Almost A Bride (Montana Born Brides)

by Mayberry, Sarah

  Reid took both her hands in his. Hers were icy, his warm and strong.

  “Whatever you need, I’m here, okay?”

  There was a gravelly note to his voice that made her throat get even tighter. His eyes were full of sympathy, and a worried frown creased his forehead.

  “Thanks.”

  Her gaze dropped to his strong thighs, exposed thanks to his workout shorts. He had a tan, she couldn’t help noticing. When on earth did he have time to get a tan, in between pulling shifts at Bozeman PD with her and helping out his parents in their apple orchard?

  The absurdity of the thought—the stupid, inappropriate randomness of it—almost made her laugh. She was noticing Reid Dalton’s thighs now, of all times?

  It’s easier than dealing with the truth.

  Indeed.

  It was tempting to cling to his hands, to use them as an anchor, but this was her mess. Her life. Her fiancé.

  She eased back in the seat, slipping her hands free from his, suddenly overwhelmingly aware of the weight of the dress she was wearing. Not so many minutes ago, the heavy satin fabric and the dress’s boning had felt comforting, supportive, substantial. Now it felt like a cage. A trap.

  She stood. “I need to get out of this dress.”

  He stood, too, but she was already pushing past him, opening the door. Her sister was hovering near the change rooms, arms crossed over her chest, her expression worried.

  “What’s going on?” she asked as Tara marched toward her.

  “Help me out of this thing. I want it off,” Tara said.

  She offered her sister her back, every muscle tense as she waited for the hiss of the zipper.

  “Can you please tell me what’s going on?” Scarlett asked, her voice scared now.

  It hit Tara that her sister was probably imagining the worst—death or injury for someone they loved. Nothing as small and seedy as the truth.

  “Simon has been having an affair with one of his students,” Tara said.

  There was a profound silence behind her. Then she felt the tug of the zipper being undone. Wordlessly she walked into the change room, Scarlett hard on her heels. Her sister didn’t say anything, simply shut the door. For the first time Tara was grateful that their mother hadn’t been able to attend today’s appointment, the symptoms from her recently diagnosed Parkinson’s disease having taxed her severely over the last few days. Tammy Buck had never been good in a crisis, and she would be cursing up a storm and weeping and hollering right now if she were here, sucking up all the oxygen in the room and leaving nothing for anyone else.

  Instead, there was only Scarlett working silently to help her out of the dress. Only when the satin was piled on the chair in the corner did her sister open her arms, her eyes filled with sadness. Tara’s shoulders sagged, and she fell into her twin’s embrace.

  “I’m so sorry,” Scarlett said, her voice raw.

  Out of all the people in the world, only Scarlett knew how truly awful this moment was.

  Tara had worked all her life to avoid her mother’s fate. She had been careful. She had been prudent. She had been wise.

  And yet here she was.

  Disengaging from her sister’s embrace, she reached for her clothes.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Two

  Somehow Tara managed to hold in her tears until she was safely home, the door shut between her and the world. Scarlett had been adamant about coming home with her, and Reid had hovered while she’d made her excuses to Lisa Renee, the manager of Married in Marietta, but Tara had convinced them both that there was no merit to be had in hashing over everything.

  Not that Reid would want to hash over anything. He wasn’t the type to talk for talking’s sake. He would have sat vigil with her if she’d asked, though. But she wanted to be alone when Simon came home. It was humiliating enough that the whole town would soon know of her fiancé’s betrayal; she didn’t need witnesses to the ugly little scene that was sure to ensue.

  Scarlett had been harder to shake, but Tara’s insistence that this was something she needed to do alone had finally sunk in. Her twin couldn’t lessen this pain or take it away. This was all Tara’s.

  Tara glanced around the living room of the town house she and Simon shared, taking in the classic rolled-arm cream-colored couch with its oversized cushions, the recycled Oregon coffee table they’d picked up at a craft fair, the antique oil lamp that had once been her grandmother’s.

  It all looked so nice and neat and perfect. Like a page out of a Pottery Barn catalogue.

  She drew in a shuddering breath. Simon was supposedly playing golf with a buddy this afternoon. He’d told her he probably wouldn’t be home until after three when he kissed her goodbye. Angry tears filled her eyes as she imagined him putting his golf bag in the back of his car—along with whatever it was a person took to a motel room when he planned on cheating on his bride-to-be. Condoms, maybe. Perhaps a bottle of wine, or a small gift for his girlfriend.

  Girl being the operative word.

  Tears rolled down her face as the reaction she’d fought so hard to hold off washed over her. Her body shook, her teeth chattering with the force of her anger and hurt. How could Simon do this to her? How could he lie in bed next to her, night after night, talking and laughing and, yes, making love with her, while all the while he was bedding one of his students?

  It was beyond her. The man she’d lived with for two years simply wasn’t capable of this kind of betrayal. He was decent. He was gentle. He was thoughtful and a little stubborn and sometimes overly cautious.

