The Marriage Pact (Hqn) (17 page)

“I know that, Dad,” Tripp said just as quietly. He paused, drank a few more swallows of coffee before going on. “You up to this big trip you’ve got planned? We could always postpone it for a while. Say, till spring...”

Jim scowled. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said testily. “You’ve been on my neck from the minute you got back, telling me I need to get off this place and do something different, kick up my heels a little. Now, all of a sudden, you’re singing a whole different tune.”

“I’m just concerned about you, that’s all,” Tripp told him. “No need to take my head off.”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” the old man retorted. “When I came in here, you looked like you might just unplug that old coffeemaker, open the back door and hurl the works halfway to the barn.”

Tripp shoved a hand through his hair, clamped his molars together for a moment, then forcibly relaxed his jaw muscles. “Okay,” he said, drawing the word out to twice its normal length.

Jim thumped at the tabletop with his right index finger, the way he’d always done when he was adamant about making his point. “Ellie was
happy,
damn it, tending this house. She could have gotten a job in town if she’d wanted to—she had secretarial skills, you know. Supported herself and you both before we met and got married. But she liked being right here
,
doing what she was doing, being who she was.”

“I wasn’t saying different, Dad,” Tripp pointed out diplomatically.

The dog, seated a few feet away, perked up his ears a little and looked from Tripp to Jim and back again, like a fascinated spectator at a badminton game.

Jim’s sigh came from somewhere deep within him. “I realize that, son,” he said after a few minutes. “I reckon I just get to fighting my own head sometimes when it comes to Ellie. Except for not having any more kids—she was sad about that and so was I—I always figured she was pretty content with the lot of a mom and a rancher’s wife. I tend to get my hackles up if anybody suggests otherwise, maybe because there’s a part of me that’ll always wonder if she ever regretted throwing in with the likes of me.”

“She was happy,” Tripp said, and he knew it was true. He could still see the light in his mother’s eyes when Jim was due back at the house after a full workday. By then, having finished his after-school chores, Tripp was usually parked at the kitchen table—this very one, in fact—doing homework. Ellie, busy fixing supper, would glance at the wall clock often. She’d hum under her breath and when she heard the roar of Jim’s truck pulling in, she’d dash into the bathroom to fuss with her hair and put on lipstick and come out wearing a fresh apron.

Ellie had a thing about aprons, even though they hadn’t even been in style, and she whipped them up herself, on her trusty sewing machine, always choosing bright fabrics with polka dots or stripes or splashy floral prints, adding ruffles and rickrack trim, and she must have had at least two dozen of them. Once one of these creations was stained, or began to look a little shabby, she’d toss it into the ragbag and make a replacement, pronto. She’d starched and ironed them, too; that was Ellie Galloway, retro when retro wasn’t cool.

At the time, Tripp reflected, thinking back over the years, he’d found it funny, the fussy aprons and all that carrying on with her hair and her lipstick, just because Jim was about to walk through the door, same as he did every night, covered from head to foot in dust or mud. There’d be a sweaty ring pressed into his hair and circling his head, showing where his hat had rested. He’d give Ellie a quick once-over and say he was surely the luckiest SOB ever to have a wife like her, and she’d blush like a cheerleader after a couple of good cartwheels. Tripp, meanwhile, rolled his eyes.

Ellie would pretend to pout when Jim refused to kiss her until after he’d taken a shower, and sometimes she’d tell Tripp to keep an eye on the potatoes or the creamed peas or the chicken roasting in the oven for a while, and she’d disappear.

None the wiser, Tripp would do as he was told and make sure supper didn’t burn until she eventually turned up again, with Jim right on her heels, half an hour or so later, bright-eyed and smiling in a very different way than usual.

Why, he wondered now, with a pang, hadn’t he realized what a good thing it was to grow up in a home like that, with parents who loved each other, who loved
him?
Okay, he’d been a kid, and pretty clueless when it came to anything other than rodeo, football, horses and girls. Still, he’d had plenty of friends at school who came from broken homes and lived with one parent or the other—or, like Will and Hadleigh, didn’t have either. Their grandmother had loved and looked after them, but it wasn’t the same.

