Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides)

by Anne McAllister

“What?” Sadie looked at Cole as if she’d been pole-axed. “Of course it will work! You and Nell—”

  “Let him finish,” Sam said sharply, never taking his eyes off Cole.

  Cole’s gaze locked with his. He gripped his fork and knife a little tighter as he took a breath and tried to say it as casually as possible. “We got married because it seemed like a good idea to both of us at the time.” He shrugged as if it had been nothing more than a lark. “You know what Reno’s like—it’s ... not the real world. Not my real world. It’s a long way from Marietta.” His mouth twisted. “Anyway, when I got home I decided I hadn’t been thinking straight. But there’s so much of my life tied up with the ranch ... And Nell has a life, too. Hell, you saw it! She’s clever, smart, talented. She can be a success anywhere. I’m here.”

  The last two words dropped like stones into the silence. He didn’t mean them as some sort of accusation, just as a statement of fact. “I’ve always expected—wanted—to stay here, take over the ranch. I’ve got ... responsibilities.” He gave a light shrug.

  “Responsibilities,” Sam almost spat the word. “You had me havin’ a heart attack while you were still gone,” he said, his tone redolent with self-disgust. “And that’s why you decided.”

  “That didn’t have anything to do with it,” Cole protested.

  “The hell it didn’t.” Sam picked up his knife and thwacked it back down on his plate for emphasis. “Look me in the eye and say that.” He narrowed his gaze further in Cole’s direction. “Lie to me again and I swear I’ll still take you to the woodshed.”

  “Like to see you try,” Cole said mildly.

  Sam shoved his chair back.

  “Stop it, both of you,” Gran cut in. Her voice was as mild as Cole’s, but neither he nor Sam were fooled. Emily McCullough might speak softly, but you didn’t want to rile her. The food would be awful for weeks to come. There would be no clean bedding. No laundry done. Worst of all, no conversation either. Except Sadie. God knew he and Sam never talked unless spoken to, and Emily McCullough didn’t talk when she was mad.

  As she’d told Cole when he was ten, “I might regret something I’d say. Better to say nothing.” So that was what she did. Weeks of disapproving silence from Em didn’t bear thinking about.

  Now she pointed a finger at her son. “You didn’t have your heart attack on purpose to make Cole shoulder all the responsibility of the ranch. So you can stop blaming yourself. And you—” the finger moved from Sam to Cole “— have always done more than your share. You’re a blessing, Cole. But you don’t have to shoulder the whole world by yourself. We’re your family. We love you. We can help. We want to help.”

  “I know that,” he protested, shaking his head. “You do help. We all help. But we’re here. On the ranch. In the middle of nowhere. I didn’t think it was fair to her to ask her to give up what she has to come back here.”

  “So are you leaving?” Trust Sadie to cut to the chase.

  “No,” Cole said sharply. “I’m not going anywhere. Nell is. She’s finishing up the show—coming here in May for the last episode—then wrapping everything up and moving back to the ranch.”

  “Really? So ... you really are ... staying married?” Sadie asked cautiously.

  He nodded.

  “She’s quitting?” Sam looked stunned, as astonished as Cole had been when Nell had vowed she would do so,

  He took a breath and let it out slowly, then met each of their gazes in turn. “That’s what she says.”

  Nell told Grant she was married.

  She told him she would finish up the last episodes on The Compatibility Game and then she was quitting. She said she was giving up her career and moving back to Montana to live on the ranch he’d thought was a perfect reality TV location.

  “So it does have indoor plumbing?” he asked, which proved that at least he’d heard her.

  But he didn’t believe a word she said.

  “Sure,” he said, blowing her off every time she mentioned her impending departure, and if she pressed him, he just said, “No time now, Corbett.”

  They didn’t need time, Nell wanted to tell him. He needed to hear what she was saying. He didn’t believe her any more than Cole had.

  Well, his loss, she decided. She told the cameramen. She told Judy who worked in the office as The Person Who Kept Grant Organized If Not Sane. And as often as she could, she told Cole.

