that it scared him.
Unlike Livie, he wasn’t impulsive. He planned. He worked hard for what he wanted. He thought things out. Like this engagement and upcoming wedding. Everything had been moving way too fast for him.
From the get-go, though, he’d been reluctant to get involved with a Hamilton girl. The boy from the wrong side of the tracks and a Hamilton? Once he fell for her, he’d wished more times than he wanted to count that she wasn’t Buckmaster Hamilton’s daughter.
As he approached the bench where she was sitting, he realized with a shock that Olivia was crying. Stepping to her, he knelt down in front of the bench. “Livie, what is it?”
“We have to talk,” she said, hurriedly wiping at her tears. “Let’s go into the house,” she said, getting to her feet. “I thought this could wait, but it can’t.”
His insides turned to ice. “Livie, tell me what it is.”
“Not here,” she said, taking his hand and leading him around the edge of the ballroom toward the house. He saw several people at the party looking in their direction, Delia among them.
Delia had tried to warn him when he’d told her he was seeing Livie. “Oh, Cooper, you don’t want to get involved with one of them, trust me.”
It had been too late. He’d already fallen.
“Livie’s not like that.”
Delia had laughed. “She’s Buckmaster Hamilton’s daughter and she will always be his daughter. Do yourself a favor and run as far and fast as you can in the opposite direction.” She’d made the same argument he had made to himself. “She isn’t like you and me. We know what it’s like to be poor, to come from the wrong family and have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. She’s fascinated with you now because you’re different from anyone else she’s dated. But when it comes time to get married, she’s going to want more than you will ever be able to give her.”
Now he feared Delia was right as he and Livie worked their way around the crowd, away from all the noise, to the quiet of the house. “Let’s go into Daddy’s den. There is something I have to tell you,” she said, making his heart begin to ache.
“Tell me what this is about,” he demanded as they walked down the empty hallway even though he was afraid he already knew. She’d changed her mind. Just like that. She’d insisted on getting married sooner than he’d wanted, she hadn’t been able to wait for the engagement party, and now she’d realized what she was doing and was backing out.
“Do we really have to do this now?” he asked as she led him toward her father’s plush, wood-paneled den. He felt himself getting angry. “It’s our engagement party, Livie, a party that you and your sisters and father insisted on, you might recall.” He balked, stopping in the doorway to the den, digging in his heels as he had so many other times with her. “Just tell me.”
* * *
OLIVIA KNEW THE timing was terrible. The thought almost made her laugh. There was no good time for what she had to tell him.
“Would you please close the door and sit down?” she asked impatiently when he remained stubbornly standing in the doorway.
With obvious reluctance, he closed the door and seemed to brace himself. “Just say you don’t want to marry me and get it over with. I’ve been expecting this.”
She shook her head in astonishment, her emotions running as wild as the horses Cooper tamed. The man never ceased to amaze her. “You’ve been expecting me to break our engagement?”
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Your father reminded me again tonight that you’re a Hamilton and that you require the finer things in life, things that apparently he feels I can’t give you fast enough.” Cooper’s eyes narrowed. “It isn’t as if you haven’t made it clear you feel the same way.”
Livie sighed. Every fight they’d had was over her father’s offers of financial help. Buckmaster Hamilton lived for his daughters. He couldn’t understand Cooper’s stubbornness any more than she could. Coop had refused both land and money, both graciously offered. He was determined to do everything himself, no matter how hard it was or how long it took.
But none of that mattered now because Livie doubted there was going to be a wedding, anyway. “Please. Sit down. That isn’t what I need to talk to you about,” she said, fighting the ever-present nausea. Her head felt as if it were spinning. The last thing she wanted was to break her engagement, but she figured Cooper would do that once she told him about the note in her purse.
He stood for a moment longer before finally dropping into a chair across from her. Dangling his Stetson on his knee, he said, “Okay, let’s have it. I’ve known something was going on with you for weeks now.”
She nodded, although she was surprised. She’d thought she’d kept her secret better than that. “Remember back in late January? We had an argument. I left in the middle of the night not really knowing where I was going.”
“I remember all of our fights. This one, though, I believe, you threw your engagement ring at me as you left.”
She felt her face flame at the memory. If only she could go back... If only... She swallowed the lump in her throat. Her mouth had gone dust dry. Searching for the right words, she said, “I took a shortcut across the state, thinking I might go to Missoula or Great Falls. I didn’t really know.”
His dark eyes narrowed as he frowned. “You just took off because you were angry. As I recall, you got caught in a winter storm, went off the road and couldn’t get home for several days.”
Livie nodded and touched her temple where she had only a faint scar, a reminder of what had happened that night, as if she needed one. Her other scars ran much deeper.
“Where I went off the road was miles from the nearest town. There was no cell phone coverage. If a driver hadn’t come along when he did...”
“What are you trying to tell me, Olivia?” Cooper asked, his voice dangerously low. His handsome suntanned face had gone pale. As pale and shaken as she felt.
“The driver who helped me...took me to his cabin that wasn’t far from where I went in the ditch.”
His voice dropped to a near-whisper. “You spent the night there?”
She knew she had to get this out as quickly as possible or she wouldn’t be able to. For months she’d tried hard to forget. “He called to have my car towed so I’d have it the next morning. He seemed nice...”
Cooper was on his feet, his expression stricken. “What happened?”
She’d told herself not to break down, but her hormones were out of whack and she was so scared she was going to lose Cooper, the only man she’d ever truly loved, that she couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.
“I woke up in his bed. I have no memory of—”
Cooper shook his head as he took a step back. “You slept with him.”
“It wasn’t like that. You have to understand. I didn’t want any of this to happen. If I hadn’t been on that road...”
He
