Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides)

by Anne McAllister

  Cole’s brows lifted. “What sort of job?”

  “I don’t know. What can you do in Marietta with a double major in archaeology and ancient languages?”

  His lips quirked. “Wash dishes?”

  Lacey laughed, then wrinkled her nose. “That’s what I was afraid of. In other words, I’m useless. Except for washing dishes. Well, maybe I should.” She shrugged with more equanimity than Cole would have expected. “It might be a good place to start.”

  Instinctively he shook his head. “Don’t sell yourself short.” Cole was adamant about that. “You’ve got an education. You should use it. Don’t waste it doing something anybody can do. You don’t want to bury yourself here!”

  Her eyes widened at his vehemence. “Is that what you’re doing?”

  His shoulders felt oddly tense as he shook his head. “I was born here. My dad and granddad were born here. I belong here. It’s in the blood.”

  “So the rest of us are what? Outsiders forever?” Lacey’s brows arched indignantly and Cole realized he was arguing with the woman in his head, not the one looking askance at him now.

  “Of course not. It’s just—” But he wasn’t sure he could explain it. And anyway, the band was making noises. Any minute now they’d begin to play, and, Cole dared to hope, maybe Lacey would dance and save him from further conversation.

  He took a breath and tried one last time. “I’m just saying it’s not an easy life. More than that, it’s a narrow life. There are not a lot of options in Marietta. Oh, Troy’s hotel is bringing some variety in. But lots of folks who think they’ll like it, they actually go stir crazy here.” His mother, for example. And Sadie’s. “People think it’s romantic.” He shook his head emphatically. “It’s not.”

  Lacey gave him a faint smile. “Be still my beating heart.”

  Cole grimaced and shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry. Not what you wanted to hear.”

  “No,” she admitted. “But maybe what I should hear,” Lacey sighed. “My dad would thank you. And I have to admit that making plans is easier before they have to be realistic.” She twisted a lock of hair around her finger. “It was lots easier when my real live cowboy was just hat and boots and an ‘aw shucks, ma’am’ grin.” So, she got the point even if she didn’t want to.

  Cole smiled. “I just don’t want you makin’ a mistake,” he said now. He should have been as firm with Nell, should have said marriage was out of the question.

  “Heaven forbid that I should ever make a mistake.” Lacey’s eyes twinkled, and Cole thought she probably intended to pay no more attention to him than Nell had. It wasn’t a matter of being firm with her, he realized now. He should have been a hell of a lot more firm with himself. His jaw tightened again.

  “If I promise to go away and forget Marietta,” Lacey said now, tilting her head, her curls bouncing as she smiled at him, “will you dance with me first? Or is that another myth—that real live cowboys can dance?”

  “This one can,” Cole assured her, grateful for the reprieve. He stood up, smiled, and held out his hand to her. “May I have this dance, Ms. McKay?”

  The music was already starting as she stood and he drew her into his arms. She was taller than Nell. Her nose was nearly on a level with his. She could look straight into his eyes. She came willingly, settling into his arms and smiling at him.

  Ruefully Cole smiled back. “Don’t mind me,” he told her as he waltzed her across the floor. “It’s the end of a long week and I’m just a bad-tempered son-of-a-gun.”

  “With an ‘aw shucks’ grin.” Lacey flashed her dimples at him.

  He couldn’t help giving her one. But dancing with her wasn’t like dancing with Nell. He’d danced with Nell only one night in Reno, but it felt as if they had danced together forever. The way she had nestled into his arms, it felt as if she were coming home. Her body had fit snug against his, her heart beating in time with his. Her heavy thick dark golden hair, a mixture of silk and sunshine, had brushed his jaw, tempting him to bury his face in it, to breathe in the scent of her.

  “We belong together.” She had even said the words. And then she had turned her head to look up at him with those deep brown eyes of hers, and their lips had touched.

  Cole swallowed a groan and mustered a smile at the same time, trying to pay attention to what Lacey McKay was saying. She was a nice girl. She meant well. It wasn’t her fault he couldn’t get Nell out of his mind.

