Mismatch Read Free

to cherish and be cherished. She had so much love inside her to give. Yet she almost had married Ross Hilliard, and she hadn’t loved him any more than he had loved her. She had been fond of Ross, comfortable with Ross, but she hadn’t loved him. When she had discovered him with Belinda, she had been stunned and angry, but she hadn’t hurt the way she knew she would have had she truly loved him. What was the matter with her, making such a horrible mistake?
    “What are you doing here?” Wade asked pointblank. He felt a little uneasy breaking into her thoughts. She seemed detached, as if she wasn’t quite in touch with the real world.
    “Why, I’ve come here to stay, of course.”
    He looked around them. The house was a shambles. It smelled of mice and mold. There was no electricity. He doubted the plumbing was in working order. Who knew what kind of wildlife had taken up residence. It was hardly the sort of place a woman like Bronwynn Prescott Pierson would stay. He couldn’t picture her staying anyplace that didn’t have a complete staff and Jacuzzis in every room. She looked too delicate, too fragile for anything less than elegance. “You’re kidding.”
    She gave him a blank look over her shoulder and turned back to stare out again at the overgrown lawn, remembering how it had looked when she and Zane had played croquet there as little girls. It had been like a fairy-tale house to them, the woods beyond like an enchanted forest. Her heart twisted at the memory of all the imaginary princes that had rescued them from one dragon or another. There were no princes in her life today. And she felt like Alice tumbling down the long, black rabbit hole.
    Wade gave a half laugh and ran a hand back through his hair. “Lady, you can’t be serious. You can’t stay here.”
    “I most certainly can. This house belongs to me. My great-uncle Duncan willed it to me nineteen years ago.” She had been twelve and thrilled with the prospect of owning this gingerbread castle, but then she had gotten older and her interests had turned in other directions. Until she’d sped away from the church earlier, she’d all but forgotten about the house.
    “And it’s been remarkably well kept up ever since,” Wade remarked dryly. He crossed the room to a Victorian sofa covered in water-stained burgundy velvet. The upholstery was ripped and someone or something had made off with a good deal of the stuffing. Dirty shreds of the stuff trailed out of the hole in the center of the seat. He gave it a little shove with his foot, and three mice catapulted themselves out of the couch and disappeared into a hole in the baseboard.
    Brows dropping low over her exotic eyes, Bronwynn stomped across the room and gave Wade a shove. “Keep your feet off my furniture, you man. Were you born in a barn?”
    Wade stepped back and scowled at her. “No. This is as close as I’ve come to being in a barn in a long time.”
    “How dare you say such a rude thing about my house!” she said. Somewhere in the dim reaches of her mind she knew it was an unreasonable thing to say. The house was a standing disaster area. For the moment, though, she preferred to see it as it had been, bright and pretty with its fancy old furniture, and Mrs. Foster, her uncle’s housekeeper, serving little tea cakes on hand-painted china to Zane and Bronwynn and their dolls and teddy bears. Life had been so much better then. She’d had her parents and her dreams. Now she felt as if she had nothing.
    She felt emotionally isolated. Even at the wedding, surrounded by hundreds of people, she had felt alone. Zane, too, hadn’t seemed close to her, though her sister had tried to penetrate the strange wall of confusion Bronwynn had felt encased by for the last two days.
    It was a frightening way to feel. To distract herself from it, she tried to ignore the confusion and focus her fading anger on the man in front of her. “Who do you think you are, barging in here insulting my house and