The Bride Wore Starlight

by Lizbeth Selvig

  “Mmm.” A minute later her sigh went through him like a shiver. “Okay, I do know what’s wrong.”

  “Good.”

  “I feel like I’m losing ground. My savings are almost gone. I need a job. I have no skills. I have no car to go get any skills. And all that’s okay—they’re things to be dealt with. They tick me off, but when they need to get done I’ll find a way. But now there’s this whole big Fourth of July thing at the rodeo that Harper got us involved with. I’m supposed to go and be some honorary past queen ambassador, and trust me the idea isn’t all that appealing. Then here comes Trampas Manterville and suddenly big, wonderful Paradise Ranch, whose owners brag about all the things we do to help the town, is not that great a role model.”

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” he said. “What happened nearly a hundred years ago has nothing to do with today, but I think you’ll see that better in the morning when you aren’t so tired. Tell me instead about this queen ambassador thing.”

  A sense of relief flowed through him now that she’d brought that subject up. He’d known about it ever since Vince had told him, but Joely had never mentioned it so he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “I’ve been afraid to tell you. Why would I want you to know I was participating in the rodeo?”

  “My gosh, Joely, I don’t care if you go to the rodeo. I’m happy for you!”

  “Great. Terrific. Thanks. But you wouldn’t be there to cheer me on, right? Not for a million dollars.”

  “Well, for a million . . . ” He tried to joke, but she pulled away.

  “You’ll kiss me in front of my whole family. Which I liked, by the way. You like being with me as long as I don’t step foot in a rodeo ring. Then I’m on my own. Do I have it about right?”

  He couldn’t answer. She was right. If she wanted to go to the rodeo and make good on an invitation, he had no problem with it. He’d hoped she’d understand that it was the one thing he’d chosen never to do again. Then again, how could she know it was about more than a decision? It was about his vow. He’d never told anybody about that.”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand now.”

  “And God forbid I should be able to ask you to help me understand. I’m terrified to bring up the subject. Simple Rules for Alec and Joely to Live by Number One, as I recall.”

  “I don’t go because I promised I wouldn’t.” The words came out stiffly, but she deserved to hear them.

  “Promised who?”

  “My cousin.”

  “Your dead cousin?”

  He stood up. “Yeah. My dead cousin. Who can never be there again either. It’s that simple.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so insensitive, and I was. But, Alec, you can’t make promises to people who don’t care. Your cousin wouldn’t want this.”

  “That’s the cliché thing to say and why I don’t tell anyone about it. It’s my decision. My promise. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Look,” she said, laying a hand on his forearm. “I do get it. And I’m sorry this ranch thing hit me wrong and I took it out on you. You’re probably right that it’ll all seem funny in the morning and everything will be fine. In fact, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to stay here tonight. Would that be okay?”

  He had no say on where she slept. It stung because it was a shutout—no long good-byes on her front stoop—but of course it was okay.

  “If that’s what you want to do. Do you still want to ride tomorrow?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Her surprise at his question was genuine.

  That made him feel marginally better. “Okay, then I’ll be here. Three thirty after work?”

  She nodded and stood to meet him. “Alec, I am sorry. Tomorrow will be a better day. Promise.”

  Before she turned, he placed a hand on the back of her head and pulled her in for the kiss he’d miss on her doorstep.

  “People argue,” he said. “This wasn’t a big deal. I love your emotions—you’re just figuring them out after everything that’s happened.”

  “You don’t always have to be so nice, you know. I wasn’t today.”

  “You know plenty well enough I’m not always nice either. I’ll be right in.”

  She smiled and headed back to the house. He sank back onto the bench.

  Moments later, a hand dropped onto his shoulder in the dark. For some reason it didn’t even startle him, but he was surprised she was there.

  “I wasn’t spying,” Sadie said. “Trampas headed back to town, and I saw Joely come in alone. I’m sorry she was upset.”