  The dance floor was getting more crowded. His shoulder brushed someone else’s and with a murmured apology, Cole pulled Lacey closer and turned them away. But she didn’t fit him the way Nell had. Instead of the smooth gold and scent of citrus he got with Nell, now he had spice and a face full of riotous red curls.

  “Well, damn,” he said with a grin, and turned his head to gaze out over her shoulder— straight into a pair of shocked eyes. Deep brown eyes. They widened just above the shoulder of her tall, tuxedo-clad partner, colliding with Cole’s, stopping him dead.

  “Nell?” His voice was hoarse, disbelieving.

  “What?” Lacey tripped over his suddenly immobile boots. She pulled back to look at him. “Cole?”

  But her voice was a million miles away. The only thing he could see was the woman staring back at him with equal parts disbelief and consternation. His heart hammered. His stomach turned a somersault.

  Lacey frowned, then glanced around, following the direction of his stare. “Someone you know?” she ventured. Then she raised a brow. “Someone you weren’t expecting?” she ventured.

  Cole nodded. He cleared his throat. “Yes.” Someone he knew. “No.” Someone he definitely wasn’t expecting.

  Eleanor Corbett. Nell.

  His wife.

  Chapter Two

  “No!” The word came out of Nell’s mouth unbidden, voiced in astonishment, cloaked in disbelief.

  “No?” Grant, Nell’s boss, frowned down at her curiously as she stopped in the middle of the dance floor. “What do you mean, no? I’m not that bad a dancer.” His mobile mouth tipped wryly. “Am I? You’re the one who needs to pick up her feet, for heaven’s sake! I thought all you cowgirls could dance.” He gave her his best flirtatious grin.

  Nell barely noticed. She wasn’t even aware of having spoken aloud. She simply stood, frozen to the spot, staring over Grant’s fine black wool-covered shoulder at Cole.

  Here. At the Valentine’s Ball. The last place she ever expected to see him. Nell sucked in a breath.

  What on earth was Cole doing at the Marietta Valentine’s Ball?

  Stupid question. It was obvious what he was doing. He was dancing with the most gorgeous woman in the room—a tall slender redhead with enough self-confidence to let her carroty curls spring riotously all over her head. She could not possibly have got through school without someone nicknaming her after the famous pot-and-pan scrubbers. Yet, here she was, flaunting her hair, making it a conversation piece. Cole certainly seemed to like it well enough. He’d had his nose buried in it moments before!

  Nell’s heart was slamming against the wall of her chest, and she was suddenly aware that she was strangling Grant’s hand. Abruptly, she let go, spinning away from him. “I need some air.”

  “What?”

  But she didn’t wait for Grant to follow. In fact she prayed he wouldn’t. She didn’t need a witness to what she was feeling now. But of course, Grant was on her heels before she left the ballroom and he’d caught up before she got halfway across the lobby. The narrow skirt of her ankle-length red sheath made running impossible. And he snagged her hand as she darted through the airlock and out the front doors, hanging on until they stood, staring at each other, breathing hard, in the middle of a swirling snowstorm.

  For a long moment, neither spoke. Then “Air?” Grant said and cocked his head, giving her a doubtful look. “Is that what you Montanans call this white stuff?”

  She knew he was trying to make her smile. It was what he did. Her producer boss, Grant Merrick, was a hard taskmaster, demanding and
intense. “Attila the Hun on steroids,” Judy, his long-suffering production assistant, called him. But he was also incredibly sensitive to peoples’ moods. It was why he was so successful. He might run right over you ninety percent of the time, when you were capable of handling it. But when you weren’t—when you were rattled and not coping at all—Grant always picked up on the tells.

  And right now he was clearly aware that his normally easy-going, hard-working, unflappable director was a quaking, shivering mess. Nell knew she had been increasingly edgy since she’d proposed looking at Marietta’s Great Wedding Giveaway as a venue for two episodes she would be directing of the reality TV series, The Compatibility Game which Grant produced. She’d been even twitchier since he’d agreed.

