The Bride Ran Away

Sophie stanched the urge to defend herself. She nodded and turned to descend the granite steps.

The weather had changed. The Mom’s Place looked less rosy under a now cloudy sky, and a chill breeze mussed her hair. Even the girls had taken their books inside.

Sophie glanced toward her car and froze. Ian had materialized, seemingly out of nowhere. Long and lean, feet crossed at the ankles, he was braced against her car. Her first thought was that he had to be cold in his light camel-colored windbreaker. Then she saw anger in his blue eyes. His mouth was a thin slash of pain.

She walked toward him. “Why are you following me?” she asked. She couldn’t control the desire she felt at seeing him, but then stiffened against it. Her body was no longer running her relationship with Ian.

“You’re my wife. You’re carrying my child. I want to be with you. Take your pick.”

“You’ve prepared a series of stories?” She had to get Ian out of here before Gran saw him and called for family reinforcements. “Let’s start with the one where you want to be with me. You’re saying that because you think that’s what I want to hear. We can drop that whole ‘wife’ concept, because we’re getting divorced. That leaves you thinking you owe something to my baby.” She halted, prepared to shove him aside to reach her car door. “You owe the baby nothing. I’m the one who depended on a condom.” She was allergic to the Pill, but she’d never explained that to Ian. Who’d have thought she’d need to? “This is my child.”

“Mine, too.” His dogged gaze devoured her. He might be looking for changes in her body, but his regard turned her heart into a battle drum.

She longed to throw him off her mountain. Her sense of his betrayal was still so strong she wanted to call her cousin Zach, the local sheriff, to chat with Ian about stalking.

“Even if you plan to be the baby’s father, you have no business near me until I deliver.” She fished her keys from her purse and held them up. “Will you move?”

He straightened, his skin taut across his cheekbones. “I made a mistake.” Tired and anxious, his voice softened with a plea that unsettled her. Ian never begged.

“It’s too late.” She lifted her keys again.

He ignored them. “I’m sorry.” She could hear the ache in his tone. “I don’t know how to be a husband, but I’ll do my best if you give me a chance. How can I convince you?”

“Make me forget you lied about wanting to be one.” A horrible truth dawned on her. She actually wished she could forget what he’d said at the church. “I trusted you.”

“I didn’t lie.” He held himself still, his only movement the rubbing of his right thumb against his index finger. One night as they’d lain in a moonlight-painted bed, he’d told her that finger, unnaturally straight from middle knuckle to nail, tingled in cold weather.

She’d never asked how he’d damaged it. Why hadn’t she? Why hadn’t he told her, anyway? None of that mattered now.

“If I thought I couldn’t be with my child any other way,” she said, “I’d pretend I wanted you, too.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again without speaking. She suddenly found herself focusing on it. She remembered how it felt beneath hers, moist with passion, seductively destroying that common sense her grandmother had mentioned. She’d glimpsed a future in his kisses. She’d believed in him because she’d thought no one could make love as they had without sharing more than just physical need.

“Sophie.” He curved his hand around her forearm. “When you look at me like that…”

He dragged her closer, but it wasn’t hard. She forgot to resist. His breath whispered against her lips.

He paused, his seemingly defenseless gaze almost asking permission. She could break away if only she could remember how to make her feet move. She might have been dangling in midair. She’d made another mistake, putting herself within his reach.

She was about to make a worse one. She closed her eyes and sighed in absolute, physical relief when Ian brushed his lips over hers.

A sane inner voice commanded her to run. She made herself deaf. She hadn’t touched him in nearly three weeks, and she’d pined for his hands on her, his kiss, his beating heart pressed against her seeking palm.

This was their strongest bond, and she needed him in ways she didn’t begin to understand. He closed the chilly space between them. Sophie slid her hands into the hair at his nape and pulled his head down to hers with strength born of inexplicable longing. Holding Ian was more like coming home than driving up the mountain road had been.

He tightened his arms as if surprised to find her in them. His warm hands bunched her sweater. She breathed in as his fingertips traced her spine, her rib cage, the curve of her breasts.

