The women of Bliss County are ready to meet the men of their dreams! See how it all begins in this enthralling new series by #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

Ten years ago, Hadleigh Stevens was eighteen and this close to saying “I do,” when Tripp Galloway interrupted her walk down the aisle. Now that she’s recovered from her youthful mistake and Tripp’s interference, Hadleigh and her single friends form a marriage pact. She doesn’t expect Tripp to meddle with her new plan to find Mr. Right—or to discover that she’s more attracted to him than ever!

Divorced and eager to reconnect with his cowboy roots, Tripp returns to Bliss County to save his ailing father’s ranch. He’s not looking for another wife—certainly not his best friend’s little sister. But he’s never been able to forget Hadleigh. And this time, if she ends up in his arms, he won’t be walking away!

Praise for #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

“Miller tugs at the heartstrings as few authors can.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[Miller] is one of the finest American writers in the genre.”

—RT Book Reviews

“All three titles should appeal to readers who like their contemporary romances Western, slightly dangerous and graced with enlightened (more or less) bad-boy heroes.”

—Library Journal on the Montana Creeds series

“A real page-turner. With vibrant prose, fully realized characters, an engrossing plot…Miller has hit another bull’s-eye.”

—LoveWesternRomances.com, 5-Spur Review, on The Rustler

“Miller seems to understand her characters’ thoughts

and state of mind while fulfilling her reader’s expectations.

She doesn’t disappoint.”

—Armchair Interviews on The Rustler

“Linda Lael Miller has crafted a tale that has the perfect balance of passion, compelling characters and a rich setting,

proving once again that she is a master of her craft.”

—Romance Junkies on A Wanted Man

“Miller enthralls, once again, in the second entry of her new McKettrick Men series (following McKettrick’s Luck), an engrossing, contemporary western romance…Miller’s masterful ability to create living, breathing characters never flags, even in the case of Echo’s dog, Avalon; combined with a taut story line and vivid prose, Miller’s romance won’t disappoint.”

—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Pride (starred review)

“Miller’s name is synonymous with the finest

in western romance. From the hard realities of life

in an untamed land to the passionate people

who bring the colorful history to life, she brings the best

of the West to readers, never failing to deliver a great read!”

—RT Book Reviews on McKettrick’s Choice

The Marriage Pact

Linda Lael Miller

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Readers and Friends,

I’m excited to introduce you to an entirely new series of contemporary Western romances, The Brides of Bliss County.

Set in Wyoming in and around a small fictional town called Mustang Creek, the stories come directly from my heart.

The saga begins with The Marriage Pact, and the agreement between three close friends—Hadleigh, Melody and Becca (also known as Bex)—to work together to find a Mr. Right for themselves and each other. They’re successful in their chosen careers, and that’s fine with all of them, but they’re also tired of being perennial bridesmaids; they want homes and families of their own, beginning with a husband—preferably perfect.

In The Marriage Pact, you’ll read about cowboy/businessman Tripp Galloway, who has just sold a very successful charter-jet company and come home to the family ranch, along with his dog, Ridley, to help his widowed stepfather and maybe—just maybe—come to terms with his own past. Hadleigh Stevens, local quilt-shop owner and quilt designer, is a big part of that past, and not just because Tripp “rescued” her from marrying the wrong man a decade before—by carrying her bodily out of the church before the “I dos” could be said. Hadleigh’s known her share of tragedy, losing both parents and then her beloved older brother, Will, who just happened to be Tripp’s closest friend. He’d made a solemn promise to look after Will’s kid sister, to step in and be her big brother.

Promises have consequences, though, don’t they?

What happens when time and trouble have mellowed both Hadleigh and Tripp, and fate has brought them together again?

And what happens when Hadleigh decides to let go of her childhood crush on Tripp and get on with her life, just when Tripp is finally realizing she’s all grown-up and he wants to be her partner, not her honorary big brother?

Read on, my friends…

With love,

For Buck and Goldie Taylor,

cherished friends and true Westerners, with love.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Extract

Prologue

One Saturday in September,

Ten years ago...

BOTH SIDES OF the shady street were jammed with cars and trucks for what seemed like a mile in both directions, and time was running out—fast. So Tripp Galloway double-parked his stepdad’s ancient truck alongside the bride and groom’s waiting limo, shifted into Neutral, set the emergency brake and jumped out, leaving the engine running and the door gaping.

The limo driver, probably rented along with the car, was killing time on the sidewalk, cell phone pressed to one ear. A clock-watcher, Tripp decided distractedly. The chauffeur was obviously waiting for the shindig to end so he could collect his money and beat it. His jowly face was florid.

Seeing that Tripp meant to leave the rig unattended, the man broke off his ongoing conversation to protest, “Hey, buddy, you can’t park there—”

Tripp went right past him without a word, through the open arbor-style gateway and up the flagstone walk.

The doors of Mustang Creek’s small and venerable redbrick church, one of the oldest buildings in the county, were wide-open, despite the faint chill of the autumn afternoon, and the place was ominously quiet.

And that might—or might not—be a good sign.

Tripp didn’t know all that much about wedding protocol, especially these days, when a lot of couples got hitched freestyle, but if the thing was over—if he was too late to stop what amounted to a matrimonial train wreck—there would be rivers of triumphant organ music swelling out into that sunny afternoon. Wouldn’t there?

On the other hand, the silence could mean that Hadleigh Stevens was just now saying, “I do.” That the deed was done.

Tripp drew an anxious breath and hurried inside.

Three ushers occupied the tiny vestibule, watching the proceedings up by the altar and nervously adjusting their spiffy black bow ties. Hoping there wouldn’t be a tussle, Tripp shouldered his way between them, bold as a brass bowling ball, and strode into the sanctuary.

Fortunately, no one tried to stop him.

This incident was bound to be hard enough on Hadleigh as it was, without a knock-down, drag-out brawl to ratchet up the drama a notch or two.

Not to mention, Tripp reflected grimly, that this was a church, not a cowboy bar.

He kept walking, only peripherally aware of the guests crowding the pews, packing the choir loft, lining the walls.

Clearly, this wedding was the main event of the season. Except in July, when the rodeo was on, there wasn’t much to do in Mustang Creek, and it would have been plenty talked about, even without the impending interruption. Now, Tripp thought, the day would spawn legends.

Time slowed to a crawl, it seemed to him, as he moved steadily forward.

Hadleigh was up ahead, a vision in white, beautiful even facing in the other direction, her veil sparkling with tiny rhinestones, tumbling down her slender—and mostly bare—back, iridescent as a waterfall reflecting flashes of light. She and the bridegroom stood facing the minister, who spotted Tripp’s approach before the happy couple did, of course. The old man raised his eyebrows, sighed heavily and closed the small book he’d been reading the ceremony from with a snap that echoed through the gathering like a bullet ricocheting off cold steel.

The guests, briefly dumbstruck, soon began to murmur among themselves.

Tripp prepared himself for a row but, once again, no one interfered.

Hadleigh, turning her head to follow the preacher’s gaze, started when she saw Tripp, standing just a few feet away from her now, his boots splotched with the pink-and-white rose petals strewn along the aisle.

She didn’t make a sound, not then at least, but even through the layers of chiffon comprising her veil, Tripp saw Hadleigh’s luminous brown eyes widen in surprise. Over the course of the next few seconds, which passed with all the speed of a glacier carving out a new canyon, however, the bride’s astonishment gave way to pure feminine fury.

She whirled, took a step toward him and nearly tripped on the hem of that over-the-top dress. This, of course, did nothing to improve her general outlook.

Always undaunted, a combat veteran and a man who flew commercial airliners for a living, Tripp realized his heart was hammering, and he felt heat climb up his neck, pulse behind his ears.

Say something, commanded a voice in his head—the voice of his dead best friend, Hadleigh’s older brother, Will.

Tripp cleared his throat and asked benevolently, “Did I miss the part where the preacher asks if anybody here can give just cause why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony?”

More gasps sounded behind him, followed by a lot of whispering and a few nervous chuckles, but, for the time being, these were the least of his concerns.

He merely looked straight at the preacher and waited for an answer to his question.

