Big Sky Bride, Be Mine!

by Victoria Pade

  “I think I like you more than I should….” he said in an almost-whisper that didn’t sound as if it was meant for her to hear.

  And with that he leaned in and kissed her again, taking her mouth gently at first, causing her to think he was going to make a quick getaway—like he had the night before.

  But he didn’t do that. Instead, the kiss went on long enough for her to get comfortable with it.

  Long enough for her to remind herself that she shouldn’t be allowing him to kiss her at all, to tell herself that she should stop it, and instead to kiss him back.

  So easily, so naturally that it almost shocked her to think that Ian was the first man she’d kissed since she’d met her ex-husband. Really kissed, so that it counted.

  But oh, boy, did this one count!

  He deepened the kiss then, parting his lips.

  Jenna’s lips parted, too. He gently massaged her cheek as her own hand found its way to his chest. His rock-hard chest that had way, way too many layers of clothing covering it.

  Still, she could feel the solidity of him even through the thick sweater, through his jacket, while the kiss went on and on, giving her the chance to savor the suppleness of his mouth, the sweet taste of him, the sense of contained power and strength that emanated from him.

  She lost herself in that kiss so completely that tonight the surprise was when it came to an end.

  A slow, lingering end that said he wasn’t any more eager for that than she was. But an end nonetheless.

  And when it had, he again peered into her eyes.

  His brows arched as if he were as dazed by the potency of that kiss as she had been.

  Jenna couldn’t find words for what had just happened between them, and apparently neither could Ian, because all he did was whisper, “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” before he took his hand from her face, stepped away from her and went back to his car.

  But Jenna couldn’t make herself move just yet. She stayed in the cold, watching him go, reliving that kiss in her mind while the feel of it was still on her mouth.

  And letting the chilly air cool the heat of her cheeks before she had to face the babysitter.

  Who, with any luck, wouldn’t be able to tell that inside Jenna was all churned up and wishing, wishing, wishing that that kiss was still going on…

  And thinking that whoever Chelsea was, she should be sorry all she was getting from Ian Kincaid was a playlist….

  Chapter Seven

  “Calm down, Dad,” Ian said to his father the next evening as he was getting dressed for the Spring Fling Dance.

  Morgan Kincaid was in a huff on the other end of the cell phone.

  “How did you even know Chelsea had called?” Ian asked after his father had read him the riot act.

  “I had drinks with her father late this afternoon, that’s how. He told me to convey the message to you that Chelsea was leaving today for a photo shoot in the country where she won’t be reachable. Where she’ll be for the next two weeks! Two weeks that you won’t be able to even talk to her, and you didn’t answer when she called this morning or call her back!”

  Morgan Kincaid had not calmed down.

  Ian hadn’t expected his father to know about the call from Chelsea, but he refused to be ruffled by the fact that he did.

  “The time difference is a problem—Paris is eight hours ahead of us, you know. I was in a breakfast meeting when the call came in, so it went to voicemail. She had already left Paris and was unreachable when I finally listened to the message—”

  “And now two weeks will go by without you being able to talk to her!”

  “Dad! This is not worth stroking out over. It was a missed phone call. No big deal. She was only calling to give me a heads-up on a new musician she discovered, and she left the message on my voicemail. I’m going to say it again—Chelsea and I are nothing—nothing—but friendly.” Ian said each of those words slowly, precisely, emphatically. “We are not an item. Or a couple. Or anything. Friendly—that’s it.”

  “You need to fix that!”

  “There’s nothing to fix. If not for the connection between you and her father, and the connection you want between the Monarchs and Tanner Brewery, she and I probably wouldn’t even be friends. Missing a call from her certainly wouldn’t be and isn’t a crisis. And whether or not you want to believe it, it isn’t a crisis on Chelsea’s side, either—so I didn’t talk to her? So what?”

  “So what? So this is important! Sponsorship from her father is important—”

  “Which I will likely get us with or without Chelsea— I told you that, too. I spoke to Bill Tanner yesterday and he’s seeing the advantages of backing the Monarchs. I assured him that I’m also urging Chelsea to do the ad campaign but I made no promises—”

  “Maybe you should have. Maybe he’d be signed on already if you had.”

  “What should I have promised? To marry his daughter and keep her barefoot and pregnant so he could see her every day?” Ian said facetiously. “Because none of that is going to happen. I’m not going to get into anything with this woman because you or her father might like it if I did! This is business and that’s as far as it goes. And if that’s a deal breaker with Tanner Brewery, then that’s the way it is.”

  “You need to give this the full-court press!” his father still insisted.

  “It’s her father and his business that I’m giving the full-court press. And I’ll get this endorsement like I get every other endorsement—through hard work and diligence and salesmanship. Remember that we learned this lesson the hard way—mix business, family and romance, and it all goes bad. All of it. We’ll get Tanner Brewery as a sponsor, I’ll do what I can to get Chelsea to be the face of our new partnership to please her father, but we’ll do it by the book.”

  “It still doesn’t help to miss her calls,” Morgan persisted.

  “It also doesn’t hurt anything,” Ian said, standing his ground.

