“She’s incredible,” Natalie reflected.
“Almost as incredible as you.” Colt reached for her, one hand entwining with her own, the other cupping her cheek. “Last night was unbelievable.”
She wasn’t prone to blushing, but the way he looked into her eyes made her skin catch fire. “Yeah, well, wait until our wedding night.”
She knew her voice had gone husky with pent up desire, but damn it, this abstinence thing was torture. They’d been holding off, waiting until they were husband and wife, something they hadn’t planned, but had seemed right somehow. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t act like teenagers now and then.
“I’m looking forward to—”
“Colt,” Wes interrupted, popping his head in the kitchen through the side door, sunshine silhouetting his shape into a shadow, cowboy hat and all. “One of the band members is looking for a 240 outlet. Do you have one they can plug into?”
And right behind Wes, Mariah. “Natalie, I need duct tape. The plastic table tops are blowing around.”
Natalie and Colt exchanged amused glances. It was like a shot from a starting gun. For the next few hours they ran. Directing traffic, greeting guests and, most importantly, helping to raise money. When it came time for Colt to perform, Natalie felt lucky to squeeze in a moment to watch.
“I told you he was amazing,” Jillian said, coming up next to her—quite a feat given Colt’s arena seemed to have more people packed around it than a high school football game.
“You were right,” Natalie murmured.
“Of course, you’re pretty amazing yourself.”
Colt was just getting to the part where he would drag out the ring for Sam to jump through. Sam, the woman who’d managed to capture the heart of Hollywood’s newest “it” man—much to the chagrin of women the world over.
“What is this? Ply Natalie with compliments day?”
“What do you mean?”
But Natalie made sure Jillian knew she wasn’t serious. “Earlier Claire and I were talking about what a saint I am, but I’m not complaining.” She glanced back at the arena, watching as Colt removed the soon-to-be flaming hoop from the trailer. “Go on. Sing my praises.”
From the rail, she heard Jillian chuckle. “Well when you put it that way, forget it.”
Natalie would have let the matter drop, but Jillian said, “Seriously. You’re an inspiration. Not only did you compete in your first reining competition this past month, but you’re back on track to qualify for international competition.”
“No,” Natalie said. “I wouldn’t go quite that far yet. There’s still some work to do.”
But it wasn’t the dizzy spells she had to worry about. Those had disappeared the day she’d ridden in the mini prix. Psychosomatic, her neurologists had concluded, which explained why they had never been able to find a physical cause for them. She’d been given the all clear to ride again, and despite her quip to Colt, she’d continued her training with Playboy, relishing her success at a reining competition. Her neurologist had cautioned that show jumping was a dangerous sport, though. She knew that, but Colt supported her 100 percent. Once they were married they planned to build a state-of-the-art training facility at the ranch. A place to call her own. A place that she and Colt could maintain and love—no matter if she had fifty clients or five.
“Who would have known that day you introduced Colt to me it would change my life.”
Jillian glanced at her friend. “No,” she said softly. “You changed his.”
Natalie slipped an arm around her friend’s shoulders and whispered in her ear, “If I tell you a secret will you promise not to tell?”
Jillian drew back sharply. “You’re pregnant.”
Natalie laughed. “Not possible.” She shook her head, lowered her voice again. Around her, the crowd seemed oblivious, their gazes fixed on the performers in the middle of the arena. Colt had just lit the hoop on fire, Sam peeling off for the finale of the show.
“Not pregnant.” She smiled. “Getting married.” And her heart suddenly filled with love. “Tonight.”
“Tonight!”
“Shh.” Natalie glanced around, not that anyone noticed. “After everyone’s gone. Well, after last year’s Grammy winners leave, and their celebrity friends and what seems like half of Santa Barbara County.”
“You’re kidding.”
“This time tomorrow morning, we’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Colton Reynolds.”
In the arena Sam headed toward the hoop, and just as it always did, Natalie’s breath caught. Or maybe she couldn’t breathe because she knew that in less than twenty-four hours, the man inside the arena would be hers at last.
Jillian squeezed her. Hard. “I’m so glad.”
“We figured, why not. Everyone’s already here. The caterer gave us a deal and the place is all decorated.”
“It’ll be perfect.”
And it was. Natalie didn’t know who told the band—probably Jillian—but once they heard there would be a wedding, nothing could persuade them to leave. And so, beneath a starry sky, with friends and family and more than a few celebrities watching, Natalie married Colt in a ceremony that couldn’t have been more perfect if they’d tried.
“I just wish Chance could have been here,” Colt whispered as they danced.
“He’s here in spirit.”
Colt’s brother was currently deployed, but he’d told Colt last night that he wouldn’t be reenlisting. By the end of the year he’d be back at the ranch. Colt couldn’t wait to welcome his brother back into the fold.
“Can I have this dance?” Wes asked after tapping Colt on the shoulder.
“No,” Colt said, sounding like his surly old self as he whisked Natalie away.
She laughed. “That wasn’t nice.”
He leaned down close to her, his cowboy hat brushing the top of her veil. “I can’t help it,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m not a very nice person.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. “I hope not, Mr. Reynolds. In fact, I’m counting on you being very naughty tonight.”
