Kitabı oku: «The Millionaire's Cinderella Wife»

Chapter One

At seven on a Tuesday morning in June, both the waterfront and the adjacent marina in Stoneport, North Carolina were quiet.

Pre-dawn fishing expeditions must already have departed, while the more tourist-oriented charter trips and sailing classes didn’t get under way until a little later. Sierra Taylor walked from her nearby hotel, passed a café called Tides, open for breakfast, and decided she’d go back there and wait over coffee if the office at Garrett Marine was unattended at this hour.

On edge about the coming confrontation with Ty, she almost hoped it would be.

No such luck, she soon discovered.

Ty Garrett had always been an early riser, which must have been an asset in his business success. Through the glass door she saw a woman behind the main desk frowning at a computer screen, and when Sierra dipped the handle the door swung inward, jangling a nautical bell.

“Good morning!” The woman was young, twenty-two at most, and her voice sounded impossibly perky at this hour. Behind her head, a blonde ponytail swung through the hole in her baseball cap, keeping time to the music of her words. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Garrett.”

“Are you booking a sailing class? Already booked? Questions about our boat rentals? Give me your name, and—”

“Actually, no, it’s personal.”

“Well, give me your name…” This time she enunciated slowly and clearly, as if she dealt with too many people who weren’t all that bright.

“Sierra.” No point in fighting over it.

“Last name?”

“He doesn’t need my last name.”

“O-kay.” Miss Perky Ponytail shrugged and sashayed off down a short, dark corridor in the direction of a closed door.

She moved as if she was climbing around the deck of a sail-boat on a sunny day, and she didn’t knock at the door—which must surely lead to Ty’s private office—but peeled off into another room, from which Sierra soon heard various clinking and gushing sounds which suggested that coffee was being made.

She took a couple of careful breaths, reining in emotions that were too strong and too complex to fully make sense after so long. Why so much ambivalence? Why shouldn’t this be easy? She’d driven the six hundred miles from Landerville, Ohio, primed for this moment and coolly determined. She really hadn’t expected to feel so messed up about it.

Trying to center herself, Sierra leaned her elbow on the high desk. Her gaze idly wander over the desk’s surface, taking in a pile of glossy printed brochures, a pen and a box of mints. And then she saw it—the magazine that had brought her to Stoneport—right there at an angle in front of her.

Ty’s face grinned up at her from A-list’s front cover—tanned, sheened with sun screen and faintly dusted with salt, handsome as a Greek god. His dark hair begged for a woman’s fingers to tidy its wind-swept waves. Behind him, a brightly colored spinnaker sail bellied against the breeze, while the glimpse of a sun-bronzed shoulder at the bottom of the frame strongly suggested he was shirtless.

Even though she’d seen it countless times now, the image and the four words that captioned it in bold red letters still made Sierra catch her breath with shock and self-doubt, a healthy dose of anger, and something else that she didn’t want to put a name to.

“Bachelor Of The Year!” trumpeted A-list’s banner headline.

As for the three-page feature article inside, Sierra knew it almost by heart.

It catalogued Ty’s business success here on the Stoneport waterfront. It painted in dramatic colors the story of how he’d rescued a young couple from a stricken sail-boat during a spring storm, how he’d kept the unconscious husband alive, delivered the wife’s premature baby, and saved both mother and child. It quoted local residents and Garrett Marine staff praising him in extravagant terms, and guesstimated his growing wealth in the tens of millions.

Finally, just in case the front cover had left any woman in America in any doubt, it included several more photos that proved his good looks and stunning physique were not merely the products of clever lighting and heavy use of an air-brush.

You’d have to be pretty mean-spirited to suggest that Ty Garrett hadn’t earned the Bachelor of the Year label.

Sierra had only one small problem with it, herself.

She was already married to him.

Miss Ponytail had made the coffee. With a big, milkless mug of it in her hand, she finally reached the closed door and knocked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she called, “There’s another one, Ty.”

Sierra heard his still-familiar voice through the door. “Early bird.”

“Says the worm.”

“Yeah, already squirming. Does she want a class or a charter?”

Miss Ponytail opened the door a crack, leaned in and dropped her voice, but didn’t drop it low enough. “No, she’s going with the ‘It’s personal’ angle. Won’t give her last name. Thinks that’s an original game plan, just like the other forty-seven women who have tried it.”

