by Megan Crane
Game Of Brides
a montana born brides novel
Megan Crane
Game of Brides
©Copyright 2014 Megan Crane
The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN: 978-1-940296-37-1
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Montana Born Brides
About The Author
Chapter One
She felt him before she saw him.
It was the same as it had always been during those long, golden Montana summers when she’d been unable to escape how helpless and wild he’d made her feel as an inexperienced teenager—that little shiver down the back of her neck, then snaking along her arms, as if every hair on her body was shivering to attention.
And then, because she wasn’t a teenager any longer, lower. Much lower.
Emmy Mathis scowled at the baggage carousel at the Bozeman, Montana airport, willing her reaction away. Willing her goose bumps to disappear. Willing herself to feel none of that shimmering, infuriating need that curled like light deep inside her. Willing her absurd reaction to be nothing more than a response to the colder temperature.
It was May in Montana and only chilly for Emmy because she’d woken up this morning back home in much warmer Atlanta, and when she slung her duffel bag over her shoulder and turned around, he was there. Of course he was. Standing by the wall, those unfairly gorgeous green eyes fixed on her in that brooding, knowing way of his. Just like any given day in any summer of her youth.
Especially that last summer. When she’d been eighteen and head over heels in love with him and he’d been completely out of her league—until that very last night before she’d left for college.
Her scowl deepened. And Griffin Hyatt—the bane of her existence and one of the ten million reasons Emmy wanted to be anywhere but back in Montana, even if that meant missing her only sister’s wedding—grinned back at her.
If that was what that little crook of his hard mouth was.
He was whole lot older now than he’d been during those long ago summers. A grown man made entirely of smooth, lean, perfect muscle packed into faded jeans and an MSU T-shirt, with intricate tattoos peeking out from beneath each sleeve and all the way down the length of one corded, masculine forearm. His ridiculous green eyes packed the same hard punch she’d never quite managed to forget, and she wasn’t in any way emotionally prepared for the way his too-long dark hair and that mouth of his hit at her, making her whole body feel too warm. Feverish, even. He was the kind of man who left scars. He had.
It was so unfair. If anyone deserved to turn ugly with age it was Griffin. Emmy wanted to dump her coffee on him in retaliation for any one of a thousand old sins—and maybe mess up some of his arrogant, lazy hotness as he stood there, studying her reaction with an intensity that made her stomach curl in on itself. It took every last shred of willpower she had to restrain herself.
This was merely an unfortunate coincidence, she assured herself. A chance encounter, nothing more. A mature person would smile, maybe even nod politely to an old acquaintance, so that was what Emmy did. And then she pretended he wasn’t there as she looked away from him, gazing around for a member of her family, one of whom had been supposed to meet her plane this afternoon.
The same way she was pretending she’d never been naked in front of him—the way she’d been pretending for going on ten years now.
The baggage carousel emptied. The crowd dissipated. Emmy checked her phone approximately twelve thousand times, but there were still no messages from her parents or her sister to explain their absence.
It wasn’t until the carousel had stopped moving and Emmy was the only one still standing there next to it that a hideous possibility occurred to her.
She tensed. She knew.
Then she turned slightly, stiffly, to find Griffin exactly where she’d last seen him. Leaning back against the wall, his arms folded over his lean, hard chest and his booted feet crossed, watching her like she was the most entertaining thing he’d seen in years.
Given what she knew about him through the family grapevine that he was a part of because their grandmothers—Gran Harriet and Gran Martha—were still the best friends they’d been when they’d roomed together at Radcliffe way back when, Emmy doubted very much that she entertained him even a little bit. She was a perfectly decent advertising copywriter who lived a perfectly nice life in perfectly comfortable Atlanta. Griffin was an extreme sports nut and athletic clothing entrepreneur who liked to fling himself down mountains and out of planes, making money and risking almost certain death every time he inhaled.
He’d been out of her league when she’d been eighteen. He was beyond her understanding now. But no less gorgeous, she couldn’t help but notice. And even more compelling than he’d been back then.
Griffin lifted his upper hand with the same deceptively languid arrogance he apparently still did everything else and then crooked the top two fingers. Ordering her to come to him without uttering a single word.
Every last part of Emmy protested. Violently. Because there was too much of her that simply wanted to rush to obey him, the way she’d done more than she liked to admit to herself as a girl. And look where that had gotten her. Naked and abandoned the night before she’d left for college, and nary a word to or from this man since.
But there was no one else there who could possibly be her ride, and so she found herself walking toward him. Reluctantly. She stopped when she was a foot or so away, and told herself her spiking body temperature had nothing to do with the frank, male appraisal in those green eyes of his as they ran over her, much less the way that mouth of his kicked up in one corner.
