A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides)

by Megan Crane

  Chapter Two

  Emmy’s heart had just about stopped its cartwheeling and clattering by the time Griffin drove the long, dirt road that wound up into her grandmother’s land and steered his pickup truck to a stop in front of the wide front steps of Gran Harriet’s log and timber home.

  God, she’d missed this.

  Emmy gazed at the great house that sprawled across the clearing and the mountains that framed it and rose high behind it, the spring day blue and bright all around. She’d missed the arching great sky and crisp air, the mountains and the fields. Aspen trees bursting into riots of yellow over clear streams of icy cold snowmelt. The Rocky Mountains in all their harsh, heart-stopping splendor. Montana.

  She’d missed the drive into Marietta she remembered so well from all her summers here, with Copper Mountain scraping up into the dizzy blue like it was lording it over the town, high above the other peaks and still draped in a coat of white this early into one of Montana’s fickle thaws. She’d missed Marietta itself, from the sweet old river that carved its way along the edge of town and reminded her of a thousand summer afternoons spent swimming and floating and sunning herself to the postcard-perfect Main Street that could have served as the backdrop to one of the advertisements she worked on back home in Atlanta, so quintessentially Western was it.

  And she’d missed the winding drive up into the hills, then onto the land her grandmother had bought with her best friend in the 1960s. She knew every curve of the dirt road that wound deep into the trees as if it had long ago been imprinted on her skin. She could smell sunshine and pine through the cracked window of Griffin’s truck, and she felt a powerful kick of something like loss, or possibly longing, reverberate through her.

  This felt like a hard, deep landing. Like coming home at long last.

  And it was his fault it had taken almost ten years.

  “Still not speaking to me?” Griffin asked from beside her as he turned off the truck’s ignition.

  Because she hadn’t answered his question in the airport. She hadn’t trusted herself to speak. She’d attempted to convey her desire to murder him with her eyes alone—and thought she might have been successful when he’d let out a laugh—and then she’d followed him out to his truck, climbed in, and ignored him for the entire drive from Bozeman to Marietta.

  Not the mature thing to do, she was well aware. But it was better than actually murdering him, which she was fairly certain would result in jail time.

  “I’ll let you know when and if I have something to say,” Emmy replied now without risking another look at him. “Maybe in another ten years or so.”

  She could see enough in her peripheral vision. The way he lounged at the wheel, one strong arm draped over the steering wheel, his tattoos climbing in and around the strong muscles of his arm, making her wish she could trace all the patterns herself. She reached out for the door, ready to jump out and flee into the long lost familiarity of her favorite place on earth—but he reached over and put a hand on her arm.

  And everything shifted. Then burned white hot.

  Emmy froze, horrified. Would he know, the way he had ten years ago? Would he see the way she reacted to him, written all over her as if in flashing neon?

  She stared at the place where his strong, calloused hand wrapped around her bare skin because she’d shoved her shirt and sweater up over her forearm, and didn’t understand how he could do this. How he could touch her in such an irrelevant, perfectly polite way and her whole body ignite like he was gasoline and a lit match and she was nothing but dry kindling.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, a low rumble.

  And it all sort of rolled up inside of her, then. Her sister’s unreasonable demands that had left Emmy with no choice but to risk her job to spend the required three weeks here or sign herself up for an open war with the bride. How angry she was, though she’d never admit it, that Margery, who had spent every single summer of their lives complaining about having to spend two entire months in what she called that backwater had turned around two years ago and claimed this place for her wedding. Not that Emmy had any wedding plans herself, but that didn’t matter, did it? She was the one who had always loved Montana. Surely she should have been the one who got married here. Not to mention, all of her unresolved feelings about Griffin and what had happened all those years ago. It all rolled around and hardened and then burst.

  “I don’t know what that’s an apology for,” she gritted out, glaring at his hand, wishing she couldn’t feel it everywhere, in the tightness of her chest and that telltale melting in her core. “I can think of at least twenty things you should apologize to me for, but this isn’t the place for that any more than the airport was.”

