THE COWBOY CRASHES A WEDDING

by Anne MacAllister

  Heck, you'd have thought Shane had been the one two-timing him with Milly! But Cash knew better than that.

  And he didn't waste much time thinking about Shane. Shane didn't matter. Nothing mattered—but Milly.

  She was the reason, damn it all, that he'd come back.

  He'd driven all those miles staring not at the road but at a future without Milly—and finally, finally, his head had come to terms with what his heart seemed to have known all along: that what mattered most wasn't Deliverance or winning money or gold buckles or having his freedom or anything else.

  What mattered was Milly.

  When he had to face the rest of his life knowing that she wouldn't be there for him—that he could never just call and talk to her, or drop in and tease her, or go horseback riding or canoeing with her, or make love with her—well, that mattered a whole hell of a lot.

  Cash had never given much thought to settling down. It had always seemed like something old folks did. Now he thought it might be something that people who loved each other did—because they wanted to be together, because they wanted to know they could count on each other.

  He finally discovered something that scared him more than marriage—the realization that Milly was getting married and that the guy marrying her wasn't going to be him.

  Facing a future without Milly was suddenly a whole lot scarier than walking down the aisle and saying, "I do."

  He needed Milly. He'd come to count on her in ways that he didn't even yet completely understand, though they'd never really talked about what they meant to each other. Or he hadn't, anyway.

  He was a guy, for crying out loud. He didn't say mushy things. He didn't even think mushy things.

  But on the road north in that storm, he'd thought pretty desperate things—like what would happen if he got there too late!

  But he hadn't got there too late. He'd stopped the wedding.

  Milly was still free. And someday, she would be his—if he could ever convince her.

  * * *

  Eleven

  « ^

  She wouldn't talk to him. She wouldn't listen to him. She wouldn't even see him.

  If he walked into her parents' house, she walked out. If he came to Poppy's florist shop, she left. If he showed up at her apartment, she wouldn't answer the door. He tried ordering flowers sent to the motel room where he was staying so she'd have to deliver them; she threw the bouquet in his face. When he tried it again, Poppy delivered them.

  "What the hell am I going to do with these?" he demanded, when she shoved a dozen red roses in his face.

  "Make potpourri," she suggested. Poppy was no help. She was vague and absentminded and dithery. Not at all the Poppy he was used to.

  He tried to talk to Milly's parents, to get them to make her realize how much he cared. They at least listened to him, especially once he offered to help pay the bills from the wedding he'd spoiled.

  Her father went so far as to say, "I gotta admit, I admire your guts, boy."

  But even he couldn't make Milly see Cash. "She's a force," he said again.

  Yeah, Cash was beginning to figure that out for himself.

  Milly's mother was sympathetic. She scolded him for making Milly cry. But then she gave him cups of coffee and patted his arm while he tried to articulate his feelings. But she couldn't make Milly listen, either.

  "Our Milly's a little stubborn," she said in what had to be the understatement of the year. "And you did embarrass her."

  Like he hadn't embarrassed himself? But, hell, Cash thought, what was a little embarrassment in the larger course of events.

  "Too much," Dori informed him. "She would like to kill you."

  "Tell her she can," Cash said, desperate. "Tell her I'll wait for her down by the river tonight. Her choice of weapon."

  Dori smiled. "That sounds promising."

  "Swear you'll tell her."

  Dori swore. But Milly never came.

  He was at his wit's end.

  "What'm I gonna do?" he asked Shane.

  "Hang yourself," Shane said. He looked pretty glum these days, too.

  "Come for dinner tomorrow night," her mother invited him after two weeks of fruitless attempts to make Milly see reason. "Someone else might be here, too," she added with a smile.

  Hoping against hope, Cash came. He was sitting at the kitchen table talking to her mother when "someone else" came in the door.

  When Milly saw him, she stopped dead.

  "How could you?" she railed at her mother. "You're sleeping with the enemy!"

  Cash bolted to his feet so fast he knocked the chair over. "I am not sleepin' with your mother!"

