The Wedding Assignment

by Cathryn Clare

  Well, if he was, it wasn’t her problem. She didn’t want his high-handed interference in her life, and if she just put her mind to it, she knew she would be able to clear away the troubling memory of how it had felt to be clasped in his arms last night, rocking to the rhythm of their shared desires.

  Desire wasn’t the same as commitment. And attraction wasn’t any guarantee of happiness. Nothing that Wiley Cotter could offer meant anything in the long term, not to Rae-Anne or her unborn child. And the long term was what she had to keep her mind on.

  She sat up straighter on the bed, resolutely keeping her eyes away from Wiley’s side of the room, and said, “I’d just as soon get moving with this, if it’s all the same to you. What exactly am I supposed to be after, and do you have any idea where I should start looking for it?”

  Chapter 6

  He had to try one more time.

  Wiley had listened in on all of Jack’s briefing, trying to keep the details of Rodney’s financial affairs straight in his mind. He’d heard all this once, and it had been hard to concentrate then, too, because he’d been thinking so inescapably about Rae-Anne.

  He was doing the same thing now.

  He had stayed put in his corner of the room for as long as he could, and then his restlessness had made him start pacing, from the window in the corner to the bathroom door and back.

  That had helped a little, although it was still impossible to look at Rae-Anne’s pale, composed face without wanting to run across the room and shake her until she admitted that the only wise thing to do was walk away from Rodney Dietrich and let somebody else sort out the details.

  It hadn’t taken long for Jack to call a halt to Wiley’s pacing. “You want to take a hike or something, big brother?” he’d said. “This is like being in a tiger cage.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Wiley growled.

  It had been tempting to go and walk off at least some of his tension, but he didn’t want to miss any of Jack’s briefing. So he’d crossed his arms and gone to lean against the window frame, holding himself still by main strength and trying to keep his eyes away from Rae-Anne’s serious, thoughtful features as much as he could.

  He’d stayed there while Mack MacGuire went out and got a bunch of sandwiches, and he still hadn’t moved when the meeting resumed after lunch. Sooner or later, he thought, he would get a chance to talk to Rae-Anne alone. She wouldn’t just walk off and leave him without saying anything, not when he’d made it so clear that the idea of her heading back into Rodney Dietrich’s life was making him half-crazy.

  He finally got his chance, although Rae-Anne didn’t exactly seem to be going out of her way to seize the opportunity to speak to him. It was midafternoon, and the three FBI agents had gone out to their car, leaving Wiley and RaeAnne to gather their belongings in the cabin. Sam was outside, too, indulging in one of the cigarettes he was allegedly trying to give up. Rae-Anne had vanished into the inner bedroom, but it didn’t take long for Wiley to follow her in there.

  “Rae-Anne, listen to me.” He shut the door behind him, ignoring her protest. “We need to talk about this.”

  She looked steadily at him for a long moment, then turned to the small suitcase he’d brought for her. “You missed your chance, Wiley,” she told him. “We should have talked about it last night, before we—got sidetracked.”

  He sliced one of his hands through the air in what he intended as a sharp, frustrated motion. He hadn’t realized he was heading for Rae-Anne until his fingers were actually touching her thick auburn hair.

  She went just as still as he did, and Wiley could feel her trembling slightly. He was shaking, too, with the sudden realization of how much it had been costing him to keep his distance from her all day.

  “Don’t do this, Wiley.” Her voice was low and unsteady, but she didn’t move.

  She didn’t really mean it, Wiley thought. She was trying to talk herself into something she didn’t really want, the same as she’d been trying to do with this plan about Rodney Dietrich. All he needed to do was reinforce her reluctance, her doubts.

  He eased his hand over the elastic band that held her hair in a ponytail and circled the back of her neck gently, persuasively. “I was convinced yesterday when I picked you up in the limo that you didn’t really want to marry Rodney Dietrich,” he said. “And I’m just as convinced now.”