She wished, with a sudden onslaught of deep fervor, that she’d dressed up to travel today, the way her mother still did. She wished she’d done something with her hair besides clip it back out of her way with that ruthless efficiency her far more feminine and sultry sister Margery liked to call her depressing practicality. She wished she did the kinds of things to her jeans that Griffin did so effortlessly to his. That she was as ordinary as ever next to all his beaming male glory poked at her. It stung in old wounds she’d imagined long since healed. Emmy tucked her chin down toward the lightweight blue scarf she’d looped around her neck and glared at him.
“Hey, Bug,” Griffin said. Drawled, really.
“Funny thing about the name Bug,” Emmy replied, which was hard, given how tightly she’d clenched her teeth together at the sound of the nickname he’d given her when she was all of seven. “It’s been ten years since anyone called me that and I still hate it. If you’ve forgotten my actual name, just say so.”
The girl she’d been, awkward and emotional and distraught at the way this beautiful older boy looked right through her—until the summer he hadn’t, bristled when he studied her for a long moment. She told herself she didn’t flush. More, that she didn’t remember his hands against her skin in the dark of his grandmother’s barn. That she couldn’t still taste him the way she had the la
st night she’d seen him.
“I know your name,” he said.
“Then I have a great idea. Use it.”
“Nice to see you too, Emmy,” Griffin said, with that lurking hint of laughter and a completely unearned note of authority that put her back up. “You might want to mind your manners. I’m your ride.”
“Why?” She made no effort to keep from glaring at him. Maybe that would hide all the rest of the things that swamped her then at the idea of being alone with him in a confined space. Or at all. “Did my entire extended family die from wedding overkill already? Or have you opened up a taxi service?”
“I’m not sure rural Montana is really the optimal place to launch a new taxi service,” he said in his lazy way that still managed to remind her that he was the one who’d been written up in Forbes magazine, not her. “Way to think outside the box, though. I appreciate a new business proposition as much as the next guy.”
“Why you?” She realized how rude that sounded when his dark brows rose over that dangerous gleam of amusement in his gaze, and she forced the kind of smile she used on her awful, patronizing boss. “I mean, surely you have better things to do. Don’t you? Aren’t you some kind of mogul these days?”
He smirked, she smiled harder, and Emmy was pretty sure both of them knew perfectly well that she knew exactly what he did. Or had done. GriffinFlight, his brand and ever-evolving product line, was turning up on every snowboarder, skateboarder, free-range skier, and surfer anyone had ever heard of lately. Outside magazine had called the tattoo-reminiscent designs “high-octane, a necessary blast of fresh air, and, in a word, hot.”
Not that Emmy had ever Googled him.
“Something like that,” Griffin said, with that knowing look on his face that Emmy felt everywhere. The way she always had.
“And yet you take time out of your busy Wolf of Wall Street day to play cab driver for me,” she said, still smiling, though she made no attempt to keep that dry note from her voice. “I feel like Cinderella on her way to the ball. Which I believe makes you the pumpkin. Or a mouse pretending to be a man. Something like that, right?”
Griffin straightened from the wall then, and Emmy couldn’t believe she’d forgotten how tall he was. Or maybe it was that he’d filled out in the decade since she’d last seen him, all that lanky restlessness she remembered turned into visible, unmistakable strength and power. Her throat went dry, and she hated herself.
“You haven’t been here in a while,” he said, low and perfectly courteous, so there was no reason at all that Emmy should feel it wash through her like that. Like a wave of pure, hot, aching sensation, with a little bit of warning besides. “So maybe I need to remind you that our grandmothers deliberately bought adjoining land in the hills outside of Marietta so they could see each other all the time. We grew up here.” He smiled at her, though there was that sharpness she remembered too well there, too, making it an edgy, challenging thing. That was the Griffin she knew, the Griffin she’d always wanted far more than was safe. Or wise. Or requited, a little voice reminded her. “Well. You were just a summer girl.”
“Don’t revise history I can remember all by myself,” she chided him, shifting her duffel bag higher on her shoulder and tipping her chin up, like she was ready to go a few rounds with him. She thought maybe she was. The eighteen-year-old he’d abandoned so cavalierly deserved it. “You grew up in Baltimore. You went to one of those fancy New England prep schools. You lived in Marietta for exactly one semester before you went to Dartmouth.”
“Glad to see you were paying such close attention,” he murmured, a gleam she definitely didn’t like in his eyes, and Emmy couldn’t believe this was happening again. That knot in her stomach. That pressing need to either prove something to him or prove she didn’t care about him—when she shouldn’t waste a single thought on him. Not after what he’d done. Or not done, for that matter.
It was like she took one look at this man and she was thirteen. Again. Forever.
“Your mother couldn’t make it,” Griffin said when she didn’t say anything. Emmy was darkly certain he didn’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone, ever. He never had, not even when he was young and relatively unformed. He’d still been Griffin. “Something about wildflowers.”
