The Cowboy's Bride

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  Cody led the way across a shallow mountain stream. When her mount hesitated midstream, he pulled his stallion up beside her mare and reached over and took hold of her reins. “You expect me to buy that?”

  Callie stiffened in the saddle. Because her horse was being difficult, she let Cody guide her across the stream. As they crossed to the opposite bank, she turned toward him, looking him straight in the eye. “I don’t care what you buy.”

  Cody leaned over and petted her mare, then handed the reins back to Callie. “So you didn’t know Uncle Max owned the WRW video matchmaking service?”

  “No.” Once again, Callie followed Cody’s lead.

  Cody tipped the brim of his hat back, off his face. “If you had, would you still have made a tape and sent it in?”

  That was not easy to answer. Callie knew, deep down, she had never given up entirely on the idea of the two of them someday being together again. She’d even had fantasies about Cody finding her, telling her nothing had really changed, that he still loved her and always would. “I don’t know,” Callie said finally as they led their horses through yet another section of woods. “I admit to being curious about what happened to you, Trace and Patience. But I was busy trying to make ends meet. had no time to follow through.” And more to the point...would Cody ever be safe with her as long as Buck and Pa were around? Did she want to subject him to their money-grubbing schemes?

  “Well, financial security isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We’re all three a living testament to the fact that money doesn’t buy happiness.”

  Callie turned in the saddle and gave Cody a sharp glance. “Being poor doesn’t automatically guarantee happiness, either.” How well she knew that.

  He gave her a long, contemplative look. “So what does, then?” he asked after a moment.

  “I don’t know.” Callie shook her head, wishing she knew. She looked at the horizon, focusing on the pale gold of the sun. “I’m still searching for the answer to that.”

  “OH, CODY, IT’S BEAUTIFUL,” Callie said long minutes later as they paused in front of a fenced-in site, complete with private woods, stream and a flower-filled meadow. “This fenced-in area ...” Callie began.

  “It’s the fifteen to twenty acres Uncle Max willed to you,” Cody finished. Strong hands encircling her waist, he helped her down from her horse. “I was planning on building a house here one day.”

  “That’s why you fenced it in.” Callie briefly rested her hands on his shoulders to steady herself, then, aware of how he was looking at her, half in yearning, half in mistrust, pulled away.

  Cody nodded, his expression grim. “It was the first step to my plan. Next, I was gonna have a road built, leading to this section of the property, then the foundation laid, and so on and so on.”

  “And Max knew that,” Callie guessed unhappily, hating to think she’d taken anything else away from him.

  “Of course,” Cody said furiously. “It’s why he willed it to you.” He gave her a level look. “To make sure I’d marry you again.”

  Callie flushed at his bluntness. She had never wanted to be the booby prize in an unwanted game, but here she was anyway. “I’m sorry Max put you in such a predicament. I’m sure he felt he was doing the right thing,” Callie continued as she tethered her mare to a tree. “So you shouldn’t be angry with him.”

  Cody merely shrugged and, hands braced loosely on his waist, continued looking out at the neat brown fence. She could tell by the tense set of his shoulders he wasn’t going to take her advice on that or anything else.

  Callie swallowed, beginning to feel uneasy again. “I thought we were going to do some ranchwork this morning.” But there were no cattle in sight.

  Cody swung back around to face her, his look a little too easygoing to be trusted. “I’ve taken pity on you,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to cook you breakfast before we get down to business.”

  Breakfast sounded good. After last night’s meager supper of a lone granola bar she’d found in the cabinet, which she had devoured as if it were a three-course meal, and the long ride this morning, Callie was famished. Deciding to meet him halfway on this, she smiled at him gregariously. “Need help?”

  “Nope.” He shrugged off her offer of help with a broad sweep of his hand. “But feel free to look around.”

  While he unpacked his saddlebags, Callie decided to do just that. When she came back long minutes later, a bouquet of wildflowers clutched in her hand, he had a campfire going. The rich, aromatic scent of freshly brewed coffee filled the air. Golden brown hotcakes sizzled in the cast-iron skillet.

