by Joanna Sims
She’s already forgotten, but can she forgive?
After a near-fatal crash, Savannah Brand awakens to discover years have been wiped from her memory. What she does recall is her love for husband, Bruce, and their blissful life together. Then Bruce blindsides her with the news that preaccident Savannah had filed for divorce. Savannah can’t believe it; she just wants to return to Sugar Creek Ranch with her husband.
Bruce is hesitant, still reeling from the separation. But his love for Savannah hasn’t wavered, not even during the tragedy that originally divided them—the accidental death of their baby boy. All Bruce ever wanted was Savannah back home, but she doesn’t remember their loss. How can he ever disclose the reason she left, knowing it’ll break her heart all over again?
“I didn’t file for divorce, Savannah. You did.”
Bewildered, she stared into his eyes, seeming to be searching for answers. “I did? Why? Why would I do that?”
“We had a lot of problems we just couldn’t seem to work out,” he told her honestly.
Savannah covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said, “I just want to go home.”
Bruce moved to her side; sitting on the edge of the bed, he pulled her hands down from her face and tugged her gently into his arms so he could comfort her in the only way he knew how. He ran his hand over the back of her hair, the way she always liked him to, and was relieved that instead of drawing away from him, Savannah leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Come home to me, Savannah.” Bruce hugged his wife, his eyes closed.
Savannah broke the embrace and studied his face, looked directly into his eyes again when she asked him, “Do you still love me?”
The cowboy answered firmly and without any hesitation, “Yes, beautiful. Yes, I do.”
* * *
THE BRANDS OF MONTANA: Wrangling their own happily-ever-afters
Dear Reader,
Thank you for choosing A Wedding to Remember! This is my ninth Special Edition book featuring the Brand family, which is an honor for me. I’m excited to introduce you to a whole new branch of the Brands. A Wedding to Remember introduces readers to the Brands of Sugar Creek Ranch, a sprawling working cattle ranch outside Bozeman, Montana. Jock Brand is the patriarch of the Bozeman Brands, and he has fathered eight children from two marriages. I am looking forward to bringing you stories about each and every one of them!
A Wedding to Remember features Bruce Brand and his wife, Savannah. These two star-crossed lovers are on the verge of divorce when Savannah is in a near-fatal car accident. This accident is the catalyst that brings about a return to love for Bruce and Savannah, whose marriage had been torn apart by a tragedy. A Wedding to Remember is a second-chance story; a story about redemption, forgiveness and renewing a commitment to marriage. I love writing second-chance stories and I hope that you will love A Wedding to Remember!
I invite you to visit my website, joannasimsromance.com, and while you’re there, be sure to sign up for Rendezvous Magazine for Brand-family extras, news and swag. Part of the joy of writing is hearing from readers. If you write me, I will write you back! That’s a promise.
Happy reading!
Joanna
A Wedding to Remember
Joanna Sims
Joanna Sims is proud to pen contemporary romance for Harlequin Special Edition. Joanna’s series, The Brands of Montana, features hardworking characters with hometown values. You are cordially invited to join the Brands of Montana as they wrangle their own happily-ever-afters. And, as always, Joanna welcomes you to visit her at her website: joannasimsromance.com.
Books by Joanna Sims
Harlequin Special Edition
The Brands of Montana
Thankful For You
Meet Me at the Chapel
High Country Baby
High Country Christmas
A Match Made in Montana
Marry Me, Mackenzie!
The One He’s Been Looking For
A Baby for Christmas
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Dedicated to my dear friend Madhu.
An exceptional woman who recently rediscovered romance.
I love you.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Excerpt from The Waitress's Secret by Kathy Douglass
Chapter One
“Hello?”
It was the middle of the night, but for the last week Bruce Brand had been sleeping lightly, waiting for any news from the hospital. Savannah, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, had been in a coma after a near-fatal car accident.
“She’s awake.” It was Carol, his mother-in-law, on the other end of the call.
Bruce tossed the covers off his body, sat up on the edge of the bed and dropped his head into the palm of his free hand. “Thank God. Jesus—thank God.”
“She’s been asking for you,” Carol added after a pause.
Bruce lifted his head in surprise. “Asking for me?”
“Yes,” Carol confirmed matter-of-factly. “Will you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
Not thinking, just acting, Bruce stood up as he was ending the call. He grabbed his jeans, which were draped over a chair in the corner of the room, and tugged them on. With his jeans pulled up but still unzipped, he pushed the pillows off the chair, sat down and shoved his foot into his boot.
“What’s going on?” Kerri, the woman he’d been dating for the last six months or so, flipped on the light.
“Savannah’s awake.” Bruce rose after his boots were on.
