The Marriage Pact (Hqn) by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

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