“Let’s shift gears for a minute,” he suggested eventually, hoping to recapture the earlier mood of easy camaraderie. “Why don’t you tell me about your life in California?”
Rather than seizing on it as the neutral topic he’d hoped for, though, she tensed perceptibly.
“My life in California is over. I’m back in Wyoming to stay,” she said, sounding every bit as defensive as he had earlier.
“Why did you go there in the first place?”
“I told you before—it seemed like it would be exciting,” she said.
“And it wasn’t?”
“It was,” she said. “For a while.”
His gaze narrowed at her terse replies. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It’s part of who you are,” he corrected.
“The same way your father and his actions are a part of who you are. You didn’t want to talk about that, any more than I want to discuss a period of my life I’ve put behind me.”
He studied her. There was usually only one reason a woman ran from her past, a man. “Who was he?” he asked eventually, not even sure he wanted to hear the answer.
She regarded him blankly. “Who was who?”
“The man who hurt you.”
Her mouth curved in the beginnings of a smile. “What makes you think there was a man involved?”
“When a woman’s as beautiful as you are, there usually is. Of course, usually it’s the man who winds up brokenhearted.”
“Your mother being the exception to that rule,” she said, deliberately taunting him.
Wade frowned. He was forced to admit that she had pegged that right. “Yes,” he said, his voice tight.
“Well, I hate to disappoint you, but no man chased me off. I came back here because I finally figured out that this is where I belong.”
Wade regarded her with disbelief. “Really? What led you to reach this earth-shattering conclusion?”
“Ever since our class held its reunion a little over a year ago, I’ve been coming back to visit my friends,” she explained. “I finally realized that I’m happier here than I was in Los Angeles. It’s as simple as that.”
She was holding something back. He could hear it in her cautious choice of words, see it in her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me, Lauren?”
She seemed to be waging some sort of internal debate. He waited. Finally, she met his gaze evenly.
“Okay, this has nothing to do with why I came back, but you might as well know that I’ve been married,” she said slowly. “Twice.”
The announcement shook Wade more than anything else she might have said. The thought of her with any other man was enough to make him want to break things. The idea that she’d cared enough about two men to actually marry them made him a little crazy. He didn’t know what to say. What kind of woman had been through two marriages before she turned thirty?
She feigned a halfhearted smile. “You don’t have a quick comeback for that, do you?”
He shook his head. “I guess I’m surprised. You don’t seem like the kind of woman who’d take a decision about marriage lightly.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “Both times, I thought it was true love. It didn’t take long to figure out I was wrong.”
“How long?”
“Less than a year both times,” she admitted with a rueful expression. “That’s why I intend to think long and hard before I make that kind of leap again.” She looked straight into his eyes. “I might never be ready to try it again.”
Her words left him shaken. Not that he’d intended to pop the question tonight, if ever, but it bothered him to realize that she might never be ready to hear it.
“Sounds to me like you’re blaming yourself for something that might not have been your fault,” he said. “It usually takes two people to make a bad marriage.”
“Thank you for saying that, but in both instances it was my mistake. I exercised lousy judgment. Neither man was who I thought he was.”
“Don’t you suppose they set out to make you believe they were whatever you wanted them to be? In other words, that they might have deliberately deceived you?” Pretty much the way Travis had deceived his mother.
Lauren seemed completely startled by his understanding of that. “Of course they did,” she said at once. “But I should have seen through it.”
“Are you some kind of mind reader?” he asked.
“No, but—”
He leaned forward and regarded her intently. “Look, everybody sees what they want to see when they look at another person, especially once their hormones have kicked in. And some people happen to be masters at knowing just which buttons to push. You got taken in. It’s not a character flaw. You were just too trusting.”
A nasty thought occurred to him. “You’re not still pining away for either of those guys, are you?”
She laughed at that, and his mood brightened considerably.
“No way,” she said fervently. “That part of my life was over long before I made the decision to come back here.”
Satisfaction washed over him. “Good. Then we’re both agreed, the past is over with, right? We’re looking forward from here on.”
Lauren lifted her glass, then tapped it against his bottle of beer. “To the future,” she said.
Wade took a long swallow of beer, then echoed, “To the future.”
It was suddenly looking brighter than it had in a very long time.
Chapter Eight
Wade stood on the back steps to the main house, frozen in place as Lauren’s heated words carried outside. All of his complacency about
