Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides)

by Anne McAllister

  “We’ll be ready,” Chandler promised. He slanted a grin Mac’s way. “We can make Maggie and Beth get up early and fix us breakfast.”

  “They’re staying, too?” Cole was surprised.

  “Yep. They’re coming back with Jane. Everybody’s back,” Mac told him. “Couldn’t stay away.” He grinned. “See you in the morning. Oh, and Nell said to tell you she’ll be along as soon as they’ve had dinner. She’d call but in the rush to get to the hospital, she left her phone at the cabin.”

  Nell’s phone was vibrating on the counter top when Cole opened the door.

  He looked at it for a moment, then shook his head and walked past it. After a minute it stopped.

  He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a beer, popped the top and carried it over to the chair by the fireplace. Behind him the phone started vibrating again.

  He began setting out kindling to make a fire in the fireplace. Nell might like one when she got back. Since they weren’t even going to have a day’s worth of honeymoon, maybe a fire would be a nice gesture. And it gave him something to do until the phone stopped vibrating.

  When he got it going, Cole shed his boots and sprawled in the chair in front of the fire, balancing the beer bottle on his belt buckle as he stared into the flames. He didn’t see them. He saw his dad, starkly pale and oddly apologetic. So not Sam. Damn it!

  The phone started vibrating again. What the hell?

  He ground his teeth. Who would be calling at this time of night? Over and over and over? He tried to blot it out. Not his business, he told himself.

  But Nell was his business. What if that was her, having borrowed someone else’s phone, trying to call him?

  His own phone was dead, a not unusual occurrence. It was old and tired and had spent much of its life looking for satellite signals that were few and far between. Nell knew that. She had a sleek new fancy phone that did more things than a trained seal. It obviously had plenty of battery life because, damn it, it had stopped ringing moments ago and almost at once began again.

  Cole cursed under his breath, got up and grabbed the phone. It wasn’t Jane or Maggie or Beth or even Sadie. The caller ID said Grant. Cole cursed again. Out loud this time.

  The phone kept vibrating in his hand. He regarded it as if it were a rattlesnake until it stopped. What the hell did her boss want with her on a Saturday night? How urgent was it?

  Pretty urgent apparently. The phone was already vibrating again.

  Goaded, Cole answered. “What do you want?” he barked.

  There was a split second’s silence. Then Nell’s boss said, “Who’s this? The husband?”

  Well, at least he knew she had one. “That’s right.”

  “Where’s Nell?”

  “None of your business. It’s Saturday night,” Cole told him. “She doesn’t work for you 24/7. She’s not a slave. It can’t be a matter of life or death!”

  “It’s a matter of her career,” Grant said sharply. “If she still wants to have one, that is. I presume she does?” He made it sound like a question.

  Cole knew it wasn’t. His fingers tightened on the phone. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means she had better stop playing games. I can’t keep putting her name out there to the studio for the European adventure job if she keeps saying no.”

  What European adventure job? Cole didn’t ask. Instead he said, “Maybe you should listen to her.”

  “Maybe you should stop complicating her life,” Grant snarled back. “Or maybe you should get on a plane and go with her if you two are so much in love.”

  Cole’s teeth came together with a snap. “She quit her job!”

  “Yes, so she keeps telling me. And what kind of damn fool does that? Not a woman with more talent in her little finger than most of the people I work with every day! Why the hell do you think I’ve promoted her so damn fast? Why do you think she’s already directing whole segments of the show? Because she’s good! Damn good! She knows people. She knows possibilities. She knows how to put them together and make them work. And she’s not afraid to take a chance!” Pause. “At least she wasn’t.” The cold insinuation was like a knife between the ribs.

  Cole felt it go in, felt it twist. Gritted his teeth. Didn’t say a word.

  Nell’s boss didn’t speak either, not for a long moment. Perhaps he was wondering if he’d overstepped his bounds. No, Cole decided, a man like Grant would never think he’d overstepped anything.