Hadleigh’s face went apricot-pink behind that veil; her mouth opened and then closed again. It was as if her vocal chords had been tied up in a knot.

The reverend, a balding, rotund man named John Deever, who raised hogs when he wasn’t preaching the Gospel, conducting weddings or teaching shop at Mustang Creek High School nine months out of the year, had been known to wear bib overalls under his stately ministerial robes during busy times so he could get right back to his farmwork without having to change his clothes.

“This,” Deever announced, ponderous as a judge, “is highly irregular.”

Tripp could have sworn he saw a brief twinkle dance in the man’s eyes, for all his outward show of disapproval.

Oakley Smyth, the bridegroom, finally turned around, looking faintly shocked to find himself where he was, in a church, surrounded by people, confronted with opposition. He resembled a man who’d been cruelly jolted out of a sound sleep—or a coma. As he registered Tripp’s presence and what it meant, Oakley’s eyes narrowed and a flush appeared on his smooth-shaven face.

“What the—” he muttered, then bit back the rest of whatever he’d been about to say.

“Because,” Tripp went on, in that forceful way people use when they intend to override any argument, operating on the theory that they might all be standing there glowering at each other for the rest of the day if he didn’t get things rolling, “it just so happens that I know a reason, and it’s a damned good one.”

Hadleigh, clenching her bridal bouquet in white-knuckled hands, closed the short distance between Tripp and herself in a few purposeful steps, cheeks glowing like neon, eyes flashing whiskey-colored outrage. “What,” she demanded, looking as though she’d gladly have swapped that delicate cluster of pink-and-white flowers for a loaded pistol, “do you think you’re doing, Tripp Galloway?”

“I’m stopping this wedding,” Tripp said, deciding Hadleigh’s question must have been rhetorical, since the answer was so obvious.

A short silence throbbed between them.

“Why?” Hadleigh whispered, ending that silence, sounding stricken now as well as furious. At eighteen, she was a budding beauty, but not yet a full-grown woman, not in Tripp’s estimation, anyway. No, she was still his late best friend’s kid sister, the one he’d promised to protect, still too young and naive to know what was good for her, let alone guess that she’d been dancing on the razor’s edge.

Instead of offering a reply, Tripp locked eyes with Smyth and asked, quietly and evenly, “Shall I tell Hadleigh why she shouldn’t marry you, Oakley, or would you rather do that yourself?”

The groom hadn’t moved, except for a few reflexive twitches here and there, but the look in his eyes would have scorched two layers of olive-drab paint off an army jeep.

In Oakley’s place, Tripp reckoned, he would’ve done more than just glare—he’d have decked any man with the gall to barge in at the last possible second and wreck his wedding. Oh, yeah. He’d have thrown a punch, all right, church or no church.

An ironic insight for sure, considering what he was there to do, but, damn it all, it was the principle of the thing.

Oakley gulped visibly and shook his head once, very slowly.

The best man, standing at Oakley’s right side, studied the ceiling as though he’d developed a sudden fascination with the rough-hewn rafters.

None of the ushers stepped in, nor did any of the guests, for that matter.

It was as if the entire group was standing on the outside of some giant impenetrable bubble, looking in at Hadleigh and the bridegroom and Tripp as if they were figures in a snow globe.

Hadleigh was still glaring at him, still trembling with the effort of subduing her anger, but tears stood in her eyes, too, and her full lower lip wobbled.

Don’t cry, Tripp pleaded silently. Anything but that.

She was hurt and confused, and when Hadleigh was in pain, he was, too. It was a law of the universe.

“How could you?” she whispered, and the misery in her voice cracked open Tripp Galloway’s heart like the shell on a walnut.

Tripp had intended to explain, but later, someplace quiet, without half of Bliss County there watching, so he just put out one hand and waited for Hadleigh to take it, the way she’d done so many times as a kid, when she was scared or uncertain and Will was elsewhere or too distracted to notice.

Instead of accepting Tripp’s help, though, Hadleigh raised the bouquet, gripping it with both fists, and whacked him hard across the knuckles. The blow stung as if she’d wielded a bullwhip instead of a bunch of fragile flowers, rendering a low and somewhat affronted “Owww!” from Tripp.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Hadleigh informed him once she’d calmed down a little, breathing hard, squaring her slender shoulders and jutting out her chin. “I came here to get married, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do, because I love Oakley and he loves me, so I’ll thank you to get out of this church before God goes all Old Testament and sights in on you with a lightning bolt!”

Tripp sighed, shaking his still-smarting hand in an attempt to restore the circulation. Clearly, everybody in the place—with the notable exception of the bride—understood that the party was over.

There wasn’t going to be any wedding, not today, anyhow.

No reception, no tiered cake, no honeymoon.

Tripp tried to reason with Hadleigh, an admittedly ambitious endeavor under the circumstances, given that he was dead certain all she really wanted to do was kill him where he stood.

“Hadleigh,” he began, “if you’ll just—”

She took another swing at him with the bouquet, this time going for his face, putting so much energy behind it that she nearly threw herself off-balance and took a header. Tripp dodged the blow, hoisted her off the floor and slung her over his right shoulder, fireman-style.

“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 that 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?

A little of both, probably.

He took the seat opposite hers.

A waitress—her name tag read Ginny— sashayed over to their table, wide-eyed. Folks might wear a getup like Hadleigh’s in greasy spoons out in L.A., or down in Vegas, but it just didn’t happen in Mustang Creek, Wyoming.

Not until today, anyhow.

“What’ll it be?” the fiftyish woman asked, as calmly as if she served food to women in full bridal regalia every day of the week. “The special’s a meatloaf sandwich, salad on the side, your choice of dressing.”

Half expecting Hadleigh to announce that she’d been kidnapped and demand that the police be called immediately, Tripp was a touch surprised when, instead, she said decisively, “I’ll have a cheeseburger, medium rare, and a chocolate shake, please. With whipped cream.”

“I’ll try the special,” Tripp said, somewhat hoarsely, when it was his turn to order up some grub. “Blue cheese dressing on the salad.”

Ginny—she didn’t look familiar, but then he’d been away from Mustang Creek for a long time—made careful notes on her order pad and hurried away.

“I haven’t had a milk shake in six weeks,” Hadleigh confided, rather defensively, Tripp thought, as though she’d expected him to criticize her choice. “There’s no room inside this blasted dress for a single extra ounce, even after months of exercising like a crazy woman and living on lettuce leaves and water.”

Tripp stifled a grin. “I reckon you can afford to take a chance,” he said. She looked fine to him, better than fine, actually, given the way that dress hugged her curves with sinful perfection.

She made a face at him. “Thanks so much,” she answered, her tone as sour as her expression.

He chuckled. “Well, now, why not look on the bright side? Since the wedding’s off, you can pig out all you want.” He paused. “Long as you don’t bust a seam before you get home, it’s all good.”

She narrowed her expressive gold-flecked eyes. Even with her face in need of scrubbing, she was beautiful, in an unformed kind of way.

“You do realize,” she purred tartly, “that my entire life is completely ruined, and it’s all your fault?”

“You’re eighteen, Hadleigh,” Tripp reminded her. “Your ‘entire life’ hasn’t actually started yet.”

“That’s what you think,” she retorted. “Besides, I’m mature for my age.”

“The hell you are,” Tripp countered.

“In your opinion, maybe,” she said. “Anyway, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s perfectly legal for a woman to get married at eighteen.” A pause, coupled with a scowl, and even that looked good on her. “And if Gram doesn’t object, why should you?”

He leaned in a little. “Your grandmother probably does object—she’s just not strong enough to carry you bodily out of the church. And don’t try to tell me she didn’t talk herself blue in the face trying to convince you to wait awhile before you got hitched, sweetie pie, because I know Alice Stevens too well to believe that for a nanosecond. You were too hardheaded to listen to her, that’s all.”

Hadleigh blushed again, averting her eyes—obviously, Alice had disapproved of the match—then sliced her gaze straight back to Tripp’s face, sharp enough to draw blood. “Was it Gram? I mean, did she ask you to come back here and...and do what you did?”

“No,” he said. “I follow the local news online. That’s how I found out you were getting married. Your grandmother had nothing to do with it.”

