CULLEN'S BRIDE

by Fiona Brand

  Rachel swallowed on a surge of anguish. She'd been so sure her reaction to Cullen this afternoon had stemmed from her own emotional vulnerability, that the soulless lawyer's letter had been the key. When she next saw him, she'd expected to feel embarrassed by her adolescent overreaction. She hadn't expected the attraction to deepen. A tendril of fear curled in her stomach. She'd barely recovered from Adam. The thought of plunging headlong into another relationship, when she knew she wasn't anywhere near ready to try again, turned the fear into a tight, cold knot of panic.

  "Hey, Cul," Dane croaked. "How 'bout that? Grapes."

  Rachel straightened and moved back a step, resisting the urge to put even more space between herself and Cullen. Resisting the urge to snatch up her holdall and flat-out run. "You probably won't be able to eat them yet," she said in a voice that was too husky, too abrupt.

  As if sensing her uncertainty, the raw panic churning in her stomach, Cullen took the bag of grapes from her without so much as brushing her fingers with his and placed it on Dane's bedside cabinet. "He'll appreciate them in a day or two."

  Rachel took another step backward. "If there's anything else I can do…?"

  Cullen tracked her retreat, and, if anything, his expression became even grimmer. "You've already helped more than most people would ever dream of doing."

  Rachel stiffened. Despite her need to escape, the dismissive quality of Cullen's voice rankled. Evidently he'd pigeonholed her as thoroughly as Cole thought he had—as a soft city creature playing at living in the country. The kind of woman who needed to be protected from anything too rough or earthy. Rachel checked her watch, and relief that she could leave warred with the sudden inexplicable need to prove to Cullen that she wasn't made of spun glass. But the thirty minutes were nearly up, and while she had no qualms about ignoring her brother's dictates, she didn't want a scene in front of a ward full of sick people. "I have to go. Can I come see you again, Dane?"

  Dane tried to smile and ended up wincing instead. "You don' have to bring anything next time."

  "But I will," she said firmly, resisting the urge to glance at Cullen, to challenge his assumptions about her. "What do you need? Books? A magazine? Some more fruit?"

  "Maybe a magazine. 'Bout horses."

  "Horses?" This time Rachel did glance at Cullen, and even though she was prepared, the cool power of his gaze still sent a minor shockwave rippling through her. "If you don't mind back issues, I can bring you a whole pile. Cole's got an office overflowing with them."

  Dane thanked her, but she hardly heard him, her awareness was so attuned to Cullen. With a blank goodbye and an even blanker smile, she retrieved her holdall and turned, only to be confronted by a beefy, older man who'd just come to a halt at the foot of the bed.

  "Trask," Cullen said in a rumble so low it lifted all the hairs at her nape.

  "Logan," the man snarled in return. "What the hell are you doin' here?"

  Rachel felt Cullen's heat all down her back. "Making sure your boy's all right."

  "Dane doesn't need your kind of help. He's got his family to look out for him."

  Dane's father switched his attention to her. The cold aggression of his stare had Rachel's hand tightening involuntarily on the strap of her bag. Almost without conscious thought she twisted the strap once around her wrist and firmed her grip again.

  "Who's she?" Trask snapped.

  He didn't speak to Rachel but directed the question at Cullen, as if he disdained women. As if she belonged to Cullen and he answered for her. Rachel's chin shot up, but Cullen moved before she could, brushing past her and planting himself directly in front of her so his broad back obscured most of Dane's father from her view.

  "None of your business, Trask," Cullen replied. "Just like the boy in that hospital bed is none of your business."

  "She's the one, isn't she? The bitch who's getting my boy into trouble."

  "Get out," Cullen said softly. "Before I call the police and lay a complaint of harassment."

  "You wouldn't do that," Trask said with a sneer, but he backed off all the same. Weight for weight, there probably wasn't much to choose between them, but Cullen was a good six inches taller, and his body was tightly, sleekly muscled, while Trask wore his weight mostly around his middle.

