A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides)

by Megan Crane

  It sat in her stomach like lead.

  She didn’t see him at the ceremony, conducted on Gran Harriet’s wide back stairs under hastily erected heat lamps in the biting cold, and she told herself she didn’t look once. Or only looked once. She wore her dahlia-colored dress and she arranged Margery’s train to look pretty and she smiled.

  She smiled through the ceremony. She smiled while Margery and Philip kissed and everybody cheered. She smiled through all the interminable pictures and she sat at the high table and picked at her dinner and smiled all the more. She toasted her sister and made Margery teary in a good way, for once, and then the dancing started and it was time, she decided, to drink.

  Heavily and plentifully. And if she started hitting on the groomsmen or woke up face down beneath one of the tables, oh well. No one could say she hadn’t done her job as maid of honor first. She marched over to the caterer and liberated a bottle of white wine, and then she settled herself down in a far corner of the tent, where she could feel the wind from outside and where, if she was lucky, no one would see her become very, very drunk.

  She tipped the bottle to her mouth and was about to take a long, hard swig when it was gently removed from her possession.

  “Easy, killer. That’s a nasty headache waiting to happen.”

  Griffin, of course. Because life was cruel and he was worse.

  Emmy didn’t want to look up at him, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

  Shit, she thought helplessly as her eyes moved up over all of his magnificence packed tight into a perfectly fitted dark suit. Only the faintest hint of a tattoo poked out from the cuff of one sleeve, and on the back of his neck, and her curse was that it made her burn for him. His green eyes were brighter than she remembered and his muscles seemed harder and she wished she’d never heard of Griffin Hyatt. She wished she could reach inside her head and excise him, just like that.

  Instead, she smiled, because they’d never promised each other anything and if he wanted to get back with his fiancée, he should. And because she’d been smiling all day long. What was one more?

  “How’s Celia?” she asked. “Did you all have fun catching up?”

  “Yes,” he said, the wine bottle dangling from one hand and his gaze a hard thing on hers. “It was a delightful trip down memory lane. Because what’s better than looking up from the woman you love to see the woman who left you?”

  She couldn’t possibly have heard that right.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” he threw at her, a little belligerently, she thought. “I love you, Emmy. And I know you love me. You’ve loved me since you were a kid. You’re ruined for all other men and I hope I haunt you forever, I really do.”

  “There’s no need to be rude, Griffin,” she snapped at him, shooting up to her feet, her hands on her hips before she knew she was moving. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I can’t stand you looking at me like that,” he said quietly. Softly. Making her start to tremble way down deep inside. “Like I broke your heart all over again.”

  “Let’s examine the facts,” she said with a coolness she might have admired had her heart been capable of beating properly, instead of leaping all over the place inside of her like that. “I’m not saying my heart has anything to do with this conversation but if it did? It probably wouldn’t have enjoyed you staring at your ex like she was the second coming before you disappeared—presumably with said ex—for two days. You own a company, Griffin. I’ve seen the computer equipment in your cabin and I’ve watched you take business calls. All of this suggests that if you wanted to talk to me, you would have. You didn’t.”

  “I did.” He reached over like he meant to trace her mouth with his fingers but stopped, and Emmy thought that might hurt worse than all the rest of it. “I had to take care of a few things first.”

  “I got that part.” She didn’t even try to force a smile then. “Your silence was very loud, actually. A lot like it was ten years ago.”

  “I bought a shop,” he said. Blurted out, really. “Down in town. I’m going to open a tattoo parlor. Just me, I mean. No GriffinFlight.”

  She blinked, and thinking about tattoos was easier than thinking about the crushed thing in her chest where her heart had been. “That’s a great idea. But how will you run the company if you’re tattooing people?”

  “I’m selling it,” he said, with a current of intensity in his voice and in his green eyes that she refused to let get to her. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two days. I’ve been holed up in the Graff Hotel hammering it all out with my lawyers. Henry and Celia are going to run it. They’re better at it anyway.”

