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“I can’t cancel the wedding,” he sputtered. “It’s three weeks away. It’s going to be the wedding.” Long fingers would be scraping back his hair, his handsome features would be marred by a frown, the wrinkles deep in his forehead.
Lacey turned from the bank of windows. The plane was now a speck in the distance. She took a deep breath. On the other side of the pay phone she was using stood a beautiful statue, cast in bronze, protected by a glass case. It was of a cowboy standing quietly beside a horse that dipped its head to water. Something about it had made her ache with an emotion she did not understand.
But that had something to do with the word the. Why did it have to be the wedding?
She would have settled for a wedding. For ordinary things.
She snorted at herself. Since when?
Since precisely three hours ago, when the off-ramp to the airport had beckoned to her so bewitchingly she could not say no.
“Where are you?” Keith demanded.
“I don’t think that’s important.”
“Area code 403,” he read off his call display.
Her eyes rested on the bronze again. When she was a child, she had begged her father to consider the Stampede as a vacation possibility. There had never been money for exotic holidays, though. Not that her father would have considered a rodeo exotic.
Lacey wondered about taking it in while she was here. Then some long-forgotten part of her recalled the Stampede was in the summer. July? And summer was long past here.
Listening, she could hear Keith on the other end of the line, thumbing through papers. The telephone book, she guessed bleakly.
“Canada,” he crowed. “Alberta. Lacey, what are you doing in Alberta?”
“I don’t know,” she’d answered truthfully.
And she didn’t. She only knew that when she had seen the airport sign, she had been compelled to obey something within her that told her to go. To go now. Before it was too late.
For what, she was not sure.
Keith was handsome, gloriously so. And wildly successful in his own right, quite separate from the old family wealth he came from. “A young man going to the very top,” her father had pronounced with grave approval after meeting him for the first time.
And, of course, Lacey had her own career, and though it was not quite as illustrious as Keith’s, between the two of them they were well on their way.
Again, her eyes had been drawn to the bronze cowboy. So still.
Of course he was still, she chided herself with annoyance. He was bronze.
“Lacey, what’s the matter?”
Keith was trying so hard for a tender note, but she could picture him glancing at his watch. And she could certainly hear the edge of impatience in his voice. The wedding was about to go up in smoke because of a whim. Her whim. Keith did not like whims.
He liked things organized. Predictable. Perfect.
“I can’t go through with it,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
“There’s no such word as can’t.” This was an expression Keith had picked up at one of the motivational seminars the company had sponsored.
“I’m having some doubts.” The details on the bronze made it very lifelike. The bronze cowboy had his back to her, and when she was done on the phone she would go look at the front of him. Still, even from the back, how he was standing said so much. Weariness in the slope of his shoulders but pride, too.
“What kind of doubts? Why now? The time for doubts was six months ago. A year.”
She knew she had failed to have her doubts on schedule. Before the two hundred guests had been invited and the caterers confirmed. She knew her timing was terrible. She had known it even as she drove toward the airport, but knowing had not stopped her.
“Keith, I just feel confused.”
“Oh,” he said with relief, “confused. Lacey, all brides have the prewedding jitters.”
She didn’t care if he was L.A.’s most persuasive lawyer. He wasn’t going to convince her that a bride-to-be getting on an airplane and flying across a continent was nothing more than prewedding jitters.
“You’ve been doing too much,” he said, his voice soothing, a man who had all the answers. For everybody. “My mother could have looked after wedding details. Or yours.”
She felt petty for noticing his own services were not volunteered. He was probably right. The frantic pace, the dress fittings, the endless arrangements and appointments, the expectations coming at her from all sides that it was going to be the perfect fairy-tale wedding.
“Plus,” he added, “you’ve been working in Divorce too long.”
That was true. She’d seen more than her fair share of how those perfect fairy-tale weddings could end.
“Come on,” he said. “Hop the next plane out of there. I can tell you’re still at the airport. I can hear the luggage wheels rumbling by you. Come home. Everything’s going to be fine.”
She took a deep breath. Of course he was right She was just suffering a terrible case of prenuptial jitters. Taken to the extreme by her close proximity to a Visa Gold card.
But then she suddenly caught sight of her own reflection in the glass around the cowboy. She looked very professional in her suit. Her blond hair was piled up on top of her head in a very corporate topknot. Well, her hair, being her hair, was falling out a bit on one side.
Still, she looked cool and calm and utterly professional, not at all like a woman who would ever lose her head or be irresponsible. Not like a woman capable of letting down her future groom, her parents, and two hundred confirmed guests.
She had the unnerving idea, studying her reflection, that it was like studying a stranger. That composed woman wasn’t her at all.
“I’ve got to go.”
“Calgary!” he said. “You’re at the airport in Calgary. The number you’re calling from has Calgary prefixes. If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you. Grab a seat at the bar. I’ll be there in—how long will it take me to get there?”
“Don’t come.”
“I’m coming,” he announced.
She hung up the phone and began calling hotels. Only to find out even her Visa Gold wasn’t going to buy her a hiding place in this town. Not tonight.
She sank into a chair and contemplated her options. She could fly somewhere else.
She realized she was being crazy, but a rebellious voice inside her head told her to go ahead and be crazy. Told her there was something wrong with being thirty years old and never having done one crazy or impulsive thing.
She had set goals and worked steadily toward them all her adult life. At eighteen she had started university. She had earned scholarships, maintained an A average throughout, passed the bar in the top percentile and nailed a job with one of L.A.’s top ten law firms. Not bad for a girl from a staunchly blue-collar neighborhood, a cop’s daughter.
