Wildflower Bride in Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad
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go, he’d be out of a job. And not a newspaper in the world would even care.
This wasn’t the first time he had been hired to babysit Angelina. She had been his last assignment with Brighton Security, the one right before he went into the military. Her father had received some kidnapping threats regarding her so Tyler had been assigned to serve as one of her bodyguards during her senior year of high school. At nineteen years old, he’d been chosen for the job because he could blend in with the other students and stay close to Angelina. All he was supposed to do in a bad situation was to summon the older Brighton guards who were there in the distance. No one had expected him to stop the kidnapping, identify a stalker and then dance with Angelina at the prom after her date waltzed off with another girl.
He remembered her father had barely blinked an eye at the kidnapping attempt, but he’d almost fired Tyler over the dance. Mr. Brighton had coldly informed Tyler that he had higher aspirations for his only child than for her to marry some half-breed Native American boy with criminal blood flowing through his veins. Tyler didn’t mind what the man said about his heritage; he had always been proud that he looked like his Cherokee ancestors and nothing much could change that.
But he never talked about his mother or the fact that she was in prison for murdering his father. The shame of that burned deep inside him because, when all was said and done, Tyler knew the tragedy had somehow been his fault. He had been twelve years old, which in the Cherokee world was grown enough to be considered a man. But he hadn’t had the nerve to go into the barn that awful day when he overheard his father throwing things and cursing his name. The man had a violent temper, and Tyler still had the bruises from his last beating. So he ran away, back to the house, where he hid. He never knew what his mother had said in response to his father or how long they argued or how she happened to strike that fatal blow. All Tyler knew was if he had gone inside that barn, things would have ended differently.
He glanced down at the photo of Angelina that he had taped to his dashboard. He hadn’t asked for the photo, but her father, his boss, had given it to him anyway. Blonde, blue-eyed and petite, Angelina looked like a fashion doll at twenty-three years old. Tyler was only a year older than her, but he felt like he had been dragged through the bottom mud long enough to be many times her age. Of course, being in the military could do that to a man, especially when he was a special ops guy trying to infiltrate the Pashtun tribal region with only his wits for backup.
Just then a faint humming sound made Tyler look up into his rearview mirror. A car was approaching from behind. His left arm was still healing so he reached over with his right hand to roll up the window on his pickup, hoping whoever it was would drive by. Then the car got closer, and he saw it was a shiny red convertible—one that he recognized all too well.
Angelina was coming into town with the top down on her sports car and her long blond hair blowing in the wind. She always did live with gusto, he thought as he grinned for the first time in months.
When the convertible sped past, he realized Angelina was driving much too fast. What did she think she was doing? He knew she never took the slow way anywhere, but she had to live long enough to make it back to Boston or there would be no paycheck for him.
Tyler turned the key in his ignition. He had barely pulled back onto the road when he saw a sheriff’s car come out from behind the café.
Good, he thought. The law was going to deal with her.
Just then the convertible screeched to a halt and started to back up at the same speed it had gone forward. Tyler had no choice but to pull off the road again. Only Angelina would try to outrun a lawman by putting her car in Reverse. Life was too precious to drive like a maniac and someone needed to tell Angelina that, he told himself. By the time she came parallel to him, the convertible screeched again as she put on the brakes.
Before it seemed possible, Angelina had flung open her door. The dust was still settling when she stepped out of her car. Then she stood up, turned and leaned forward, bracing her hands against the side of her convertible.
“Where’d you get that pickup?” she demanded.
Of all the things he’d expected her to say, that wasn’t one of them. He knew she couldn’t see him clearly enough to recognize him. She confirmed that when she put up one of her hands to shade her eyes from the sun as she squinted in his direction.
“I’d know that pickup anywhere,” she continued, her voice still strong but sounding less sure of herself. “Not many old black pickups have a dent on one side and an Indian head bumper sticker like that on the other.”
The bumper sticker, a chief in full headdress, was one of the few things Tyler had taken with him when he left the family ranch. He had been determined to be a warrior after that day by the barn. Longing to be self-sufficient and strong, he pledged not to fear anyone, or need them either. If he’d taken his beating like a man, no one would have died and his mother would be home in her kitchen baking pies instead of sitting in some prison.
Tyler opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out. He couldn’t do much more than breathe. He’d forgotten how vibrant Angelina was when she was stirred up. Her blond hair looked like spun gold and it floated around her as she started marching around the car on her way toward his pickup.
“That’s Tyler Stone’s pickup.” She rounded the side of her convertible and pointed right at him. “He left it at my father’s place and no one has permission to drive it. No one.”
She was fearless.
Tyler finally forced his pulse to slow down. All he owned was this old pickup truck and maybe some interest in his family’s deserted ranch. His modest prospects were the main reason her father had forbid him to show any interest in her. And, on that one point, Tyler had agreed. He was poor and he knew what it was to do without. He could never ask Angelina to give up her trust fund money and he couldn’t accept any of it either. A man had to have some pride. No, they had no choice but to part at the end of her senior year.
“It’s me,” he managed to say.
Her face had gone paler than Tyler liked, but he supposed he had no right to expect her to be happy to see him. She’d called him her jailer more than once. He was used to hauling her out of trouble. He should have told Brighton Security to send someone else.
“But you’re supposed to be dead!” she said with shock in her voice.
“It was a misunderstanding,” Tyler said as he scrambled to make sense of what had happened. “I wasn’t really dead. The notification was a mistake.”
He remembered how he had managed to get the three Pashtun children to safety before the bomb exploded, but he was left standing too close. He ended up with a big red burn along his right side and a piece of metal in his knee that slowed him down considerably. His left arm suffered some damage and he couldn’t easily make a fist on that hand. After the explosion, the parents of those children had carried him to a hospital where he’d lain semiconscious and unidentified for weeks. He’d been gone so long that, when the villagers said he’d been killed in the bomb blast, his unit had given him up for dead. The notification was supposed to say Missing in Action, but somehow things had gotten confused.
“And you never thought to tell me you were still alive?” Angelina exclaimed, her sapphire-blue eyes flashing at him.
“I—ah—” He hadn’t thought she would have cared.
Tyler moved his head, leaning farther out the window, hoping it would ease the situation if she could see him better. That’s when the brim of his Stetson hit the edge of the open window and was knocked off his head. He watched the cream-colored hat fall straight down into the dirt. Without his hat, the sunlight hit his face full strength.
“You really are Tyler Stone.” Angelina’s lips pursed together and she shook her head. Then she did the most amazing thing. She calmly walked over to where his hat sat on the ground, bent down and picked it up, then brushed it off and offered it to him.
“You’ll need this,” she said, her words clipped.
The Angelina he remembered