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nights ago we had a prewedding dinner. My fiancé, Ross, and a number of my relatives were staying at the house. Later that night I decided I was going to surprise Ross, so I went into his room and hid in this big antique wardrobe. I left the door cracked open so I could see out. Then someone else snuck into the room—my cousin Belinda. Well, I’m ready to jump out and grab her by the throat, when in comes Ross and he’s not at all surprised to see Belinda. It seems he’d been seeing Belinda and planned to go on seeing Belinda, and we all saw a lot more of Belinda before they retired to the bathroom for aquatic sports in the Jacuzzi.”
    “Brother,” Wade muttered, wincing. That had to be one of life’s nastier surprises. No wonder she’d been acting so crazy. He abandoned his sandwich and moved to sit on the sofa. He reached out and ran his hand over the top of hers where it rested on her slender thigh. “It must have hurt,” he said quietly.
    Her smile was rueful. “Not as much as it should have. I was angry. Mainly, I was confused. Here I was about to marry the man and, in a strange way, I almost didn’t care that he was interested in someone else. I was mad simply because he’d played me for a fool.
    “You see,” she explained, “Ross and I have never had what you would call a passionate relationship. We were friends. He was there for me when I lost my parents last year.”
    The part that confused her most was that if she hadn’t felt anything other than friendship for Ross, why had she agreed to marry him? And once she had become engaged to him, why hadn’t she paid enough attention to see what kind of a creep he really was?
    Since she didn’t know the answers to those questions yet, she skipped them. “Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. It was such a shock, I wandered around in a kind of daze which everyone mistook for prewedding jitters. I didn’t snap out of it until it was almost too late. I actually almost went through with the wedding! Then, in the middle of everything, I denounced Ross and took off.” She gave a little shrug. “And here I am.”
    All Wade could do was shake his head. He plucked a cookie out of the bag next to him and munched on it thoughtfully. Tucker wandered in, snatched up his master’s half-eaten sandwich, flopped down on Wade’s sleeping bag, and went to sleep.
    “So,” Bronwynn said in an exaggerated conversational tone, “what are you doing in Vermont, Wade?”
    “R and R,” he answered absently, still turning her incredible story over and over in his mind. “Job stress.”
    His voice had a hoarseness to it, a raspiness that spoke of too many cigarettes. It was a tremendously sexy quality Bronwynn hadn’t paid much attention to before. As her body responded to it, she tried to latch on to a topic to distract herself.
    “Can I ask why you’re wearing a necktie?”
    Wade glanced down at his shirt front, at the strip of brown silk.
Man, you really do need a vacation,
he told himself. “Force of habit,” he said.
    What an odd pair they made, Bronwynn thought, a runaway socialite and a burned-out corporate executive. He hadn’t said he was a corporate executive, but it took no imagination at all to picture him in a basic black suit with a proper paisley silk tie knotted beneath his stubborn chin. He probably was the heartthrob of the secretarial pool, she thought, knowing instinctively he would scowl at her if she said so. What an odd sort of relationship they’d fallen into. It was like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between antagonism and a quiet understanding.
    She rather liked it. Too much, she told herself.
    “What are you going to do?” Wade asked with a genuinely curious look, a little worry line jetting up between his dark blond eyebrows.
    “I came here to think,” she said, gathering up the bags of junk food she’d dined on and setting them on the marble-topped end table next to the sofa. “I called my sister and told her not to expect me