“Oh, I will be,” he reassured her, but she could hear the laughter in his voice. “I plan to do all kinds of wicked things to you later this evening.”
And later that night he did exactly as promised, the two of them sharing a night made all the more special by how long they’d waited. It was the first of many such nights, nights they would never again spend alone.
* * * * *
Keep reading for a bonus novella by Laura Marie Altom, A HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.
A Home for
Christmas
Laura Marie Altom
“Rachel!”
Ignoring Chance Mulgrave, her husband’s best friend, Rachel Finch gripped her umbrella handle as if it were the only thing keeping her from throwing herself over the edge of the cliff, at the base of which thundered an angry Pacific. Even for Oregon Coast standards, the day was hellish. Brutal winds, driving cold rain...
The wailing gloom suited her. Only ten minutes earlier, she’d left the small chapel where her presumed dead husband’s memorial service had just been held.
“Please, Rachel!” Chance shouted above the storm. Rachel didn’t see Chance since her back was to him, but she could feel him thumping toward her on crutches. “Honey...”
He cupped his hand to her shoulder and she flinched, pulling herself free of his hold. “Don’t.”
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever. I just—”
She turned to him, too exhausted to cry. “I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“Wes didn’t know. I’d planned on telling him after he’d finished this case.”
“God, Rache.” Sharing the suffocating space beneath her umbrella, his demeanor softened. “I’m sorry. Or maybe happy. Hell, I’m not sure what to say.”
“There’s not much anyone can say at this point,” she responded. “Wes is gone. I’m having his child...but how can I even think of being a mother when I’m so emotionally
...”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “No matter what you need, I’m here for you. Wes and I made a pact. Should anything happen to either of us, we’d watch after each other’s family.”
“But you don’t have a family,” she pointed out.
“Yet. But it could’ve just as easily been me whose life we were celebrating here today.” He bowed his head. “Seeing you like this...so sad...makes me almost wish it was.”
Me, too.
There. Even if Rachel hadn’t given voice to her resentment, it was at least out there, for the universe to hear. Ordinarily, Chance and her husband worked together like a well-oiled team, watching each other’s backs. But then Chance had had to go and bust his ankle while helping one of their fellow deputy US marshals move into a new apartment.
If Chance had really cared for Wes, he’d have been more careful. He wouldn’t have allowed his friend to be murdered at the hands of a madman—a rogue marshal who’d also come uncomfortably close to taking out one of the most key witnesses the Marshal’s Service had ever had.
Her handful of girlfriends had tried consoling her, suggesting maybe Wes wasn’t really dead...but Rachel knew. There had been an exhaustive six-week search for Wes’s body. Combined with that, of the five marshals who’d been on that assignment, only two had come home alive. Another two bodies had been found, both shot. It didn’t take rocket science to assume the same had happened to her dear husband.
“Let me take you home,” Chance said. Despite his crutches, he tried to angle her away from the thrashing sea and back to the parking lot, to the sweet little chapel where less than a year earlier she and Wes had spoken their wedding vows.
“You’re soaked. Being out here in this weather can’t be good for you or the baby.”
“I’m all right,” she said, again wrenching free of his hold. This time, it had been her elbow he’d grasped. She was trying to regain her dignity after having lost it in front of the church filled with Wes’s coworkers and friends, and she just wanted to be left alone. “Please...leave. I can handle this on my own.”
“Rachel, that’s just it,” he said, awkwardly chasing after her as she strode down the perilous trail edging the cliff.
His every step tore at her heart. Why was he alive and not her husband? The father of her child. What was she going to do? How was she ever going to cope with raising a baby on her own?
“Honey, you don’t have to deal with Wes’s passing on your own. If you’d just open up to me, I’m here for you—for as long as you need.”
That was the breaking point. Rachel stopped abruptly. She tossed her umbrella out to sea, tipped her head up to the battering rain and screamed.
Tears returned with a hot, messy vengeance. Only, in the rain it was impossible to tell where tears left off and rain began. Then, suddenly, Chance was there, drawing her against him, into his island of strength and warmth, his crutches braced on either side of her like walls blocking the worst of her pain.
“That’s it,” he crooned into her ear. “Let it out. I’m here. I’m here.”
She did exactly as he urged, but then, because she’d always been an intensely private person and not one prone to histrionics, she stilled. Curiously, the rain and wind also slowed to a gentle patter and hushed din.
“Thank you,” she eventually said. “You’ll never know how much I appreciate you trying to help, but...”
“I’m not just trying,” he said. “If you’d let me in, we can ride this out together. I’m hurting, too.”
“I know,” she said, looking to where she’d white-knuckle gripped the soaked lapels of his buff-colored trench. “But I—I can’t explain. I have to do this on my own. I was alone before meeting Wes, and now I am again.”
“But you don’t have to be. Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? I’m here for you.”
“No,” she said, walking away from him again, this time in the direction of her car.
“Thanks, but definitely, no.”
Eighteen months later...
THROUGH THE RAIN-DRIZZLED, holiday-themed windows of bustling Hohlmann’s Department Store, Chance caught sight of a woman’s long, buttery-blond hair. Heart pounding, his first instinct was to run toward her, seeking an answer to the perpetual question: Was it her? Was it Rachel?