  "Dane may have let you off the hook," Cullen warned coldly, "but don't make the mistake of believing I will."

  Trask backed off another step. Rachel could see him clearly now. His gaze kept darting from the door to his son's bed. "I'm entitled to see my own son!"

  Cullen shifted again—trying to block her from Trask's view she realised, as if he didn't want the man to see her or to even remember she'd been here. "Not if you've come to threaten him."

  Trask swore loudly enough to alert anyone in the ward who wasn't already aware of the tense situation. "I'll see you when you get home," he snarled at Dane, stabbing a finger toward his son; then he turned on his heel and swaggered out.

  Rachel let out a shaky breath as Cullen's hands curled around her upper arms. She knew what he was seeing, the same white-faced bewilderment she'd shown him in the alley.

  "You all right?" he asked, a disturbing intimacy in the rasp of his voice, the way he kept holding her.

  Just when Rachel wondered if he was going to release her, his hands tightened, then slid away, as if he'd liked the texture of her skin and hadn't wanted to let her go.

  "I'm fine." She forced a smile.

  "Were you going to use that?"

  She followed Cullen's wry glance. Her holdall strap was still looped taut around her wrist, her fingers clenched on the rough braid, ready to swing the makeshift weapon if she needed to. She eased her grip. "It worked once before."

  The wryness disappeared from Cullen's expression. "It won't work on him, babe. Trust me. Frank Trask brawls just to fill in time. He's as poisonous as they come and knows every dirty trick there is. Promise me you won't ever get yourself in a situation where you're alone with him."

  "I'm not likely to—"

  "Promise me."

  Rachel shivered at the raw demand in Cullen's voice. She didn't think he even realised he'd called her "babe." "I promise."

  Cullen held her gaze for a moment longer, then, as if realising how intense they'd got, he gestured toward the chair. "Maybe you should sit down. There's water on the cabinet if you need a drink."

  Rachel checked her watch again. More than thirty minutes had passed now, and the last thing any of them needed was for her possessive older brother to come striding down the ward. "I should go. Cole's waiting. Besides, Dane's the one who needs the attention."

  Beneath all the bruising and bandaging, Dane looked even paler, and he was carefully refraining from meeting her gaze.

  "I'll walk you to your car," Cullen said curtly.

  It was a flat statement, delivered with complete male assurance that his protection was required and she would submit. Rachel almost made a tart comment at the familiarity and the exasperation of it, but in this case she fully agreed. Trask had scared her. There had been a feral coldness to him, a lack of humanity, that had disturbed her more than she liked to admit. Cullen would walk her to her car.

  On the way through the ward, he waylaid an orderly, sending him along to sit with Dane in case Trask came back while Cullen was away.

  "What will you do when you can't be here?" she asked as Cullen held a swing door open for her.

  "The ward sister's already aware of Dane's situation." His mouth twitched in an almost smile as he fell into step beside her. "If he gets past her again, he's a better man than I am. In any case, I don't think Trask will risk anything in front of witnesses. He prefers to use his fists when he knows he won't have to answer for it."

  Rachel dragged her gaze from Cullen's mouth. It had been a near thing, that twitch at the corners, and she'd wanted to keep watching, certain that he was on the verge of smiling. But then, maybe not, she amended fiercely. All brain function had almost ground to a halt as it was. If he smiled, she
would probably turn into a full-fledged idiot.

  As they passed the women's surgical ward, Rachel recognised the Reeses, mother and daughter, walking toward them. No doubt visiting Edna Simms and her new hip. Her stomach tightened. She was doing her best to desensitize herself to the gossip that was as much a part of Riverbend as any of the local shops, but the process was unexpectedly difficult. It was unfortunate that the Reeses carried such clout. Isobel Reese was related to half the influential people in town and liked everyone to know it. She'd made a point of informing Rachel that Richard Hayward, the local solicitor Rachel had used when purchasing the salon, was her nephew.

  "Murphy's law," she muttered in resignation.

