Hayley Gardner - Kidnapping His Bride

In reflection, Tessa thought, maybe she should have told Griff to take her into the woods to talk and let him drive until he ran out of gas somewhere. They would both have been a lot better off.

“Stop the nuptials?” Sadie asked, looking from Tessa back to Griff in bewilderment. “Why on earth would I want to do that?” She slapped him with her glove. “Or anyone else, for that matter?”

Griff looked as if he was going to laugh, and that would have been the end of him as far as Sadie was concerned—she demanded respect from anyone under forty, and quite a few over, too. Even though Tessa was annoyed with Griff and wouldn’t have minded seeing Sadie unleash her irritation on him with Griff powerless to stop her, Tessa took her grandmother’s arm.

“I have no idea why anyone would want to stop my wedding, Grandma,” Tessa told her. “But you don’t have to challenge Griff to a duel over it. I’ll forgive him—someday—and Clay’s going to talk to him. Let’s go home, and we can talk about rescheduling this wedding for a later date.”

“Later? How much later?”

With all the eyes staring at them, Tessa did not want to pursue this subject. “We can talk at home,” she told her.

“Yes, let’s. Clayton, Griffin, we’ll get this ironed out there, and everyone—” she turned to the crowd, most of whom were now displaced wedding guests, and gave a regal sweep of her arm “—I’ll let you know the rescheduled date as soon as possible.”

“I’ll bet you five dollars they never make it to the altar,” Jasper said to the man next to him. Reba, his wife, walked over and shushed him.

Tessa loved the community and almost all the townspeople and, normally, would have been grinning ear to ear at the old men’s antics, but all she could think about now was that Griff was following her every movement with his eyes, and how much she needed to get out of there before she began to like it.

Tessa was almost to the door when the bells rang again, and a six-year-old boy with a Huckleberry Finn smile entered and grinned up at her. “Hey, Tessa, where’s my Dad?”

Grinning back, Tessa felt the stress of the day wane a little. Being around Jeb Ledoux, Clay’s son and the real reason she was marrying Clay, now that his wife, Lindy, her good friend, had passed on, always had that effect on her.

“Around the corner, Jeb.” She pointed. “Who brought you?”

“Grandma and Grandpa,” he said, referring to Clay and Griff’s parents. “They’re looking for a parking space.” He didn’t move. “How come you didn’t marry Dad?”

“That’s the question of the hour.” Sadie sniffed.

“Grandma,” Tessa scolded gently, then turned back to the boy she so badly wanted to be a mother to. Jeb looked confused.

“There was a temporary problem.” Well, at least part of that was very true. Griff was a problem, but Tessa could only hope he was a temporary one. “Your dad and I will be having the wedding as soon as we figure out how to fix it.”

“Okay.” Jeb darted off around the corner to where Clay was still sitting. Tessa lingered and watched as the child stopped when he saw Griff.

“Uncle Griff! You’re back! We going fishing?”

“Come along, Tessa.” Sadie nudged her arm.

She didn’t have to be asked twice. Outside, Tessa hurried to Griff’s truck and got her veil and gloves. With a wave at Griff’s parents at the other end of the parking lot, she came back to her grandmother’s car just in time to see Sadie fish her keys out of her dress purse.

Tessa reached for them, and Sadie frowned and slapped at her hand, the way only the person who raised you could get away with. Sighing, Tessa let Sadie drive, but made sure the passenger side air bag was turned on and her seat belt snug. Seconds after the elderly woman started the engine, she started in on Tessa, just as expected.

“Darling girl, how on earth could you let yourself be thrown over someone’s shoulder and carted away?”

“It wasn’t like that, Grandma,” she said, gripping the armrest as her grandmother turned onto the highway and gunned the engine. Actually, now that her irritation had worn off a bit, Tessa realized that it had been exciting—which was Griff’s way. Romantic, even…With her eyes closed, she could see Griff’s image clearly in her mind. He was smiling, and touching her shoulder, and pulling her into his arms, and then he was—

“He didn’t kiss you, did he?”

Tessa’s eyes flew open. “No, nothing like that. He wouldn’t.” And she didn’t want him to. She swore she didn’t.

But her grandmother’s astute question pulled her back to reality. She definitely shouldn’t be fantasizing about Griff Ledoux. “It’s been over between us for years.”

“Hmm. Sounds like you’re protesting too much. Why on earth did he tote you off?”

“It was a joke on his brother,” she said softly, staring straight ahead. Her grandmother seemed to accept that and fell silent, giving Tessa all too much time to think on the ride home about Griff, and what he was really doing back in Claiborne Landing for more than a day’s visit.

One thing she did know for sure. As soon as Griff figured out he wasn’t going to stop her from marrying Clay—couldn’t stop her—he would be returning to the Air Force. He’d told her while they’d dated in high school that ever since he was a small child, the only thing he’d ever wanted to do was to fly planes, and the second he’d learned he could earn a free education at the Air Force Academy in Colorado and they would train him to fly, he’d worked all during high school toward that goal. Four years in the Academy and six years mandatory commission. Ten years of his life promised away meant nothing to him.

