The Marriage Pact (Hqn) by Linda Lael Miller

Author:Linda Lael Miller [Miller, Linda Lael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

HE’D MARK THE days off on a calendar if he had to, Tripp promised himself the chilly, dark morning after his big night out with Hadleigh, but one thing was for damn sure: he wasn’t going near the woman again for at least a week, not on purpose, anyhow.

Tripp was 100 percent positive that if he didn’t keep his distance long enough to get his bearings, he’d do—or say—something really stupid again. Moreover, if Hadleigh happened to be looking drop-dead sexy at their next encounter, like she had in the black jeans and second-skin pink shirt she’d worn last night, well, that would probably double the odds that he’d make a damn fool of himself.

On top of that, he wondered where it had come from, this totally unfamiliar yahoo, hyped-up version of himself, walking around in his body, wearing his face and called by his name.

Would the real Tripp Galloway please stand up?

Because, damn it, this wasn’t him.

He’d been a combat pilot, for God’s sake, and he’d seen plenty of action. Once he was out of the service and flying jumbo jets for a major airline, he’d been responsible for the lives of literally thousands of passengers, as well as crew, and he’d never broken a sweat, even in some of the tough situations every pilot eventually runs into.

Later, while starting and building his charter-jet operation, he’d flown smaller, sleeker crafts a lot, especially in the beginning, when he was still getting established and couldn’t afford to hire more pilots. Over time, Tripp had coped with wind shears, ice on the wings, instrument failures, in-flight engine blowouts, some rodeo-worthy turbulence, flocks of birds, along with a few unscheduled nosedives just to make things interesting. And not once—not once in all that time—had he lost his cool. He’d simply handled it, whatever it happened to be, as he’d been trained to do.

And what all of that came down to was one outstanding fact: Tripp had never had any call to think of himself as the jumpy type. Hell, he hadn’t even known how to be anything but his normal, competent, unflappable self.

Now, because of one night, with one woman, he was a nervous wreck.

Even ranch work didn’t help calm him. He’d already fed the little band of basically useless horses out there in Jim’s sway-roofed barn, lugging hay to the stalls, filling the troughs with the garden hose, brushing the critters down.

And all he’d been able to think about, the whole blessed time, was Hadleigh—the way she looked, the way she smelled of soap and flowers, the way her whiskey-brown eyes turned almost amber when she felt strongly about something.

Which was pretty much all the time, because even when she was a little kid, Hadleigh had been opinionated and stubborn. And she hadn’t changed, at least in that respect, over the intervening years, as far as Tripp could tell.

In short, he felt as if he’d jump right out of his skin if he didn’t find manage to put her out of his mind for a while.

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