  “Sit down,” he said with surprising and suspicious generosity. “Grab a plate.”

  From the looks of things, Cody was a great cook. Nevertheless, Callie didn’t quite trust his abrupt change of mood. Last night he couldn’t be bothered to even share a pillow with her. This morning he was waking her at dawn, which was a bad thing, and cooking her a delicious breakfast, which was a good thing. He also seemed awfully cheerful for a man who had lost his dream-home site to her. Unable to help herself, she hesitated briefly, then teased, “This food isn’t poisoned, is it?”

  He glanced over at her, amusement glimmering in his ocean blue eyes. “Hope not,” he drawled with a conciliatory smile, “’cause it’s what I’m eating, too.” He handed her a stack of fluffy pancakes and a plastic bottle of real maple syrup. Callie drenched her pancakes with the syrup. He drenched his. Together, they began to eat.

  Callie wasn’t disappointed by his efforts. The pancakes were so light and tender they fairly melted on her tongue. “This really is good.”

  Cody smiled. “Thanks.”

  As Callie forked up another bite, she figured they might as well lay it all on the line. “I have to wonder why you’re being so nice to me, though.” As much as she hated to admit it, it didn’t feel quite right. Maybe because she sensed his warm, caring attitude was not genuine. Too late, she saw her instinct about the situation was right on the money.

  Cody’s expression turned serious. His eyes pinned her. “Maybe because, our parting aside,you always seemed like a practical person at heart.”

  Practical, Callie thought as his coldly calculated words echoed in her ears. The fluffy pancakes settled like lead in her stomach. Cody was leading up to something. A deal. Something, anything that would get them swiftly out of each other’s lives. It was probably what he’d been thinking about all last evening when he’d been sitting before the fire.

  With hands that trembled, she set her nearly empty plate aside. “So in other words, this is a bribe,” she said in her coldest tone, trying and failing to conceal her hurt.

  “An effort to set the mood,” Cody corrected with forced affability, leaning over to pour her more coffee. “For the bargain I’d like to make with you.”

  Callie swallowed hard and lifted the tin mug to her lips, not sure what was making her the angriest. The knowledge he felt she could be bought? Or the knowledge he thought she could be bought so easily.

  She took a sip of the coffee and found it had grown as bitter as her mood. “I see,” she said finally, more curious than willing to hear him out. “And that bargain is... ?”

  Cody set the coffee back on the fire and leaned forward earnestly, one forearm resting on his bent knee. “After we get married as per terms of the will, I want you to sell the land you’ve inherited back to me. I’ll pay a fair market price. All you have to do is agree to leave Montana, divorce me and never come back.”

  Callie set her chin. That was quite a bargain all right. “Suppose I don’t want to leave Montana or sell it.”

  Cody followed his grimace with a deep draft of coffee. “Then we have a problem,” he drawled as his superficial cordiality began to dissolve as swiftly as it had appeared. “’Cause I am determined to get this land, one way or another.”

  Callie had the feeling he wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever it took to get rid of her. And while she admired his tenacity when it came to getting w
hat he wanted, she hated his shortsighted, narrow-minded view. He was basing everything on a past that was no longer valid. Even she could see that. She set her tin cup down with a thud. “Why do you hate me so much?” She had taken great pains writing that note so he wouldn’t!

  Cody snorted impatiently. “After what happened in Mexico, you even have to ask?” He regarded her incredulously.

  “Yes,” Callie said flatly. “I do.”

  Chapter Three

  Cody dumped his coffee on the fire and watched it hiss and smoke as it hit the burning coals. His lips thinning grimly, he drawled, “That’s quite a gutsy—if unwise — attitude coming from the bride who lured me to Mexico and then pulled the scam of the century.”

  Callie watched as he emptied the coffeepot over the coals. Hunkering down beside the campfire, he began gathering up their dirty dishes and utensils. “What are you talking about?” she asked warily, helping him carry the dishes down to the stream.

  “Like you don’t know!” he countered harshly as he rinsed their dishes in the water, item by item, and laid them on the grassy bank to dry.