“Wildflowers,” Emmy repeated. Then rolled her eyes, so annoyed with her sister’s circus of a wedding that she momentarily forgot who she was talking to. “Yes, of course. Margery wants dried wildflower centerpieces for the tables in the tent at the reception. The bridesmaids and family members are supposed to pick them every day throughout the month of May. And then maybe hold hands and sing around her like a springtime reenactment of the Nutcracker. That part was unclear.”
“Sounds like Margery,” Griffin said. “She always did like the princess routine.”
Emmy didn’t know why she felt the urge to leap to Margery’s defense then, because it was true. Margery had never met a tiara she didn’t like, had never encountered a holiday that couldn’t be tailored into a vast celebration of All Things Margery, and had been blessed with the sort of lithe, sweet, blonde prettiness that made people adore those things about her instead of attempting to beat her to death with the fairy wings she’d worn more than once and not always on Halloween.
It wasn’t a surprise that she’d decreed that her wedding to Philip Rollins, the wealthy Chicago financier, should encompass whole weeks and contain so many different events that Emmy had been forced to pack all the separate, ornate invitations in their own expandable file folder. The hayride. The wedding party’s horseback ride and barbecue. A spa day. A family-only party. Etc. But that didn’t mean that Emmy didn’t dread the next three weeks. She did. She’d fumed about it all the way from Atlanta.
Griffin Hyatt was merely the icing on the cake. The six-layer, multi-flavored, monstrosity of a wedding cake that Margery had insisted was the only true representation of hers and Philip’s deep and abiding love. That and his bank account, Emmy’s more cynical side had insisted.
“I think I’d rather find my own way to Marietta,” Emmy said now, because her stomach was still curling in on itself and she was choosing to believe that was nausea, not an unwieldy longing for this man she’d spent the better part of a decade telling herself she wasn’t pining for at all. “A half-hour in a car with you is about thirty minutes too long.”
Griffin laughed, which made Emmy’s pulse rocket through her.
“I see you haven’t lost any of your charm down there in Atlanta,” he said. “Must be that Southern influence.”
Emmy eyed him for a moment that stretched into two. Then longer. And the past was thick between them, turning the air to a kind of fog, and she was still the same girl he’d stripped and then abandoned. Why couldn’t she remember that when she was standing in front of him?
“What kind of charm do you think you deserve, Griffin?” she asked quietly. “All these years later?”
He was very still then, as he looked down at her, his mouth something like grim. But he didn’t look away. He didn’t pretend he didn’t know what she meant.
“That’s a subject best discussed in private,” he said, with more of that brooding jade green gaze of his, making her think of all kinds of things she’d thought she’d banished years ago. Like catching a gaze very much like this one that last summer, across the hot, dry breathlessness of a late Montana afternoon high up in the hills. “Not right here in the middle of an airport. Don’t you think?”
Ten years ago, he’d walked away from her when she’d been naked and begging him to stay with her, to touch her, to take her. Ten years ago, she’d offered him her virginity and he’d refused. He’d broken her heart. Emmy didn’t want to discuss that. She wanted to continue pretending that night had never, ever happened.
Or, barring that, to continue poking at him about it without ever having to address it head on. Discussing it might lead to understanding and compassion. She preferred vilification and condemnation, thank you.
“I th
ink I’ll pass,” she said, very evenly. “And while I’m at it, I’ll find myself a real cab.”
And she pivoted and started for the exit.
Only to be stopped three steps later by a hand on her shoulder—a hand that kept her from moving in one heartbeat and took the duffel from her in the next. And she didn’t want to think about how close he was then, how she could smell the soap he’d used in his morning shower and the faintest hint of coffee, how it made her want to sink down into a puddle on the ground and cry the way she had ten years ago.
“Here’s the thing, Bug,” Griffin said, his mouth in that same flat line and a very different sort of gleam in his green eyes. It made her shiver—which was better than crying. “Your mother asked me to pick your sweet ass up, and that means I’m taking you back to Marietta if I have to tie you down in the back of my truck to do it. So you should probably just go ahead and surrender to the inevitable, because we both know I’m going to win.”
Emmy had no doubt at all that he’d not only tie her up in the back of his truck like he’d said he would, but that he’d enjoy it. Worse, that she might, too, if it involved his hands on her again. And she hated the both of them, then, almost as much as she hated this damned hunger that only he ever inspired in her.
“Oh, like last time?” she asked in a hard, bright voice. “Because that didn’t end so well, did it?”
His hard, beautiful mouth shifted, he stopped walking, and everything went lethal. Shimmering hot, like it was already the height of summer. Like they weren’t standing in an airport. Like there was nothing in the world but this.
Him. Them. That same old yearning.
“Are you mad that I got you naked in the first place, Emmy?” Griffin asked in that low, arrogant drawl that snuck in beneath her skin and wrapped itself like smoke around her bones. “Or are you still pissed off that I left you unsatisfied?”
