The Marriage Pact (Hqn) Read online

  “Well, damn if you aren’t as contrary as you ever were,” Tripp muttered. She was heavier than she looked, too, although pointing that out would definitely be a tactical error. Besides, he was swamped, all of a sudden, by great billows of silky white fabric and rhinestone-studded lace, so that he could barely see or even breathe.

  And Hadleigh, a Wyoming cowgirl born and bred, struggled wildly all the while, yelling and banging away at Tripp’s back with what remained of the bridal bouquet as he carried her down the aisle, treading on the bruised rose petals, striding past all the guests without looking to the left or right, on through the vestibule and then outside, into the crisp sunshine.

  Still, nobody said a word, let alone made a move to intercede, even with Hadleigh ranting and raving that she was being abducted, damn it, and this was wrong. It was a crime, and she needed help. Why didn’t somebody do something?

  Tripp’s strides were long as he headed toward the waiting truck, its oft-rebuilt engine chortling loudly, the dented, primer-spotted chassis fairly vibrating with the need for speed. The limo driver was still standing on the sidewalk, chain-smoking and blabbing into his cell phone, but when Tripp emerged from the redbrick church, lugging a squirming, squealing bride, he shut up and gaped.

  By then, the bouquet must have finally fallen apart, because Hadleigh was slugging away at Tripp with her fists, evidently out to pound one or both of his kidneys into a bloody pulp.

  Reaching the truck, at long last, Tripp allowed himself a sigh of relief and wrestled Hadleigh and her bride getup until he could yank open the passenger-side door and thrust her into the cab, then stuff the voluminous skirts of her wedding dress in after her and shut the door hard. He figured she’d try to make a break for it, but by the time she’d managed to burrow through all that frothy lace to get hold of the door handle, Tripp was in the driver’s seat and they were rolling.

  It seemed a safe enough bet that Hadleigh was half-again too smart to jump from a moving vehicle—though her taste in men, Tripp had to concede, belied her famously high IQ—and he took a firm grip on her left arm just in case he was giving her too much credit for brainpower.

  She settled down a bit, although she was still generating enough steam to run an old-time locomotive up a steep incline.

  “I can’t believe you just did that!” she finally sputtered when he let go of her. By then, they were doing forty, so she wasn’t likely to make a leap, but there was another problem. That damn wedding dress of hers practically filled the whole inside of the truck, creating a variety of hazards. Tripp was reminded of the time he and Will, young enough then that they were still waiting for their permanent front teeth to grow in, somehow got hold of a box of powdered laundry soap and dumped it in the big fountain in front of the courthouse over in Bliss River. In two shakes, the suds had been over their heads.

  “Believe it,” Tripp said flatly.

  Hadleigh shoved the veil back, revealing a splotchy, mascara-streaked face and fiery eyes as she did her best to glare a scorching hole in Tripp’s hide. One of her stick-on eyelashes had come loose, clinging to the middle of her eyelid like a bug to a windshield—and he laughed.

  A mistake, of course—not that he could have kept a straight face if his life depended on it. He’d already pushed his luck about as far as it was likely to go, by his reckoning. Laughing at a woman this pissed off was downright foolhardy, but there it was.

  If Will was looking on from heaven, or wherever good men wound up for the duration, Tripp hoped he was satisfied. Waltzing with a mama bear would have been easier—and safer—than rescuing Hadleigh from a lifetime spent hog-tied to the likes of Oakley Smyth.

  The air inside that truck was all but electrified. “You think this is funny?” Hadleigh snapped, folding her arms, which took some doing, with all that dress getting in her way.

  Tripp choked back one last chortle. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I do think it’s funny. And I’m betting that someday, you’ll think so, too.”

  “I could have you arrested!”

  “Go ahead,” Tripp said blithely. “Get Spence Hogan to toss me in the hoosegow. ’Course, I’ll be out before you can say ‘poker buddy.’” He paused, frowned thoughtfully. “But now that you mention it, I would like to ask my old pal Spence why you weren’t taken into protective custody and held until you came to your senses and broke it off with Smyth.” Another pause, a shake of his head. “Smyth,” he repeated disdainfully. “Just how pretentious does somebody have to be to spell an otherwise ordinary name with a y?”

  “You think you know Oakley,” Hadleigh protested hotly, “but you don’t.”

  “No,” Tripp argued mildly, “you don’t.”

  “We’re in love! Or, at least, we were until you butted in! How am I supposed to face people after this, Tripp? What about all the planning and the money Gram and I spent on this dress, plus the flowers and the cake and the bridesmaids’ gowns for Bex and Melody? On top of all that, there’s a mountain of presents in our dining room, all of which will have to be returned—”

  She fell silent, and Tripp let things quiet down for a few minutes before he said, “You’re in love with love, Hadleigh. That’s all. And, oh yeah, has it occurred to you yet that a man who loves a woman—really loves her—would at least speak up, if not fight to keep her from being hauled out of church on their wedding day?”

  That reasoning deflated Hadleigh a little, and Tripp felt a stab of regret. The truth hurts. No wonder that saying had been around long enough to turn trite.

  “Oakley’s a gentleman,” she finally replied, with a disdainful sniff. “Not a rough-and-tumble cowboy who thinks he can settle anything with his fists!”

  “You have something against cowboys?” Tripp drawled the question.

  Her cheeks flared again. “Shut up, Tripp. Just shut up.”

  Discretion had never been one of Tripp’s great strengths. “And while we’re at it, why in hell would you glue fake lashes on your eyelids like that?” he asked, with matter-of-fact ease and genuine curiosity. “There’s nothing wrong with the eyelashes you were born with, far as I can tell.”

  Hadleigh gave a strangled squeal of frustration. “Are you through?” she inquired acidly.

  So much for reasonable adult conversation.

  Normally, Tripp would have insisted that Hadleigh put on her seat belt, since he’d just noticed she wasn’t wearing one, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to find it in that burgeoning cloud of virginal white lace.

  Virginal.

  Was Hadleigh still innocent? Or had Oakley Smyth—or some other smarm-ball yahoo—sweet-talked her into his bed?

  The thought galled Tripp through and through, even though Hadleigh’s sex life was purely none of his damn business. Granted, eighteen was young, but it wasn’t that young. Lots of women her age were twisting the sheets with some guy, whether they were married to him or not.

  Tripp decided not to pursue that train of thought, aloud or in the privacy of his own mind, since it would be the equivalent of lighting a match to a fuse.

  He’d concentrate on his driving instead.

  So they cruised along the quiet main street of Mustang Creek, past the post office and the grocery store and the old movie house, the latter having been boarded up two or three recessions back, in incendiary silence.

  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 th
at 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?