“And is she pretty?”

“You be the judge.”

“So what’s the first name?”

“Sierra.”

Thick silence.

Sierra discovered she’d stopped breathing.

“Here’s your coffee, by the way…Oops!” Miss Ponytail said.

Appearing in the doorway, Ty had almost made her spill it, but they both recovered in time. He didn’t take the hot beverage, however. Instead, his gaze arrowed over Miss Ponytail’s head and reached Sierra. Lord, in the flesh he was better looking even than in the professional photos, she realized at once, as she took in a long, slow drag of air. Better than all of her memories.

He wore a white polo-neck shirt that set off his tan the way whipped cream set off chocolate mousse, and baggy navy shorts that ended just at the hard knots of muscle above his knees, and he looked at her as if he’d half-expected her but didn’t fully believe she was here, all the same.

“Sierra,” he said.

“Got it in one.” Her tone came out flip and unnatural.

The tension in the room sang like wind through a sailboat’s metal stays.

“You haven’t changed so much in eight years.” His guarded expression didn’t telegraph his opinion on any of the changes that had occurred.

“You have, Ty,” Sierra blurted out.

He’d filled out his strong frame over the past few years, and success and maturity had given him a confidence of bearing that made his jaw look as strong as iron and his blue eyes as steady as the moon. And as Sierra knew very well, he hadn’t ever lacked confidence, even in his early twenties.

“I guess this one was right,” Miss Ponytail said. “You really didn’t need her last name.”

“Cookie, can you go check that Footloose is ready to roll for that two-day charter?” Ty asked, not looking at Miss Ponytail.

His eyes seemed to have the power to heat Sierra’s skin like a radiant lamp, and, oh, she suddenly remembered in such vivid, physical detail all the reasons why she’d once loved him so much, why she’d believed so completely in what they had, why she’d ached and burned so hard when it had ended.

“You might have to handle things on your own, this morning,” he told his employee. “And can you dump the coffee?” he added.

“Sure,” Miss Ponytail said. Cookie, apparently.

She disappeared back into the room where she’d made the coffee. At the edge of her buzzing, shrilling awareness, Sierra heard the liquid splosh into a sink, then the sound of another door opening and closing, and Cookie’s feet on the wooden planking of the dock. She’d left via the back entrance, and Sierra and Ty were alone.

Alone.

For the first time since the take-it-or-leave-it, marriage-busting conversation that Sierra remembered every word of, even after eight years. Ty had left Landerville that same day, and he hadn’t been back since. They hadn’t even spoken on the phone.

They should have done.

They should never have let things drag out for this long.

“I guess I know why you’re here,” he said. He looked wary, and ready to be angry if the right trigger came.

Sierra’s heart thudded suddenly. “Do you?”

“I wondered if you’d see the magazine.”

“If I’d see it?” She laughed briefly. “Sometimes I feel as if everyone in America has seen it.”

“You could have called.” He mimicked a voice every bit as perky as Cookie’s. “I saw the cover story. Photos came out great. Congratulations.”

Perky, but with a metallic edge.

“You know that’s not why I’m here.” Her voice sounded scratchy, and not nearly as strong as she wanted it to.

“Wait a minute,” he drawled, in mock surprise. “You’re not here because of A-list?”

“Don’t do this.” Okay, that was better. Harder. “Yes, I’m here because of A-list. Of course I’m here because of A-list. But not to—”

The nautical bell jangled again at that moment as the front door opened, and Ty took a couple of backward steps into the doorway that led from the front office to the short corridor, then froze as if it might be dangerous for him to move in either direction.

A woman stepped awkwardly inside the building. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and was dressed in a too-tight cutesy sailor suit with navy shorts, a striped top, and a red sailor-style neck tie, all of which the sales assistant in Silly Outfits ‘R’ Us really should have talked her out of.

“Um, I was wondering about sailing classes,” she said, shyly ducking her head.

“Sure,” Ty answered cheerfully. He wore the same smile showcased to such stunning effect on the front cover of A-list, but he still hadn’t moved. To Sierra it looked as if he might make a run for it when he did. “We’re pretty full, right now, but I’m taking down contact details, because we’re putting together some extra classes.”

“And will those extra classes be handled by…uh…by you personally. Um. Or will they be, um, taught by someone else?”