Hadleigh ruminated for a few minutes, then colored again and said accusingly, “You never liked Oakley. Neither did my brother. And I can’t imagine why, because he’s really very sweet.”

It 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, not to mention the constant barrage of texts, emails and telephone calls and the decisions that had to be made

Now. Or better yet, yesterday.

Out here, in the open country, he wouldn’t be able to dodge the stuff that prodded at the underside of his conscious mind 24/7. Losing his mom when he was just sixteen, for instance. Sitting by helplessly while his best friend died, thousands of miles from home. And then there was his short-term marriage, over for some eight years now—he and Danielle were better off without each other, no doubt about it, but the divorce had hurt, and hurt badly, just the same.

He’d dated a lot of women since then, but he’d always been careful not to get too involved. Once the lady in question started bringing up topics like kids and houses—and leaving bridal magazines around, with pages showing spectacular wedding gowns or knock-out engagement rings—he was out of there, and quick. It wasn’t that Tripp didn’t want a home and family. He did.

He’d been led to believe that Danielle did, too.

Wrong.

When they’d finally called it quits over that disagreement and numerous others, it wasn’t Danielle’s departure that grieved him for months, even years, afterward, it was the death of the dream. The failure.

Tripp banished his dejection—no sense getting sucked into the past if he could avoid it—just as he and the dog rolled on, into the heart of town. By then, Ridley had pulled his head back inside the truck and was checking out their surroundings, tongue lolling.

Mustang Creek proper was something to see, all right. The main street was outfitted to look like an Old West town, with wooden facades on all the buildings, board sidewalks and hitching posts and even horse troughs in front of a few of the businesses. While a number of the local establishments had saloonlike names—the Rusty Bucket, the Diamond Spur and so on—there was only one genuine bar among the lot of them, the Moose Jaw Tavern. The Bucket housed an insurance agency, and the Spur was a dentist’s office.

Tripp supposed the whole setup was pretty tacky, but the fact was, he sort of liked it. Sometimes, at odd moments, it gave him the uncharacteristically fanciful feeling that he’d slipped through a time warp and ended up in the 1800s, where life was simpler, if less convenient.

Once they’d left the main street behind, the town began to look a little more modern, if the 1950s could be called modern. Here, there were tidy shingled houses with painted porches and picket-fenced yards bursting with the last and heartiest flowers of summer. The sidewalks were buckled in places, mostly by tree roots, and dogs wandered loose, clean and well fed, safe because they belonged, because everybody knew them by name and finding their way home was easy.

Ridley made a whining sound, probably born of envy, as they passed yet another meandering canine.

Tripp chuckled and reached over to pat the Lab’s glossy ruff. “Easy, now,” he said. “Once we get to the ranch, you’ll have more freedom than you’ll know what to do with.”

Ridley rested his muzzle on the dashboard, rolled his eyes balefully in Tripp’s direction and sighed heavily, as if to say, Promises, promises.

And then, just like that, there it was, the redbrick church, as unchanged as the rest of the town. Looking at the place, remembering how he’d crashed Hadleigh Stevens’s wedding, called a halt to the proceedings and then carried her out of there like a sack of grain made his stomach twitch.

It wasn’t that Tripp regretted what he’d done; time had proven him right. That pecker-head she’d been about to marry, Oakley Smyth, was on his third divorce at last report, due to a persistent gambling habit and an aversion to monogamy. Moreover, his trust fund had seized up like a tractor left out in the weather to rust, courtesy of a clause in his parents’ wills that allowed for any adjustments the executrix might deem advisable, pinching the cash flow from a torrent to a trickle.

These days, evidently, it sucked to be Oakley.

And that was fine with Tripp. What wasn’t fine, then or now, was seeing Hadleigh hurt so badly, knowing he’d personally broken her heart, however good his intentions might have been. Knowing she’d never found what she really wanted, what she’d wanted from the time she was a little girl: a home and family, the traditional kind comprising a husband, a wife, 2.5 children and some pets.

A light, dust-settling drizzle began just then, reflecting his mood—the weather could change quickly in Wyoming—as they were passing the town limits, only ten miles or so from the ranch, and Tripp eased his foot down on the gas pedal, eager to get there.

As the rig picked up speed, Ridley let it be known that he’d appreciate another opportunity to stick his head out into the wind, rain or no rain.

* * *

RAIN.

Well, Hadleigh Stevens thought philosophically, the farmers and ranchers would certainly appreciate it, even if she didn’t.

Such weather made some people feel downright cozy; they’d brew some tea and light a cheery blaze in the fireplace and swap out their shoes for comfortable slippers. But it always saddened Hadleigh a little when the sky clouded over and the storm began, be it drizzle or downpour.

It had been raining that long-ago afternoon when her grandmother had shown up at school, her face creased with grief, to collect Hadleigh, saying not a word. They’d gone on, in Gram’s old station wagon, to pick up Will. He was waiting out in front of the junior high building, pale and seemingly heedless of the downpour. Being seven years older than Hadleigh, he’d known what she hadn’t—that both their parents had died in a car crash just hours before, outside Laramie.

It rained the day of their mom and dad’s joint funeral and again a few years later, when Hadleigh and her grandmother got word that Will had died as a result of wounds received during a roadside bombing in Afghanistan.

And when Gram had passed away, after a long illness, the skies had been gray and umbrellas had sprouted everywhere, like colorful mushrooms.

Today, Hadleigh had tried to shake off the mood by her usual method—keeping busy.

She’d closed Patches, the quilting shop she’d inherited from her grandmother, at noon; her two closest friends were coming over that evening, on serious business. The modest house was neat and tidy. She’d vacuumed and dusted and polished for an hour after lunch, but there was still plenty to do, like have a shower, do something with her hair and bake a cake for dessert.

She was taking one last narrow-eyed look around the living room, making sure everything was as it should be, when she heard the familiar whimper outside on the porch, followed by persistent scratching at the screen door.

Muggles was back.

Hadleigh hurried to open up, and her heart went out to the soggy golden retriever sitting forlornly on her welcome mat, brown eyes luminous and hopeful and apologetically miserable, all at once.

“Hey, Mugs,” Hadleigh said with a welcoming smile. She unlatched the screen door and stepped back to admit the neighbor’s dog. “What’s up?”

Muggles crossed the threshold slowly, stood dripping on the colorful hooked rug in the small foyer, and gazed up at Hadleigh again, bereft.

“It’s okay,” Hadleigh assured her visitor, bending to pat the critter’s head. “You just sit tight, and I’ll get you a nice, fluffy towel. Then you can have something to eat and curl up in front of the fire.”

Obediently, Muggles dropped onto her haunches, rainwater puddling all around her.

Hadleigh rushed into the downstairs bathroom—Gram had always called it “the powder room”—and snatched a blue towel off the rack between the sink and the toilet.

After returning to the foyer, she crouched to bundle Muggles in the towel, draping it around those shivering shoulders, drying the animal’s grubby coat as gently as she could.

“Now for some food,” she said when Muggles was as clean as could be expected, without an actual tub bath or a thorough hosing-down. “Follow me.”

Muggles wagged her plumy tail once and rose from the rug.

The poor thing smelled like—well, a wet dog—and clumps of mud still clung to her fur, but it didn’t occur to Hadleigh to fret about her clean carpets and just-washed floors.

Reaching the kitchen, which was pleasantly outdated like the rest of the house, Hadleigh made her way to the pantry and found the plastic bowls she’d bought especially for Muggles, who’d been a frequent visitor over the three months since her doting mistress, Eula Rollins, had passed away. Eula’s husband, Earl, was elderly, grieving the loss of the wife he’d adored, and in frail health besides. While Earl certainly wasn’t an unkind person, he understandably tended to forget certain things—like letting the dog back inside after she’d gone out.

That was why Hadleigh kept a fifty-pound sack of kibble on the screened-in back porch and a stash of old blankets in the hall closet, for those times when Muggles needed water, a meal and a place to crash.

At the sink, she filled one of the bowls with water and set it down nearby. While Muggles drank thirstily, Hadleigh zipped out onto the porch to scoop up a generous portion of kibble.

