, even if it meant delegating some of the paperwork at the Double C.

He glanced at the tractor, just beyond the tree’s branches. Eli was gone, the little slacker. Trent scanned the yard, his gaze ending at the back porch. He was surprised to see a man standing there. Would Eli really dare to—

But it wasn’t Eli. It was Doyle. Dapper as ever, the lawyer posed like a GQ model, one foot cocked up against the white scrolled balustrade. His gold silk tie and handkerchief matched his hair.

Somebody should tell the fool that women didn’t like their men to be prettier than they were.

Richard held a cocktail in his hand, a signal that the business part of his visit was over. Though Susannah must have provided the drink, she was nowhere in sight.

The porch was about twenty yards away, so it was hard to be sure, but the lawyer seemed to be staring up at the tree where Trent was working. And his handsome face seemed hard, set with hostile intensity that almost exactly replicated the anger Trent had glimpsed on Eli’s face earlier.

Trent sighed. This could get old.

None of the men in Susannah’s life trusted him. And they were jealous as hell. Okay, fair enough. He got that. The green-eyed monster wasn’t exactly a stranger to him, either.

But too bad. Trent was her husband, at least for the next year, and all the wannabes, the sycophants and the stuffed shirts she’d passed over when making her choice would just have to deal with it.

Suddenly, Doyle raised his drink in a stiff salute.

“Afternoon, Maxwell,” he called. He sipped the drink, then smiled. “Better watch your step up there.”

“Yeah.” Trent nodded. “Thanks.” But he felt irrationally irritated. Naturally, Doyle thought cutting trees was dangerous. It was real physical labor, as foreign to the pencil pusher as scaling the craters of the moon.

Or was Trent just regressing again? Resenting the rich boys who never smelled like wood chips…or sweat?

Get over it, Maxwell, he told himself. That chip on his shoulder was every bit as pointless as Doyle’s gold silk pocket square.

He held the chain saw above the next limb, then let it fall slowly, the blade slicing into the wood, sending off chips like sparks from a diamond cutter’s wheel. But this branch wasn’t completely dead. It resisted, and Trent had to put muscle behind it. He leaned over, adding his other foot to the fourth step for balance.

And suddenly, without any warning he could hear over the roar of the chain saw, the step gave way, the old bolt pulled away from the frame and the plank jackknifed right under his feet.

As he felt himself go, he somehow had the presence of mind to release the chain saw. It died immediately and dropped, whining, like a missile to the ground.

The millisecond after, Trent’s whole body did the same.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS TWO IN THE MORNING. After a long evening poring through payroll records, Susannah yawned while she roamed the first floor, checking dead bolts and turning off lights.

As she passed the staircase that led down to the wine cellar, she heard a strange scrabbling noise deep in its shadows.

For a moment, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. The wine cellar had been her grandfather’s last folly, a ridiculous expenditure better suited to the millionaire rancher he’d once been than the struggling, debt-ridden peach farmer he’d become.

She used the front part of the cellar now for preserves, and the occasional bottle of peach wine. The back half, beyond the wrought-iron wine door, had become a mess of storage and clutter. Boxes of sentimental junk, yard games, canopies and chairs that came out only for parties, furniture too broken to sit in but too fine for the dump.

Her grandfather’s ghost would be appalled.

Luckily, she didn’t believe in ghosts.

But she heard the noise again, so it hadn’t been her imagination, either. It must be Trent down there, rooting around in the dark. She wondered why, then remembered that she’d mentioned she needed to dig out the tents and get them cleaned for the peach party.

She hadn’t been hinting for him to do it. Had he thought she was? It wouldn’t have crossed her mind to ask him to lug anything so heavy, not after taking that hard fall this afternoon.

She felt a nip, like a small bee sting of guilt, deep in her conscience. She hadn’t even properly thanked him for his work on the trees, much less offered any TLC for his injury. Pitching in on odd jobs at Everly was above and beyond anything their “agreement” required of him. And things were such a mess around here that she was deeply grateful for any extra help from anyone.

She just hadn’t known how to show it without feeling vulnerable. Only anger felt truly safe, and she hadn’t had the courage to retreat from it, even when he clearly deserved better treatment.

Relations between them were obviously going to remain complicated, but that didn’t absolve her from the obligation to show decent manners. She made her way down the stairs quickly. She had on only a nightshirt, but it was old and grubby, and no one could construe it as a come-on.

“Trent? Please don’t bother with the tents tonight. They weigh a ton, and you shouldn’t—”

To her surprise, he was sitting at the center tasting table, with a bottle of peach schnapps and a shot glass laid out before him on the recycled-wine-barrel surface. The recessed lighting her grandfather had installed overhead picked out blue-black diamonds in his hair, but the rest of him was mostly in shadow.

“Oh.” She stopped at the foot of the stairs. “I’m sorry. I thought you might be trying to find the tents.”

