“Well,” she began when she was sure her voice would be steady, “she’s settled now. She and Reese are very happy together.”
“They sure do look it.” Doris Irene grinned slyly. “Maybe you can take some pointers from them.” Then she leaned over and kissed Hallie’s cheek. “I think I’ll go find William and see if I can get him to dance with me. I haven’t kicked up my heels in far too long. See you, baby.”
Though she tried her best not to swear, once her mother was out of sight, Hallie muttered, “Damn, damn, damn.”
“Careful there.” The words were delivered in a low, throaty, lazy drawl from behind her. “Oklahoma’s got a law on the books against swearing in public. I’d hate to have to take you away from Neely and Reese’s party in handcuffs.”
She turned to find Brady Marshall leaning one shoulder against her tree trunk. Like the other groomsmen, he’d changed out of his tuxedo, and he looked even better in his jeans and a black shirt than he had in the bar the other night. When she’d seen him sitting there alone, she’d been speechless for a moment. He was quite possibly the most handsome man she’d ever seen. He stood six-four, was lean and hard-muscled, and everything about him that night, like tonight, had been dark—from his hair and skin to his shirt, jeans and cowboy hat, to the aura surrounding him. He’d been the epitome of tall, dark and handsome…to say nothing of dangerous.
She’d spent ten minutes at the bar, watching him, speculating about him. Why was he there, and why was he alone? Was there a Mrs. Tall, Dark and Handsome, and if so, why did she let him out of the house without her protection? Finally she’d found the courage to take him a bottle of beer, and she’d seen that not everything about him was dark. His eyes were as blue as the clearest spring sky.
He’d looked incapable of smiling, of any tender emotions at all, but later, at the motel, he’d touched her tenderly. He’d made her feel…. She tilted her head to one side, considering that sentence. No, there wasn’t anything missing. That was all she wanted to say. He’d made her feel.
Shaking off the memories, she forced her attention back to his remark. “You’re kidding, right?”
Under the neat black mustache his finely shaped mouth was unsmiling, but there was something she thought might be humor in his voice. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly hate it, but I don’t think seeing me arrest their bridesmaid is exactly the sort of memory Neely and Reese want to take away tonight.”
She made a face. “I meant about the law.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t kid about such things. It’s punishable by thirty days in jail and a fine of up to $500.” After a moment, he gestured toward the dance floor. “Why aren’t you out there with your sisters?”
“I’d rather enjoy it from back here.”
“You don’t look like you’re enjoying it much.”
Drat him. Her sisters and her mother hadn’t noticed that she was putting on an act. How had this man who didn’t know her at all guessed it? But rather than try to find a response, she turned the subject back on him. “Why aren’t you out there?”
“I ran out of Madison sisters to dance with.”
She lowered her gaze to hide the fact that she would enjoy dancing with him. She already knew, both from watching him with her sisters and from the hours she’d spent with him, that his movements were graceful, sensual and powerfully controlled. She would very much like to feel his arms around her one more time, to let the heat radiating from his body warm her, to close her eyes and breathe deeply of his purely male scent and sway slowly in time to the music.
Sure, and when the dance was over and he walked away from her, what would she want then? How would she feel?
She was tired of men walking away from her, tired of never being enough for them.
“I take it you’re not fond of weddings,” Brady remarked.
“Or too fond of them, according to my family.”
“They’ve come to expect weddings from you?”
Realizing he’d overheard her conversation with her mother, she managed a quavery, embarrassed smile. “We weren’t properly introduced, were we?” She stuck out her hand. “Hi, I’m Hallie Madison, Neely’s younger sister and three-time loser at the game of marriage.”
She’d meant it as a bad joke, but before she could withdraw her hand, he’d taken it, enveloping it in his. His hands had fascinated her Thursday night—large, powerful, his fingers long and narrow, capable of calming a small child, controlling a grown man or arousing a needy woman. She had wondered if his palms were callused, his caresses rough, and decided they were, then he’d proved it in her room. His touch had been enough to make a lonely woman weep.
“Three times, huh?” he murmured, still holding her hand.
“At least you kept trying. I gave up after the first one.”
A flicker of something shadowed his eyes after he’d spoken. Surprise? Uneasiness? Did he know he’d told her more than the simple fact that he’d been married and divorced—that now she knew he must have been brokenhearted over the end of his marriage? With the shortage of marriageable men, it was a fact of life that men as handsome as he, as amazingly sexy as he, didn’t remain single long, not unless the scars from their failed relationships ran too deep to heal.
“You learned from your mistake. I didn’t.” Though she would be perfectly content to stand there all night with her hand in his, she caught the looks that said people were starting to notice. Gently she tugged, and after a moment’s hesitation, he let go. “What did you think of Kylie?”
“Truthfully?” He waited for her nod before he went on.
“She’s not my type.”
“Nope, sorry, wrong answer. If Neely thinks you two are right for each other, then you are. She’s never wrong.”
Ignoring her disagreement, he pushed away from the tree. “Come and dance with me.”