Ty’s smile tightened a little. A stranger might not have spotted it but Sierra did and she was stunned at how well she remembered details about him like this. “Not sure, at this stage,” he said.

“Because I’d rather be handled by you personally.”

“I’m sure you would.”

“Oh!” The woman suddenly clapped her hands to her mouth. She blushed and giggled. “I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did! I’m so sorry!” As with the sailor suit, the blush, giggle and hands on mouth were not a good look for her. She took several steps closer and reached out, as if itching to give him an apologetic and lengthy squeeze. “I’m really so, so sorry!”

“We’re actually closed right now,” Ty said quickly. “Could I ask you to come back at eight, when our office opens, and give your details to my assistant?”

“Oh, of course.” She reversed direction like a mechanical toy, and the hands went back to the mouth, muffling another repetition of, “I’m so sorry.”

She backed up to the door, dragged one hand from her mouth long enough to grab the doorhandle, edged through the narrow opening she’d made, and pulled the door shut with a slam. The nautical bell protested as if it, like Ty, had showcased its skills for too many similar women in recent days.

Ty sighed. “Can we close this place up and go grab coffee somewhere else?” he said to Sierra. “I appreciate that you want to talk.”

His eyes flicked over her, taking in—probably—the way she’d aged, and the conservative outfit of matching skirt and top that she wore. They’d seemed appropriate, in her hotel room this morning, for an assertive confrontation with her husband. Now they made her feel plain and staid.

“Talking makes sense,” Ty was saying. “We’ve both been stubborn about the situation for far too long. But it’s obvious we’ll never be able to do it here.”

“No?” Sierra wasn’t sure that she liked the idea of having this conversation in public, even if “public” did mean the quietest corner of that café she’d passed on her way here. On the other hand, a more private location had its downside, also.

“You think that sailor suit gal is the first?” Ty drawled. He leaned his elbow at head height against the doorjamb, as if he’d already reached the end of a long day.

“Uh, not from what your assistant said, no. But I’d have thought the extra traffic was good for business.”

“Extra traffic? The whole of Garrett Marine has been under siege from the day A-list hit the stands.” He glanced through the full-length front windows and along the boardwalk that led back to the waterfront’s other businesses, spotted a pair of female figures moving toward the office and decreed, “Out the back way. Now. I’ll lock.”

This time, Sierra didn’t argue. Didn’t even say, “Serves you right,” although she couldn’t help thinking it.

And that really was mean-spirited.

Get a grip, Sierra. Cool down.

Ty locked the front door, dimmed the computer screen, switched off the interior lights and ducked into the back room, all in the space of seconds. Sierra followed him, hearing a disappointed, “Oh, they’re not open yet,” through the glass door behind her.

“Let’s roll,” Ty said.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her around the side of the small office building, so they could escape down the boardwalk while the two women were still reading Garrett Marine’s office hours on the sign hanging against the glass. His palm and fingers felt warm against her skin, and his grip was as strong and confident as ever. Metaphorically, he’d tried to pull her from Landerville to Stoneport in exactly the same way.

Grab.

Roll.

Go where I want, never mind your own plans.

Back then, on that issue, she’d objected. This time, since it was just coffee and a long overdue conversation, she didn’t. His hand on her arm felt better than she wanted it to, however, and the way he moved was like a charge of energy that overflowed into her own body and brought her back to life. They covered forty yards in what felt like five seconds, and her heart beat sped up.

“Here we go,” Ty said, and pulled Sierra into Tides, the café she had noted earlier.

“Hey, Mr. Garrett,” said another perky female.

He didn’t flinch, so Sierra guessed the girl was an employee, not one of the besieging women he’d mentioned. This must be the café described in A-list as part of his extensive and still growing business empire.

“We’ll take the corner table,” he told the waitress. “And can you…like…move the potted plants, or something?”

“The model boat?”

“Perfect!”

“I’ll get Evan to help.” She called someone from the kitchen and the two of them shifted a glass case containing the fully-rigged model of an old clipper ship so that it did a good job of blocking the corner table from general view. Nobody seemed surprised that this strategy was necessary, which lent credibility to Ty’s claim that Garrett Marine was “under siege.”

Once seated, he didn’t wait for a menu, but ordered a Danish and black coffee for himself—“Just keep it coming, Gina, okay?”—while Sierra asked for a muffin and a cappuccino. Both orders arrived promptly, which meant they didn’t have to spend long pretending they had nothing important to talk about.

