The Wedding Assignment

by Cathryn Clare

  She knew that gesture of his so well. It meant he was restless and uncertain but determined not to let anyone know it.

  Rae-Anne had always been able to see through Wiley’s defenses that way, just as he’d seen through hers. It had made them more vulnerable to each other than either one really liked to be. But it had also made them equal partners, evenly matched whether they were making love or wrangling with each other about anything that was handy.

  They’d done a lot of both in the few months they’d spent together. And Rae-Anne knew—suddenly, achingly—that that was why she was feeling so much clearer and more alive again.

  It wasn’t the orange juice or the fresh air. It was Wiley. It was the fact that for the first time in what felt like forever, she was facing her natural counterpart, the sparring partner who’d brought out her strengths without even trying, the man who seemed to understand her instinctively and immediately.

  And the man who’d broken her heart so that it had never really mended again.

  She got to her feet, pleased to note that her knees felt steady and strong this time. “So you won’t take me to New Braunfels?” she asked.

  “No.” He wasn’t looking at her as he spoke.

  “Fine. I’ll get my own ride, then.”

  She expected him to argue, but he didn’t. She expected to hear the heels of his expensive leather boots clunking toward her across the hot pavement of the parking area, but the light rustling of the live oak leaves was the only sound that followed her as she headed for the side of the road.

  It was a farm road they’d been following, one of hundreds of narrow, winding routes that crisscrossed the hill country. Some of them were pretty remote, but they all led somewhere eventually, and after a moment’s hesitation, Rae-Anne decided that going on would be smarter than going back. She knew there was nothing behind them but miles of empty territory, but there might be a town, or at least a ranch, just around the next bend.

  So she walked, or tried to. Her satin slippers kept wobbling underneath her, and she knew it wouldn’t take long before they started raising blisters on her feet. The pavement, which had felt smooth under the cushioned ride of the limo, turned out to be much rougher than she’d expected. Her ankles kept turning on loose stones she couldn’t see under her wide skirt, and more than once she caught herself just before she fell.

  But the important thing was that she was free, and moving under her own steam. She gritted her teeth and told herself blisters didn’t matter and pushed herself to a slightly faster pace.

  It was strange that Wiley still wasn’t coming after her in the limo, she thought. She’d been sure he would follow her immediately, but he so far hadn’t.

  When she reached the crest of the first hill, she turned briefly and looked at the picnic area. Wiley had opened the driver’s door of the blue sedan and seemed to be taking off his dark tailcoat before he climbed inside.

  The blue car must be his, she realized. He must have left it in this isolated spot, knowing that a long white limousine would be far too easy to spot once the general alarm went out that Rae-Anne had disappeared on the way to her wedding.

  She still couldn’t imagine why he’d gone to all this trouble, or what his veiled remarks about Rodney had meant. She felt her curiosity building inside her, but the urge to keep moving was even stronger, and as Wiley got into the sedan and slammed the door, she started walking again. The sound of the car engine starting up reached her faintly on the wind that was snaking over the top of the rise.

  “Good try, Wiley,” she said out loud. “Get me out in the middle of nowhere, figure I’ll sit around waiting to see what you do next. You seem to have forgotten a thing or two that you used to know about me.”

  Talking out loud was a way of taking her mind off the increasing pain in her feet. She’d known the slippers were slightly too small, but there hadn’t been time to customorder a pair in the right size. And it hadn’t seemed to matter so much when she’d only expected to walk up the aisle in them and to take a single turn around the dance floor.

  The thought of all the preparations in New Braunfels prompted her to walk even faster. She would get a ride to a telephone, she thought. The first driver to come by would be bound to stop for her, if only to find out why a bride in full wedding regalia was hiking along the side of a farm road in the middle of the hill country.

  The car behind her was getting closer. Rae-Anne closed her hands into fists and realized she was still wearing her elbow-length gloves. Impatiently, she tugged at the fingertips of one of them, feeling suddenly hemmed in by her fancy clothes. Her whole body felt lighter when she had pulled the gloves off and let them fall by the side of the road. If Wiley tried to drag her off, she was going to give him a fight, and that was going to be easier to do without beaded elbow-length interference.

  She nearly turned her ankle again, and cursed quietly as she caught her balance. The car behind her slowed, then came on until it was just behind her.

  “You issuing a challenge, Rae-Anne?”

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Wiley was holding her discarded gloves. He was grinning, too, the son of a gun. She turned away from him.

  “Because if you are,” Wiley went on, “I accept. Why don’t you get into the car and we’ll talk about it?”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “Actually, I’m very serious.”

  He didn’t sound serious. But then, he almost never did. Unless you knew how to listen to him, unless you could see through that mocking exterior of his, it was easy to think that Wiley Cotter was just another urban cowboy, long-legged and glib and out for a good time and not much else.

  Rae-Anne knew better—had always known better. For a confused couple of seconds she felt her grip on time slipping away from her, whirling her out of the present and back to the days when she and Wiley had plunged headlong into each other’s lives as though yesterday and tomorrow didn’t even exist.

