Page 22 of Winter Vows

Hardy didn’t need any coaching to agree. She looked fabulous. She was wearing a dark-blue wool skirt that fell to midcalf, boots, and a pale-blue sweater that looked so soft he had to stop himself from reaching out to brush his fingers over it. She’d worn her hair down, so that it skimmed her shoulders in soft waves. Suddenly he felt just as he had in high school when he’d picked up his date for the senior prom. He was flustered and tongue-tied. Why was it this woman could reduce him to a jumble of nerves, when no other woman on earth could?

“Ready to go?” he asked, his tone brusque.

“Absolutely.”

He turned to Kelly. “We won’t be long,” he said, as if she’d just reminded him of some curfew.

“Stay as long as you like,” she retorted, her eyes glittering with amusement. “I don’t have any plans for this evening. Laura and I will be just fine.”

After they were settled in his truck and on the way, Trish turned in the seat to face him. “It’s very nice of you to do this,” she said.

“No problem.”

“It’s great to be able to start thinking about the future, making plans. For a long time all I thought about was getting away from Houston, away from my father, away from...well, everything.”

“Including Laura’s father?”

“Him most of all, I suppose.”

“Have you told him about her?”

“No, but I’m sure my father has. They’re very tight.”

Hardy gritted his teeth. “Is that so?”

“Jack works for him. He’s been envisioning a vice presidency ever since he and I started dating. I’m sure it must be a huge disappointment to him to think he might actually have to earn it.”

Hardy shot a look at her. “You don’t think much of the man, do you?”

“I did for a while. He was handsome and charming. He courted me with fancy dinners and thoughtful little gifts. I got caught up in the romance.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad to me. What happened?”

“It turned out I was only one of the women being treated to such attention.” She made a face. “I’ve never been fond of being part of a crowd, especially when I’m the one wearing an engagement ring. I made a rather public scene and broke it off the same day I found out I was pregnant.”

“Lousy timing,” he observed.

“I don’t suppose there’s any good time to make a discovery like that, but in a way I’m glad it happened when it did. What if I’d actually married the jerk and then found out? Bottom line, Laura and I are both better off without him.”

“But your folks don’t see it that way?”

“Oh, no. They had visions of us being one big happy family. Still do. The more distance I keep between us until they accept my decision, the better. My father tends to bulldoze over any decision he finds inconvenient. He found my decision to dump Jack extremely inconvenient. It’s left him with a gap in his executive staff. He can’t very well make Jack a vice president when all of Houston society knows what happened between him and me. The whole country club witnessed me dropping my engagement ring down the overexposed cleavage of one of his girlfriends.”

Hardy laughed, which earned him a scowl. “It wasn’t funny,” she chided.

“I’m sure it wasn’t at the time, but you have to admit it made quite a statement. I’m impressed.”

Her lips twitched ever so slightly. “Yes, I suppose it did. I always wondered, though, which of them retrieved it. Jack, probably. The diamond was worth a fortune, and she didn’t strike me as a keeper.”

“So you packed up and took off?”

“Not right away. I had to plan for it. I had to sell my business, close up my apartment and do it all without my father getting suspicious. He would have locked me in my room at the family mansion if he’d guessed what my intentions were.”

“Being cut off from your family must be difficult. Obviously he loves you or he wouldn’t have stirred up such a ruckus when he realized you were missing.”

She shrugged. “He does love me, in his way. So does my mother. But they’re both more concerned about how what I do reflects on them than whether or not I’m happy. They hated my bookstore. It wasn’t in the right neighborhood. It didn’t cater to the right clientele. My father referred to it as my little hobby. It drove him crazy that it operated in the black and I didn’t have to keep running to him for money to prop it up. He’d be shocked to find out what I got for it when I sold it.”

Hardy saw an opportunity to slow down her rush to open a bookstore in Los Piños. “Then you don’t have to go back to work right away? You could stay home with Laura for a while?”

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