The Marriage Pact. Linda Miller Lael

was true that neither Tripp nor Will had wanted to hang around with Oakley, who had been in their class all through school and was therefore a full seven years older than Hadleigh, but it was also beside the point.

      This wasn’t about his low opinion of Oakley, who had been a slimeball and an all-around sneaky, bullying son of a bitch from kindergarten right on through senior year. It was about a promise Tripp had made to Will, several years ago, as his friend lay dying in a field hospital in Afghanistan. Most of all, it was about the thorough background check Tripp had commissioned, even after knowing Smyth for most of his life, on a hunch that there was more to the story.

      And sure as hell, there was.

      So here he was, back in the old hometown, sitting across a burger-joint table from the bride he’d kidnapped less than thirty minutes before.

      Their food arrived, and the waitress scuttled away again, after giving them both a quick and searching once-over, but Hadleigh didn’t touch her burger, and Tripp left his meatloaf sandwich on his plate.

      Quietly, he told Hadleigh about the pole dancer up in Laramie, a woman named Callie Barstow, and how Oakley had been living with her, off and on, for over five years—right up to last weekend, actually. Furthermore, they had kids, a four-year-old boy and a girl of six months, although the children went by Callie’s last name, not Oakley’s, and the Smyth clan either didn’t know they existed or figured on ignoring them until they went away.

      According to the detective’s report, Callie was beginning to chafe under all the secrecy; she wanted some respect, a significant degree of financial assistance and for her children to be acknowledged as rightful heirs to the Smyth fortune. Oakley had evidently balked, not only at marriage, but at making the introductions to Mom and Dad, as well. The upshot was that Callie had been complaining to friends and coworkers for nearly a year that she was fed up with the whole situation. If Oakley wouldn’t tell his parents about their grandchildren, she would.

      Oakley, who wanted to forestall this embarrassing confrontation, and yet knowing he wouldn’t be able to prevent it indefinitely, had made a big production of breaking things off with Callie. He’d continued to support his children—a point in his favor, Tripp had to admit, however grudgingly—and then gone after Hadleigh in earnest. Evidently, he’d hoped to take the sting out of Callie’s inevitable revelation by beating her to the proverbial punch, marrying a woman the folks would find socially acceptable.

      Though poor in comparison to the Smyths, the Stevens family was practically part of the landscape, they’d been around so long, and the name was an honored one in this part of the state and elsewhere. Hadleigh and Will’s ancestors had been among the first pioneers to settle in the area, back in the 1850s, well before the rush of land-hungry immigrants that followed the Civil War. In places like Mustang Creek, that kind of longevity mattered.

      All of this might have been okay—everybody had a past, after all—but for the fact that Oakley was still sleeping with Callie on a regular basis.

      Watching Hadleigh absorb it all was harder than anything Tripp had ever had to endure, except for the all-time lows of losing his mother and then, just a few years later, keeping a hopeless vigil beside his best friend’s deathbed in a strange and unwelcoming place incomprehensibly far from home.

      Some people, a lot of people, would have demanded proof, pictures, documentation, some kind of evidence that everything Tripp was telling her was true, but Hadleigh simply listened, believing, her illusions crumbling visibly, lying fractured in her brown eyes.

      The worst was yet to come, though, because Hadleigh asked Tripp to take her back to L.A. with him when he left town, and he had to give her an answer he knew would hurt almost as much as the broken fairy tale.

      “I can’t do that, Hadleigh,” he said evenly. “My wife wouldn’t understand.”

      Chapter One

      Present-day Mustang Creek, Wyoming

      Mid-September

      “WELL, DOG,” TRIPP Galloway said, addressing his sidekick, a cross-eyed black Lab he’d bought as a pup out of the back of a beat-up pickup alongside a Seattle highway the year before, “we’re almost home.”

      Ridley glanced over at him and yawned expansively.

      Tripp sighed. “Truth is, I’m not all that excited about it, either,” he confided.

      Ridley gave a sympathetic whimper, then turned away to press his muzzle against the well-smudged passenger-side window—his way of saying he’d like to stick his head out, if it was all the same to Tripp, and let his ears flap in the wind like a pair of furry flags.

      Tripp chuckled and hit the button on his armrest to open Ridley’s window halfway, and the inevitable roar filled the extended cab of the truck. The dog was in hog heaven, while his master wondered, not for the first time, how the hell the critter could breathe with all that air coming at him.

      Tripp sighed again. Another of life’s little mysteries, he thought.

      He could see the ragged outskirts of Mustang Creek just ahead—a convenience store/gas station here and there, a few lone trailers rusting in weedy lots, their best days far behind them, and more storage units than any community ought to need, especially one the size of his hometown.

      It was a sign of the times, Tripp supposed, a mite glumly, that people had so damn much stuff that their houses and garages were overflowing. Instead of taking a good long look at themselves and figuring out what kind of interior hole they were trying to fill, they bought more stuff and rented a place to stash the excess. At this rate, the whole planet would be clogged with boxes and bins full of forgotten belongings in no time at all.

      He shook his head, resigned. He was a wealthy man, but he believed in owning one of most things, from watches and pairs of boots to houses and cars. He did make certain exceptions, of course—dogs, horses and cattle, to name a few, but, then, of course, animals weren’t things.

      Tripp shifted his attention back to coming home. He’d been there intermittently, over the years, returning for the odd Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday, the usual funerals and weddings—one of them particularly memorable—and a class reunion or two at the high school. It had been a long time, though, since he’d been a resident.

      In the off-season, Mustang Creek was a sleepy little burg nestled in a wide valley, with mountains towering on all sides, but in the summer, when folks came through in campers and minivans on family vacations, taking in the Grand Tetons as they made their way either to or from Yellowstone, things livened up considerably. The second big season, of course, was winter, when visitors from all over the world came to ski, enjoy some of the most magnificent scenery to be found anywhere and, to the irritated relief of the locals, spend plenty of money.

      As it happened, he and Ridley were arriving during the brief lull between the sizable influxes of outsiders, that being September, October and part of November, and Tripp was looking forward to living quietly on his stepdad’s ranch for a while, doing real work of the hard physical variety. After several years spent running his small but profitable charter-jet service out of Seattle—ironically, he’d put in most of his hours behind a desk instead of in the cockpit, where he would have preferred to be—Tripp hankered for the sweat-soaked, sore-muscle satisfaction that came with putting in a long day on the range.

      He’d made some heavy-duty changes in his life, most of them recent, selling his company and all six jets, leasing out his penthouse condo with its breathtaking view of Elliott Bay and points beyond, including the snow-covered Olympic mountain range.

      He didn’t miss the city traffic, the honking horns and other noise, or jostling through crowds everywhere he went.

      Oh, yeah. Tripp Galloway was ready for a little un-urban renewal.

      More than ready.

      There were some things in his past he needed to come to terms with, now that he’d shifted gears and left his fast-track life, with its pie-charts and spreadsheets, three-piece suits and meetings,