A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides)

by Megan Crane

  “I’d suggest you marry such an impressive catch,” Gran Martha said, much too casually, and Griffin knew what was coming. He’d walked right into it. “But that didn’t work out very well with the last woman you lived with, did it?”

  “You know perfectly well that I’m not living with Emmy.” He checked his belligerent tone, reminding himself who he was talking to here. “She’s staying with me for a limited amount of time because her sister’s friends took every other room in two houses.”

  That wasn’t even a lie.

  “Is that how Celia was made to feel in that house of yours in Wyoming? Like a guest? I imagine I might act out in a number of ways if my fiancé made me feel that way.”

  “Gran.”

  “One of these days you’re going to have to deal with the wreckage of your relationship with that poor girl, Griffin. Or at least hear her out instead of simply moving away from your home in a huff without so much as a single conversation. And then pretending she doesn’t exist.”

  There were so many things that were wrong and that he disliked about what she’d said that he almost couldn’t decide which part to respond to. He picked the first one, as it was relatively safer than the rest.

  “I can think of a lot of names to call Celia, Gran, but ‘that poor girl’ isn’t on the list.”

  “She calls me, you know.” He did know. It was one more reason to fume. Gran Martha sat back in her seat and eyed Griffin for a moment, like she was trying to read him. He remembered a time when she could do it with ease and he wondered if that resigned expression on her face meant she did, too. “At least once a week.”

  “You shouldn’t answer.” He took a slug from his beer and wished he could just get up and walk away from this conversation. But he wouldn’t. As Gran Martha knew perfectly well and was only too happy to use against him, he was aware. “I don’t.”

  “And what are you going to do if you win the Great Wedding Giveaway?” Gran Martha asked after a moment. The band below charged into a country song, which was appropriate, he thought. Griffin felt about as close to redneck crazy as he’d ever been. “There’s a dinner for the finalists next week.”

  “I’m not going to win anything.” He glared at her. “You shouldn’t have signed me up. Which I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned one or two thousand times.”

  He hadn’t actually known about it when Gran Martha had entered him and Celia into the town’s latest, grandest marketing scheme for her own meddling, Machiavellian reasons. The Graff Hotel was an old Montana jewel, a great monument to a bygone era. It had fallen into disrepair over the past century but had recently been restored to its full glory by one of Marietta’s success stories, Troy Sheenan. Jane Weiss, a recent addition to the town and the new head of its Chamber of Commerce, had planned a 100th Anniversary Wedding Giveaway to celebrate and advertise the brand new Graff and all the rest of what Marietta had to offer, mimicking a similar event that had occurred back when the hotel was new. Griffin had been called upon to donate some design work once Jane had learned he was in town. He’d been happy enough to do it.

  He’d been less happy when his grandmother had insisted that he attend a Valentine’s Day Ball as her date.

  Your grandfather loathes this sort of thing.

  So do I. With every last bone in my body.

  Yes, but you have to do as I say, Griffin, as my obedient grandchild. Your grandfather, I’m sad to say, doesn’t. Gran Martha had smiled when he’d sighed in obvious defeat. There’s a good boy. And make sure you look sharp. I can’t have a ruffian on my arm.

  And he’d been furious when he’d discovered that Gran Martha had entered him into the freaking contest, with a letter she’d written extolling the virtues of his nonexistent relationship with Celia and Griffin’s own life-long connection to Marietta.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so invested in this,” he said now, picking his words and his tone carefully. “And don’t think I don’t know that you had a hand in my being picked as a finalist.”

  “Are you suggested I colluded with that lovely Jane Weiss in some way?” Gran Martha asked, laughing, though the truth of it was perfectly clear in that glint in her green eyes. “Simply because I happen to be a member of the Chamber of Commerce? I’ve never been so offended in my life.”