As Muggles munched away on her supper, Hadleigh fetched the blankets from the closet in the hall and arranged them carefully in front of the pellet stove in the corner of the kitchen. The moment she’d eaten her fill, the animal ambled wearily over to the improvised dog bed, circled a few times and lay down to sleep.

Hadleigh sighed. Like most of the other women in the neighborhood, she’d taken her turn looking in on Earl, bringing over a casserole now and then or a freshly baked pie, picking up his medicine at the pharmacy, carrying in his newspaper and his mail. Before each visit, she’d made up her mind to speak to the old man about Muggles, very gently of course, but once she’d crossed the street and knocked on the familiar door and he’d let her in, his loneliness and despair so poignantly evident that she felt bruised herself, she always seemed to lose whatever momentum she’d managed to drum up.

Another time, she’d tell herself guiltily. I’ll make my pitch to adopt Muggles tomorrow or the next day. Earl loves this dog. And she’s all he has left of Eula, besides a lot of bittersweet memories, this old house and its overabundance of knickknacks.

Well, she thought now with another sigh, the rain beating down hard on the roof over her head, maybe “another time” has finally come. However much she sympathized with Earl, and that was a great deal, since she’d grown up knowing him and Eula, somebody had to step up and do something about the situation. Muggles couldn’t speak for herself, after all. So Hadleigh was stuck.

Decision made, Hadleigh took her hooded jacket from the row of pegs on the back porch—she had to rummage for it, since Gram’s coats were still hanging there, along with a tattered denim jacket that had belonged to her dad and then to Will.

Her throat thickened, and she touched one of the sleeves, worn soft at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs. For a moment, she allowed herself to remember both men, and then, because she had a clearer picture of Will, she recalled the sound of his laugh, the way he always slammed the screen door coming in or going out, accompanied by Gram’s good-natured fussing.

Like many kid sisters, Hadleigh had idolized her big brother. She’d accepted his loss, she supposed, but she still wasn’t reconciled to the unfairness of it. He’d been so young when he was killed, full of promise and energy and idealism, and he’d never gotten the chance to chase his own dreams.

For several years, the scent of Will’s aftershave had clung to the fabric of that jacket, along with a tinge of woodsmoke, but now the garment had a dank, rainy-day smell, faintly musty, like an old sleeping bag somebody had rolled up, put away in an attic or a basement and forgotten.

Get a grip, Hadleigh told herself when sadness threatened to overwhelm her. Think about right now, because that’s what matters.

Resolutely, she raised the hood of her jacket, tugged the drawstrings tight around her face and marched out into the rain.

Hands jammed into her pockets, head lowered slightly against the continuing downpour, Hadleigh followed the concrete walkway that ran alongside the house, past the flower beds and the familiar windows, silently going over the things she might say to Earl when he opened his door—and discarding each one in turn.

Everything sounded so...patronizing. How could she tell this good man that he was too old and too sick to take proper care of his own dog? Earl Rollins had worked hard all his life, been active in his church and in the rest of the community, and he’d already lost not only his professional identity and the ordinary freedoms younger people took for granted, such as a driver’s license. He’d lost Eula, his soul mate, too.

Still, there was Muggles, a living, breathing creature who needed food, shelter and love.

Torn between responsibility and sentiment, Hadleigh forged on, reached her front yard and came to a sudden, startled stop in the soggy grass.

An ambulance was just pulling into the Rollinses’ driveway, lights flashing.

Hadleigh peered both ways and then splashed across the street, her heart wedging itself in her throat.

Another neighbor, Mrs. Culpepper, stood in Earl’s doorway, gesturing anxiously for the paramedics to hurry.

They parked the ambulance, circled to the back of the vehicle and opened the doors to pull out a collapsible gurney.

“Quickly,” Mrs. Culpepper pleaded.

Hadleigh must have read the woman’s lips, because the pounding rain, crackling like fire on roofs and sidewalks and asphalt, made it impossible to hear.

The EMTs moved past Mrs. Culpepper swiftly, disappearing inside the house.

Hadleigh hurried over to the porch. She didn’t want to get in the way, but she needed to know what was happening.

Mrs. Culpepper, after directing the paramedics to the kitchen in a shrill and tremulous voice, turned to meet Hadleigh’s gaze.

“This is terrible,” the older woman moaned.

Hadleigh felt an unbecoming—her grandmother’s word, unbecoming—rush of impatience, which she stifled quickly. Mrs. Culpepper, though long retired, had been her first-grade teacher and, like Earl and Eula, she was as much a part of Mustang Creek, Wyoming, as the landscape.

So Hadleigh waited politely for more information.

“I came over to check on Earl,” Mrs. Culpepper said, after some swallowing and fluttering of one hand, as though fanning herself on a hot day. “I realized I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since Tuesday. Lucky thing he never locks his doors. Eula didn’t either, even back in the day, when Earl was on the road so much because of his work. Anyhow, when nobody answered my knock—I called out a couple of times, too—I let myself in and there he was, just lying there on the kitchen floor, his eyes wide-open, staring at me. I could see what a struggle it was for him to speak...” She paused to draw a wavery breath. “I called nine-one-one right away, and then I knelt beside poor Earl and bent down, trying to hear what he was saying.”

Hadleigh rested a hand on Mrs. Culpepper’s bird-boned shoulder. “Maybe you should sit down,” she said, worried by the papery pallor in the lady’s face and the tremor in her voice.

But Mrs. Culpepper shook her head. “No, no,” she protested distractedly. “I’m fine, dear.” Another indrawn breath, this one raspy and shallow. “When I finally managed to make out what Earl was trying to tell me, this old heart of mine just cracked right down the middle. Sick as he is, that man was fretting over the dog. Wanted to know who’d take care of it.”

Hadleigh’s eyes welled with tears—she’d been right; Earl did love Muggles. But before she could formulate a reply, she saw the paramedics emerging from the kitchen, the gurney between them, Earl lying shrunken and gray under a hospital blanket, eyes closed.

Hadleigh stepped into the tiny foyer then, easing Mrs. Culpepper to one side, so the EMTs could pass, then hurrying to catch up. Stepping alongside the gurney, she managed to grasp one of Earl’s hands.

His flesh felt cold and dry against her palm and fingers.

“Don’t worry,” she said, raising her voice, the rain pelting down on all of them. “Do you hear me, Earl? Don’t worry about Muggles. She’s at my house right now, and I promise I’ll look after her for as long as necessary!”

Remarkably, Earl opened his eyes, blinking in the rain. He smiled, ever so tentatively, and his lips formed the words, “Thank you.”

“Step aside, please, ma’am,” one of the paramedics ordered, his tone and manner brisk but still polite.

Hadleigh moved out of the way and stood in the wet grass of Earl’s front lawn, watching as the EMTs deftly folded the gurney’s legs, then slid the patient inside. One of the men climbed in beside Earl, while the other secured the ambulance doors and then jogged around to get behind the wheel.

Seconds later, the vehicle sped away.

Dazed, Hadleigh nonetheless had the presence of mind to cross the street again, back her dilapidated, wood-paneled station wagon out of the garage and drive Mrs. Culpepper home. She lived close by, just around the block, as she pointed out, but the rain wasn’t letting up and one neighbor headed for the hospital was, Hadleigh felt, quite enough.

Once she’d delivered Mrs. Culpepper to her door, Hadleigh dashed back to the car and headed for her own place.

As she drove, she thought about Will, and how proud he’d been of that ancient station wagon. He’d insisted it was a classic and planned to restore it to its original glory as soon as he’d finished his hitch in the air force and came home to Mustang Creek.

In the end, he’d come home, all right—in a flag-draped coffin, with a bleak-eyed Tripp Galloway and two other uniformed soldiers serving as escorts.

Tripp Galloway.

Just thinking about the man still raised her hackles, but on this dreary, gray-skied afternoon, even the rush of acidic irritation came as a welcome distraction.

* * *

TRIPP CERTAINLY HADN’T planned on dropping by to see Hadleigh, not consciously, at least, but here he was, parked in front of that house where he’d spent so much time as a kid, hanging out with Will. He found himself smiling as he recalled those halcyon days, shooting hoops in the driveway, playing beat-up guitars in the garage, blithely convinced that their ragtag crew of potential rednecks was destined to be the next chart-busting grunge band.

