Marriage, Maverick Style!

by Christine Rimmer

  THE MAVERICK MEETS HER MATCH

  RUST CREEK RAMBLINGS

  As summer arrives in Rust Creek Falls, the town is bursting with babies…and the Gazette is bursting with news. Did you hear there’s a new billionaire in town? President and CEO of Drake Distilleries and Drake Hospitality, Carson Drake is no one’s baby daddy...at least, not yet. But the handsome, delicious Los Angeleno has his eye on our own Tessa Strickland, and things are about to get very interesting...

  Sweet, serious Tessa has had firsthand experience with heartbreak and is determined to avoid a second go-round. But after one unexpected night in Carson’s sheltering arms, she begins to waver. Dear readers, that’s only the beginning of the surprises. Saddle up and find out what happens when two commitment-phobes discover that love is life’s richest reward!

  “You want us to be exclusive? That is what you’re talking about here, right?”

  She groaned at that. “See? I’m a mess when it comes to this relationship stuff. I just asked you to be my friend and ten minutes later I’m grilling you about other women, making you think I’m demanding exclusivity.”

  “But you do want exclusivity, don’t you?” He had no doubt that she did. “See, that’s the thing, Tessa. You have to tell me what you want.”

  She blew out her cheeks with a hard breath. “Well, how about if you could be exclusive for the next two weeks, anyway?”

  Carson tried not to grin. “Even though we’re just friends?”

  She covered her face with her hands. “We shouldn’t even be talking about this right now. It’s too early to be talking about this.”

  He suggested, “How about this? I promise not to seduce any strange women for the next two weeks—present company excluded.”

  She let her hands drop to her lap, revealing bright spots of red high on her cheeks. “Maybe you shouldn’t warn me ahead that you’ll be trying to seduce me.”

  “Why not? We both know that I will, so the least I can do is be honest about it.”

  Montana Mavericks: The Baby Bonanza—Meet Rust Creek Falls’ newest bundles of joy!

  Dear Reader,

  Neither Tessa Strickland nor Carson Drake has time for love—or babies. But one night of forbidden passion is about to change their minds—and hearts—forever.

  Carson Drake has been in Rust Creek Falls, Montana, for two weeks. He’s trying to track down the small town’s eccentric moonshine-maker, Homer Gilmore. Carson wants to bottle Homer’s famous moonshine and sell it all over the world. But he can’t even get a meeting with Homer. Carson’s considering heading back home to Los Angeles. He’s not a big fan of small towns, anyway. He loves the big-city life.

  And then he meets Tessa.

  Tessa Strickland has been there and done that with hot, dynamic alpha males like Carson Drake. She vows to stay away from him. Right now, she only wants a chance to live a settled, family-centered, happy life right there in Rust Creek Falls.

  But the charming tycoon is irresistible. What can it hurt to spend a sunny holiday afternoon at his side? They’ll enjoy each other’s company and then he’ll return to the big city while she remains in the small town she loves...

  Happy reading everyone,

  Marriage, Maverick Style!

  Christine Rimmer

  Christine Rimmer came to her profession the long way around. She tried everything from acting to teaching to telephone sales. Now she’s finally found work that suits her perfectly. She insists she never had a problem keeping a job—she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine lives with her family in Oregon. Visit her at christinerimmer.com.

  Books by Christine Rimmer

  Harlequin Special Edition

  The Bravos of Justice Creek

  Carter Bravo’s Christmas Bride

  The Good Girl’s Second Chance

  Not Quite Married

  The Bravo Royales

  A Bravo Christmas Wedding

  The Earl’s Pregnant Bride

  The Prince’s Cinderella Bride

  Holiday Royale

  How to Marry a Princess

  Her Highness and the Bodyguard

  The Rancher’s Christmas Princess

  Bravo Family Ties

  A Bravo Homecoming

  Marriage, Bravo Style!

  Donovan’s Child

  Expecting the Boss’s Baby

  Montana Mavericks: What Happened at the Wedding?

  The Maverick’s Accidental Bride

  Montana Mavericks: 20 Years in the Saddle!

  Million-Dollar Maverick

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  For MSR, always.

  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

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Riverbend Road by RaeAnne Thayne

  Chapter One

  Carson Drake was ready to go home to LA.

  As president and CEO of both Drake Distilleries and Drake Hospitality, Carson enjoyed luxury cars, willing, sophisticated women and very old Scotch, not necessarily in that order. As for small country towns where everybody knew everybody and every holiday included flag-waving and a parade?

  Didn’t thrill him in the least.

  So what, really, was he doing here on the town hall steps in a tiny dot on the Montana map called Rust Creek Falls? Carson pondered that question as he watched the Rust Creek Falls Baby Bonanza Memorial Day Parade wander by. All around him flags waved. And there were babies. A whole bunch of babies.