  She had closed her eyes. He could see her fighting against something. Just at the moment, it was hard to tell which way the battle was going.

  “And if you don’t want to marry him, why the hell go back there?” he went on, massaging the too-tight muscles of her neck with his thumb. “Why not just cut your losses? Jack’ll find a way to wrap his case up with or without you. You don’t need to take this risk.”

  Her eyes opened suddenly, and Wiley stopped moving. “I do have to do this,” she told him.

  “Why?” He could feel her starting to pull away, but he kept his hand where it was, insisting that she meet his eyes and answer his question. “Why not just leave? You’ve done it before. You did it when you thought I’d died, did it so thoroughly I couldn’t find you in forty-eight states and three countries.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Her voice was thick with tension. Wiley wanted desperately to wrap his arms around her and hold her against his chest, keeping every kind of danger and doubt away from her.

  But that unsettling combination of anger and doubt in her eyes stopped him. “Are you just trying to wrap up old unfinished business here?” she was asking. “You couldn’t find me after you disappeared ten years ago, so you’re trying to make it up to me by fixing everything in my life now. Is that what’s going on, Wiley?”

  He growled an expletive and finally loosened his hold. He turned away from her with the same restlessness that had been shooting through him all day, and moved toward the curtained window, listening to the faint sound of his brothers’ conversation in the parking lot.

  He didn’t know exactly what was going on. Of course he couldn’t magically make their happy past come back to life. And even their happiest moments had been stolen ones, seized in the face of Wiley’s uncertain job and Rae-Anne’s longings for all the things Wiley knew he could never give her.

  None of that had changed. But there was so much more between them than just some unsettled memories. The way they’d made love last night had proved that. Wiley didn’t know where it might lead, but he’d be damned if he would let Rae-Anne cut things off just as they’d finally found each other again.

  “I’m not trying to fix everything in your life,” he said roughly. “Just the parts I know are wrong. And I know your heart isn’t in this marriage, Rae-Anne. You can’t make me believe it is.”

  They looked at each other for what felt to Wiley like a very long time, and then Rae-Anne sighed. Her face was pale in the dim light of the bedroom. He saw a resigned look come into her wide blue eyes, and felt something hopeful springing to life inside him. Was she finally admitting he was right?

  She was, but she looked so unhappy about it that Wiley couldn’t feel any satisfaction as she said, “You’re right. Rodney isn’t exactly the man of my dreams. But I have to go back there anyway.”

  “Why?”

  The word exploded out of him as his frustration reached its limit. She’d just admitted that Rodney didn’t mean the moon and the stars to her. Then why was she doing this? Why couldn’t she admit that Wiley did mean something? He wasn’t sure where that could lead, but maybe—slowly, gradually—they might be able to pick up where they’d left off ten years earlier.

  Her answer shot all of that to pieces.

  “I have to go back because I’m pregnant with Rodney’s child,” she said.

  At first Wiley laughed. He couldn’t imagine what else to do. It was ridiculous—it was impossible. The body that had had him on his knees in adoration last night had been so perfectly, so exactly the same as he remembered it. The idea that she could be carrying another man’s child was one that his mi
nd simply refused to grasp.

  “Now do you understand?”

  It wasn’t her words, but her tone, that got through to Wiley. She sounded resolute, and even more serious than she’d been while she’d listened to Jack and the other FBI agents outlining the case they were building against the father of her baby. She’d had more to grapple with than Wiley had imagined, and she seemed to have come to terms with it in her usual determined style.

  “How long—” He couldn’t find the words to complete his question.

  She finished it for him. “How long have I been pregnant? Not long. About six weeks.”

  “Six weeks.” He repeated it mindlessly.

  “That’s why the wedding arrangements were—a little rushed.”

  Wiley’s thoughts kept scattering away on him, refusing to fall into place. But isolated parts of the picture were snapping into focus in spite of his confusion.

