Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides)

by Anne McAllister

  Twenty-eight hours later she had thrown caution to the wind, had listened to her heart and had married him.

  Now she wasn’t sure how much she knew—and how much she’d merely hoped.

  But she wasn’t going to find out by talking to him in front of a third party—particularly not one as avidly interested as Grant. “I know him,” she assured her boss now. “It’s fine.”

  Grant looked dubious, but he also looked longingly toward the ballroom.

  “You’ll see she gets to her room?” he said to Cole as the call button light went off and the elevator doors opened. “Because if you will, I really should get back and—”

  “I can see myself to my room,” Nell said sharply. “I’m fine. Go.” Nell would have pushed him if she’d dared. As it was she gave him a quick smile and stepped into the elevator, then pressed the button for her floor. Immediately Cole stepped in, too. He reached down to press the button to close the doors immediately.

  Grant gave her a brows-raised silent query. “If you need anything—”

  The doors slid shut in his face.

  “That’s your boss?” Cole looked appalled.

  “That’s my boss,” Nell said firmly. “You have a problem with it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders against the back wall of the elevator. “He always sounded like some little wimp.”

  “Er, no. But if he were, what difference does it make?”

  Cole shook his head. He was staring at her in the mirror on the elevator wall, not face to face. She saw his mouth twist. She heard him crack his knuckles. The last time she had been in an elevator with Cole McCullough, it was the night they got married.

  Their room had been on the 12th floor. There had been one other person on the elevator, too. She’d got off on five. And the minute they were alone, Cole’s fingers had been in her hair, his lips on her jaw, her cheeks, her mouth. He had insinuated a knee between hers, pressing close, close enough that she had felt the hard urgency of his arousal. And Nell had tugged his shirt tails out of his jeans, had slid her hands up beneath them, letting them rove over the heated skin of his back, then brought them around to stroke across his hard belly and dipped a hand beneath his waistband, brushing against him, making him moan.

  Now the silence was deafening. He didn’t touch her. She didn’t move. They couldn’t speak.

  She’d waited months for this moment—when at last they were finally together again—and now it felt as if there were a wall of glass between them. And nothing at all to say.

  No, that wasn’t true. There were a thousand things to say. The question was: where to start?

  She couldn’t count on Cole to start. God knew he wasn’t a talker. She had learned that the first day she’d met him at the Wilsall rodeo. His buddies, Dane and Brian, had talked her ear off, flirting and teasing and suggesting she might like to go with them and shoot her ‘little film’ on down the road. Even Levi, the bronc rider who was some relation of Cole’s, had given his approval of the suggestion. Cole hadn’t said a word. He’d just looked at her, his blue eyes intent, hungry. And hot. Hot enough to burn her to the ground.

  She could still burn now when she thought about that—and grow cold as Marietta in February when she remembered Cole’s arms around the redhead in the ballroom.

  She straightened and lifted her chin. “You don’t have to come with me,” she told him and was grateful that her voice was steady and clear, not shaking the way she was inside. “It’s not necessary.” She hesitated, then pressed on, still steady, still clear, “And I wouldn’t want to take you away from your girlfriend.”

  His body suddenly shifted, and he turned, his gaze swinging around to meet hers. “What? She’s not my girlfriend!”

  “Oh? Really?” Still steady. Just enough doubt in her tone to suggest otherwise. Nell raised a doubtful brow, then shrugged.

  Did he think she was an idiot? What other reason could he have for being at the Marietta Valentine’s Ball? Unattached single cowboys did not go to formal dances on their own—at least not lone wolves like Cole.

  “She’s not!” Cole growled as the elevator stopped and the doors slid open. “Whatever you say.” Nell gave a negligent shrug, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other, as if the sight hadn’t gutted her. She stepped out into the hallway.

  Dragging in a ragged breath, Cole followed her. “You didn’t tell me you were coming.” It sounded like an accusation. He kept pace with her down the hall.

