The Bridal Contract

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER ONE

THE late afternoon Texas heat was even more intense than it had been earlier, making the minor fence repair a feat of endurance rather than the mindless drudgery it usually was. Fay Sheridan felt another rivulet of perspiration streak down her cheek to bead on her jaw as she set the prongs of the last staple against a fence post. The bead of sweat fell as she hammered the staple into the wood, securing the loose strand of barbed wire. A few of the older wood posts along this stretch of fence needed to be replaced with T-posts when she got time.

Time. She felt the stifling weight of it as she pulled off her Stetson to blot her forehead and jaw on the sleeve of her plaid work shirt. She was overloaded with time these days. Months, weeks, days, hours, minutes…

There weren’t many true seconds anymore. It was as if they’d all stretched to the length of minutes, and she was living some kind of slow-motion life, where the more she found to do, the more leftover time she was stuck with. She’d somehow lost her grip on the kind of days when hard, continuous work made time fly.

Fay put her Stetson back on and walked to her horse. The sorrel gelding had been dozing in the heat but he perked up when she put the hammer and bag of staples in the saddlebag, as if he hoped the workday was done. Thunder rumbled, and Fay glanced toward the western sky.

The thunderhead that had been building in the distance looked to be at least seventy thousand feet high, with others piling high on either side behind it. The massive, anvil topped cloud formations had blocked the sun, though the air was still hot and muggy and the sky overhead and behind her to the east was blue. The storm would be a big one, bringing an evening of hail and much needed rain, with maybe a tornado or two.

Fay mounted her horse and continued along the fence, scanning the four-strand barbed wire that separated her ranch from the much larger R/K Ranch. If the storm held off, she might be able to finish checking this stretch. She’d become almost fanatical about maintaining the miles of fence on her ranch, but then, she’d become fanatical about a lot of things this past year.

Constant vigilance and almost continuous hard work had helped her stay sane, providing her with purpose and restoring at least some sense of order. Life had become predictable again; at least she’d been able to create the illusion that it was. And yet the energy that illusion of predictability required had also leached what little vitality and pleasure life might still hold for her.

Which was probably why the oncoming storms brought an inkling of relief despite the frustration of having to leave a chore unfinished. The sameness of the past year had worn her down, but storms the size of this one banished a bit of that sameness. A long, much louder rumble of thunder sounded, and she drew her horse to a halt at the crest of a rise.

The massive clouds had churned closer in the few minutes she’d been riding, and parts of them were dragging rain shafts. She could tell when the wind picked up at ground level in the distance, and watched as it brushed down the dry grass like a giant, invisible arm sweeping across the land.

The sorrel warily turned toward the fence and pricked his ears forward expectantly, his nostrils flaring to catch the scent of rain as the first cooling wind gust reached them. The air temperature dropped several degrees, and Fay felt a light chill over her sweat-damp clothes. The first gust was quickly followed by harder, much cooler gusts, and the air filled with the scent of rain.

It didn’t bother her that she was astride a horse on top of a ripple of land, not only high profile in open country next to a wire fence, but also carrying enough metal in her saddlebag to attract a bolt of lightning. Lightning could strike from miles away, but she felt no fear at the notion, and wondered fleetingly if she’d ever feel fear again. She’d already faced one of the most excruciating pains life could hold. After that, every other calamity paled in comparison, even the idea of being struck by lightning.

The sorrel began to fidget, but Fay tightened the reins to check his movement, more than a little mesmerized by the storm. Something about it mirrored the deepest places in her heart, places where despair warred against the will to survive, and her soul grappled with incomprehensible tragedy.

The black clouds of the storm roiled faster now, blotting out the western sky from north to south and rapidly filling the air above her. The rumble of thunder varied from muted rambling to crackling cascades of sound that tumbled from screeching highs to throbbing lows that trailed on and on.

She ought to turn the sorrel and ride to the house, but she couldn’t seem to make herself start. Sheet-lightning whitened a cloud here and there, and occasional cloud-to-ground lightning pierced down to dance across the land.

Tendrils of spectral clouds dangled eerily nearby, but there was no sign yet of a wall cloud that signaled a potential tornado. Fat, intermittent drops of rain began to splatter the dry grass near the fence, kicking up tiny dust explosions here and there as the drops hit dirt.

The sorrel began to fidget again, momentarily distracting her. The horse was impatient for the shelter and safety of the stable. No doubt he wanted to outrun the storm and was confused about the delay. Any horse would be looking forward to the end of a workday, eager for a stall and a rubdown before a fresh pail of water and a measure of grain. The storm would make that idea even more attractive.

