Lilian Darcy - The Millionaire's Cinderella Wife

There was her teaching job, working with a class of special needs kids, and three younger siblings who still depended on her a lot, and Dad’s health to monitor—he tended to leave the treatment of his diabetes largely to her—as well as his role as Landerville’s mayor to support.

She knew she needed a vacation, but…sucking on a lemon?

Ty’s finger-tips moved cool and light against her skin, like a caress, but still she flinched away and drawled, “Gee, thanks!”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Maybe because of all the extravagant compliments you’re paying me.”

“And again.”

“Ty, do you or do you not want a divorce?” she blurted out desperately.

“You wouldn’t contest it?”

Okay, Sierra. Don’t sigh. Don’t suck on a lemon.

She lifted her chin, managed not to gust out the big whoosh of air that tightened her chest, and said quietly, “No, of course I wouldn’t contest it.”

“You’ve had eight years to file for one, and you haven’t.”

“No, I haven’t. Neither have you. But I want to, now. It’s way overdue, don’t you think?”

Of course she was right, Ty conceded to himself. About seven years and eight months overdue, probably. He should have filed the papers himself, as soon as he’d realized that she had called his colossal, confident, angry bluff and really wasn’t going to follow him to Stoneport.

But he’d been stubborn about it. That was how he’d dealt with the hurt, by channelling it into sheer pigheaded pride. He wasn’t the one making their marriage impossible. He wasn’t wrong about any of this! Let Sierra take the steps to legally sever their union, if that was what she wanted.

She never had.

He’d been so cocky at twenty-four, so sure of himself, his goals, his decisions. “You know where to find me,” he’d told her.

“And you know where to find me!”

And the hurt and disappointment had eased with time and hard work, the way such things did. The way they must have eased for her, too.

“If it’s so overdue,” he answered her at last, “why haven’t you done something about it long before this? Why did it take some frothy magazine article to bring you here?”

She colored and shrugged, and paused for almost as long as Ty had, before she answered. “Let’s just label it a wake-up call, shall we? Principles have a limited shelf life, I’ve discovered.”

“Principles?” The word startled him. “Whose principles?”

“I’m not the one who walked out of our marriage. I’m not the one who wanted it to end. You did, Ty. So the divorce should have been up to you.”

“I never walked out of our marriage! I walked out of Landerville.”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t! I was pretty clear on that at the time, I thought. There was no future for me there. Not one that could possibly have made me happy. I needed this.” He swept his arm around, encompassing his world.

“What’s ‘this’?” She hooked her fingers around the word to make the quotation marks.

“The ocean, the boats, a chance to make a future for myself in a place where I wasn’t just that more-or-less-orphaned Garrett boy who might get as far as managing the hardware store some day, if the love-struck mayor’s daughter from the right side of the tracks could keep him honest. But you still don’t get any of that, do you?”

“No, I don’t. Dad never looked at you that way.”

“The rest of Landerville did.”

“You weren’t just asking me to turn my back on a few narrow-minded attitudes. You were asking me to—” She stopped. Her cheeks were pink and angry and her dark eyes flashed. “A family is not something you can just walk away from, Ty. My family was not something I could just walk away from.”

He sat up straighter. “I don’t consider—I’ve never considered—that I was asking you to do that.”

“Just listen to us!”

Sierra did the lemon thing with her mouth again and he couldn’t find an answer. Yeah, listen to them! Back to square one. Back eight years to exactly what had slammed them apart in the first place.

She was so right. The divorce was overdue.

She sat there looking at him over the rim of her cappuccino cup and he took a moment to assess the changes in her. She’d been stunningly beautiful, to his eyes, when they’d gotten married twelve years ago. That graceful figure, as lean as a catwalk model’s. That creamy skin. That wide, expressive mouth. That dark, straight, silky hair, flowing like a satin waterfall down her back. Those big, slightly exotic brown eyes—a throw-back to some distant Cherokee heritage on her mother’s side.

And she was still beautiful. The hair was the same, only kept a little shorter and folded into an efficient pleat high on the back of her head, this morning. The figure was a touch more womanly beneath its conservative olive and beige top and skirt, but if there was a man in this world who didn’t like a few feminine curves in the right places, then that man wasn’t him.

Her eyes and her mouth and her skin?

Yeah, beautiful.

Stunning.

Except…

She looked tired, at certain moments. Stressed. Angry? Unhappy?

And her eyes and mouth and skin were the places where the problems showed, whatever they were. The sucking on a lemon thing. A tightness to her skin which sketched out to the world where her wrinkles would some day appear. A way of narrowing those dark eyes so that the fire deep inside them almost looked as if it had gone out.

If the limbo of their non-marriage gave an explanation for any of this, all the more reason to get it dealt with so that both of them could get on with their lives.

Ty gulped some coffee and took a bite of the cherry and cream cheese Danish, wondering how best to get down to the nitty gritty of lawyers and such.

They had no kids, no joint property acquired during their four years together. And Sierra had never been the grasping type. On the contrary she was far too generous for her own good at times. She would never stake any kind of a claim on the wealth he’d acquired since their split, and even if she did no judge would award it to her.

He leaned closer to her across the table. “There’s no reason why this can’t be simple and amicable and quickly dealt with, right? Since it’s what we both want?”

“No reason at all,” she agreed.

“Then, yes, let’s get it taken care of, get the ball rolling, before you head back.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said. “No fuss.”

“No going over old ground.”

“No. Because we’ve—”

“Ty?” said a musical female voice that he recognized, and Sierra didn’t get a chance to finish.

Ty looked away from her tight face to find A-list journalist Lucy Little smiling at him, much more casually dressed than Sierra in clam-diggers and a tight little black tank. She seemed as relaxed and at home as if she lived here, even though Ty had had no idea she’d planned to come back to Stoneport once she’d completed the magazine story that was causing all the current trouble.

He wasn’t thrilled to see her, especially not at this moment. Sierra still looked so tight and emotional on the other side of the table, and his own feelings were attacking his sense of certainty like a guerilla-style ambush.

Before he could react to Lucy’ greeting, she leaned down, cupped her hand around his jaw and kissed him European style, once on each cheek. The second kiss caught the corner of his mouth and trailed away slowly enough to signal unmistakable interest, and he remembered a couple of cryptic comments she’d made about professional boundaries and personal needs during the three days she’d spent here last month.

Okay…