  “You need to talk to her,” Grant said finally, and his voice had moderated now, though Cole could still hear the implacable command in it. “You can’t let her throw this away.”

  “Nell’s her own person,” Cole began.

  “Not now she’s not,” Grant snapped. “Now she thinks she has to give up everything she’s worked for to play nursemaid to some cowboy and a bunch of cows.”

  Cole swallowed. “It’s her choice.”

  “Is it? Is that what you’re telling yourself? Try looking at it sensibly, why don’t you? She’s got a gift, an amazing talent—and I don’t throw those words around lightly. She is the best storyteller I know. And she works well with people. She gets the best out of them.” He paused. “She should be doing that.”

  Cole shut his eyes. He heard more than Grant’s words, he heard the truth in them.

  “Don’t hang up on me,” Grant said sharply to the silence.

  “I didn’t hang up,” Cole said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, then pressed his fingers against his eyelids.

  “She’s doing this for you,” Grant went on relentlessly. “Giving up everything for you. Losing the best part of herself. For you. Think about that.”

  Then Grant hung up on him.

  Nell got home—and she did think of the cabin as home already—just past eleven.

  The light that shone from the front windows drew her like a beacon, ready to wrap her in the warmth that waited. She had driven Sadie’s car up from the ranch house. Now she got out and hurried up the steps as the front door opened.

  “Hey,” Cole said. He was standing there in his socks, silhouetted by the fire in the fireplace, and she practically ran those last few steps and flung herself into his arms. They closed around her instinctively, wrapped her tightly, held her close. She felt his cheek against the top of her head. She nuzzled against his hard chest, rubbed her cheek against the soft flannel of his shirt and drew in the scent of leather and beer and that something that was indefinably Cole. She felt her throat tighten and knew tears threatened to spill.

  “Hey,” Cole said again, sensing something and stepping back, pulling her into the house after him and holding her away to look into her eyes. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  “N-nothing.” She felt like an idiot. Sam had had a heart attack, but he was alive! He was going to be okay. There was nothing to cry about. She shook her head. “Just ... overwhelmed, I guess.” She smiled a little shakily. “Glad to be home.”

  Cole smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He looked as strained and fraught as she felt, and there was more reason for it. He was the one whose father had almost died today. “Yeah,” he said. He shifted from one foot to the other awkwardly, as if unsure what to do next.

  “I’m tired,” Nell said. “I feel like I could sleep a hundred years.”

  “Yeah, me, too. But I can’t,” Cole said. “I figured what with everything that happened, I’d get an early start in the morning. Mac and Chandler are coming along. I didn’t figure you’d care. I know you said you’d take Gran to the hospital. The sooner I go, the sooner I can get back. And I don’t want her and Sadie to have to deal on their own. Just in case,” he added, his mouth twisting.

  Nell wanted to say she’d stay. She wanted to stay, God knew. But the production schedule meant she needed to get things done, and productions schedules waited for no one. “That’s a good idea,” she said quietly. She rubbed his hands with hers. They both felt cold. “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  Cole hesita
ted. “Your boss wants you to call him.”

  Nell shook her head. “Not tonight.”

  The last person she wanted to talk to tonight was Grant.

  They made love that night with an aching tenderness that Cole had never felt before. It was as if they were on the edge of a great gaping loss—could sense it there before them, and any quick movement, any hasty action might tumble them straight into despair.

  Cole wouldn’t look at it. Tried to pretend it wasn’t there. He settled between her thighs and focused entirely on Nell. His beautiful, loving, giving Nell, who looked up at him in the moonlight with a smile on her exotic yet familiar and beloved features. She pressed a palm to his cheek, then slipped her hand against the nape of his neck and drew him down into a long, lingering kiss. And then with a single slow thrust, he slid into her, watched her face, memorized it, held it in his heart as he began to move.