Tripp couldn’t help knowing how badly Will missed his and Hadleigh’s folks, because there wasn’t much the two of them didn’t talk about. The deepest confidences traveled between their two bunk beds, after the lights were out.

He’d known Will envied him a little—maybe a lot—because Tripp’s mom nagged him to study and clean up his room, not in spite of it, and because he had rules to follow and chores to do. Jim had never once laid a hand on Tripp, but he’d been strict just the same, and even come to town looking for him a time or two when he’d stayed out past the agreed-on curfew. Tripp had been mighty embarrassed when that happened, especially given that most of his friends were around, and Jim’s voice would be real quiet when he said, “Get in the truck.”

The old man rarely said much during the drive back to the ranch, beyond a grim, “Your mother’s been worrying.” This, to Jim’s mind, was a near-felonious infraction, and Tripp would feel so guilty about it, he’d start wishing his dad would yell at him the whole way.

It would have been better than that tight-jawed silence.

“Thanks,” he said now.

Jim looked puzzled, sitting there with his wild gray-white hair and his bathrobe and those god-awful slippers, his coffee half-finished on the table in front of him. “For what, exactly?” he asked.

Tripp chuckled hoarsely. “For giving my mom a good life and treating the kid she brought along with her like your own son.”

Jim’s eyes misted over for a moment; he sniffled and looked away briefly. “You
are
my son,” he said, gravel-voiced even after clearing his throat a couple of times. “Your last name is Galloway, isn’t it?”

Tripp folded his arms, his head tilted slightly to one side as he studied his dad’s gaunt face. “Come on,” he said. “Mom was pretty and smart and funny, and a whole lot of other things, too. But you must have had a few misgivings where I was concerned, in the beginning at least.”

“Your mother was
beautiful,
not just pretty,” Jim clarified, and though the mist had disappeared, his eyes were faraway, with a hint of a smile in them now, soft as a twilight shadow. “You were three years old and cuter than any kid has a right to be. Smart as a whip, too—you could already read a little and count to twenty without a misstep. It was clear from the first that you and your mom were a package deal, and I figured that just made me twice
as lucky as I already was for catching Ellie’s eye—
me,
a lunkheaded bachelor cowboy with a run-down ranch and not much else, and suddenly, after a lot of lonely years, I got myself a
family.
And this old place wasn’t just a house anymore, either—it was a home.” He paused, cleared his throat again and looked Tripp square in the eyes. “Now,” he went on with resolute cheer, “shall I scramble us some eggs and burn a few slices of toast, or are we just going to sit here and blubber over the past until we waste away from hunger?”

Tripp laughed, shook his head. “Get yourself dressed,” he said, “and we’ll drive to town—get ourselves some breakfast and buy you some new duds for that fancy cruise of yours.”

“What about all those construction fellas?” Jim fretted. “They’ll be here pretty soon. And then there’s the dog. And the chores.”

“I fed the horses, Ridley can wait in the truck and the construction crews will be fine even if you’re not here to breathe down their necks and ask them a dozen times an hour if they’re sure they know what they’re doing.” He smiled at the consternation he saw in Jim’s face. “Plus,” he finished up, “I’ll be able to get a halfway decent cup of coffee.”

* * *

H
ADLEIGH
, B
EX
AND
Melody gathered around an old table in the center of Melody’s spacious studio, where she drew up jewelry designs, soldered and drilled and repeatedly soaked various metals in a stinky Crock-Pot concoction with the unappealing name of liver of sulfur, though Melody called it pickle juice. Her three cats, Ralph, Waldo and Emerson, a ragtag calico crew of indeterminate breed, were lined up along the top of a nearby bookshelf like china figurines, inscrutable and unblinking, but keeping a close eye on Muggles, who apparently hadn’t noticed their presence at all, let alone felt any inclination to chase them.

“You promised to tell all,” Melody reminded Hadleigh, propping her elbows on the table, propping her chin in her palms and leaning in a little.

“I could hardly wait to get over here,” Bex added, wide-eyed.

Hadleigh figured they’d be pretty disappointed once she’d spilled the proverbial beans, but she launched in anyway, if only to get it over with, so they could talk about other things.