He’d always been welcome here, back then. Always.

Alice had simply smiled and set another place at the supper table when he came home with Will after basketball, baseball or football practice, depending on the time of year. She’d make up the extra bed in Will’s room if Tripp lingered long enough after the meal, which he often did, helping with the follow-up chores. He’d clear the table, carry out the trash, help either Will or Hadleigh, whoever’s turn it was, wash and dry the dishes. Then, after his mom had died, when he was sixteen, Alice had taken it upon herself to oversee his homework and sometimes even wash his clothes.

That was Alice, God rest her generous soul.

Now, Hadleigh was in charge, and from her perspective, he’d be about as welcome under her roof as a flea infestation.

Ridley gave a low growl, not hostile, but a mite on the desperate side.

Great, Tripp thought, recognizing the dog communique for what it was, a plea to be let out before he disgraced himself. He’d lift a leg against the pole supporting Hadleigh’s mailbox or crap on her lawn for sure. Or both.

With a sigh, Tripp got out of the truck, shoulders hunched against the continuous rain, walked around to the other side and opened the door so Ridley could jump down. He snapped the leash onto the Lab’s collar, tore a poop bag from the roll he kept under the passenger seat and started purposefully down the sidewalk, his trajectory away from Hadleigh’s mailbox and the trellis arching at the entrance to her front yard.

Ridley, usually a cooperative sort, balked, hunkering down and refusing to budge.

“Shit,” Tripp muttered.

Ridley immediately complied.

And that, thanks to Murphy’s Law, was the precise moment Hadleigh pulled into her driveway, at the wheel of the station wagon that had once been Will’s proudest possession. Even with the windshield awash with rain and the wipers going back and forth at warp speed, Tripp had a clear view of her face.

She looked surprised, then confused, then affronted.

Tripp bent to deploy the poop bag. Fortunately, garbage day must have been imminent, because there were trash containers in front of every house.

He tossed the bag into one of them and braced himself when he heard the heavy door of the station wagon slam, doing his best to work up a grin as he turned around to face Hadleigh, who was already headed in his direction.

The grin was flimsy, and it didn’t hold.

Hadleigh favored the dog with a heartwarming smile and a pat on the head, but when she looked up at Tripp, the smile immediately morphed into a frown.

It was a safe bet she wasn’t fixing to pat him on the head.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded tersely. Her fists were bunched in the pockets of her jacket, and she’d pulled the strings of her hood so tight around her face that she reminded him of a little kid all trussed up in a snowsuit for a cold winter day.

Tripp considered the question. In light of the fact that he’d gotten almost to the ranch and then doubled back, it was worth answering.

What was he doing there?

Damned if he knew.

Ridley wagged his tail, glanced quizzically up at Tripp, then turned a fond gaze on Hadleigh.

Tripp scrambled for a reply. “Getting wet?” he suggested.

Chapter Two

WAS TRIPP GALLOWAY real—or was he a figment of her frazzled imagination?

Hadleigh bit her lower lip, shifted her weight slightly, wondering why she didn’t just turn her back on him and walk away. Instead, she seemed stuck there, as surely as if the soles of her shoes were glued to the very ordinary sidewalk in front of her equally ordinary house. There was a strange sense of dissociation, too, as though she’d left her body at some point, sprung back suddenly and landed a smidgen to one side of herself, like her own ghost.

The relentless rain continued, drenching her, drenching the man and the dog.

Both Tripp and the animal seemed oblivious to the weather, and both of them were staring at her. The dog acted cheerfully expectant, while its master looked almost as disconcerted as Hadleigh felt.

In the next instant, another dizzying change occurred, bringing her back to herself with a jolt not unlike the slamming of a steel door.

Patches of warmth pulsed in Hadleigh’s cheeks—it would be bad enough if it turned out she was teetering on the precipice of a breakdown, but having Tripp there to witness it? Unthinkable.

Her only recourse, she concluded, was to get mad.

And what was he doing here, anyway?

Hadn’t the man already done enough to mess up her life? And never mind that he’d arguably rescued her from a potentially miserable situation by stopping her from marrying Oakley on that long-ago September day, because, damn it, that was beside the point!

Just about anybody else would have had the common decency to butt out, let her make her own mistakes and learn from them.

But not Tripp Galloway. Oh, no. From his officious and arrogant point of view, she’d been too young back then, too fragile, too naive—okay, too dumb—to make decisions, right or wrong, without his interference.

As though he might be reading her mind, a grin lifted one corner of Tripp’s mouth, and he gripped Hadleigh’s elbow gently. “Can we go inside?” he asked reasonably, tilting his head in the direction of the house. “Maybe you and I don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, but poor Ridley here probably does. He’s just not in a position to say so, that’s all.”

Hadleigh felt a stab of sympathy—not for Tripp, but for the dog.

She wrenched her elbow free from Tripp’s grasp but gave a brisk nod of assent before moving toward the house. They trooped along the front walk, single file, Hadleigh in the lead, head lowered, shoulders hunched against the rain. Ridley was right behind her, Tripp bringing up the rear.

As she hurried along, Hadleigh silently willed herself to turn on one heel, stand there like a stone wall and flat-out tell the man to get gone and stay that way.

It didn’t happen.

She was behaving irresponsibly, even recklessly, allowing Tripp into her house—into her life. Where were her personal boundaries?

The whole situation reminded her more than a little of Gram’s favorite cautionary tale, that timeworn fable of a gullible frog hitching a ride across a wide river on a scorpion’s back, only to sustain a fatal sting in the middle of the waterway.

Why did you do it? the feckless toad had cried, knowing they’d both drown, ostensibly because the scorpion could not survive without its stinger, a factor Hadleigh had never completely understood—but the answer made a grim sort of sense. Because I’m a scorpion. It’s my nature to sting.

Tripp might not be a scorpion, but he could wound her, all right. Like nobody else could, in fact.

Still disgruntled, standing on the welcome mat now, and therefore out of time, Hadleigh curved a hand around the cold metal doorknob and glanced back over one shoulder, hoping her visitor would conveniently have second thoughts about the visit and leave—just load his dog and himself into his truck and drive away.

As if. Nothing about Tripp Galloway was now or ever had been “convenient,” not for Hadleigh, anyhow.

He was way too close, and he was watching her with a sort of forlorn amusement in his eyes. They looked nearly turquoise in the rain-filtered light. His hair dripped and water beaded his unfairly long eyelashes and there was something disturbingly, deliciously intimate about his proximity. They might have been naked, both of them, standing face-to-face in a narrow shower stall, instead of fully clothed on her front porch.

Ridley broke the silence, suddenly shaking himself off exuberantly, baptizing both Tripp and Hadleigh in sprays of dog-scented rainwater.

There was a taut moment and then, entirely against her will, Hadleigh laughed.

Tripp’s eyes lit up at the sound, and he uttered a raspy chuckle.

Damn, even his laugh was sexy.

Thinking of the ill-fated frog again, Hadleigh turned away quickly, rattling the knob. The door jammed, since the wood was old and tended to swell in damp weather, and she was about to give it a hard shove with her shoulder when Tripp calmly reached past her, splayed a hand against the panel and pushed.

“This place needs some work,” he observed quietly.

Of course, the door flew open immediately, creaking on its hinges, and Muggles, who must have been waiting with her nose pressed to the crack, scrabbled backward, nails clicking on the wooden floor, to get out of the way.

Hadleigh felt a little swell of joy, despite the fact that she wasn’t over watching poor Earl being shoved into the back of an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. And now, without warning, here was Tripp.

Of all people.

Still, she had one reason for celebration: Muggles would be staying with her from now on, with Earl’s blessing.

“She’s harmless,” Hadleigh said, for whose benefit she didn’t know, when Tripp’s dog and the retriever met on the threshold, nose to nose, conducting a silent standoff.

Ridley gave in first, wagging his tail and drawing back the corners of his mouth in a doggy grin. His whole manner seemed to say, Charmed, I’m sure.