  “She’s a wonder,” Alec said. “Underneath her pain, she’s one of the most empathetic people I’ve ever met. This all boils down to her feeling sorry for Simon Manterville, believe it or not. I think that’s incredible, even though it makes her feel sorry for herself, too.”

  “Can I ask a personal question?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “Why, exactly, do you avoid the rodeo?”

  He frowned into the darkness. “I can’t ride broncs anymore.”

  “That’s why you don’t go to the rodeo to compete. Why do you avoid it altogether? You were once the equivalent of a rock star. I would think the whole atmosphere would be in your blood.”

  “I appreciate that you care.” Alec kept his tone even. “But I have my reasons, and they even have to do with Joely. I want to be as perfect for her as I can be, so I can hold her up when she needs it. I’ve failed at that for so many people, so many times in my life that falling for her scares me to death. So, I refuse to be a person who hangs on to the old. Those days weren’t good for me. Rodeo had its turn in my life.”

  “Do you plan to marry her?”

  “What? I’ve known her a month. No, I’m barely learning to deserve her.”

  “Do you want to make love to her?”

  “Now, Sadie!” He spun on the bench and stared at the quiet old woman who didn’t look the least concerned at her breach in privacy. “That’s a little personal don’t you think?”

  She only smiled. “There are a lot of meanings for the phrase making love. The one thing every meaning has in common, however, is trust. And believe me, Alec. When it comes to trust, a woman doesn’t need you to be perfect or even strong. But she does need you to be whole.”

  “And that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Alec said.

  “You have done a better job than most making yourself whole on the outside. But you’re forgetting about the inside. I don’t believe you’ll be whole until you make peace with the rodeo. If you do that, then you can decide you never want to go again. Until then you aren’t ruling your decision, it’s ruling you.”

  “Sadie. I don’t know . . . ”

  “That’s all right. My lecture is done. So is my prying.” She patted his shoulders with her slightly gnarled fingers. “But I won’t apologize. Anyone who’s after one of my girls better be ready to prove himself worthy.”

  Sadie left him, slipping back into the shadows until all he could hear were her footsteps and cane on the deck steps returning to the house. He laughed almost in defeat. Prove himself worthy? He’d believed he wasn’t worthy from the moment he’d met Joely Crockett.

  Now he knew for sure.

  Ten minutes later he let himself into the house and headed to the living room. He came upon the group there, and he stopped for a moment, struck by the tableau. Harper, Cole, Mia, Gabe, Joely, Bella, and Sadie sat in a square made from chairs they’d shoved close together. Close as they were, they still leaned in toward each other. He vaguely heard references to somebody calling the triplets.

  They were quite a family.

  Family.

  Understanding slapped him in the face. They were family, and they pulled together. No matter how angry they’d once been at each other or how annoyed they got now—they bent their heads and came up with a plan.

  That’s what he no longer had—what he hadn’t been able to
save. When he’d failed to rescue Buzz; when his aunt and uncle had blamed him for coming back alive without the real son; when he’d lost his cousin, who’d been more like a brother, the person he’d really loved most—he’d been truly alone. No bent heads. No roots. No connection.

  Suddenly he got it. Why Joely wanted him at the damn rodeo so bad. She didn’t care about the rodeo itself. She didn’t want him there necessarily to see her participate. She was hoping to find her old self somewhere, and she was clinging to her family with all her might. She was trying to add him to it.

  He didn’t know if he could do that for her—become her family. He was only as sure as he’d ever been that he was able to mess up any family unlucky enough to take him in.

  Chapter Nineteen

  HE HADN’T HAD the dream in a long time. It was one of the indicators that his two years of therapy had been helpful—the nightmares had stopped. Tonight, however, he could see the surface of sleep through a field of fire and destruction, just out of reach, as if he had to swim through the pictures to reach wakefulness. He didn’t want to get anywhere near the fiery images, and he tried to stay under, to push further down, but the currents dragged him upward.

  “Alec, man, I’m sorry. I’m sorry we missed him. You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, of course.”

  “You want me to drive?”

