Kitabı oku: «A Rancher To Trust», sayfa 2
“It is you! Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you at first. You look so...different.” His eyes dropped to the teeth that had endured five long years of belated braces to correct her overbite.
Now that he was standing right in front of her, the memories Dan had jarred loose felt even more overwhelming. Her heart was thudding so hard it actually hurt.
Bailey took a deep breath. Settle down, she told herself firmly. You can handle this.
She could. She didn’t just look different. She was different. The night Dan had left her had marked the lowest point in her life. But after a few weeks of wallowing in self-pity, she’d washed her tear-splotched face and decided enough was enough.
Over the next few months, she’d toned up, given up sugar, ditched her glasses for contacts and straightened her crooked teeth. And while everybody else raved over how different she looked, Bailey knew the really important changes had happened on the inside.
She stood on her own two feet now, and she trusted her head a lot more than she trusted her heart. She’d learned those lessons the hard way, and she couldn’t afford to forget them, no matter who pulled up in her driveway.
She forced a shrug. “It’s been a long time, Dan. People change.”
“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. “I guess they do.”
An awkward silence fell between them. Finally, Bailey raised an eyebrow. “Well, now that the pleasantries are out of the way, I guess we can move on to the main event. Why are you here, Dan?”
“You called me.”
“I called you,” Bailey repeated. He made it sound so simple, as if the two of them facing each other after all this time wasn’t the most complicated thing that had ever happened in her entire life. Her jangled nerves found that ridiculously funny. She tried her best to swallow her laugh, but it just came out through her nose in a strangled snort. “And instead of—I don’t know—calling me back, you decided to drive all the way here from Wyoming?”
“I wasn’t in Wyoming. I was in Oklahoma tending to some business. Not that it would have mattered.” He drew in a long breath. “I’d have driven here from Alaska, if that’s where I’d been. You and I both know that I owe you that much. At least.”
“Maybe you do.” Bailey saw no point in skirting the truth. “But I gave up on collecting that debt a long time ago.”
He didn’t flinch. “I figured. That’s how I knew this had to be about something important. You’d never have called me otherwise. It’s true, what you said a minute ago. People do change. I’ve changed. I don’t expect you to take my word on that, but it’s why I’m here. So just tell me what you need from me. If there’s any way I can give it to you, it’s yours. No questions asked.”
Bailey’s knees had started wobbling, and that irritated her. The unfairness of this whole situation irritated her. She wasn’t supposed to be standing two feet away from Dan while they had this conversation. All of this was supposed to happen over the phone, and that would have been plenty tough enough, thank you very much.
She wasn’t prepared for this.
But she should have been. She, of all people, should have known that Dan Whitlock had a knack for sending a person’s well-crafted plans spinning sideways.
She clamped her hands together, digging her short fingernails into her palms. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Dan. Because the truth is, you’re right. There is something I need from you.”
“Okay.” His eyes never left hers. “Name it.”
“A divorce.”
Chapter Two
He couldn’t have heard that right. “A what?”
“A divorce,” Bailey repeated.
“But we’re not still...” He stalled out, searching her face. “I mean, didn’t you...?” He watched as a flush heated Bailey’s cheeks. “Bailey, are you telling me we’re still married?”
“Yes.” There was a little muscle twitching in her cheek, but she held her ground. “I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised. You were there.”
“But that was years ago.” He stopped and shook his head. “I figured you’d have dealt with it, had it annulled or whatever people do. In fact, I was pretty sure that was the first thing you’d have done after I...left.”
The flush in Bailey’s cheeks deepened. “Better late than never.”
Dan searched his mind for something to say, but he came up with nothing. “Maybe I was a little quick on the trigger with that no-questions-asked thing. Is there someplace we could sit down while we talk this over?”
Bailey hesitated then nodded reluctantly. “We can sit on the porch if you want, but there’s really not much to talk about. The whole thing should be very straightforward.”
Straightforward wasn’t the word Dan would have picked. He’d been trampled by bulls and walked away feeling more clearheaded than he felt right now.
All these years, he’d been married to Bailey Quinn? It was more than he could take in. The feelings he’d kept corralled in the deepest part of his heart were stampeding in fifty different directions. The dust was going to have to settle some before he could make sense of all of this.
He hadn’t even wrapped his mind around the fact that the woman standing in front of him was really Bailey. She looked so different from the girl he remembered.
