A SEAL's Oath (SEALs of Chance Creek Book 1) (8 page)

But before that happened he needed to know more about Riley. An idea was beginning to percolate in his mind, an idea both intriguing and somewhat shady. The minute he’d seen Riley, a part of his brain had locked on target, and he’d felt something vastly more powerful than curiosity about an old friend. It was as if she’d reached into his chest and taken hold of his heart. Now he wanted to be close to her. He wanted to talk to her. He was willing to do what it took to keep her here long enough to get to know her again.

“I’m up here, sailor.” Her flat tone bordered on anger.

“Sorry.” But he wasn’t sorry and she had to know it. Her cleavage was so prettily displayed it would be impossible to ignore.

“You could at least pretend not to ogle me.”

“I don’t think I could.” He braced himself for an angry answer, but she only stared at him impassively, leaving him wishing he hadn’t tried to joke with her. Riley deserved better than that. His old shame washed over him, but it was tempered by her presence. God, he’d missed Riley. He hadn’t realized how much until faced with her again.

“It’s good to see you.” He meant it. She’d grown up into a beautiful woman, but her cautious manner told him she was still the Riley he knew, and he was grateful for that. A woman as lovely as her could have become vain and shallow, but not his Riley.

She made a face he couldn’t decipher. “Look, I don’t want to disappoint my friends. Would it make any difference if I told you we’re trying to live up to a set of ideals, too?”

She didn’t have to convince him to let her stay, but he used her question to buy time, wanting to discover the lay of the land before he said yes. “By dressing up?”

She frowned and once again Boone regretted his words. Riley often had surprising ideas, but she always had a reason for what she did.

“By paying homage to an era when beauty meant something. When people respected literature, poetry, art and spending time—real time—with their family and friends.”

“I’m not sure I understand.” He glanced over at the other three women still standing by the fire. They looked straight out of a movie poster for some period drama he’d automatically pass over. “Jane Austen,” he said suddenly. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me.
Pride and Prejudice
.”

“What’s wrong with
Pride and Prejudice
?”

His grandmother liked that movie and she’d forced him to watch half of it once. “Are you acting it out or something?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Forget it,” Riley said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Give me a chance.” He shifted closer again. There was something magnetic about Riley that pulled him in. He wanted to touch her. Was her skin as soft as it looked?

“Haven’t you ever felt like modern life is just so… empty?” she said. “We work, work, work so we can spend, spend, spend on all kinds of crap we don’t even need. Do you know how much junk I threw out when I gave up my apartment? And don’t even get me started on how much I spent on eating out since I was in the office sixty hours a week and didn’t have time to shop or cook!”

Riley drew a breath and Boone could only stare at her as she continued her tirade, a female version of the rant he’d spewed himself on countless occasions. So she did care about the state of the world. He was surprised how much that gratified him—and turned him on. Who would have guessed this woman he hadn’t seen in thirteen years could come to the same conclusions about life as he had? He knew his memories were just that—memories. It defied the odds that Riley could still be the kind of soulmate she once had promised to be, but if she shared a passion for his causes, too, it would be a miracle.

“What happened to friendship?” Riley was saying when he tuned into her words again. “What happened to long afternoons poring over a good novel or a great work of art? What happened to an honest exchange of opinions between educated people who respect each other? What’s wrong with tending a garden or creating a beautiful home? Did you know that a well-to-do woman in Jane Austen’s time would have had seven or eight dresses?”

Caught off guard by her sudden question, it took Boone a minute to answer. In truth he’d been too absorbed in examining her face—so sweetly familiar and so different, too. Her eyes reflected the light of the far-off fire. “Uh… no, I didn’t know that.”

“Seven or eight,” she repeated. “How many outfits did I have before I came here?”

“I… don’t know.” Boone didn’t often find himself at a loss for words, but the more he thought about it, the more he was sure of one thing. An extraordinary coincidence had placed him and Riley in the same place at the same time. He’d be a fool not to seize the opportunity with both hands.