  “Good.” Her voice stuck somewhere in her throat, but she pushed it out. “I’m happy for you. All of you.”

  “I’m free, Emmy,” he told her softly. “And the only thing I want that I don’t already have is you.”

  For a second, then, Emmy let herself imagine that things might work out this time. That this wasn’t ten years ago.

  But there was no point making it easy on either one of them. “What makes you think you can have me?”

  “You love me something crazy,” he said, his mouth kicking up in one corner. “I thought we covered that.”

  “I have a crush on you, maybe. An infatuation that will surely fade and three weeks of okay sex.”

  He laughed. “If that’s only ‘okay,’ I hope we never upgrade to good. We’ll burn the town down.”

  She didn’t want to hope, she thought then. It was too painful. She didn’t dare. She’d tried to tell him she loved him in that restaurant and his ex had appeared, as if summoned. What would happen if she actually said it? Would Copper Mountain fall down on top of them?

  “You’re conceited and arrogant and you’re not going to change. You’ve been exactly the same your entire life.” She glared at him, because it was easier to do that than face all those dark, shadowy, fearful things inside of her. “I’ve gotten over you before, Griffin. It shouldn’t be that hard to do it again.”

  He looked down at her for a long moment, while the band played something sweet. Inside her chest, Emmy’s heart seemed to dance along with it, much less crushed and ruined than she’d thought it was only a few moments before. Or maybe that was the look in his eyes, making her forget she’d ever doubted him. Making her wonder how she ever could have.

  Make her think it might be worth it to risk the mountain falling down, after all.

  “Come here,” he said. He reached over and took her hand in his, and led her out of the tent and into the cool night air, and she went with him.

  Of course she went with him.

  It was the temperature that hit her first, that slap of winter and the immediate muffling of the sounds from within when the tent flap closed behind them. There were lanterns set up on metal posts, dotting the lawn and the path back up to Gran Harriet’s house, which blazed with light at the crest of the hill.

  And all around them, snow fell, a quiet dance from above.

  Emmy couldn’t help herself. She shivered. And not because she was cold. But she didn’t complain when Griffin moved behind her and wrapped his arms around her, enveloping her in all of that heat and that scent of his, soap and man and him.

  “I love you,” he said, deeper somehow, out here where it was so quiet and there was nothing to distract from the power of it. No crowd this time. No interruptions. Only the snow above and the too-loud beating of her nervous heart. “I think I always have. It’s snowing all over us, Bug, but as long as you’re with me, it’s summer. Don’t you know that? We make it summer, you and me.”

  There wasn’t much fight in her but she let out a sigh as if there was, leaning her head back against his shoulder, letting her cheek rest against his, and if it was still cold, she stopped noticing.

  “This will never work. I’ll uproot myself and move here, leaving everything I know in Atlanta—”

  “Do you actually like Atlanta or do you not hate it? It’s not the same
thing.”

  “—and we’ll have a great summer, but fall will come, and then the endless winter—”

  “That happens. Every year. Don’t forget the snow.”

  “—and we’ll fight. And it will all go horribly wrong. And you’ll still be Griffin Hyatt, who sold a company to open a tattoo parlor because he can do as he likes. While I’ll be the idiot who stranded herself in Montana with some guy she should have gotten over when she was a teenager.”

  He laughed, and she found she was smiling when he turned her around in his arms and shook his head at her.

  “Or,” he said, truth and finality and a thousand shining things in his beautiful eyes, “you’ll be the woman I love, and this will be our life, and we’ll live happily ever after because guess what, Bug?”

  “What?” But she was smiling up at him.

  “You love me so much you can’t see straight. You’re not going anywhere. You’re not getting over me and we’re not breaking up no matter how much we fight. I’d marry you right now but it would upset your sister.”

  And she couldn’t tell the difference between his smile and hers. As if they’d blended, somehow, out here in the cold night air.

  “That and you should probably propose, first, and see what I say. I could go either way. It might hinge on whether or not you need someone to run this tattoo shop of yours because I feel like I’d be excellent at bossing you around. And I want a salary. With benefits.”