  He was also a fantasy, apparently. A figment of her imagination. Because her Simon—the one she’d thought she was going to marry, the man she’d thought she’d spend the rest of her life with—didn’t exist. She’d been sharing her life with some other person. A man she didn’t know at all. A man who was capable of undressing one of his students—a girl who not so long ago had been wearing a training bra and taking driving lessons and giggling over posters of One Direction and Zac Efron—and lying down with her in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere.

  Bile burned the back of her throat. She wiped away the tears with the backs of her hands, then marched into the bedroom. Bundling the duvet in her arms, she dragged it off the bed and kicked it into the corner. The sheets came next. The pillow cases resisted her efforts to strip them from the pillows and she sobbed with fury as she wrenched first one, then the other free. The duvet cover was liberated, then she took the lot into the laundry room and stuffed it all into the washing machine with vicious, angry jabs. She poured in too much detergent, then slapped the machine on.

  Then she slid down the wall until her ass hit the floor. Head bowed, she cried until there were no more tears, and all that was left was a hollow ache in her chest.

  Had her mother felt like this the day she came home to find Tara’s father gone, leaving her to raise two thirteen-year-old girls alone? Had she felt sick and sad and angry all at the same time? As though the rug had been pulled out from beneath her?

  Tara didn’t know. She’d never had a conversation with her mother on the subject. In fact, she’d assiduously avoided it, a tough ask given her mother’s inability to let go and move on, even after thirteen years.

  Tara and Scarlett had grown into womanhood steeped in stories of their father’s reckless charm and sense of adventure, every tale ending with the same bitter, wounded observation from their mother—that man had no business getting married.

  Despite the fact that she’d had no contact with her father once the divorce was final—her father’s choice—Tara had been old enough when he left to have her own memories to draw on. She could remember piggyback rides and impulsive day trips to far-flung parts of the state and being showered with presents for no reason whatsoever, simply because their father felt like it. She could remember his magnetic warmth and infectious laughter, the way people used to gravitate to him. And she could remember his restlessness and dark silences, the way
he used to look at her and Scarlett sometimes, as though the walls were pressing in on him.

  Most of all she remembered the pain of discovering that he’d lied to her, that his promises had been worth nothing, and that he’d chosen a short redhead with big breasts over her and her sister and their mother.

  And yet here she was, staring the same betrayal in the face, despite the fact that she’d done her level best to learn from her mother’s mistakes and pick a man she could trust. An earnest man. A man who laughed quietly, who loved history, who had a genuine passion for teaching. A man who was steady and goodhearted.

  Safe.

  She’d had three serious boyfriends since she started dating in her late teens and a couple of not-so-serious ones, but Simon had been the best of them. Or so she’d believed.

  Her tears dried. The hypnotic chug-chug of the washing machine lulled her into a dull-eyed trance as she waited for Simon to return home. She breathed, she tried not to think. She waited.

  She had no idea how much time passed before she heard his car in the driveway. Slowly she pushed herself to her feet. The sound of the front door opening and closing echoed through the townhouse.

  “Hey, I’m back. How was your shopping trip?” Simon called. “Did you find your princess-for-a-day dress?”

  She studied the floor for a second. Then she lifted her chin. He was tossing his car keys onto the hall table when she entered the living room, an easy smile on his face. His chinos were crisp, his dark blond hair perfectly in place.

  “Hey—” His smile dropped like a rock when he saw her face. He took a step toward her, one hand extended. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  She saw the exact moment that it hit him that she knew. His step faltered. His hand wavered in the air before falling to his side.

  “You have half an hour to pack whatever you need, then I’m having the locks changed.” Her voice sounded distant and foreign even to her own ears.

  The color drained from his face. “I can explain.”

  “You don’t need to. Reid saw you and Paige Donovan leaving a motel. That pretty much covers it, don’t you think?” Tara took out her phone and opened the timer function, spinning the dial until she had thirty minutes showing. She tapped the screen to start it off.

  “Thirty minutes,” she said, heading for the front door.

  He grabbed her arm as she walked past, his grip urgent.

  “Please, Tara. You have to understand. I tried so hard. I didn’t want any of this to happen. You have to believe me.”

  “Take your hands off me.”

  “It was a mistake. It only happened this one time, I swear. And it will never happen again—”

  He knew her history, knew about her father. And still he’d done this to her.

  “Take. Your. Hands. Off. Me.”

  His grip loosened and she pulled free. Eyes straight ahead, she strode to the door.

  She could hear him breathing as she pulled it open, panting as though he’d just run a race. Panicking over the fact that his whole world was about to implode around him, no doubt.

  She shut the door firmly behind herself, then walked to the nearest flower bed and threw up.

  Reid drove straight out to his parents’ place after leaving Tara. She didn’t want his help, but it didn’t feel right to simply walk away. Yet that was what he was doing, because he didn’t have any other options.

  He passed the dusty sign for Dalton Orchards and turned into the gravel driveway. Apple trees marched either side of the winding road, escorting him all the way to the simple white-washed farmhouse and outbuildings that had been home to Daltons for three generations.