  "What can go wrong, always does," Cullen affirmed in a soft aside, the amusement in his slanting look startling her. She had a sudden vision of him as a wild, go-to-hell boy thumbing his nose at anyone who tried to put him down.

  "Mrs. Reese," he drawled, as both ladies were about to sweep past them without any visible signs of recognition, then with an ironic tilt to his straight, dark brows, "Eleanor."

  Mrs. Reese replied with stiff correctness, flustered colour forming on her plump cheeks. Eleanor muttered a hello, not bothering to acknowledge Rachel's greeting—her attention was all for Cullen, and she was so busy taking in the view she scarcely noticed that her mother was recovering from Cullen's full-frontal, bad-boy charm attack and was doing a rapid shift into high dudgeon mode.

  It wasn't until Isobel Reese hustled her daughter into the women's surgical ward with an almost ludicrous haste that Rachel realised she'd been holding her breath. "Does she always treat you like that?"

  "Don't sweat it," Cullen murmured. "Isobel Reese is something of a character around here. Everyone knows what she's like."

  "It doesn't bother you? You don't get angry when she's … when she's—"

  "Bad-mouthing me all over town?" His eyes still glittered with an unholy amusement. "Why should I?"

  Rachel buried the impulse to step even closer to Cullen than she was and jab an annoyed finger at his chest. If he didn't care about what Rachel considered to be outright slander, then why should she? Besides, the last time she'd tangled with Cullen physically, she'd been the one who was sorry. "Maybe I'm too sensitive," she allowed bluntly, "but I don't like gossip. And I don't believe some of the wild stories flying around this town."

  Surprise registered in Cullen's eyes, then his expression settled back into what Rachel realised was habitual grimness. "Believe them," he said roughly, taking her elbow in the tingling hot grip of his fingers and urging her toward the foyer as if he were suddenly in a big hurry to get rid of her.

  Rachel pulled free, jolted by the simple touch and furious with herself for reacting in any way at all. "I don't believe you killed … a man."

  Cullen stopped abruptly. His expression held none of the fragile rapport they'd shared before; he looked big and dangerous, more wild than tamed. And fall-down tired, as if he hadn't slept in days and didn't anticipate getting any sleep in the near future.

  "I work for the military," he said in a low, flat voice.

  Rachel was certain Cullen had deliberately misunderstood her statement, just as, on a purely instinctual level, she was suddenly certain he hadn't killed his father. "That's different."

  "There are degrees of killing?"

  "You know what I'm talking about," she said calmly. "If you want to keep the bad-boy image up, you're going to have to stop saving people."

  A muscle flexed along his jaw. "I don't foster any kind of image at all. And I may not have done everything they accuse me of, but I sure as hell did some of it. I'll leave you to figure out which crimes I'm guilty of committing."

  Rachel drew a breath at the bleak acceptance inherent in his statement. Most people looked for excuses for any wrongdoing. She got the feeling that Cullen judged himself more harshly than anyone. "I don't believe you're capable of committing murder."

  Emotion flickered in his eyes, surprise again, and a dark throb of despair quickly cloaked in shades of grey. Then, before she could speak, before she could do something as revealing as reach out and touch him, Cullen spun on his heel and pushed open the main foyer doors.

  Cole loped up the steps just as Cullen held the door to allow her through. The door closed behind Rachel with the hushed sound of compressed air. She could feel the tension in Cole's silence, see the fury in his expression.

  "Logan," Cole offered grimly.

  "Sinclair," Cullen acknowledged.

  Her brother eased up another step and laid his hand on her arm, and Rachel kissed any claim on adulthood goodbye. The past twenty-four hours had been too disturbing, too disruptive, for any kind of logical reaction now. If her brother thought the tantrums she used to throw when she was three years old were wild and memorable, then he had a thing or two to learn. She was way more irritated now than she'd ever been at the tender age of three.

  "Get your hand off my arm," she warned. "I'm not a juicy bone to be guarded."