  That protective gesture of Rae-Anne’s that he hadn’t understood, when she’d wrapped her arms around herself… The dawning, protesting awareness on her face when she’d wakened in his bed this morning… Her refusal to admit that Rodney was guilty until she’d proven it for herself…

  “Damn it, Rae-Anne—”

  He didn’t know what he had started to say. There were no words for the sudden sense of loss that was carving him up inside, no way to tell her how hollow he felt at the realization that she would never be his—that she would always belong to the father of her child in a way she could never belong to Wiley.

  He hadn’t known how desperate he was to win her back until this very moment.

  “If Jack gets the evidence he needs—” Jack suddenly seemed like as much of an enemy as Rodney Dietrich had been just moments ago. Rae-Anne was hemmed in, he saw suddenly, surrounded by far too many grim possibilities.

  She was nodding. “My baby’s going to have a father who’s in jail,” she said. “That’s why I have to be sure, Wiley. I have to do what’s best for this child. I thought I knew—”

  She covered her face suddenly with both hands, and Wiley felt something wrench inside him at the helpless thought that he had no right to comfort her now. He’d only added to her turmoil by stirring up all the old feelings that lay unresolved between them.

  When she looked up, she had settled her shoulders in a way that seemed to be warning him away. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said, looking him in the eye again. “I’m only telling you this because I had a horrible feeling you were never going to get off my case otherwise.”

  He had a horrible feeling she might be right.

  It was disturbing to see himself from Rae-Anne’s point of view all of a sudden. He’d thought he was making things easier for her, and instead he’d been charging around in her already complicated life like a rodeo bull run completely out of control.

  “And if you breathe a word of this to anybody—“

  “I won’t.” At least that was easy to promise. Wiley held up one palm and fought the urge to pull her close to him, to offer her whatever strength and comfort she might be able to draw from him.

  Strength and comfort had turned all too quickly to lust and longing when they’d touched each other last night. And now Wiley could see why she’d looked so miserable when she’d wakened this morning and remembered what had happened.

  He couldn’t think of a single apology that would do any good. And he’d never been a man to offer excuses.

  So he jammed both hands into his jeans pockets again, amazed at how nothing—not his brothers’ presence just outside the cabin, not the bombshell she’d just dropped on him, not the danger she was intent on walking into—could keep his body from responding to Rae-Anne’s soft white skin and heartbreaking blue eyes. He would have to be halfdead, he thought, before he could stop himself from wanting her.

  “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” he said gruffly.

  “I’m sure.”

  In spite of the stubborn tilt of her chin, she didn’t sound sure. She still sounded scared, and everything in Wiley’s bloodstream was telling him to carry her off someplace safe, someplace sheltered.

  But that’s what he’d been trying to do yesterday, and he’d only succeeded in snarling things up even more. He gave an angry, inarticulate sound that was half profanity, half apology, and started for the bedroom door when he heard his brother Jack demanding from the other room whether Rae-Anne was ready to go yet.

  “It’s the next gate on the left.”

  Rae-Anne was almost as nervous going toward the Dietrich ranch as she’d been driving away from it yesterday. She smoothed her hands against her jeans and glanced at Sam Cotter, who was driving.

  “How did you manage to get a car from the cab company in New Braunfels, anyway?” she asked him.

  Sam gave her the slanted grin that seemed to be his stock response to any and all questions. “We’ve got a lot of contacts in the area,” he said.

  “’We’ meaning Cotter Investigations?”

  He gave her a slow nod and flicked on the turn signal.

  “How long have you been working there?”

  “Eight, nine years now.”

  “What did you do before that?”

  His grin had turned ironic. “Anything,” he said, “and everything.”

  She hadn’t quite been able to stifle her curiosity about the Cotter brothers. She still hadn’t gotten a very clear answer about why Sam had come along to this morning’s meeting. She did know he had offered to see that she got safely to Rodney’s home, and that Jack had taken his brother up on it, agreeing it wouldn’t hurt to have someone make sure she would at least be welcome at the Dietrich ranch.

