Gradually, Tripp relaxed a bit, smiled to himself, remembering days of old, when Hadleigh was a gawky preteen, all scraped knees and bony elbows and piano-key teeth, freckle-faced and wide-eyed, full of questions, tagging along after him and Will and some of their other friends whenever they allowed it. She’d changed a lot since then, of course, but she still had a way to go before she had any business getting herself tied down to one man for the rest of her life.

What about college, damn it? Hadleigh was smart as hell; her SAT scores were off the charts, and she’d been offered full-ride scholarships to some of the best schools in the country. Besides, didn’t she want to see at least some of the world beyond Wyoming, Montana and Colorado? Try a few different jobs on for size, figure out what she really wanted or simply have a place of her own for a while?

A horrible thought struck Tripp then, a reason she might have been in a hurry to land a husband and, like a damn fool, he blurted it right out instead of keeping it to himself like he should have. “Hadleigh—are you pregnant?”

She stiffened as if he’d slapped her, frozen in the process of ripping off her faux eyelashes. “Of course not,” she said. “Oakley and I do—did—plan on having children, but not right away.” Once again, her eyes swam with tears of indignation.

No wonder she was ticked off and disappointed. After all, this should have been the best day of her life so far—and maybe it was, but at the moment, it had to feel like one of the worst. Tripp was half-sick with relief at her answer, but he had regrouped enough to hide any further reaction to the possibility that Hadleigh, normally sweet, sensitive and predominantly reasonable Hadleigh, might have been carrying another man’s child.

Especially when that man was likely to break her heart before the honeymoon was even over.

And Hadleigh was unique. The kind of woman who ought to be loved full-out, even cherished, and certainly protected, along with any baby she might have.

“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 of the righteously innocent. Her veil dangled down her back, caught precariously on one of the hairpins threatening to slip and send her glorious brown hair tumbling from its once-graceful chignon.

“I wouldn’t think of it,” Tripp said with another grin. “Touch you, I mean.”

He quickened his pace to get ahead of Hadleigh, who was covering a lot of ground with every stride, opened the heavy glass door and held it until she glided through.

Hadleigh gave him a poisonous look over one shoulder, then walked straight past the please-wait-to-be-seated sign with her shoulders back and her head held high.

As Tripp had hoped, there were only a few waitresses and carhops on the scene, along with the fry cook and some guy plunked on a stool at the far end of the counter with a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie in front of him.

Tripp’s stomach rumbled.

Hadleigh, meanwhile, proceeded majestically toward the nearest booth and slid onto the vinyl seat, making a comical effort to contain her surging skirts and whatever was underneath them as she did so. Her face was pale now, a mask of quiet decorum, and Tripp felt yet another pang of sympathy for her. Or was it regret?

A little of both, probably.

He took the seat opposite hers.

A waitress—her name tag read Ginny— sashayed over to their table, wide-eyed. Folks might wear a getup like Hadleigh’s in greasy spoons out in L.A., or down in Vegas, but it just didn’t happen in Mustang Creek, Wyoming.

Not until today, anyhow.

“What’ll it be?” the fiftyish woman asked, as calmly as if she served food to women in full bridal regalia every day of the week. “The special’s a meatloaf sandwich, salad on the side, your choice of dressing.”

Half expecting Hadleigh to announce that she’d been kidnapped and demand that the police be called immediately, Tripp was a touch surprised when, instead, she said decisively, “I’ll have a cheeseburger, medium rare, and a chocolate shake, please. With whipped cream.”

“I’ll try the special,” Tripp said, somewhat hoarsely, when it was his turn to order up some grub. “Blue cheese dressing on the salad.”

Ginny—she didn’t look familiar, but then he’d been away from Mustang Creek for a long time—made careful notes on her order pad and hurried away.

“I haven’t had a milk shake in six weeks,” Hadleigh confided, rather defensively, Tripp thought, as though she’d expected him to criticize her choice. “There’s no room inside this blasted dress for a single extra ounce, even after months of exercising like a crazy woman and living on lettuce leaves and water.”

Tripp stifled a grin. “I reckon you can afford to take a chance,” he said. She looked fine to him, better than fine, actually, given the way that dress hugged her curves with sinful perfection.

She made a face at him. “Thanks so much,” she answered, her tone as sour as her expression.