Fay had no similar eagerness for home and rest, and hadn’t for a long time. The hardest part of the day, other than facing the start of a new one before dawn, was the time she had to finally walk into the big house, where the only person there was a housekeeper. Yet more often than not, Margie’s work would be done and she’d have gone home.

Fay continued to watch the clouds, letting the growing danger send a tingle of peril through her to offset the bleakness she felt at the idea of going home to an empty house. The wind blew harder now, and the fat raindrops gave way to smaller, faster drops. The sky continued to rumble and flash, as if to warn her, and the anger she’d been numb to for months began to stir. Suddenly it burst into outrage.

The boys hadn’t been given a warning; they’d never had a chance. One moment they’d been having the time of their lives learning to water ski; the next, they’d been struck by a boat and drowned. They’d barely had a hint of what was coming, and no chance to escape it.

The agony of that knowledge was unbearable, and her failure to come to terms with it this past year stoked the conflagration of pain and anger until she was wild with it. If death meant to reach out for her now, too, then it could damn well get on with it while she was watching.

The defiant thought was buttressed by an avalanche of self-pity. What did she really have left anyway, but a life of work and responsibility that was dominated by grief and loss and regret? Her heart had been crushed and sometimes she felt so hollow and hurt so much that she wasn’t sure she could scrape up enough courage to face another moment.

One stroke of lightning could put a quick end to the relentless march of endless gray days, and the idea grew more tantalizing by the second. After weeks and months of being numb, the mounting chaos of dark feelings was overwhelming. The knowledge that she wanted to die made her feel even more defiant.

The sorrel began to prance again and toss his head, but Fay kept the reins tight, all but daring death to strike her down as brutally as it had her brothers. As if the storm was eager to accommodate her, the wind began to blow even harder. Marble-size bits of hail beat down with the rain, then abruptly stopped, and the sorrel tossed his head again, snorting impatiently.

Fay was so caught up in the storm and the anger that boiled impotently inside her that she was slow to distinguish the distant shouts over the roar of the wind. Once they caught her attention, the shouts became louder and more distinct.

Fay!

Run, Fay!

Go now—please!

The sound of her name in the roar and the urgent message jolted her.

Fay—don’t do it!

Run!

Recognition struck her heart like a closed fist, and sent a rash of goose bumps over her skin. The world tipped, and she felt the fleeting touch of something otherworldly, yet familiar. Shaken to her soul, she glanced wildly around.

“Ty? Troy?”

She hadn’t mistaken her brothers’ voices, and yet she couldn’t possibly have heard them call to her. As she continued to glance around and strained to hear their voices in the howl of the storm, she realized she was trembling.

The sorrel had taken advantage of her distraction and was moving away from the fence, though Fay’s grip had frozen on the reins and she was still holding him back.

Her brain was in shock, and her heart all but bled with longing to hear those beloved voices again.

Had she lost her mind? The question burst into her consciousness, bringing a new torment. Her heart was pounding hard enough to make her chest ache as her thoughts ran crazily for an explanation. She knew her brothers’ voices and always would, but to hear them so clearly, and to feel that otherworldly touch…

Fay loosened the sorrel’s reins, still straining to hear their voices, but suddenly a little afraid she would. Maybe going crazy and hearing voices was the next turn in the downward spiral she’d been on, and the idea shook her up even more.

She couldn’t deal with this, couldn’t cope. The knowledge that she’d reached her emotional limit sent anxiety pumping through her. She urged the sorrel into a trot away from the fence in the rain-slick grass in an instinctive need to flee what she couldn’t understand, but just as she signaled him into a gallop, the air suddenly went blindingly white. The simultaneous boom of thunder sent the sorrel shying hard to the side, taking Fay so by surprise that she lost her balance and clung to the side of the saddle.

A second flash and boom, even more blinding and deafening than the first, made the sorrel lunge the other way, literally pitching her from one side of the saddle to the other. At the same instant, his back hooves slipped and his backside started to go down. Fay managed to yank her left boot from the stirrup to keep from getting a foot trapped, but the sorrel caught himself and lurched awkwardly to his feet.

He barely got all four hooves solidly beneath him before he rocketed away, breaking her hold, and the hard, wet ground leaped up to slam the breath out of her.

Fay Sheridan had been different when her brothers were alive. Energetic, full of fun, her never-met-a-stranger personality had made her a stand out. Her younger twin brothers, Ty and Troy, had been a lot like her. Handsome, competitive, but in their cases, always up to something. Fay had handled them good-naturedly, tough and strict when they’d needed it, but managing to walk that precarious line between proud big sister and parent after their momma and daddy had died five years back.

Then a year ago, the world had tragically changed for Fay, robbing her of her brothers, but also stealing away the happy, vital young woman that nearly every single male in that part of Texas had taken note of. She’d become something of a hermit after those first weeks, exiling herself from the ranch community in general, old friends in particular, and neighbors when she could. For the past year few people, other than her housekeeper and ranch hands, got more than a fleeting glimpse of her.

