The Bridal Path: Ashley

by Sherryl Woods

  “What are you proposing we do about the situation?” Dillon asked.

  “One of you could leave,” she suggested hopefully. “There must be someplace else one of you could go.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Dillon and Ashley responded in chorus.

  That drew Mrs. Fawcett’s first glimmer of a smile. “I think I see the problem. You’re both too stubborn to give in.”

  “It’s a family trait,” Dillon said. “All the Wilde women share it, along with their father.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about Trent Wilde,” Mrs. Fawcett said, her expression turning nostalgic. “He was in the very first algebra class I ever taught. Drove me to distraction, he did. In fact, he did everything he possibly could to make me regret going into teaching at all.”

  “My father?” Ashley asked, astonishment written all over her face.

  “Oh, you’ve always thought of him as an upright member of this community, and indeed, that is what he became, but back then, let me tell you, he was a hellion.”

  Ashley’s suddenly thoughtful gaze settled on Dillon.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  Her lips twitched. “Oh, do you really? You can read my mind now, too?”

  “It’s not all that difficult,” he assured her. “You think you’ve just discovered the key to the friendship between your father and me.”

  “Mrs. Fawcett’s revelations about Daddy do raise some interesting comparisons, I must admit,” she said.

  The retired math teacher looked vaguely bemused by the twist the conversation had taken. “I must be missing something. Are you saying that this young man and your father are friends?”

  “So Dillon assures me,” Ashley concurred. “And he did arrive here with the key.”

  “It’s the truth,” Dillon insisted, not one bit happy about the mutual skepticism the two were expressing. “Look, I can settle this once and for all. Why don’t we call Trent in Arizona and he can vouch for it?”

  “No phone,” Ashley reminded him.

  “I have one,” he admitted sheepishly.

  She stared at him as if he’d announced he owned stock in a company that sold guns to terrorists.

  “You lying, cheating rat,” she said, her cheeks flushed with indignation.

  “Oh, no, you don’t, sweetheart. Don’t even go there,” he warned. “I never once said I didn’t have a phone the other night. I asked where you were going to get your hands on one.”

  Ashley glowered at him. Mrs. Fawcett merely looked confused.

  “What does a phone have to do with anything?”

  “Never mind,” Dillon told her. “The point is if the two of you don’t want to take my word that Trent and I are friends, we can call him and put the matter to rest.”

  “That is not the issue,” Mrs. Fawcett insisted. “It’s the impropriety of this arrangement you have here.” She stared hard at Dillon again. “And you sitting here half-naked, without thinking twice about it. It tells me I was right to come when I did.”

  “Believe me, your timing was impeccable,” Ashley said. A devilish gleam lit her eyes right before she said, “Perhaps you have a room you’d like to let to Dillon for the remainder of his time in the area.”

  Dillon choked on his coffee.

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Mrs. Fawcett said thoughtfully. “I suppose that would work. There would certainly be no monkey business between you two if he were under my watchful eye.” She nodded happily. “Yes, I like it. Pack your things, young man.” She directed a meaningful look at his bare chest. “I assume you do have some clothes with you.”

  Dillon didn’t like the way they seemed to be eagerly taking charge of his life. “Excuse me, but I have some say in this, and I am not going anywhere. I made arrangements to borrow Trent’s cabin and I intend to stay in Trent’s cabin.” He scowled at Ashley. “I thought we had settled this days ago.”

  “A few things have come up since then.”

  “Such as?” he demanded, wondering if she would dare to mention the previous night’s interlude.

  She seemed to be struggling for a suitable response. Finally, she said, “People know we’re here together now.”

  “Not people,” he pointed out. “Just Mrs. Fawcett, and as you yourself reassured me the other day, Mrs. Fawcett is the epitome of discretion.” He stared hard at the teacher. “I’m sure that’s true, isn’t it?”

  The older woman looked torn between her honor and her very clear mission to split the pair of them up.

  “Of course, I keep what I know to myself,” she finally declared staunchly. “That doesn’t mean you should get away with these shenanigans.”

  “What shenanigans?” Dillon asked. “We’ve both assured you there are no shenanigans going on.”

  “Oh, fiddle-faddle,” she said dismissively. “Only a fool would believe that, and I’m no fool. Besides, even if it is true now, it won’t be for long. The sparks flying between you two could set the woods on fire. I owe it to Trent to see that nothing comes of that.”

  “After the way he treated you way back when, you feel you owe him more loyalty than you do us?” Dillon asked.

  “He changed,” she said, as if that was explanation enough.

  “So have I,” Dillon said quietly.

  But he could tell from the expressions that greeted his announcement there were two women in the room who didn’t believe him.

  * * *

  Ashley hadn’t been at all sure that Mrs. Fawcett would ever give up and go away without one of them in tow. Eventually, though, she had left alone with the promise that she would be checking on them.

  “At any hour of the day or night, so mind your p’s and q’s,” she warned them.

  After she had reluctantly left them, Ashley turned to Dillon, whose eyes were sparkling with pure mischief, just as they had all those years ago. “Do you feel like you’re sixteen again?” she asked.