He chuckled. “Well, now, why not look on the bright side? Since the wedding’s off, you can pig out all you want.” He paused. “Long as you don’t bust a seam before you get home, it’s all good.”

She narrowed her expressive gold-flecked eyes. Even with her face in need of scrubbing, she was beautiful, in an unformed kind of way.

“You do realize,” she purred tartly, “that my entire life is completely ruined, and it’s all your fault?”

“You’re eighteen, Hadleigh,” Tripp reminded her. “Your ‘entire life’ hasn’t actually started yet.”

“That’s what you think,” she retorted. “Besides, I’m mature for my age.”

“The hell you are,” Tripp countered.

“In your opinion, maybe,” she said. “Anyway, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s perfectly legal for a woman to get married at eighteen.” A pause, coupled with a scowl, and even that looked good on her. “And if Gram doesn’t object, why should you?”

He leaned in a little. “Your grandmother probably does object—she’s just not strong enough to carry you bodily out of the church. And don’t try to tell me she didn’t talk herself blue in the face trying to convince you to wait awhile before you got hitched, sweetie pie, because I know Alice Stevens too well to believe that for a nanosecond. You were too hardheaded to listen to her, that’s all.”

Hadleigh blushed again, averting her eyes—obviously, Alice had disapproved of the match—then sliced her gaze straight back to Tripp’s face, sharp enough to draw blood. “Was it Gram? I mean, did she ask you to come back here and...and do what you did?”

“No,” he said. “I follow the local news online. That’s how I found out you were getting married. Your grandmother had nothing to do with it.”

Hadleigh ruminated for a few minutes, then colored again and said accusingly, “You never liked Oakley. Neither did my brother. And I can’t imagine why, because he’s really very sweet.”

It was true that neither Tripp nor Will had wanted to hang around with Oakley, who had been in their class all through school and was therefore a full seven years older than Hadleigh, but it was also beside the point.

This wasn’t about his low opinion of Oakley, who had been a slimeball and an all-around sneaky, bullying son of a bitch from kindergarten right on through senior year. It was about a promise Tripp had made to Will, several years ago, as his friend lay dying in a field hospital in Afghanistan. Most of all, it was about the thorough background check Tripp had commissioned, even after knowing Smyth for most of his life, on a hunch that there was more to the story.

And sure as hell, there was.

So here he was, back in the old hometown, sitting across a burger-joint table from the bride he’d kidnapped less than thirty minutes before.

Their food arrived, and the waitress scuttled away again, after giving them both a quick and searching once-over, but Hadleigh didn’t touch her burger, and Tripp left his meatloaf sandwich on his plate.

Quietly, he told Hadleigh about the pole dancer up in Laramie, a woman named Callie Barstow, and how Oakley had been living with her, off and on, for over five years—right up to last weekend, actually. Furthermore, they had kids, a four-year-old boy and a girl of six months, although the children went by Callie’s last name, not Oakley’s, and the Smyth clan either didn’t know they existed or figured on ignoring them until they went away.

According to the detective’s report, Callie was beginning to chafe under all the secrecy; she wanted some respect, a significant degree of financial assistance and for her children to be acknowledged as rightful heirs to the Smyth fortune. Oakley had evidently balked, not only at marriage, but at making the introductions to Mom and Dad, as well. The upshot was that Callie had been complaining to friends and coworkers for nearly a year that she was fed up with the whole situation. If Oakley wouldn’t tell his parents about their grandchildren, she would.

Oakley, who wanted to forestall this embarrassing confrontation, and yet knowing he wouldn’t be able to prevent it indefinitely, had made a big production of breaking things off with Callie. He’d continued to support his children—a point in his favor, Tripp had to admit, however grudgingly—and then gone after Hadleigh in earnest. Evidently, he’d hoped to take the sting out of Callie’s inevitable revelation by beating her to the proverbial punch, marrying a woman the folks would find socially acceptable.

Though poor in comparison to the Smyths, the Stevens family was practically part of the landscape, they’d been around so long, and the name was an honored one in this part of the state and elsewhere. Hadleigh and Will’s ancestors had been among the first pioneers to settle in the area, back in the 1850s, well before the rush of land-hungry immigrants that followed the Civil War. In places like Mustang Creek, that kind of longevity mattered.

