And then he’d gotten in the car and headed for the Hill Country, deciding about ten minutes into the drive that running away wouldn’t solve a damn thing. He needed to deal with the problem, needed to call a halt to the pending disaster that would be his marriage to Lianna.
So he went to meet her at the plane.
Ash smiled to himself. Yeah. He remembered. He remembered it all. At last, he knew for certain. What had happened, how it had gone down—all the way to the moment when he found himself lying in a snowbank after the crash, his mind blinking in and out of consciousness but clearing long enough to watch a guy in winter gear and a ski mask come roaring up on a snowmobile. Ash had thought he was rescued. But then the guy jumped off just long enough to go through his pockets and strip off his Rolex. Then the thief was back on that snowmobile, roaring away through trees.
Amazing. Mugged by a snowmobiler after a plane crash. Who would have guessed it? Ash had lain there in the snow for an indeterminate time after the guy in the ski mask rode away with his wallet and his watch. Eventually, he’d managed to get upright and somehow, he’d staggered through the snow to the highway where a kind-hearted trucker had picked him up.
Oh, yeah. Everything. He remembered it all.
And he would deal with Lianna now, this morning. Nothing was going to stop him. He’d been put off way more than long enough. He stepped forward, took the housekeeper by her plump shoulders and moved her to the side. Tuning out her frantic protests, he rapped on Lianna’s door.
On the other side, she started shouting again. He heard her stomping closer. “What is the matter with you, Marta? I said—” She flung the door wide—and gasped. “Oh! Ash…” Her face was flushed. She wore a bronze wisp of silk. And nothing else. There were fading bruises from the crash on her arms and legs. The bandage around her head was gone. So was her hair on one side, where they must have shaved it at the hospital.
From the first door at the top of the hall, her father called, “Lianna, what the hell is going on?”
Ash stuck his foot in the way so she couldn’t try to shut the door on him. He spoke softly. “We have to talk. You know we do.”
“Lianna!” Her father’s voice boomed again.
Lianna seemed to know she was caught. She brought her hand up to the bald side of her head. “I look awful…”
“You look fine. We have to talk.”
“Lianna!” her father bellowed a third time.
“It’s nothing, Daddy,” she called sweetly. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep…” The door down the hall clicked shut. And Lianna stepped back, allowing him into the room. “You can go, Marta,” she told the housekeeper before closing the door.
Ash stood there, staring at her. He hardly knew where to begin.
“All right.” Her pretty mouth quivered. She sagged against the shut door. “Say it. Just go ahead. Say it.”
They stood in a sitting room. Through another doorway he could see her wide bed, satin sheets in disarray.
“We broke up,” he said. “I remember it clearly now.”
“No…” She put a hand to her mouth as the tears welled and began leaking from the corners of her eyes. “No…”
“Yes.” He told it as it had happened. “You were already on the plane when I got on with you. You started ragging on me for being late. I said I wasn’t late. I was only there to tell you it wasn’t going to work with us. I said how sorry I was, but it was over.”
“Oh, no…”
“That’s exactly what you said, Lianna. No. Over and over. You were crying. And yelling. You started throwing things from that giant shiny red bag you’d brought into the cabin with you, screaming at me, calling me all kinds of really colorful names.”
“I didn’t…” She was sobbing now, all pain and denial. But he looked in her streaming eyes and he saw the lie there. She had thrown things. And even if the head wound she’d suffered kept her from recalling the specifics, she knew he’d called it off with her. She’d been lying from the moment she regained consciousness, even though the lie was so damn pointless. Eventually, it had been bound to come to this.
Ash went on, speaking softly, patiently, “The copilot came out of the cockpit and said they were ready for takeoff. I told him I wasn’t going. You dug in your heels and said that you were. So I asked the copilot to give me five minutes and I’d be off that plane. He ducked back into the cockpit.” Ash remembered the look on the man’s face. The guy had flown Lianna before and he was only too happy to get out of that cabin, to put a door between himself and the crazy Mercer heiress. Ash said, “You started ranting at me again, that I couldn’t break up with you, that we were getting married and if I thought otherwise, I was very wrong.”
“Ash. Please…”
“Almost done,” he told her gently. “Then you pulled that bottle of Cristal from that red bag of yours…”
“No. Oh, no…”
“I didn’t see you do it. I was already turning to go. You said, ‘Ash. One more thing.’ And when I turned back, you hit me in the forehead with that bottle.” He reached up, absently, touched the healing scar. “It wasn’t the plane crash that almost cost me my life. It was you and a bottle of excellent champagne.” And that was why he had reeked of booze, later, when he’d forgotten who the hell he was.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she cried. “I was…so upset…”
“But you did do it. And now you’ve admitted that you do remember.”
“I…oh, God…” Sobs shook her slender frame.
He said, “I stayed on my feet. I thought I was all right. It wasn’t until later, after the crash, when the blood started leaking under the bone, that I lost consciousness. But at the time, when you hit me and the champagne went flying, I just went into the restroom to clean up. And while I was in there, the plane started moving…”
“You have to understand,” Lianna sobbed. “It was terrible for me…” She buried her face in her hands and her slim shoulders shook.