In the yellow glow of the lamp, the nipples of her full, naked breasts peeking through her wavy, sun-bleached blond hair, Kerri wore an expression of disappointment mixed with resignation on her pretty girl-next-door face.
“And she asked for you,” Kerri stated in a monotone as she pulled the sheet up over her breasts and held it in place with her arms pinned to her sides.
Bruce didn’t bother tucking in his T-shirt; he ran his fingers through the front of his silver-laced black hair several times to push it off his forehead before he put his cowboy hat on. He checked to make sure his wallet was in his back pocket, then grabbed the keys to his truck off the top of the dresser.
“I’m sorry. I have to go.” When he leaned in to kiss her on the lips, she turned her head so her mouth was just out of reach.
Bruce straightened; he understood Kerri well enough to know that this was the beginning of a fight they were going to have later.
Kerri looked up at him, and he genuinely regretted the raw hurt he could easily read in her eyes.
“If this hadn’t happened,” Kerri reminded him, “you’d already be divorced.”
She was right about that. He’d spent the last two years paying for his lawyer to fight with Savannah’s lawyer. He’d received the final draft of the divorce agreement a couple of days before the accident. For now, the divorce was on hold. And, even though they hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, legally he was Savannah’s husband.
“She’s still my wife,” Bruce paused in the doorway to say. “I’ll call when I can.”
* * *
The night of Savannah’s accident, and every day since, had felt more like a surreal dream sequence than reality. For the last week, when he wasn’t working, he was with the Scott family, crammed into the small waiting room designated for families who had a loved one in the critical care unit. Truth be told, he’d never expected to speak to any of Savannah’s kin again, much less spend several hours a day in a confined space with them drinking burnt coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and trying to make sense out of the sudden detour his life had just taken.
When he arrived at the hospital, the feeling in the waiting room had changed dramatically from somber to celebratory. Savannah’s two sisters, Joy and Justine, were smiling with tears of relief and happiness drying on their faces. The peaches-and-cream color had returned to Carol’s plump face, and John, Savannah’s burly father, was actually smiling broadly enough so that the tips of his upper teeth, normally hidden from view behind his thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, were visible. But there was one person in the room who didn’t seem to be happy at all.
“Hi, Carol.” Bruce stopped next to Carol and the cowboy Savannah had been dating. He didn’t offer his hand when he said, “Leroy.”
Beside the fact that the cowpoke was dating his wife, Bruce had a hard time keeping his cool around Leroy. It was Leroy’s high-powered muscle car that Savannah had been driving the night of the accident. Leroy had been in the passenger seat and had walked away from the accident with a broken wrist and a couple of scrapes and bruises, while Savannah had shattered the windshield with her skull.
Leroy had a stricken look on his narrow face. “She doesn’t remember me.”
Carol put her hand on Leroy’s arm to comfort him. “She will, Leroy. The doctor said that it may take a couple of days. We just have to be patient and give her some time.”
The cowpoke left with his head bent down, and it occurred to Bruce, for the first time, that Leroy was in love with Savannah.
“What’s he talking about?” he asked Carol.
The Scott clan closed ranks and surrounded him as if they were worried he would try to escape.
Now Carol’s hand was on his arm. “Savannah’s neurologist thinks she may be experiencing some...temporary memory loss.”
No one spoke for a second, but all of the Scotts were watching him like a cat watching fish in a fishbowl. “How temporary?”
“They don’t know.” John spoke directly to him for the first time, instead of communicating through his wife and daughters as was his usual route.
“Bruce.” Carol’s fingers tightened on his arm. “Savannah doesn’t seem to remember the divorce.”
Until right then, Bruce hadn’t felt like he needed to sit down. Now he did. Wordlessly, he took a couple of steps backward and settled in a nearby chair.
Savannah’s family moved as one unit as they followed him, making loud scraping noises on the floor as they pulled chairs closer to him, boxing him in again. Bruce realized now that Savannah’s tight-knit family wasn’t trying to protect him—they were trying to make sure he didn’t leave.
As much as his in-laws knew about Savannah’s condition and potential recovery, they shared with him. Savannah was awake and talking; her speech was a little slurred, but she was making sense. But she had lost, at least temporarily, memory of the last several years. As far as Savannah was concerned, there was no divorce, they hadn’t spent the last two years fighting through their lawyers and she had never moved out of their home. In her mind, they were still happily married. Now he understood why she had been asking for him. Savannah needed her husband.
