The Marriage Pact. Linda Miller Lael

“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