Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides) Read online

  Last Year’s Bride

  a montana born brides novel

  Anne McAllister

  Last Year’s Bride

  © Copyright 2014 Anne McAllister

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-940296-38-8

  Dedication

  For Jane Porter, with many thanks for giving me the chance to write a cowboy hero again, and for Linda Wallerich who may recognize where the inspiration came from.

  Dear Reader

  I had such a good time writing Last Year's Bride because it took me back to Montana and writing a cowboy hero, two of my favorite things!

  Some years ago I wrote nearly twenty inter-related "Code of the West" books, tapping into the heroes of my childhood (at age five I imprinted on a real live cowboy, and the impact has never worn off). Later I wrote about other locales and other heroes–though deep down many had that stubborn honorable cowboy hero mentality. In my heart, I missed those cowboys. I missed Montana.

  With Last Year's Bride, I've found you can go home again–and the cowboys are just as stubborn this time around! Cole McCullough comes from a family who has ranched the same land for over a hundred years. He has no business marrying professor's daughter and reality TV director, Nell Corbett. It's a disaster waiting to happen–for both of them. And Cole is determined not to let it.

  Nell has other ideas. And she's just as stubborn as he is. I loved putting them together and watching what happened. Lots of times it wasn't what I expected. That's the joy of characters simply taking over.

  I hope you'll enjoy their journey as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  Anne

  Contents

  Dedication

  Dear Reader

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “It’s only one blessed night!” Sam McCullough smacked his hand on the old round oak dinner table as he rose and glowered across the meat loaf at his son. “You’re not going to tell me you’ve got a date.”

  “No.” Cole had plenty of practice keeping his voice even. “I just don’t like the notion of doing business at a Valentine’s Day dance.”

  “It’s not a dance,” his sister Sadie corrected. “It’s a ball.” She used her fingers to put quotes around the word, as if her enunciation weren’t enough. She was grinning like the Cheshire Cat from the old storybook she used to lug around when she was a little thing. Now she was nineteen and read fashion mags.

  “The ‘ball’—”Sam’s voice made the same quotation marks his daughter’s had “—is a business proposition itself. You reckon Troy Sheenan is in it for the pretty music? You better believe he’s got his eye on the bottom line.”

  “And it’s a damn sight blacker than ours,” Cole muttered. He forked in another bite of his grandmother’s meat loaf, but he didn’t take his eyes away from his father’s. Under the grizzled stubble on Sam’s cheeks, Cole saw the wash of red that meant the old man was getting riled. He knew his grandmother saw it, too. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that her fork had stopped halfway to her mouth. She pressed her lips together, but then after a brief moment the fork continued its journey and she took another bite and kept on chewing.

  “Ours won’t be red much longer. I’m workin’ on it,” Sam said, both hands pressing down against the table as he leaned toward Cole. The cords in his neck stood out.

  “So’m I,” Sadie chipped in cheerfully. “Got an interview Sunday afternoon.”

  Sadie’s job prospects—she was a marketing major at MSU whose work experience was largely confined to waiting tables at the diner in Marietta and writing ads for the Copper Mountain Courier and the Bozeman Chronicle— were not going to save them from foreclosure, and they all knew it.

  Cole wasn’t convinced anything was going to save them—and wasn’t sure he wanted it to. As much as he loved the ranch that had been in his family for a little over a hundred years—and had been his life for virtually all of his own thirty years—he knew the pain of fighting a losing battle, of watching his father die a little more each day as their financial ground eroded beneath them. It seemed to him that his dad’s new plan, running cattle for his old friend—and now millionaire several times over—Tom McKay, wasn’t much better than any of the others he’d come up with over the past dozen years.

  “One Saturday night,” Sam pressed him. “One little dance. It’s not like you have better things to do. It’s not like I’m askin’ you to marry the girl!”

  Cole’s jaw went tight. Good thing, too, he thought grimly. He rolled his shoulders and tried to ease the feeling of carrying not just the ranch, but the entire Absaroka mountain range on his back.