Gina left to serve some new arrivals, and Sierra seized her opportunity, because there had already been interruptions enough. “Please don’t pretend that you don’t know exactly why I’m here,” she said.

“Tell me straight out, and neither of us should have to pretend anything.”

“If you want a divorce, Ty, ask for a divorce. That’s all you have to do. Don’t advertise yourself in a national magazine as being gloriously available, and wait for me to draw the obvious conclusions, the way the entire town of Landerville has.”

“You think this was about me wanting a divorce? You honestly think—”

“I’ve had hints and innuendoes and the same tired jokes over and over, total strangers coming up to me in the supermarket wanting to know the exact status of—well, our marriage, if there is one.”

“Okay, for a start, your Dad’s been mayor for about a hundred years; you know no-one in a town like Landerville is going to consider you a total stranger. Your life is town property, and so was mine, before I left.”

Sierra ignored him and went on, “My sisters are acting like someone died, and Dad was threatening at one stage to—” But Ty didn’t need to know about her father’s threats to his son-in-law’s safety. “It’s been…very embarrassing,” she finished lamely, knowing she hadn’t communicated a fraction of what she felt.

“Embarrassing?” Ty echoed, on an impatient laugh. “Yeah, tell me about it! That sailor suit lady a few minutes ago was more subtle than most. Trust me, Sierra, I’m winning in the embarrassment stakes, hands down!”

“In that case,” she told him with a sharp edge, “it might have been a good idea if you’d thought the whole A-list thing through a teeny-weeny bit, before you agreed to it, huh?”

His blue eyes narrowed. “I never agreed to it, Sierra! Is that the kind of man you think I am? Interested in that kind of cheap publicity? Hell, interested in getting dates for myself that way? Listen! The Bachelor of the Year headline was the journalist’s idea, not mine.”

“You could have said no.”

“I had no clue she was going to present the boat rescue story like that, until it appeared in the magazine. I didn’t realize how much she was going to hook it into my business success, or that it would be on the cover. Let alone that it would bring this kind of response from total strangers. This mess has just erupted. You have no idea!”

“Gee, all that extra money coming in for extra sailing classes. All the extra business in your restaurants and waterfront stores. Yeah, most tourist enterprises really hate feel-good national publicity, I’m sure!”

He frowned. “Don’t do that thing with your mouth. It doesn’t suit you.”

“What thing?”

“Looks like you’re sucking on a lemon.” Still frowning, he reached across the table and tried to do something to her lips with his fingers, the way he might have brushed a crumb from a child’s cheek. What on earth…?

Smoothing them out? Yes, soothing those tight little muscles around her mouth.

With his touch, Sierra could feel the tight muscles herself, and wondered if that was why her face so often felt stiff and tired by the end of the day. Even before this whole mess with the magazine, she’d had so much on her plate.

There was her teaching job, working with a class of special needs kids, and three younger siblings who still depended on her a lot, and Dad’s health to monitor—he tended to leave the treatment of his diabetes largely to her—as well as his role as Landerville’s mayor to support.

She knew she needed a vacation, but…sucking on a lemon?

Ty’s finger-tips moved cool and light against her skin, like a caress, but still she flinched away and drawled, “Gee, thanks!”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Maybe because of all the extravagant compliments you’re paying me.”

“And again.”

“Ty, do you or do you not want a divorce?” she blurted out desperately.

“You wouldn’t contest it?”

Okay, Sierra. Don’t sigh. Don’t suck on a lemon.

She lifted her chin, managed not to gust out the big whoosh of air that tightened her chest, and said quietly, “No, of course I wouldn’t contest it.”

“You’ve had eight years to file for one, and you haven’t.”

“No, I haven’t. Neither have you. But I want to, now. It’s way overdue, don’t you think?”

Of course she was right, Ty conceded to himself. About seven years and eight months overdue, probably. He should have filed the papers himself, as soon as he’d realized that she had called his colossal, confident, angry bluff and really wasn’t going to follow him to Stoneport.

But he’d been stubborn about it. That was how he’d dealt with the hurt, by channelling it into sheer pigheaded pride. He wasn’t the one making their marriage impossible. He wasn’t wrong about any of this! Let Sierra take the steps to legally sever their union, if that was what she wanted.

She never had.

