The Marriage Pact (Hqn) by Linda Lael Miller

was likely to get one, but, at the same time, she was desperate to know why he was there, in her house.
    Tripp paused, still holding the steaming mugs, and sighed. Apparently reading both her expression and her mind, he said huskily, “I can’t rightly say why I’m here, if that’s what you’re about to ask.”
    Without a word, Hadleigh walked to the table and sat down in her usual chair, figuring that Tripp would remain standing as long as she stayed on her feet, and she was beginning to feel wobbly-kneed.
    Sure enough, once she was seated, he crossed to the table, set one of the mugs in front of her, and took a seat opposite hers. By then, Ridley, fur comically askew from a vigorous toweling several minutes before, promptly curled up at his master’s feet, yawned broadly and closed his eyes to catch a nap.
    Tripp cleared his throat, stared down into his coffee for a few minutes and then raised his eyes to meet Hadleigh’s gaze. A sad smile curved his mouth. “It feels strange—being here in this house again, I mean—after all these years.”
    Hadleigh swallowed. She was definitely overreacting to everything the man said or did, but she couldn’t seem to help it. For good or ill, she’d always overreacted to Tripp, her brother’s best friend, her first serious crush.
    “Strange?” She croaked the word.
    Tripp raised and lowered one of his strong shoulders in a shrug. “With Will gone and everything,” he explained quietly, awkwardly, his voice still gruff.
    Tears threatened—as often happened when her late brother was mentioned, even though Will had been dead for over a decade—but Hadleigh forced them back. She nodded once, abruptly, before cupping her hands around the mug to warm her fingers, although she didn’t take a sip. “Yes,” she agreed softly.
    Then, and it was about time, her natural practicality began to reassert itself. Her closest friends, Melody Nolan and Becca “Bex” Stuart, would be arriving soon for the powwow the three of them had been planning for a week, and, for a variety of reasons, Hadleigh wanted Tripp gone before they showed up.
    The three of them, Melody, Bex and Hadleigh, had serious business to attend to, after all. Strategies to map out. Goals to set.
    And it was none of Tripp’s business what those goals involved.
    Conversely, though, Hadleigh found she wanted her visitor to stay as much as she wanted him to get the heck out of there, pronto, and never, ever return. This despite the fact that he seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room, creating a deep-space vacuum that just might incinerate her.
    She gulped back another sigh. The heat and substance Tripp exuded both attracted Hadleigh and scared her so badly she wanted to run in the opposite direction. He could be tender, she knew, particularly with small children, old folks and animals, but he was cowboy-tough, too, right to his molten core. Totally, proudly, uncompromisinglymasculine, he was completely at ease in his own skin, solidly centered in his heart and his brain as well as his body. He had a sly sense of humor, a mischievous streak as wild and wide as the Snake River and a capacity for stone-cold, cussed stubbornness that could render him out-and-out impossible.
    Once Tripp made up his mind about something—or someone — he was as immovable as the Grand Tetons themselves.
    Well, Hadleigh reminded herself, she could be bullheaded, too.
    This was her house, and she certainly hadn’t asked Tripp to drop in to drink her coffee, dry himself and his dog with her clean towels and calmly proceed to topple the very structure of her life, like some modern-day Samson leveling a temple.
    She had to take hold now,rein in her crazy emotions, or she’d be swept away for sure.
    So she folded her arms and sat back in her chair, eyebrows raised, pointedly awaiting an explanation. If Tripp truly didn’t know why he was there, she reasoned peevishly, he’d better get busy figuring it out, because the proverbial ball