  Milly didn't answer. She just turned and ran.

  Carole put her hand on his arm to stop him going after her. "Figure of speech, my dear."

  She couldn't take much more of this.

  Everywhere she went in Livingston, people looked at her and whispered. And Milly knew what they were whispering.

  Look, there's the girl whose wedding got crashed! What could she have been thinking marrying a man she didn't love? Had she made up with the one who made a fool of her? What had a smart fellow like Mike Dutton seen in a weak-minded idiot like Milly Malone, anyway?

  Milly wondered the same things herself—about everything except whether or not she and Cash had made up.

  They hadn't. They weren't going to. Ever.

  She was adamant about that. She told her mother, her father, Dori, Poppy, everyone who would listen.

  She didn't tell Cash.

  She wouldn't talk to him. She was sure she wouldn't need to.

  He might hang around a day or two—"until Tuesday," she would mutter bitterly every time she thought about it—but before long, she knew there would be a horse to ride somewhere down the road, and he would be off again, chasing that gold buckle and his freedom.

  It wasn't that he always left—that there was always another horse, another rodeo or another gold buckle—that bothered Milly. It was that somehow, wanting those things meant to him that he couldn't also want her.

  With Cash it had always been one or the other. Never both.

  Milly didn't understand. She never would.

  But it didn't matter now. It was good, in fact. It meant that he would be gone soon. And when he was, she would pick up the pieces and get on with her life.

  The trouble was, he didn't go.

  Instead of heading off to points south and gold buckles galore, he got a job working for Noah Tanner and Taggart Jones. They taught bronc-and-bull-riding to hopeful rodeo cowboys on Taggart's ranch up near Elmer. Cash, Poppy told her, was helping out with their schools.

  "Here?" Milly was aghast. "He's-staying here?"

  "In Elmer. That's what I heard, anyway," Poppy said vaguely. She didn't say who she'd heard it from.

  "He won't stay," Milly said. She hoped.

  But the fates conspired against her. Next thing she knew he was also working for Jed McCall.

  "Jed broke his arm," Poppy said. "He needs someone to feed cattle and help with the calving."

  "Field work?" Milly said, disbelieving.

  Cash would never do field work, Milly was certain. But the next time she saw him he was buying a tractor part. She turned on her heel and rapidly walked the other way.

  It didn't matter that he was hanging around, she told herself. Out at Jones's ranch or up at Jed McCall's, he might as well be in San Antonio or Phoenix. She never went there. She wouldn't have to see him.

  Three days later she stopped at the grocery store, and damned if Cash wasn't unloading boxes there!

  "What are you doing here?" Milly demanded shrilly. She looked from him to her father accusingly.

  Her father gave a vague, helpless shrug and said, "He offered to help."

  Cash gave her a hard smile. "I'm settlin' in."

  She didn't believe it. Wouldn't believe it.

  She tried not to think about him. But he was like that credit card in the commercial on TV—everywhere she
wanted to be! She felt some nights that if she rolled over in bed, Cash would be there beside her.

  In the flesh, he wasn't.

  In her mind, heaven help her, he was.

  Spring was upon them in earnest. The leaves were coming out on the trees. The sheep had baby lambs frolicking after them. The mamma cows were calving. Still Cash didn't go away.

  Milly knew then that she'd have to.

  Livingston—not just Livingston—Montana wasn't big enough for both of them!

  Milly made up her mind to leave. She needed space. Distance. A new life. She'd been going to have one once before, hadn't she? She'd been going to go to Denver.

  What was to stop her going now?

  Her father was doing fine. Now that Jake was in school all day, Dori was almost an equal partner. They had a new stock boy helping out. They even had Cash, for goodness' sake!

  If he wanted to stay here, let him.

  She would be the one to leave this time.

  "She's what?" Cash didn't believe his ears. He stared at Milly's mother, who kept right on stirring the pot on the stove.

  She spared him a sympathetic glance. "Moving to Denver. She told us last night."

