The Marriage Pact

Ridley broke the silence, suddenly shaking himself off exuberantly, baptizing both Tripp and Hadleigh in sprays of dog-scented rainwater.

There was a taut moment and then, entirely against her will, Hadleigh laughed.

Tripp’s eyes lit up at the sound, and he uttered a raspy chuckle.

Damn, even his laugh was sexy.

Thinking of the ill-fated frog again, Hadleigh turned away quickly, rattling the knob. The door jammed, since the wood was old and tended to swell in damp weather, and she was about to give it a hard shove with her shoulder when Tripp calmly reached past her, splayed a hand against the panel and pushed.

“This place needs some work,” he observed quietly.

Of course, the door flew open immediately, creaking on its hinges, and Muggles, who must have been waiting with her nose pressed to the crack, scrabbled backward, nails clicking on the wooden floor, to get out of the way.

Hadleigh felt a little swell of joy, despite the fact that she wasn’t over watching poor Earl being shoved into the back of an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. And now, without warning, here was Tripp.

Of all people.

Still, she had one reason for celebration: Muggles would be staying with her from now on, with Earl’s blessing.

“She’s harmless,” Hadleigh said, for whose benefit she didn’t know, when Tripp’s dog and the retriever met on the threshold, nose to nose, conducting a silent standoff.

Ridley gave in first, wagging his tail and drawing back the corners of his mouth in a doggy grin. His whole manner seemed to say, Charmed, I’m sure.

“This guy’s pretty timid himself,” Tripp replied, making no move to unsnap the leash.

A few tense moments passed—at least, Hadleigh felt tense—and then Muggles apparently lost interest, because she turned and meandered into the living room to settle on the rug in front of the unlit fireplace.

Relieved that a dogfight hadn’t broken out but otherwise as unsettled as before, Hadleigh led Tripp through the small dining room and into the tidy kitchen beyond, although she knew he could have found his way on his own, blindfolded. After all, he’d spent almost as much time in this house, growing up, as in his own. He and Will had been all but inseparable in those days.

Hadleigh took off her hoodie as they entered the heart of the house, where countless meals had been shared, where flesh-and-blood human beings had laughed and cried, celebrated and mourned, swapped dreams and secrets and silly jokes.

Heedlessly, in contrast to her usual freakish neatness, she tossed the sodden garment through the laundry-room doorway and moved automatically toward the coffeemaker. It was what country and small-town people did when someone dropped in—whether that someone was welcome or not. They offered a seat at the table, a cup of hot, fresh coffee, especially in bad weather, and, usually, food.

Since this busywork afforded Hadleigh a few desperately needed minutes to recover from the lingering shock of seeing Tripp Galloway again, she took full advantage of it. Of all the things she might have expected to happen that day, or any other for that matter, an up-close-and-personal encounter with her girlhood hero, teenage heartthrob and erstwhile nemesis wouldn’t have been anywhere on the radar.

The decision to come home must have been a sudden one on Tripp’s part. If he’d mentioned his plans to anyone, the news would have spread through Mustang Creek like a wildfire. She’d have heard about it, surely.

Or not.

“Sit down,” she said. This, too, was automatic, like the offer to serve coffee. Inside, she was still thinking about the scorpion and the toad.

Dumb-ass toad.

She heard a familiar scraping sound as Tripp pulled back a chair at the table.

Ridley ambled over to Muggles’s bowl and lapped up some water, and that made Hadleigh smile. Make yourself at home, dog, she thought fondly. She might have issues with Tripp—hell, she had a lot of them—but she’d never met a dog she didn’t like.

The silence in the kitchen was leaden.

While the coffee brewed, Hadleigh went to the hallway and grabbed a couple of neatly folded towels from the linen closet. After returning to the kitchen, she handed them to Tripp, one for him and one for the dog. Or, more accurately, she shoved them at him.

“Thanks,” Tripp murmured, with a twinkle in his eyes and a quiver of amusement on his lips.

Hadleigh didn’t bother with the customary “You’re welcome”; it would have been insincere and, anyway, she didn’t trust her voice.

A moment later, she rushed off again, this time making for her bedroom. Shivering with rain chill, she shut the door and hastily peeled off her wet clothes, replacing everything from her bra and panties outward before returning to the kitchen in dry jeans and a sweatshirt, thick socks and sneakers.

