The Marriage Pact

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.