by Jane Graves
But as he looked her up and down, light slowly dawned, and he had the feeling the first day of his new life had just gone straight to hell. She was dripping wet. She was dirty from head to toe. She looked lost and lonely and helpless.
And she was wearing a wedding dress.
Chapter 2
Brandy must have been equally stunned by the woman standing on the porch, because she stopped barking and stood motionless, looking up at Marc with a whimper of confusion. But I’m ready, boss. If whatever that thing is steps out of line, I’m on it.
But the woman wasn’t stepping out of line. In fact, she wasn’t saying anything. She just stood there staring up at Marc, her eyes wide. He looked past her to the driveway and didn’t see a car. How the hell had she gotten there?
“Can I help you?” he asked.
A smile flickered on her face, then died. “I-I kinda had an accident down the road, and I was wondering…”
Marc came to attention. “Accident? What happened?”
She teetered a little. “I was driving, and there was this deer…I didn’t want to hit him…”
“You swerved to miss a deer?”
She nodded. “And now my car is wrecked.”
“Forget about that. Are you all right?”
“Uh…yeah. I think so.”
All at once, lightning crashed. The woman’s eyes flew wide open. She came to life, bounding across his threshold, dragging approximately two tons of wet, muddy dress behind her. She spun around, her hand at her throat and her eyes still wide with surprise, acting as if she’d just cheated death. Given how lightning was exploding all around his house, maybe she had.
“Aren’t you going to shut the door?” she said, her voice shaky.
Marc closed the door, then turned to face her. There were mascara rings under her eyes. Her hair was dangling in a wet blob, and he couldn’t tell what color it was. Maybe a little bit red?
Brandy walked back and forth nervously, still trying to make sense of this woman. But if Marc couldn’t figure it out, what chance did his poor dog have?
“What happened to your shoes?” he asked.
She looked down. “I don’t know. I think the mud sucked them off my feet about a quarter mile ago.” She held her hands out helplessly, looking down at herself. “Look at me. I’m a mess. This dress…oh, God. Hilda would just die if she saw me now!”
“Who’s Hilda?”
“My wedding planner. She freaked out when a pearl fell off the train. What would she do if she saw this?”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Kari Worthington,” she said. “You must be somebody…Cordero. I saw the sign.”
“Marc Cordero. Now tell me why you were driving around in the country after dark in the middle of a storm wearing a wedding dress.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Then her eyes slowly filled with tears. Marc felt a glimmer of panic. No! No crying! There was no crisis on earth that couldn’t be made worse if a woman started to cry.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, afraid she was going to tell him.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I couldn’t marry Greg. So I ran.”
“Ran?”
“There were only twenty-two minutes left. Twenty-two minutes before I was going to be a married woman. And I just couldn’t do it.”
“You left your own wedding?”
Her face crumpled, but she kept the tears at bay. “Yes.”
“Let me get this straight. You got into a car in this weather in a wedding dress and just drove away?”
“No! Well, not exactly. It wasn’t raining when I left Houston.”
Marc drew back. “Houston? You drove all the way here from Houston? That’s over two hundred miles!”
She held up her palm. “Now, it’s not as bad as it sounds. See, I was going to drive to Austin, but then the hotels were all full because of parents taking kids back to college, so I thought I’d go to San Antonio. But when I headed that direction, the rain came and there was an accident and traffic was a mess and I was running out of gas, so I got off the freeway to find a gas station and then I got lost. And then there was the deer, and…” She shrugged weakly. “And here I am.”
Marc had news for her. It really was as bad as it sounded. “You need to call somebody to come get you.”
“No!” she said. “Whoever I call will talk me into getting married. And I can’t do that. I’ll be miserable for the rest of my life!”
All this should have kicked off Marc’s usual reaction to a crisis, which was to wade in, take control, and solve the problem, but he’d never encountered a problem like this. A woman who ran away from her own wedding into a driving rainstorm? In what weird universe did that happen?
“Okay,” Marc said. “Your car. Is it drivable?”
“Well, it’s kinda wrapped around a tree. No windshield. So I guess I’d say…probably not.”
“You’re two hundred miles from home. Do you know anybody in the area? Anybody at all?”
She shrugged weakly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even know where I am.”
“Didn’t you bring a map with you?”
“No. I didn’t exactly plan to run away.”
“Still, you might have stopped along the way. Regrouped. Gotten organized. Put a little thought into—”
All at once she put her hand to her stomach and started to weave, her eyes dropping closed. Marc took hold of her wrist to steady her. It felt cold from the rain and so fine boned he could wrap his entire hand around it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Sorry. I’m just…I’m just having a hard time…breathing…”
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
“No,” she said, her face contorting. “It’s this dress. It’s so tight. And my stomach feels funny. I haven’t eaten much in the last couple of days.”
“Why haven’t you eaten?”
“Because my dress was too tight. I needed to be able to get into it on my wedding day.”
“I’ll get you some crackers—”
“No. The dress is too tight. If I eat something, I’ll barf it right back up.”