“This guy’s pretty timid himself,” Tripp replied, making no move to unsnap the leash.

A few tense moments passed—at least, Hadleigh felt tense—and then Muggles apparently lost interest, because she turned and meandered into the living room to settle on the rug in front of the unlit fireplace.

Relieved that a dogfight hadn’t broken out but otherwise as unsettled as before, Hadleigh led Tripp through the small dining room and into the tidy kitchen beyond, although she knew he could have found his way on his own, blindfolded. After all, he’d spent almost as much time in this house, growing up, as in his own. He and Will had been all but inseparable in those days.

Hadleigh took off her hoodie as they entered the heart of the house, where countless meals had been shared, where flesh-and-blood human beings had laughed and cried, celebrated and mourned, swapped dreams and secrets and silly jokes.

Heedlessly, in contrast to her usual freakish neatness, she tossed the sodden garment through the laundry-room doorway and moved automatically toward the coffeemaker. It was what country and small-town people did when someone dropped in—whether that someone was welcome or not. They offered a seat at the table, a cup of hot, fresh coffee, especially in bad weather, and, usually, food.

Since this busywork afforded Hadleigh a few desperately needed minutes to recover from the lingering shock of seeing Tripp Galloway again, she took full advantage of it. Of all the things she might have expected to happen that day, or any other for that matter, an up-close-and-personal encounter with her girlhood hero, teenage heartthrob and erstwhile nemesis wouldn’t have been anywhere on the radar.

The decision to come home must have been a sudden one on Tripp’s part. If he’d mentioned his plans to anyone, the news would have spread through Mustang Creek like a wildfire. She’d have heard about it, surely.

Or not.

“Sit down,” she said. This, too, was automatic, like the offer to serve coffee. Inside, she was still thinking about the scorpion and the toad.

Dumb-ass toad.

She heard a familiar scraping sound as Tripp pulled back a chair at the table.

Ridley ambled over to Muggles’s bowl and lapped up some water, and that made Hadleigh smile. Make yourself at home, dog, she thought fondly. She might have issues with Tripp—hell, she had a lot of them—but she’d never met a dog she didn’t like.

The silence in the kitchen was leaden.

While the coffee brewed, Hadleigh went to the hallway and grabbed a couple of neatly folded towels from the linen closet. After returning to the kitchen, she handed them to Tripp, one for him and one for the dog. Or, more accurately, she shoved them at him.

“Thanks,” Tripp murmured, with a twinkle in his eyes and a quiver of amusement on his lips.

Hadleigh didn’t bother with the customary “You’re welcome”; it would have been insincere and, anyway, she didn’t trust her voice.

A moment later, she rushed off again, this time making for her bedroom. Shivering with rain chill, she shut the door and hastily peeled off her wet clothes, replacing everything from her bra and panties outward before returning to the kitchen in dry jeans and a sweatshirt, thick socks and sneakers.

Tripp was standing at the counter, his back to the room, pouring coffee into two mugs. He’d dried his dark blond hair with the towel she’d given him earlier, leaving it attractively rumpled, but his shirt still clung, transparent, to the broad expanse of his shoulders, and his jeans were soaked through.

Hadleigh paused in the doorway, not speaking, indulging, against her better judgment, in that rare, brief opportunity to take in his lean but powerful lines. Without trying to be subtle.

Damn, she thought, with a shake of her head. The man looked almost as good from the back as he did from the front—and where was the justice in that?

His still-damp hair curled fetchingly at his collar and she caught the familiar clean-laundry scent of his skin, even from a distance of several yards.

Hadleigh found it hard to swallow as the seconds ticked by, each one dissolving another fragile layer of the broken dreams and pretended apathy that had blanketed her heart, covering the cracks and fissures for so long.

Hadleigh felt stricken, not merely vulnerable, but exposed, like a still-featherless chick, hatched too soon, up to its ankles in shards of eggshell.

She stifled a sigh, frustrated with herself, and brushed one hand across her forehead.

She was losing it, all right. She was definitely losing it.

Blithely unaware, it seemed, that he was upending Hadleigh’s entire world all over again, the world she’d spent years gluing back together, after searching and sifting through the wreckage for all the pieces, Tripp set the coffee carafe on its burner, picked up a mug in each hand and turned around.

Hadleigh’s breath caught. Just when she thought nothing could surprise her, that she might regain her equanimity at some point, the ground shifted beneath her feet.

Her brain kicked into gear, cataloging everything about Tripp as though this were their first meeting, all in the length of a nanosecond. He was at once a stranger and someone she’d loved through a dozen lifetimes. At least that was how it felt.

Enough, she told herself silently. Get a grip. This isn’t like you. And that was true—except when she designed quilts or window displays for her shop, allowing whimsy to take over, Hadleigh Stevens simply wasn’t the fanciful type.

And it wasn’t as if she’d never laid eyes on this insufferably handsome yahoo, nor had she forgotten, for one second, what he looked like.

She’d grown up with Tripp and had caught glimpses of him a few times over the years since that fateful day when he’d crashed her fairy-tale wedding like a barnstormer, but there had always been a carefully maintained distance between them.

He’d returned to Mustang Creek now and then, to attend weddings and funerals, including Alice’s memorial service two years before, but even then he’d been careful not to get too close. And while Tripp had come home for occasional visits with his stepfather, too, usually over the winter holidays, he’d never stayed long. Never tried to contact her.

So what was different about today?

Hadleigh figured she wouldn’t like the answer to that question, not that she was likely to get one, but, at the same time, she was desperate to know why he was there, in her house.

Tripp paused, still holding the steaming mugs, and sighed. Apparently reading both her expression and her mind, he said huskily, “I can’t rightly say why I’m here, if that’s what you’re about to ask.”

Without a word, Hadleigh walked to the table and sat down in her usual chair, figuring that Tripp would remain standing as long as she stayed on her feet, and she was beginning to feel wobbly-kneed.

Sure enough, once she was seated, he crossed to the table, set one of the mugs in front of her, and took a seat opposite hers. By then, Ridley, fur comically askew from a vigorous toweling several minutes before, promptly curled up at his master’s feet, yawned broadly and closed his eyes to catch a nap.

Tripp cleared his throat, stared down into his coffee for a few minutes and then raised his eyes to meet Hadleigh’s gaze. A sad smile curved his mouth. “It feels strange—being here in this house again, I mean—after all these years.”

Hadleigh swallowed. She was definitely overreacting to everything the man said or did, but she couldn’t seem to help it. For good or ill, she’d always overreacted to Tripp, her brother’s best friend, her first serious crush.

“Strange?” She croaked the word.

Tripp raised and lowered one of his strong shoulders in a shrug. “With Will gone and everything,” he explained quietly, awkwardly, his voice still gruff.

Tears threatened—as often happened when her late brother was mentioned, even though Will had been dead for over a decade—but Hadleigh forced them back. She nodded once, abruptly, before cupping her hands around the mug to warm her fingers, although she didn’t take a sip. “Yes,” she agreed softly.

Then, and it was about time, her natural practicality began to reassert itself. Her closest friends, Melody Nolan and Becca “Bex” Stuart, would be arriving soon for the powwow the three of them had been planning for a week, and, for a variety of reasons, Hadleigh wanted Tripp gone before they showed up.

The three of them, Melody, Bex and Hadleigh, had serious business to attend to, after all. Strategies to map out. Goals to set.

And it was none of Tripp’s business what those goals involved.

Conversely, though, Hadleigh found she wanted her visitor to stay as much as she wanted him to get the heck out of there, pronto, and never, ever return. This despite the fact that he seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room, creating a deep-space vacuum that just might incinerate her.

She gulped back another sigh. The heat and substance Tripp exuded both attracted Hadleigh and scared her so badly she wanted to run in the opposite direction. He could be tender, she knew, particularly with small children, old folks and animals, but he was cowboy-tough, too, right to his molten core. Totally, proudly, uncompromisingly masculine, he was completely at ease in his own skin, solidly centered in his heart and his brain as well as his body. He had a sly sense of humor, a mischievous streak as wild and wide as the Snake River and a capacity for stone-cold, cussed stubbornness that could render him out-and-out impossible.