Back in high school she’d carried a few extra pounds that softened her figure, and her front teeth had been a little crooked. She’d always worn a pair of dark-rimmed glasses that had slid to the end of her nose about every five minutes. She was forever pushing them back up with an impatient finger, and he was forever plucking them off so that he could steal a kiss.
All those things had just made Bailey cuter.
He could think of a lot of words to describe Bailey now, but cute wasn’t one of them. This new Bailey was lean and fit, with perfectly straight teeth and a don’t-mess-with-me way of looking straight at you.
She was beautiful, sure. No man alive would dispute that. But it was a whole different kind of beauty than he remembered.
Now this woman he barely recognized was telling him she was his wife?
The man he’d spoken to back in town had told him Bailey had just bought this place. The closer Dan and Bailey got to the farmhouse, the more he wondered why. Bailey had her work cut out for her, all right. The house had good bones, but it needed lot of repairs.
There were no chairs on the porch, so he settled carefully on the splintered steps. After an awkward pause, Bailey joined him. She positioned herself against the sagging wooden handrail, leaving a generous space between them. The shadow of the overhanging roof blocked the thin warmth of the January sun, but the sudden chill Dan felt had little to do with the weather.
In the old days Bailey would have cuddled close to him, settling her head in the gap between his shoulder and his neck. He could still remember exactly how that had made him feel at nineteen. Fiercely protective and defiantly happy, at a time in his life when happiness had been pretty hard to come by.
Now the very same girl was treating him like a stranger. He’d earned the coolness in those beautiful brown eyes, every bit of it.
But, man, oh man. The pain of seeing it there was almost more than he could stand.
Dan cleared his throat. “Okay. First off, how is this even possible?”
Bailey cocked her eyebrows. “We eloped, Dan. To Tennessee, remember?”
Yeah, he remembered. He’d just gotten dinged by the county sheriff for underage drinking again, and Bailey’s long-suffering parents had handed down an ultimatum. If he wanted to attend church with them, fine. That much they’d allow, although they didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the idea. But they made it clear that their daughter wasn’t to spend any more time alone with him. He wouldn’t be allowed to drive Bailey anywhere or take her out to dinner. It was plain enough that Mr. and Mrs. Quinn were more than ready to put a stop to a relationship they’d never really approved of in the first place.
The idea of being separated from Bailey had sent Dan into a tailspin. She was the one good thing in his out-of-control life, the only person in the whole town who hadn’t heard his last name and shied away from him. But her parents, along with everybody else in Pine Valley, seemed sure that he and Abel would turn out to be drunks and thieves, just like their dad and uncles had been, and their granddad before that.
And deep down, he’d been scared that—in his case, anyway—they were dead right. At nineteen, his drinking was already starting to get away from him, and he’d tangled with the law a few times. Nothing big, not yet. But without Bailey in his life...well, he’d known exactly what that would mean for him.
He’d self-destruct fast.
The fear had made him desperate and angry—and selfish. So selfish that one moonlit June night, he’d sweet-talked the eighteen-year-old girl he loved into leaving her parents’ tidy brick home and running away with him.
He’d never forgive himself for that.
Bailey was still waiting for his answer. He swallowed. “I know we were married. But we haven’t laid eyes on each other in years.”
Bailey gave a frustrated laugh. “A marriage certificate doesn’t have an expiration date, Dan. It’s not a jug of milk.”
“Well, no. But after I...” He stopped short.
“Ran off and left me at that awful motel in Kentucky?” Bailey’s eyes hardened as she finished his sentence. “You thought that made the marriage evaporate? Well, it didn’t.”
He winced. “You’ve got every right to be mad, Bailey. I deserve that for talking you into the whole elopement idea and then leaving you to clean up the mess all by yourself. I knew you’d have to do things. Fill out papers and all that. I’d always assumed that’s what you did.”
“Trust me, I wish I had taken care of it back then, but I didn’t. So we have to deal with it now. Let’s stay focused on that.”
“Hold on a minute.” He studied Bailey. That muscle was jumping in her cheek again, and there was a tenseness about her body that he recognized with the instinct of a man who’d spent most of his last decade moving cattle. She wanted to bolt. Something about this conversation was spooking her.
“Dan—” she started off again, but he interrupted, intent on circling back to the territory that was puzzling him.