  Because there was nothing more for her to do, Callie stood and began to pace. She wasn’t sure how much he knew, although it was clear he had discerned something, so she started at the beginning. “I ran away from you, Cody, because I had no choice.”

  He nodded, looking as if he didn’t believe her for a second. “And the ransom demand?” he countered coolly. “Did you have no choice about that, either?”

  Callie blinked. “Wait a red-hot minute. I never asked you for money.”

  “That’s right. You didn’t, Callie. Your brother Buck and your pa were the ones who came to me with the news you’d been kidnapped. They were the ones who delivered the ransom note. But I have no doubt you are as familiar with the bottom of the deck as they are.”

  “I was never kidnapped! I ran away from you on our wedding night.”

  Cody’s eyes glimmered with suppressed temper. “I eventually figured that out. But not,” he emphasized bluntly as he stood and straightened to his full six feet, “before your brother and your pa put me through forty-eight hours of sheer hell.”

  Callie gulped. “They actually came to you and told you I’d been kidnapped?” she asked apprehensively. She had figured Buck and Pa would back off with their schemes to extort money from Cody when she was no longer around to help. This explained a lot about why he detested her as much as he did! It didn’t, however, make it fair.

  He glared at her. “Yes, Callie, they did.”

  Indignant at being unjustly lumped in with her no-account father and brother, Callie squared off with Cody. “What happened to the note I left you?” she demanded, furious he was so quick to judge her. She closed the distance between them. “Or did you completely disregard that?”

  Cody regarded her with unbridled skepticism. “What note?”

  Callie blew out an impatient breath. “The one I left on the hotel room dresser, the one that said I was leaving you because I loved you too much to subject you to the hell I’d already been through with my kin. The one that said I wanted you to have a happy life and I knew you’d never have it with me. And don’t tell me that note blew away. I put a heavy brush on top of it to weigh it down and hold it firmly in place. That note was plainly visible to anyone who walked in the room,” Callie continued emotionally before he could interrupt.

  For once, Cody was silent. “Your note wasn’t there when I got back to the hotel room,” he conceded finally, looking for a moment as if he were tempted to believe her—and even more, had his own share of regrets.

  His brief show of vulnerability touched her in a way his smug attitude had not. Ruefully, Callie realized she hadn’t given him much chance to explain, either. “Is that why you’ve been so angry with me?” she asked softly. “Because you thought I left you without so much as a note or word of goodbye?”

  Cody released a long, ragged breath. “I didn’t know why you left me,” he confessed huskily. As he looked at her, his blue eyes glimmered with hurt. “I just figured you’d had second thoughts. That you’d decided you were too young to get married or didn’t love me after all.” Cody tugged the brim of his Stetson a little lower across his brow. “After all, everything had happened pretty quickly once you’d made the decision to run away from your family. I asked you to elope. Max suggested Mexico, because you were underage, and loaned us his Learjet airplane.”

  Callie shook her head at him, annoyed that Cody—who was incredibly bright about everything else—could be so dense when it came to romance. Stepping closer, she tapped a hand against his chest. “You shortchanged us both by thinking so little of me, Cody McKendrick.”

  Cody stared down at her, looking as if he wanted so much to believe in her, the way she had once believed in him. But trust no longer came easily to either of them, it seemed. “You’re telling me that your walking out that way wasn’t a setup all along?” he persisted.

  Callie nodded. That was exactly what she was saying. “I’m sorry my brother and Pa tried to run a con on you,” she added, wondering if she would ever stop being ashamed of them, of feeling somehow sullied by the illegal, unethical and immoral things they had done, simply by virtue of being related to them.

  Cody continued to study her. “But in retrospect it doesn’t surprise you, does it?”

  “No.” Aware that his nearness was beginning to get to her, Callie turned on her heel and headed back to the campfire. As she shoved her hands into the pockets of her suede jacket, Cody fell into step beside her, his glance turning to a circling eagle overhead. “Sad to say, they’d been running cons as long as I could recall. That’s why I wanted out so bad. Because they were pressuring me to start helping them,” she explained.