A shiver skittered through Hallie, making her face warm, her palms damp and her hands unsteady. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“I think it’s an excellent idea.” He pulled the bottle of water from her hand and set it on a nearby table, then clasped her hand in his and started for the pavilion.
The music was slow and romantic, and the lights cast flickering shadows back and forth as they swayed in the breeze. For one fearful moment, she wished she could break free and run off into the night. He was too tempting. She was too emotionally fragile. Neely honestly wasn’t ever wrong.
But, as if he sensed her skittishness, he held her hand tightly as he led the way to the middle of the dance floor. There he stopped and pulled her slowly into his arms, closer than was proper, practically as close as they’d been Thursday night.
It was an incredible place to be.
Hallie held back as much as she could. Occasionally she made eye contact with one sister or another, and once Doris Irene and her husband, William, waltzed past, and Hallie was convinced they were all wondering what Brady was doing with her instead of Kylie. When she caught a glimpse of Neely and Reese both watching them, she lowered her gaze to the center of Brady’s chest and wished once again that she was someplace else.
“Relax,” he murmured in her ear. “Surely you’re used to people looking at you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re a beautiful woman, and people tend to look at beautiful women.”
Tilting her head back, Hallie met his gaze. “Okay, I get it. Your job tonight—besides acting as a groomsman—is keeping the newly divorced bridesmaid from ruining everyone’s fun with her mood, right?”
He gazed down at her a long time. His blue eyes revealed nothing, but she had the sense that her words offended or irritated him. When he spoke, though, his tone was no different than before. “Trust me, I would be the last person in the county anyone would choose to entertain, flatter or even talk to anyone else.”
“And why is that?”
While he considered an answer, the music ended and so did the dance. He didn’t release her right away, bu
t held her and looked at her and made her feel incredibly warm and tingly, until finally Del Barnett’s voice quieted the crowd.
“Reese wanted to sneak out of here, but Neely says she’s got three single sisters and she’s not going without throwing her bouquet. So all you unmarried ladies gather around up here, and all you single men be prepared to run.”
It seemed to Hallie that everyone was moving someplace except her and Brady. He was still just looking at her, and darned if she couldn’t pull her gaze away from his.
Abruptly he let her go. “Go on.”
“I’m not single.”
“You’re not married.”
“No, I’m divorced. There’s a difference.”
“Not enough to count. Go on, or your sisters will create a scene.”
Already she was dimly aware of Kylie and Bailey calling her name in unison. She looked at Brady, and he looked away, breaking the spell that held her. Without a word, she walked away and joined the group of women on the grass.
With her back to them, Neely gave the flowers a great toss, and they tumbled, stem over bloom, through the air straight at Hallie. She didn’t raise her hands, didn’t move, didn’t do a thing. When Kylie reached across and grabbed them before they hit the ground, Hallie looked back to where she’d left Brady.
He was gone.
He was a cold-hearted bastard.
Brady stood in the shadow of a clump of trees where no light could reach and watched as Neely and Reese said goodbye to their families. Neely hugged her mother, then her sisters, starting with Bailey and ending with Hallie. She was the only blonde in a family of brunettes, but it was more than her hair color that set her apart. She was lonely. Wounded.
And he wanted to take advantage of that.
Farewells said, Neely and Reese got into the waiting limousine, and the driver slowly pulled away. They were spending the night in Tulsa, then catching an early flight to the Caribbean. There they would be taken by boat to an isolated island where one of Reese’s friends from his pro baseball days was letting them use his beachfront estate. They weren’t planning to come back for three weeks—unless she decided just to stay forever, Neely had threatened.
As the limo disappeared from sight, the wedding guests began heading back to their dancing, visiting and celebrating. Hallie talked to her sisters for a few minutes and got hugs from both of them. Kylie tried to give her the bridal bouquet—probably with a joke about Hallie’s multiple marriages. Her family didn’t appear to have a clue how three divorces had affected her.
After refusing the flowers, Hallie left her sisters and headed toward the church. She passed within ten feet of where he stood, so close he could smell her fragrance on the warm night air. She spoke politely to guests going the other way, then crossed the street to her car, a flashy little blue convertible.
He waited until she’d driven away to move out of the shadows. His truck was parked down the block and around the corner, but he didn’t hurry. There was only one main road from Heartbreak to Buffalo Plains, and he knew where she was staying.
Plus, he needed time to talk himself out of what he wanted.
He was almost at his truck when a voice called, “Hey, Brady.”
He knew before he turned it was Jace Barnett. He was a couple of years older than Brady, Reese’s cousin and a detective with the Kansas City Police Department, and after Reese and Neely, he was the closest thing to a friend Brady had. “Jace.”
“You heading off this early? You know a few dozen of these folks will be here until the early hours of the morning—including me.”
“I’m not much on parties.”
“Reese says you’ll be acting sheriff while he’s gone.”