  "Got a chance to buy into a business," Milly's dad added. "She says it's a great opportunity." He sounded hearty, but Cash knew him well enough now to hear the false bravado in his words. He didn't sound any more convinced than Cash felt, and he was looking at Cash as if Milly's decision to leave was all his fault.

  Well, according to Milly, he was sure it was.

  He'd had plenty of time to realize how humiliated she'd been at the wedding where she didn't marry Dutton. He'd heard enough from Shane and Jed and Taggart and Mace Nichols and their wives to know that they were the talk of the valley.

  "You're more famous than those Hollywood fellas," Jed had told him just last week.

  "Still?"

  Jed nodded. "Reckon you'll be the talk of the town till Redford does another movie hereabouts."

  "Swell." Hurry up, Redford! "What can I do?" Cash asked.

  "Marry her," Jed suggested. "That'd put an end to it."

  "What the hell do you think I'm tryin' to do?" Cash almost exploded.

  "She still won't listen? It's been months. How long you gonna wait?"

  "Forever," Cash said. He meant it, too.

  He'd show her that he knew life was no eight-second ride—if it took him eighty years!

  It was hard because every day he saw things he wanted to tell her about, to share with her and watch her smile. There were baby lambs on the hillsides now. Some of the more innovative ranchers were running both sheep and cattle. Some had baby buffalo here and there, too. There was nothing funnier than a just-born baby buffalo wobbling after its mom. Even calves, too, were pretty amazing.

  He'd done a lot of rodeoing, but he'd never stayed in one place long enough to do much real cowboy work. He found he liked it. The world didn't go by in such a whirl as it did when he was going down the road. He had time to stop and appreciate the little things, the subtle things.

  And all time to miss Milly that there was in the world.

  Brenna, Jed's wife, had a baby while Cash was working for them. He'd never paid much attention to babies before. He couldn't ever remember being impressed by one. But, like the lambs and the calves and the buffalo, little Shannon McCall was pretty amazing.

  He remembered Milly talking about "their kids." Then the words had sent a shaft of panic straight through him. Now it didn't seem like such a bad idea at all. He wanted to tell her, to talk to her about it.

  Except Milly still wasn't talking—or listening—to him.

  She was moving to Denver instead.

  It was too much to hope that Cash wouldn't come to Poppy Hamilton's wedding. It was, after all, Cash's rodeo buddy, Shane Nichols, that Poppy was marrying.

  Milly couldn't believe it when Poppy told her. "Shane?" she'd said when Poppy told her that morning in the florist's shop. "You don't even know him!"

  Poppy had turned as red as her name and cleared her throat and looked out the window at something that must have been really interesting. Then she shrugged sort of awkwardly and said, "Well, I do now."

  "Obviously," Milly replied drily, then looked at Poppy intently. "How did you meet? It wasn't Cash who introduced you, was it?"

  "Of course not," Poppy said hotly, her color still abnormally high. "The whole world doesn't revolve around you, you know!"

  Milly felt her own cheeks burn. "I know that. I just … thought… Never mind." She went back to work on the flowers she was arranging.

  Poppy gave her arm a pat. "I didn't mean to jump on you. It's just … you've got to get over this. You've got to move on."

  "I am moving on," Milly reminded her. "I'm going to Denver at the end of the month, remember?"

  "That's not moving on," Poppy said flatly. "That's running away."

  Milly's head jerked up. "You're on his side?"

  "I'm not on anyone's side," Poppy said patiently. "I just hate to see two people who love each other—"

  "I do not love Cash!"

  Poppy just looked at her.

  It seemed to Milly that everyone at Poppy and Shane's wedding was looking at her now. She was still a local curiosity—the girl who didn't know her own mind.

  She felt as if all eyes were on her wherever she went. Well, maybe not all eyes. Some people were watching Mike. And some were watching Cash. Wondering if they were going to come to blows, perhaps?

  Milly tried very hard not to look at either one of them.

  She was quite sure Mike didn't want to see her. And God knew she didn't want to see Cash!

