A Cowboy in the Kitchen

by Meg Maxwell

  Annabel was marrying the right man, in the right dress, for sensible reasons. She slid the veil on and fluffed it back and almost cried again. She looked like a bride.

  She wished her gram and her sisters and her parents were here. She’d promised Clementine behind-the-scenes pictures, so she snapped a couple of selfies, which was so silly it made her smile. A light dusting of makeup, a spritz of Chanel No 19, the bracelet and shoes on and she was ready.

  When she opened the door and stepped out, West stared at her—hard.

  “Oh my God, Annabel. You look absolutely beautiful. Too beautiful.”

  She managed a smile, afraid to get all choked up and end up with mascara tracks down her cheeks.

  “Let’s go get married,” West said.

  * * *

  When the officiant called their names, Annabel looped her arm through West’s and headed into the small chapel. A narrow red velvet carpet, appropriate, since Annabel did feel a bit like an actress, led from the door to where the officiant stood in front of a stained glass window—church effect, Annabel supposed—and an arrangement of exquisite red roses. The officiant, a woman in her fifties, wearing a mint-green suit and veiled hat, introduced Annabel and West to their witnesses, since they brought none of their own, a couple whose job it was to attend quickie weddings, sign licenses and snap photos.

  Annabel stood across from West, glancing around as he was doing. She got it. It wasn’t easy to stand across from the person you were vowing to love, honor and cherish till death did you part when those vows were actually about something else. Annabel: I vow to make healthful breakfasts for your daughter, make sure her hair is knot-free and weed her closet of raggedy, holey pants. West: I vow to keep Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen afloat.

  The officiant called for the rings, which until this moment Annabel had completely overlooked. But West pulled two rings out of his pocket, a plain gold band and a beautiful gold band dotted with diamonds. He must have bought them before they arrived.

  “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?” the officiant asked West, nothing about vowing to love or cherish her.

  West took Annabel’s left hand in his, sliding the stunning diamond band halfway on her finger. He cleared his throat. “I do.” He slid the ring the rest of the way. It fit perfectly, which meant he must have asked Clementine for her ring size.

  Annabel tried to hold West’s gaze, but she glanced at her ring, then at her peau de soie shoes and tried to breathe.

  West handed Annabel his ring and held out his hand. She took the ring and slid it halfway up his ring finger.

  “And do you, Annabel Hurley, take this man, Weston Dallas Montgomery, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  She hadn’t known his middle name was Dallas. She was marrying a man, right this moment, whose middle name she hadn’t known.

  She looked into West’s driftwood-colored eyes, intense and soft on her at the same time, and part of her wanted to shout, Of course I do! He’s West Montgomery. But the rest of her knew that he wasn’t marrying her because he loved her, and standing here, actually marrying him, felt terribly wrong. So wrong that her stomach turned over and tears pricked the backs of her eyes. She looked down, blinking the tears away.

  “Annabel? You okay?” West whispered.

  “Just a little overwhelmed with emotion,” she managed to squeak out. She glanced at the officiant, then at West. “I do. I do take this man.” She slid the ring fully on his finger.

  He kept his eyes on hers and nodded, giving her hand a little squeeze.

  “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the officiant said. “You may now kiss the bride.”

  West leaned over, taking her face in his hands, and kissed her—passionately. Annabel leaned into him, kissing him back, feeling herself swoon. There was nothing fake, nothing temporary, nothing businesslike about the kiss. It showed his passionate appreciation, she realized. But then it was over, West pulling back.

  The witnesses took lots of pictures with West’s and Annabel’s phones, and West sent a couple of shots right away to Lucy, via the Dunkins’ email since she was staying with them for the night. Then the officiant called for the four-thirty couple, and Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery found themselves outside the chapel.

  A limo passed them, a woman flashing her breasts and drunkenly shouting, “Whoo-hoo! Vegas, baby!” out the window. Up and down the Strip, Annabel could see a few brides in all different kinds of gowns, one groom in a New England Patriots jersey and helmet. “So, Mrs. Annabel Hurley Montgomery, for your wedding night, would you like a wild night on the town or quiet room service on the balcony, just the two of us?”

  “Which would you prefer?” she asked, hoping he’d go for door number two.

  “Just the two of us.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  They walked back to their hotel, just a short distance away, folks congratulating them along the way.

  But all the way up in the elevator to the seventeenth floor, she kept thinking about how they hadn’t ironed out the sex issue. Was West expecting a real wedding night? Was she? Was it better not to start something she wasn’t sure should continue? Would sex complicate what was a temporary business arrangement?

  What didn’t sex complicate?

  But as West stood so close beside her, all six feet three inches of him, the delicious clean soap smell of him, she saw herself beneath him in the hayloft, the guy of her dreams, now her legal husband. Her husband. She wanted him—desperately.

  * * *

  On the balcony, West took a few selfies of the two of them holding up their rings. Then room service arrived, and they decided to get out of their fancy clothes before eating. West headed into the bathroom with his overnight bag and returned wearing a pair of very sexy jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. Annabel grabbed her own bag and shot inside, closing the door and sucking in a deep breath. She carefully removed her dress and hung it back in the garment bag with the shoes and veil, then changed into skinny jeans and a ruffly white tank top, leaving her hair loose.