“No.” He lifted the bottle and topped off the glass. “Just stealing a little home-made painkiller. If I took the stuff Doc Marchant left, I’d be a zombie tomorrow.”

She glanced at his hand, which had a small bandage on the palm, and then his leg, which he had stretched out before him in an ever-so-slightly unnatural position. His jeans covered the cut on his calf, so she couldn’t judge how bad it was.

“Does it hurt a lot?”

“Nothing the schnapps won’t cure.” He jiggled the bottle, sending little white fairy lights scampering over the brick walls. “This stuff packs a punch.”

She knew it was true. When her grandfather had run out of money less than halfway through stocking these Malaysian mahogany racks, she’d found him down here almost every night, brooding over his laptop, researching wines he’d never buy and getting plastered on peach schnapps.

But although liquor had always made her grandfather meaner, it seemed to be mellowing Trent. His voice sounded almost warm, as if the drink famous for thawing out Alpine skiers had finally cut through the ice inside him, too.

“I heard Doc Marchant had to sew up your calf.” She cringed, imagining. “Nineteen stitches, is that right?”

Trent shook his head. “That sounds like Zander’s usual hyperbole. It was only six stitches, and only because Marchant is a worrywart. I’ve had worse cuts from sliding down rocks at Green Fern Pool.”

She would have believed him, except that she’d seen the blood.

She still wasn’t sure how it had happened. The memory had the disjointed quality of a nightmare. She’d just met Richard on the back porch when she heard the crash of something heavy and metallic slamming into the ground. And then, before she could identify the cause, she saw Trent tumble from the ladder.

Without thinking, she flew down onto the lawn, her heart racing. She called out his name. No pausing to consider her dignity. No wondering whether he’d want her help.

Pure reflex. Pure gut.

The ladder wasn’t all that high, thank God, and it was clear immediately that there was no grave danger. While she knelt in the grass beside him, trying to still her heart and catch her breath, he pulled himself to his feet and shook himself off with a smile.

Within seconds, Zander, too, came running from the other side of the yard. The two men walked off together to check out what they insisted was just a scrape.

The message had been clear. Trent hadn’t wanted her to fuss over him then, and he certainly wouldn’t want it now.

“Well, I guess I should go,” she said after an awkward pause. “I just wanted to be sure you weren’t trying to haul out those tents. I was headed—”

She hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable about mentioning bed, for fear it might sound like an invitation. But the hesitation was conspicuous, too. “Headed upstairs.”

He looked amused, though he didn’t say anything.

Argh. She leaned her head against the cool bricks and shut her eyes for a second. Did every road lead to sex?

“I wanted to tell you…I’m really sorry about the ladder,” she said, eager to change the subject. “As you can see, I’ve had to let a lot of the repairs and maintenance slide lately.”

“Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I won’t sue.”

She couldn’t help smiling back. “That’s only because you know there’s nothing to get.”

He raised one eyebrow, toying with his empty shot glass with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No money, maybe.”

The cellar’s extravagant, Internet-monitored thermostat and humidity control system had long ago been disabled, but suddenly the temperature in the shadowy room seemed to drop ten degrees. Susannah looked at his fingers, and something about their slow grace made her shiver.

The way he looked at her…

There was no mistaking what he meant.

Suddenly she realized what a foolish mistake she’d made, letting guilt send her down here. She knew he hadn’t given up his plan to make her pay, and wasn’t this the perfect spot, with its cool seclusion, the musty smell of old wine and the sticky sweet scent of peaches? He must have known she’d come. He’d waited here, like a panther, in the dark.

And she’d fallen right into the trap. She was the moronic horror movie heroine who, even knowing there was a killer in the house, still decided to investigate the spooky noises in the basement.

“But then,” he went on, “money hasn’t ever been my weakness.”

His voice made her shiver, too. She crossed her arms in front, holding them by the elbows, trying to warm herself. “Trent, I really should go to—”

“To bed. Yes, I know. We can do that, too, if you like. Later.”

“That isn’t what I meant. You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”

“I think we understand each other perfectly.” He held out a hand, palm up. The bandage gleamed in the recessed lights. “You made a bargain, and it’s time to keep it. I promise you it won’t be too painful. It will meet all your terms, Sue. All pleasure. No risk. No repercussions.”

She flushed, well aware of what he wanted. Oral sex. He wanted her to take him into her mouth, and her hands, and make him come. Back when they first made love, at only eighteen, he’d begged her to. He’d told her that all girls did it. All men wanted it.

But she’d been afraid, afraid that she wouldn’t know how, that she wouldn’t be good enough, that she’d try and try, humiliating herself, only to fail.

She’d been such a prissy lover, she knew that now. Such a tame little Puritan. Only in the back of the car, only with their clothes on, only on the bottom, only in the dark.

She’d been so naive, in fact, that when she stumbled on Trent and Missy Snowdon in the abandoned playground that rainy midnight, sitting together on the swing, she had no idea what was happening.

