Fortune's June Bride (Mills & Boon Cherish) (The Fortunes of Texas: Cowboy Country, Book 6)

by Allison Leigh

  “No.” She thrust her fingers through her red hair and actually pulled on it. “I need to just tell her the truth. This lying business is getting out of hand.”

  “What does it matter?” he reminded. “You said yourself that she’s here for a day or two and will be gone again for good. I think it bugs the hell out of her worrying that you’re not married—”

  “What?” She looked startled. “Why would she worry about that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s making sure you’re all tied up before she lets her husband within twenty feet of you.”

  Aurora shook her head. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “And yet she keeps pursuing it. Are you saying it’s because the two of you were such good friends?”

  “Hardly.” Aurora pressed her lips together. “I would have switched roommates, except I was afraid at the time that I would get stuck with someone worse. And, much as I don’t want to admit it, in the beginning, being roommates with her wasn’t awful. I didn’t know a soul, and everyone wanted to know her. We went to a lot of functions.”

  “Parties?”

  She gave a reluctant smile. “Well, yes, there were parties, too.”

  “That how you met Anthony?” He had a hard time saying the name without wanting to sneer. “At a party?”

  “A fraternity party. Yes.”

  “Did you love him?”

  Her eyes shied away from his. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Aurora.”

  She huffed. “I was engaged to him,” she admitted flatly. “For all of three months. I thought he was the love of my life. Then he eloped with her.”

  He went still, not hearing much beyond the “engaged” part. “You only said before he was your boyfriend.”

  “Yes, well, what does it matter what I called him? He tossed me aside like a used tissue for Roselyn.”

  “I never heard you were engaged.” Ten years before, he’d been working two jobs in addition to cowboying for his dad, trying to earn enough for a down payment on some acreage of his own. He’d been in Horseback Hollow all right, but he’d been damn busy, too, so he supposed it wasn’t unlikely that he’d missed that nugget of local news.

  “I don’t imagine my parents had much time to brag about it. Mark killed himself a few months later.”

  He started. “He didn’t kill himself. It was an accident.”

  She raised her brows. “Really? Mark, who’d been holding his liquor since long before he was legally of age to have any? Who’d been driving one vehicle or another since he was probably ten years old? He just accidentally drove his truck head-on into a tree? Don’t kid yourself, Galen.” Her voice was thin. “Instead of telling our daddy that he hated everything to do with ranch life—that he didn’t want to inherit everything that Dad had ever worked for his whole life—he took the only way out of it that he thought he could. He never got a chance to go to college. He didn’t know anything else. You were his friend. How could you not know that?”

  “I was his friend,” he agreed flatly. “And I’m telling you, he didn’t do it deliberately. The guy I knew was too self-involved to hurt himself like that. He had his chances, too. He just didn’t take them.” Just because they’d been friends since childhood didn’t mean he’d been blind to Mark’s faults. But once the guy was gone, Galen preferred remembering the good over the bad. “Is that what your parents think, too?”

  “They think the sun rose and set on him. The only thing they regretted was not being able to pay for him to go to college.” She pressed her lips together. Then sighed. “What are we going to do about Roselyn?” She jerked her head toward the hallway leading to the kitchen.

  “Toss her a celery stick and send her on her way?” Sooner or later, he’d straighten her out about her brother, but for now, Roselyn’s presence was a ticking bomb. So he lifted Aurora’s chin with his finger. “Invite her to dinner,” he suggested calmly. “Get it over with. Two hours of playing newlyweds for her in exchange for getting her out of your hair forever.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because I like your hair.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Besides, she strikes me as a bully. If you invite her, she might back down. Come up with a half dozen excuses why she—” and your ex-fiancé “—can’t make it, after all.” In fact, he liked that possibility best of all.

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then she doesn’t.”

  “But it’s not going to be just her,” Aurora muttered. “She’ll have her husband and the kids.”

  He watched her face carefully. “Is that a problem?”