“I’m sorry. I sure don’t have any right to question how you handled things, but this just isn’t making any sense to me. Your parents couldn’t even stand the idea of me being your boyfriend. Me being your husband? That must have sent them straight into orbit. Mind you, looking back I can’t say as I blame them. How come they didn’t take you to file the paperwork five minutes after you got back home?” He couldn’t think of a single reason they wouldn’t have.
Bailey sighed, but she met his eyes squarely. “Because I never told them we got married.”
Okay. Except for that.
“You didn’t...what do you mean you never told them?”
“I didn’t tell anybody.” She looked away and continued in a rush, “Look, none of that really matters now, does it? We were young, and we made a mistake. I didn’t call you to rehash the past. I called you because I’m ready to move on with my life, and there are certain things I can’t do until we get this settled.”
Certain things. The confused feelings swooping around in Dan’s chest turned to stone and dropped heavily into the pit of his stomach.
So that’s what this was about. Bailey had fallen in love with another guy—probably wanted to get married. But she couldn’t, not while she was still legally bound to Dan.
When Dan didn’t respond, Bailey glanced at him. His expression had changed. The sun creases in the corners of his eyes had deepened, and his jaw was set. He looked tired.
And a little sad.
He caught her eye. “I get what you’re saying about leaving the past behind. No man who’s made the kind of mistakes I’ve made would argue with you. But before we do, I’d like to give you an overdue apology. If you’ll let me.”
He was holding his hat in his hands, running the brim slowly around in a circle. He watched her face, waiting to see if she was willing to hear him out.
She wasn’t. She was holding herself together by a thread, and this wasn’t a road she wanted to go down right now.
“You don’t need to apologize, Dan. I’ll admit it hurt when you walked out on me, but in time I realized that even if you’d come back that night, things couldn’t have worked out any differently in the long run. We never should have gotten married in the first place.”
“And that’s completely on me. I never should have talked you into it. But, Bailey, back then I was so in love with you. I was scared to death I was going to lose you, and—”
“Please. Just stop.” Bailey stood. She’d had just about all she could take. “This isn’t all on you, Dan. It’s not like you kidnapped me. I let you talk me into eloping. And honestly, I was such a pushover, you could’ve talked me into just about anything. The way I see it, I’m just as much to blame as you are, and I take full responsibility for my own mistake. Now, I appreciate you driving all this way, but it really wasn’t necessary. Once the divorce papers are drawn up, I’ll just need your notarized signature, and it’ll be a done deal.”
“All right.” He had stayed seated and was looking up at her, his expression carefully blank. “I’ll make sure you get it.”
“Thanks.” Bailey reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and a pen. “Write down your email address, and I’ll be in touch. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get back to work.” She hesitated awkwardly, unsure what she should say or do next. How exactly did you end a conversation like this with some kind of dignity? She had no idea.
Finally, she reached out a hand and laid it gently on his bicep. It felt like touching a sun-warmed rock. “Goodbye, Dan.”
She turned away and headed across the yard to the unfinished fence. Leaning over, she snagged the work gloves she’d dropped on the ground...what? Twenty minutes ago, maybe?
It felt like a lifetime.
Her hands were shaking so much that she had a hard time getting her fingers into the right slots. When the gloves were finally on, she reached for the post-hole diggers. As she jammed them back into the hole she’d begun, she heard the boards of the porch steps creak.
Okay, good. Dan was leaving. She held her breath, waiting to hear his truck door open and close.
“Bailey.” He spoke from so close behind her that she jumped like a startled deer. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to spook you. But...what you said back there. You were wrong. I did come back.”
She flashed him an irritated glance. “What are you talking about?”
“I drove around for a few hours. Did some drinking.” His fingers were clenched down so hard on the weathered brim of his hat that his knuckles were white. “But then I came back to the motel room. It was about three thirty in the morning, and you were curled up asleep on the bed with wadded-up tissues all around you. You’d been crying—hard—and you almost never cried. I’d done that to you on our wedding day, because I’d fought with you about driving back to Pine Valley and facing up to your parents.”
“Dan, like I said, there’s no point in—”
He cut her off. “I told you I wanted to go west, start fresh someplace new, just the two of us. But the truth was, I was just a coward. I was scared if we went back to Georgia, your parents would talk you into getting out of the marriage. Why wouldn’t they? I was a nineteen-year-old boy with a pretty serious drinking problem, a bad reputation and zero skills that would help me land a job. And standing there looking down at you, I knew they were right. I was going to ruin your life.”