  His voice was so familiar. And at the very back of it, beyond that ironic tone, beneath that deep rasp that had shocked her into silence when he’d first spoken to her in the limousine, Rae-Anne could hear the same old buried hunger that had always touched and stirred something far, far inside herself.

  Oh, God, Wiley, I’ve missed you...

  The words spun out of her unconscious mind, leaving an ache behind them that startled her. She forced herself to walk faster, as if she could outdistance the feelings that were starting to wake inside her after all these years.

  “Leave me alone, Wiley,” she said, as firmly as she could. “You’ve caused enough problems for me already today.”

  She thought she heard him snort, but decided to ignore it. If he preferred to discover all over again how stubborn she could be, she was happy to let him do it.

  She didn’t know how much territory they actually covered, with Rae-Anne striding as steadily on as she could and Wiley just behind her in the blue sedan. She did know that by the time she finally heard another engine approaching, her feet were burning with fresh blisters and she was beginning to wonder if anyone ever used this road at all.

  It was a pickup truck, a red one. She could see it coming down the slope of the next hill. She hoisted her unwieldy skirt a little higher as she stepped into the middle of the road and raised an arm to flag the truck down.

  But it only slowed and gave her a wide berth. It took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t the only one waving.

  Behind her, Wiley had raised both his hands from the steering wheel in a “what can you do?” gesture that seemed to generate immediate sympathy from the two men in the pickup. Neither of them rolled down their windows, but both grinned at Wiley. One of them even gave him a thumbs-up sign, clearly wishing him good luck.

  “You son of a bitch.” Rae-Anne stopped walking so suddenly that Wiley had to stomp on the brakes. “What are you trying to do?”

  “I’m trying to get you to get into the car with me. And I’d appreciate it if you’d do it soon. This
is wasting a lot of time.” He looked unrepentant.

  Rae-Anne’s annoyance grew as she listened to him. “Hey, if you’ve got plans for the day, don’t let me keep you,” she said. “Me, I only had one thing scheduled, and I’m just interested in getting back to it as soon as I can.”

  Wiley put the sedan in gear again as Rae-Anne began to walk. “Aren’t your feet getting kind of sore?” he asked.

  “That’s my problem, not yours.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot. You’re the one who can always handle any situation she gets into, right?”

  She dimly recalled telling him that when they’d first met, one night when she’d had to pacify a couple of noisy drunks at the bar and Wiley had wondered out loud why she hadn’t chosen an easier line of work.

  “That’s right.” She muttered another curse as her ankle turned under her, and told herself it wouldn’t help if she sprained something and had to resort to standing here, helpless, waiting for the next truck to drive by.

  The silence between them was punctuated by the purring of the car engine and the light, irritated tapping of RaeAnne’s slippers against the pavement. The breeze was still whistling by, tugging at Rae-Anne’s veil and making her aware of all the finicky little hairpins that were holding her hair tightly in place.

  It felt like a long time before Wiley spoke again.

  “You work at one of Rodney Dietrich’s hotels, right?”

  “How do you know that?” She didn’t like the feeling that there was a lot going on around her that she hadn’t been aware of. Whatever Wiley was doing here, it was clearly part of some larger scheme she knew nothing about.

  He headed off her question with another one of his own. “How much has Rodney ever told you about how his first wife died?” he asked.

  Chapter 3

  He’d caught her, he could tell.

  Until now, even when she’d been half-woozy with hunger and shock at the picnic area, she’d been wearing that stubbornly mutinous look he remembered so well. She’d been resisting the idea that Wiley was even here, and refusing point-blank to listen to what he was saying.

  But now he’d touched something in her that looked like genuine interest. She didn’t stop walking, but her voice sounded less defiant.

  “He doesn’t talk about Danielle much,” she said slowly. “Why are you asking?”

  He cleared his throat. Somehow he hadn’t expected this would be so difficult.

  But then, Rae-Anne had never wanted things sugarcoated. And maybe there wasn’t a way to sugarcoat this particular piece of news, anyway. “There’s a certain amount of evidence to suggest that Danielle Dietrich’s death wasn’t exactly an accident,” he said.

  She frowned but didn’t say anything, and Wiley went on. “How much do you know about how Rodney’s hotel business is financed?”

  Once again he saw the slight flicker in her blue eyes that betrayed her interest, in spite of the impatience in her voice. “I wish you’d stick to one subject at a time,” she told him.

  “It’s the same subject. Rae-Anne, Rodney’s not just the well-to-do good old boy he seems to be. He inherited a lot of money when he was twenty-one, but he lost it all in some real estate venture that went wrong—”

  “He’s told me about that,” she said quickly. “It wasn’t his fault. His partner walked out on him and took all the money along.”

  “I know. The point is, he took over running his family’s hotel chain when he had no more money of his own. And then he expanded the business too far, too fast, and ended up scrambling for financing when times suddenly got tighter again.”

  He waited, feeling a little hypnotized by the way RaeAnne’s veil was floating out behind her. Her strides were angry and determined, but the veil kept catching the rhythm of her body and translating it into a gentle, wafting motion.