  She wasn’t in the least bit offended, or if she was, she dealt with it by eating more of his fries with perfect equanimity. Griffin ran a hand over his face and wished he could summon the same kind of cool. They’d announced the finalists at a barn dance in April, which he’d only attended because he was a vendor. He hadn’t been amused to discover that he’d been named one of them.

  “Celia and I aren’t getting back together and even if we were, it wouldn’t be because of a contest.” He shook his head at his grandmother. “If you’re so determined to get involved, you should tell her the next time she calls that generally speaking, sleeping with your fiancé’s best friend is a surefire way to indicate you want out of the engagement. What’s the point of talking about it?”

  Gran Martha lifted her gaze to his, then returned to the diminishing pile of fries. “She sounds deeply remorseful.”

  “Celia is a very practical person, Gran,” Griffin said from between his teeth. “It’s probably sunk in by now that trading in the owner for the CFO of the company she works in might not have been the best thing for her stock portfolio.”

  Gran Martha eyed him in a way that made him feel like a very young boy again. A very naughty and disappointing young boy.

  “I liked Celia well enough,” she said, although as Griffin remembered it, she’d only ever tolerated Celia. Her recent and vocal championing of his ex had come as a highly unwelcome surprise. “But that isn’t the point, is it?”

  “If I had the slightest idea what the point was, Gran, we wouldn’t have to keep having this conversation.”

  “This is only an observation,” she said, and she leaned forward then, her disconcertingly direct gaze boring into him. He didn’t like that much, either, but this was his grandmother, so he sat up straight in his chair and took it like a man. “But no matter how many times you tell the story of how and why you left Jackson Hole, there’s very little of you in it. They did this. She did that. What did you do?”

  It was very, very hard not to snarl at this woman he’d worshipped his whole life. But somehow, he didn’t. “I left.”

  “What I wonder,” Gran Martha said quietly, “is when you stopped making your own decisions? When did you become someone things simply happened to?”

  He told himself it was the insult that sliced into him then, cutting him open like that. Not that her words had any truth to them. Because of course they didn’t.

  “Excuse me,” he gritted out, rising to his feet then, because it was that or lose his cool. “I have to hit the bathroom.”

  “Because I would hate to see Harriet Mathis’s granddaughter—”

  Emmy. She was back to Emmy, and that got to him far more than anything she might say about Celia. Celia was the past. Emmy was… his.

  “—get caught up in all these things you don’t decide. These things that happen to you, Griffin. Like weather. Because the last time you involved Emmy in your own little version of a hurricane, she stayed away from Montana for a decade and broke her grandmother’s heart. And her heart too, while you were at it.” Her gaze was level on his. The accusation was much too calm, much too quiet, and maybe that was why it seemed to tear through him like some terrible storm she’d summoned purely to make her point. “Don’t you do it again, Griffin Anthony Hyatt. Don’t you dare.”

  Chapter Six

  Emmy had only been pretending to listen to whatever Suzie Someone Or Other had been twittering on about to her left for the past fifteen minutes but even if she’d been paying close attention, she saw nothing but Griffin when he came down the stairs from the brewery’s second level like a thundercloud.

  He didn’t glance her way as he disappeared into the crowd in front of the lon
g hall that led toward the bathrooms. He didn’t give the slightest indication that a mere handful of hours before, he’d been doing his level best to make sure she couldn’t get dressed for the bridesmaids’ evening outing. The memory of it still made her shiver.

  Because she could still feel the way his mouth had moved on her, the way his hands had gripped her hips while he licked into her, the way he—

  “You don’t still have a crush on him, do you?” Margery asked from beside her, her tone a little too arch for Emmy’s liking. Emmy ignored it, because that was her sworn duty for the next week and a half.

  You need to lock all that sassiness away, Gran Harriet had told her after an unfortunate altercation between Emmy and Margery over the latter’s desire for personalized gourmet chocolates to grace every place setting.

  How lucky for Margery that the owner of Copper Mountain Chocolates is nicer than me, she’d retorted. Because obviously having chocolates made in the shape of her face is insane.

