Kidnapping His Bride. Hayley Gardner

life for a married couple. Let alone kids.”

      “She did want to come back home toward the end,” Tessa admitted. “But Dad always promised her there was more fun around the corner, if she would just stay with him. That he needed her, couldn’t survive without her. So she kept staying, even though she hated the life we had. The bill collectors calling, the skipping out at night on the rent. She spent a lot of time crying.” Just like Tessa had, when Griff had left and she’d known it had to be over between them.

      Sadie sniffed. “Men always think there’s something better around the next corner. What is it with them, anyway?”

      It was a rhetorical question, one that both Sadie and she had asked themselves many times while she was getting over Griff.

      “You never told me all that about your parents before,” Sadie added.

      “I didn’t want you to feel badly, I guess.” It had been worse than she’d ever admitted to Sadie. Her father had left her with her mother, who’d had pneumonia, Tessa had been told later, not wanting the responsibility of either of them, she supposed. She’d only been eleven, but she’d nursed her mother until she’d gotten really bad, and then Tessa had called the police for help, not wanting to, knowing that when they took her mother away, she would die and Tessa would never see her again. She’d been right. Her mother’s heart had simply stopped beating. The doctor had said it was a defect in a valve, but Tessa had always figured her mother had died of a broken heart.

      Afterward, she’d ended up without a real family in foster homes for almost a year, before she’d remembered where her grandmother, whom her mother had hardly ever talked about, lived. Sadie had come for her as soon as she was called, and Tessa had made every effort to put her former life out of her mind.

      “I really thought I’d forgotten all of it, but the memories seem to pop up when I’m upset.”

      “Or when Griff comes to town, you mean.”

      “I suppose so.” Tessa willed away the sad heart she always got when she thought about the distant past. “Anyway, he knows I want to be married and have children. As soon as he figures out the e-mailer was wrong and Clay and I will be perfectly happy together, he’s going to leave.”

      “You think so, huh?” Sadie pulled into their driveway.

      “Why wouldn’t he?” Tessa asked.

      “Maybe the boy has figured out what your father never did,” Sadie said as she proceeded slowly up the two hundred slightly rutted feet to their home. “That the grass doesn’t get any greener than right here in Claiborne Landing.”

      “He can’t stay here, Grandma,” Tessa said, her stomach doing funny flip-flops at the very thought. “It would ruin everything.”

      “Then you’ll do what you’ll have to to make sure he has no reason to stay, won’t you? Hard as that might be.”

      And it would be. As long as Tessa could remember, she’d dreamed of having a husband who doted on her and her children. When she’d met Griff, she’d thought he would be that man—right up to the point where his dream had become more important than hers and she’d broken it off with him, because she didn’t want to ruin his life the way her father had ruined her mother’s by his extreme need.

      Sadie had been wonderful, of course, but Tessa had this dream of being part of the perfect family, and once she’d realized that the dream would never come true for her as a child, she’d changed to wanting to create it as a mother. With all her heart. If she married Clay, she would have Jeb—and, after all that had happened, that would be her dream come true.

      The trouble was, while Griff was in another state, she could easily tell herself she didn’t love him anymore until she was blue in the face. But now that he would be so close to her that she could reach out and touch him anytime she wanted, well, she was a little afraid that the electricity that still sparked in the air between them might become a higher voltage than she could handle.

      She would just have to, that was all. Jeb needed her as his mother, and that was that. No one at all could be allowed to stop the wedding, not even Griff.

      Not for any reason.

      She wondered, worriedly, just how clear Clay was making all of this to his long lost brother, whom she definitely didn’t love.

      Or at least that’s what she tried to tell herself.