Which meant he didn’t trust her to do the right thing.
Angela sat at his desk, going through the books as she switched them over to the new accounting program—
“Clay said to set these on his desk.”
Angela looked up to find a brunette with big brown eyes staring at her. The young woman handed her the mail.
“Hi, I’m Emily. The housekeeper.”
Housekeeper? She was kidding, right?
Angela hadn’t actually said that, but she’d wanted to. Emily was young and pretty. And only a bachelor would hire girlfriend material to pick up after him.
Maybe she was the girlfriend, and housekeeper was the term they were using for Angela’s benefit. Not that they needed to bother hiding their relationship. “Angela. Adams,” she added unnecessarily.
“I know, Clay’s wife.”
“Soon to be ex-wife.”
“I know.”
“Oh.” Angela didn’t know what to say to that. Apparently Emily knew everything.
“I’ll unload the groceries and get to work.”
Smiling politely, Angela nodded and set the mail aside to get back to work herself, when the bill on top of the mail pile caught her attention. She and Hatch had their cell phones on the same plan to save them both some money.
Her name was on the statement with his, so she didn’t think anything about opening the envelope. Had the man never heard of electronic billing?
She could set him up in a matter of minutes. And while she was at it, she’d separate their accounts.
“Wait a second.” Her name was on the bill.
Her name was also on a couple pieces of junk mail that had been delivered. And the statements for their joint bank account. The one she deposited into for child care.
Seeing all those statements started the wheels spinning. She opened drawers until she came across a year’s worth of cell phone bills in both their names.
She didn’t have to establish residency. Residency had already been established for her.
With a little online research, she found the military loophole she needed to file for divorce as a resident of Wyoming.
It was all she could do not to grab her keys and go.
But he could trust her to do the right thing. So she’d wait it out. So they could talk. After everything she’d said to him, she didn’t want him thinking she was trying to pull a fast one on him.
The sound of the vacuum upstairs had her glancing at the clock. It was five after three. Five after three?
She did grab her keys and go then.
Hatch’s truck was still parked outside. It wasn’t like him to vary his routine. She spotted him walking toward her from across the compound.
“Did you forget the time?” She rushed past him.
“Don’t think so.” He checked his PalmPilot. “No,” he said with conviction.
“What about Ryder? Shouldn’t we be leaving to meet his bus?” This was the last day of school.
“He’s spending the night with Alex.”
And nobody had bothered to tell her that. “Since when?”
“Every Friday night since he’s been here.”
She should have known. And she should have realized something was up when Emily had delivered the mail. Hatch normally collected it when he picked up Ryder from the bus.
Emily stepped out onto the front porch. When Jason—auto parts Jason—stepped up to meet her, Angela did a double take.
The two kissed, a little too passionately for having an audience, and then strolled hand in hand toward Jason’s apple-green Dodge Charger.
“’Night, Clay. ’Night, Angela,” they said in unison.
“’Night, Em, Jason.” Hatch nodded. “Recognize your old beau?”
“He was only interested in my pink Cadillac.” Nice to know he could still tease her about that. “Jason works for you now?”
“Couple days a week. Helps keep the equipment running.”
“Emily, too.”
“Same deal, couple days a week.”
The place cleared out fast on a Friday night. The hired help had plans to paint the town red. Even Smitty pulled out a few minutes later, leaving Angela and Hatch alone.
“And what is it you do on Friday nights?” she dared ask.
“Same as everybody else. You want to come?”
She hestitated because her first instinct had been to say yes. And she’d had to remind herself she was engaged. “No, thank you. I don’t think so.”
RYDER SAT IN FRONT OF THE TV at his friend Alex Stewart’s house, playing Mario Kart. Same as he did every Friday night. Will came home from work with a pizza. And Mia let them eat it in the living room as long as they were careful not to spill their pop on the carpet.
“Hatch and my mom are getting a divorce.” He put his whole body into moving Mario around the track.
“Bummer,” Alex said.
“Yeah,” Ryder agreed. “We’re moving again, too. I wish we could stay here.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Alex found a break in the action long enough to manage a bite of pizza and glance back over his shoulder at his mom and stepdad. And his annoying little bother, Anthony, who was four. He had a sister, Sophia, who was seven, but she was at a slumber party tonight. “My mom’s going to have another baby.”
“Yeah.” Alex called Will “Dad,” even though he was his stepdad. “I wish Hatch was my real dad,” Ryder stated.
“He’s your stepdad.”
“Technically, no,” he said, repeating what his mother always said.
“Yeah, he is. He’s married to your mom, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all it takes to make him your stepdad.”
“I guess.” Ryder watched annoying little Anthony crawl all over his mother’s lap, until Will picked him up and carried him off to bed. Mia stood to stretch her back, and Ryder couldn’t help but notice the baby in her belly. “Do you think if they had their own kid they’d stay together?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
But Ryder’s mom and stepdad didn’t even sleep in the same bed. Half the time they didn’t even sleep on the same continent.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“MOJITO,” ANGELA SHOUTED above the din. “A real one. Not the kind that comes in a bottle.”