  She lifted her chin a little. “No.”

  He almost asked if she was sure. But decided he wasn’t sure he wanted to know that, either. Not when it was going to take some time to digest the fact that she’d been involved enough with the guy to be engaged to him.

  The love of her life.

  It made him want to punch something.

  “So it’s settled,” he said evenly instead.

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. Then she stepped away from him, squaring her shoulders as though she was preparing to face a firing squad.

  That alone was enough to make him tell Roselyn whatever lies were necessary to send her quickly on her way even if it did mean having to meet Aurora’s ex.

  “Sorry about that,” Aurora said when they returned to the kitchen.

  “I remember what being a newlywed was like.” Roselyn stroked her belly meaningfully. “Of course, Anthony still likes to act as if we are, too.”

  Galen managed not to grimace. He leaned against the cluttered counter while Aurora took the chair opposite Roselyn at the table.

  “How did his interview go with Moore Entertainment?” Aurora asked politely.

  “Beautifully.” Roselyn’s hand started straying toward the redolent cinnamon rolls sitting so near to her elbow, but veered away to rub against the metal edge of the table instead. “In fact, they’ve asked him to stay here for another couple days to meet with Mr. Moore himself. He’ll be in town soon to see his daughter, Caitlyn.

  “I hear she’s almost engaged,” she offered the news like someone doling out treats. “To Brodie Hayes. He’s practically royalty. His mother is Lady Josephine Chesterfield. I saw her on television at William and Kate’s wedding. Anthony tells me that they’re all pretty much living here in Horseback Hollow, which is just unfathomable to me. Her daughter, Lady Amelia, started it off, no doubt, what with all that scandal last year when she was engaged to that duke or whatever he was.”

  “Amelia was never engaged to Lord Banning,” Galen corrected. “The only reason there was a scandal was because the tabloids cooked one up.” He could easily envision Roselyn courting those sorts of stories about herself, whereas Amelia had been desperate to avoid them.

  “Your hubby certainly stays up on the local gossip,” Roselyn told Aurora.

  “I just stay up on the family news,” Galen drawled. “Amelia and Brodie? They’re my cousins. Lady Josie is my auntie,” he added, just to see her reaction.

  Which was pretty priceless. He even saw Aurora bite back a smile at Roselyn’s slack expression.

  “You don’t actually call her that, do you?”

  “I call her Josephine. She’s my mother’s sister.” Immaterial to him at that moment that none of them had known that fact until recently.

  “Look at you, Aurora.” Roselyn recovered quickly. “Rubbing elbows with famous people after all.”

  “Strange how life turns out, isn’t it?” Aurora’s voice was smooth, but he still heard the irony underneath. “I’m surprised you would even consider living somewhere other than California. Or does Moore Entertainment have an operation there that I’m not remembering?”

  Roselyn’s lashes drooped as she studied her nails. “We’re tired of California, actually. But Moore’s headquarters is in Chicago. So—” she lifted her shoulder “—hopefully. Did you ever get back to school to get a degree?”


  Aurora shook her head. “And you didn’t need to, I guess, what with your stint as Bianca Blaisdell.”

  Roselyn’s lips curved. She touched the base of her throat. “Bianca did rather put me on the map. It would have been such a waste if you’d gone on that audition instead of me.”

  Galen studied Aurora, wondering what other tidbits she was harboring in her pretty red head that she hadn’t bothered to share with him. “Why’s that?” he asked Roselyn.

  “They were looking for a type.” She lifted her shoulder. “My type.”

  Bitch? He wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  “They wanted a dark-haired siren, not a ginger-haired ingénue,” Aurora said. “At least that’s what Bianca turned into once you joined the cast of Tomorrow’s Loves. Probably hard for you to give up the role.”

  “Well, they couldn’t possibly replace me, of course. Bianca was too popular of a character to recast. My agent hears from the producers every couple months.”