A moment’s shame flitted through her as she welcomed his touch. She’d run from that church because she hadn’t wanted to need him. Letting him hold her like this, giving vent to her desire, put the lie to that, but she’d stopped feeling whole without him.

A groan slipped from his mouth to hers, melting her against the car. She arched, claiming him, offering herself. But somehow sanity reminded her where they were.

“My gran,” she said against his throat, unable to make herself look over at the resort’s open windows.

At once he released her. They were both breathing hard. He caught her left hand. “Where’s your ring?” She’d never heard his passion-thickened tone in public.

Bemused, she shook her head.

“Your ring, Sophie.” Repeated more harshly, the question finally penetrated her thoughts.

“Nothing’s changed.” In case he didn’t understand, she widened a bland gaze, trying to force him to believe her. “You touch me—I want you. Apparently, I’d make love to you anywhere, anytime, but nothing else has changed, either. I don’t trust you, and I can’t live with you.”

“You can.” He rubbed his finger again, his thumb trembling in time with her heartbeat. “We’ll learn to trust each other.”

“Not in front of our child. I want to do motherhood right.”

He reached for her again. Thank goodness he expected her to give in as if she possessed no will of her own, because she caught him off guard, taking his wrists to drag him away from her car door. He didn’t seem to be a guy who struggled with women. He was easy to move.

She opened the door and jumped inside, completely unashamed of her healthy fear. Not of him—of herself and her apparent addiction to him. She wasn’t on her own anymore. Time to break bad habits.

She started the engine. Ian planted his hands on his hips, the picture of a gunslinger.

She reversed the car, staring straight into his unforgiving gaze. He’d find her before long. He had a gift for hunting down his quarry. She’d never hidden from anyone before, and how far could she run in Bardill’s Ridge?

DUST SETTLED ON THE GRAVEL that had skidded from beneath Sophie’s tires. Ian took stock of the faces at the windows of the resort. Somewhere among those reproachful women, Greta Calvert no doubt wished him dead.

He couldn’t blame her. He’d screwed up Sophie’s life, and he’d certainly want to destroy anyone who ever hurt his child.

He turned away, unable to go inside to reassure Greta, since he had to follow Sophie. Or anticipate where she’d head next. To her father. If she planned to move back to Bardill’s Ridge—and that had to be her plan—she’d tell Ethan Calvert about the baby.

Ian already knew the way. If only he’d kept his big mouth shut after the ceremony, they’d be telling her father together. She shouldn’t have to face him alone. A sense of guilt made him hurry to his own rental car. Sophie loved her dad, respected him, worried more about his disappointment in her than even Greta’s. Her parents’ divorce had driven her to want to please Ethan.

Ian quick-stopped through a couple of four-way intersections on the country roads before he reached town. Three red lights later, he had to slow for traffic at the square. Some of the local farmers had brought early wares from their greenhouses and set up stalls beyond the wrought-iron fence that protected the grass. Their customers upped the small-town traffic.

By the time he reached Ethan Calvert’s house, Sophie and her father, a tall man in jeans and logger’s plaid, were standing in front of the barn-workshop that rose higher than Ethan’s clapboard house. The pair were clearly at odds. Ethan leaned down to say something that made Sophie grimace. Ian didn’t think. He just launched himself from the car to protect his wife.

Ethan and Sophie turned at the sound of his slammed car door. Sophie tried to stop him with a hand up, looking like an impatient crossing guard.

“Ian, no. This is about our family.”

“I’m part of your family now, Sophie.”

She widened her eyes in an urgent, silent appeal that he keep quiet about the wedding. He shook his head. He’d rather saw off his own arm than hurt her again, but she’d made their child the spoils of this fight.

Ethan interrupted their unspoken battle, moving in front of his daughter.

“Dad.” She grabbed his flannel-covered arm. “It’s as much my fault as Ian’s.”

“Maybe you don’t know how we handle your kind of man down here.” A threat of bodily harm quivered in Ethan Calvert’s voice.