  But she couldn’t figure out how else to get back to Montana without announcing that, oh by the way, she’d been married for ten months and wanted to know why her husband was divorcing her so would Grant mind if she took a week off.

  Of course Grant would mind! The world revolved around his bloody reality TV shows, and for all that he thought Nell was terrific at her job, he wasn’t going to just let her go because she needed to. She knew Grant. If she wanted to confront Cole, she’d have to do it while she was working.

  So here she was. And she’d fully intended to see him tomorrow. To talk to him. To listen to him. To argue with him, no doubt. But she’d be prepared. Not knocked sideways from having come almost face to face with him in the middle of a dance floor—with his arms around another woman!

  “You’re like some wild thing,” Grant said. “You have been since we got here. Always looking over your shoulder—or in this case, my shoulder. This is your neck of the woods, isn’t it, Corbett? This was your idea. So what’s spooking you?”

  “I’m not from here,” Nell said, splitting hairs. “I grew up in Bozeman.”

  “Right. You were born in Korea. You lived in New York, in Missouri, in Leeds, in Antwerp, and you ended up in Bozeman, forty miles away.”

  Trust Grant to have a photographic memory when it came to CVs.

  “It’s different,” Nell said. “Bozeman is ... different. But nothing’s spooking me.” She gave herself a deliberate shake, as the cold began to seep into her bones. “I’m fine. I just ... needed some air, that’s all. It’s hot in there.”

  Not to mention that the heat from Cole’s gaze boring into her had threatened to send her up in flames. Now, though, the opposite reaction had set in: her teeth were chattering and she was shivering. Crossing her arms, Nell tucked her hands against her sides and pressed her teeth together.

  Grant grunted. “Ah. Cooling off, are you?” He gave her a sardonic look, that intensified and narrowed as he studied her flaming cheeks and her jaw which she’d clamped shut.

  Hoping he couldn’t hear her teeth chattering, Nell gave a stiff jerky nod. But even so, she was in no hurry to go back inside and come face to face with Cole—and the woman he’d brought to the ball.

  She hadn’t known what to expect when she saw Cole—but she had never expected that. The sight of Cole with another woman in his arms was like a physical blow. It left her gasping in disbelief. But on another level, seeing him with her suddenly made everything—from his increasing remoteness during their telephone conversations, to his awkward answers to any questions about when they could finally be together, to the unexpected arrival of the divorce papers and his terse little note about them being ‘for the best’— made horrible mortifying sense.

  “You’re not going to tell me,” Grant said. It sounded as if they were having a perfectly normal conversation.

  “It’s not your business.” There was no point pulling punches with Grant.

  He laughed. “It’s my business that we’re standing in the snow, though.”

  “You can go back in.”

  “I will ... when you do,” he said easily, obviously prepared to wait her out.

  Nell sighed irritably, then shifted, trying to glimpse past Grant’s rangy six foot two inch form to see if she could spot Cole in the lobby. She didn’t see him, and she dared to breathe a little easier though her teeth were chattering again. “F-fine. We can go back in now.”

  “You’re sure it’s safe?” Grant’s tone was still sardonic, needling, and not for the first time did Nell think he was the last man on earth who should be producing a show called The Compatibility Game.

  Grant Merrick didn’t have a clue about compatibility. He thought it was just another term for everyone thinking the same way he did. “Your teeth are chattering,” he said, as if she didn’t know it. His gaze narrowed suspiciously. “You’re not sick, are you?”

  Nell’s first instinct was to deny it. She wasn’t sick, except at heart. But if Grant thought she was, maybe she could escape, go to her room, get a little breathing space—at least until she figured out what to do next.

  “You know,” she said faintly, “I’m not ... really.”

  Grant’s blond brows drew down. “Well, you can’t be sick,” he said, as if his decreeing it would make it so. “At least not tomorrow. We’ve got site to visit tomorrow. Go upstairs and get some rest.” He already had hold of her arm and was marching her back in through the air lock toward the warmth of the lobby. “We need to get an early start. Can you drive in this?” He scowled out at the snow, as if it had been put here to annoy him.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Then get some sleep and be ready to go by eight.”