“Forty-six. At least! I counted them! That doesn’t even include all the outfits I gave away a few months ago because they were too out of fashion.”

“Okay.” Distracted, Boone wasn’t sure where she was headed with this, but he didn’t really care, either. He could listen to her as long as she cared to talk.

She lifted her hands in exasperation. “Think about it. Think about what I could do if I didn’t have to worry about what I was going to wear each day.” She tugged at her dress, a gown of soft material with a light background that was dotted with flowers. “This is my morning dress. I have two of them. Two! For the next six months that’s the only choice I’ll have. Wear this one or the other one. How simple is that?”

Boone’s attention snapped back into focus. He knew exactly what she was talking about now. “Simplicity. You’re into simple living?” He couldn’t believe his luck.

“Not simple living. Beautiful living!”

“But you just said about the dresses—”

“Two morning dresses, one walking dress, one promenade gown, one riding habit”—she ticked them off on her fingers as Boone’s bewilderment grew—“and…well, we decided against getting evening gowns, ball gowns, and court attire since we intend to stay home for the most part.”

“Yeah, I doubt you’ll need a ball gown in Chance Creek.” He waited for her to laugh, but she didn’t. Maybe they weren’t as compatible as he’d thought.

“I suppose not. It was tempting, though,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.

Boone lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck. This was not how he thought his first night at Westfield would go. He’d spent the last few hours walking around the ranch and taking in the contours of the land. Deciding on a building site had been easy. The rest was harder. “So you’re going to wear a bunch of impractical outfits and do what—sit around and read all day?” His disappointment made him angry. He wanted Riley to be a match, but ball gowns had no place in the world he was building, and if she was fixated on them, they wouldn’t get far.

“What are you going to do in your
sustainable community
?” She made the term sound like a dirty word.

“Create a home, tend a garden, produce my own food, generate my own power, make a community that can sustain itself without input from the outside world.”

“We’re going to do most of that, too,” Riley said. “We’ll tend the manor”—she waved a hand at the house behind them—“garden, cook, and pursue our passions while sticking to a budget that most people couldn’t live on. That will give us a chance to paint, play instruments, write and act; all the things that increase beauty in the world.”

“The world doesn’t need beauty,” Boone said, suddenly exasperated. “The world needs practical solutions to its problems.”

A heavy silence greeted this pronouncement.

“Go on back to your commune, Boone. Forget you ever saw me here. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.” She turned away, but not before he saw the sheen of tears in her eyes. His gut tightened and he grabbed her hand instinctively. He wasn’t ready to lose her again.

“Come on, Riley.” He felt like he’d kicked a puppy, but good intentions and pretty dresses weren’t going to solve anything. The world needed people who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and work on its problems. He’d made a promise to dedicate his life to finding some of those answers. She should, too.

He assessed her again. She was intelligent. Caring. She was here in his own backyard. Practically in his arms.

He could teach her to care about sustainability the way he’d taught her to ride and hunt.

He knew he didn’t want to watch her walk away again.

Boone told himself it was because he had an impossible deadline, and he’d already figured out how to coerce Riley into marrying him. It was only practical to make use of an opportunity put right in front of him. Any man would do the same.

The truth was, practicality had little to do with it.

Faced with Riley again, he ached to take the opportunity she’d once offered him. From the moment he’d seen her, she’d taken his breath away, captivating him from the curve of her cheek to the swell of her breasts under that ridiculous gown, to the way the breeze caught at the tendrils of her hair and sent them dancing. She was so much more beautiful standing in front of him than she’d been in her photograph. So much more… alive. He wanted to get inside her head and know what she was thinking—know if they could still connect the way they once had.

Most of all, he wanted to share his life with a woman who mattered to him, and no one he’d met in the last thirteen years had ever mattered the way Riley once had.

She tugged at his hand, trying to break free.

“Uh-uh.” Boone didn’t let go. “We’re not done here.”

The night he’d watched Riley walk away he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.

Now he’d been given a second chance. He’d taken a leap of faith many times in his career. Time to leap again.