  “Why should I?” Thank heaven she didn’t have to go far. Her room was fairly close to the elevator. She fumbled her room card out of her tiny evening bag. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  His scowl deepened. “Then what are you doing here?”

  “We’re scouting locations for the series I work on. My boss, Grant. And me. This is work.” And thank God for that. He needn’t think she’d come just because of him.

  “Here?” He stared at her, shaking his head. “You work in L.A.”

  “Not always. We go on location. And we’re considering two episodes of reality TV set on a Montana ranch. Couples trying it on for size, learning new things—seeing what they’re willing to do or learn to do for love.”

  Cole just looked confused. As well he might. What did he know about trying to make things work for love? They hadn’t spent more than two days together and he’d suggested they get a divorce. They hadn’t tried at all. Nell glared at him.

  Cole rubbed a hand against the corded muscles of the back of his neck. “So your being here is a ... coincidence.” It wasn’t quite a question. She couldn’t tell whether he was relieved or not.

  “Sort of. I would have told you I was here. I would have tried to talk to you. We need to talk, Cole.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t just send divorce papers and expect me to sign them without an explanation! I need to know why. I need to know what went wrong.”

  Cole snorted. “Nothing went wrong—if you don’t count my old man’s heart attack and the second mortgage he took out on the ranch without telling anyone and the fact that city girls have no business marrying Montana ranchers—”

  “Only city girls who get asked to marry them,” Nell retorted.

  Cole’s jaw worked. “I didn’t ... I wasn’t ... thinking straight.”

  Nell’s heart stopped. “What do you mean, you didn’t? You didn’t ask me?”

  “We weren’t in the real world that weekend,” he protested, his voice ragged. “It was ... like a dream.”

  The most beautiful dream of her life. “And that’s bad?” Nell reached the door to her room and turned to look up at him. He was so close she could feel his breath.

  He swallowed and she saw his Adam’s apple work. “No. Yes.” He dragged off his hat and rubbed a hand through his hair. “It’s not real, Nell.” His tone was harsh.

  “It felt real to me!” She swallowed against the hard lump in her throat.

  Cole’s jaw tightened. “Then,” he said.

  “Still,” Nell insisted, holding his gaze.

  But Cole resolutely shook his head. “We were dreaming. It won’t work. It was a mistake.”

  Nell hugged her arms across her chest. “I’m not discussing this in a hallway.”

  “We don’t have to discuss it at all,” Cole said. “We can just end it. Pretend it never happened.”

  Nell’s eyes widened. “It did happen!”

  “One weekend.” He said the words dismissively, as if it didn’t matter at all. “It’s not as if we have to go on with it. You’ve got your job in L.A. I’ve got mine here—”

  “I’ve got my job in L.A. because you told me to take it.”

  “Because there was—is—no future for you here!”

  Ah, a reaction. Not stolid, unfeeling words. Even his gaze was anguished now, not indifferent. And Nell felt perversely pleased, knowing she wasn’t the only one feeling the pain. It gave her hope. There was a long moment of silence.

  Then Cole sucked in a har
sh breath. “Just sign the papers, Nell.”

  No. No, she couldn’t do that. Not now. Not yet. She didn’t believe it yet.

  But it was going to take more than throwing herself into his arms to get him to change his mind. She could see that now. She had come to Marietta to confront him, assuring herself that once she had done so, everything would be fine, that whatever misgivings he was having while they were apart were not insurmountable; they could be resolved.

  But she’d seen that stubborn tilt to his jaw before, had kissed those tightly compressed lips. She wanted to kiss them now, to smooth away the angst and the stubbornness and whatever other ornery feelings Cole McCullough had about the world. But she knew better.

  Her dad always used to say, “You can’t pretend something doesn’t exist. You need to face it. Deal with it.”

  The question was: what was she dealing with? And how could she do it?