  While they were apart, all five and a half weeks, she tried to call him every day. Some days she got through. Most days she got voice mail and left a message. Occasionally he got the messages and actually called back.

  Every time they talked she said she missed him and she loved him. He said the pups were getting bigger and friskier, that the crocuses were blooming or the daffodils were or they might see tulips before the month was out. The weather was warmer most days, he told her. He said that last week they’d had eight inches of snow or it had sleeted during the night. He told her that Gran had bought some tomato plants for the garden but she wasn’t putting them in yet, that Jane had brought Gran a bouquet of ‘store-bought flowers’ for Mother’s Day.

  “She and Sam are definitely ...”

  “Definitely what?” Nell prodded when he didn’t finish.

  “Definitely ... together.” The notion seemed to make him squirm. As Jane was probably only five or six years older than he was, Nell supposed Cole might be having trouble coming to terms with that. “What’s she thinking?” he demanded.

  Nell wasn’t sure Jane was thinking. She seemed more likely to be feeling. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Maybe she loves him.”

  “Yeah, but—” He didn’t finish that thought either.

  “Like I love you,” Nell said for the second time that call, determined to make him say it. He could say it easily enough when they were face to face.

  But now there was a pause, seconds of dead air during which she envisioned him glancing around to make sure no one was listening before he said gruffly, “I love you, too.”

  She smiled. “I’ll see you Sunday. The plane gets in a little after four.”

  The pause wasn’t nearly as long this time. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  She should have told Cole not to come.

  Not because she didn’t want to see him. She’d been dying to see him since the day she’d left him back in April. But there was so much to do getting ready from the minute she got off the plane. There were trucks to rent, equipment to pick up, last minute discussions with the cameramen and the rest of the crew as well as with the talent that Nell barely had time to throw her arms around Cole while they waited for the luggage.

  The sight of him standing there at the bottom of the stairway, looking handsome and rangy and oh so much a man of the land, made her heart kick over. Being swept into his arms was the best thing that had happened since the night she’d made love with him.

  Yet she ended up apologizing almost as soon as she finished kissing him. “I’ve got to pick up gear,” she told him. “And then we’ve got meetings. I need to know what your plans are for branding. Can you spare the time to meet with us tonight or tomorrow?”

  Cole said he could do that, and he helped carry luggage and tracked down the trucks they were renting, then said, “Let them drive over. You can come with me.”

  And she wanted to—desperately—but Len, the main cameraman, hadn’t been with them the last time they were here. And he hadn’t been around back in L.A. this past week. He’d been on another assignment in Barbados. He’d asked to talk with her on the way from the airport to Marietta so she could catch him up. She had had to say yes.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Cole, her hand on his arm as it had been ever since she’d arrived. She’d barely let go of him, needing to feel his solid strength, his very presence, right there within her reach.

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a crew cab. He can ride with us.”

  “Do you mind?” she asked worriedly, certain this wasn’t how her homecoming was supp
osed to go as far as he was concerned.

  But Cole just grinned. “Would I rather have you to myself? Hell, yes. But you know what you have to do. It’s your responsibility. This is your work. I understand all about that.”

  Nell knew how true that was.

  So when Len got in, she invited him to come along with them back to Marietta. The weather was cool but sunny. It was springtime in the Rockies now. Everything was turning green, the trees were coming into leaf, though the snow was still heavy on the peaks of the Bridgers. She would have loved to savor it all, to sit next to Cole, reach over and touch him at will, steal a kiss just because he was here and so was she, and she’d wanted to ever since she’d left him six weeks ago.

  But Len was ready to talk shop, and so all the way back to Marietta they discussed plans and compared notes. Having Cole there actually turned out to be a plus in a way she hadn’t expected. Whenever questions came up she could ask him. He answered questions about the branding, which she’d never seen in person. He told them about working the cattle, vaccinating and castrating as well as branding.