He’d been so cocky at twenty-four, so sure of himself, his goals, his decisions. “You know where to find me,” he’d told her.

“And you know where to find me!”

And the hurt and disappointment had eased with time and hard work, the way such things did. The way they must have eased for her, too.

“If it’s so overdue,” he answered her at last, “why haven’t you done something about it long before this? Why did it take some frothy magazine article to bring you here?”

She colored and shrugged, and paused for almost as long as Ty had, before she answered. “Let’s just label it a wake-up call, shall we? Principles have a limited shelf life, I’ve discovered.”

“Principles?” The word startled him. “Whose principles?”

“I’m not the one who walked out of our marriage. I’m not the one who wanted it to end. You did, Ty. So the divorce should have been up to you.”

“I never walked out of our marriage! I walked out of Landerville.”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t! I was pretty clear on that at the time, I thought. There was no future for me there. Not one that could possibly have made me happy. I needed this.” He swept his arm around, encompassing his world.

“What’s ‘this’?” She hooked her fingers around the word to make the quotation marks.

“The ocean, the boats, a chance to make a future for myself in a place where I wasn’t just that more-or-less-orphaned Garrett boy who might get as far as managing the hardware store some day, if the love-struck mayor’s daughter from the right side of the tracks could keep him honest. But you still don’t get any of that, do you?”

“No, I don’t. Dad never looked at you that way.”

“The rest of Landerville did.”

“You weren’t just asking me to turn my back on a few narrow-minded attitudes. You were asking me to—” She stopped. Her cheeks were pink and angry and her dark eyes flashed. “A family is not something you can just walk away from, Ty. My family was not something I could just walk away from.”

He sat up straighter. “I don’t consider—I’ve never considered—that I was asking you to do that.”

“Just listen to us!”

Sierra did the lemon thing with her mouth again and he couldn’t find an answer. Yeah, listen to them! Back to square one. Back eight years to exactly what had slammed them apart in the first place.

She was so right. The divorce was overdue.

She sat there looking at him over the rim of her cappuccino cup and he took a moment to assess the changes in her. She’d been stunningly beautiful, to his eyes, when they’d gotten married twelve years ago. That graceful figure, as lean as a catwalk model’s. That creamy skin. That wide, expressive mouth. That dark, straight, silky hair, flowing like a satin waterfall down her back. Those big, slightly exotic brown eyes—a throw-back to some distant Cherokee heritage on her mother’s side.

And she was still beautiful. The hair was the same, only kept a little shorter and folded into an efficient pleat high on the back of her head, this morning. The figure was a touch more womanly beneath its conservative olive and beige top and skirt, but if there was a man in this world who didn’t like a few feminine curves in the right places, then that man wasn’t him.

Her eyes and her mouth and her skin?

Yeah, beautiful.

Stunning.

Except…

She looked tired, at certain moments. Stressed. Angry? Unhappy?

And her eyes and mouth and skin were the places where the problems showed, whatever they were. The sucking on a lemon thing. A tightness to her skin which sketched out to the world where her wrinkles would some day appear. A way of narrowing those dark eyes so that the fire deep inside them almost looked as if it had gone out.

If the limbo of their non-marriage gave an explanation for any of this, all the more reason to get it dealt with so that both of them could get on with their lives.

Ty gulped some coffee and took a bite of the cherry and cream cheese Danish, wondering how best to get down to the nitty gritty of lawyers and such.

They had no kids, no joint property acquired during their four years together. And Sierra had never been the grasping type. On the contrary she was far too generous for her own good at times. She would never stake any kind of a claim on the wealth he’d acquired since their split, and even if she did no judge would award it to her.

He leaned closer to her across the table. “There’s no reason why this can’t be simple and amicable and quickly dealt with, right? Since it’s what we both want?”

“No reason at all,” she agreed.

“Then, yes, let’s get it taken care of, get the ball rolling, before you head back.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said. “No fuss.”

“No going over old ground.”

“No. Because we’ve—”

“Ty?” said a musical female voice that he recognized, and Sierra didn’t get a chance to finish.

Ty looked away from her tight face to find A-list journalist Lucy Little smiling at him, much more casually dressed than Sierra in clam-diggers and a tight little black tank. She seemed as relaxed and at home as if she lived here, even though Ty had had no idea she’d planned to come back to Stoneport once she’d completed the magazine story that was causing all the current trouble.