Tripp was standing at the counter, his back to the room, pouring coffee into two mugs. He’d dried his dark blond hair with the towel she’d given him earlier, leaving it attractively rumpled, but his shirt still clung, transparent, to the broad expanse of his shoulders, and his jeans were soaked through.

Hadleigh paused in the doorway, not speaking, indulging, against her better judgment, in that rare, brief opportunity to take in his lean but powerful lines. Without trying to be subtle.

Damn, she thought, with a shake of her head. The man looked almost as good from the back as he did from the front—and where was the justice in that?

His still-damp hair curled fetchingly at his collar and she caught the familiar clean-laundry scent of his skin, even from a distance of several yards.

Hadleigh found it hard to swallow as the seconds ticked by, each one dissolving another fragile layer of the broken dreams and pretended apathy that had blanketed her heart, covering the cracks and fissures for so long.

Hadleigh felt stricken, not merely vulnerable, but exposed, like a still-featherless chick, hatched too soon, up to its ankles in shards of eggshell.

She stifled a sigh, frustrated with herself, and brushed one hand across her forehead.

She was losing it, all right. She was definitely losing it.

Blithely unaware, it seemed, that he was upending Hadleigh’s entire world all over again, the world she’d spent years gluing back together, after searching and sifting through the wreckage for all the pieces, Tripp set the coffee carafe on its burner, picked up a mug in each hand and turned around.

Hadleigh’s breath caught. Just when she thought nothing could surprise her, that she might regain her equanimity at some point, the ground shifted beneath her feet.

Her brain kicked into gear, cataloging everything about Tripp as though this were their first meeting, all in the length of a nanosecond. He was at once a stranger and someone she’d loved through a dozen lifetimes. At least that was how it felt.

Enough, she told herself silently. Get a grip. This isn’t like you. And that was true—except when she designed quilts or window displays for her shop, allowing whimsy to take over, Hadleigh Stevens simply wasn’t the fanciful type.

And it wasn’t as if she’d never laid eyes on this insufferably handsome yahoo, nor had she forgotten, for one second, what he looked like.

She’d grown up with Tripp and had caught glimpses of him a few times over the years since that fateful day when he’d crashed her fairy-tale wedding like a barnstormer, but there had always been a carefully maintained distance between them.

He’d returned to Mustang Creek now and then, to attend weddings and funerals, including Alice’s memorial service two years before, but even then he’d been careful not to get too close. And while Tripp had come home for occasional visits with his stepfather, too, usually over the winter holidays, he’d never stayed long. Never tried to contact her.

So what was different about today?

Hadleigh figured she wouldn’t like the answer to that question, not that she was likely to get one, but, at the same time, she was desperate to know why he was there, in her house.

Tripp paused, still holding the steaming mugs, and sighed. Apparently reading both her expression and her mind, he said huskily, “I can’t rightly say why I’m here, if that’s what you’re about to ask.”

Without a word, Hadleigh walked to the table and sat down in her usual chair, figuring that Tripp would remain standing as long as she stayed on her feet, and she was beginning to feel wobbly-kneed.

Sure enough, once she was seated, he crossed to the table, set one of the mugs in front of her, and took a seat opposite hers. By then, Ridley, fur comically askew from a vigorous toweling several minutes before, promptly curled up at his master’s feet, yawned broadly and closed his eyes to catch a nap.

Tripp cleared his throat, stared down into his coffee for a few minutes and then raised his eyes to meet Hadleigh’s gaze. A sad smile curved his mouth. “It feels strange—being here in this house again, I mean—after all these years.”

Hadleigh swallowed. She was definitely overreacting to everything the man said or did, but she couldn’t seem to help it. For good or ill, she’d always overreacted to Tripp, her brother’s best friend, her first serious crush.

“Strange?” She croaked the word.

Tripp raised and lowered one of his strong shoulders in a shrug. “With Will gone and everything,” he explained quietly, awkwardly, his voice still gruff.

Tears threatened—as often happened when her late brother was mentioned, even though Will had been dead for over a decade—but Hadleigh forced them back. She nodded once, abruptly, before cupping her hands around the mug to warm her fingers, although she didn’t take a sip. “Yes,” she agreed softly.