  “More like twelve,” he said.

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “You were far more precocious than I was.”

  “Don’t sound so regretful about it,” he said. “Being precocious wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. People tend not to take you very seriously, unless you count the fact that shop owners never take their eyes off you. That was about as serious as a bullet to the chest.”

  Ashley was surprised by the bitterness in his voice. “Was it that awful?”

  “Being tried and judged by every adult in town? It wasn’t all that much fun. And if you think the shop owners were bad, you should have seen the looks I got from parents every time I went anywhere close to their daughters.” His expression turned rueful. “Of course, they might have had some reason to worry.”

  “No doubt.” She studied him intently as a thought occurred to her for the first time. “Dillon, were you as bad as everyone thought you were?”

  “You mean with girls?”

  She nodded.

  “Sweetheart, I didn’t get that reputation by sitting home alone on Saturday nights.”

  “Amazing.”

  “What is?”

  “That you never got caught.”

  He looked vaguely uneasy at that, which stirred her suspicions. “You didn’t, did you?”

  He shook his head, his expression unreadable. If Ashley had had to guess what he was thinking, she would have said he found this question, like so many others, insulting. Even so, he answered it.

  “No, you can relax. There are no little Ford babies running around Riverton unclaimed.”

  She nodded, gratified. “Which brings me back to my original point. If you were so bad, if half the girls in town were so eager to jump into the sack with you, how come you didn’t get caught? No one is that lucky. Teenagers make mistakes all the time, especially when they’re taking so many chances.”

  “Maybe I was very careful.”

  “Or maybe you never slept with any of them,” she said, watching closely for his reaction.

  “You heard all th
e talk. You know I did.”

  She noticed he didn’t quite meet her eyes when he said it. “Or was it just girls wanting everyone to believe that they’d conquered the dangerous Dillon Ford?” she speculated.

  “Sweetheart, don’t you know all that locker-room talk is something only guys do?”

  “Obviously, you’ve never been at a teenage girls’ slumber party.”

  “Well, actually…”

  Ashley chuckled. “I should have known. Whose was it?”

  “I never, ever kissed and told,” he declared piously. “I don’t intend to start now.”

  “Well, your dates certainly did. How much were they making up, Dillon?” she asked again, refusing to let the matter drop until he’d given her a straight answer.

  He stood and poured himself another cup of coffee. He took a very long time doing it. A suspicious person might think he was trying to hide something. Ashley had gone beyond suspicion to flat-out conviction.

  “How old were you when you made love for the first time?” she asked.

  “Isn’t that awfully personal?”

  “Considering how close we’ve become, to quote you, I’d say I have a right to ask a few personal questions.”

  “Can I plead the Fifth?”

  “This isn’t a court of law.”

  “It feels like it.”

  “Dillon, the question isn’t all that complicated or particularly damning. Quite the contrary, in fact.”

  “No, you’re just suggesting that I was a fraud back then.”

  So she was, Ashley realized. “Well, only in the best possible way.”

  He laughed at that. “Is it any wonder I find you fascinating? You have the most convoluted, twisted logic of any woman I’ve ever known. Most women try to prove the men they’re involved with are sleeping around on them. You’re dead certain I wasn’t sleeping around ten years ago, when all the evidence points to the contrary.”

  “What evidence? A bunch of hormonal seventeen-year-olds out to prove how grown-up and daring they were?”

  Dillon sighed. “Where were you a decade ago?”

  “Trying to figure out how to get on your list of conquests,” she admitted candidly.

  Pure lust suddenly shimmered in his eyes. “It’s never too late.”

  “So they say,” Ashley agreed. “But I want straight answers first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t figure out why you’d let everyone in town believe you were so bad when my guess is that you never touched those girls.”

  “Oh, I touched a few of them,” he confessed, then sighed. “But you’re right. It never went any further than that. I was twenty when I made love for the first time.”

  “Mind-boggling,” she said, half to herself. “Then why did you let everyone believe you were so bad?”

  “You won’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Because having a reputation as a juvenile delinquent seemed better to me at seventeen than having no reputation at all.”

  Ashley struggled with the implications of that for several minutes before conceding defeat. “You’re right. I don’t understand.”

  “Why should you?” he said bitterly. “You were the daughter of the most powerful man in town. You were bright and beautiful and just about as close to perfect as a summer sky. You were everyone’s role model. Mothers berated their daughters for not being more like you, and fathers berated their sons for not courting you.”

  Ashley winced at the assessment. “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an exaggeration?”

  “Do you?” he countered.

  Ashley sighed. “Okay, I suppose people did think that, but they were all overestimating me. I was just an insecure teenage girl, like all the rest. At any rate, what does that have to do with you?”

  “I was a nobody, with a father who wasn’t around most of the time and no mother at all,” he said.

  He said it with surprisingly little resentment. Apparently he’d been saving that for her all these years. She began to wonder if his feelings for her back then had been fascination or antagonism. Based on what he was saying now, she must have represented a lot of things he disliked. She listened intently for some clue as he continued to describe the way it had been for him.