  For a second she was about to slide off the ring but realized it was meant to stay on. She stared at it, wondering how long it would take to feel comfortable on her finger, to feel as though it belonged.

  She found West on the balcony, pouring two glasses of champagne. He handed her one, then held his own up to her.

  “To you,” he said. “If it weren’t for you...” He glanced away, down at the sparkling lights of the Strip, then cleared his throat. “Sometimes I can’t believe that we really had to resort to such a drastic measure.”

  Sometimes Annabel thought West shouldn’t talk so much.

  “I mean, I really thought I was done with marriage,” he went on. “Once burned, twice shy and all that.” He sat down at the little round table on the balcony, removing the lid on his dinner: prime rib, classic wedding entrée.

  “How were you burned?” she asked, realizing she knew very little about his marriage to Lorna. She removed the lid on hers, not much appetite for the delicious-looking lemon sole.

  “Maybe we should have our toast first,” he said, clinking her glass. “To...this marriage doing its job.”

  Good Lord. The less he talked the better. Annabel wondered if the room service menu had earplugs.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t understand that this was a business deal, a temporary one, at that. But they were legally, lawfully wed, husband and wife, and they’d be sharing a home, a bedroom, acting in public like a happy married couple. He could at least...something. Ugh. This was so frustrating. Although...did she want him to pretend to love her? Of course not.

  He sliced into his prime rib. “I married Lorna because she was pregnant. To be honest, at the time, I didn’t even like her. But she told me she was pregnant with my baby, so I proposed marriage. You know what her answer wa
s? ‘If you can get me the two-carat ring I want from Blue Gulch Jewelers, size six, okay, I’ll marry you.’ I sold my one and only head of cattle, and I bought her the ring she wanted.”

  “So she wouldn’t have married you if you didn’t buy her that ring?”

  West laughed. “Honestly I don’t know.”

  “You said ‘at the time’ you didn’t like her. Things changed between you?”

  If things changed for the better with him and Lorna, maybe there was hope that things could change for them. Maybe.

  “She had her good points,” he said, biting off the head of a stalk of asparagus. “Very soon after Lorna told me she was pregnant, my parents moved to Austin and said I could have the house and their small herd of cattle. A wedding present, I guess. Lorna hated the idea, but it was either that or moving in with her folks, and she thought living on a ranch might be fun.”

  Annabel tried to imagine Lorna Dunkin on a ranch with her three-inch heels.

  West looked down at the lights of the Strip, waiting for a limo beeping to the tune of the Wedding March to pipe down. At least it made them both smile. “Anyway, for most of her pregnancy, Lorna did seem to like it okay. But she got sick of it. Right before she was due, she wanted to move to town, which I couldn’t afford. And my parents had died just a few months before that. There was no way I was selling my family homestead with my brother and my parents both gone. The house, the land were the only things I had left of my family, even if we didn’t get along.”

  “I can understand that,” she said. “When my parents died it was hard to leave the house we grew up in and move to Gram’s Victorian. Clementine took that the hardest.” Annabel thought of Clem, having shuffled from foster home to foster home, losing the adoptive parents she thought would be her forever family.

  West nodded. “Then when Lucy was born, I was so madly in love with that little six-pound baby that I desperately wanted things to work out between Lorna and me. She could be fun, had a good sense of humor, liked to have a good time. And here and there, she’d dote on Lucy. But she hated the ranch, wanted to go out with her girlfriends, starting staying in town more and more instead of coming home at night. I tried to make her happy any way I could to keep her home for Lucy’s sake, but a year ago, right before the accident, she told me she couldn’t take another minute of her life, she loved Lucy but she couldn’t be a good mother if she was miserable, so she was taking off for New York City to try to become a singer.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine just leaving your kid?”

  “No. I really can’t.” It was unfathomable.

  He took a swig of champagne. “In that moment, when Lorna told me she was leaving Lucy—a five-year-old—any feelings I had for my wife turned to ash.”

  She didn’t know what to say, so she sipped her own champagne, her appetite totally gone.

  “At least now I know what I’m dealing with,” he said, holding up his left hand, the gold band glinting with the sunset. “Believe me, I prefer this. We know exactly what we are doing here, how you feel, how I feel.”

  “Oh?” she said before she could stop herself. “How do I feel?”

  He looked up at her, tilting his head. “You feel like saving Hurley’s means the world to you. That you’d do anything for your gram, anything to save the family business. And you’re doing it—you married a man you barely know, a man you don’t love, a man you probably don’t even like.” He dropped his head for a moment. “When I look back on how we left things seven years ago, I’d expect you to hate me, actually.”

  She both wanted to talk about this and didn’t want to talk about this. She breathed in deeply, the scent of her bridal bouquet on a little table nearby reaching her.

  “I don’t hate you,” she said. “Obviously,” she added, managing a small smile.

  “I suppose. Or all the money in the world wouldn’t have made you marry me.”