  Which you can talk about at your leisure after the wedding, Gran Harriet had replied serenely without even glancing up from her Kindle, where, she’d announced at dinner only the night before, she kept all her erotica. But not before, Emmy. Consider it a personal challenge.

  “Of course I don’t still have a crush on him,” Emmy replied stoutly now.

  It was no more than the honest truth. It wasn’t a crush if she’d been sleeping with the man for more than a week, was it? Or not sleeping with the man, to be more precise. It was definitely something else. Not that she knew what that something else was. Not that there had been much time to ask between all that making up for lost time and experimenting with a lifetime of longing made real at last.

  She modified her tone in deference to her grandmother and continued. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not a teenager anymore. I don’t spend a whole lot of time screaming into the wind or at Mom and Dad that no one understands my adolescent pain. I don’t keep a dramatic journal. I don’t have unexplained bouts of hormonal angst for no reason, or a face full of pimples for that matter. And I don’t have a crush on Griffin.”

  It didn’t matter what she called this thing with Griffin, of course. She was going home after the wedding, he was staying here, and that was that. If there was a small bubble of something inside her that felt a bit too scraped raw at that thought, oh well. Reality was reality no matter how she felt about it.

  “I’m delighted to hear it.” Margery settled back in her chair and smiled as she glanced around at all of her too-pretty, too-perfect friends as they chattered with each other and laughed in that particular way some women had, that was all about calling attention to themselves.

  Stop, Emmy ordered herself. Being snide only makes you one of them.

  Margery returned her attention to Emmy eventually, with what felt like a little touch of unnecessary theater. “Because he’s engaged, you know.”

  “Is he?” Emmy feigned a great fascination with the label on the fancy huckleberry soda she was drinking. “Why did I think that was called off?”

  “The rumor is that she cheated on him.” Margery sniffed. “But he still entered the two of them in that stupid wedding contest, so draw your own conclusions about what that means.” She didn’t wait for Emmy to draw any conclusions one way or another, she simply launched into her grievances concerning Marietta’s Great Wedding Giveaway, a topic she returned to roughly fifteen times a day. Even when Gran Harriet was in the room, though Margery knew as well as Emmy did that Gran was on the Marietta Chamber of Commerce along with her usual partner in crime, Griffin’s Gran Martha. “Do you really think that I would have had my wedding now if I’d known about this? If it had even existed eighteen months ago? I don’t understand these people. Some of us plan things in advance. Some of us actually care about our weddings and don’t leave them up to the random choices of some backwater town.”

  “You mean this backwater town?” Emmy asked mildly, thunking her soda bottle on the table before her with perhaps a shade too much force. “The very one where you’ve chosen to have your great three-week wedding extravaganza?”

  “You know what I mean,” Margery said dismissively. “Who comes up with these things? Why didn’t the Grans put a stop to it when they knew perfectly well my wedding was this year? And besides, what couple would think it was a good idea to throw themselves on the mercy of strangers for something as important as their own wedding? God only knows what will happen. It will be like a patchwork quilt of a wedding. Raggedy Ann Gets Married By A Committee Of People She’s Never Met.”

  “Some people like patchwork quilts. And Raggedy Ann, for that matter.”

  “Some people like Cheez Whiz, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m offering it with the canapés.”

  “Calm down, Bridezilla,” Emmy suggested, and maybe there was more snideness in her tone than she intended, because the look Margery gave her was very narrow indeed. “There are other people getting married this year. Many on the very same day as you. I know it’s hard to get your head around this, but you can’t actually reserve an entire year all for yourself.”

  “It’s obnoxious,” Margery said, and Emmy honestly didn’t know if she meant the fact she couldn’t reserve the whole year or the Wedding Giveaway itself. “It completely penalizes those of us who actually spent the time planning our weddings for ourselves.”