All of this might have been okay—everybody had a past, after all—but for the fact that Oakley was still sleeping with Callie on a regular basis.

Watching Hadleigh absorb it all was harder than anything Tripp had ever had to endure, except for the all-time lows of losing his mother and then, just a few years later, keeping a hopeless vigil beside his best friend’s deathbed in a strange and unwelcoming place incomprehensibly far from home.

Some people, a lot of people, would have demanded proof, pictures, documentation, some kind of evidence that everything Tripp was telling her was true, but Hadleigh simply listened, believing, her illusions crumbling visibly, lying fractured in her brown eyes.

The worst was yet to come, though, because Hadleigh asked Tripp to take her back to L.A. with him when he left town, and he had to give her an answer he knew would hurt almost as much as the broken fairy tale.

“I can’t do that, Hadleigh,” he said evenly. “My wife wouldn’t understand.”

Chapter One

Present-day Mustang Creek, Wyoming

Mid-September

“WELL, DOG,” TRIPP Galloway said, addressing his sidekick, a cross-eyed black Lab he’d bought as a pup out of the back of a beat-up pickup alongside a Seattle highway the year before, “we’re almost home.”

Ridley glanced over at him and yawned expansively.

Tripp sighed. “Truth is, I’m not all that excited about it, either,” he confided.

Ridley gave a sympathetic whimper, then turned away to press his muzzle against the well-smudged passenger-side window—his way of saying he’d like to stick his head out, if it was all the same to Tripp, and let his ears flap in the wind like a pair of furry flags.

Tripp chuckled and hit the button on his armrest to open Ridley’s window halfway, and the inevitable roar filled the extended cab of the truck. The dog was in hog heaven, while his master wondered, not for the first time, how the hell the critter could breathe with all that air coming at him.

Tripp sighed again. Another of life’s little mysteries, he thought.

He could see the ragged outskirts of Mustang Creek just ahead—a convenience store/gas station here and there, a few lone trailers rusting in weedy lots, their best days far behind them, and more storage units than any community ought to need, especially one the size of his hometown.

It was a sign of the times, Tripp supposed, a mite glumly, that people had so damn much stuff that their houses and garages were overflowing. Instead of taking a good long look at themselves and figuring out what kind of interior hole they were trying to fill, they bought more stuff and rented a place to stash the excess. At this rate, the whole planet would be clogged with boxes and bins full of forgotten belongings in no time at all.

He shook his head, resigned. He was a wealthy man, but he believed in owning one of most things, from watches and pairs of boots to houses and cars. He did make certain exceptions, of course—dogs, horses and cattle, to name a few, but, then, of course, animals weren’t things.

Tripp shifted his attention back to coming home. He’d been there intermittently, over the years, returning for the odd Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday, the usual funerals and weddings—one of them particularly memorable—and a class reunion or two at the high school. It had been a long time, though, since he’d been a resident.

In the off-season, Mustang Creek was a sleepy little burg nestled in a wide valley, with mountains towering on all sides, but in the summer, when folks came through in campers and minivans on family vacations, taking in the Grand Tetons as they made their way either to or from Yellowstone, things livened up considerably. The second big season, of course, was winter, when visitors from all over the world came to ski, enjoy some of the most magnificent scenery to be found anywhere and, to the irritated relief of the locals, spend plenty of money.

As it happened, he and Ridley were arriving during the brief lull between the sizable influxes of outsiders, that being September, October and part of November, and Tripp was looking forward to living quietly on his stepdad’s ranch for a while, doing real work of the hard physical variety. After several years spent running his small but profitable charter-jet service out of Seattle—ironically, he’d put in most of his hours behind a desk instead of in the cockpit, where he would have preferred to be—Tripp hankered for the sweat-soaked, sore-muscle satisfaction that came with putting in a long day on the range.

He’d made some heavy-duty changes in his life, most of them recent, selling his company and all six jets, leasing out his penthouse condo with its breathtaking view of Elliott Bay and points beyond, including the snow-covered Olympic mountain range.

He didn’t miss the city traffic, the honking horns and other noise, or jostling through crowds everywhere he went.

Oh, yeah. Tripp Galloway was ready for a little un-urban renewal.

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The Marriage Pact

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