  She wanted to tell him that she hadn’t married him for money at all, that she would have said her I do anyway, to help him keep his daughter. But right now it was her only protection, the only thing that kept her from feeling entirely vulnerable.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “For what I did to you seven years ago. I shouldn’t have just left it like that, never talked to you about it.”

  “That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago, really.” For him anyway. He’d married, had a child, been widowed, become a prosperous rancher. She stood up and braced her hands on the railing, watching the people below, the sparkling lights. But she’d always wanted to know why he’d stopped so suddenly that night in the hayloft. “What happened that night?” she asked softly, facing the Strip.

  He stood up and moved beside her, resting his forearms on the rail. “I knew I was taking advantage of you, so I stopped.”

  She whirled to face him. “What?”

  “I was half out of my mind that night, Annabel. I’d just lost my brother. My parents, my family, were all ignoring me because I was the black-sheep kid, the bad seed, the troublemaker, and they didn’t say it, but I knew they were thinking, ‘Too bad it wasn’t West.’”

  Her heart constricted for him. How awful to believe that was what his own parents had been thinking. “What? No. No one thought that, West.” She put her hand on his arm.

  He stiffened, and she pulled her hand away. “Like you said, Annabel, it was a long time ago.”

  She knew she should change the subject from his parents. “You weren’t taking advantage of me, by the way. I was there very willingly.”

  “I know, but I doubt you wanted to go from what—the first time we’d ever really had a conversation to sex. You were there, you were beautiful and I couldn’t keep my hands off you. I didn’t want to take advantage of that.”

  You were beautiful... “I’ve always thought it was the grief that made you reach for me,” she said. “I mean, I was Geekabel with my container of chili and you were...West Montgomery.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Geekabel?”

  “Some girls at school liked to call me that,” she said. “I guess I thought that’s how you looked at me too.”

  From the look in his eyes, he clearly had no idea what she was talking about. “All I know is that the beautiful, tall, auburn-haired girl I’d see around town, working at Hurley’s, was in the hayloft with me, talking to me the way no one ever had, listening like what I had to say mattered, meant something. I wanted you so badly that night. And when you let me take off your shirt and I saw that lacy bra, I couldn’t control myself and was all over you.”

  She remembered.

  “But then there was this moment that I stared into your eyes, and you looked so trusting, so innocent, and I called myself a jerk and made myself stop.”

  “Oh, West,” she said, putting her hand back on his arm.

  He turned and pulled her close, his mouth coming down hard on hers. She closed her eyes and arched into him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He picked her up—and at five foot nine, Annabel was a tall woman—and effortlessly carried her into the room and laid her down on the bed, then lay down on top of her, moving her arms up on either side of her head and holding them there while he kissed her hard and possessively.

  He released her hands and she tangled them in his hair as his own hands inched up under her top, roaming over her bra, her stomach, the snap of her jeans, which he undid in a split second, the denim sliding down her hips and legs and feet until they were in a heap on the floor. He leaned up and looked down the length of her, sliding a finger under the narrow lacy band of her fancy ivory silk panties and inching them down her legs. She closed her eyes, aware of nothing but her heartbeat, the scent of his soap, the sensations building inside her. West moved and she opened her eyes to find him sitting at the edge of the bed, removing his T-shirt, then his own jeans and finally his underwear.

  He lay down on top of her again,
her arms back over her head as he kissed her neck and collarbone, then her ear, one hand freeing to slide down her shoulder, her stomach. Suddenly his hands, his mouth, were moving upward, his fingers reaching behind her to unclasp the matching little bra and letting it drop on the floor. Then his mouth explored her breasts, back up to her neck and her lips. She wanted to touch him, to run her own hands all over his body, but she held back, feeling a little shy.

  “I can’t wait another second,” he whispered, reaching across the bed to the table, the crackle sound of a condom wrapper opening no match for how loudly her heart was beating. “You’re so beautiful, Annabel,” he said and then he was inside her, and Annabel gasped with how incredibly good it felt, how at home she was with him, how much she loved this man. Her husband.

  * * *

  When West woke up, Annabel naked and sleeping beside him, a long tangle of her auburn hair across her cheek, he had the strongest urge to wrap her in his arms and slowly wake her up by trailing kisses down her stomach. But as he looked at her, so peaceful, so innocent, he cursed himself for not only taking advantage of her again—but losing control completely and making love to her. How many glasses of champagne had they had? Barely one glass each. He couldn’t even blame it on booze. Their marriage was a business deal, and to complicate it with sex was a huge mistake. One of them would end up hurt, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure which of them it would be.

  As he watched Annabel sleep, he heard his parents’ voices... If her grandmother had any sense she’d send Annabel away tomorrow... I love West...but he is who he is.

  If only they knew. She had gotten away from him and now he’d dragged her into his mess.

  He felt something shutter inside him and turned away, getting out of bed. The last time he’d been incommunicado for his daughter because he’d been in bed with a woman, he’d vowed no more women. That he’d focus all his emotional energy on his daughter. Now, because of his uncontrollable lust for Annabel and the emotion of the day—his own wedding—he’d gone too far. Bad for Annabel and bad for him. And bad for Lucy. He had to remember he’d gotten married for Lucy. She was his focus.