He went to a fragile inlaid side table and whipped several tissues from the box waiting there. Then, with caution, he approached her again. “Here.” So strange that he could speak to her kindly, in spite of what she’d done. But then again, maybe not so strange. After all, he had pursued her. He had wanted her for her looks and her connections, for her money and her father’s influence. And he’d almost ended up getting exactly what he wanted.
She reached up and took the tissues from his hand.
He continued, “You had told the pilot I’d left the plane. So they closed the doors, told you to buckle up, and took off.”
She blew her nose. Loudly. “I just wanted us to have a little time together…”
“Lianna.”
She gazed up at him through brimming eyes. “Oh, Ash…”
“It’s over. It was over before you whacked me with that bottle. You know it. So do I. And after you hit me, I considered pounding on the door and telling the pilot to take me back to the gate. But then I decided I’d leave it alone, just go ahead and fly to San Francisco, and turn around and fly right back. If you’ll recall—and you do recall, don’t you…?”
“I…I…”
“You know what? Don’t tell me. I’ll tell you. I spent the trip in the sleeping alcove, with the door between it and the main cabin pulled shut and latched, reeking of expensive champagne because it was all over me and I had no clean clothes to change into. Eventually, the ride got too wild and I came back out and buckled up and tried to calm you down again.”
In the endless twenty minutes or so before the crash, the plane had lunged from side to side, shuddering, while it dropped and leveled out, rose and dropped again, keeping them plunging and bucking, worse than any airplane turbulence he’d ever known.
There was little more to say. He finished the story. “And that was it. The plane crashed.”
Lianna collapsed to the floor. She wrapped her arms around her knees and curled into a ball. “I…I messed up. I know it.”
He stood above
her, staring down at her half-shaved bent head. Gently, he instructed, “You will tell your parents and everyone else that you realized you were wrong, to have agreed to marry me. That you know now it can never work out. You just don’t love me. And so you had to break it off with me. I’ll tell everyone the same thing.”
She lifted her face to him, swiped the tears away—and took the giant engagement ring from her finger. “I…thank you.”
She was thanking him? “For what?”
“For saving me my pride, at least, for letting me call it my choice, for not suing me for bashing you over the head the way I did…” In her big brown eyes, he saw a flicker of real understanding. Maybe there was hope for her after all. In time. Once she grew up a little. She held out the ring to him. And then she blinked. “You’re not…going to sue me, are you?”
He shook his head. “Keep the damn ring. Sell it. Give it away. Whatever.” Ash felt the weight of the world lift from his shoulders. He no longer had to wonder what had happened on that plane. And Lianna had finally accepted that the two of them were through.
His life was his own again. He knew himself better than he ever had before. He understood who he was and where he came from in a way he never had until now.
Most important of all, he knew where he was going.
Chapter Sixteen
In North Magdalene, Saturday dawned cold and crystal-clear. Tessa looked out her bedroom window and breathed a sigh of relief. It was a good day. A perfect day. Just as Tawny Riggins had always insisted it would be.
At 2:00 in the afternoon, in the white clapboard Community Church, Tawny walked down the aisle to marry her longtime love, Parker Montgomery.
Tawny’s dad gave her away and Parker’s brother, Price, was the best man. Tawny had five bridesmaids, all dressed in red velvet—including Tessa. The matron of honor, Tawny’s big sister, Amy Riggins Jones, wore red velvet, too.
The bride was a vision in white satin and lace. She carried red roses, which she passed to Amy before the exchange of vows.
“I do,” said the groom, his voice steady and sure.
“I do,” said the bride, all the stars of the heavens shining in her eyes.
“You may kiss the bride.”
And Parker took Tawny in his loving arms as everyone in the chapel erupted in cheers and joyous applause.
After the vows, they all went over to the town hall, where there was a sit-down steak dinner for three hundred, followed by dancing upstairs in the knotty-pine ballroom.
Tessa danced with her dad and her uncles, with so many of the guys she’d grown up with, most of whom were married now to women she’d known all her life.
She chatted with her sister, Marnie, who had driven up with Mark from Santa Barbara for the occasion.
“You look good,” Marnie said.
“I feel good,” Tessa said. And strangely, she did. She missed Ash every day, she wondered how he was, if he was well. She thought that the time might come when she’d have to head for Texas. But that time wasn’t yet. Tessa confided in her sister. “I’m thinking of selling the store and trying my luck elsewhere.”
“You’re kidding me. I never thought you’d leave town.”
“Oh, well. What can I say? Even your saintly big sister is capable of change.”
The bride and groom cut the cake.
And then Tawny threw her bouquet. Tessa caught it, which had everybody clapping wildly. She simply turned and handed it to Marnie. “I believe this is yours.”
Marnie winked at Mark. “We’ll see…”
The bride and groom were leaving for their honeymoon in the Bahamas. Everyone ran out to Main Street and pelted the long, white limousine with birdseed as the car rolled majestically away from them, the beer cans tied to the back bumper banging and clanging along the street like an out-of-tune brass band.
Once the limo disappeared around a turn, they all filed back inside, where the band started in again.
