A Rancher To Trust. Laurel Blount

in high school she’d carried a few extra pounds that softened her figure, and her front teeth had been a little crooked. She’d always worn a pair of dark-rimmed glasses that had slid to the end of her nose about every five minutes. She was forever pushing them back up with an impatient finger, and he was forever plucking them off so that he could steal a kiss.

      All those things had just made Bailey cuter.

      He could think of a lot of words to describe Bailey now, but cute wasn’t one of them. This new Bailey was lean and fit, with perfectly straight teeth and a don’t-mess-with-me way of looking straight at you.

      She was beautiful, sure. No man alive would dispute that. But it was a whole different kind of beauty than he remembered.

      Now this woman he barely recognized was telling him she was his wife?

      The man he’d spoken to back in town had told him Bailey had just bought this place. The closer Dan and Bailey got to the farmhouse, the more he wondered why. Bailey had her work cut out for her, all right. The house had good bones, but it needed lot of repairs.

      There were no chairs on the porch, so he settled carefully on the splintered steps. After an awkward pause, Bailey joined him. She positioned herself against the sagging wooden handrail, leaving a generous space between them. The shadow of the overhanging roof blocked the thin warmth of the January sun, but the sudden chill Dan felt had little to do with the weather.

      In the old days Bailey would have cuddled close to him, settling her head in the gap between his shoulder and his neck. He could still remember exactly how that had made him feel at nineteen. Fiercely protective and defiantly happy, at a time in his life when happiness had been pretty hard to come by.

      Now the very same girl was treating him like a stranger. He’d earned the coolness in those beautiful brown eyes, every bit of it.

      But, man, oh man. The pain of seeing it there was almost more than he could stand.

      Dan cleared his throat. “Okay. First off, how is this even possible?”

      Bailey cocked her eyebrows. “We eloped, Dan. To Tennessee, remember?”

      Yeah, he remembered. He’d just gotten dinged by the county sheriff for underage drinking again, and Bailey’s long-suffering parents had handed down an ultimatum. If he wanted to attend church with them, fine. That much they’d allow, although they didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the idea. But they made it clear that their daughter wasn’t to spend any more time alone with him. He wouldn’t be allowed to drive Bailey anywhere or take her out to dinner. It was plain enough that Mr. and Mrs. Quinn were more than ready to put a stop to a relationship they’d never really approved of in the first place.

      The idea of being separated from Bailey had sent Dan into a tailspin. She was the one good thing in his out-of-control life, the only person in the whole town who hadn’t heard his last name and shied away from him. But her parents, along with everybody else in Pine Valley, seemed sure that he and Abel would turn out to be drunks and thieves, just like their dad and uncles had been, and their granddad before that.

      And deep down, he’d been scared that—in his case, anyway—they were dead right. At nineteen, his drinking was already starting to get away from him, and he’d tangled with the law a few times. Nothing big, not yet. But without Bailey in his life...well, he’d known exactly what that would mean for him.

      He’d self-destruct fast.

      The fear had made him desperate and angry—and selfish. So selfish that one moonlit June night, he’d sweet-talked the eighteen-year-old girl he loved into leaving her parents’ tidy brick home and running away with him.

      He’d never forgive himself for that.

      Bailey was still waiting for his answer. He swallowed. “I know we were married. But we haven’t laid eyes on each other in years.”

      Bailey gave a frustrated laugh. “A marriage certificate doesn’t have an expiration date, Dan. It’s not a jug of milk.”

      “Well, no. But after I...” He stopped short.

      “Ran off and left me at that awful motel in Kentucky?” Bailey’s eyes hardened as she finished his sentence. “You thought that made the marriage evaporate? Well, it didn’t.”

      He winced. “You’ve got every right to be mad, Bailey. I deserve that for talking you into the whole elopement idea and then leaving you to clean up the mess all by yourself. I knew you’d have to do things. Fill out papers and all that. I’d always assumed that’s what you did.”

      “Trust me, I wish I had taken care of it back then, but I didn’t. So we have to deal with it now. Let’s stay focused on that.”

      “Hold on a minute.” He studied Bailey. That muscle was jumping in her cheek again, and there was a tenseness about her body that he recognized with the instinct of a man who’d spent most of his last decade moving cattle. She wanted to bolt. Something about this conversation was spooking her.

      “Dan—” she started off again, but he interrupted, intent on circling back to the territory that was puzzling him.

      “I’m sorry. I sure don’t have any right to question how you handled things, but this just isn’t making any sense to me. Your parents couldn’t even stand the idea of me being your boyfriend. Me being your husband? That must have sent them straight into orbit. Mind you, looking back I can’t say as I blame them. How come they didn’t take you to file the paperwork five minutes after you got back home?” He couldn’t think of a single reason they wouldn’t have.

      Bailey sighed, but she met his eyes squarely. “Because I never told them we got married.”

      Okay. Except for that.

      “You didn’t...what do you mean you never told them?”

      “I didn’t tell anybody.” She looked away and continued in a rush, “Look, none of that really matters now, does it? We were young, and we made a mistake. I didn’t call you to rehash the past. I called you because I’m ready to move on with my life, and there are certain things I can’t do until we get this settled.”

      Certain things. The confused feelings swooping around in Dan’s chest turned to stone and dropped heavily into the pit of his stomach.

      So that’s what this was about. Bailey had fallen in love with another guy—probably wanted to get married. But she couldn’t, not while she was still legally bound to Dan.

      When Dan didn’t respond, Bailey glanced at him. His expression had changed. The sun creases in the corners of his eyes had deepened, and his jaw was set. He looked tired.

      And a little sad.

      He caught her eye. “I get what you’re saying about leaving the past behind. No man who’s made the kind of mistakes I’ve made would argue with you. But before we do, I’d like to give you an overdue apology. If you’ll let me.”

      He was holding his hat in his hands, running the brim slowly around in a circle. He watched her face, waiting to see if she was willing to hear him out.

      She wasn’t. She was holding herself together by a thread, and this wasn’t a road she wanted to go down right now.

      “You don’t need to apologize, Dan. I’ll admit it hurt when you walked out on me, but in time I realized that even if you’d come back that night, things couldn’t have worked out any differently in the long run. We never should have gotten married in the first place.”

      “And that’s completely on me. I never should have talked you into it. But, Bailey, back then I was so in love with you. I was scared to death I was going to lose you, and—”

      “Please. Just stop.” Bailey stood. She’d had just about all she could take. “This isn’t all on you, Dan. It’s