  “Twenty?” Griffin’s voice was as hot as his hand, and darker. She had to fight back a shudder from way down deep inside of her. “I was thinking more like two.”

  Emmy risked looking up at him then, and glared. At that absurdly beautiful face of his that had ruined her, really, when she thought about it. That had been her first, completely unrequited, deeply scarring, and humiliating introduction to love. How could anything or anyone else compare? No wonder, she thought now that she was sitting next to him again and could see that she hadn’t been exaggerating his impact on her years ago, that she’d had entire relationships with less spark and sizzle than Griffin Hyatt’s hand on her arm.

  “Twenty at the very least,” she snapped at him. “And I’m not eighteen any more. If you want to apologize to me, Griffin, you can do it like a man. Over a drink at that goddamned saloon I was never old enough to enjoy properly, or not at all.”

  His hand tightened slightly on her arm, and she saw his smile in his green eyes a moment before it made those hard lips crook.

  “Welcome home, Emmy,” he murmured.

  “Go to hell, Griffin,” she replied, and that felt like old times too, all those summers before she was eighteen when they’d done nothing but trade barbs and hurl words at each other like weapons until they’d made each other laugh. Emmy didn’t want to admit how comfortable it was now, like she’d accidentally dropped herself back into the life she should have had, the life she’d walked away from a decade ago when she’d vowed she’d never come back to Montana again.

  Something hung there between them, alive and much too sharp, and Griffin’s gaze darkened. Emmy found she was holding her breath.

  And then she heard the door slam and her sister’s trademark squeal, loud enough to scare the birds from the nearby trees and worse, Griffin’s hand from her arm.

  “You’re already late!” Margery cried from the top of Gran Harriet’s stairs, her hands on her tiny little hips and her pretty face already wreathed in a scowl. “What kind of maid of honor is late to her only sister’s wedding?”

  Griffin was grateful to Margery Mathis for what was undoubtedly the first time in all the years he’d known her.

  He watched as Emmy, his Emmy, who had followed him around like a puppy for years and there was probably something wrong with him that he missed that phase, shifted in her seat and sighed.

  She certainly wasn’t a puppy any longer.

  Emmy had been skinny as a rail at fifteen, but now had the kind of lithe figure that begged for a man’s hands—or his hands, anyway. They itched to touch her. Her hair was a silky, shiny brown run through with hints of gold and the way she wore it showed off her elegant bone structure, making him feel greedy and hot. Her mouth was something too close to indecent, and he couldn’t seem to keep his gaze off of it. And she still looked at him with those clever dark brown eyes of hers, the way she had as a know-it-all eighteen-year-old almost-college-freshman, like she could see straight through him to the hidden things beneath.

  All that, and she looked edible besides, in jeans that licked over her lean curves the way he’d like to do and that cute scarf that wrapped her in a deep blue gauze.

  Emmy squared her shoulders, climbed out of the passenger seat, and didn’t look back as she walked toward the front steps and
her pain-in-the-ass sister. Griffin lied and told himself he was grateful for that, too.

  He’d expected to appreciate her. He always had, even before that stupid night he’d gotten much too carried away, which he didn’t really think was entirely his fault given that mouth and what he’d liked to have done with it, but hadn’t. Didn’t he deserve retroactive points for not being as much of a douchebag as he could have been?

  He’d expected that, as ever, he’d enjoy Emmy Mathis’s company, even if by some chance she was still mad at him.

  But he hadn’t expected sheer, near-ungovernable lust to blindside him, pinning him there against the wall of the baggage claim when he’d first seen her saunter into view. He hadn’t expected that pounding, driving hunger to slam its way through him, making him wilder with every breath, when he hadn’t felt a damn thing for or about anyone since he’d left Jackson Hole last fall. He hadn’t expected Emmy’s scowl to jack up his temperature like a blast of summer heat and he certainly hadn’t expected a simple hand on her arm to feel like her mouth against the hardest part of him, just like all those fantasies he told himself he hadn’t had way back when.

