The Millionaire's Cinderella Wife

“I’ll get Evan to help.” She called someone from the kitchen and the two of them shifted a glass case containing the fully-rigged model of an old clipper ship so that it did a good job of blocking the corner table from general view. Nobody seemed surprised that this strategy was necessary, which lent credibility to Ty’s claim that Garrett Marine was “under siege.”

Once seated, he didn’t wait for a menu, but ordered a Danish and black coffee for himself—“Just keep it coming, Gina, okay?”—while Sierra asked for a muffin and a cappuccino. Both orders arrived promptly, which meant they didn’t have to spend long pretending they had nothing important to talk about.

Gina left to serve some new arrivals, and Sierra seized her opportunity, because there had already been interruptions enough. “Please don’t pretend that you don’t know exactly why I’m here,” she said.

“Tell me straight out, and neither of us should have to pretend anything.”

“If you want a divorce, Ty, ask for a divorce. That’s all you have to do. Don’t advertise yourself in a national magazine as being gloriously available, and wait for me to draw the obvious conclusions, the way the entire town of Landerville has.”

“You think this was about me wanting a divorce? You honestly think—”

“I’ve had hints and innuendoes and the same tired jokes over and over, total strangers coming up to me in the supermarket wanting to know the exact status of—well, our marriage, if there is one.”

“Okay, for a start, your Dad’s been mayor for about a hundred years; you know no-one in a town like Landerville is going to consider you a total stranger. Your life is town property, and so was mine, before I left.”

Sierra ignored him and went on, “My sisters are acting like someone died, and Dad was threatening at one stage to—” But Ty didn’t need to know about her father’s threats to his son-in-law’s safety. “It’s been…very embarrassing,” she finished lamely, knowing she hadn’t communicated a fraction of what she felt.

“Embarrassing?” Ty echoed, on an impatient laugh. “Yeah, tell me about it! That sailor suit lady a few minutes ago was more subtle than most. Trust me, Sierra, I’m winning in the embarrassment stakes, hands down!”

“In that case,” she told him with a sharp edge, “it might have been a good idea if you’d thought the whole A-list thing through a teeny-weeny bit, before you agreed to it, huh?”

His blue eyes narrowed. “I never agreed to it, Sierra! Is that the kind of man you think I am? Interested in that kind of cheap publicity? Hell, interested in getting dates for myself that way? Listen! The Bachelor of the Year headline was the journalist’s idea, not mine.”

“You could have said no.”

“I had no clue she was going to present the boat rescue story like that, until it appeared in the magazine. I didn’t realize how much she was going to hook it into my business success, or that it would be on the cover. Let alone that it would bring this kind of response from total strangers. This mess has just erupted. You have no idea!”

“Gee, all that extra money coming in for extra sailing classes. All the extra business in your restaurants and waterfront stores. Yeah, most tourist enterprises really hate feel-good national publicity, I’m sure!”

He frowned. “Don’t do that thing with your mouth. It doesn’t suit you.”

“What thing?”

“Looks like you’re sucking on a lemon.” Still frowning, he reached across the table and tried to do something to her lips with his fingers, the way he might have brushed a crumb from a child’s cheek. What on earth…?

Smoothing them out? Yes, soothing those tight little muscles around her mouth.

With his touch, Sierra could feel the tight muscles herself, and wondered if that was why her face so often felt stiff and tired by the end of the day. Even before this whole mess with the magazine, she’d had so much on her plate.

There was her teaching job, working with a class of special needs kids, and three younger siblings who still depended on her a lot, and Dad’s health to monitor—he tended to leave the treatment of his diabetes largely to her—as well as his role as Landerville’s mayor to support.

She knew she needed a vacation, but…sucking on a lemon?

Ty’s finger-tips moved cool and light against her skin, like a caress, but still she flinched away and drawled, “Gee, thanks!”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Maybe because of all the extravagant compliments you’re paying me.”

“And again.”

“Ty, do you or do you not want a divorce?” she blurted out desperately.

“You wouldn’t contest it?”

Okay, Sierra. Don’t sigh. Don’t suck on a lemon.

She lifted her chin, managed not to gust out the big whoosh of air that tightened her chest, and said quietly, “No, of course I wouldn’t contest it.”

“You’ve had eight years to file for one, and you haven’t.”

“No, I haven’t. Neither have you. But I want to, now. It’s way overdue, don’t you think?”

Of course she was right, Ty conceded to himself. About seven years and eight months overdue, probably. He should have filed the papers himself, as soon as he’d realized that she had called his colossal, confident, angry bluff and really wasn’t going to follow him to Stoneport.

But he’d been stubborn about it. That was how he’d dealt with the hurt, by channelling it into sheer pigheaded pride. He wasn’t the one making their marriage impossible. He wasn’t wrong about any of this! Let Sierra take the steps to legally sever their union, if that was what she wanted.

She never had.

He’d been so cocky at twenty-four, so sure of himself, his goals, his decisions. “You know where to find me,” he’d told her.

“And you know where to find me!”

And the hurt and disappointment had eased with time and hard work, the way such things did. The way they must have eased for her, too.

“If it’s so overdue,” he answered her at last, “why haven’t you done something about it long before this? Why did it take some frothy magazine article to bring you here?”

She colored and shrugged, and paused for almost as long as Ty had, before she answered. “Let’s just label it a wake-up call, shall we? Principles have a limited shelf life, I’ve discovered.”

“Principles?” The word startled him. “Whose principles?”

“I’m not the one who walked out of our marriage. I’m not the one who wanted it to end. You did, Ty. So the divorce should have been up to you.”

“I never walked out of our marriage! I walked out of Landerville.”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t! I was pretty clear on that at the time, I thought. There was no future for me there. Not one that could possibly have made me happy. I needed this.” He swept his arm around, encompassing his world.

“What’s ‘this’?” She hooked her fingers around the word to make the quotation marks.

“The ocean, the boats, a chance to make a future for myself in a place where I wasn’t just that more-or-less-orphaned Garrett boy who might get as far as managing the hardware store some day, if the love-struck mayor’s daughter from the right side of the tracks could keep him honest. But you still don’t get any of that, do you?”

“No, I don’t. Dad never looked at you that way.”

“The rest of Landerville did.”

“You weren’t just asking me to turn my back on a few narrow-minded attitudes. You were asking me to—” She stopped. Her cheeks were pink and angry and her dark eyes flashed. “A family is not something you can just walk away from, Ty. My family was not something I could just walk away from.”