“Yeah.” He’d never officially held the position—Reese wasn’t in the habit of taking vacations—but he’d been in charge every other weekend for the past two years. He could handle it for three weeks. It wasn’t as if Canyon County was likely to develop a rash of crimes the minute the sheriff left the state.
“Watch out,” Jace said good-naturedly as Brady reached his truck. “Don’t let the paperwork get to you.”
Something had already gotten to him, Brady thought as he climbed in, and it wasn’t work. He waved goodbye to Jace, then headed for Main Street.
It took five miles, and passing a half dozen cars, to catch up to the convertible with California tags. He got only close enough to be sure it was Hallie’s car, then dropped back a fair distance.
He wasn’t going to follow her to the motel, and there were a dozen reasons or more why. She was his boss’s sister-in-law, and anyone knew you didn’t mess with a man’s family. He’d be better off home alone. She’d been hurt before. He would just be using her, and she’d been used enough.
When they reached the Buffalo Plains town limits, she headed into downtown, where a right turn would take her to her motel on the east side of town. After a moment’s hesitation, he took the first right, onto Cedar Street, and drove the block and a half to his house.
Until two weeks ago, he’d spent his entire six years in Buffalo Plains in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment on the west end of town and had been satisfied there—satisfaction being relative, of course. Then one day while on patrol, he’d seen an old man hammering a For Sale sign in the yard that fronted a small neat house. He’d stopped to ask him about it and had driven away a half hour later with the keys in his pocket and a sales contract pending.
It wasn’t a great house. It was sixty years old, one story, painted white with dark green trim. There was a front porch wide enough for a swing and a back stoop barely big enough for a man to stand on. Inside was a living room, a dining room and kitchen, one bedroom and bathroom, and an additional room he planned someday to incorporate into the living room. The floors were wood, with cracked and peeling linoleum in the kitchen, and the walls needed painting, the bathroom updating, the roof reshingling. He’d paid cash for it, and could have done the same for a house ten times its price, but he hadn’t wanted a bigger, nicer place.
After all, he hadn’t been buying a house but a memory.
One of the few childhood memories he recalled with fondness.
He pulled into the gravel driveway and parked next to his sheriff’s department SUV, then shut off the engine. Nights were quiet in this part of town. The lots were several acres, the houses distant from each other, and behind them was pasture. Forty acres of it had come with the house, but the old man had leased it to a neighboring rancher, and Brady had continued the lease. Someday, though, he planned to put up a barn and buy a few horses from Easy Rafferty, one of Reese’s friends over in Heartbreak who raised damn fine paints.
He went inside the dark, empty house, turned on the TV and settled on the sofa with a beer. Welcome to his usual Saturday night.
Most of the time he didn’t care how alone he was. Hell, he’d been that way so long it had come to feel natural. Growing up, he and his kid brother, Logan, had pretty much been each other’s best—and only—friends. They’d known other kids at school, of course, but they’d kept to themselves. It had seemed safer that way.
Then Logan had disappeared without a trace nearly seventeen years ago. Brady had gone to bed one night and Logan was there in the next room, and he’d awakened the next morning and his brother was gone. He’d taken his clothes and left a note, one line that had just about killed Brady.
He didn’t let himself think about Logan very often, but tonight it somehow seemed appropriate. Where was he? Had he even survived the last seventeen years? Had he managed to make himself over into someone who could live a normal life, have friends, laugh, be happy? Had he ever married, had kids? Did he ever think about looking up his older brother?
Probably no more often than Brady thought about trying to find him. He had run a nationwide driver’s license check a few years ago and come up with a number of Logan Marshalls, but none whose birth date matched his brother’s. He’d even considered hiring a private investigator, but had discarded the idea. Log
an had had his reasons for taking off the way he did. The least Brady could do was respect them.
He flipped through the channels, watched the clock and told himself that, barring any emergencies, he was home for the night. Bored with television, he went in and took a shower, then went into the bedroom to get a pair of boxers. He wasn’t getting dressed, he told himself, even as he took a clean pair of Levi’s from the closet, and he repeated it as he pulled a T-shirt from the dresser drawer. He absolutely wasn’t going anywhere, he insisted as he picked up his wallet, pager and keys from the dresser, then started toward the front door.
He wasn’t going to the motel.
Wasn’t parking beside her Mercedes in the back lot.
Wasn’t climbing the stairs.
Wasn’t standing in front of Room 22.
He stood there, trying desperately to talk himself out of knocking. But damn it, being accustomed to being alone didn’t mean it didn’t eat at him sometimes. Some days the need for somebody got under his skin and damn near drove him mad until he’d satisfied it. That was what had sent him to the bar Thursday night—what had made him come back to the motel with Hallie. Usually that one night would have been enough to fill the emptiness that sometimes consumed him and would enable him to go back to his life for a few more months.
But this time, God help him, he wanted more, and Hallie Madison was the perfect person to give it. They’d already filled each other’s needs once. He liked her, and she… He didn’t know whether she liked him, but at least she wasn’t intimidated by him.
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