  “You might have fun,” his grandmother remarked, her tone mild. She smiled at him over the cup of coffee she cradled in her hand. “Been a long time since you’ve had some fun, Cole.”

  It wouldn’t be fun to go a fancy ‘ball’ at the old Graff Hotel which in his youth had been a rundown flea bag joint and had recently been ‘restored to its former glory’ by local-rancher’s-son-made-good. Troy Sheenan, the older brother of one of Cole’s classmates, Dillon Sheenan, had parlayed his smarts into millions of bucks in the California technology market and had decided to spend a lot of it locally, restoring the Graff. Cole had always liked Troy, and he admired his decision even though he wasn’t sure he understood it. And maybe it was just envy that had him squirming at the thought of turning up at the Graff as if he belonged there with all the rich folks.

  But he couldn’t see any way out of it. Not if his grandmother was sticking her oar in. Emily McCullough rarely voiced a comment when he and his father locked horns. She watched worriedly, but she didn’t speak up unless she was worrying about Sam’s dodgy heart. He’d had a heart attack in his mid-thirties, right after Sadie’s mother had upped and left.

  “Congenital defect,” the doc in Bozeman had said. “But we can do something about it.”

  Or they could have if Sam had agreed. He hadn’t.

  “No time,” he’d said succinctly, checking himself out of the cardiac unit as soon as he could pull on his boots and slap his hat on his head.

  “You’ll have all the time in the world if they bury you,” Cole had argued often since, and his older brother Clint had shaken his head and muttered, “Damn fool.”

  But no one told Sam anything, least of all his sons or his mother. Only Sadie could occasionally worm her way through a chink in the Sam McCullough armor.

  Now she tossed her dark hair and said stoutly, “I’d go, but I don’t suppose Tom McKay’s daughter would want to dance with me.”

  A faint smile flickered across Sam’s hard face. “Don’t reckon,” he said drily. Then he turned his gaze back to Cole. “It’s a real live cowboy she’s hankerin’ to meet.”

  Cole had heard a lot about Tom McKay’s daughter in the last week or so. The opposite of his sister who had never been sick in her life despite growing up teething on spurs, Lacey
McKay had been frail and sickly for much of her life. Her father’s rough-and-tumble Montana childhood had been the stuff of fantasies. A liver transplant two years ago had given her a new lease on life. And a promise from her father had brought her to Marietta to see the stuff of her fantasies in person. That apparently included meeting ‘a real live cowboy.’

  “I ain’t pushin’ you to marry the girl,” Sam pointed out. Again.

  No chance of that. Cole couldn’t count the number of times he had heard his father hold forth long and hard about the foolishness of thinking ‘hot-house city girls’ could survive the wilds of rural Montana. He could recite Sam’s diatribes by heart, had grown up on them. The words ground together like stones in the pit of his stomach.

  “What do you say, Cole?” his grandmother asked quietly. “I won’t even put much starch in your shirt.” She gave him a gentle coaxing smile.

  She knew he’d do anything for her, so she rarely ever asked. She had been the shelter of his youth, the one he had always been able to count on, who had kept him steady and strong when so often he had wanted to go right off the rails. If she hadn’t protected him from every bit of his foolishness, it was only because she hadn’t been there at the time.

  She worried about his dad. Sam was her only son. He was hard and stubborn and could argue a fence post into the ground. But she loved him. So did Cole—when he didn’t want to hit the old man over the head with a shovel.

  Now he wiped his mouth on his napkin, set it beside his plate, then pushed his chair back from the table and stood up so that he could meet his father’s gaze eye to eye. It was gratifying that, for the last decade, he’d had an inch and a half on his father and it was Sam who had to look up.

  Now their gazes locked, Sam’s blue eyes as hard as the ice on the Yellowstone River. Cole knew what they were saying: It’s for the ranch. It’s your duty. A man does his duty. Always.

  He let his breath out slowly. “Fine. I’ll go.”