  He parked his car beneath the old oak tree and went into the main house. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, banging pots around, a sure sign she was pissed about something. She barely glanced at him as he entered, returning to whatever she was doing in the cupboard next to the oven. He headed straight to the fridge for the pitcher of iced tea his mother always kept there.

  “What’s he done now?” he asked.

  “I caught him up a ladder, checking on the apple scab on those trees down near the western fence.” Judy Dalton’s voice vibrated with despair and frustration.

  Fourteen months ago his father had been involved in a car accident that had broken his right leg and pelvis. He’d been in the hospital for weeks, followed by months of painful rehab. Reid had given up the lucrative private security work he’d been doing in Europe and flown home to help out. It had been a short-term arrangement to get his parents through a tough time before he took off again, but the slowness of his father’s recovery had soon changed that plan. After a couple of months of cooling his heels in between helping out around the orchard, Reid had applied for a job at Bozeman Police Department, his old stomping ground, and resigned himself to hanging around for a while in order to take the pressure off his father’s recovery.

  Running the orchard had always been a part-time occupation for the Daltons, with Reid’s grandfather and father both splitting their time between maintaining the trees and running a small law practice in Marietta, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t demanding work. Depending on the season, the trees needed pruning, spraying, fertilizing. And then there was harvest time...

  The four hundred apple trees that made up Dalton Orchards were in the low-maintenance phase of the growing cycle at the moment, however; the fruit was barely budding on the trees. There was no reason for his father to be risking his health by climbing up and down ladders, even if he was worried about the outbreak of apple scab he’d been trying to eradicate for a few months now.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Reid said.

  “Fat lot of good that will do. You’re both as bad as each other.”

  Reid eyed his mother. He wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn himself a share of her bad mood, but he wisely chose to retreat rather than investigate further. She’d be over her crankiness by dinner time, no doubt.

  He tracked his dad down to the barn, where he found him tinkering with the apple press, the contents of his tool box spilling across the dirt floor. At sixty-three, Ross Dalton still had a full head of salt and pepper hair and a face that was worn from too many hours in the sun. He’d lost weight since the accident, and his worn jeans hung from his hips, making him look as though he was wearing borrowed clothing.

  “Don’t want to hear it,” he said as Reid approached.

  “How do you know you don’t want to hear it when you don’t know what I’m going to say?”

  “Did she tell you about the ladder?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You could have waited for me to get home,” Reid said mildly.

  “I’m fine. You saw my last X-rays. Everything’s solid.”

  “Your reflexes are shot. You know that.” Not to mention his father was still trying to rebuild his strength after months of reduced activities. “If you slipped or the ladder fell, there’s no way you’re fast enough to do anything about it. But I’m not going to lecture you.”

  “What do you call this, then?” his father asked sourly.

  “A conversation.”

  His father grunted in response, but his mouth curled up at the corners. They’d always got along well, which was a good thing, since Reid was an only child.

  “How’d your game go?” his father asked.

  “All right.”

  His father shot him a searching glance, obviously picking up on the heaviness in Reid’s tone.

  “Something happened on the way home,” Reid said. He needed to decompress after breaking the news to Tara, and he knew his words wouldn’t go any further. “The guys and I spotted Tara’s fiancé leaving the motel up on the freeway.”

  “I take it he wasn’t with Tara?” his father asked.

  Reid shook his head.

  There was a short silence as his father processed the news. “You told her yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d she
take it?”

  Reid remembered the way she’d fumbled for the seat when he’d broken the news about Paige. She hadn’t cried, though. Hadn’t shed a single tear.

  “She’s pretty tough,” he said.

  “Still. She must be upset.”

  Reid glanced out the door of the barn, remembering the tense set of her shoulders as she left the salon. “Yeah.”

  “You tell her if she needs any legal advice, it’s on the house, okay?”

  His father had been forced to wind up his practice after the accident, but he still took on odd jobs for neighbors and friends.

  “Thanks, I will.”

  Reid knew that Tara and Simon had been together for three years, but he had no idea how complicated their financial arrangements were. He frowned as he thought about all the crap she was going to have to wade through. Moving Simon out of the house, canceling wedding plans, dealing with the inevitable gossip around town and at the station... all of that on top of the hours she already put in helping out her mother.

  If he could make it all go away for her, he would. But he couldn’t.

  “I need a shower,” he said, turning away.

  He left his father to his tinkering, crossing to the wooden staircase that led to the self-contained apartment over the garage that had been his home for the past year.

  Originally built to accommodate visitors from out of state—his mother came from a large family—the space was divided into sleeping, living and cooking zones, with a small bathroom. More than enough to accommodate his needs, and private enough that he didn’t feel as though he was living in his parents’ pockets.

  That didn’t mean he wasn’t looking forward to having his own place again when he left Marietta. Which reminded him...

  Crossing to the laptop he’d left on the coffee table, he called up his email program. There was nothing new, and he pushed the computer away. He’d interviewed for a job with a Chicago-based security company over a month ago now, but they still hadn’t gotten back to him.