  “Might be more plausible for her to show up in a cab,” Jack had said.

  “No problem. I can borrow one.”

  So now, as the sun started to dim in the western sky, she was rolling between the same tall limestone gates that Wiley had driven her through yesterday afternoon.

  “You remember the plan,” Sam was saying, as the car started up the long driveway toward the low stone ranch house. “You tell them you don’t have any money on you, and you need to pay the driver. Then, when you come out, if you’re even slightly worried about the reception you’re getting, I can get you out of here in no time.”

  Part of her wanted to tell him to get her out of here right now, before she had to face her jilted bridegroom. She wasn’t used to maintaining any kind of pretense, and she wasn’t sure she was going to be very good at it. What if she couldn’t come up with the answers she needed and was left with this nagging sense of uncertainty about the father of her child?

  It was only the thought of that child that kept her voice steady as she said, “I remember.”

  “Think Rodney’s likely to be home?”

  “That’s his pickup in the yard.” Rae-Anne nodded toward the gleaming dark blue truck parked next to the house. “And he generally spends Sundays getting things done on the ranch.”

  Or rather, making sure his employees were getting things done. Rodney belonged to the fourth generation of Dietrichs to live on this hill-country ranch, but he preferred to see himself as a gentleman farmer, retreating to the country after working all week in the city hotel business his father had bought fifty years earlier.

  “You like it out here?” Sam was asking her.

  She nodded. “I love it,” she said. “My mother’s family came from the hill country, and I always seemed to end up drifting in this direction whenever I was on the road.”

  “According to Wiley, you were on the road a lot.”

  She looked sharply at him, but his casual manner hadn’t changed. Had Wiley been discussing her with his brothers? She felt a blush creeping over her treacherously fair complexion as she wondered what Wiley might have said about her.

  He wouldn’t have shared the news about her pregnancy. She was certain of that. He was one of the most intuitive men she’d ever met, and when she’d broken her news to him, he’d seen immediately what
a bind she was in. In fact, the perceptive look in his dark eyes was still with her as she tried to answer Sam levelly.

  “Wiley should talk,” she said. “He’s always been harder to pin down than a tumbleweed on a windy day.”

  The corner of Sam’s mouth quirked upward. “True enough,” he admitted. “All the Cotters seem to have inherited a kind of footloose gene somewhere along the line.”

  Rae-Anne wished he hadn’t brought Wiley’s name into the conversation. She’d been working at keeping him out of her thoughts, because the last thing she needed on her mind this evening was the memory of his eloquent eyes, or the echo of how he’d called her name in the heat of their loving. Just as she thought she’d banished him to the back of her mind, though, Sam mentioned him again.

  “You know,” he said, in the easy drawl that was like a slow-motion version of Wiley’s voice, “Jack and I put our heads together about Wiley while you all were packing up this afternoon.”

  She turned to look at him, not sure what he meant.

  Sam spun the steering wheel, gradually easing the car around the long curve of the lane. “We were trying to remember if we’d ever seen Wiley let anybody sass him the way you were doing at that meeting this morning.”

  “He had it coming to him.” Rae-Anne didn’t want to go into details about why she and Wiley had been sparring so heatedly.

  Sam’s grin had widened. “I believe you,” he said, “but mostly women don’t come out and tell him so. Either they can’t be bothered, or they’re too head-over-heels about him, or they haven’t got the nerve.”

  Rae-Anne felt a jealous little jolt go through her at Sam’s words. So there were other women in Wiley’s life, were there? Well, she supposed it wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was the way she was reacting to the news.

  You were head-over-heels enough yourself to completely miss the point about why Wiley came back, she reminded herself sternly. And you’re supposed to be over that now. Grow up, Rae-Anne.