Chase Rafferty had been one of the few, regularly pushing his way into her life and into her business. That’s why he was driving to the boundary fence late that afternoon. One of his men had seen Fay out this way, and since the weather service had issued multiple storm watches and warnings, Chase had decided to see if she was still out here. He didn’t trust that she’d ridden on home.

The moment he’d seen the slim female atop the sorrel, he’d known he was right to investigate. The storm was almost on top of her, but instead of sensibly making tracks to shelter Fay was watching the clouds, frittering away precious minutes that could have ensured she safely reached home. It was foolish to gawk at a storm while she was so exposed to the danger of lightning, and in the case of this storm, it was suicidal.

And that’s the real reason he was here. Fay Sheridan had lost her way and, despite the stubborn front she put up, he’d sensed the recklessness in her. Now he was seeing it, and he shoved down on the truck’s accelerator to intervene as the big raindrops on his windshield changed to a wind-lashed deluge.

A bright flash of lightning and cannon shot of thunder was quickly followed by a second flash that struck close. The almost instantaneous explosion of thunder set the sorrel off and Chase watched through the rain-sheeted windshield as the horse started to go down, scrambled for footing, then bolted away without his rider.

The gate between Rafferty/Keenan and Sheridan land was more than a mile away, so he steered his big truck toward the fence. The impact of the truck against four strands of taut wire was minimal, but he felt a moment of resistance before the wire gave way. Once the truck was clear of the wire, he cranked the wheel to the left and circled to find where Fay had landed.

Now that he was facing the storm, the wind-driven rain made it all but impossible to see through the windshield. Wary of running her over, Chase levered the door open a little and leaned out in time to see Fay rise to her hands and knees.

The little idiot was alive.

Fay managed to stay conscious but couldn’t breathe. She instinctively rolled to her side then to her stomach to pull in enough air to relieve the pressure in her chest. Her head was spinning and she was nauseous, but she made it to her hands and knees and panted while she waited for more strength. Her clothes were soaked, her shoulder, hip and knee were throbbing, and she had the headache of her life. She tried to get up, but couldn’t do it yet, so she settled for moving a hand around until her fingers came in contact with the brim of her Stetson and dragged it close.

She thought she heard a pickup engine over the sound of the storm, but her ears were ringing so she wasn’t sure. Anxiety went through her at the idea that she was still hearing things that weren’t there, and the chill the thought left in its wake made her tremble. She didn’t hear the heavy tread of man-size boots until just before someone caught her around the waist and lifted her to her feet.

Fay cried out against the pain and surprise of the sudden move, helpless to do anything but bite her lip to stifle another embarrassing cry as she was all but dragged to the open door of a white pickup. At least this was real, and her anxiety eased. Her rescuer gathered her up and lifted her to the driver’s seat so suddenly that she had to close her eyes against the dizziness. She tried to move across the bench seat under her own power, but a pair of strong hands shifted her out of the way as easily as if she was a child.

Her rescuer climbed in after her, his big body bumping solidly against her bruised side, but Fay was too rattled and disoriented to move even an inch away from it. Besides, the heat of the shoulder to knee contact felt good, though the warmth set off another wave of the icy shivers that racked her.

A volley of hail hit the pickup roof, and the truck door banged shut. The engine revved as the pickup lurched backward, swinging around and nearly pitching her off the seat. The driver’s hard arm kept her from falling.

Fay reflexively reached for it, but the arm jerked down to shift gears as the pickup abruptly stopped then shot forward into a bumpy, fishtailing ride. Her nausea came back in direct proportion and she grabbed urgently for the driver’s arm.

“Slow down!” she panted, too weak to do more than hang on to him with her good right hand. She was so dizzy she had to close her eyes again.

The low voice that shot back was blunt and offensively descriptive.

“We gotta funnel cloud about to blow up the tailpipe.”

Fay felt a fresh surge of nausea as she recognized the voice. She made herself let go of his arm as he went on.

“Not that you’d care if a tornado dropped down on your head, but some of us would rather die of old age.”

The sarcasm cleared her brain and she managed to focus briefly on Chase Rafferty’s grim profile before she faced forward, her insides twisting with shame. And resentment.

Rafferty. Chase Rafferty, the biggest bull in the pasture, who regularly charged in where she didn’t want him to be. Good fences and closed doors meant nothing to him. In all these months he’d been the one person she hadn’t been able to keep away, the one person who hadn’t allowed her to come to grips with the loss of her brothers in solitude.