Then, and it was about time, her natural practicality began to reassert itself. Her closest friends, Melody Nolan and Becca “Bex” Stuart, would be arriving soon for the powwow the three of them had been planning for a week, and, for a variety of reasons, Hadleigh wanted Tripp gone before they showed up.

The three of them, Melody, Bex and Hadleigh, had serious business to attend to, after all. Strategies to map out. Goals to set.

And it was none of Tripp’s business what those goals involved.

Conversely, though, Hadleigh found she wanted her visitor to stay as much as she wanted him to get the heck out of there, pronto, and never, ever return. This despite the fact that he seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room, creating a deep-space vacuum that just might incinerate her.

She gulped back another sigh. The heat and substance Tripp exuded both attracted Hadleigh and scared her so badly she wanted to run in the opposite direction. He could be tender, she knew, particularly with small children, old folks and animals, but he was cowboy-tough, too, right to his molten core. Totally, proudly, uncompromisingly masculine, he was completely at ease in his own skin, solidly centered in his heart and his brain as well as his body. He had a sly sense of humor, a mischievous streak as wild and wide as the Snake River and a capacity for stone-cold, cussed stubbornness that could render him out-and-out impossible.

Once Tripp made up his mind about something—or someone—he was as immovable as the Grand Tetons themselves.

Well, Hadleigh reminded herself, she could be bullheaded, too.

This was her house, and she certainly hadn’t asked Tripp to drop in to drink her coffee, dry himself and his dog with her clean towels and calmly proceed to topple the very structure of her life, like some modern-day Samson leveling a temple.

She had to take hold now, rein in her crazy emotions, or she’d be swept away for sure.

So she folded her arms and sat back in her chair, eyebrows raised, pointedly awaiting an explanation. If Tripp truly didn’t know why he was there, she reasoned peevishly, he’d better get busy figuring it out, because the proverbial ball was in his court.

Tripp shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Then he cleared his throat again, but when he opened his mouth to speak, no words came out.

Hadleigh didn’t move, yet she realized that every tense line of her body gave voice to the silent question “Well?”

He made another attempt—Tripp was constitutionally incapable of giving up on anything he set out to do—and his voice sounded rusty, even a little raw, as though what he said next had been scraped out of him. “I figure it’s time we came to terms with the past, that’s all,” he told her. “Your brother was my best friend. I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a duck—” He paused, drew a breath and then forged on, his neck reddening slightly as he spoke, his expression grimly earnest. He was groping his way through this conversation; it wasn’t something he’d planned. Or that was her impression, at least. “It’s wrong, Hadleigh,” he went on gruffly. “Our being on the outs for so long, I mean, always avoiding each other, like...like we’re enemies or something.”

“We are enemies,” Hadleigh reminded him sweetly.

He glowered at her, shaking his head. “It doesn’t have to be that way, and you damn well know it.”

“You’re asking me to forgive you?” Hadleigh inquired in an airy tone calculated to annoy him. Maybe it wasn’t the most grown-up thing to do, but after what he’d put her through ten years ago, he could just deal with it. And if Tripp Galloway had to squirm a little, that was fine by her.

It was so his turn.

Tripp’s jaws locked briefly, and blue fire blazed in his eyes. He raked one hand through his hair, mussing it even more, and glared at her in pure exasperation.

Obviously, he was stuck for an answer.

Good for him.

Once he’d regained a modicum of control, though, Tripp half growled, “You want me to apologize for keeping you from marrying Oakley Smyth? Hell will freeze over first.” He actually dared to shake an index finger at Hadleigh, and, if she’d been closer, she’d have bitten it off at the knuckle. “Fact is, lady, I’d do the same thing all over again if I had to.”

Hadleigh snapped then. She shoved back her chair to stand and would have tipped over the table—like a cheated gambler in an old Western movie, sending their cups crashing to the floor—if it hadn’t been for the dog lying close to Tripp. No sense scaring the poor creature out of its wits if she hadn’t already.

Great. Now, on top of everything else, she felt guilty, too.

“You have a real nerve, saying that!” she said, struggling to keep her voice down. “How dare you?”

