She shifted in her seat, her foot shaking. “Our lawyer thought, just to be on the safe side, you could sign an affidavit that you accept the divorce decree. Daddy’s afraid you might get it in your head to protest the divorce, though I know you wouldn’t, by saying they didn’t make enough effort to find you. You see, I’m getting engaged in a few weeks, when he finishes his training with his company and moves to Gillette. The affidavit would just make things nice and clean.”
Chance heard the words, felt their impact, and almost stopped breathing. Libby was getting married. To another guy. And she wanted things cleaned up. That’s why she was here. Not because she cared about him. Not because she felt bad about how she had treated him. Nothing to do with Chance. Everything to do with the guy she was going to marry.
Fool. Stupid idiot. Glutton for punishment. When would he learn where Libby was concerned?
“You want this cleaned up. That’s why you’re here?”
“My father’s lawyers are going to be contacting you, but I thought since you were in Cheyenne, if I talked to you—”
“Get out of the truck, Libby.” And he meant it. He’d wondered why she’d come to the bar to open old sores. Now he knew.
She stared at him as if she didn’t believe him. “Chance, I just want to—”
“Our lawyers can handle this.” He reached over her, felt the heat from her body as he pulled the passenger door handle down. The door sprang open. “Out. Now. Before I say things we’ll both regret.” His heart was pounding hard in his chest, pushing adrenaline through his veins like when he was sitting on a bronc just before the gate opened.
She scrambled down. When she touched ground, he started the engine. He had to get out of there. Calm down. Think. Not feel.
She stood looking at him with a pained expression on her face and tears glistening in her eyes. Her crying wouldn’t touch him again.
She closed the door, and he threw the truck into reverse, turned the wheel, jammed the gear into first, and whipped the pickup toward the exit, gravel flying. Checking the rearview mirror, he saw her dark silhouette framed in the dim light, standing there with her hands on her hips. As if she was mad at him.
He gunned the engine and shifted. The Ford lurched as it sped down the paved road, putting distance between him and the woman who’d broken his heart.
*
Libby sat on the leather stool at the family’s granite-topped kitchen island the next morning and tried to focus on the man on the other end of the cell phone, despite the fact someone else was crowding her thoughts.
“I miss you, too,” she responded to Ben’s similar confession. “Three weeks isn’t so long. You’ll be done with training in no time.” Ben had landed a job right after he finished his MBA. He was at the drilling company’s headquarters in Texas going through orientation and would be relocating to the company’s Wyoming site if all went well.
She, on the other hand, hadn’t found anything and would be stuck at the Casper dealership working for her father. Not that she wanted to move away. Even though it had been almost ten years since her mother had died, and perhaps because she had lost her mother so young, family meant a lot to her, even with the issues between her and her father. He was her dad. She loved him. She just didn’t want to work for him.
She sensed Ben had jumped at the job with the drilling company because of the corporation’s operations outside of Gillette, not too far from the Casper dealership.
“No, I haven’t found anything else, but I don’t want to take the job with my father.”
Ben argued for the job in Casper, citing job security and the future potential to be a partner in a business.
“Except I hate the car business. I’m not a car salesman type.”
He said something sweet about her being his type. For the first time since they’d talked marriage, she wondered if that was true. He was so buttoned-down, so together. She felt anything but.
“I think I should keep looking for another job.” But she knew if she didn’t accept the job at the dealership after all her stalling, her father would be too angry to offer it again. He’d just keep doing it all himself.
Ben reminded her of that fact. She changed the subject, and they talked about his training and the Gillette job. Ending the call, she set her phone on the counter and let out a deep sigh. She did care about Ben. He was a good guy, ambitious, smart, college educated. He wanted to settle down. He was everything she could want in a husband.
So why did she have that uncomfortable feeling, like she was hiding something from herself?
She sunk her face into her hands and leaned her elbows on the cold, hard counter. It seemed nothing was working out in her life when just a week before, she’d have said everything was falling into place.
That was before her father had brought up the issue about the divorce and insisted it be addressed, given Chance was in town. That was before she’d seen Chance, touched him, kissed him. Before he’d thrown her out of the truck.
She’d been so sure he hated her all these years, she had never expected the kiss, the tenderness, the glimpse of the Chance she had fallen in love with. Or his anger at being asked to sign the affidavit—and her reason for requesting it.