  “Er, yes.” Nell gave him a grateful smile and started toward the elevator when he caught her arm, spinning her back so he could peer down into her face. “Are you all right on your own? Really?” Super-sensitive Grant was back, his laser gaze dissecting her.

  Nell lifted her chin under his gaze. “Of course.”

  “You still look awful.”

  “Thanks very much. Really, I’ll be fine. “ She shook his arm off and started toward the elevators.

  “You think. Maybe we should get that Jane person to call a doctor. They do have doctors here, don’t they? You’re as white as Ahab’s whale.” Grant continued dogging her like a Border Collie all the way to the elevators.

  When they reached them, she turned and pasted a bright smile on her face. “What a lovely thing to say. I’ll be all right. And I won’t mess up your day tomorrow. I promise. I just ... need to lie down.” She turned around again and pressed the button for the elevator.

  “I’ll see that she gets to her room.” The rough masculine voice sent a shiver straight down her spine.

  Nell whirled around. Cole was right behind her, so close she could feel him breathing down her neck.

  “Who’re you?” Grant’s gaze raked Cole but Cole didn’t even glance his way. His eyes were locked on Nell’s. Grant nudged her. “Who the hell is he?”

  “My—” Nell began, then stopped. Who was he? Her husband? Yes, he was that. But she’d never told Grant she was married. He had offered her the job only a few weeks after their hasty nuptials, and Cole’s dad was still in serious condition after his second heart attack. There was no way he could spring an unexpected bride on the family then, Cole had told her. So she might as well take the job for a few months—until things got sorted.

  Being married, in theory, shouldn’t have prevented Grant from hiring her. But being married to a man who lived in Montana would certainly have been a drawback. Grant never would have hired her for a Los Angeles-based job if he’d thought she was going to leave for Montana before the end of the year.

  So she’d kept her mouth shut about her marriage and had taken the job.

  Cole, of course, hadn’t told anyone, either. They’d married before she’d finished her Master’s, so of course she’d had to go back to San Francisco. That had gone without saying. It would give him time, Cole had told her, to break the news to his family—essentially to his dad.

  “Don’t want to give the old man a heart attack,” he’d joked.

  But by the time he’d got home, it hadn’t been a joking matter. Sam had had one whil
e Cole was gone.

  And now? Well, that was the point of her being here, wasn’t it? To discover whether they had a marriage or not.

  “My boss,” she said at last. “This is my boss, Grant Merrick,” she told Cole. Then to Grant, she said, “This is Cole McCullough.” A name was the only thing she offered.

  Grant scowled at the man who was scowling right back. “You know him?” Grant said doubtfully.

  “Nell knows me,” Cole ground out, his jaw hard.

  Nell had never seen Cole dressed up. At their impromptu wedding he’d worn his ‘best jeans’ and a powder blue long-sleeved shirt with the collar button open. No tie.

  “Why would I bring a tie to buy a bull?” he’d asked logically, because that’s what he’d really come to Reno for—not to marry Nell.

  When they had married, though, he’d been clean and neat, but decidedly casual.

  Tonight he was anything but. His sharply tailored black suit emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. His black dress shirt, its cuffs fastened by tiny copper branding iron cuff links, lent an air of danger to his dark good looks, a danger that the narrow blood red silk tie only emphasized.

  Did she know Cole McCullough? Really?

  Last year Nell would have said so. They’d only dated a single summer. But from the first there had been a connection. The same things made them laugh. The same dreams made them smile. When they touched, something electric seemed to shimmer through the air. And when they kissed ... no one had ever kissed her the way Cole had, no one had made her toes curl and her heart hammer and her body want more and more of the man making her feel like this.

  She would have said he was her soulmate. He was certainly the man she hadn’t forgotten when she’d gone back to San Francisco for her second year of film school despite Cole’s assurances that she would. He was the man she’d dropped everything to meet again in Reno when he’d come there last April to buy that bull. He’d said, “Can you meet me?” and she’d been on the train. She’d flown to his arms and when they’d wrapped around her, she’d felt as if she were complete again, as if part of her had been missing.