  Tell him yes. Yes. Switch places with him goddammit.

  “Nope. No, it’s good, gives me something to concentrate on. Thanks.”

  Buzz was dead. Gone. No body, no hope. They’d missed him by a week. The insurgents had arrived the damn day he’d landed in the country. It had taken five precious days to start his job, contact his old unit, tell them what he knew. They’d taken him with them, against all regulations—a civilian embedded.

  “Alec you sure you okay, buddy?”

  He wasn’t fucking okay. But he needed to drive. He needed to hit every hateful pothole and . . .

  Screams tore into his ears before the shrapnel slammed his body. Light seared his eyes, took away all sight. How ironic was that? Darkness out of light. The world rotated way too quickly so many times he lost count at two. Or three. His head. His neck. God, his leg.

  “Pritch? Sandman? Morse?”

  Nothing.

  Petroleum. In his nose. In his mouth. And copper—an ugly vomit-inducing taste. He finally caught sight of an opening in the smoke. He tried to move. It worked. He wriggled free of his seatbelt. He noticed in passing that the steering wheel was gone. Huh. Convenient.

  “Morse? Pritch? Sandman?”

  He cleared the smoke field.

  He knew for sure he was dreaming. He could see the surface of his dream much closer now, and it made no sense to try to go back into deep sleep even though he knew what was coming.

  But the dream took a turn.

  Hands reached through the burning Humvee, like a ghost beckoning for him. Not the disembodied hands of Frank Pritchett and Harry Sands, but real, solid, living hands. Grabbing for him.

  He reached back, indescribably relieved for the help. Up and up he went until he woke above the chaos. Safe in his bedroom. Safe in front of Aunt Chris and Uncle Rick. “Thank heavens you were there,” he said. “Thank you. It’s so good to see you.”

  “How could you fail us?” Aunt Chris asked. “You promised you’d bring him back.”

  “You brought back the wrong son,” Uncle Rick said, sobbing violently into a tissue.

  Alec swiveled his head to take in his surroundings. It looked like his bedroom. What were they doing here?

  “I couldn’t bring him back.” He tried to touch his uncle’s shoulder, but he kept moving just out of reach. “They took his body and they . . . ”

  To this day he had no idea what the insurgents had done with the bodies of those they’d killed.

  “You promised,” Uncle Rick said. “You promised. You promised. You prom—”

  Alec awoke fully with a jolt that lifted his torso what felt like ten inches off the bed. He landed back into the mattress with an audible grunt and stared wildly around the room. His aunt and uncle were gone. He lay back, exhausted, and concentrated on yoga breathing. It was the only yoga he did or ever planned to do, but his therapist had insisted he learn three different techniques. They worked.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out this dream’s trigger.

  Your dead cousin? Joely had blurted earlier that night.

  He’d realized at her words that he never referred to his cousin as dead. He was Buzz. Past tense, yeah, but always as if he might, nonetheless, walk through the door any moment. But Buzz was dead, and even though Alec had given up rodeo in penance because it was his fault Buzz had lost it forever, too, he was very fuzzy at the moment as to what purpose a promise to a dead man served.

  Slowly the purpose solidified—it always solidified at some point—as the sleep cleared from his brain. The purpose was to pay his uncle back the only way he could. He’d only cried twice since Buzz’s death. Once at the funeral. The second time when he’d first faced his uncle after returning from Iraq and heard his fateful words.

  “You brought back the wrong son.”

  He’d cried because he’d agreed. At the very least, Alec should have turned over control of the Humvee to one of the others and been one of the passengers killed. He’d had no business driving as distracted as he’d been. Hell, maybe he’d have seen the damn IED if—

  He stopped the downward spiral of thoughts and climbed out of bed. This would not be his third time to cry. It also wasn’t a time to curl up and analyze the dream or face his fears as he’d been taught to do. He knew what he wanted, what he needed to do. He’d lost his family, but he had a chance to help Joely keep hers. If he loved her, he could help her reach her dreams. He could get her back to her rodeo.