She hadn’t eaten because the dress was too tight, but because the dress was too tight, she couldn’t eat? One of Marc’s biggest pet peeves was circular logic that led nowhere. How did anyone get off a roller coaster like that?
“And it’s worse now,” she said, her breath fast and shallow. “I think the dress is drying and shrinking. I need to get out of it.”
“But you don’t have any clothes to put on,” Marc said.
“No. I have clothes. They’re in my luggage.”
“Where’s your luggage?”
“In my car.”
“And your car is in a ditch.”
“Yeah.”
Marc sighed. He was no psychic, but he was having no trouble predicting the near future. He was going to be wading through a muddy ditch to pull suitcases out of a wrecked car.
“Where did you have the accident? East on the highway or west?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Never mind,” Marc said. “Surely you’ll know which way to go once we reach the gate.”
“The gate?”
“My front gate. I’ll take you to your car to get your luggage. Then I’ll drop you off at a hotel in town. You can check in, get cleaned up, and change clothes. Then tomorrow you can deal with your car.”
“But the weather—”
“It’s letting up.”
Actually, Marc wasn’t too sure about that, but it didn’t matter. One way or another, he was taking her to town. Then he’d get back to his football game and pretend all this had never happened.
“Come with me,” he said, heading for the kitchen.
She trudged along behind him, the train of her dress making a wide, muddy streak across the tile floor. It looked as if a gigantic slug had slithered through his house. As they came into the kitchen, Sas
ha was in her usual spot on top of the refrigerator. She was Siamese, and from the day Angela brought her home as a kitten, it was as if she knew she came from royal stock. That refrigerator was her throne, and she judged every situation that passed before her like the princess she was sure she was.
How about it, Sasha? Does Her Majesty have a solution to this problem?
Marc stopped in the mudroom and put on a raincoat and a pair of rubber boots, then grabbed a poncho for Kari.
“No sense in getting wetter than you already are,” he said as he eased it over her head and pulled it down, then tugged the hood up over her blob of hair. The poncho was Day-Glo yellow. She looked like Big Bird in a wedding dress.
He still didn’t know why she’d left her fiancé at the altar, but in the end it didn’t matter. He only knew he wanted this woman out of his house as quickly as possible so he could get back to his new life.
A few minutes later, Kari sat in the passenger seat of the biggest pickup truck she’d ever seen, listening to the roar of hundreds of horses under the hood as Marc motored down the storm-darkened highway. He drove every bit of the speed limit even though the rain still poured. At first she thought, Daredevil, only to realize every move he made seemed careful and measured, as if he knew every hill and curve as well as he knew his own name.
As he was stuffing her and her dress into the passenger seat of his truck, she’d seen two rifles on a gun rack in the back window of the club cab pickup. Her heart stuttered at the sight, but she told herself to stop being silly.
Ignore the guns. This is rural Texas. Five-year-olds carry guns in rural Texas.
Left to her own devices, Kari generally associated with men who played guitars and wrote poetry because at least they understood her creative, disordered mind and didn’t cringe when she dyed her hair purple. When she dated men her father approved of, they wore sport coats over their two-hundred-dollar jeans, talked about the stock market, and got exasperated when she wanted to try a vegan restaurant.
Either way, nothing had prepared her for Marc Cordero.
He was a big man with a big truck and big guns, and every indication said he wasn’t the least bit happy to be taking her anywhere on a night like tonight. He hadn’t cracked a smile from the moment he’d opened his front door. And as she gave him a sidelong glance now, she forgot her wrecked car, forgot the storm, forgot everything but the man sitting next to her, a man who looked as if he could pick her up and snap her in half if he chose to.
But she couldn’t say she hated it.
She glanced at his hands on the steering wheel, big, strong hands that looked as if they could split firewood without an ax. Underneath that raincoat was a body to match his hands, with a chest and shoulders so broad he could have made two of any of the men she knew. She didn’t know exactly what it took to run a vineyard, but it was clear he’d gotten his gorgeous body and his golden tan the hard way—by spending long hours working in the sun. She glanced back at his left hand on the steering wheel. No ring.
But why was she bothering to look?
Because he’s sexy as hell, that’s why.
But that didn’t matter. The last thing a pushover like her needed was a man to push her over. If Greg had been able to do it, she wouldn’t stand a chance with a man like this one.
“So you run a vineyard?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“You have a nice house.”
“It’s home.”
That was the one word that described it perfectly. It had a wide front porch with a wooden swing, and on the inside the oak floors, thick rugs, and country kitchen made it feel cozy and warm. For a second her brain flashed to her father’s house—three times the size and cold as ice.
“Are you sure your car is this direction?” Marc asked. “We’ve gone a long way.”
“I walked a long way.”
“Wait. There it is.”
Marc slowed down, then made a U-turn to pull onto the shoulder near where her car had gone off the road. He shined his headlights on it as best he could, then held out his hand. “Keys?”