“Huh?” their waitress asked for the second time.
“Two beers. And two mojitos. The kind that come in a bottle is fine.” Hatch held up two hands, two fingers.
“You just changed my drink order,” Angela said, somewhat amused by his need to always take charge. She hadn’t planned on going out with him tonight. But when she couldn’t get ahold of Jake, her big plans for staying close to the phone for the evening had changed.
“No bartender likes to make those fancy drinks on a busy Friday night.” Busy because a local singer by the name of Dusty was back in town for the first time since signing a major record deal.
Hatch had sent her the CD while she was in Afghanistan.
“FYI.” She leaned forward and toyed with the candleholder in front of her. “No date likes to be told what she can and cannot order.”
“Are you my date?” he asked with equal amusement.
“No, I’m your soon-to-be-ex-wife. Just thought maybe you could use the dating tip.” She stared at the candle flame, recalling those dating tips he’d given her all those years ago. Advice she’d never followed.
He met her halfway across the small round table and lowered his voice. “Where did we go wrong?”
It was so not what she’d expected to hear that she didn’t even think about telling him that she planned to file for divorce on Monday. With or without him.
Their waitress saved her from having to answer right away by setting a napkin in front of her. And the truth was she could choose not to answer. Angela sank back in her seat while Hatch settled the bill.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Hatch.”
“Something happened between us.”
She ignored
her drink in favor of peeling off the label on the beer bottle. “A lot of things have happened between us over the years. Most of them good.”
“But that one night wasn’t?”
“See, you’re twisting my words.”
“What’s the point of all this now?” He’d had six years to ask her that question, and she found it more than a little disconcerting that he chose to ask it now. “Maybe the issue here isn’t my sneaking out but your not trying to stop me.”
There. She’d said it. He hadn’t tried to stop her.
He’d made love to her. He’d stopped her from saying she loved him. And he’d simply let her go.
Admitting that hurt made her feel exposed. And she still didn’t see the point of revisiting the past.
“Thank you for being honest.”
“That’s it? That’s all you want from me?”
“I just want you to be happy, Angela.”
“Clay?” A redhead closer to his age than hers approached their table. “I thought that was you, darlin’.”
The woman completely ignored Angela as Hatch struggled just to recall her name. He should have defaulted to admitting he couldn’t remember, and allowed the woman to fill in the blanks. Not in this case, however.
Angela had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t want to find out how he knew this woman.
“Excuse me,” he said to the other woman. “I’m here with my wife.”
“May I have this dance?” He held out his hand to Angela.
She placed her hand in his and he led her out onto the crowded dance floor. The band was playing a cover of Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road.”
“Your wife?” she said, looping her arms around his neck.
“I didn’t know what else to call you.”
He was teasing her again. She thought she’d become better at compartmentalizing.
Consider it a dance and it’s just a dance.
But when she felt those tingles of anticipation where his fingers trailed her spine, oh, boy, was she in trouble.
In the military the ability to compartmentalize was a necessary part of survival. She couldn’t walk around with her head in the clouds or she’d likely trip herself up. She had to stay grounded in reality. Focused.
Concentrate on the task at hand.
Watch where she stepped and be aware of her surroundings at all times.
But she couldn’t do that here, not with him. Not for another twenty minutes.
Let alone twenty days.
Not when the instant she let her guard down all those old feelings came rushing in. No wonder one or the other of them picked a fight after two or three days.
She had a new name for fight or flight.
All her senses were screaming. Put out or get out. Fast.
“So how do you know the redhead?”
He seemed to gauge his words. “What if I said I honestly couldn’t remember?”
“That makes it ten times worse.”
“I honestly can’t remember.”
“Have you slept with her?”
He stopped dancing. “Not once in six years have you asked me that question.” He sounded more than just a little irritated. “You don’t get to be engaged to another man and ask me that.”
THE DRIVE HOME WAS a silent one. The tension in the cab of the truck was so thick he couldn’t have cut it with a hacksaw. She shouldn’t ask him personal questions if she really didn’t want to know the answer.
And if she didn’t like the answer, tough.
“Do you really want know?”
He’d startled her with the question, he could tell. She cast a sharp glance in his direction. She’d understood immediately what he was talking about. She’d been thinking about it.
Had he slept with the redhead?
She wanted to know, all right. She wanted to know because she wanted an excuse, any excuse, to pick a whopper of a fight. And he was ready for it. If that was what it took to get it all out in the open, so be it. Either they’d get beyond this or they wouldn’t. He glanced at her reflection in the windshield. The cab was dark and he could barely make out her features in the reflected glow of the dashboard lights. “Come on, let’s play our own version of the newlywed game. How well do we really know each other?”
