The Bridal Path: Ashley Read Free

same defiant, daring way. When she finally reached his face, which had a fresh cut just above the left eye, her mouth gaped in recognition and astonishment. Her already jittery nerves set off an adrenaline rush unlike anything she’d felt in years.
    “Dillon?” She mouthed the name in little more than a stunned whisper.
    His hard mouth quirked into something vaguely resembling a smile. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said in a voice as rough and dangerous as bad whiskey and twice as intoxicating. “It’s been a long time.”
    A long time? An eternity was more like it. Ashley could remember every single detail of the last time she had set eyes on Dillon Ford. He’d been running from the law, hightailing it out of town on his beat-up Harley. Or so everyone in town had surmised at the time. They had never cut Dillon much slack, and he’d never been very big on explanations, even when they might have cleared his name.
    Judging from the harsh, unrelenting expression on his face right now, he might still be in more trouble than any other ten men combined.
    For some reason, though, Ashley was less concerned about that than she was about the fact that even now, after all these years, Dillon Ford still had the ability to make her pulse and her wits scramble.
    Despite the unfortunate timing of his arrival, despite this inauspicious beginning, she was ridiculously glad to see him. And that scared her worse than finding a rattler in her bed might have.

Chapter Two
    D illon couldn’t help wondering if his blood was pumping so fast because he’d subconsciously guessed that the woman in the cabin was Ashley Wilde. The actual thought had struck him at the precise moment that lamp had shattered a window and grazed his head. It was the kind of outrageous act of which she’d always been capable.
    That was what had drawn him to her back in high school. She’d been beautiful, so bright it was scary, and yet there had been an impetuous, daring side to her that had matched his own wild streak. In those days about the only thing the rebellious Dillon Ford hadn’t dared was to ask the daughter of Trent Wilde on a date. It was one of his very few regrets.
    Moments ago when he had walked through the cabin’s front door and seen her, the past ten years had fallen away. A once familiar burst of pure lust had slammed through him, proving once and for all that surging adolescent hormones hadn’t been the sole cause of his reaction to her years before.
    With his body on high alert, he’d had to work very hard to preserve even a facade of the hard-edged anger that had been all too real only seconds before, with that gash in his head bleeding profusely.
    What he really wanted to do was stand silently before her and absorb everything about her, from the clean, crisp scent of her perfume to the porcelain sheen of her skin. He wanted to take his time and examine her from head to toe, from the artfully streaked blond hair and the unusual topaz eyes to those endlessly long, denim-encased legs that were the stuff of very steamy dreams. How had he survived all these years without so much as a glimpse of her?
    Of course, that wasn’t counting the times he’d stood at a newsstand enthralled by her image on the cover of some glossy fashion magazine. Only the most rigid willpower had prevented him from gathering up all the copies and taking them home with him. Plastering his bedroom walls with her pictures would have seriously interfered with his active love life, a sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make for an elusive dream.
    His body tightened just looking at her, though with that famed blond hair swept into a bedraggled ponytail and tangled wildly, her heart-shaped face devoid of makeup and her eyes red-rimmed from crying, she wasn’t exactly at her best.
    Time, it seemed, hadn’t dimmed the forbidden attraction he’d felt for her back in the days when he’d been Riverton High’s resident juvenile delinquent and she’d been its perennial homecoming