Tripp stood, too, with an easy grace that, contrasted with Hadleigh’s response, made her wish she hadn’t reacted to his words. To him.

His gaze was level, steady, as he replied, “I did what I knew was right. And I’ll be damned if I’ll say sorry for that, now or ever.”

Hadleigh willed herself not to shake, not to shout. Not to fling herself at Tripp with her fists knotted.

“I think you should go now,” she said, her tone so calm and so foreign that it might not have been her speaking at all, but someone else.

Someone who hadn’t been hopelessly in love with Tripp Galloway since puberty.

He was facing her now, looking into her eyes, seeing way too much. “Nothing’s settled between us, Hadleigh,” he informed her evenly. “Not by a long shot.”

Time seemed to freeze.

Tripp’s mouth moved perilously close to hers, and her lips tingled with anticipation. For one fabulously dreadful, shameful moment, Hadleigh actually thought he might kiss her. Wanted him to kiss her.

Instead, to her great relief and even greater disappointment, he stepped away, spoke mildly to the dog, then turned and simply walked off, making his way through the archway that led into the dining room and to the front door.

Good riddance, Hadleigh told herself, putting a finger to her lower lip to stop it from wobbling.

The dog followed, of course, though he paused once to look back at Hadleigh in what might have been resignation. Then he, too, was gone.

Hadleigh didn’t move a muscle until she heard the front door close in the near distance, not with a slam but not with a faint click, either, just a firm and decisive snap.

She should be glad Tripp had left, considering she hadn’t wanted him there in the first place.

So why wasn’t she?

For a while, Hadleigh stood rooted to the kitchen floor, overwhelmed by all sorts of conflicting emotions—dull fury mingled with a strange, thrill-ride excitement, dread with an equal measure of relief, happiness all tangled up with sorrow.

Talk about confusing.

But, then, when had her feelings about Tripp been anything but confusing?

* * *

BACK IN HIS truck, the fancy silver extended-cab rig he’d bought in Seattle a year or so before in a fit of homesickness, Tripp started the engine with the push of a button and gunned the motor once, just to hear the satisfying roar. The rain had finally let up, turning from a torrent to a misty drizzle, and the sun was already muscling its way through slowly parting clouds.

Despite his lingering agitation, the clearing sky lifted Tripp’s spirits.

Ridley sat alert in the passenger seat, watching Tripp intently, head tilted to one side as if awaiting an update.

After a quick, sidelong glance in the direction of Hadleigh’s house, Tripp shifted gears and commented, “It’s going to take a while to get back into the lady’s good graces.” He chuckled. “I always did like a challenge.”

Ridley just looked at him, comically puzzled.

Grinning, Tripp checked his mirrors and, since the coast was clear, pulled away from the curb, rear tires flinging up sheets of muddy water as they spun and then grabbed the pavement with a noisy lurch.

The rain had stopped entirely by the time they passed the town limits, giving everything a just-washed sparkle. The clouds had stretched themselves thin and then disappeared, and dazzling shafts of sunlight spilled between the crimson and gold-leafed trees amid broad pastures along both sides of the road, creating an almost sacred glow.

Even Ridley seemed a little stunned by the scenery.

Tripp, meanwhile, whistled softly as he drove, admiring their surroundings anew, even though he’d traveled that road a zillion times before.

On either side, cattle, Black Angus and Herefords mostly, grazed on wind-bent grass sprinkled with diamonds of rainwater, as did horses of just about every breed. Farther on, they passed whole herds of bison, lumbering and deceptively passive behind sturdy fences.

The sky arching over all of it, pierced at the horizon by the rugged peaks of the Grand Tetons, was blue enough to crack a man’s heart right down the middle.

Home.

He’d had some misgivings about coming back here to stay—and Hadleigh’s reception couldn’t have been described as encouraging in any way, shape or form—but now, breathing in this place, like air, taking in the rugged terrain soul-deep, he knew he’d made the right decision.

Whether the going was easy or hard, this was where he belonged.

This, not the big city, was where he was most truly himself, where he was genuinely free.

The closer he got to the ranch, the more certain he was.

The home place, not so creatively called the Galloway Ranch, consisted of four hundred acres tucked away in one of the valleys folded into the otherwise craggy high country. They could take a newcomer by surprise, these flat, green expanses of rangeland, appearing out of nowhere at the rounding of a bend or the cresting of a hill.