  That was why she stayed aware of every move Cash made. Because she wanted to avoid him, not because she cared!

  It didn't matter to her if he talked to every pretty female under the age of forty in the room. She didn't care if he danced with them, either.

  But somehow it was easier to breathe when he was talking to Poppy's father, the judge, or to Shane's brother, Mace, or to Taggart and Felicity Jones or Noah and Tess Tanner or Jed and Brenna McCall.

  He seemed to have developed a circle of friends in the valley. He even spent some time chatting with Ranee Phillips, the guy Poppy's father had wanted her to marry.

  Why couldn't Cash have behaved like Ranee? Milly wondered irritably. Ranee hadn't broken up Shane and Poppy's wedding, even though he was Poppy's father's choice for a groom. No, he came with a date, danced with the bride and behaved like a sane adult.

  Not like some men she could mention.

  If Cash had behaved like that, she'd be Mrs. Mike Dutton now.

  She glanced in Mike's direction. He was standing by the bar talking to Lisa, the girl who worked in the outfitter's shop below Milly's apartment. They were laughing and, as Milly watched, Mike put his hand on Lisa's arm and said something right into her ear.

  Milly felt nothing. No jealousy. No envy. No wish that it was her arm he was touching. She actually felt glad, relieved. At least Mike's life hadn't been destroyed by her idiocy. He was moving on.

  Just like her.

  As if he sensed her thoughts, Mike looked around just then and saw her looking at him. Immediately Milly looked away. But not before she saw Mike say something to Lisa, then move purposefully toward her.

  Please, no! Milly cast around for a quick escape. But there was none—except the door behind where Cash stood talking to Shane's brother. She turned, desperate, and spotted Jake, his nose pressed against the window glass, obviously far more interested in whatever was outside than the wedding reception in here. She'd go get him and take him out for a while. Poor little kid had to be bored stiff.

  But before she could, Mike was there. "Still haven't made up?"

  "What?" Milly blinked, then began edging away. But he caught her fingers and anchored her where she stood. He leaned against the wall next to her, so that they stood together ostensibly watching the other couples dance.

  But Milly knew Mike's eyes were on
Cash. And even though Cash kept on talking to Mace, Milly could feel Cash's eyes on her.

  "You know what I mean," Mike said easily.

  She would have liked to have pretended she didn't, but she'd already made enough of a fool of herself where Mike was concerned. There was nothing to be gained by pretending.

  "No, we haven't," she said, refusing to look at either one of them. "And we never will."

  "Never is a long time," Mike said mildly, still staring across the room. Then he looked down at Milly and added quietly, "Almost as long as forever." Then he took her hand. "Dance with me."

  "You don't want to—"

  "I wanted to marry you," Mike said firmly, pulling her gently but inexorably into his arms. "I think I can be trusted to decide whether or not I want to dance with you." His eyes met hers. "Come on, Milly. Dance."

  They danced. It was a slow dance. An easy-listening, easy-dancing number—soft swaying music that seeped into a person's soul and set it free. And, moving to the music, Milly began to breathe more easily for the first time that day. Something tight inside her began to loosen. She felt the tension in her—the tension that had been in her so long she couldn't even remember a time it hadn't been there—begin to relax, to release.

  She knew what he was doing. He was forgiving her. He was saying he understood. He accepted. He was here, dancing with her, to tell her that.

  He was setting things right between them—and making sure everyone knew it.

  Milly blinked back a tear, then smiled up at him. "Thank you," she whispered.

  Mike smiled at her. "My pleasure." And then he danced her across the floor, and his arms loosened, and he stepped back and turned her—

  Into Cash's arms.

  Cash appeared as startled as she was. And as desperate, she noted, as he looked in astonishment from her to Mike.

  Milly shook her head and started to back away. What on earth do you think you're doing? she asked Mike silently.

  He smiled encouragement at her. "He said he loves you," Mike reminded her. "From what I've seen the past couple of months, he's been trying to show you he loves you." Then he looked at Cash. "Maybe you'd better tell her again."