No. It wasn’t her. And this time, just as so many others, the disappointment landed like a crushing blow to his chest.
That day at the chapel had been the last time he’d seen her. Despite exhaustive efforts to track her, she’d vanished—destroying him inside and out.
When eventually he’d had to return to work and his so-called normal life, he’d put a private investigator on retainer, telling the man to contact him upon finding the slightest lead.
“You all right?” his little sister, nineteen-year-old Sarah, asked above an obnoxious Muzak rendition of “Jingle Bells.” She was clutching the prewrapped perfume box she’d just purchased for their mother. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Might as well have,” he said, taking the box from her to add to his already bulging bag. “Got everything you need?”
“Sure,” she said, giving him the Look. The one that said she knew he was thinking about Rachel again, and that her wish for Christmas was that her usually wise big brother would once and for all put the woman—his dead best friend’s wife—out of his heart and head.
Two hours later, Chance stuck his key in the lock of the Victorian relic his maternal grandmother had left him, shutting out hectic holiday traffic and torrential rain. Portland had been swamped under six inches in the past twenty-four hours. The last time they’d had such a deluge had been the last time he’d seen Rachel.
“Where are you?” he asked softly as the wind bent gnarled branches, eerily scratching them against the back porch roof.
Setting his meager selection of family gifts on the wood bench parked alongside the door, he looked away from the gray afternoon and to the blinking light on his answering machine. Expecting the message to be from Sarah, telling him she’d left a gift or glove in his Jeep, he pressed Play.
“Chance,” his PI said, voice like gravel from too many cigarettes and not enough broccoli. “I’ve got a lead for you on that missing Finch girl. It’s a long shot, but you said you wanted everything, no matter how unlikely...”
Despite the fact that Rachel had run off without the decency of a proper—or even improper—goodbye, her tears still haunted him when he closed his eyes.
Chance listened to the message three times before committing the information to memory, then headed to his computer to book a flight to Denver.
* * *
“WESLEY, SWEETIE, PLEASE stop crying,” Rachel crooned to her ten-month-old baby boy, the only bright spot in what was becoming an increasingly frightening life. Having grown up in an orphanage, Rachel was no stranger to feeling alone in a crowd, or having to make it on her own. So why, after six months, was this still so hard?
Despite her hugging and cooing, the boy only wailed more.
“Want me to take him?”
She looked up to see one of Baker Street Homeless Shelter’s newest residents wave grungy hands toward her child. She hadn’t looked much better when she’d first arrived, and Rachel still couldn’t get past the shock that she and her baby were now what most people would call bums.
After reverting back to the name she’d gone by at the orphanage, Rachel Parkson, she’d traveled to Denver to room with her friend Jenny. But while Jenny had gotten lucky, landing a great job transfer to Des Moines, Rachel had descended into an abyss of bad luck.
A tough pregnancy had landed her in hospital. While she’d been blessed with a beautiful, healthy baby, at the rate she was going, the hefty medical bill wouldn’t be gone till he was out of high school. Wes’s life insurance company had repeatedly denied her claim, stating that without a body it wouldn’t pay.
Making a long, sad story short, she’d lost everything, and here she was, now earning le
ss than minimum wage doing bookkeeping for the shelter while trying to finish her business degree one night course at a time through a downtown Denver community college.
She was raising her precious son in a shelter with barely enough money for diapers, let alone food and a place of their own. She used to cry herself to sleep every night, but now, she was just too exhausted. She used to pray, as well, but it seemed God, just like her husband, had deserted her.
Baby Wesley continued to wail.
“Sorry for all the noise,” she said to the poor soul beside her, holding her son close as she wearily pushed to her feet with her free hand. She had to get out of here, but how? How could she ever escape this downward financial spiral?
“Rachel?”
That voice...
She paused before looking up. But when she did, tingles climbed her spine.
“Chance?”
* * *
AFTER ALL THIS TIME, was it really Rachel? Raising Wes’s child in a homeless shelter? Why, why hadn’t she just asked for help?
Chance pressed the heel of his hand to stinging eyes.
“Y-you look good,” he said, lying through his teeth at the waiflike ghost of the woman he used to know. Dark shadows hollowed pale blue eyes. Wes used to brag about the silky feel of Rachel’s long hair cascading against his chest when they’d made love—but it was now shorn into a short cap. “And the baby. He’s wonderful, Rachel. You did good.”
“Thanks,” she said above her son’s pitiful cry. “We’re okay.” She paused. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you... To help you...”
“I don’t need help.”
“Bull,” he said, taking the now screaming baby from her, cradling him against his chest, nuzzling the infant’s downy hair beneath his chin. “What’s his name?”
“Wesley,” she said, refusing to meet his gaze.
He nodded, fighting a sudden knot at the back of his throat. Such a beautiful child, growing up in such cruel surroundings. And why? All because of Rachel’s foolish pride.
“Get your things,” he growled between clenched teeth, edging her away from a rag-clothed derelict reeking of booze.
Her Rodeo Hero (Cowboys in Uniform) Page 18