And now this. Her wedding, the final coup, the match made in heaven.
No one could have been more surprised than her when, driving back to work this afternoon, she’d been almost overwhelmed by a sense of—She forced herself to analyze it, sitting there in the airport. A sense of what?
Emptiness.
Emptiness, she chided herself. In a life so full she’d been unable to find time to have lunch for the past two and a half months? Emptiness?
Okay, piped up the recently released rebel inside her own brain, maybe loss would be a better word.
Loss.
But loss of what? She had everything. The career. The man. They were looking at a lovely house with a pool. A pool. Her father would be beside himself with glee if they bought it.
Get back on that plane, her responsible voice ordered her.
All right, she told it. But she did not move. She buried her face in her hands and allowed herself to feel totally exhausted. She couldn’t even bring herself to go look at the front of the bronze statue.
She was a lawyer. She’d made it. She was going to marry Keith Wilcox, probably the most eligible bachelor in L.A.
Her parents were thrilled for her. Everybody’s dreams for her were coming true.
Get back on the plane. She gathered up her purse. That was what she’d do. She could feel it now. The return of her senses. It had been madness, that was all. Just a few moments of utter madness brought on by too much divorce court, too much—
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
And Gumpy had stood there. And she had taken one look at him and let the madness come back, followed the light in his eyes toward an uncertain future.
And now she was here, lying in a lumpy bed, running her fingers through the hopeless tangles of her hair, hoping beyond hope some miracle would allow her to stay in this refuge for a while. To look after those adorable children, and to sort through her own confusion.
She decided, not for the first time, she absolutely hated her hair. And she decided, right before she slept, jockeys. He’d wear jockeys.
Wondering what the hell she was sleeping in kept Ethan awake until the dawn was touching the sky. He finally slept, awakening to bright light pouring in his window and the aroma of cooking food tickling his nostrils. Food that smelled like heaven.
It was the first time in two weeks he hadn’t woken up with two little kids staring at him, their eyes only inches from his face. He was astonished to find he missed it.
He got up and dressed, hoping to catch Gumpy in the act of putting one over on him.
But it was Lacey McCade standing at the stove, looking dangerously at ease with a frying pan. Her hair was braided. She had on the same pink suit. It was impossibly rumpled.
He realized she’d slept in it.
“Morning.” she said cheerfully.
He took a sip of the coffee she had handed him. Damn, it was good. Gumpy and the kids were already tucking into whatever was on their plates.
He was relieved to see it looked like slop.
“Omelette ranchero,” she told him, setting a plate on the table for him as he sat down.
“Not too talkative this morning,” Gumpy goaded him. “What do you think of the coffee?”
“It’s okay.”
Gumpy grinned.
A delicate smell wafted up to him—of eggs and onions and herbs. He bit into the omelette cautiously. Ambrosia. The slop was salsa. He glanced at Gumpy who was laughing at him.
She’s not staying, he mouthed.
“Promises are important,” Gumpy said out loud.
Ethan tried to think of exactly what he had said last night. It hadn’t been a promise. Not even close. A bet. They hadn’t even shaken on it.
Gumpy didn’t believe in shaking. He believed in honor. If a man said something, he followed through. Even if he’d said it when he was dead tired and felt backed into the corner. Ethan realized he’d taken the bait—hook, line and sinker.
“So, how long could you stay?” Gumpy asked her, when Ethan failed to say anything.
She turned and looked at them, her face bright with hope.
Why would anybody even want to stay here? Ethan asked himself. A million miles from the nearest shopping mall with two kids who didn’t obey, an old man and a grouch. Whatever she was running from must be pretty bad. A boyfriend who beat her? He inspected her visible skin areas for bruises, feeling some sort of unfathomable anger as he did so.
But he didn’t see any bruises.
She was looking at him. He continued to eat his breakfast. He pretended to be engrossed in Danny’s retelling of a dream about a monster who ate frogs and purple dogs.
“I could stay until you found somebody else,” she said. “Two weeks tops.”
Everybody was looking at him now. Danny was suddenly quiet.
Doreen laid her hand on his arm, leaving a little trail of salsa on the sleeve of his shirt, which was practically brand-new. “Oh, please, Unca,” she said.
If he said no, she’d start crying. He just knew it.
And Gumpy, when insulted, sometimes went into the hills alone for days.
Which would leave him in an even more unworkable position than the one he had been in twenty-four hours ago. Ethan was finished breakfast, anyway. He scraped back his chair, and got up, went to the door and put on his hat and boots and coat. He waited until he had one foot out the door before he said, “Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”
He didn’t turn around to see Lacey McCade’s reaction. He didn’t want to see her reaction because he had the awful feeling that if she ever directed the full wattage of that dazzling smile at him, he would be lost.
Totally, completely, irrevocably lost.
He jammed his hat harder on his head and lengthened his stride.
Chapter Three
She was staying!
Lacey couldn’t believe how elated she felt, how absolutely wonderful it felt to be a million miles from anything familiar. The view out the kitchen window this morning reminded her of that—a pastoral winter scene of barns, old fences, cattle and horses.
Now, as she paused for a moment from gathering the breakfast dishes to gaze again at the scene, Ethan came into her line of vision, walking down the road heading toward the barn. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, his stride long and purposeful, his black cowboy hat pulled low over his brow. He kicked at an ice ball and it sailed down the drive ahead of him.
Clearly he was not sharing her elation. Not at all.