The same old rural mailbox, rusted but sturdy, stenciled with the family name in weather-faded letters, stood like part of the landscape at the base of the drive, as it had for as long as Tripp could remember, listing slightly to the left.

“Fasten your seat belt,” he told Ridley as they crossed the cattle guard. “It’ll be a bumpy ride up to the house.”

The driveway, too fancy a name for what amounted to a glorified cow path, was fringed here and there with towering poplars, planted back in homestead days to serve as windbreaks. As rutted as ever, the dirt road was almost a mile long, twisting around boulders and a scattering of ancient pines, crossing the same creek twice, plunging into shallow gullies and then rising again.

Ridley seemed unfazed by all the jostling; he looked eagerly out at the sprawling rangeland all around them, haunches quivering with anticipation whenever a rabbit or a flock of quail skittered across up ahead.

The barn, big and red and much in need of a paint job, came into view first, then the log house, with its wraparound porch and gray shingled roof.

The front door opened and Jim stepped out, not quite as tall as the last time Tripp had seen him, significantly thinner and a little stooped in the shoulders.

And his hair, though still thick, had gone almost white.

For all that, a broad smile brightened Jim’s weathered face. He stayed where he was, instead of striding out to meet Tripp the way he always had before, leaning against one of the thick pillars that supported the porch roof and raising one hand in greeting.

Tripp’s heart squeezed at the sight of the only father he’d ever known, the man who hadn’t just raised somebody else’s son as his own, but had loved that boy’s mother with the kind of quiet, steadfast devotion most women probably only read about in books or saw in movies.

Jim had never been a rich man, but he couldn’t have been called poor, either. He worked long and hard, raising some of the finest cattle and horses in Bliss County, and he’d provided well for his wife and son. In good weather, he’d found time to take Tripp fishing and camping, taught him to ride and rope, shoot and drive the tractor. During the harsh Wyoming winters, when the land lay virtually bared to the bitter winds and snow gathered in drifts so high the fences were just shallow gray lines etched into glistening white, Jim had been the one to roll, uncomplaining, from a warm bed, haul on socks and boots and cross over icy floors to relight the temperamental old furnace in the basement, then come back up to the kitchen to start the coffee brewing and light the fire in the potbellied stove.

He’d always managed to get the truck running, no matter how low the temperature might have plunged during the night, good-humored even as fresh snow weighted the brim of his hat and slipped under the collar of his sheepskin-lined coat, so chilly it burned against bed-warmed flesh.

Some men talked a good game, when it came to things like love and integrity, hard work and persistence, common decency and courage in the face of all kinds of adversity. Jim Galloway, never one to “run off at the mouth,” as he put it, quietly lived all those stellar qualities and then some.

Now, studying his dad from behind the windshield of that fancy truck, Tripp gulped hard, figuring he’d better get a grip here if he didn’t want to make a damn fool of himself. Resolved, he shut off the engine, shoved open the driver’s-side door and got out. Ridley didn’t stand on ceremony; he scrambled across the gearshift and the cushy leather seat and leaped to the ground, where he proceeded to bound around in happy circles.

Jim chuckled at the dog’s antics, then fixed his gaze on Tripp’s face, turning solemn. Beyond a slight shift of his weight, he didn’t move, but remained where he was, with one shoulder braced against that pole on the porch. He seemed to lean in, as though he wasn’t sure he could stand on his own.

Grim certainty clenched the pit of Tripp’s stomach as he opened the front gate and approached. When they’d spoken over the phone a few days before, Jim had admitted he needed help but not much more than that. Now, in this moment, Tripp knew he’d been right to worry.

Something was wrong. Really wrong.

Ridley, having followed Tripp through the gate, commenced galloping in circles again, celebrating this new liberty.

Tripp kept the grin plastered to his mouth as he reached the porch steps, climbed them, ready to offer the customary handshake.

Instead, Jim put an arm around Tripp and held him close for a long moment before recovering enough to summon up another smile—probably no more genuine than Tripp’s—and to clear his throat. Jim’s pale blue eyes were watery when he clasped Tripp’s shoulder, held him away a little and muttered. “Let me look at you, boy.”