He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was rough with conviction. “I don’t think I ever sobered up as fast in my life as I did that night. And yeah, I left you there. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I’m really sorry I hurt you, but when I think about some of the things that happened to me after that, some of the places I ended up before I finally got myself turned around... Well, I can only thank the good Lord that I didn’t hurt you even worse.”
Bailey stared at him, the post-hole diggers still clenched in her hands. What was she supposed to say to that?
After a second or two, he cleared his throat. “About this divorce thing. Lawyers can get pricey. I’d like to cover the cost.”
“I’m not asking you to do that.”
“I know you’re not. But I want to, just the same. How long will it take get it all settled?”
Bailey blinked and swallowed hard. “I don’t know. I’ll have to meet with the lawyer and see how soon he can draw up the papers. Did you leave me your email?”
“I wrote it down.” He offered her the scrap of paper she’d left behind on the porch step. She took it, careful not to brush his fingers with hers, and tucked it back into the breast pocket of her shirt.
“Okay. I’ll be in touch once I know more.”
“Would it speed things up any if I stayed in Pine Valley until the papers are ready?”
Bailey bit her lip. He wanted to stick around town? The idea made her uneasy. “That’s not necessary. Besides, you’ve probably got things you need to tend to back home.”
“Nothing more important than this. I came here to do whatever I could to set things right, Bailey. I can stay for as long as you need me to.”
“Like I said, all I need is your signature, and we can handle that long-distance.” She hesitated, but in the end she couldn’t resist adding, “But if you’re serious about setting things straight around here, you should stop by and make your peace with your brother before you leave.”
Dan flinched. “Abel still lives around here?”
“He does, but not at the old cabin. He lives on Goosefeather Farm with his wife and kids now. He married Emily Elliott a few years ago.”
“Is that so? He always was crazy about Emily, but he never figured she’d look twice at him. And he’s ended up with Mrs. Sadie’s farm to boot. He loved that place.” Dan’s wary expression softened. “Isn’t that something? Well, I’m glad it all worked out for him.”
Bailey hesitated, but the sadness in Dan’s eyes and her long-standing friendship with Abel overrode her reluctance to meddle. “You should stop and see them, Dan. It would mean the world to Abel.”
Dan shook his head absently, his eyes lingering on the semicircle of pines crowding the edge of the sparkling pond. “I doubt that. But maybe I will. I came here to face up to the messes I left behind. If Abel wants to take a swing at me, it’s no more than I deserve.”
“I think Abel might surprise you. But if you don’t mind, could you keep our situation quiet? I wasn’t kidding before when I said I didn’t tell anybody about our marriage. Abel doesn’t know, either, and since it’s all about to be over and done with anyway, I don’t see much point in telling him about it now.”
“I don’t imagine I’ll be on Abel’s property long enough to do a whole lot of talking, so don’t worry yourself. He won’t hear about it from me.”
Bailey nodded. “Thanks. If there’s nothing else, I really do need to get this fence up.”
“Need some help? Because I could—”
“No.” She cut off the offer quickly. “I’ll manage. But thanks.”
“All right, then. I’ll leave you be.” He settled his cowboy hat back on his head. His eyes were instantly shadowed, but she could feel them on her face, studying her. “I’ll be seeing you, I reckon.”
Her heart jolted at the idea. “Like I said, I’ll be in touch once I’ve heard back from the lawyer.” She stuck out her gloved hand. “I know things are—different between us now. But I’m glad to see you’re doing so well, Dan. I truly am.”
He took her hand and held it gently for a second or two. Even through the roughness of the glove, she could feel the strong warmth of his fingers. “It’s good seeing you, too, Bailey. Doing so well.”
Flustered, she nodded. She pulled her hand free and turned back toward the fence line.
“Be careful.” He spoke quietly behind her just as she jammed the diggers into the dirt. “Set those posts in good and straight. Take it from me, it’s a lot of trouble trying to fix up the crooked ones later.”
Once Dan’s pickup had rumbled out of the driveway, Bailey sucked in a long, deep breath and bent to rest her head on the wooden handles of the post-hole diggers. She stood that way for several long minutes until her heartbeat slowed back down to something closer to normal.
Then she straightened up, wiped her eyes briskly on her sleeve and went back to work.
