“I can’t. My ankle—”
“Is fine. I watched you all but skip up the porch steps five minutes ago.” The ball of frustration that sat in his gut these days took a little roll. “I checked the schedule, and you’re clear until the rehearsal. Look, you and I need to spend some time together. Otherwise, somebody is going to notice this awkwardness between us.”
“All right. Okay. Just give me a few minutes to change my clothes.”
“Good. I’ll wait for you below the tree house.”
She nodded. Tucker knew he should turn away and save his question for later, but he couldn’t do it. Her red-rimmed eyes were killing him. “You’ve been crying. Why?”
“Allergies. That’s all. Something in the mountain air.”
He didn’t believe her, but he sensed that now was not the time to push. He’d wait to wrest the real reason out of her once they were out of sight of any potentially prying eyes, although he was pretty sure he could guess the reason.
The wedding. Caroline was having a real wedding with a real dress and a real officiant, and Gillian had had Elvis.
“Women.” Tucker marched away from the cabin with a real bee in his boots. Women, weddings, and wishes that failed to come true. “Dammit.”
He stewed about it for the next ten minutes, working up a real head of steam. He knew what was going on here. He’d run out of damned time. She was going to insist on the divorce, and he would have to give it to her, and it royally pissed him off. Tucker didn’t like not getting his way, especially about something so important as staying married to the woman he loved.
When ten minutes stretched to fifteen, he added the sin of tardiness to his general pissed-off frame of mind. After he’d been cooling his heels beneath the Callahans’ damned tree house for twenty minutes, he was done. If it took him playing Cro-Magnon man and pulling her off by her hair, he would do it. They were overdue for a walk and a talk. He had a few things he wanted to say about weddings to the secret Mrs. McBride.
He almost marched right past Maisy without stopping when she waved him down, but her words finally made it past the blood roaring in his ears. “… bag I left. She asked me to find you, and tell you she’ll be back for your walk in an hour.”
Wait. “What? I’m sorry, would you repeat that?”
Maisy rolled her eyes. “You’re as cloud-headed as the rest of us today, Tucker. We accidentally left Gillian’s bag up at the river camp after the photography session. She went to get it and asked me to tell you she’ll look for you when she gets back.”
Why didn’t she come get me? “I’d have taken her up.”
“I offered to go with her, but honestly, I think she needed a little time alone. This week is hard on her. It’s the first wedding she’s been to since hers was canceled.”
If one doesn’t count Elvis.
“She’s being a real trooper, but it didn’t help that her mother went all weepy when she saw Caroline in her wedding gown this morning.”
Well, damn. “Okay, well, thanks for the heads-up.”
Maisy tilted her head and studied him. “You okay, Tucker?”
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
“You seem a little tense. You’re not nervous about the wedding, are you? Being a co–best man with Boone and everything? Tell me y’all haven’t lost the rings.”
“We haven’t lost the rings, and I’m not tense,” he snapped.
“Well, okay, then. I think I’ll toddle off and see if any other happy person needs any help. Haley was talking about digging worms to go fishing.” She finger-waved and turned to leave.
Ashamed, Tucker said, “Maisy. I’m sorry. I am a little tense, I guess. Just a lot going on.”
“Everything will be okay, Tucker. Know how I know? Celeste told me so. Of course, Angelica said Celeste is full of herself and doesn’t know everything, but she agreed the wedding was going to be fabulous.”
He grinned crookedly. “You gotta love the Blessing cousins.”
“Don’t ya know it?”
Tucker ended up joining Maisy and Haley in the hunt for fishing worms. Throughout the task, he kept an eye out for Gillian’s return. The trip up to the river camp and back should have taken an hour a most, an hour and a half if she screwed around.
Two hours after she’d left the Callahan compound, he started calling her. She didn’t answer. He called and he called and he called. After the eighth call, Brick’s wife, Liliana, came looking for him. “Tucker, I heard the phone ringing in Gillian’s bedroom. It was plugged into the charger. Your name is on the display.”
“She doesn’t have her phone?” he demanded. “She went up to that remote camp without her freaking phone?”
This time, he really would kill her—if the bears didn’t get to her first.
* * *
Gillian indulged in a few tears on her way up to the river camp in the cute little Mercedes she’d rented to have some independence during the Colorado trip. She snagged her bag and took advantage of the moment to fix her makeup. Her eyes were red as an interstate highway on a road map. No wonder Tucker had guessed she’d been crying.
Bag in hand, makeup repaired, redness-reducing teardrops applied, she returned to her car and began to lecture herself about keeping the tears at bay. This had been an emotional morning, but she couldn’t lose her composure every time she turned around. She needed to wrestle her mood changes into submission and remain more even-keeled. Ever since the Enchanted Canyon argument with Tucker, she’d been a pinball bouncing randomly between one emotion bumper and another.
Her thoughts were a million miles away as she drove the winding road through to Stardance River Camp and exited the gate, turning left. Her friends thought she had wedding envy. Caroline, in a sweet gesture from a caring heart, had even offered Gillian the opportunity to bow out of her bridesmaid commitment if the activities and events would prove too painful for her.
They had no way of knowing, of course, that wedding envy was only a small part of what was bothering her.
She wouldn’t be normal if she didn’t regret the circumstances of the Vegas event. She would have liked the bridal photos at dawn and sharing all the pre-ceremony fellowship with her own band of sisters. Caroline’s lakeside wedding tomorrow was sure to be gorgeous, and Gillian didn’t doubt that she’d feel a twinge or two for a beautiful ceremony of her own, but again, what unmarried woman doesn’t feel that way at a wedding?
Of course, that was the rub, wasn’t it? She was not an unmarried woman. She was a married woman.
Married by Elvis in a tacky neon wedding chapel in the middle of the night. Viva Las Vegas.
Married to a tall, dark, handsome hero who made her knees weak and her heart sing and her soul yearn.
Love. He’d offered her love. Her heart told her she loved him in return. Could she possibly believe in it? Believe in him? Believe in herself?
Not this fast, no. Not in only four months. She read Cosmo and Allure and Women’s Health magazines. She knew to beware of the differences between infatuation and love. True love took time to develop. Tucker might be thinking he was in love with her, but it was more likely to be lust than love. They simply hadn’t had enough time to—