And everything to her, since she’d had such different goals for her life.

“Don’t let his return mess up your life, honey,” Sadie said unexpectedly. Startled, Tessa gazed over at her. “Make sure you reschedule the wedding with Clay. He’s a good man, and he can give you what you want.”

A perfect family, and a home in what she thought of—after a childhood on the road with parents who made dysfunctional sound fun—as paradise. Claiborne Landing. A place she never wanted to leave again—and where Griff usually never stayed long enough to hang up his hat.

“I know he can.”

“And you’ve already got a lot between you. Don’t mess up your chances like your mother did.”

“You never talk about Mom,” Tessa said, reaching for her gloves and holding them tightly in her hands.

“You look a lot like her.” Sadie shot a smile in her direction as she turned onto the highway that would take Tessa and her to where they had split a two-story home into their own apartments. “But you’re a lot more levelheaded. You didn’t go following Griff around the world like she did your father. That’s no kind of life for a married couple. Let alone kids.”

“She did want to come back home toward the end,” Tessa admitted. “But Dad always promised her there was more fun around the corner, if she would just stay with him. That he needed her, couldn’t survive without her. So she kept staying, even though she hated the life we had. The bill collectors calling, the skipping out at night on the rent. She spent a lot of time crying.” Just like Tessa had, when Griff had left and she’d known it had to be over between them.

Sadie sniffed. “Men always think there’s something better around the next corner. What is it with them, anyway?”

It was a rhetorical question, one that both Sadie and she had asked themselves many times while she was getting over Griff.

“You never told me all that about your parents before,” Sadie added.

“I didn’t want you to feel badly, I guess.” It had been worse than she’d ever admitted to Sadie. Her father had left her with her mother, who’d had pneumonia, Tessa had been told later, not wanting the responsibility of either of them, she supposed. She’d only been eleven, but she’d nursed her mother until she’d gotten really bad, and then Tessa had called the police for help, not wanting to, knowing that when they took her mother away, she would die and Tessa would never see her again. She’d been right. Her mother’s heart had simply stopped beating. The doctor had said it was a defect in a valve, but Tessa had always figured her mother had died of a broken heart.

Afterward, she’d ended up without a real family in foster homes for almost a year, before she’d remembered where her grandmother, whom her mother had hardly ever talked about, lived. Sadie had come for her as soon as she was called, and Tessa had made every effort to put her former life out of her mind.

“I really thought I’d forgotten all of it, but the memories seem to pop up when I’m upset.”

“Or when Griff comes to town, you mean.”

“I suppose so.” Tessa willed away the sad heart she always got when she thought about the distant past. “Anyway, he knows I want to be married and have children. As soon as he figures out the e-mailer was wrong and Clay and I will be perfectly happy together, he’s going to leave.”

“You think so, huh?” Sadie pulled into their driveway.

“Why wouldn’t he?” Tessa asked.

“Maybe the boy has figured out what your father never did,” Sadie said as she proceeded slowly up the two hundred slightly rutted feet to their home. “That the grass doesn’t get any greener than right here in Claiborne Landing.”

“He can’t stay here, Grandma,” Tessa said, her stomach doing funny flip-flops at the very thought. “It would ruin everything.”

“Then you’ll do what you’ll have to to make sure he has no reason to stay, won’t you? Hard as that might be.”

And it would be. As long as Tessa could remember, she’d dreamed of having a husband who doted on her and her children. When she’d met Griff, she’d thought he would be that man—right up to the point where his dream had become more important than hers and she’d broken it off with him, because she didn’t want to ruin his life the way her father had ruined her mother’s by his extreme need.

Sadie had been wonderful, of course, but Tessa had this dream of being part of the perfect family, and once she’d realized that the dream would never come true for her as a child, she’d changed to wanting to create it as a mother. With all her heart. If she married Clay, she would have Jeb—and, after all that had happened, that would be her dream come true.

The trouble was, while Griff was in another state, she could easily tell herself she didn’t love him anymore until she was blue in the face. But now that he would be so close to her that she could reach out and touch him anytime she wanted, well, she was a little afraid that the electricity that still sparked in the air between them might become a higher voltage than she could handle.

She would just have to, that was all. Jeb needed her as his mother, and that was that. No one at all could be allowed to stop the wedding, not even Griff.

Not for any reason.

She wondered, worriedly, just how clear Clay was making all of this to his long lost brother, whom she definitely didn’t love.

Or at least that’s what she tried to tell herself.

Jeb came running out of his bedroom to where Griff was sitting on Clay’s couch, with tousled hair and a grin a mile wide, fully changed from ring bearer back to normal kid.

“Dad said I could stay with you or with Grandma, since he’s going to work,” Jeb told him. The three of them had come to Clay’s house, a couple of miles from Casey’s Kitchen, in the too quiet village of Athens. Too quiet at least from Griff’s viewpoint. He never understood why Clay seemed to like it just fine—in his eyes, they’d locked up excitement a long time ago and thrown away the key.