  He heard his father’s sigh on the other end of the line but Morgan let the subject drop. They discussed a few details about the training center and then Ian brought the call to a close. But after he’d hung up he did feel a twinge of guilt for lying to his father.

  He hadn’t had a breakfast meeting this morning.

  When Chelsea had called he could have answered.

  He just hadn’t wanted to.

  He’d been awake, lying in bed, thinking about Jenna. About having kissed her the night before. And the last thing he’d wanted to do at that moment was talk to another woman, even if it had only been about music. And even if, for the sake of business, he probably should have.

  As he chose a black cashmere turtleneck sweater to wear tonight with his dark gray slacks, his thoughts turned to last night.

  Oh, yeah, he’d been thinking about that kiss all right….

  Whew!

  Last night had been a kiss!

  Jenna was something…

  She was great. Sweet and beautiful and smart and quick and funny. What red-blooded man wouldn’t have wanted to kiss her?

  Still, he shouldn’t have. And not because of Chelsea—Chelsea was a nonissue no matter what his father or hers might want. He shouldn’t have kissed Jenna because of Abby.

  Because when it came to big deals, Jenna having Abby was one of them.

  He wasn’t ready for diapers and feedings and nap-times and bedtimes and babysitters and thinking and worrying and taking care of a kid. Living a life that revolved around a kid. The way Jenna did.

  Someday he would be. But he wasn’t ready for it now.

  And more importantly, when he was ready for it, he really, really wanted the kid to be his own.

  He respected and admired Jenna for taking on Abby. But when he had kids himself, he wanted the full experience. He’d heard friends talk about how there was nothing like having their newborn handed to them. That there was nothing like the feelings that had washed over them when they’d looked down at the little being of their own making. When they saw the
mselves or the people they loved in their child’s face or mannerisms.

  And he wanted to know what that was like. He wanted that bonding-at-birth experience for his own sake and for the sake of any child whose life he touched. That bonding-at-birth experience that he obviously hadn’t had with his father.

  That bonding-at-birth experience that might have made him feel differently….

  Not that he hadn’t loved his mother, that he didn’t love his father, he thought as he pulled on his pants.

  Not that he wasn’t grateful for everything they’d done for him, given him. He was.

  And not that they hadn’t been and weren’t his parents because they were the only parents he’d ever truly known. Parents he would have and still would do anything for, his parents to the end.

  It was just that he didn’t want any child of his to have the lifelong sense he’d had that he needed to work harder to be worthy of those parents because the child hadn’t been born to him.

  In the grand scheme of his own life, he wanted things to be strictly traditional—meet the right girl, fall in love, be alone together for a while, make the decision to have kids when they were both ready for it, create those kids, have and raise those kids together. He wanted the kind of closeness to those kids that came from that kind of irrefutable, undeniable, unbreakable connection.

  Jenna could well have something close to that with Abby, because while she wasn’t Abby’s biological mother, she was still family. Blood. They were still connected.

  But him? If anything developed between himself and Jenna, if he ended up a fixture in Abby’s life? It wouldn’t be the same with him.

  And it sure as hell wouldn’t fit that traditional picture he had of himself, of his future, of his life.

  No, being with Jenna wouldn’t fit his game plan at all, he thought as he shrugged into the sweater and peered into the mirror over the sink.

  “So don’t go around kissing her,” he told his reflection when he picked up his brush to straighten out his hair.

  Yeah, kissing was a bad move.

  “That has to stop. Here and now,” he ordered his reflected image. “Keeping each other company with the couples—that’s all there can be to this. Back off the personal stuff. And don’t kiss her again!”

  He knew that was exactly how he should play it. Just friends. That’s what they’d agreed to. That’s what he needed to stick to.

  But then he thought about dancing with her tonight. Holding her in his arms even with other people around. About how talking to her came so easily. About how quick-witted she was and how she always made him laugh, always kept him on his toes. About how the minute he set eyes on her, everything around them, everyone around them, faded into the background and all he could see, all he could think about, was her.

  And he knew he was going to want to kiss her again….

  “Just don’t!” he told himself as if he and his reflection were two separate entities.

  But as he stepped away from the mirror he honestly didn’t know if he could resist….

  By the last dance of the Spring Fling, Jenna had been spun, twirled, dipped and turned every which way. She’d long ago freed her feet from the pain of shoes that hadn’t ever seen that much action, pushed up the sleeves of her handmade boatneck sweater with its crocheted hem and wished she’d worn a skirt instead of slacks. She should have realized that attending a function like this with someone who not only knew how to dance, but who was also an athlete, would keep her on her toes. But it was the last dance—thankfully, a slow one—in the candlelit church basement adorned with multi-colored wild flowers both real and in the form of paper streamers to give the feel of Spring. And Ian was holding her just close enough for her to look up at his sculpted face as they did little more than merely sway to the music.

  “Okay, I really have to know,” she said in reference to something Ian had artfully dodged all evening, “how does Super-Jock-The-Football-Star dance like you’ve danced tonight? And no fooling around this time.”