  Nell met him with a few moves of her own. She challenged him, tormented him, shattered him, even as she shattered with him. And then she stroked her hands down his sweat-slick back and kissed him again.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  His throat tightened. “I love you, too.” The words were hard to get past the painful lump in his throat. He could say the words now, even when they hurt. But being able to say them meant nothing as much as doing what love knew needed to be done.

  He was dressed and ready to go out the door a little after five. He hadn’t slept. He’d wrestled with his conscience, with his desires, with doing what was best for the woman he loved. He knew what was best, what he had to have the courage to do. And yet he hoped against hope, it wouldn’t happen.

  He could have just walked out and left her sleeping, left with the memory their loving, of the smile on Nell’s face. Left her to find the divorce papers on the counter top along with the note he’d tried painstakingly to write.

  But he owed her more than that, so Cole woke her up before he went.

  She yawned and stretched and looked up at him with a sleepy smile in the low light from the small lamp on the dresser across the room. “You’re going now?”

  He nodded. “Yeah ... I ...”

  She sat up and held out her arms to him, her honey-colored hair tumbling around her shoulders, making him remember its softness, its weight, its faint flowery scent. Instead of bending into her arms, he caught her hands in his.

  “I put the divorce papers on the counter,” he said before he had second—or seventy-second—thoughts.

  Her eyes widened. Her smile vanished. She looked stricken. “What?”

  “I think you should sign them. I know it’s your decision,” he said quickly. “But you need to stop and think. You have a gift, a talent, a great career. You could do so much—”

  “You’ve been talking to Grant. You’ve been listening to Grant,” she corrected at once. She flung his hands away and scrambled out of bed.

  “I talked to him last night, yes. And I don’t like the son-of-a-gun at all. He’s an overbearing know-it-all. But about you—” Cole swallowed “—he’s right. You’d be wasting your talent here. You’d be turning your back on what you do best!”

  “Next thing I know you’ll be telling me I’m hiding my light under a bushel basket,” Nell bit out. She was yanking on her clothes, covering up her gorgeous nakedness, armoring herself in jeans and a shirt. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons.

  “You aren’t yet,” Cole said. “But you would be.”

  “How the hell would you know?” Nell demanded. She sat down with a thump and pulled on her socks, then stood to glare nose to nose at him. “You don’t know anything!”

  In the face of her ferocity, Cole took a step back.

  Nell gave an inelegant snort. “Exactly,” she snapped, and stalked out to the kitchen. The divorce papers were sitting on the counter alongside the note he’d written which said pretty much everything he’d tried to say to her now. He should’ve just let her read it.

  She was reading it. Her lip curled as she did and when she finished, she crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. “Bull,” she said. “This has nothing to do with me or my work!”

  Cole stared. “What? Of course it does!”

  But Nell was shaking her head implacably. “No, it doesn’t. It has to do with you. You’re afraid to trust me. You’re afraid that if you let me stay now, you might actually get to like me here, to like me—“

  “I love you!”

  Nell made another disparaging noise. “You’re afraid of loving me!”

  “The hell I am!”

  “Really?” She dismissed his protest instantly. “I don’t believe that. I think you’re terrified that you might come to depend on me, on our relationship—and that I might change my mind, that I might leave!”

  Cole stared at her.

  “And you’d be in the same boat Sam has been in. Cut to shreds by loving a woman who didn’t love him back.”

  “That’s not—”

  “It isn’t? That isn’t why you want to get rid of me rather than live with the fear that I might leave you?”

  “Nell!”

  “So you push me into a divorce so you don’t have to worry that someday I’ll do what your mother did, what Sadie’s mother did, what you’re sure Jane is going to do! Well, fine—” she grabbed a pen out of the drawer, flipped through the pages of the divorce document until she got to the end and scrawled her signature on it, then thrust the papers at him. “Here’s your damned divorce!”

  “Nell!”

