A Marriage for the Marine
Page 12
Well? Are you coming?
Helene wouldn’t be put off, and if Cora didn’t answer her, she’d call. So Cora picked up her phone and said, Yes, I’ll be there.
Bringing anyone?
At that moment, Charlie plucked her phone from her hand. “You’re missing out,” he said, placing it face-down on the table on his left, out of her reach.
“It’s my sister,” she said, panic rearing in her chest now.
“Kent asked what song you’re singing.” Charlie nodded to the man sitting next to Cora on her other side.
Confusion needled her. “Singing?” She scoffed. “I’m not singing.” Sure, she’d come to the karoke bar, but she never sang.
“You told Charlie to tell Sissy to put you on the list,” Kent said. “I thought it was weird.” He nodded toward the phone. “Let me see that.”
Cora made a lunge for her device as Charlie passed it over to him, both of them chuckling. She’d learned in the first day at the Brush Creek Fire Department not to keep anything sensitive on her phone. They got passed around like sticks of gum, and she sometimes texted her mates from someone else’s phone.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Family anniversary party,” Kent read, his dark eyes squinting in concentration. A whistle followed. “Wow, forty years.” He handed the phone back to her. “Are you going with anyone?”
No one in Brush Creek knew she’d been married before, and she wanted to keep it that way. She’d dated at least a dozen men in the year she’d been in town. Dated wasn’t really the right word. She went to dinner with a guy and then didn’t call him back. Or hung out with a man for a couple of weeks before settling into friend territory.
She’d met a few men that stirred her interest, but her goal of landing on a hotshot crew always kept her focus away from starting something serious. She simply wasn’t interested in serious.
“I don’t know.” Cora sighed out her answer. She looked at Kent and then Charlie, wondering if she could ask one of them to go with her. Kent probably would. He’d been one she’d eaten burgers with and then brushed off.
Kent flipped her ponytail like an annoying older brother. “Still no boyfriend, then?”
Cora snorted, all the answer that question required.
The conversation at the table quieted, and Cora glanced around, wondering if her disgust at Kent’s question had really been that loud.
“Go on, then,” Jorge said, folding his giant arms and making his biceps bulge. It was a miracle the women a couple of tables over didn’t faint at the sight.
“Go on where?” Cora asked, reaching for her refilled glass of lemonade.
“They just called your name.” He nodded toward the stage, and Cora whipped her attention behind her so fast her neck sent a shock of pain down her spine.
Kent nudged her out of her seat and Charlie pushed her toward the steps amidst her protests. Along the way, she passed a table of men, all of them with sandy hair and light eyes. They smiled at her in what she was sure was meant to be encouragement.
She knew who they were; everyone knew the Fullers. But she didn’t know any of the men by name, only reputation, and when one nodded at her, his grin fading to the natural strong set of his jaw, she paused.
All noise fell away, leaving just a silent conduit from her to this handsome Fuller man seated furthest from her.
Somehow, her feet took her up the steps to the stage, and it seemed like everyone in the bar had suddenly run out of things to say to one another. With sixty pairs of eyes on her, she gripped the mic and pointed to the song she wanted to sing.
The music started, a slow ballad of a childhood song she’d grown up belting out with her brother and sister. She closed her eyes just before starting on the first line, really losing herself to the moment and hoping with everything in her that she didn’t make a complete fool of herself.
“Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you.”
She opened her eyes, her gaze locking onto the man watching her intently now. One of his brothers elbowed him, but he didn’t look away from her.
Cora didn’t need to look at the screen to keep signing. She belted out the chorus with accuracy, putting on a good show as she became aware of her firefighter crew yelping and whooping their encouragement.
But she absolutely couldn’t look away from the mystery man who’d captured her attention in a single moment of time.
He got up and went over to the table where she’d been sitting with her back to him, leaning down to say something to Charlie. Kent joined the conversation, and Cora’s blood boiled because no doubt they were talking about her.
“Time after time,” she sang into the mic. “Time after time.” One last big breath, and she ended with another, “Time after time,” in the best breathy Cyndi Lauper voice she could muster. The 80s music faded, leaving only her, alone on the stage in her tight black jeans and flowy black tank top, her hand dropping to her side as if the mic were too heavy to hold up for another rmoment.
She handed it to Sissy and stumbled toward the steps, at the bottom of which Kent and Charlie were now clapping. Before she’d even gotten both feet on solid ground, Kent pushed her toward the man who’d singlehandedly gotten her pulse racing and said, “Here’s your next date, Cora.”
She fumbled into him, her hands landing solidly on his chest. His very solid, wide chest.
Cora swallowed, righted herself, and glared at Kent. “I’m not looking for a date.”
“Sure you are,” Charlie said. “To your parent’s party.”
Humiliation crept up Cora’s back and down her arms. “You guys—no.” She met the Fuller man’s eyes and nearly drowned in the beautiful depths of them. “No offense,” she managed to squeak out.
My, he was handsome. Tall. With loads of sandy hair that would surely glide right through her fingers like silk. And those hazel eyes that looked dark as chocolate in this dim bar lighting.
“I’m Brennan Fuller,” he said, extending his hand toward her to shake. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
That same floaty feeling that had happened the first time they’d looked at one another happened again. Kent’s voice faded. Charlie’s body behind her, trapping her close to Brennan, disappeared.
There was just this Brennan Fuller man wearing half a coy smile, and Cora. The two of them breathed in and out together, and Cora found herself saying, “I’m Cora Wesley. How do you feel about stuffy anniversary parties with dozens of married people?”
Preorder A Fiancé for the Firefighter, the next Fuller family novel in the Brush Creek Brides series, coming on June 19.
Read More by Liz Isaacson
Love Brush Creek and the Fuller family and want to stay here? Great! Read A Fiancé for the Firefighter, Book 8 in the Brush Creek Brides series.
Read all the Brush Creek Brides novels, starting with Year One: The Cowboys.
Want to find out how Landon and Megan came to Brush Creek? Read Through the Mist, Book 3 in the Gold Valley Romance series.
Read all the books in the Gold Valley Romance series.
Love small town western romance? Who doesn’t, right? Read all the books in the Amazon #1 bestselling Three Rivers Ranch Romance series.
About Liz
Liz Isaacson is the author of the #1 bestselling Three Rivers Ranch Romance series, the #1 bestselling Gold Valley Romance series, the Brush Creek Brides series, the Steeple Ridge Romance series (Buttars Brothers novels), the Grape Seed Falls Romance series, and several other collaborations. She writes inspirational romance, usually set in Texas and Montana, or anywhere else horses and cowboys exist. She lives in Utah, where she teaches elementary school, taxis her daughter to dance several times a week, and eats a lot of Ferrero Rocher while writing.
Learn more about all her books here. Find her on Facebook, twitter, and her website.
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A MARRIAGE FOR THE MARINE
Book Seven in the Brush Creek Brides series
by Liz Isaacson
Copyright © 2018 by Elana Johnson, writing as Liz Isaacson
Published by AEJ Creative Works
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book can be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without the express written permission of the author. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in, or encourage, the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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