  "Rachel—"

  "Don't talk. If you talk, you'll make it worse. I'll scream." She wasn't actually about to throw a screaming fit, but Cole, like every other member of her all-male family, was as thick as a plank when it came to women. He would believe her.

  Cole froze. Rachel stepped away from both men. They watched her warily, then looked at each other. It was a male look of complete understanding, a look that said all women were crazy, and men were crazier to even try to understand them.

  "See that taxi over there?" Rachel nodded in the direction of the rank. "I'm going to get in it, and I hope the driver is a woman, or I may just decide to walk."

  She strode down the steps. The silence behind her was audible. As she bent to look in the car window, she heard footsteps. Her head shot up, and she glared at Cole. He swivelled abruptly and walked to his car. Rachel knew what he was up to; he was going to follow the taxi if she got in it.

  Unable to deny the compulsion, she glanced at Cullen. He was standing at the top of the steps, and his gaze hadn't left her. She'd felt die force of it levelled between her shoulder blades as she'd marched toward the taxi. Even through the encroaching darkness she could discern the slitted heat in his eyes—the same heat that had burned her so badly this afternoon—and her stomach muscles jerked with the impact of all that hot, hungry approval.

  The now familiar response shimmered through her, along with the tightening knot of panic that was equally familiar. It frightened her that she had so little control over her reaction to Cullen, that she was so open and vulnerable to a man who hadn't given her the slightest sign that he wanted even the most superficial of friendships.

  Rachel bent down to the taxi window again. "Are you a woman?" she demanded.

  A laid back, definitely feminine voice replied, "Some men might dispute that fact, honey, but last time I looked, I was."

  Rachel let out a relieved sigh. "Well, good." Opening the front passenger door, she slid into the seat and dumped her holdall on the floor between her feet. "I wasn't going to let you drive me home unless you were a woman," she explained.

  "I'm not about to complain about discrimination." The woman chuckled. "I wish I had more customers like you."

  * * *

  Cullen waited until Rachel had left before he started checking the carpark to make sure Trask's rusted-out Ute wasn't still in evidence.

  He'd barely been able to trust himself not to go after Rachel while she was still there. When her eyes had flared and she'd stood both him and Cole back on their heels, he'd wanted her with a fierceness, a longing, that stunned him.

  And his body had responded with a hair-trigger lack of control that alarmed him. If he could lose control, shed fifteen years of hard-won discipline, because Rachel Sinclair traded a bold look with him, then he could lose control in other areas. The thought made him break out in a cold sweat. He'd never tested his resolve to remain outside of the normal man-woman relationships, mostly because he'd never been tempted. Well, God in h
eaven, he was tempted now.

  It had been bad enough that he'd given in to the compulsion to comfort Rachel after Trask had done his low-life act on the ward. The second he'd wrapped his hands around her bare arms, he'd known he was going to have trouble letting her go. Her skin had felt like silk. The texture had instantly reminded him of an exquisite silk velvet he'd once handled in an Asian warehouse his assault team had searched while trying to locate an illegal arms cache. According to one of the guys, the bale of cloth had been French and worth a fortune. But it had been the way the silk had clung and warmed against his skin that had entranced Cullen, not its monetary value.

  His eyes closed on a sudden vision of Rachel clinging to him as softly, as sweetly, as the silk velvet had, and he swore beneath his breath at his stubborn arousal. The heavy ache throbbed with a low-level intensity that was both distracting and kept him constantly on edge. He could control it if he kept away from Rachel. If she kept away from him.

  The only real question was, how long would it take for her to realise that this town, the whole roughness of country living, just wasn't for her? Not long, he decided, with an odd mixture of fury and relief. Despite that surprising temper and her ideals, she was a city creature, too sensitive and delicate to survive for longer than a few months in Riverbend.

  He just hoped he would survive until she left.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

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  Rachel would have dropped the tray of prime steaks she was ferrying to the barbecue if a strong, tanned hand hadn't reached out and steadied it for her.