Big Sky Bride, Be Mine!

by Victoria Pade

  “I’ll fill you in on everything later….” Ian had whispered in her ear.

  But later hadn’t come during the remainder of the evening at Adz. It also hadn’t come on the drive back to the Mackey and McKendrick compound where a babysitter was watching the children tonight.

  After finding that Abby was asleep, Jenna agreed to Meg’s suggestion that Abby spend the night with her since Jenna would be back early the next morning to get ready for the wedding anyway. Which left Jenna free to accept Ian’s invitation to have a glass of wine in the small studio apartment above Meg’s garage where he was staying. Hopefully now she’d get to hear what Ian had to say about his twin.

  She was sitting on a bar stool at the island counter that separated the kitchen from the living room, waiting. He was on the other side of the counter opening the wine but still not saying anything of consequence.

  Not that watching him was an unpleasant distraction. He was dressed in charcoal-gray slacks and a dove-gray dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. Until his brother had walked in to provide a mirror image of him tonight, Jenna had considered him the best looking man in the room. And even after meeting his brother, looking back and forth between them, marveling at just how much they did look alike, Jenna had still decided that she preferred Ian’s more tailored look to the casual air that Hutch had about him. So getting a private show of him opening and pouring the wine now was hardly a trial.

  But still she was dying to know what had happened between the brothers—both to cause the rift and now to mend it—and she was tired of waiting.

  “Okay, I’m on pins and needles!” she said when Ian slid a glass of red wine across the bar to her, and he bent forward to lean his forearms on the counter with his own glass cupped between his hands. “You said you’d fill me in—so fill me in! You knew your brother was coming tonight?”

  “I did,” he admitted. He explained how he’d known, how he’d even given his approval to the idea.

  “And were you really okay with him coming, or did you just say so because it wasn’t your place to keep him away from Shannon’s wedding?”

  “I was really okay with it,” he said, and it sounded like the truth. “I’ve had time to think about what it would be like to see him again since I first found out Shannon and Chase had gotten hold of him. I just realized that what had aggravated me six years ago didn’t aggravate me anymore. And by this morning, I thought that I was ready to forget about everything and get past it.”

  “And do I get to know what happened between you that caused the rift?” Jenna asked hopefully, sipping her wine.

  “Her name was Iris Stinson—”

  “There’s an Iris and a Chelsea?” Jenna heard herself blurt out before she’d even thought about it.

  Ian squinted his pale blue eyes at her. “How do you know about Chelsea?”

  Too late to lie. “I overheard your father talking to you about her that day you brought him to the farm.”

  “Ah,” Ian said. But he wasn’t flustered in any way by the fact that Jenna knew about the other woman. And he certainly didn’t seem to feel any kind of guilt or embarrassment, nor did he give any indication that he’d been caught at something.

  Instead he said, “Well, yeah, I do know a Chelsea, and there was an Iris. And there are some similarities in things with the two of them, namely what my father hopes—and hoped—to accomplish through them. Chelsea’s father owns Tanner Brewery and getting Tanner Brewery as a sponsor for the Monarchs would be a coup. My father would love it if Chelsea fell madly in love with me and Tanner Brewery became a permanent sponsor through marriage. Chelsea is a model and she works mainly in Europe. Her father would like it if she didn’t. He wants her to be closer to home. He wants me to sell her on becoming the face of Tanner Brewery as the Monarchs’ sponsor and he’s hinted that he also wouldn’t mind seeing her settle down, married, having a few grandchildren. I’m working on Chelsea doing advertisements—”

  “In exchange for your playlist?”

  Ian laughed. “Oh, you really were listening that day. Chelsea likes obscure jazz and so do I. It’s common ground, a common interest that I’m using to cultivate a business relationship—we’d be playing golf if she golfed. But cultivating a business relationship through a common interest is all that’s between Chelsea and I. As we speak she’s juggling three men on two different continents—that’s part of why her father would like to see her settle down. But I am not one of the three men, and I have no desire to be number four.”

  Jenna studied him, looking for signs that he was lying or downplaying the whole Chelsea issue.

  But she believed him.

  Then, in a more serious vein, he said, “Iris, on the other hand, was something else entirely.”

  Iris, on the other hand, had her even more curious.

  “What was your father hoping to accomplish through this Iris person?” Jenna asked.

  “Iris was the younger sister of Dwayne Stinson, owner of the South Dakota Stingers.”

  “Another football team,” Jenna said, thinking she’d heard the name before and putting two and two together when it came to the Kincaids and their focus on that particular sport.

  “Another NFL football team, right. The one that recruited Hutch to play out of college. Even before Hutch joined the team, the Stingers had had some respectable seasons, but they also had some financial struggles. My father knew that and was hoping to parlay Hutch’s connection with the team into his own partnership with Dwayne Stinson. My father wanted to be co-owner of the Stingers.”

  “He’s been single-minded about achieving that goal, your father…”

  “He has. From when he was still playing himself, he wanted to own an NFL football team. And he was looking to do that any way he could.”

  “And your brother opened that door for him.”