  When he broke out the devilish smile, she knew she was weaponless against him if he did joke his way around giving a serious answer.

  But he obliged her, “That was my mother’s input. She was afraid my father was making Hutch and I into grunting gorillas who couldn’t do anything but play football. She wanted us to have some culture and refinement, too—that’s what she said. When we were kids she tried to take us to the opera, the ballet, but we just embarrassed her by being two rowdy boys who fought with each other over the armrest, laughed at the men in tights, made fun of—”

  “In other words, you were gorillas.”

  “Pretty much. Then she sold my dad on dance lessons the year before she died. She said that because dance was physical and about movement, it could help us on the football field, make us more agile, help our response time, things along those lines. And once Dad looked at it like that, he got behind it and—”

  “Pushed you to excel at it, so you learned to be good dancers.”

  “And kept it up even after Mom was gone. He also assured us—out of earshot of my mother—that it would help us get girls.” The devilish smile grew more devilish. “And he was right.”

  Jenna did not believe that Ian had ever had any problem getting girls, whether or not he could dance. But it was nice that he knew how to dance, although he’d nearly danced her to death—no exercise class, no double shift at any hospital, no hike, jog or farm work, no marathon shopping trip had ever worn her out as much as he had.

  Which was why, she told herself, she was so pliant in his arms. Why she was longing for him to hold her closer, tighter. Why she wanted to just mold herself to him and rest her head on his chest.

  It was all merely the weariness. It had nothing to do with the fact that she might be longing to be held closer and tighter, to be molded up against him with her head on his chest.

  “Well, I’m not sure who to thank, but I’ve never danced as much as I’ve danced tonight, and it was nice not sitting on the sidelines, watching everyone else dance for a change.”

  “The ex didn’t dance?” Ian asked.

  “Nooo. No way. Never,” she said. “He hated it.”

  That seemed to prompt Ian to tighten his arm around her the way she’d been wishing he would. He pulled her just a bit closer.

  She moved her hand on his back in response and closed the separation between them a hint more.

  “Well, I’m glad we got to do this tonight,” Ian said, dropping his chin to the top of Jenna’s head.

  And what could she do when that happened? She couldn’t just stiffen her neck as if she were providing some sort of pedestal for him. The natural thing was for her to turn her head to the side and lay her cheek to his cashmere-clad chest.

  At least that’s what felt like the natural thing to do when she did it.

  Natural and so, so nice…

  And not noticeably out of the ordinary since everyone around them was dancing basically the same way to the very slow music that the band was playing.

  Unfortunately, after only a few minutes the music drew to an end, and everyone stopped dancing—including Jenna and Ian. Jenna had had only the briefest taste of that nearness she’d been craving. A teaser of how nice it actually could be—and was—before it was gone and they weren’t even touching any longer.

  But Jenna bucked up, told herself it shouldn’t have happened in the first place and clapped along with everyone else. People shouted thanks and praise for the band whose members took a bow, then turned to pack away their instruments, signaling that the evening had really and truly come to an end.

  The crowd had dwindled considerably since the Spring Fling started. So after slipping her feet back into her shoes, Jenna and Ian had an easy time making their way to the door where the last of the revelers were putting on coats.

  Saying good-night to everyone didn’t take too long, and then Jenna was in the passenger seat of Ian’s car again as he rounded the front end and slid behind the wheel.


  The drive home was quick, and Ian insisted on coming inside with her to pay her babysitter tonight. Not that Jenna minded that he came in—she’d been wondering if she should invite him, telling herself she shouldn’t and still trying to find a good reason to do it.

  And once he was inside, had paid the sitter and it was just the two of them again, Jenna offered him a nightcap. Just to be polite, of course. Which Ian accepted—probably for the same reason, she thought.

  Ian took off his jacket and hung it on the coatrack while Jenna poured some of her father’s brandy in two juice glasses—apologizing for the fact that she didn’t have brandy snifters—and then they went into the living room to sit on her sofa.

  Jenna kicked off her shoes, making sure to hug one end of the couch when she sat down. But Ian sat in the center. And since they were angled to face each other, there was not quite as much distance between them as there might have been. As there should have been.

  “Are you working at all this weekend?” Ian asked her, settling in with an arm braced atop the sofa back after his first sip of brandy.

  “No, I have the whole weekend off. Do you?” she asked.

  “I have some paperwork to do, some emails that need sending, a few phone calls—”

  “Your-Father-The-Boss is making you work on the weekend?” Jenna teased him.

  Ian smiled an indulgent smile. “You know, to everyone except my father, I’m the boss.”

  “What exactly are you?”

  “I’m the Chief Operating Officer of the Monarchs football team.”

  “But you still work for your father.”

  Ian rolled his eyes. “I work for my father, and everyone else works for me.”

  “Have you always worked for your father? I know you said you went from college to the Kincaid Corporation, so—”

  “Actually,” Ian said, swirling his brandy and watching it coat the glass, “no, I haven’t always worked for my father.”

  “Really…” Jenna said, surprised and intrigued.

  “Mmm. About six years ago I left the family business.”