“Why aren’t we? Done, I mean,” she demanded.

“Because I need a wife and you need a home. We’re going to make a deal.”

Riley wasn’t sure
she’d heard Boone right. “You need a… wife?”

“That’s right. And I’m looking at her.”

Riley swallowed in a suddenly dry throat. Boone had lost his mind. Maybe he didn’t even own Westfield. Maybe he’d gotten a brain injury during one of his missions. Was he packing a gun somewhere on that long, lean frame?

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a simple trade. You can stay at Westfield—for free—as long as you agree to marry me.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

Boone’s quick grin transformed him from formidable to sexy as hell. “Because I can’t think of any woman I’d rather marry.”

Her body responded to that smile with a rush of desire, but Riley clamped down on her overactive libido. He had to be pulling her leg. She wished she understood what kind of twisted joke he thought he was playing. “What is this all about, Boone?”

He held his hands out in a placating gesture. “I get it. This is pretty strange. Confession time. Fulsom—the man funding us—wants our community to be realistic. A bunch of single men won’t do the trick. We need couples. Families. I’m supposed to set the tone.” Boone waved the details away like they weren’t important, but a muscle twitched in his jaw. Riley remembered that tic.

Boone was keeping something back.

“Who’s going to care if you’re married or single?”

“The audience watching our reality television show.”

Riley blinked. “You’re going to be on TV?”

“That’s right. That’s how Fulsom is going to help us increase awareness about sustainable living.”

“You’re nuts if you think I’m going to marry you.” He hadn’t bothered to contact her since the day he’d left Chance Creek. He’d stood by and watched her crash and burn in front of all his friends. If it weren’t for infrequent updates passed along via gossip, she wouldn’t even have known he was still alive.

“More like desperate,” he confessed. “I’m in a jam, too, Riley. I didn’t know about the marriage part until it was too late. Come on, let’s help each other out. Think of it as a temporary solution with a possibility of permanence. If it doesn’t work out we can divorce when it’s over. But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Riley couldn’t keep up. How could Boone leap from recognizing her to wanting to marry in less than a few minutes? She understood he needed to for his sustainable community thingy with Fulsom, but still, wasn’t that jumping the gun?

“From June through November—that’s all I’m asking. Just until the show wraps up.”

November? She’d already planned to stay at least through October. Was that a coincidence, too? Or was Boone right—was Fate at play here?

“Listen,” he went on. “You just told me you sold everything, gave up your apartments, your jobs. I could boot you all out of here right now. Are you going to let your friends go homeless?”

His jab hit a target and Riley winced. She’d do just about anything not to let her friends down. But marriage—to a man she hadn’t seen in years? To… Boone? That wasn’t a good idea, fake or not. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

“I just got out of the Navy, remember? Haven’t had much time to date.”

“You said the Fulsom Foundation owns this place,” Riley tried. “So you don’t actually own—”

“The house is mine to offer. Or to take away.” He leaned closer. “Did you really sell everything?”

“Everything a woman in Regency times wouldn’t have. We thought we’d found a way to step out of the rat race for a minute.” She explained about her friends. “Can you blame us for wanting something different?”

“What about you?”

“Me?” She hesitated to tell him too much about herself. “I just want to be part of a bigger conversation about life. About what’s beautiful, what’s wonderful, what’s meant to be treasured. I want to slow down and think about things rather than rushing from job to job, filling my days with meaningless work.”

“Musician, actor, writer. Didn’t you get a degree?”

“Yes. Bachelor of Fine Arts. I’m a painter,” she said. That was a side of herself she hadn’t shared with the Horsemen—or even Boone.

He didn’t seem surprised, though.

“If you stayed at Westfield with me, you’d have all the time you wanted to paint.”

“Would I? I’d expect you to think it was as much a waste of time as reading.”

“I never said reading was a waste of time.”

“Didn’t you?”

Boone frowned. “I didn’t mean to. Sustainable living isn’t just a hobby of mine. It goes deeper than that. I can get… single-minded.”