The Marriage Pact. Linda Miller Lael

could be gone for good.

      Time. Let there be enough of it.

      Resigned, Tripp left the house, crossed the back porch and descended the somewhat rickety steps to the yard. Ridley stopped exploring the flower beds and the base of the picket fence and trotted over to Tripp’s side. They both headed for the barn.

      The chores were familiar; Tripp could have done them in his sleep.

      With Ridley tagging after him, clearly curious about the huge nickering critters standing in the stalls, Tripp filled the feeders with good grass hay, made sure the outdated aluminum water troughs were topped off and paused to greet each of the six horses with a pat and a kindly word.

      Later, as he and the dog returned to the house, Tripp stared up at the night sky and watched as the first stars popped out.

      Maybe, he thought, things would turn out all right.

      In fact, he meant to see to it that they did.

      Jim would recover, Tripp assured himself. With more rest and less worry, he’d be his old ornery self in no time at all.

      As for making friends with Hadleigh...well, that would be a challenge, for sure and for certain.

      And Tripp Galloway loved a challenge.

      * * *

      MELODY WAS THE first to arrive at Hadleigh’s place that evening, looking rushed and windblown, even though she wasn’t late. She’d buttoned up her black tailored coat without bothering to free her shoulder-length blond hair from under the collar, the strap of her shoulder bag was across her chest and the supermarket deli tray—cheese and cold cuts—shook slightly as she held it out to her hostess with ungloved hands.

      “You’ve heard,” she concluded after studying Hadleigh’s face for a moment.

      Hadleigh took the tray from her friend, set it on the nearest counter and nodded glumly, there being no earthly reason to pretend she didn’t know what Melody meant. “Tripp’s back,” she said.

      Was he still married? Did he have children?

      She hadn’t had the courage to ask.

      Melody let out a relieved breath, put her purse aside, unbuttoned her coat and flopped it over the back of a chair before fluffing out her formerly trapped hair with a quick swipe of her splayed fingers and a shake of her head. “And?” she prompted, still peering at Hadleigh’s face.

      “And he was here,” Hadleigh said. To her, this wasn’t good news, but she knew Melody would be surprised, and she rather enjoyed springing it on her.

      The reaction was immediate. “Here?” Melody’s blue-green eyes sparkled with pleased alarm. “Tripp Galloway was here, in this house? When?”

      “Today,” Hadleigh answered. She took Melody’s discarded coat from the back of the chair and carried it out of the kitchen to the foyer, where she hung it carefully from one of the hooks on her grandmother’s antique brass coat-tree.

      Melody trailed her the whole way, peppering Hadleigh with questions and giving her no space to wedge in an answer. “What did he want? What did he say? What did you say? Were you glad to see him—or were you mad? Or sad or what? Were you shocked? You must have been shocked—did you cry? You didn’t cry, did you? Oh, God, tell me you didn’t cry—”

      Hadleigh turned from the coat-tree, hands resting on her hips, grinning in spite of the flash of indignation she felt. “Of course I didn’t cry,” she said. “Me, shed tears over Tripp Galloway? That will be the day.”

      As if they both didn’t know she’d wept rivers for weeks after her ruined wedding, and that, as few people would have guessed, those tears had had nothing to do with Oakley and everything to do with Tripp’s announcement that he was married.

      How could she not have known?

      Tripp would have told his dad, if no one else—wouldn’t he?

      Hard to tell. Jim, like many men of his generation, tended to keep his own counsel when it came to matters he regarded as personal, and he was the sort to listen a lot more than he talked.

      Melody, good friend that she was, refrained from pointing out the obvious. “What are you going to do?” she asked instead, acknowledging Muggles with a casual but fond pat on the head when the retriever joined them on the return trip to the kitchen. Since the dog came and went constantly from Earl’s place to Hadleigh’s, her presence was nothing unusual.

      Melody regarded her as part of the household.

      “Do?” Hadleigh echoed. Then she giggled in a strangled sort of way and went on. “Well, let’s see now. What to do, what to do.” She paused, snapped her fingers. “I know. I could enter a convent. Or sign up for the Foreign Legion, provided they’re accepting women nowadays. Failing that, I suppose I could take to the high seas, become a merchant marine—dangerous work, but I hear the money’s good.”

      Melody laughed, but the expression in her eyes remained pensive. “Stop it,” she said. “This is serious. We might have to scrap the whole marriage pact thing, start over from scratch.”

      They’d reached the kitchen by then, and before Hadleigh could come up with a response, Bex Stuart peered through the oval window in the back door, rapped on the glass and let herself in.

      There was something vaguely musical about the way Bex moved; Hadleigh could almost hear the tinkling chime of distant bells.

      “Have you heard?” Bex blurted, breathless with excitement the second she’d crossed the threshold.

      “Tripp Galloway’s back in town,” Melody and Hadleigh answered in perfect unison.

      This inspired a brief ripple of nervous chuckles.

      Bex, disappointed that the big story had already broken, put down her purse and a box from the local bakery, then wriggled out of her puffy nylon coat, which Hadleigh took from her.

      She retraced the short trek to the coat-tree, this time with Bex and Muggles as part of the caravan, Melody along for the ride, Bex spouting questions.

      Déjà vu all over again.

      It was comical, really.

      “Will everybody please take a breath?” Hadleigh said, while two women and a dog studied her curiously there in the foyer.

      “I couldn’t get a thing out of her,” Melody confided to Bex, as though Hadleigh were suddenly absent.

      Bex’s chameleon eyes, sometimes a pale shade of amber, sometimes green, widened with rising interest.

      “Not only that,” Melody went on, still ignoring Hadleigh, “but he was here.”

      “Wow,” Bex marveled. She glanced upward. “And the roof didn’t fall in.”

      “You’re not breathing,” Hadleigh told her friends.

      They were breathing, of course, just not in the calming way she’d meant. On either side of her, Melody and Bex each took one of Hadleigh’s elbows and firmly propelled her back to the kitchen. They even sat her down in a chair, as though she’d been yanked from the jaws of certain death and might still be in shock.

      Muggles, tail sweeping back and forth, tagged along, cheerfully fascinated by all this moving from room to room. Strange creatures, these humans, she must’ve been thinking. No matter where they are, they want to be someplace else.

      Nothing was said, but Hadleigh’s two best friends went into action, as if they’d choreographed the scene beforehand.

      Bex slid a step stool in front of the refrigerator and climbed up to open the cupboard above, reaching past an I Love Lucy cookie jar and groping around for a lone and very dusty bottle of whiskey, last used to spike the eggnog at Christmas. It was still three-quarters full.

      Melody, meanwhile, took a trio of squat tumblers from another cupboard, carried them to the sink, then