  She had no answers. She only knew she couldn’t do it in the hallway. She turned away without saying anything and tried to slide the key card into the lock on the door. She missed.

  “Give it here.” Impatiently Cole took the card out of her hand and tried to shove it into the lock himself. His hands were no steadier than hers. It took three tries, but finally he got it in and the door unlocked. Shoving the door open, he held it and nodded for her to go ahead.

  She plucked the card from his fingers as she did so. “Thank you.” She slipped past, careful not to touch him though her traitorous body dearly wanted to. She flicked on the overhead light.

  Cole came in after her. Nell heard the door shut behind him with a solid click. She turned, half expecting him to be breathing down her neck. But once inside, he didn’t move, standing instead with his back to the door. He looked angry. But his eyes told a different story. His eyes were as hungry as ever.

  They held the same deep blue intensity she had seen on the day she’d met him. Whenever they had been together, she’d found it whenever his gaze fell on her. Somehow it connected them. And even now, when his words spoke of divorce, the look in his eyes said something different, speaking instead of the intense connection they shared. The connection Nell hoped they shared.

  “Sit down,” she invited.

  He shook his head. “I can’t. I’ve got—”

  “A woman to dance with?” Nell lifted a brow.

  “She not a date,” he said. “Not really. Her dad is a friend of my old man’s. They grew up together. She’d never been here. Never met a cowboy.” He gave a derisive snort. “Like we’re a different species or something.”

  Some of you are, Nell thought. She didn’t say it.

  “It’s work,” he told her. “It’s always work. That’s the problem, if you want a problem! There’s always something. The ranch, the old man, the finances!”

  “Life,” Nell agreed simply, determinedly keeping her tone mild.

  “Life,” Cole agreed through gritted teeth. “And it isn’t going to change.”

  “We could deal with it together.” Nell kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bed. He was almost out of sight, backed against the door. She hoped that if she settled in, he would come further into the room.

  He did take a few steps so that now he hovered near the mini-fridge tucked into the quarter sawn oak cabinet. “No,” he said. “We can’t. It’s my responsibility, not yours.” He shifted, flexing his shoulders as if adjusting the weight on them.

  Cole had broad shoulders. He had to, Nell had told him once, to carry the world.

  It wasn’t entirely a joke. The first day she’d met him—at the Wilsall rodeo— he’d been taping his hands before riding his bronc, and while all his buddies had done their best to flirt and charm, Cole had barely looked her way. Only when he’d finished taping to his satisfaction, did he respond to her request to shoot footage of him, and she could tell that unlike his buddies, he had seriously considered saying no.

  And it was probably only because he had been afraid his friends’ teasing flirtatiousness while she was shooting might overwhelm her that he had stepped in and said, “Lay off. She’s got a job to do.”

  It had made her smile inside. In fact, Nell had appreciated that he had taken her seriously as much as she had appreciated his handsome, rough-hewn rangy cowboy good looks.

  She might have come to the rodeo because making a short documentary about a couple of rodeo cowboys had seemed like a good idea at the time, and she was curious because she knew nothing much about the life. But the minute she had seen Cole, her gaze, her focus had sharpened. She had been drawn to him instantly—and so had her camera. Unlike his buddies, there was seriousness to Cole McCullough. They were living for the moment. He had more demands on his time.

  His friends, Dane and Brian, had suggested she not confine her film to the rodeo itself, but come to the dance after. “Can’t have a rodeo without a dance,” Brian had said, grinning widely. “Right, guys?”

  Cole’s cousin Levi had nodded emphatically. But Cole shook his head.

  “You can,” he’d said. “I can’t. No time,” he’d added with an apologetic glance in Nell’s direction. “No time. I’ve got things to do. I need to get home.”

  How true that was—and how many responsibilities Cole had—she found out later that evening when, after his ride threw him head first into the metal railings of the chute, she volunteered to drive him home.

  “You don’t need to,” he muttered, pacing woozily back and forth behind the chutes in an effort to walk off the effects. “I’ll be fine. I can catch a ride.”