Once Tripp made up his mind about something—or someone—he was as immovable as the Grand Tetons themselves.

Well, Hadleigh reminded herself, she could be bullheaded, too.

This was her house, and she certainly hadn’t asked Tripp to drop in to drink her coffee, dry himself and his dog with her clean towels and calmly proceed to topple the very structure of her life, like some modern-day Samson leveling a temple.

She had to take hold now, rein in her crazy emotions, or she’d be swept away for sure.

So she folded her arms and sat back in her chair, eyebrows raised, pointedly awaiting an explanation. If Tripp truly didn’t know why he was there, she reasoned peevishly, he’d better get busy figuring it out, because the proverbial ball was in his court.

Tripp shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Then he cleared his throat again, but when he opened his mouth to speak, no words came out.

Hadleigh didn’t move, yet she realized that every tense line of her body gave voice to the silent question “Well?”

He made another attempt—Tripp was constitutionally incapable of giving up on anything he set out to do—and his voice sounded rusty, even a little raw, as though what he said next had been scraped out of him. “I figure it’s time we came to terms with the past, that’s all,” he told her. “Your brother was my best friend. I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a duck—” He paused, drew a breath and then forged on, his neck reddening slightly as he spoke, his expression grimly earnest. He was groping his way through this conversation; it wasn’t something he’d planned. Or that was her impression, at least. “It’s wrong, Hadleigh,” he went on gruffly. “Our being on the outs for so long, I mean, always avoiding each other, like...like we’re enemies or something.”

“We are enemies,” Hadleigh reminded him sweetly.

He glowered at her, shaking his head. “It doesn’t have to be that way, and you damn well know it.”

“You’re asking me to forgive you?” Hadleigh inquired in an airy tone calculated to annoy him. Maybe it wasn’t the most grown-up thing to do, but after what he’d put her through ten years ago, he could just deal with it. And if Tripp Galloway had to squirm a little, that was fine by her.

It was so his turn.

Tripp’s jaws locked briefly, and blue fire blazed in his eyes. He raked one hand through his hair, mussing it even more, and glared at her in pure exasperation.

Obviously, he was stuck for an answer.

Good for him.

Once he’d regained a modicum of control, though, Tripp half growled, “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 been a rich man, but he couldn’t have been called poor, either. He worked long and hard, raising some of the finest cattle and horses in Bliss County, and he’d provided well for his wife and son. In good weather, he’d found time to take Tripp fishing and camping, taught him to ride and rope, shoot and drive the tractor. During the harsh Wyoming winters, when the land lay virtually bared to the bitter winds and snow gathered in drifts so high the fences were just shallow gray lines etched into glistening white, Jim had been the one to roll, uncomplaining, from a warm bed, haul on socks and boots and cross over icy floors to relight the temperamental old furnace in the basement, then come back up to the kitchen to start the coffee brewing and light the fire in the potbellied stove.

He’d always managed to get the truck running, no matter how low the temperature might have plunged during the night, good-humored even as fresh snow weighted the brim of his hat and slipped under the collar of his sheepskin-lined coat, so chilly it burned against bed-warmed flesh.

Some men talked a good game, when it came to things like love and integrity, hard work and persistence, common decency and courage in the face of all kinds of adversity. Jim Galloway, never one to “run off at the mouth,” as he put it, quietly lived all those stellar qualities and then some.

Now, studying his dad from behind the windshield of that fancy truck, Tripp gulped hard, figuring he’d better get a grip here if he didn’t want to make a damn fool of himself. Resolved, he shut off the engine, shoved open the driver’s-side door and got out. Ridley didn’t stand on ceremony; he scrambled across the gearshift and the cushy leather seat and leaped to the ground, where he proceeded to bound around in happy circles.

Jim chuckled at the dog’s antics, then fixed his gaze on Tripp’s face, turning solemn. Beyond a slight shift of his weight, he didn’t move, but remained where he was, with one shoulder braced against that pole on the porch. He seemed to lean in, as though he wasn’t sure he could stand on his own.

Grim certainty clenched the pit of Tripp’s stomach as he opened the front gate and approached. When they’d spoken over the phone a few days before, Jim had admitted he needed help but not much more than that. Now, in this moment, Tripp knew he’d been right to worry.

Something was wrong. Really wrong.

Ridley, having followed Tripp through the gate, commenced galloping in circles again, celebrating this new liberty.

Tripp kept the grin plastered to his mouth as he reached the porch steps, climbed them, ready to offer the customary handshake.

Instead, Jim put an arm around Tripp and held him close for a long moment before recovering enough to summon up another smile—probably no more genuine than Tripp’s—and to clear his throat. Jim’s pale blue eyes were watery when he clasped Tripp’s shoulder, held him away a little and muttered. “Let me look at you, boy.”

Tripp couldn’t sustain the fake grin any longer; it had already hardened into a grimace, so he let it fall away, like a handful of pebbles clattering down the face of a cliff. “What’s the story, Dad?” he demanded quietly. “And don’t give me any of that John Wayne, man-of-few-words bullshit, either. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Jim sighed and pushed away from the pole to stand up straight. He swayed almost imperceptibly, and his hold on Tripp’s shoulder briefly tightened.

“I reckon you have a right to know,” he allowed after a long time spent pondering. He gestured toward the gaping front door. “But we’re letting the flies in, standing out here like this, and, besides, I’d just as soon have this conversation inside the house, with a cup of hot coffee in front of me—if it’s all the same to you.”

Tripp nodded tersely, willing to accept that much of a delay and no more, and wisely but barely refrained from taking hold of Jim’s arm and ushering him over the threshold.

Pausing just inside, he whistled for Ridley, who ignored him completely, busy checking out one of the flower beds now.

“Let the poor critter be,” Jim said in a kindly rasp. “He needs to breathe some fresh air and stretch his legs a bit.”

Tripp hesitated, walking close behind his stepfather, ready to catch him if he stumbled. “But he could run off or something...”

Jim, shuffling across the worn plank floors of the living room now, didn’t look back. “He’ll be fine,” he replied. He gave another scratchy chuckle. “This isn’t the big city, son. If he runs off, he’ll come back. Anyhow, there’s not much traffic on the county road, let alone way out here, so it’s not as if he’s fixing to get himself run over by a garbage truck or one of those taxicabs.”

In spite of what he’d guessed, and the dread of all he still didn’t know, Tripp laughed, a short, hoarse bark of a sound. “No, sir,” he countered. “This country’s as safe as a Sunday-school picnic—if you don’t mind a few wolves, coyotes, rattlesnakes and grizzly bears.”

Jim shook his head, passing through the archway and into the dining room. “Been too long since you set foot on plain ol’ dirt,” he observed drily. “Living in Seattle all those years, surrounded by nothing but concrete and asphalt, why, it’s done something to your brain. Made a worrywart out of you.”

Tripp smiled—this time for real. To Jim’s way of thinking, any community with a population over ten thousand was too big for its own good.

Therefore, he didn’t bother to make a case for Seattle. Jim would only sigh and shake his head again. What Tripp did say was, “The point is, I’m back to stay.”

Jim paused in the open doorway to the kitchen, gripped the framework with one hand to steady himself, take a moment’s rest. “It’s about damn time, too,” he grumbled good-naturedly, squaring his bony shoulders and then, with a little too much effort, moving forward again.

Tripp was relieved when his stepfather finally made it to the kitchen, crossed to the table and pulled out a chair to sit down.

“I’ll get you that coffee,” Tripp said lightly. “In the meantime, start talking.”

Chapter Three

JIM TOOK A while to catch his breath. He was pale under that perennial outdoorsman’s suntan of his, and he closed his eyes for a second, summoning strength. When he opened them again, he looked at Tripp with a kind of weary directness.

“I’ve been sick,” he finally confided. “That’s the long and the short of it.”

Tripp, in the process of filling the carafe from the coffeemaker at the sink, froze; his throat went tight as a cinch strap that’d been yanked hard around a horse’s belly and buckled to the last notch. “What kind of ‘sick’?” he asked when he was halfway certain he could speak without stumbling over every word.