  That was Rae-Anne all over, Wiley thought—taut and confident and ready to fight on the one hand, and almost magically gentle on the other. She was the most maddening combination of toughness and vulnerability he’d ever encountered.

  “What are you telling me, Wiley?” she demanded.

  “I’m telling you that your fiancé only salvaged his business empire by letting the mob into it in a big way.”

  He couldn’t tell if her silence was due to shock or to the fact that she was thinking hard. Her fine auburn brows had drawn together, and he wondered if his words were making more sense to her than she was willing to admit.

  “And I’m also saying that Rodney’s first wife, Danielle, got wind of what he’d done and didn’t like it. When she challenged him on it, and threatened to divorce him and claim half their assets in a settlement, she just happened to die accidentally. The divorce claim would have exposed his real source of income, and Rodney couldn’t risk that.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Her words were quick.

  “I think you do.”

  He knew he was right when he saw her pace falter slightly, as though she suddenly couldn’t decide whether she wanted to keep walking. He could see the struggle going on inside her and could almost feel the effort of will that kept her moving ahead.

  He’d only caught a glimpse of her shoes when she’d come down the broad stairs from the front door of the ranch house, but he was pretty sure they weren’t doing her feet any good on this rough road. And she’d been close to fainting half an hour earlier. The fact that she was still moving at all was proof of just how tenacious she could be.

  But she was smart as well as stubborn—smart enough, Wiley hoped, that she’d already been entertaining a doubt or two about the man she’d been going to marry.

  “I think you’ve been wondering about this, Rae-Anne,” he told her. “Otherwise you would be telling me I was full of hot air and you’d be obliged if I’d just drive off a mountaintop at the first opportunity. Right?”

  The exquisitely fair skin of her forehead creased into a frown. “I don’t know why you’re not dead like you’re supposed to be, Wiley, but if you’ve been this irritating to everybody over the past ten years, it’s a wonder somebody hasn’t tried to kill you.”

  “Oh, people have tried.”

  And nearly succeeded, he didn’t add. It had been an attempt on his life that had forced him away from Rae-Anne in the first place, but this wasn’t the time or the place to be talking about that. Until she was clear of Rodney Dietrich, there was no possible point to discussing their past or imagining that they might have any kind of a future.

  “How about a guy named Ellis Maitland?” he asked. “Did you happen to know him?”

  “Of course I knew Ellis. He was one of the courtesy van drivers for the hotel chain.”

  “Then you know that he met with a little accident not long ago.”

  “It wasn’t just a little accident, Wiley. He died, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Do you know how?”

  “He was fishing.” She sounded less than certain about it. “A big wave swept him off a pier, I think.”

  “Well, that’s the official guess, anyway.” Wiley eased his foot down a little lower on the gas pedal to keep up with Rae-Anne’s quicker steps. She seemed to be trying to outpace what he was saying, and he was inclined to take that as another sign that she suspected he might be right about all of this.

  “Would it surprise you to learn that old Ellis was working for the mob as well as for Rodney?” he asked. “Or that his real job, under cover of driving that courtesy van, was to pick up illegal gambling cash from mob runners and get it to Rodney, who’s in charge of laundering it through a network of bank accounts he’s set up? Ellis got nailed for a moving violation a while ago, and decided that rather than take a chance on going to jail, he would testify about what went on at Rodney’s hotels. And then—what do you know? He has an accident on a fishing pier.”

  “Money laundering?” She seemed to be testing the words out, asking herself whether they made sense.

  “That’s right. That’s Rodney’s real job, honey. That’s what he does for hi
s silent partners in exchange for all the money they pumped into his hotels. All Rodney really wants is to go on leading that hill-country-gentleman existence of his, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes—”

  “Stop it!” She stopped and turned on her heel suddenly. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, Wiley, but I don’t want to hear any more.”

  He’d expected anger from her, and resentment, and opposition. He hadn’t expected the anguish he saw in her face, or the desperation that had shot through her words.

  And he didn’t understand why she was wrapping her arms so tightly around her rib cage. It almost looked as though she was in physical pain. Her face had gone pale again, pale enough that even through the porcelain finish of her makeup he could see a faint hint of the freckles that had always dotted her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, a legacy, she’d once told him, of her red-hair-and-freckles youth.

  At least she didn’t look as though she was going to keel over. But this was almost worse. She looked, he realized suddenly, as though she’d been pushed to some limit he hadn’t known was there, or maybe a little beyond it.

  The thought was disturbing. Had he been misreading her after all? He’d been so certain he was touching on doubts that had already formed in her mind, so certain that he was doing the right thing in opening her eyes about Rodney Dietrich. But her posture, tight and held-in and defensive, made him think there might be something in this whole situation he’d missed.

  He pulled the car quickly to the side of the road and cranked on the hand brake. “How far are you intending to walk in that getup?” he demanded, as he got out of the driver’s seat.

  She looked at her fairy-tale white skirt. When she met his eyes again, he was shocked to see that the tiny pearls on her dress weren’t the only things glistening in the sunlight. There were tears in Rae-Anne’s eyes, making her look younger and more frightened than he’d known she could be.