  “My father opens his own doors—sometimes he kicks them in—but one way or another, if he wants a door opened, it gets opened. But with Hutch on a team that had a weakness Morgan Kincaid could use to his advantage? Yeah, to Dad that looked like a door opening.”

  “And you went through the open door and found Iris?”

  “Pretty much. Dwayne was a lot older than Iris and raised her after their parents died, so he was more like a father to her. They were close, Hutch fast became the Stingers’ star player, my father was inching his way into team ownership, and I was family—and I was on the business end of things—so there started to be a lot of occasions when Iris and I were at the same functions.”

  “And you got together,” Jenna guessed.

  “We did. In fact, we were engaged.”

  Jenna felt her eyebrows arch as she took a sip of her wine.

  “You were engaged but you didn’t get married?” she asked after her sip.

  “Engaged but never married—right. That’s the closest I’ve ever come.”

  “But you didn’t get there….” she said to prompt more of the story.

  “Iris had some trouble deciding what she wanted to do,” Ian continued. “She’d been in and out of half a dozen different colleges and triple that many majors, all without graduating. Jobs went the same way—she just couldn’t seem to settle on anything. And then she announced that she wanted to be a part of the business end of football.”

  “And she’d cried wolf so often—”

  “Right—neither Dwayne nor I took her seriously. Dwayne said she was flighty, that wanting to work for the Stingers was just another one of her whims. There was no way he was giving her anything to do with his team. So she came to me.”

  That sounded ominous, and the fact that Ian threw back what remained of his wine and rounded the counter to sit on the bar stool facing Jenna only added to the weight of his words.

  “Iris wanted me to go to her brother on her behalf,” he said, his tone a sort of sigh. “She wanted me to point out to him that she’d been immersed in everything to do with football her whole life, that it was the normal progression of things, t
hat that was what she had the most aptitude for, that that’s where her real interests lay—stuff that made a certain amount of sense.”

  “But there was her track record.”

  “Exactly. Which was what Dwayne said when I had a drink with him and brought it up. And not only was he one hundred percent against the very idea of giving Iris any shot with the Stingers since the team was already in some financial jeopardy, he advised me to just sit back and wait until this fad blew over, too.” Ian shrugged. “And that’s the position I took.”

  And his tone was even more ominous than it had been before.

  “It didn’t do a lot for your relationship,” Jenna surmised.

  “Tanked it. Iris got madder and madder at my not taking her seriously. She thought I was siding with her brother instead of her when I should be going to bat for her with Dwayne and convincing him that he should give her a chance—which I couldn’t do because he was adamant. She accused me of being as bad as her brother, of not seeing who she was or giving her credit for anything. Ultimately, she broke the engagement.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenna said.

  Ian shrugged his broad shoulders. “It was a blow,” he admitted. “It was also the first time I’d been dumped,” he added with some chagrin. “So there had to be some wound-licking, but I got over it.”

  “Did that do damage with the other connections—your father trying to buy into her brother’s team or your brother playing for it?”

  “Actually, no, that didn’t do any harm. That was—” he seemed to be calculating in his head before he said “—a little over six and a half years ago. The harm came about seven months later. The dust had settled over the end of the engagement, I’d moved on and was actually dating someone else—my rebound, I suppose, because nothing came of it. But that was when Hutch’s contract with the Stingers was up….”

  Jenna finished her wine, and declined a second glass when Ian offered it, because she still needed to drive home.

  Then to urge him to go on, she said, “So your brother’s contract was up….”

  “Right. And Iris went to him and talked him into becoming a free agent, represented by her.”

  “Really?” Jenna said, thinking that she had to admire the other woman’s determination to prove herself.

  “Yep. Dad had negotiated Hutch’s previous contract, and Hutch knew that the old man had had his own buying-into-the-Stingers interests at heart when he’d done it. Hutch said he liked Iris’s enthusiasm, her drive, and he decided to let her see what she could do for him.”

  “The plot thickens,” Jenna said. “Had anything been going on between them before?”

  “Like when she was engaged to me? Nah. I mean, they knew each other, of course. But Hutch dated around—he did exactly what the old man disapproved of and reaped the benefits of sports fame with a progression of football groupies. So beyond knowing each other, no, he and Iris weren’t involved. Even when she talked him into letting her represent him, it was a purely business arrangement.” Another raise of just one brow. “Until it wasn’t. Which was about the time all hell broke loose.”

  “What happened?”

  “Iris actually turned out to be a good agent—she got Hutch a much better contract with another team. A team the Stingers ended up losing to every time they met them during the three years Hutch played for them. Dwayne was furious with Hutch for leaving and with Iris for brokering the deal. He took it out on Dad and said he’d see the Stingers go into bankruptcy rather than take a nickel of Dad’s money and let him in on a team his son had left hanging out to dry. And then Dad turned that around on me—”

  “How did that happen?” Jenna asked, confused.

  “The old man was in a rage—he’d been so close to finally getting what he wanted and then the rug was pulled out from under him. He started in on me about how none of it would have ever happened if I’d just married Iris—”

  “No? Seriously?” Jenna said in disbelief.