His biological father, who’d died after a routine appendectomy when Tripp was still a newborn, was an unknown quantity, a story his mother told, an unfamiliar image in old snapshots.

Jim Galloway was his dad.

Jim sighed once more. “Not the dyin’ kind, so don’t go writing up my obituary and looking for places to scatter the ashes,” he said in his slow and thoughtful way. “I’ll be around awhile, most likely.”

Tripp’s jawbones locked at the hinges. “Most likely? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Jim, watching Tripp with a mixture of compassion and amusement in his eyes, dredged up a raw chuckle that sounded like it must have hurt some on its way out.

“Everybody has to die sometime, son,” he said hoarsely. “No sense getting all knotted up over something that can’t be helped.”

Tripp leaned back against the counter while he waited for the coffee to brew, folding his arms. He probably appeared calm, but he sure as hell wasn’t. “How long has this been going on?”

His voice, like his manner, was deceptively mild.

Jim likely wasn’t fooled, but it was hard to tell with him. He tended to play his cards close to the vest—everybody’s business was nobody’s business; that was his credo. In other words, he operated on a need-to-know basis, and there was plenty he didn’t think anyone needed to know.

After a beat or two, he smiled again, but he still took his time answering. “I’ve known for just shy of a year,” he finally admitted and, sparse as the reply was, it was plain to Tripp that his dad didn’t like giving up even that much.

Stunned that Jim—even Jim—could have kept something so important to himself for so long, Tripp had opened his mouth to raise more hell when the old man cut him off with a dismissive wave of one hand.

“Some things are—well, private,” he said.

Behind Tripp, the ancient coffeemaker, pulling its weight since pre-Y2K days, chortled and thumped and steamed on the counter, like a small volcano about to blow.

“Private?” Tripp repeated, disbelieving.

Jim kept his gaze averted. A ruddy flush climbed his neck. “I’ll be all right,” he insisted, so quietly Tripp had to strain to hear him. “And I’d sure appreciate it if you’d stop repeating practically everything I say.”

Tripp shoved away from the counter and the noisy coffee machine, scraped back a chair across the table from Jim and sank onto the hard wooden seat. “Well, now,” he replied tersely and with a fair amount of irony. “Whatever disease it was that damn near killed you, and probably still could, is private. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

Jim met Tripp’s eyes with stubborn reluctance. “I could do with a mite less attitude, if it’s all the same to you,” he grumbled in response. A muscle worked in one side of his jaw, as though he was chewing on a chunk of rawhide, then he went on. “The worst is over, son. I’ve done everything the doctors said I ought to, and I’m on the mend now. I just seem to tucker out a little sooner than I used to, that’s all.”

Tripp stared at his dad, imagining some of the things the man might have endured alone, depending entirely on his own stoicism, his damnable pride. In those moments, Tripp didn’t know if he wanted to put a fist through the nearest wall or bust out bawling like a little kid.

In the end, he did neither; he simply waited for the rest of the story.

Meanwhile, Jim’s neck went from red to a purplish-crimson. “Turned out to be my prostate that was causing all the trouble,” he finally said. The words might have been dragged out of him the way he held on to each one of them like a grudge that went back for generations.

Tripp took a few moments to absorb the hard-won answer, exhausted by the effort of getting it. “I’ll be damned,” he ground out, once the information had begun to penetrate, “if it wouldn’t have been easier to drive half a dozen mules out of a knee-deep mudhole than get an answer out of you.”

With that, his vocal chords seized up again, and the breath rushed out of him, as though he’d been thrown from a horse, landed on hard-packed dirt and gotten his throat stepped on in the bargain.

On the one hand, he knew his dad hadn’t gotten sick on purpose. On the other, he felt ambushed, cornered, kept in the dark. Combined, those emotions stung through his blood like venom.

Tripp had been in this place twice before—the first time when his mother had died suddenly, and then again, strangely chilled even in the stifling heat of a foreign field-hospital, watching helplessly while the closest friend he’d ever had, or ever expected to have, breathed his last.

For once, it was Jim who got the conversation going again.

“Coffee’s ready,” he said amiably. From his tone, a person would have thought they’d been talking about something ordinary, like that year’s hay crop or local politics.

“Screw the coffee,” Tripp replied, jolted all over again. He sucked in a breath and leaned forward in his chair. “What the hell, Dad?” he demanded in a raspy whisper. “All of a sudden, you’re as delicate as somebody’s spinster aunt, so hung up on modesty—or whatever—that you’re embarrassed to mention your prostate?”

Jim said nothing, the bullheaded old coot.

Equally stubborn, Tripp pressed the issue. “It’s not as if I didn’t know you had one. And guess what? So do I.”

Since the remark was rhetorical, and since he was Jim, Tripp’s dad didn’t comment right away, although he still looked sadly exasperated. He shoved a hand through his shock of gray-white hair and, at last, made an effort to explain.

“I didn’t figure on it taking so long to get my strength back, that’s all,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t have said a word about it, being sick, I mean, if I could have managed the ranch on my own.” A sheen of moisture glistened in his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “As it turned out, I couldn’t. Too many things were slipping around here, too fast.” Jim paused again, colored again, this time in shades of defiance. “Just the same, I knew damn well I wasn’t going to die, knew it from the first. I won’t say there weren’t some tough days, and some hard nights, too, because there were, but I’ve been through worse—a lot worse.” He stopped once more, regrouping. “Like losing your mother. Ellie was my North Star. You know that.”

Tripp felt a familiar stab of sorrow, because Ellie Galloway, his mom, had been true north on his inner compass, too. Even after all this time, there were still moments when he couldn’t believe she was gone.

He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just scowled. Jim wasn’t off the hook, and Tripp wanted him to know it.

Jim made an impatient sound low in his throat. “What was I supposed to do, Tripp? Tell me that. Should I have asked you to come home the minute all of this started, so we could both be miserable?”

Not in the least mollified, even though he knew he would probably have done pretty much the same thing in Jim’s place, Tripp didn’t answer. He stalked over to the coffee machine, sloshed some java into a chipped mug and then set the stuff in front of his dad with a solid thump of crockery meeting tabletop.

He didn’t return to his chair.

Jim took a sip of coffee, savored it for a moment or two and said, “Thanks.” Another sip followed, and another. Eventually, though, he continued, “I guess I could have spoken up a little sooner.”

Tripp, standing at the long row of windows now, his back to Jim, watched Ridley gamboling around the side yard, evidently chasing a bug. “You think?” he snapped.

The coffee, strong and black the way he liked it, must have rallied Jim considerably, because he sounded almost like his old self when he replied lightly, “Then again, I might have been right to hold my tongue, after all. I figured you’d get your britches in a twist once you knew, no matter when you found out, or how, as far as that goes.”

Shaking his head, Tripp turned from the windows. “You’re the only father I’ve got,” he said, calmer now—or maybe just spent. The day had been a long one, after all. He’d been shaken by the encounter with Hadleigh and now...this. “So, yeah, I’d have freaked out in any case. Then I would have stepped up and done what needed doing on this ranch, so you could concentrate on getting well.”

Jim was looking away, probably because his eyes were misty again, and he considered Tripp’s words in solemn silence before offering a concession—of sorts. “I reckon we’ve both got a point.” He blinked a couple of times, then faced his son. “You had a right to know, and I had a right to keep my own counsel. I guess we’ve just been coming at things from different directions.” A pause. “What do you say we meet someplace in the middle?”

Tripp nodded, gulped once, got out a hoarse “Fair enough.”

“Well, then,” Jim decreed with obvious relief, “that’s settled.” He levered himself to his feet. “Now, if you can see your way clear to feeding the horses, I’ll see what I can do to rustle us up some supper.”

Once more, Tripp nodded. There was no point in pursuing the subject any further, not that night, anyway.

So, grimly silent, he helped himself to Jim’s denim jacket, found hanging in its usual place on one of the pegs beside the back door, shrugged into it, straightened the collar.

They still had issues, father and son, but in time, they’d come to terms, hammer out some kind of mutual understanding.

But time wasn’t a fixed commodity, was it? One minute, a person was there, living and breathing. The next, he or she 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 rinsed them carefully and dried them with an embroidered dish towel.

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