  “Wanting you back?”

  Roselyn just smiled and rubbed her belly. “I have more important things to focus on.”

  “When is the baby due?”

  “End of September.”

  When his sister Stacey had been pregnant with Piper, she’d been nowhere near as big as Roselyn looked. He considered saying so, but figured the woman would take her offense out on Aurora. “Hate to break up your reunion,” he lied, “but Aurora and I are expected somewhere in a little bit.”

  “We are? Oh, right.” Aurora nodded. “We are.” She rose from the table and pushed in her chair.

  Roselyn could do nothing else but stand, as well. “Give me your cell phone number, Aurora, so we can firm up details for dinner before we leave town.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  Roselyn whistled soundlessly. “That’s taking the small-town life a little far, isn’t it?”

  “Not when anyone I’m interested in talking to is within shouting distance.”

  Roselyn hesitated, then laughed, as if she’d just gotten the joke. “Here.” She snatched up the pencil hanging from the notepad attached to the side of his wall phone, and quickly wrote out her phone number. She tore off the page and set it on the table, then looked at Galen, expectantly.

  Wishing there was some way around it, he told her the number of the house line, which she quickly jotted on the next sheet. “We’ll plan on tomorrow evening.”

  “We’ve got performances tomorrow evening,” Aurora said, looking so sincerely regretful he was a little startled. “All week, actually. I guess we’ll have to give it a miss this time. But if you’re ever in the area—”

  “I’m not giving up that easily, Aurora McEl—” Roselyn broke off. “Sorry. Unlike me, I imagine you’ve taken Galen’s name, traditional little soul that you are. We’ll just get together after your last show.”

  “Won’t that be a bit late for your kids?”

  “We’ll arrange a sitter service,” Roselyn assured Aurora blithely. “I’m sure Vicker’s Corners has some sort of agency we can use.”

  Galen was pretty sure that Vicker’s Corners did not. And even though he could have named a half dozen people more than capable of watching her twins for a few hours, helping her out with child care wasn’t on his short list of things to do. So he tucked his tongue behind his teeth and stayed quiet.

  “We can meet at the Hollows Cantina,” Roselyn continued. “On us, of course. Anthony can expense it and he’s been saying he wanted to try the restaurant there, since the owners used to have something to do with some mildly famous restaurant in his hometown.” She folded the note in half and tucked it inside her bra, then caught Aurora’s shoulders in her hands and brushed her cheek quickly against hers. “I’m so glad I caught you two here,” she added as she let go again and clicked her way to the back door again. “I’d have been brokenhearted if we didn’t have another chance to catch up.” With a wave, she sailed out the door.

  Aurora’s lips twisted. “Heaven forbid that Roselyn be brokenhearted,” she said under her breath.

  “That’ll teach you to bring me cinnamon rolls.” With the annoying woman gone, he scooped out another sticky confection with his fingers. “She’d have never caught us here together if you hadn’t. She might have gone on her merry way, never to darken your door again.”

  “Proof that no good deed goes unpunished.” Shaking her head, Aurora returned to the sink, where the soap suds had fizzled.

  Galen studied her slender back as she turned on the hot water again. “Anything else she steal from you that I should know about before tomorrow night?”

  She added more soap. “She never stole anything that turned out to matter.”

  He was glad to hear the words, though he wasn’t entirely convinced she meant them. Not about the feckless idiot who’d chosen Roselyn, anyway. The idiot whose name Aurora wouldn’t even voice. “What about that audition thing?”

  She tucked the soap back under the sink and straightened to plunge the sponge back into the water. “I am sure it turned out exactly the way it was supposed to.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  She hesitated. “Because I didn’t get the message that they’d called for me until after she’d already gone in my place. We, um...” She sighed. “We had a pin board on the back of our dorm room door where we put each other’s messages. And that particular one had fallen off.”

  “Convenient.”