  He hadn’t expected her to push every last one of his buttons without even trying, and maybe he should have. Emmy had always gotten under his skin, even when she’d been nothing to him but the bossy little kid next door every summer. Hence the nickname Bug.

  But then, he’d always been a dumb fuck where women were concerned, hadn’t he? Or Celia would never have left him that last and final time to shack up with his best friend less than forty-eight hours later, which had been the final push Griffin had needed to get the hell out of Jackson Hole—and whatever the hell his relationships had become while he’d been focusing on the business—at long last. It shouldn’t really surprise him that even here in Marietta, the place he’d come to get his head on straight and figure out what the hell he was doing with his life, he’d find more proof that he was nothing but a fool where pretty women were concerned.

  Or that it would be this particular pretty woman, who he’d already made a fool of himself over a long time ago.

  The unpleasant recollection of his pathetic history with women was his cue to drive away, duty done and Emmy safely delivered to the family home and the arms of her insane Bridezilla of a sister, but, of course, Griffin didn’t do that. He’d never been one for self-preservation. The term for that in the common parlance, he was well aware, was dumb fuck. And because he couldn’t help himself, he was out of the truck and standing in the drive with another excellent view of Emmy’s sweet ass before he knew what hit him.

  Before he could get himself in check the way he knew he needed to do.

  “It’s actually impossible for me to be late to an event that’s over three weeks in the future,” Emmy was saying in that smartass way of hers, all crisp and a little bit snooty. “Thanks, though, for asking. I’m doing well. My flight was fine despite the tight connection in Minneapolis, not that flying all the way to Minnesota was at all out of my way or annoying or anything. Oh, and I’m not being paid for what my horrible boss has decided she’ll call ‘personal leave,’ because it’s so much freaking time off. But never fear, I’m happy to dip into my savings for you, Margery. Nothing’s too extreme for your special day! Even if it’s actually twenty-one days instead of one, like a normal person.”

  Margery, who had always been pretty in that overly cultivated way that left Griffin cold—maybe because he’d been knee deep in girls exactly like her at Andover and Dartmouth, or maybe because he’d always seen that gleam of calculation in her lovely blue eyes—smiled benevolently down at Emmy like the queen Griffin was pretty sure she already thought she was.

  Come to think of it, he’d seen that smile before. It was the one Celia had worn when he’d proposed to her. And then again when he’d pounded on Henry’s door to find the two of them inside, half-naked and not at all sorry that he’d finally caught a clue.

  Dumb. Fuck.

  “Are you done?” Margery asked mildly, reminding Griffin where the hell he was.

  “Not really. There’s a lot to be said about the bridesmaids’ dresses. Who looks good in purple? Particularly that shade of purple?”

  “It’s dahlia, actually, as I’d think you’d know, given your advertising expertise where I’d assume every little detail counts. And didn’t you do that whole big campaign on flowers?”

  “I did a campaign on allergy medicine which featured a lot of flowers because they were allergens, which feels like a good segue back into the bridesmaid’s dresses. Mine makes me look like I’m dying of scurvy.”

  “Then I’ll be certain to make sure you get an extra helping of fruit salad at the reception instead of the cake everyone else will be enjoying,” Margery said coolly. “Now are you done?”

  “For the moment,” Emmy said in that dry way of hers that went straight to Griffin’s gut—or maybe lower. He was too busy wondering how she’d managed to steal all the air when she wasn’t even looking at him and they were standing outside in Big Sky country to tell exactly how many ways she was getting to him.

  And then the two Mathis sisters proved that Griffin really didn’t know a damned thing about women because they both giggled, and then hugged. Long and hard, like they really meant it. It was baffling. He was baffled.

  “You’re a pain in the ass,” Emmy muttered as they pulled apart, and Margery kept her arm slung across Emmy’s shoulders.

  “That’s why you love me,” Margery replied airily, and then her gaze moved from Emmy and landed on Griffin. She inclined her head slightly, still in her regal mode. He supposed that came with the marrying-a-very-rich-dude territory. “Griffin.”