  At six o’clock in the morning it was too early to call anyone to make plans, but he could start on his own. He dug out a map Gabe had given him of Paradise Ranch—a simplified drawing Harper had worked up for guests and students of her art classes and retreats who might want to take excursions deeper into the ranch. Minutes later he was engrossed in scoping out the geographical and physical features of the Crocketts’ land.

  “I’LL BE BACK at two!” Harper waved from her car and left Joely on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building.

  One nice thing about her sisters: now that Joely had her apartment set up, the other girls offered to help all the time but backed away if Joely claimed it wasn’t needed. She said she could walk with her crutches just fine to her front door, and Harper believed her. Other overprotective people, she thought with a little dart of desire through the stomach, weren’t so easy to get rid of.

  Alec.

  Not that wanted to get rid of him.

  In fact, she wished there was a way to get closer and break down the few but substantial walls he still lived behind. She didn’t know if he’d ever let them crack much less crumble, but she wasn’t ready to give up on him. And to be fair, she had her own walls. They were slightly more transparent than his, but solid nonetheless.

  She looked into the robin’s egg sky and squinted at the sugar-white clouds dotting it. Perfect kids’ clouds, she thought. The kind that made shapes. There was an elephant—it made her think of Rowan. She picked out an ice cream cone—that made her think of kissing Alec. One cloud looked like a . . . oh, for crying out loud, something that made her think about way more than kissing.

  She dropped her gaze quickly and turned for her house. She didn’t even want to think about making love with Alec. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. What she actually didn’t want to think about was him making love to her. Oh, crap. That wasn’t precisely true either.

  She reached her door and dug her key out of her purse. What she didn’t want to think about was him looking at her while they made love. She knew what he’d see—an underweight woman with anemic curves, breasts that were adequate but so far from her Miss Wyoming days it hurt to think about, one leg that had been flattene
d atop the thigh and crushed in the calf and was now striped with three, yard-long scars to match the meandering white and pink line on her face.

  Romance novels always fixed scars by having the man kiss them tenderly, thereby rendering them beautiful. That was the very last thing Joely wanted. In fact, she feared that reaction from Alec more than she did revulsion. She imagined herself nauseated at the first touch of his lips to any spot of twisted, shiny skin.

  But maybe he wouldn’t. He hadn’t done it yet. In all their amazing time together, he’d never once kissed or licked or otherwise paid attention to the scar on her cheek. Most of her wanted desperately to give him the chance not to notice them on the rest of her body, but the part of her that never wanted him to see her leg without pants was a tough, strong, fearful little part, and it had the rest of her cowed.

  Of course, there was also the possibility that, after yesterday, Alec wouldn’t want to see any part of her at all. In the words of her father’s favorite clichéd phrase, she’d been a piece of work all day.

  She seemed to have no control over her moods. She’d done better in full-time rehab and assisted living. Everything had run on a schedule. No thought. No stress. No crankiness.

  There had been depression—strong, deep, unclimbable cliff faces of depression. To her credit she’d never once considered ending her life, but she’d definitely considered moving to a monastery in Tibet and refusing all visitors.

  She pushed into her apartment and basked in the sweet surprise of familiarity. Hers. Her pictures on the wall. Her chosen pillows on the old sofa. Her table. Her bed.

  Bed again.

  Alec.

  Stop it!

  She laughed out loud at herself, but then it dawned on her that thinking about Alec and sex was depression-free fun. It was not anxiety-free, but it was definitely on the fun end of the emotional spectrum.

  And today was a better day, just as Alec had predicted. The whole thought of Eli Crockett’s unethical acquisition of his first piece of land still pained, but the sun was out and she had a long morning planned. There was no time to dwell on Paradise Ranch’s past.

  Instead she concentrated on repairing the damage from her huge, embarrassing whine fest the night before. If she wanted to stop whining, stop worrying about her future, stop having to rely on rides everywhere, she needed further independence. Independence required her own vehicle. To ever get one of those, she needed a job.