  Her only response to his sarcasm was to rotate her shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. They may have wanted me to audition, but they cast her. She obviously wowed them.”

  “You might have wowed them, too, if you’d have had the chance. How’d they pick you out to ask you to audition in the first place?”

  “Somebody with the show saw a student production I was in.”

  “Shakespeare or something, I suppose.”

  “Not even. It was a two-act written by an upperclassman. Last I heard, he ended up being an insurance salesman. If you go back and catch up on what my classmates are doing now, there are only a handful of people who made it in the arts. Roselyn’s the most commercially famous.”

  “Because she did a daytime soap.”

  “Don’t pooh-pooh it. While her character was tramping her way through scenes, the show had better daytime ratings than some prime-time shows. In a matter of just a few years, she became one of the highest-paid actresses in daytime.”

  “Is that why you wanted to study acting? You wanted to get rich and famous?”

  “I studied theater because I was interested in all aspects of it. Playwriting, acting, production. Mostly I just wanted to act. Be someone other than me for a while.”

  “Only dream I ever had was being a rancher.”

  “Which makes you luckier than most.” She finally gave up her pretense of washing dishes and turned to face him again. “How many people in this world never get to do what they’ve always dreamed of doing? More than those who do, I’m sure.”

  “Mark thought ranching was settling.”

  Her eyes darkened. “I know. But he never seemed to know what else he could do that would feel differently.”

  “Do you think it’s settling?”

  “I had a choice. I could have taken out more student loans and gone to a school closer to home. Could have joined a community theater group in Lubbock, or even started one up in Vicker’s Corners. I’d have still been here to support my parents. But after he died, I couldn’t seem to put one foot in that world and keep the other at home. In my mind, it was one way or no way. Probably the same mind-set Mark had, only he went the way of no.”

  “I’m telling you, he didn’t do it deliberately, Aurora.”

  She looked away, but not quickly enough to hide the sudden sheen in her eyes. “If I could believe that, maybe I wouldn’t still be so angry with him.”

  He exhaled and went over to her, pulling her against him. Her head tucked neatly under his chin and he felt her arms slowly circle around his waist. “It was an
accident, Aurora. That’s all.”

  She sniffled. “It’s been ten years. I know I’m supposed to be able to let it go.”

  He rubbed her back, swallowing his own feelings about her brother. They’d been thick as thieves throughout their adolescence. Mark could have had so much more in his life. But he’d already started throwing away his opportunities long before he’d chosen to drink and drive that night. “I should have paid more attention to you after his accident.”

  She pulled back at that, looking up at him with genuine surprise. “Why?”

  He would probably kick himself later.

  But right now?

  He lowered his head and slowly brushed his lips against hers.

  Chapter Eight

  The sound of Aurora’s blood rushed in her ears like a freight train.

  She’d barely adjusted to the fact that Galen was kissing her when he was already lifting his head again.

  “That’s why,” he said gruffly. “I should’ve paid more notice to what you were going through. You were a friend.”

  She swallowed and pulled her arms away from him, and gripped the edge of the countertop behind her back instead.

  There was that word again. Friend.

  “You helped out,” she reminded. “Your whole family did. Jeanne Marie brought food and sat with Mama plenty of times. You and Deke and the boys helped Daddy. Most of the town pitched in one way or another. Just like they always do when there is a need. Just like you’ve helped out playing Rusty.” And now he was playing her real-life husband for Roselyn St. James’s benefit. “And...and everything.” She felt like an insect on a pin that he was studying and slid out from between him and the counter to retrieve the casserole dish from the table.

  “No amount of these things—” she held up the pan in which only a single roll remained “—can ever make up for everything you’ve been doing.” She set it on the counter and walked over to the wall phone, lifting the receiver off the hook, and began punching out the numbers that Roselyn had written.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling to tell her the truth. And that there’s no reason—” She broke off when he plucked the receiver out of her grasp and dropped it back on the hook. “Galen, lying like this isn’t right.”