Everyone else had gotten the message that she needed time alone and didn’t feel like seeing anyone she didn’t have to, but Chase always found a reason to butt in. The worst had been during those first weeks after the double funeral, when he’d come over at 7:00 a.m. four mornings in a row, pounding on her bedroom door to inform her that it was a workday and she had men standing around waiting for her say-so.

And of course he’d hung around in her kitchen long enough to see her after she’d got dressed and come down for a quick breakfast. He’d been able to tell she had a hangover, but he’d waited until she’d finished eating to lecture her about the dangers of crawling into a bottle to numb her grief.

On the third morning, she’d come down to the kitchen after another loud awakening and threatened to do him bodily harm if he said anything more to her than “Good morning.” That was the last hangover she’d had though, because she’d stopped drinking herself to sleep. When he’d come by at 7:00 a.m. on the fourth morning, she’d already gone out, working away from the headquarters so she wouldn’t have to see him.

A few weeks later, he’d taken to phoning at the noon meal, wanting to know if she was going to show up for a cattlemen’s meeting that night or if she had plans to go to some local event or social gathering that weekend. His message was clear: Get back to living. Her message to him, after she got a caller ID and stopped answering his calls or returning them, was: Leave me alone.

After that, he’d gone back to stopping by from time to time, only he’d started asking if she had thoughts about selling out. Short of that, he was looking for land to lease, and since she’d sold off part of her herd, would she want to work out a deal to let him run some of his cattle on her range?

Those were the times that had annoyed her the most. As if she was some wimpy female who’d never be able to hang on to her heritage by herself. His offer had stung her pride at the time, but later that sting had begun to undermine her confidence and make her feel like a failure. After all, Rafferty/Keenan was a huge operation, and the man who ran it had a knack for spotting problems.

And the fact that it had been Rafferty who’d seen her get thrown off her horse just now, Rafferty who’d picked her up and stuffed her into his truck, and Rafferty who was racing across the range to outrun a dangerous storm, was bitter comeuppance for her foolishness with the lightning.

Even more bitter was the idea that he’d seen her moments of self-destructive daring before her fall, and would no doubt soon let her know he had. That’s why she’d started to hate the sight of him, and heartily wished she could target his Achilles’ heel as mercilessly as he had hers this past year. She hated even more that men like him didn’t seem to have any.

It was hard to remember now that there’d been a time—years actually—when she’d had a huge crush on Chase Rafferty. Even the idea that she might see him somewhere had given her a thrill. She would have loved to have his attention back then, though he’d seemed to be only marginally aware of her.

He’d had too many girlfriends, and she’d been a neighbor kid seven years younger, and far too inexperienced for an earthy man of the world like him. She’d worried for years that he’d marry one of his glamorous girlfriends, and when he hadn’t, her hope that he’d finally notice her and ask her out had become acute.

Then the boys had been killed and she’d lost interest in Chase along with everything else. Though he was still as ruggedly handsome as ever and remained the most sought after bachelor in their part of Texas, Fay was immune to him now.

And she was still nauseous from the rough ride. The longer the trip went, the more aches and pains made themselves felt, but she’d bite her tongue off before she’d complain. She couldn’t let herself get sick, either; that would be the ultimate shame if it happened with Rafferty around. Surely they’d reach the main house at her place soon.

They finally drove out of the rain and were now ahead of it. Chase turned onto one of the better pasture roads and the ride smoothed out. Soon the big pecan trees at the Sheridan headquarters came into sight, then the corrals and ranch buildings. Chase drove past them all as if he did it every day, then steered the pickup onto the lawn behind her house and drove across the stone patio to the back door, turning sharply at the last moment to position the passenger door of the truck closer to the house before he stopped and switched off the engine.

The windshield wipers stopped with the engine, and Fay saw it was only sprinkling here. The wind was gusting hard as she got her door open and tried to get out of the pickup before Chase could come around and help her. She’d barely got her feet out before Chase surged close and plucked her off the seat to carry her to the door.

Good thing he didn’t need her to put her arms around his neck, because he’d trapped her right arm behind him and she couldn’t lift her injured left one high enough to reach his shoulder. As soon as they were in the mudroom, he kicked the door closed to tromp into the silent kitchen, bellowing as he did.

“Margie? You still here?”

The shout startled Fay and she jerked in his arms, setting off every ache in her body. She barely managed to stifle a moan and tried to cover it with a quick, “She’s gone. Put me down.”

Her order didn’t slow Chase in the least as he walked into the hall then into the living room to sit her on the sofa. He left her briefly to grab the TV remote, switch it on, then surf through the channels to find weather coverage.

While his back was turned, Fay fought her way to her feet despite the dizziness that swamped her. Her head was pounding and her legs felt alarmingly weak, but she managed a couple of unsteady steps before Chase found a local weather bulletin and turned back to her.