  He bit at her neck, and she laughed, and there was nothing in the sound of it but joy. And this time, it didn’t hurt one bit.

  “There will be benefits.” His kiss was hard and possessive, sweet and perfect, just like him. “Nothing but benefits, Emmy. That’s the point.”

  “You’re right,” she whispered.

  “About which part?”

  “I love you,” she told him, and the way he smiled then told her he wasn’t quite as sure of himself as he pretended to be. It made her heart flip over and her smile that much wider. “I’ve always loved you. And I’ll consider marrying you, but only under one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  She slid her hand over his heart and he covered it with his.

  “It has to feel like this, Griffin,” she whispered. “Always.”

  And she believed that it would, as he lifted her in his arms and spun her around. Around and around in their own wild dance, until they were both laughing with the sheer perfection of it.

  Because it might get hard, as all things got hard. They might fight, and they might hurt each other, because that’s what people in love did sometimes whether they wanted to do it or not. There would always be dark mixed in with the light, because that was the joy and the ache of living, but at the heart of it there would always be this. All the long, golden summers they carried between them and could take out when they wanted, just like this.

  Even in the snow and the dark of night, they’d always have their summers, together.

  Inside the wedding tent, two very old friends sat next to each other in the padded, brocaded chairs Margery had insisted were necessary to her happiness and watched the dancers who covered the parquet floor before them.

  And the couple who snuck out of the tent, about as secretive as a stampede of buffalo.

  “You owe me fifty dollars, Martha,” Gran Harriet said with great satisfaction. “I told you we’d end up related to each other, sooner or later.”

  “You were drinking too much wine and you had all the grandiose notions of the seventeen year old debutante you were,” Gran Martha said with a snort from beside her. “I hardly think that counts.”

  “What counts is that I was right,” Gran Harriet replied. “As I so often am. Pay up.”

  “So you were,” Gran Martha said. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a crisp hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the table between them. Then she smiled blandly and tapped it with her index finger.

  “Double or nothing,” she said. “The first baby will be a girl, and they’ll name her after me.”

  “Over my dead body.” Gran Harriet bristled in feigned outrage. Well, partially feigned. “You’d better hope it’s a boy.”

  “You’re on,” her best friend said, and they clinked their champagne glasses together and drank on it, the way they had a thousand years ago when they’d been so young and so silly they’d made up prophecies in their dormitory and called it fate.

  And all around them, the party swirled on. The bride beamed with happiness, the groom was handsome and attentive, and the grandchildren they’d wanted together for a very long time now pushed back inside the tent, brimming with brand new promises and shining like love, dusted all over with springtime snow. Like a blessing.

  Like it really was fate, after all.

  The End

  Montana Born Brides

  The excitement is building in Marietta, Montana, with a series of stories centered around the 100th Anniversary of the Graff Hotel and – as part of the celebration – an incredible Wedding Giveaway

  Available Now

  Prequel: Beauty’s Kiss by Jane Porter

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  Book 1: What a Bride Wants by Kelly Hunter

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  Book 2: Second Chance Bride by Trish Morey

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  Book 3: Almost a Bride by Sarah Mayberry

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  Book 4: The Unexpected Bride by Joanne Walsh

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  Book 5: The Reluctant Bride by Katherine Garbera

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  Book 6: Game of Brides by Megan Crane

  Coming Soon – May 2014

  The Substitute Bride by Kathleen O’Brien

  Last Year’s Bride by Anne McAllister

  About The Author

  USA Today bestselling author Megan Crane writes women’s fiction, chick lit, work-for-hire YA, and a lot of Harlequin Presents as Caitlin Crews. She also teaches creative writing classes both online at mediabistro.com and at UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally utilizes the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in York, England. She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic-book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals. For more info visit her at MeganCrane.com or CaitlinCrews.com.

  For the latest news, visit our website at TulePublishing.com

  If you enjoyed Game of Brides, you will love…

  Tempt Me, Cowboy by Megan Crane

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  Coming soon – June 2014