  “Seriously. We had a blowout. By then Hutch and Iris had hooked up, and even though I didn’t have any feelings left for her, I didn’t want to see her with my brother of all people. It just seemed so damn disloyal for him to get involved with her. And for me to be taking the brunt of Dad’s wrath because of what he was doing only made it worse. Hutch and I fought, and…” Yet another shrug. “There you have it. I left the Kincaid Corporation for a while—until the old man came to me, apologized, said he was out of line and being ridiculous to blame me—”

  “Which he was.”

  Ian conceded that with a tilt of his head before he went on with what he was saying, “Anyway, the old man asked me to come back to work on the Monarchs, and we’ve been okay since then. But tonight was the first time Hutch and I have been in the same room since.”

  There was one final piece that was missing and Jenna wasn’t sure how touchy a subject it might be, but she just couldn’t leave it alone. So with some care, she said, “I heard something tonight about Iris being killed?”

  “About a year ago. In a skiing accident.”

  “And neither you nor your father went to Hutch even then?”

  “We didn’t even know about it until a month later. By then… Well, we’d only found out through the grapevine that Iris and Hutch had gotten married, that they’d had a baby. We’d accepted the fact that he didn’t want us around for any of that. Since he didn’t so much as have someone else call to say Iris had died, we figured he must not have wanted us in on that either. You know how these things—family fights—are. Holes get dug deeper and deeper, and they’re pretty tough to get out of.”

  “But today…”

  “I just thought that enough was enough. Dad and I both hated not being around for the arrival of Hutch’s first child. Dad’s first grandson. My first nephew. Then not being there for Hutch when his wife died? It seemed wrong. It felt wrong. But… You know, when you haven’t spoken for years, when he hasn’t seemed to want you around…”

  Ian shook his head, and Jenna thought that whether or not he realized that he had any regrets, he did—he regretted what had gone on within his family.

  “But like I said, enough was enough, and since Hutch was willing, I wasn’t going to let this thing go on any longer than it has. Now I’ll get him together with the old man—Dad will be glad to have it over with, too—and that’ll put an end to it.”

  Jenna laughed. “That’s it? A little spackle, some paint—good as new?”

  “Sure. Why not?” he asked.

  “No talking about what went on, no resolving issues, no discussion about what was done that shouldn’t have been done and how to avoid it happening again?”

  “No!” he said, as if he hated the thought. “What would any of that change? We’ll go with the spackle and paint and be good as new.”

  Jenna nodded. “Well, I suppose that’s worked for generations of cavemen before you, so it’ll probably work for you now.”

  “Cavemen?” he repeated with a laugh of his own.

  “You can clean yourselves up and dress in well-cut pants and shirts that make women think you’ve evolved, but underneath it all, you’re still cavemen,” she observed more out of admiration for how Ian in particular cleaned up than in condemnation for his overly simplistic goal of solving a years’ long family rift.

  Ian merely smiled a wicked smile. “So you’ve been thinking about what’s underneath the shirt and pants?”

  Jenna laughed again. “That’s what you took from what I said? You are a caveman.” But yes, she did frequently wonder what his body looked like. And then reprimanded herself for it.

  Ian perched on the very edge of his bar stool until his legs straddled hers and took hold of her seat on either side, pulling it near enough for them to be almost nose to nose.

  “And here you are, in my cave….” he pointed out.

  With her wine finished and her curiosity satisfied, she said, “Mmm… But I should probably get going. Tomorrow’s a big day, and I want to be over here again
early, when Abby wakes up.”

  And yet leaving couldn’t be easily accomplished now that Ian had boxed her in.

  Not that she was making any move in that direction. She wasn’t. She was sitting exactly as she had been, answering his steady gaze with an intensity of her own.

  Oh, those blue eyes!

  And that handsome face. And the clean, woodsy scent of his cologne. And that dimple he had in the very center of his chin…

  Somehow, her index finger had found its way to that chin, to trace the rise, the dip, the second rise….

  He leaned farther forward and kissed her then, and her hand slid to the side of his face—clean shaven but still rougher than her own skin—as she kissed him in return.

  Even as she did, she drew a deep breath and told herself she shouldn’t be kissing him. Again. But it seemed like she spent every minute she wasn’t kissing him, thinking about kissing him, recalling each kiss they’d shared, wanting to kiss him again. So when it actually happened? She couldn’t make herself not kiss him.

  She couldn’t even make herself remember why she shouldn’t.

  Instead, her eyes drifted closed, and in that instant, kissing him was all there was. His mouth on hers. His lips parting over hers. Hers parting, too. Her tongue meeting his, welcoming it.

  He stroked her hair, cradling her head to deepen the kiss. His other arm went around her and pulled her to the edge of her seat until her knees were a mere fraction of an inch from the juncture of his legs.

  She tried not to think about that. But with their kiss intensifying, with his hand rubbing her back and making her think about what she wanted him to do to other parts of her, it was impossible not to think about his body being so close.

  Her own breasts seemed to be straining within the confines of her binding camisole. Her nipples were nudging against the soft fabric, tempting her with cravings all their own. Cravings to feel his touch. To feel the warmth of his hands on them.

  What was she doing? she asked herself, knowing full well that she shouldn’t be doing this. That she shouldn’t be doing anything with him.