She frowned again, annoyed with herself for not thinking to call a cab to pick her up here at a certain time. Now she’d have to have Owen drive her back to the hotel or stand around on his sidewalk while she waited for a taxi once they were through.
Oh, well. She wiped her palms on her thighs and took a quick breath. “We should talk.”
He nodded. “We should.”
She looked down at her hands as a silence stretched between them. “I’ve started looking into the annulment laws.”
“Yeah? Me, too.”
Why did that hurt so much? She twisted her fingers together. “There’s a couple of possibilities.”
“No. No, there’s not.”
Her gaze jumped up to meet his. His expression was unreadable, but his face was so handsome and so…so dear to her. How had this happened? How had she been so stupid as to fall in love when she was the kind of person who couldn’t let herself count on forever?
“The annulment idea won’t work,” Owen said.
“Oh, but I think we can find something in our circumstance that fits—”
“We’ve been living together, Izzy. I admit I’m no legal expert, but from what I’ve read, the fact that we’ve been living together—and sleeping together—puts the kibosh on that plan.”
She slumped against the back of the chair. Yesterday, after her conversation with Emily during which she’d confronted the truth that she was in love with Owen, she’d stopped thinking about a way out of their marriage and just wallowed in self-pity.
And really bad room-service pizza.
She held her palm to her stomach as if it were still burning a hole there. “Really? There’s a clause about living together?”
Owen nodded. “Think so.”
Her eyes closed. That meant they needed a divorce then. The idea of it only served to wound her ready-to-be-executed heart. An annulment could be something to forget about, since it legally ruled that the marriage had indeed never occurred. But a divorce made it real.
A divorce made it real that she’d wedded the man she was in love with and that she didn’t have what it took to stay married to him. Bryce had once called her a woman who made do with less. Had he been right?
“Izzy,” Owen said softly. “Isabella.”
She willed away the tears stinging her eyes. Swallowing hard, she looked at him. “What is it?”
“Izzy…”
Her gaze snagged on a quilt folded over the arm of the sofa he was sitting on. It looked familiar. She frowned at it, then scooted forward on her cushion so she had a better view. It certainly was a quilt. In the colors of her alma mater. The alma mater she shared with Emily.
As a matter of fact, it appeared to be the very quilt that Emily had made for Izzy the year after they’d graduated.
Eyebrows raised, she looked at Owen. He was watching her, and something in his expression made her run her gaze around the room. Some of the firefighter memorabilia on the bookcase had been rearranged. There were more books on the shelves now, including Eight Cousins and A Rose in Bloom.
Her books.
She rose to her feet, her insides unsteady as she toured the house. In the kitchen were some hand-embroidered tea towels that one of her zias had given her when she turned eighteen. Down the hall, in the room Owen used as a home office, her framed college diplomas hung on the wall next to his. Photographs that she’d taken over the years were set about, too. With a tentative fingertip, she touched one. It wasn’t a figment of her imagination.
Then she whirled, sensing Owen behind her. He stood in the doorway, his gaze trained on her face. She looked away, because what she was feeling was too big, too scary, too hard to speak of. He moved aside as she approached the door and then trailed her up the stairs to the next level.
In his bedroom, she found the clothes that had been in boxes in the garage hanging in the closet. A pair of scruffy slippers shaped like jalapeno peppers that she’d had since high school and never gotten around to throwing out peeked from under the bed.
Owen cleared his throat. “There were some god-awful flannel granny nightgowns. I took the liberty of tossing those.”
She still couldn’t look at him. Her gaze hit on another familiar item. It was propped on the pillows in the center of the bed. One of her friends had embroidered the heart-shaped thing for her eons ago. “My night has become a sunny dawn because of you.”
Blinking rapidly, she turned her head, only to find something that sent the tears cascading down her cheeks. On the bedside table—on the side that he slept on—was a beautiful frame. And inside it—their marriage certificate.
Her gaze jumped to her side of the bed, and there, in a matching frame, was a photograph from their wedding. Magnetlike, it drew her, and she took it in her hand, her vision blurring so that she couldn’t see the image of the two people who had found each other through some unexplainable intersection of luck and fate.
It didn’t matter. She remembered exactly how the couple had felt.
Happy. In love. Ready to face the future together.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand and then looked over at her husband. He was smiling at her, and she guessed that he knew his gesture had been the exact right thing to get through to her. The exact right thing to make her believe.
“You made a place for me here,” she said.
“Because I want you in my life,” Owen answered. “Forever. Do you think the rolling stone can settle down awhile?”
She sniffed, and had to wipe at her wet face again. She’d lived nowhere because there’d been no one she’d felt like this about. “I like Paxton. You know I’m in love with you.”
Grinning now, he came closer. “I counted on it.” He placed the photograph back on the table and then took her into his arms.
“I can count on you.” The knowledge was the sunny dawn that warmed every lonely and empty corner of her soul. After a childhood filled with unreliability, it was this that she needed. To know that she could count on him. He’d proved it to her, hadn’t he, by putting her things side by side with his. “I can really, really count on you.”
“Yes. On my support, on my partnership. On my love.”
Izzy hugged Owen to her, hearing his heart beating steady in her ear. “I am going to make you so happy,” she said fiercely. “Wait until you see how stubborn I can be about that.”
He tipped her face up for his kiss. “No more running?”
“Only to you,” she answered. “Always.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3258-1
RUNAWAY BRIDE RETURNS!
Copyright (c) 2009 by Christie Ridgway
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*Montana Mavericks: Home for the Holidays
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
RUNAWAY Page 15