  “How does it penalize you, exactly?” And yes, her voice was definitely sharper than necessary. Emmy told herself it had nothing to do with the fact Griffin was competing to get a patchwork wedding all his own, a fact he’d conveniently failed to disclose before they’d slept together one or two hundred times. A fact that, when coupled with what he’d told her about his not-so-ex-fiancée, could conceivably be viewed as a rather gigantic lie. Nothing at all. “I think the whole thing is sweet. It’s very Wild West. Stagecoaches and top hats. And what they’ve done to the Graff Hotel is amazing. It’s gorgeous. Have you even looked inside? Mom said the renovations cost upwards of ten million dollars, and you can tell.”

  “If you can’t afford to get married, you shouldn’t get married,” said the pampered society princess who lived in the lap of luxury in a Chicago penthouse and was marrying the very, very wealthy man who funded her demanding lifestyle of daily beauty regimens and ever-changing obsessions with this or that workout craze of the moment. “You shouldn’t pretend it’s somehow romantic to let other people—total strangers and random vendors—pay for it for you.”

  “Excuse me,” Emmy said, forcing herself to smile when that was the last thing she felt like doing, because Gran Harriet would want that. She stood then, faster than she should have, because that was a better choice than punching Margery the way she’d done once before—memorably—when she’d been a very angry eight-year-old. A better choice, if far less satisfying. “I have to go to the bathroom and vomit. Then weep for your future, Marie Antoinette.”

  “Right, because I’m the bad guy for speaking a few home truths.” Margery rolled her eyes with a complete lack of concern, and then placed her hand on her chest like she was pledging allegiance to herself. “I’m paying for my cake.”

  Emmy was ten long strides away from the table before she unclenched her jaw. And she was standing in the line for the women’s room with her arms crossed tight over her chest and her hands in fists for what felt like twelve hours before she managed to pull in a deep breath and relax a little bit. But only a little bit.

  She admitted to herself that it wasn’t Margery’s usual display of astounding self-centeredness that was getting to her. That was just Margery, and most of the time, Emmy didn’t think her sister even meant the things she said. She liked being controversial almost as much as she liked attention.

  Emmy knew what she was actually upset about wasn’t her sister’s opinion about the Great Wedding Giveaway that had nothing to do with her.

  She shifted against the wall, smiling politely at the woman behind her in line and then looking past her, back into the cro
wded main room of the brewery. It looked like a happy, comfortable sort of place where anyone in their right mind would love to while away a few evenings, and there was no reason why that should bother her, too. Atlanta was filled with happy, comfortable places, after all. It was a happy, comfortable city, which was why Emmy had chosen it in the first place.

  But almost ten years later, it still doesn’t feel like home. Not like this.

  That felt like the punch she’d have loved to deliver to her sister, straight into her solar plexus. The wind went out of her. Emmy was glad she was standing with a wall at her back, because she was afraid that if she hadn’t been, she’d have toppled over. She shook her head to clear it, but it didn’t help.

  Air, she decided. She needed air.

  She bolted out of the line and followed the hallway until it ended in a propped-open door to the outside. She pushed through it, breathing in deep as the cooler outside temperature hit her. The old railway depot seemed mysterious and grand in the long blue of a late spring night.

  Emmy didn’t know what made her walk away from the building, out toward the railway tracks and away from Front Avenue, which was still relatively busy this early on a Thursday evening. The Graff Hotel rose up to her left down past the green of the small park that separated it from the old depot, looking much more polished and inviting than she remembered it from her youth. If she followed the train tracks down to the right she’d find the Wolf Den, the seediest bar in Marietta—which was helpfully located across the street from the old Catholic church and the police station, should the sins carried out within by the usually rough customers need addressing on either the spiritual or civic level. But she didn’t move. She stood there for a moment, breathing, and then something made her turn back and gaze up into the lit windows of what looked like a sprawling apartment above the brewery and the couple that she could see clearly inside.