She hadn’t been able to see him all day. Her grandfather had company and he required her to be on hostess duty. Trent, of course, hadn’t been invited. By late night, she knew that Trent probably wasn’t expecting her to show up at the playground, where they sometimes met. But she sneaked out anyhow, hoping against hope that he might have gone there, too, just in case. Surely he wanted to see her as much as she wanted to see him.

The sound reached her first, the grind of metal against metal as someone pumped the swing rhythmically back and forth. She heard throaty laughter, and other noises that were harder to identify.

She peered toward the swing set, off in a corner. Rain diamonds winked as moonlight caught on the metal legs and the thick, glistening rod of the frame. She saw the groaning swing move back and forth, never going very high, two sets of hands gripping the wet chains, slipping, gripping again.

At first she thought they were just playing. Doubled up, with Missy in Trent’s lap, the way children might do just for the crazy fun of flying backward. Limbs tangled, hair flying, sharing the thrill.

Shock made her stupid. She worried, like an idiot, whether the chains were strong enough to hold them both, with Trent so tall, so much heavier than any child.

But then Missy’s groans turned to soft screams, and the swing’s rhythm became jerky, spasming as Trent’s heels dug into the ground, finding traction to push harder, thrust faster, finding his own orgasm there in the rain.

And then, finally, far, far too late, Susannah understood. Understood that he had needed more than an uptight little prude.

That she wasn’t enough for him.

That the world as she knew it was over.

She wondered why the memory still hurt so much, when she’d hardly thought of that night in years.

Was it because she was finally old enough to see what an idiot she’d been to run away that night, scalded, to nurse her wounds in private and concoct a revenge plot as stupid as flirting with Paul? She knew now that she should have charged right up to that swing set and overturned the cheating bastard headfirst into the dirt. Even if she’d scratched Missy Snowdon’s eyes out, that would have been a more mature way to handle it. It couldn’t have saved their relationship, but it might have saved Paul’s life.

Or maybe the memory felt so fresh and raw again because she realized that she owed Trent. She had made a deal with him, and he’d kept his part of the bargain. After all these years, she was going to have to live up to her part of their agreement and let him touch her again…something he hadn’t done since that night.

“All right,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll give you what you want. But only because I know you, and I know that if you don’t get what you need here, you’ll go looking for it somewhere else.”

He didn’t answer. He just sat there, waiting, as if he didn’t care what her reasons were. The king, waiting for his subject to perform.

She felt something harden inside her. She crossed the marble floor in five steps. He still sat in the chair, with his leg stretched out at that odd angle. She took a breath, then, holding the arms of his chair for stability, she sank to her knees in front of him.

“I’ll do it, because I won’t be a laughingstock for you again.”

He smiled oddly. “And because you promised this would be a real marriage? Because you used that promise to get me to marry you? Because you wouldn’t want to be a liar and a fraud?”

She tilted her head up and met his gaze without flinching. “You’re right. I made this deal, and I have to live with it. But I want you to know that I hate you. I hate you for not being man enough to set me free.”

He tilted his head an inch to one side, though otherwise he didn’t move a muscle. “I’m afraid you’ll have to hate me, then.”

She nodded, understanding that there was to be no reprieve. She reached out, forcing her hands not to tremble, and carefully unbuckled his belt. She felt him watching her, but she didn’t raise her eyes to his face again.

She unbuttoned the top of his jeans, and as her hands grazed the denim she felt the heat rising from him. She sensed the swollen bulk of his penis under the cloth. Instinctively, she cupped it with her palm, as a sudden tactile memory burned through her.

She had thought this would be strange, after all these years, after all the anger. But though their hearts had grown apart, grown bitter, their bodies were still the same. This was still Trent, her Trent. She knew him. She knew what he felt like, the shape and warmth and musky smell of him.

He pulsed under her hand. He needed this. She remembered how he had always looked as he first thrust into her, an agony of tension and heat, as if his body was on fire, and only she could put out the flames. It had thrilled her, but it had scared her, too, because she sensed a power she couldn’t control.

She slid the zipper down one millimeter at a time, knowing that the pressure was dragging along the length of him like a slow torture. When it was fully open, she pulled back the edges of the denim, slid her hand under the cotton boxers, and took the hard fullness of him into her hand.

He groaned. He throbbed once under her fingers, and she was shocked to realize that something hot and deep inside her was throbbing, too.

She wanted this. For the first time in her life she desperately wanted to feel this velvet steel against her teeth, her tongue. Her mouth curved, instinctively knowing what to do.

She bent her head. But then, out of nowhere, his hands were against her hair.

“What?” His voice was hoarse. “No foreplay?”

She drew a jagged breath. She looked up at him, feeling slightly dazed. Frustration coursed through her. She was ready. He was ready.

“What do you mean, foreplay?”

He rose to his feet in one graceful motion, his hands urging her up along with him. Before she could orient herself, he held her buttocks and lifted her onto the table.

“I mean this,” he said. He slid his hand under her nightshirt and eased off the panties she wore beneath.