  “And I was the mark you were supposed to bait, wasn’t I?” This time there was no judgment in Cody’s low tone.

  Embarrassed, Callie turned away. Feeling near tears, she stared at the dew sparkling like diamonds on the grass. “I admit they deliberately put me in your path by making me get a summer job waiting tables at the diner where you hung out when you were done here at the ranch.”

  Cody laid his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to turn to face him. “So you deliberately set out to get my attention?” He searched her eyes.

  “No.” Callie sighed her regret. “I didn’t even know what they had in mind.” She tilted her head back to better see into the rugged contours of his face and splayed her hands across the smooth chambray of his shirt and the hardness of his chest. “All I knew was that they said if I wasn’t going to help them run cons—they had several scams going at the time, one was a stranded motorist routine, the other a fraudulent insurance company scheme—then I had to find out what it was like to work a real job for minimum wage. So they trotted me around from place to place, standing next to me while I asked for work. Because we were new to the area, most places turned me down. When we hit Pearl’s diner, Pa started in on me, berating me for my lack of luck in front of Pearl, and she felt sorry for me and gave me a job that she didn’t really have to give.”

  “I remember,” Cody recollected softly, tightening his hold on her protectively. “I was in the diner that night, sitting in the booth in the back.” His lips thinned unhappily. “I wanted to cram my fist down your pa’s throat, the way he was humiliating you in front of everyone there.”

  Callie had never wanted Cody’s pity any more than she wanted anyone else’s. “Well, you needn’t feel sorry for me,” she replied stiffly. Her face burning with shame, she slipped out of his grasp and turned away. “Pa’s blustering and threatening that night was all part of the con.” At least, Callie thought, that’s what she had kept trying to tell herself at the time. Then and now, she wasn’t so sure.

  Cody stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Callie. Your pa’s contempt for you that night seemed real enough to me. But then again,” he admitted slowly, “so did the kidnapping scam in Mexico.”

  “I knew they’d
followed us to Mexico. The moment you left me alone they made their presence known and started pressuring me to run a con on you.”

  “And you refused?”

  “Yes. But I knew they wouldn’t give up, which is why I had to run away, so you’d be free.” Callie paused, her expression perplexed. “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” she said slowly as she struggled to put it all together. “How did they convince you I’d been kidnapped?”

  “You were gone. There was no note. All I knew was you were missing. Then they showed up and told me me the kidnappers had contacted them, using a phone number in your wallet, and demanded a ransom,” Cody related matter-of-factly.

  “So you paid.”

  An undefinable emotion flickered briefly in his face before he nodded. “And worried myself sick in the meantime,” he admitted.

  “Did they ever tell you the ransom demand had been a con?”

  “No, although they eventually gave themselves away, and I knew I’d been set up from the very first.”

  “By them, Cody,” Callie stressed, curving her hand around the powerful muscle of his bicep. “Not by me.”

  Cody looked at her and said nothing. Dread welled up inside her. She could see his doubts surfacing once again. “If I’d had any idea what they were up to, Cody, I swear I would have put a stop to it,” Callie told him softly, anxiously. “Or at least told you so that you and Max could have put a stop to it.” Callie never had been able to stand up to both Pa and Buck on her own with any success. Together, they were too wily. That’s why she’d had to run away.

  Cody calmly removed her hand from his arm and turned his attention back to the campfire. The flame had been partially doused by the coffee he’d dumped over top of it. He put it out the rest of the way by smothering it with a shovelful of rich Montana soil. The old bitterness and pain were back in his eyes. “I commend you,” he said simply.

  “For what?” She didn’t like the dangerous undertone in his low voice as he packed up his camp shovel and turned to face her again. He stuffed the paper wrappers from the trail-size packs of coffee and pancake mix into one of the saddlebags, then started back to get the camp dishes they’d left drying in the grass, saddlebag still in hand. “This was very convincing, Callie. You’re almost as good an actress as your pa and brother were actors.”