  Carson had nothing against babies. As long they belonged to someone else, babies were fine with him. But did he have any interest in watching a parade that featured babies?

  The answer would be no.

  Beside him, Ryan Roarke, a lawyer and Carson’s friend of several years, said, “That’s Emmet DePaulo.” Ryan waved at a tall, thin older man on the Rust Creek Falls Medical Clinic float as it rolled by. The man was dressed in a white coat and had a stethoscope slung around his neck. “Emmet runs the local clinic with the help of Callie Crawford, who’s—”

  “Nate Crawford’s wife, I remember,” Carson finished for him. The Crawfords were one of the town’s first families. Nate had a lot of influence in Rust Creek Falls, which meant he was someone Carson had made it a point to get to know.

  Not that all the connections he’d forged in the past two weeks had done him much good, Carson thought glumly as he settled into a slouch against one of the pillars that flanked the steps. It had been a crazy idea, anyway. And he shouldn’t let his lack of progress get him down. Not every gamble ended up in the win column. Sometimes a man simply had
to accept that he was out of his element and going nowhere fast.

  Carson was no quitter, but the plan wasn’t happening. He needed to—

  His mind went dead blank as he shoved off the pillar and snapped to his full height.

  Who’s that? he almost demanded of Ryan.

  But he shut his mouth over the eager words and simply stared instead.

  Damn. She was something. Just the sight of her had emptied his brain of rational thought and slammed all his senses straight into overload.

  She rode one of the floats and was dressed as a stork. Had anyone asked him a moment before if a woman in a stork costume could be hot, he would have laughed. But she was hot.

  Her thick brown hair poked out from under the long orange stork bill, escaping the white fluffy stork hood to curl around her flushed cheeks. She was perched on a box covered in white cotton batting—to make it look like a cloud, he assumed. In her wings, she held a tiny squalling baby wrapped up in a blue blanket. Her slim legs, encased in orange tights, ended in platterlike webbed orange feet. She should have looked ridiculous—and she did.

  Ridiculous. Adorable.

  And hot.

  Giant pink-and-blue letters sprinkled with glitter proclaimed the float “The Rust Creek Falls Gazette.”

  “That’s Kayla, Kristen’s twin,” Ryan said, which made zero sense to Carson.

  But then he ordered his brain to start working again and noticed the other woman standing beside his beautiful stork. Rigged out to look like the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch high and wearing a pageant-style sash that read, “The Rust Creek Rambler,” Miss Liberty waved and smiled as the float drifted past. She was the one Ryan had just called Kayla. Carson deduced this because the woman with the torch was a double for Ryan’s wife, Kristen.

  Ryan kept talking. “Kayla is the recently outed mystery gossip columnist known as—”

  “Judging by the sash, I’m thinking the Rust Creek Rambler?”

  “Right. Kayla had us all fooled. No one suspected she could be the one who knew everyone’s secrets and put them in the Gazette. Kayla’s quiet, you know? She’s the shy one. Nothing like my Kristen.”

  Carson tuned his friend out. The sweet stork with the wailing blue bundle had all his attention once again.

  As he stared, she actually seemed to feel his gaze on her; her slim body went perfectly still. Then, slowly, she turned her white, billed head his way—and bam! Just like in some sappy, romantic movie, their eyes collided and locked. And damned if it didn’t feel exactly as they always made it seem in the movies. As though she had reached out and touched him. As though they’d just shared a private, way-too-intimate conversation.

  As if they were the only two people in the world.

  He gaped, and she stared back at him with her sweet mouth hanging open, clearly oblivious in that moment to everything but him, though the band across the street played loudly and badly and some kid nearby had set off a chain of firecrackers and the baby in her arms continued to wail.

  What was it about her?

  Carson couldn’t have said. Maybe it was those big, shining eyes, or that slightly frantic look on her incomparable face—a face that reminded him of his perfect girl-next-door fantasy and some bold gypsy woman, both at the same time. Maybe it was the stork costume. Most of the women he knew wouldn’t be caught dead dressed as a stork.

  But whatever it was about her that had him gaping like a lovesick fool, he had to meet her.

  Her float rolled on past. Next came the Veterans of Foreign Wars float, with men and women in uniform holding babies in camo and waving way too many flags. As the band launched into “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” Carson tried to figure out what had just happened to him.

  Slowly, reality crept in—reality wrapped in a blue blanket and wailing.

  The woman had a baby, for God’s sake. Carson liked his women free and unencumbered. And there was not only the baby to consider but also the real possibility of a husband.

  Was he losing his mind? He would never make a move on a woman with a baby. If she had a husband that would simply be wrong. And if she didn’t, well, there would still be the baby. If he’d wanted kids, he wouldn’t be divorced.