  But Levi shook his head. “Would you mind?” he’d asked Nell. “We gotta get on down the road and—” he’d watched Cole propping himself up against a fence post and trying to look nonchalant “—well, somebody’s gotta.”

  “Do not,” Cole had maintained.

  But Nell had taken him. And she hadn’t left him at the house as he’d told her she could, either. Instead she had followed him in, made him a meal, then fussed a little, but not too much, about the gash he had on the side of his head.

  “You should have stitches,” she’d told him.

  He’d refused point blank, insisting he was fine.

  “If you were fine,” she had retorted with some asperity, “you’d see the wisdom of stitches.”

  She hadn’t let him fall asleep right away, thinking she’d read somewhere that people who’d had concussions were supposed to stay awake. Cole kept closing his eyes. So to keep him awake, she peppered him with questions.

  At least that was the reason Nell gave herself for all the things she asked him. Over the course of the evening and much of the night, she learned about his dad and his grandmother and his teenage sister, about the brother who’d gone out east and never returned. He told her about the cattle who needed feeding and moving and doctoring and the horses that needed shoeing. He talked about the roof on the house needing mending, and the work that had to be done on the original homestead cabin that had been his grandparents’ and was now his.

  She had asked, “Who does all that?”

  And he’d said, “Me.”

  Who else was there? he had said with a shrug. Then he had gone on to explain. His dad was determined to do everything he could. But his dad had a bad heart and no desire to undergo the knife to get it fixed. His grandmother, nearly eighty, was in good shape, but not for herding cattle. His sister was still in high school.

  “Sadie’s smart. Real smart,” Cole had said. “She needs to go to college. Get out of Marietta.”

  Nell could tell he intended to see that it happened. She could tell that first night that Cole thought it was his job to take care of them all.

  Nothing had changed, except while she and Cole had been getting married in Reno last April, his dad had had the heart attack they’d all been worrying about. Cole hadn’t found out until he got home. Then his plan to tell the family about his spur of the moment marriage had been shelved.

  “I can’t tell ‘em now,” he’d told Nell in a phone call from th
e hospital. “The doc says no stress. I’ll do it later, when the time is right.”

  “Of course. I understand,” Nell had agreed at once. But months had passed. Ten of them. And the time had never been right.

  And now Nell wondered how much of a driving factor his father’s heart attack had been, and how much of Cole’s decision was motivated by the realization when he’d got home that marrying her had been a mistake because he didn’t really love her at all.

  The thought made Nell’s stomach knot. She looked at him, wishing she could see his mind, discern what he felt as easily as she could see his rumpled dark hair, his smooth shaven chin and strong hard jaw.

  “Talkin’ won’t do any good, Nell,” he said roughly. “It was a nice idea at the time, but—” he shrugged “—in the long run, it won’t work.”

  “So you’re just going to walk away.” Her eyes challenged him and for a moment she thought she saw the fire of combat in them.

  But then the fire went out of them. They went opaque and unreadable and Cole nodded. “Yep.”

  Nell’s fingers curled tightly, her nails biting into her palms. “Because you don’t love me.”

  Pain flickered across his features. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to.” She stood, never letting go of his gaze, vowing that she wouldn’t be the first to look away.

  Cole’s mouth twisted. “It’s not like that.”

  “No? What’s it like then?”

  His eyes shuttered for a moment. His jaw tightened. He seemed to be engaged in an internal battle. And then as if he couldn’t help himself—though whether he won or lost, Nell didn’t know— Cole moved. He reached to touch her cheek.

  Instinctively Nell turned into his touch so that it wasn’t her cheek his fingers touched, but her lips that caressed his palm.

  He made a strangled sound, and wrapped his other arm around her shoulders, drawing her close. And then there was no distance, no space between them, and Nell was right where she wanted to be, hard against the solid warmth of his chest so she could feel the beat of his heart.