  “It’s a one-stop shop,” Cole told her. “Do everything that needs doing at once. Better for everyone.”

  Nell realized not for the first time that she was a city girl deep down. But when she’d said that to Cole’s grandmother back in March when they were discussing delivering a calf, Em had said, “Well, yes. But you adjust. If you want to, that is.”

  Em hadn’t known then that Nell and Cole were married, so she hadn’t been giving advice. Or had she? Did she see something going on between them? Nell got the feeling that Em didn’t miss much. And she wondered what Em would have to say to her now that she knew they were married. She’d asked Cole what they’d said when he’d told them.

  “They seemed happy enough,” he had said with typical Cole understatement. But then he’d added, “She was disappointed we hadn’t invited them to the wedding.”

  When she thought about it, Nell was disappointed about that, too. She had disappointed her own parents by her precipitous Reno marriage. She’d called them and told them the same time Cole had told Em and Sam and Sadie. They were in Norway at the moment. Her architecture professor dad, on sabbatical from MSU for the semester, was doing research on stave churches, and her mother was sketching as she always did when they traveled. Then she’d come home and translate whatever she’d sketched into a year or two of painting or collage or etching. It was a wonderfully workable arrangement. They’d taught and traveled and sketched and painted and raised six kids doing so. They were flexible. They adjusted.

  But they would have liked to have come to her wedding.

  “Did we do something wrong?” her mother asked tentatively.

  “Of course not!” Nell had protested. “I did. We should have waited. We were just—”

  “In love,” her mother finished for her, and Nell could hear the smile in her voice. “I understand. Dad and I did the same.”

  Nell smiled in recollection. Her parents and siblings could generally be counted on to be supportive and understanding. She wasn’t quite as sure about Cole’s family. But she couldn’t ask him, not with Len in the truck. Now they had to talk about business.

  And she would have to find out how Em really felt about their marriage on her own.

  The rest of the crew had already arrived at the Graff by the time they got there. Len hopped out of Cole’s truck and went straight in to the registration desk. “Go on,” Nell said. “I’ll catch up.” Then she turned to Cole. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I have meetings,” she told him, feeling guilty.

  But Cole just nodded. “Of course you do. It’s what you’re here for. Know when you’ll finish? I’ll come and get you.”

  “We’re going out to the ranch for a rundown with the cast when we’re done here. Em said she’d feed everyone.” She half expected him to say he had things to do.

  But he surprised her. “I’ll see you there.” Then he leaned close and kissed her and she caught a hint of the scents of leather and earth and something that was undefinably Cole. She breathed it in eagerly, wanting to skip the meetings, skip the TV show, skip everything but the man she had missed so much.

  He’d missed her, too. She could feel it in his kiss. It was hungry, almost urgent. A much more thorough kiss than the one he’d given her at the airport. This kiss laid a claim and made a promise, and, like Cole, it said so much more than his words ever did.

  She broke it reluctantly, then got out, shut the door and reached into the back of the pickup to grab her suitcase.

  “Leave it there,” Cole said through the open window of the cab. “I’ll take it home.”

  “Home?” Nell said stupidly.

  “The cabin,” Cole told her. “It’s mine, remember. Ours,” he corrected. There was the smallest curve of a smile on his face. “I’ve got to stay there. No reason you shouldn’t. Is there?”

  Be husband and wife? Actually live together? Starting now?

  “No,” Nell said. She’d been so consumed with getting the work side of her life taken care of, she hadn’t considered the possibility. Now she beamed at him. “No reason at all.”

  He winked and gave a quick sharp nod of his head. His eyes said more. “I’ll see you later then.”

  Yes, definitely a promise.

  It was like taking your dad, your wife’s work and eight Border Collie puppies with you on your honeymoon.

  No, it wasn’t like that. It was that.