  “Margery,” he replied. “Congratulations.”

  She smiled. “That almost sounded like you meant it. And here Gran Martha was telling us all about your poor, broken heart just last night. You seem all patched up to me.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.” He tried to look polite. “That Philip sure is a lucky guy.”

  Margery’s smile deepened, and suddenly, she reminded Griffin of a cat.

  “Aren’t you a good little bag boy,” she said, almost merrily. “I’m sure Emmy appreciates having such a rich and famous gentleman as her very own chauffeur. Or is it bellhop? Either way, you can bring her bag inside. I’m sure it’s that ratty old duffel, isn’t it, Emmy? One of these days I’m burning it in a fire.”

  “It’s a perfectly practical bag,” Emmy protested.

  “If you’re a hulking frat boy,” Margery replied. She eyed Griffin. “Though I suppose you fit that bill nicely.”

  “Frat boy, sure, a long time ago,” Griffin said mildly enough. “Hulking? You flatter me.”

  He resisted the urge to flex his biceps on cue. Barely.

  Emmy met his gaze then while Margery smirked at him, her expression a mixture of unholy glee and resignation—the usual response to a dose of Margery’s brand of sugary skewering. But Emmy went straight to his head.

  And Griffin suddenly wanted nothing more in the entire world than to take Emmy up on her challenge. To linger over a drink or two or more in a dark corner of Grey’s Saloon in town and see if he could get his fill of that decadent mouth of hers. To see if talking was enough, if he could assuage this hungry thing inside of him by subjecting himself to more of the sharp way she spoke to him, so unimpressed with him and all the things he’d accomplished and why did he like that so much? Or if it would require something else, like his mouth licking into hers, which he remembered from ten years ago with a shocking amount of clarity and detail.

  Back then, he’d been twenty-one years old and headed into his senior year at Dartmouth. He’d known Emmy had that outsized crush on him and he’d known better than to do anything about it when nothing could possibly come of it.

  Yet he’d completely failed to keep his hands off of her.

  And in all the years since then, he’d forgotten how tempting she was. How the way she moved, the way she looked at him with h
er dark eyes all lit up like that, made it impossible to keep his own promises to himself.

  But they weren’t kids any longer.

  This time, there’d be no need to make himself promises for her own good and no need to worry about breaking them. Emmy Mathis was all grown up. She could make her own damned rules. This time, if something started, there’d be absolutely no reason to stop until they were both completely satisfied.

  And Griffin found he was grinning like a fool when he grabbed her duffel again and followed Emmy and her sister into the house, like the obedient little bag boy he definitely wasn’t.

  Chapter Three

  When he swung open the door to his cabin later that day to find Emmy standing there in the gathering twilight looking narrow-eyed and mutinous, Griffin’s entire body went into meltdown.

  He stared, and hoped she couldn’t see the worst of it. He’d been sketching a new design and had been off in that in-between place in his head when the knock on the door had jolted him back to reality. But she was a much bigger, harder jolt.

  “Apparently,” she said stiffly, “you have an extra bed.”

  “I do.” He still stared at her, like an idiot. Like there was nothing else in his head. Or maybe that was what happened when a woman with a mouth like hers said the word bed in front of him; he reverted to age fifteen in an instant. “But Gran Harriet has a house full of them. A much bigger house.”

  Emmy shifted and let that damned duffel bag slide to her feet with a thunk that echoed much too loudly in the peaceful quiet of his cabin. Then she crossed her arms over her chest, which didn’t really help things. It became almost impossible to keep his gaze from tracing the curve of her breasts. Almost.

  “Funny you should mention that.” She smiled, and it was a sharp thing, but Griffin liked the blade of it. “Margery has ten bridesmaids. Ten aside from me, that is. Many of them have husbands. Some have babies. Someone named Colette has a husband, a baby, and an au pair. That works out to every spare bedroom in my grandmother’s house as well as yours, which no one bothered to count until I wanted to freshen up. By which I mean, escape the endless reminiscences of college life at Sweet Briar.”