  You’d think he’d been sampling the magic moonshine that had brought him to Montana in the first place, the magic moonshine created by a local eccentric named Homer Gilmore. Carson wanted the moonshine formula for Drake Distilleries. So far, he’d gotten nowhere near his admittedly out-there goal.

  Which was why he’d just about convinced himself to give up and go home.

  But the sight of the girl changed all that. The sight of the girl had him thinking that he didn’t really want to give up. He just needed something to go right; that was all. He needed a win.

  Meeting the adorable girl in the stork costume would definitely cheer him up, even with the damn baby—as long as there was no husband involved.

  So then. First and foremost, he needed to find out if she was already taken.

  At least that was easily done.

  He asked Ryan, “Did you see the girl in the stork costume?”

  Ryan gave it right up. “Tessa Strickland. Lives in Bozeman. She’s visiting her grandparents at their boardinghouse.”

  Tessa. It suited her. “Married to...?”

  Ryan shot Carson a narrow-eyed, you-can’t-fool-a-lawyer look. “You’re interested in Tessa. Why?”

  “Ryan, is she married or not?”

  His friend shoved back that shock of sable hair that was always falling over his forehead. “Tessa’s single.”

  “But with a baby.”

  “You are interested.”

  “Would that somehow be a problem?”

  Ryan smirked. “No problem at all. And Tessa’s got no baby.” She’s single, no baby. Things were definitely looking up. Ryan added, “The baby is Kayla’s—you remember, Kristen’s sister, the Rust Creek Rambler in the Lady Liberty costume?”

  Not that it really mattered but... “How do you know who that baby belongs to?”

  “I will repeat, Tessa doesn’t have a baby, whereas Kayla is married to Trey Strickland, and they have a son. Little Gilmore is just two months old. Kayla gave up her job writing the gossip column last year. She and Trey live down in Thunder Canyon now, but they come back to visit often. Somebody else writes the Rambler column now. Nobody knows who, but apparently someone talked Kayla into riding on the float. For old time’s sake would be my guess.”

  “Props to you, man. You’re here six months and you know everything about everyone.”

  Ryan extended both arms wide. “Welcome to my new hometown.” Actually, Ryan and Kristen lived in nearby Kalispell, but why quibble over mere facts? And Ryan was smirking again. “The baby’s named Gilmore. Get it?”

  Carson stared at him, deadpan. “You’re not serious.”

  “As a guilty verdict.”

  “They named their baby after Homer Gilmore?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Who names their kid after a crazy old homeless guy?”

  Ryan leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Kayla and Trey first got together last Fourth of July...” He arched a dark eyebrow as he let the sentence trail off.

  Carson took his meaning. “You’re telling me that they ‘got together’ over a glass of Homer’s moonshine and in the biblical sense?”

  “You said it—I didn’t.” The previous Fourth of July, a lot of women had drunk the famous moonshine, left their inhibitions behind and ended up pregnant—thus, the current Baby Bonanza. Ryan added, “As for why Tessa was holding Kayla’s baby, I’m guessing that managing the torch and the baby was too much for Kayla, so she got Tessa to carry Gil—and you’re definitely interested. Just admit it.”

  “I have another question.”

 
“Carson. Admit it.”

  “Wait. Listen. Kayla’s husband is a Strickland, you said, same as Tessa. So then, Trey Strickland must be Tessa’s brother, right?”

  “Wrong. Trey and Tessa are cousins and—Carson, what are you up to here? We’ve been friends a long time. I’m happy to introduce you around and tell you everything you need to know. But you’ve got to be up front with me. I care about what happens in this town. What do you want with Tessa?”

  Carson met Ryan’s eyes—and admitted the truth. “I think she’s gorgeous, and I want to meet her. Is there something wrong with that?”

  Ryan made a low, self-satisfied sound. “I knew it. Rust Creek Falls is getting under your skin.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. You’re just like the rest of us.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Oh, yeah. You’ll fall in love with Tessa, and you’ll never want to leave.”

  Carson had to make an effort not to scoff. “I just want to meet the girl. Can you make that happen?”

  “Consider it done.”

  * * *

  Tessa rocked the crying baby and ordered her racing heart to slow down.

  But baby Gil kept right on bawling, and Tessa’s heart kept beating way too fast and much too hard. Dear God, she was horrible with babies. They were so small and vulnerable and she always felt like she was holding them wrong. And boy, did little Gil have a set of lungs on him. How could someone so tiny make such a racket?

  “Shh now, it’s okay. Shh, sweetie, shh...” She tried to sound soothing as her heart galloped a mile a minute and a voice in her brain ordered her to toss the baby to his mother, leap right down off the moving float and run away from Main Street as fast as her webbed feet would carry her.

  She really did need to get out of there. And she needed to do it ASAP, before he found her—and, no, she didn’t know him. She’d never seen the man before in her life. She had no idea who he was or what he was doing in town.

  What she did know, what she’d known at the first sight of him, was that he would be looking for her.