“Yes, I want to know,” she snapped. “As if I don’t know the answer already.”
“She’s someone I knew from high school. I didn’t recognize her at first because she’s lost a lot of weight,” he said, letting that sink in. “I didn’t sleep with her then. And I sure as hell haven’t slept with her since.”
“Okay, so you haven’t slept with her.”
He turned down the ranch road.
“Now ask me how many women I’ve slept with since we first met.” As she studied his face he could only look at her through the reflection. “But don’t ask it unless you’re prepared to hear the answer.”
He pulled up in front of the ranch house and parked. “You want me to believe,” she said, “that you haven’t slept with another woman since the day we met.”
“Call me old-fashioned. It was also the day we married.”
“It wasn’t that kind of marriage.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed. “I thought I’d be divorced in six months, so why not wait? And that wasn’t exactly a period in my life when I was looking for companionship. Six months later I had Ryder for a year and a steep learning curve.”
“But after that—”
“Was right after we slept together. The truth is, six years later I don’t know why the hell we’re still married.”
He stared at her. She stared at her hands in her lap.
“What if I’m not ready for this to end?” he asked.
She looked at him then. It didn’t matter that there was a console in the way. He reached across that divide and kissed her. Her lips parted in surprise as he tested his limits. Tasted that minty mojito.
“No.” She pushed against his chest. “You had six years to kiss me, Hatch. You can’t kiss me now. Not like that.”
THE CLERK EYEBALLED Angela above her reading glasses. “Take a number, please.”
Angela wondered if she should point out that there was nobody else here. But the woman already knew that and just wanted to exert her authority.
So Angela took a number and waited while the ten numbers ahead of hers were called. She wouldn’t be surprised to find the woman had ripped the numbers off herself just to play games with people. Angela was in no mood for games.
She was here to file for divorce. She touched her fingers to her lips. The sooner the better. Hatch had kissed her last night like he’d meant it. But maybe the only thing he’d meant by it was that he didn’t like to lose. Because he’d certainly never made a move before the threat of losing both her and Ryder.
Ryder had left with Hatch for the feed store earlier in the morning. She was going to find it hard spending time with her son while avoiding her husband if the two of them were always together.
Finally her number was called and stepped forward. “I want to file for divorce.”
“You’re Clay’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m afraid you can’t,” the woman said with a smug smile.
“I have proof of residency.” Angela dug a handful of bills and statements out of her purse and showed them to the clerk.
“Clay filed this morning.” The woman threw that out like a bad punch line. “That makes you the defendant. Will you be contesting these divorce proceedings, Mrs. Miner?” she inquired.
“It’s Angela Adams,” she said. “And, no. No, I won’t be contesting this divorce.”
“Why don’t you save the sheriff a trip out to the ranch and pick up your summons next door. I’m surprised Clay chose irreconcilable differences. He should have chosen by reason of insanity. You are crazy to let that man go!”
Angela left the clerk’s office and headed over to the sheriff’s department in the same building. As luck would h
ave it her summons was still in their office and they were happy to let her sign for it.
Stepping outside, she heard her name—well, Mom—and turned to see Ryder waving from the passenger seat of Hatch’s truck. Like the man driving it, the truck had a lot more mileage on it these days. They all did. He checked his rearview mirror and slowed to a stop in the middle of the street as she walked up to her son’s open window.
“Hi,” she said, including them both.
That side was Hatch’s blind side, so he had to turn in his seat to be able to see her. “We’re heading back now,” he said.
He glanced at the legal document in her hand, recognizing it for what it was, and met her gaze head-on. His lips were pinched—with regret?—and seeing it made her own smile feel forced.
The countdown to the end of their marriage had begun.
They’d waited this long. Three weeks wouldn’t kill them.
And hopefully, they wouldn’t kill each other.
“ALEX FINDS THIS BORING,” Ryder whispered later that evening as the three of them were lying in wait in one of Hatch’s deer blinds. “But I know you’ll like it.”
“I’m certain I will,” Angela whispered back.
Hatch cast her a glance over Ryder’s head as if to say they were doing too much talking and not enough waiting. That her nine-year-old even knew this was called a kill plot was a bit disconcerting.
“It’s just a name, Mom,” he said. “You don’t hunt fawns or their mothers.”
But mama deer had a spot nearby and stopped for a quick bite on the way to the feeding grounds. The fawns were old enough now to follow her.
And sure enough, after sixty minutes of waiting, twenty minutes in total silence, they saw the doe and her spotted twins. Hatch passed the binoculars to Ryder, who took a peek and passed them along to Angela.
A short while later the deer moved on from the grassy knoll, but the three humans continued to stare in awed silence. Broken at last by her son’s awkward assertion.
“Hatch, if you wanted to make a baby with my mom, that would be all right with me.”
Marry Me, Marine Page 14