“I’m free,” she blurted, perhaps overzealously, and watched as Bex and Melody’s mouths fell open simultaneously. “It’s over,” Hadleigh went on, picking up speed. “I can finally leave the whole Tripp Galloway obsession behind for good and get on with my life.”

Melody blinked, then belatedly closed her mouth.

Bex gazed at Hadleigh with narrowed eyes. “
What’s
over?” she asked.

Melody had recovered enough to comment drily, “If anything ever actually
started
between the two of you
,
I must have been looking the other way at the time, because I definitely missed it.”

Hadleigh glanced down at a sleeping Muggles, whose muzzle rested companionably on top of her right foot, and a rush of affection went through her, so intense it bordered on pain.
Love.

Scary business indeed.

Her cheeks felt warm when she met her friends’ eyes and continued, speaking slowly and precisely, in the vain hope of avoiding misunderstandings. “Tripp and I had something to eat over at Billy’s,” she recounted, her tone dutiful. “And while we were sitting there, a...thought occurred to me.” When she paused, Melody made a rolling motion with both hands, urging Hadleigh to explain and be quick about it.

So Hadleigh went on, conveniently leaving out that scandalous kiss. Melody had, no doubt, showed the photos to Bex by now.

“I—I had a sort of...epiphany
,
I guess you’d call it—about the wedding.” On the shelf above Melody’s unlighted Franklin stove, her great-grandmother’s sturdy mantel clock ticked ponderously, as if marking off Hadleigh’s slow, thudding heartbeats, one by one. She took a deep breath and resumed. “I realized that I’d never really wanted to marry Oakley in the first place, although I wasn’t actually conscious of that at the time of the wedding, you understand. The embarrassing truth is, I’m almost positive I was counting on Tripp showing up like a knight in shining armor, stopping the ceremony and—here’s the part that makes me wince—declaring his undying love for me, right there in front of everybody. Insisting that he and I belonged together.” Hadleigh paused and rolled her eyes in self-deprecating amusement. “What an idiot I must have been.”

Neither Bex nor Melody looked particularly surprised by Hadleigh’s admission that she’d loved Tripp the whole time. Nor did they correct her for referring to herself as an idiot.

Of course they’d guessed the truth, probably from the very first. The miracle was that after trying to talk her out of marrying Oakley and getting nowhere, they’d gone along with the idea.

“Please say you didn’t tell Tripp that,” Melody said.

Hadleigh bit her lower lip. “I wish I could,” she answered softly. “For whatever reason, I couldn’t hold it in—I did try at first, though. We went out to his ranch, and Jim was around, so we talked for a while, the three of us—mostly Jim and me. Then, when Tripp and I were alone, I told him.”

“Why?”
Melody and Bex chorused, in pained and perfect unison.

“Because it’s the truth?” Hadleigh ventured, with less conviction than before. “Anyway, I think he already knew, because he didn’t seem very surprised.”

“Oh, Lord,” Bex commiserated, whacking her forehead with the heel of one palm. Then, hastily and with a flash of anger in her eyes, she demanded, “What happened then? Did Tripp brush you off like he did before? Make that same speech about how you were still young, with your whole life ahead of you, and the right man would come along someday?”

Hadleigh relaxed a little. “No,” she replied. “He didn’t. But then
another
really peculiar thing happened. Something—something
shifted
inside me all of a sudden and that’s when I knew.”

Melody and Bex were both visibly holding their breath, and their eyes were huge with suspense.

Enjoying the drama of it all the tiniest bit, Hadleigh spread her hands for emphasis. “I’d just fallen
out
of love with Tripp—which came as a shock, since I never thought I was
in
love with him to begin with.”

Melody blinked again. Bex just stared.

“You fell
out
of love?” Melody almost whispered once she’d recovered some of her composure. She sucked in a breath, let it out slowly and audibly. “And you think that’s a
good
thing?”

“How could you not have known how you felt about Tripp?” Bex asked fretfully. “
Everybody
knew, except maybe for Oakley. And if you
did
know, on any level, why go through with the wedding for heaven’s sake? What if Tripp hadn’t fallen in with your crazy plan and hauled you out of there, Hadleigh? Would you still have married Oakley?”

Melody gave a shudder at the thought, though she kept her opinion to herself. For the moment, that is.