* * *
Waking up from a coma had felt like swimming up to the surface from the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pool. Savannah had felt tingly all over right before the awareness of the throbbing, stabbing pain coming from the left side of her head along with the achiness and stiffness that she felt all over the rest of her body. She had been petrified, unable to understand why she was in a hospital hooked up to monitors with needles in her arms. She didn’t have any memory of the accident; the last thing she could remember was kissing Bruce goodbye as he left to start his day on the Brand family ranch. Her husband, her one and only true love, was the first person she asked for when she had awakened from the coma. Savannah could count on Bruce to make everything okay for her. He always did. So, when she finally saw her husband walk through the doorway of her hospital room, Savannah reached out to him weakly, palm facing up, and the tears of confusion and terror she had been holding back began to flow unbidden.
“It’s okay, Savannah.” Bruce quickly dried her tears with a tissue. “I’m here now.”
She tried to pull the full-face oxygen mask off, so she could talk to him, to tell him that she loved him, but he stilled her hand by taking it into his and holding on to it firmly.
“You have to get your strength back,” Bruce told her.
The mask on her face made her feel claustrophobic, and she wanted to talk. Perhaps her memory was fuzzy about the events that had landed her in the hospital, but she had very distinct memories of her family and Bruce and nurses and doctors all talking around her when she was in the coma. She could hear them murmuring, but no matter how hard she tried to respond, she couldn’t. Now that she could talk, she wanted to talk.
“I love you,” she said, her words muffled by the mask.
Bruce looked at her with an expression she couldn’t place. Why didn’t he respond right away, as he always had before?
Finally, he squeezed her fingers gently, reassuringly. “I love you.”
Behind the mask, her smile was frail, her eyelids slipping downward from exhaustion.
“I’d better let you get some rest.” The sound of Bruce’s voice made her fight to open her eyes.
When he tried to let go of her hand, she held on, moving her thumb over the empty spot where his wedding band should be.
“Ring?” Her voice was so raspy from having a trachea tube down her throat.
Again, an odd expression flashed in Bruce’s sapphire-blue eyes as he glanced down at the ring finger of his left hand.
“It’s at home.”
“My...ring?”
“I have it,” Bruce told her after he dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “I have your wedding ring.”
* * *
Retrograde amnesia secondary to traumatic brain injury and stroke. Bottom line, according to Savannah’s neurologist: Savannah had lost large swaths of her memory. With time and patience, some, or even all, of her memories could return. Until then...
“What are you suggesting that I do, Carol?” Bruce asked his mother-in-law in a lowered voice. “Move her back to the ranch?”
“We’ve all tried to talk her into coming home with us, but she wants to be with her husband.” Carol’s eyes were wide with concern. “She wants to be with you.”
Bruce held up his left hand to show Carol his wedding ring. “All she’s been talking about for the last two days is getting back into her own bed.”
Savannah had been moved to a regular hospital room soon after she had regained consciousness. Her appetite was healthy, she was laughing and talking. Her speech was still a little slurred from the dysarthria, her right hand was a little weak after the ministroke she had sustained, and of course, there was the memory loss. But even with all that, the doctors were getting ready to discharge her and continue with her care as an outpatient. Considering her near-
death experience, Savannah was making a quick recovery.
“I know it. I know it.” Carol’s brows furrowed worriedly. “It’s gonna break her sweet heart when she finds out the truth.”
They had all hoped that Savannah’s memory would return on its own; none of them, including him, wanted to be the one to bring her up to speed on her failed marriage. But her discharge date was barreling toward them with no sign that she had any inkling that they were a signature away from being divorced.
Carol seemed to have something on her mind that she had been skirting ever since he had arrived at the hospital. He had a feeling he knew exactly what his mother-in-law was thinking.
“Would it be such a horrible thing if Savannah moved back to Sugar Creek with you?” she asked him after a couple of silent moments.
Bruce knew it was only a matter of time before Carol asked this question. It was a question that had crossed his own mind a time or two. But it wasn’t that simple. Savannah hadn’t lived at the ranch with him for a long while. And although he hadn’t changed much since she had left, she didn’t have clothing or personal items at the ranch.
“Maybe this could be a second chance for the two of you,” Carol added.
Carol had always wanted their marriage to work, and had always advocated for spending their attorneys’ fees on more marriage counseling.
“You still love her. Even after all that’s happened.” His mother-in-law looked up into his face hopefully. “Don’t you?”
“I’ll always love her,” he admitted because it was true. And even as angry as he had been with Savannah after all of the fighting and money wasted on attorneys fees, seeing her unconscious in critical care slammed home the truth for him: he still loved her.
Carol’s eyes welled with tears. She put her hands on his arm. “And she loves you.”
Savannah did love him. Again. It felt bizarre to walk into her hospital room and be greeted with that sweet, welcoming smile he’d first fallen in love with, her hazel-green eyes filled with love and her arms outstretched for a hug. In an odd twist of fate, Savannah was back to being the woman he had married. In an odd twist of fate, Savannah was back in his life.