  Sam, of course, was there because he couldn’t stay at the ranch house. There wasn’t room. Well, there would have been if Maggie and Beth could have been convinced to share. But even though they were the only two left since Amy had married Keith and dropped out of contention, and Bella was gone because Hawaii’s surf had seduced Seth and they’d split up, Maggie still ‘sprawled and Beth still ‘liked her privacy.’ And Jane was out of town at some Chambers of Commerce convention so he wasn’t with her.

  Nell’s work was, of course, self-explanatory. It was what she was doing eighteen hours a day, the reason she was on the ranch at all.

  And the puppies ... well, they were eight weeks old now. Rambunctious, busy little critters who needed homes and a herd of sheep to keep them happy. Sal’s maternal instincts were fast deserting her. She wanted to get back to work.

  Cole figured he might as well.

  He made love with Nell that first night after the nearly interminable meetings at the ranch house were over. But they’d been circumspect and very quiet because, good grief, Sam was in the next room.

  Every night after that Nell was practically asleep before her head hit the pillow. Cole understood why. She worked flat out all day and all evening. And most days she got up earlier than he did to run over the day’s shooting in the notes she kept. She wanted everything to be perfect.

  “My swan song,” she had told him one night when she’d sat up going over and over one part of a sequence until she figured out just the tone she wanted. She gave him a little apologetic shrug. Was her tone wistful?

  It should be. She was damned good at what she did. He didn’t have to stand over her watching her all day long to be able to tell that. He didn’t have time to do that, of course, because his own work demanded attention. But he could tell just from the snatches he did see. He could tell she was good from the respect the crew gave her and from the attention that Mac and Maggie and Chandler and Beth paid to everything she said. He could tell from the hours she spent going over the dailies in that shelter behind the noisy generator truck that was taking up a huge amount of space behind the barn.

  And if his own observance didn’t make it clear, the number of phone calls she both took and didn’t take from her boss should have made the point. He called on her 24/7 to run ideas past her for not only The Compatibility Game, but also for a new show he was contemplating, something exotic and exciting in the far corners of the world. Sometimes she answered.

  “I have to,” she said wryly. “He’s still my boss.”
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br />   But sometimes she let it go to voice mail, like last night when she’d had her hands in Cole’s back pockets and her breasts pressed against his chest and was kissing him with the intent of melting him right down, which Cole didn’t mind at all.

  “He doesn’t own me,” she said firmly when her phone vibrated in her pocket between them. It was nearly midnight. It was Grant, no doubt. Who else would it be? “Not twenty-four hours a day,” she murmured against Cole’s lips.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Cole murmured right back, attempting to ignore the phone’s vibration in the interest of his own personal vibrations.

  But when Grant wanted something, he was difficult to ignore. And the fourth time in succession that the vibrations started over, Nell had yanked the phone out of her jeans pocket. “He’s not going to quit. Let me talk to him and then I’ll shut the phone off.”

  She did both. But when she finally got off the phone—and she hadn’t been all that charming to Grant, Cole had to admit—the mood was gone anyway. It was nearly one. They had to be up before five.

  Cole wanted to count the days until it was over—but he didn’t know how many more there were.

  He took Mac and Chandler riding fence, taught them how to stretch and staple and splice and repair barbed wire. All the while he was doing it, though, he was aware of Nell watching, directing the shooting and, somehow, managing to get more of him than of Mac and Chandler until Len said, “Let me get some closeups of those guys’ expressions.”

  Mac was intent and deliberate and quickly mastered what needed to be done. “It’s muscle memory,” he said with a grin. “I’ve spent my life dealing with people who’d as soon jab you as look at you. And then there’s Maggie.” His grin widened as it did every time he mentioned her these days.

  Cole had noticed a difference in them this visit. Mac had lost his cell phone—or at least his interest in using it—shortly after he’d help Cole deliver those twin calves back in March. “Holding honest-to-God new life in your hands,” he said, “is a little more immediate. Made me think about what really matters.” He’d said that at the end of the first episode they’d shot on the ranch, and then he’d glanced across the yard, and the camera had cut to a shot of Maggie.