She handed him the keys and he got out of the truck. The rain had let up some, but still it pelted him as he walked purposefully down the incline to where her car rested in the ditch. He unlocked the trunk and grabbed two of her biggest suitcases. She’d filled them so full she was sure she’d be charged extra at the airport, but Marc lifted them as if they were nothing. He brought them up the hill and stuffed them behind the seat in the extended portion of the club cab. He did the same with the other two. Then he climbed back into the truck and slammed the door, shoving the hood of his raincoat off his head. His boots slopped mud onto the plastic floor mat beneath his feet.
“That’s a lot of luggage,” he said as he put the truck in gear. “Where were you going?”
“Bali,” she said. “Ten days.”
“You needed four bags for ten days?”
“It was my honeymoon. I did a lot of shopping before I left.”
“Hope somebody canceled the trip.”
Didn’t matter. It was a gift from her father. Given his money, that was the last thing he cared about. Forget the vacation to Bali. He could have bought Bali.
As they drove away, Kari glanced over her shoulder. “What do you think about the condition of my car?”
“Hard to tell until Rick hauls it out. It could be anything from a flat tire and a little body damage to a total loss.”
Kari watched out the window as they sped down the highway through the shadowed trees. Minutes later they rounded a bend and she saw lights up ahead. Soon they passed a sign that read, “Rainbow Valley, Texas.” And beneath that, “Home of the Rainbow Bridge.”
“Rainbow Valley, Texas?” Kari said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Never heard of it. What’s the Rainbow Bridge?”
“Long story. Ask Gus. He loves to tell it.”
“Gus?”
“He and his wife run the bed-and-breakfast I’m taking you to.”
They passed a few farmhouses on the side of the road. The rain had diminished to a heavy drizzle, and up ahead she saw a water tower with the cartoon faces of two dogs and a cat painted on it. Then she saw the street names. Llama Lane. Persian Place. Appaloosa Avenue.
“Why are all the streets named after animals?” she asked.
“Another long story. Gus will oblige.”
Marc slowed his truck and turned onto a street called Rainbow Way. Businesses lined both sides, most of which had begun life as houses and been transformed. They were a mix of architectural styles, or maybe they’d just been added to and subtracted from so much over the years that each one was its own work of art. They were painted fun, cheerful colors. Kari was transfixed. Even through the rain, this place looked delightfully funky, like Oz without the Munchkins. She could only imagine what it looked like on a sunny summer afternoon.
They approached a town square. Vintage streetlamps illuminated the falling rain. In the center of the square was a large gazebo painted bright yellow and surrounded by flowering shrubs. The darkness and the rain should have made everything look dreary, but Kari had never seen anything so enchanting in her life. She’d felt a little depressed earlier, but how could anybody look at this place and not feel like dancing?
“This place is so cute!” she said. “Look at all the storefronts. Wait—Cordero Vineyards? You have a shop in town?”
“Yep. We move a lot of wine that way.”
“It’s cute, too.”
Marc just shrugged. “Tourists love it, particularly the big animal lovers.”
“Animal lovers? But you sell wine.”
“Yeah. Top Dog Merlot. Crazy Horse Cabernet.” He gave her a slight roll of the eyes. “We have a wine called Sex Kitten. My sister talked me into that one.”
Kari smiled. “Really?”
“It’s one of our best sellers. Unfortunately that means I’m stuck with it. Everybody loves doggies and kitties. There are big bucks in that.”
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br /> “You don’t sound happy about it.”
“On the contrary. Making a buck makes me very happy.”
“I noticed you have a doggy and a kitty.”
“My daughter has a doggy and a kitty.”
Kari came to attention. “You have a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Does she live with you?”
“Not anymore. I dropped her off at UT this afternoon for her freshman year of college.”
That astonished Kari. Most men with college-age kids were well into their forties. Marc clearly wasn’t.
“So you were in Austin this afternoon, too?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a daughter in college.”
“I’m plenty old enough.”
She looked at his left hand again. “I don’t see a ring.”
“That’s because I don’t have a wife.”
“Are you divorced?”
“Do you always talk so much?”
“Truthfully? Yeah.”
“Well, I generally don’t. So if you keep it up, pretty soon you may be talking to yourself.”
Kari took the hint, but it was all she could do not to ask a dozen more questions. Some folks thought she was a little nosy, but she liked to think of it as simply being interested in other people. A highly attractive man who was relatively young with a college-age daughter and no wife? There had to be a story there, but judging from the inaccessible look on Marc’s face, she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to hear it.
Marc passed the square and turned right onto a street behind it. He pulled into a small parking lot beside yet one more house turned business. It was a three-story Victorian painted blue, with a high-peaked roof and scrollwork detail.
He parked his truck, circled around it, and unstuffed Kari from the passenger seat. As he guided her toward the big front porch, she noticed paw prints painted on the sidewalk beneath her feet and several stone cats along the way peeking out from behind the shrubbery. Marc took her up the steps and through the front door, shoving her dress unceremoniously into the foyer behind her. A little brown-and-black mutt let out a few barks and trotted over to them. He circled around Kari, sniffing her with the same interest Marc’s dog had.