  “I had to take on too much responsibility at home too early. My grades were lousy. The first time anybody paid any attention to me was when my best friend at the time shoplifted a pack of gum and I got blamed for it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Ten, maybe eleven. All of a sudden adults couldn’t pay enough attention to me. Even my father took notice for the first time in a long time. I began to see that being bad had its advantages.”

  “A classic case of acting out to get attention,” Ashley said softly, feeling sympathy well up inside her. Dillon’s warning look kept her from expressing any hint of the pity she felt for that sad boy.

  “By the time I reached high school, it was a habit. I knew right from wrong and I never–well almost never,” he corrected with a rueful grin, “crossed that line. But by then everyone had stopped giving me the benefit of the doubt. I’d done everything I could to earn my reputation as a bad kid, and I clung to it because it was all I had.”

  Ashley thought about a scared, lonely little boy choosing the wrong path just to get something that she and her sisters had taken for granted–the attention of grown-ups.

  “Oh, Dillon,” she whispered.

  “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” he ordered tightly. “I didn’t tell you that story so you would pity me. I told you because you badgered me for the truth. Now you have it.” He regarded her intently. “It’s not nearly as provocative as thinking I was some sort of bad seed, destined to head straight to hell, is it?”

  Ashley was shocked by his assessment. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “That you were like all the others. Still are, for that matter. You were attracted to me because I represented danger and rebellion. If I’d just been another kid in the class getting average or below-average grades, wearing blue jeans and plaid shirts and cowboy boots, you would never have looked at me twice.”

  “That’s not true,” Ashley insisted, then thought back to the way she’d been in high school. She’d only dated the best and brightest, never the average or uninteresting. Dillon had been fascinating because he was dangerous and forbidden. She couldn’t deny that. “Okay, maybe back then I wouldn’t have been as drawn to you.”

  “And now?”

  “Dillon, there’s a chemistry between us.”

  “But how much of that is a carryover from before, from thinking that I’m a little shady and a whole lot dangerous?”

  “None of it,” she said at once, then sighed, forced into being honest by that penetrating gaze of his. “Okay, maybe some of it. I don’t know. How can I, when you have never let anyone get to know the real you?”

  “Your father knows me. So do a lot of other people, actually. Of course, I had to move out of Riverton to live down my reputation.”

  “You could have stayed here and fought it.”

  He shot her an all-too-knowing look. “Maybe I just wanted to get away and be somebody different. You should understand that better than anyone.”

  Ashley swallowed hard. “Because I ran away to New York so I could stop being Trent Wilde’s perfect daughter,” she said.

  “Exactly.” His sharp-eyed gaze bored into her. “Did it work?”

  “Of course, it did,” she said at once.

  “I’m not talking about the obvious now,” he said. “I mean deep down inside, where it counts. Did you find out who Ashley Wilde really is?”

  The question was so close to what was troubling her these days that she couldn’t even meet his gaze. She realized she didn’t like having the tables unexpectedly turned on her. Cross-examining Dillon was one thing. Being subjected to an intensive probing herself was another.

  “We were talking about you,” she protested swiftly.

>   He grinned. “Not any more. It’s turnabout time. You’ve been digging around in my psyche for the past hour or so. Now I want to know what makes Ashley Wilde tick.”

  She regarded him uneasily. “Why? Just to get even?”

  “Maybe it’s because I care what goes on in that gorgeous head of yours.” He waved a finger under her nose. “And don’t deny that there’s a lot going on, because I’m not buying it anymore. You didn’t come up here to get in tune with nature. Every time I gaze into those beautiful eyes of yours I see how troubled you are.”

  Because she’d had just about all the intense conversation she could handle for one morning and figured he had, too, Ashley opted for resistance to his probing. She tilted her head defiantly. “Who says?”

  “I say,” Dillon countered, but unexpectedly he relented. “Okay, we’ll play it your way for this morning. Let’s go fishing.”

  She wasn’t sure that was a big improvement over being analyzed. “I never catch anything,” she grumbled.

  “Sweetheart, this is one of the few cases where the process is almost as important as the results. Stick with me and I’ll teach you how to become laid back and relaxed.”

  Since she devoutly wished she could relax and find a little serenity, even though she doubted it would be with a fishing pole in hand, she agreed readily. “I’ll get the poles.”

  “And your waders,” he said. “None of this sissy stuff, standing on the shore.”

  “Of course not.”

  He stood up, moved to her side and leaned down to brush a kiss across her forehead. “First lesson, sweetheart. This is fun. Stop looking as if you’ve been doomed to a lifetime in the coal mines.”

  “I’ll cheer up when I catch a bigger fish than you do,” she countered grimly.

  Dillon, blast him, chuckled. “Maybe you’d better settle for just catching any fish at all.”

  Chapter Eight

  The fish were biting–Dillon had thrown back half a dozen–but Ashley couldn’t seem to catch one. Dillon watched with amusement as she got more and more frustrated, then annoyed, then grimly determined. At this rate, they’d be standing thigh-deep in the stream until nightfall, he concluded.

  “You aren’t relaxing,” he called out.