Oggie hobbled up to Tessa, hooked his manzanita cane over his arm and bowed in a fashion that could only be called courtly. “Tessy, may I have this dance?”
So she danced with her grandpa, slowly, to an old song they were probably playing back when he and her Grandma Bathsheba were in love. As the song ended, Oggie announced, “I just want to say, he’d better be good to you.”
She laughed, “Grandpa, what are you babbling about?”
“I never babble.” He took his cane from over his arm, leaned on it, and pointed with his other gnarly hand. “Look there. At the door.”
Slowly, Tessa turned as the final bars of the song faded on the air. “Ash,” she whispered, hardly daring to believe.
He stood in the doorway to the landing and the stairs leading down to the lower floor. The light from the landing limned his black hair in gold. He wore black slacks and a white shirt and a perfectly cut sport coat. She had never in her life seen a man as handsome as Ash Bravo, standing there so tall and proud, his blue gaze scanning the room.
Her grandpa, shameless as always, was shooing everyone from the floor. “Go on now, step back. Give a man the space to find what he’s looking for.” He cleared the way between Tessa and the man in the doorway.
And then it happened. Ash saw her standing there alone in the center of the scuffed pine floor.
He came for her, in long strides, those fancy boots of his eating up the distance between them.
And then he was there, before her. And the ballroom was so silent, you could have heard a snowflake drift to the floor.
He said, “At last.”
And she said, “Oh, Ash.”
“Did you doubt me?”
“Not too much. Not deep in my heart.”
“I’m free now.”
“I know that. I can see it in your eyes.”
“I love you, Tessa.”
“And, Ash, I love you.”
He stepped closer. And before she realized what he was up to, he’d braced a hand at her back and slid one low behind her knees and lifted her high against his broad chest, as if she weighed nothing—in just the way she knew her Uncle Sam had lifted her Aunt Delilah, to carry her from The Hole in the Wall and into their future as husband and wife.
Right then, the whole place erupted in catcalls and whistles. And Ash Bravo carried Tessa Jones out of that ballroom.
Into love. And happiness.
And the rest of their lives.
Watch for Gabe Bravo’s story,
The Bravo Bachelor,
coming in April 2010 only from
Mills & Boon® Special Moments™
Mills & Boon® Special Moments™
brings you a sneak preview.
In A Fortune Wedding it has been nearly twenty years
since the one-night fling between Frannie Fortune and
Roberto Mendoza. But now Roberto is back and
secrets of their past are about to explode into the
present – along with an ironclad love that
cannot be denied!
Turn the page for a peek at this fantastic new story
from Kristin Hardy, available next month in
Mills & Boon® Special Moments™!
Don’t forget you can still find all your favourite
Superromance and Special Edition stories
every month in Special Moments™!
A Fortune Wedding
by
Kristin Hardy
Red Rock, Texas
July 1991
“Come on, boy, come on,” Roberto Mendoza muttered, crouching over the withers of Cisco, his big bay gelding, as they raced up the tree-studded grassy slope. The speed was intoxicating. The wind rushed over his skin. A kaleidoscope of sound filled his ears—the thud of hoofbeats, the rush of his own breath.
The silvery sound of laughter ahead of him.
And then they burst up onto the hilltop, the great blue bowl of the sky arching overhead.
“Hah! We beat you!” Frannie Fortune whooped, reining in her little c
hestnut mare and wheeling around. “Who says the girls can’t outdo the boys?” With her short, sunbeam-blond hair and tilted eyes, she looked like a pixie, ready for mischief.
Life, Roberto thought, just didn’t get any better than this.
“You girls only won because you took a shortcut,” he told her.
“Don’t blame us because we’re smarter. We just took a faster way.”
“Yeah, like straight up the side of the hill.”
“Admit it, you’re impressed.”
He grinned. “I am, but next time you decide to take your shortcut, leave me with a suicide note for your uncle. I’m supposed to be watching out for you.”
Her cheeks were still flushed with the excitement of the race. “I keep telling Uncle Ryan I don’t need looking after. So I got thrown once. It can happen to anyone. You try staying in the saddle when a killdeer flies up between the feet of that monster you’re on,” she challenged. “See how you feel when your fanny hits the ground.”
Roberto’s lips twitched as he slid off Cisco. “I guess you’ll have to come to my rescue.”
“If you’re lucky.” She gave him an arch look.
How had he ever thought her standoffish? It hadn’t been that, but simple shyness that had kept her quiet and to herself when she’d first arrived at the Double Crown Ranch where he worked. As the weeks had passed, she’d blossomed, quiet diffidence giving way to a sly humor that perpetually hovered around that delicate mouth, the surprisingly bawdy laughter that burst out of her more and more often as the days went by.
Maybe it was just being here, out on the ranch, amid the rolling terrain of Texas hill country. It could make anybody happy, although he might be biased. No matter where his life took him, Roberto thought, no place would ever feel as right as this patch of territory where he knew nearly every tree, bush and bird by name. It was in his blood, as much a part of him as his brown eyes.
Frannie walked over to stand next to him. “You think you’ll ever leave here?” she asked, as if she knew what he’d been thinking.
The Stranger and Tessa Jones Page 17