  She stuffed her feet into her boots and grabbed her jacket off the hook by the door. “If you want it you get it. If you want me ... if you love me ... if you dare to trust me, you know where to find me!”

  Chapter Ten

  If she thought he’d come running after her, she was sadly mistaken.

  But Nell hadn’t thought that. She knew Cole well enough to know he believed what he had told her. The trouble was, he didn’t know her as well as she’d hoped.

  So she went back to L.A. that afternoon. She didn’t make excuses to Em and Sadie. She didn’t tell them anything about what had happened up at the cabin.

  Let Cole tell them. It was all his idea.

  She just drove Em to the hospital as she had promised, wished Sam the very best, gave them each hugs, and caught a cab to the airport.

  She didn’t cry. She didn’t look back.

  She focused only on the great yawning emptiness that was now her future.

  But really, what else could she have done? Nell asked herself over and over during the following days. If Cole really believed in her, really trusted that she was committed to their marriage the way he wanted her to be, he wouldn’t keep shoving divorce papers down her throat every time the waters beneath their marital boat got the least bit choppy.

  It was no way to live.

  But what she was doing day after bloody day—reviewing footage, editing, discussing, reviewing more, editing again, mixing sound, finding music, doing more and even more editing, all the while drinking endless cups of coffee that, even with milk, made her stomach hurt—didn’t have much to recommend it, either.

  She tried not to be short-tempered with anyone she worked with. Except Grant. She didn’t mind lambasting Grant whenever the occasion called for it.

  He was a bit taken aback that she seemed to, as he said, “have her feathers ruffled.” She ought to be grateful, he told her. He didn’t push the careers of just anybody.

  Only those people whose marriages you want to wreck, Nell thought bitterly. But at the same time she thought that, she knew it wasn’t really Grant’s fault. If it hadn’t been Grant and his job offer, it would have been someone or something else that would have triggered it.

  Still, it was nice to snap at him occasionally. She liked seeing the surprise on his face. It made her feel a tiny bit better for an instant. And then she felt simply awful again.

  Her only consolation was that the episode came together beautifully. The stories of the couples all wo
ve together as if she’d planned it.

  “You mean, you didn’t?” Judy, Grant’s assistant, said when she watched it.

  “Nope. It was the people themselves.” Which just proved that some people could get it right, even people who started far apart like Mac and Maggie.

  She knew they’d spent several days back at the ranch, helping out. She knew Mac and Chandler had been going to the summer range with Cole. She wanted to know how things had gone, how the cattle drive had been, how Sam was doing. And Cole.

  She wanted to know about Cole.

  But she didn’t call anyone. She had said what needed to be said. She had to cut the ties now or she’d be dragged back in, and just as Cole had feared, they would only hurt each other worse in the future.

  So she drank coffee and edited and mixed and edited some more, and tried not to remember when she saw the ranch and the people, how much she missed them—especially one bone-headed jerk in particular.

  When she got off work, she went to home to her tiny studio apartment in the South Bay and went down to the beach to walk miles along the ocean. It was the only place she could get a decent horizon. And Nell found she needed a horizon, even if she didn’t know what was waiting beyond it.

  She wasn’t so much a city girl anymore.

  The hell of it was, Cole decided after arguing with her inside his head for the first three days after Nell left, was that she was right.

  In his fingers, the knife his grandfather had given him whittled furiously at the soft pine. He’d created a Noah’s Ark of animals in the days since she’d walked away, keeping his hands busy, keeping him from pacing the floor, keeping him from going after her, from making an even bigger mistake.

  He hadn’t wanted to admit his fears. What guy did? Who needed to face his weakness when his weakness was a woman who could break his heart if he let her in? The trouble was, somewhere along the line, he had let her in.

  Had it happened back in Reno? Or before? Had it happened when she’d refused to sign the divorce papers when he’d sent them to her, but instead had chosen to confront him where he lived?