  “Right. There’s a dinner beforehand.” Sam was breathing easy now. “Be a good time for you to talk to him about how many cattle we can run. I’ve been thinking Angus from that spread down in Utah. Or there’s a place in Idaho—the Bar Nine Hollow—that would be a good place to pick up some.” Confrontation over, foreclosure forgotten, business at hand, Sam moved right on.

  But Cole hadn’t forgotten. He carried his plate to the sink. Sam was still giving orders when Cole walked out of the room.

  He didn’t want to be here.

  He sat there in his truck staring at the Graff and, in the pit of his stomach, Cole felt the knot tightening. It had been tightening all day.

  He told himself that agreeing to be some young woman’s ‘real live cowboy’ for an evening didn’t matter because in the larger scheme of things, there was nothing to it. Doing so served a larger purpose: it would make her happy, allow his dad and her father to do the business they wanted to do, which, in turn, would keep the ranch afloat and, please God, keep his father from having yet another heart attack. All good things.

  So. It was expedient. The right thing to do. And Cole was accustomed to doing the right thing. Except...

  Except he didn’t want to go to the ball with a woman he didn’t even know. If he had to go to a ball—and it wasn’t his idea of a great night out—at least he wanted the woman he went with to be Nell.

  And how useful was that?

  He wasn’t supposed to be thinking of Nell! She was off limits. He’d put her off limits a month ago when he’d known he had to be sensible, to put her best interests first, to stop living in dream land and do what needed to be done.

  It had taken him a week to do it. But finally he’d put pen to paper and had written her a letter. In it he had explained that things were never going to be the way they had hoped they would be, he could see that now. He’d told her that her coming back to Montana for them to make a go of it together was a pipe dream.

  He’d been blunt because he knew she would argue with him if he weren’t. “It won’t work. I should never have thought it would,” he’d written, pressing down hard with the pen, as if he could press the words into her heart. “You won’t be happy here.”

  Then he had ended on a positive note. He’d told her she had a great life to look forward to and advised her to go out and enjoy all that life had to offer—and he had enclosed the divorce papers for her to sign.

  And now, at the first inkling of a memory snaking its way into his head, his bloody defenses crumbled, and his mind hauled her back, front and center—and here she was.

  His gloved hands tightened on the steering wheel as he remembered lying in bed in Reno talking to Nell about the Graff this past winter. “We could make a weekend of it,” he’d said, dreaming impossible dreams.

  Yeah? Who was going to feed the cattle? Who was going to chop the wood? Who was going to make sure his old man didn’t over-strain his unrepaired heart? Stop Gran from climbing ladders to fetch things out of the attic? Keep Sadie from driving everyone nuts with her next crazy idea for keeping the ranch afloat?

  It had been insane to get married in the first place. He couldn’t imagine why they’d done it. Well, yes, he could. Their spur of the moment meet-up in Reno had turned into the best time of his life, they had clicked on every level, and when Nell had wrapped her arms around him and looked up into his eyes and said, “Imagine if every day were like this one, if we were together forever,” he’d imagined it.

  He had said, “You mean, get married?”

  And the most beautiful smile in the world had lit her face and she’d said, “Oh, Cole, yes!”

  Yes. As if he’d proposed and she had accepted.

  Actually, to be honest, he supposed he had. The question had not been as academic as it should have been. The hope had been there in his voice. He knew that. He had heard it then as well. And Nell had heard it, too. She’d clutched at it the way she’d clutched his arms and kissed him.

  “I love you,” she’d said. “Oh, I do love you. We’ll be so happy.”

  In a fairy tale world, no doubt they would have. But not here. Not in the world Cole lived in day after grinding day, the one that Nell had only seen briefly and mostly from afar.

  “You wouldn’t have been happy here,” he said gruffly now, as if she could hear him from a thousand miles away.

  But she would have liked the Graff tonight, lit up like some fairy tale castle. He opened the truck door and the wind caught it, nearly yanking it out of his hand. Snow stung his face as he banged the door shut and trudged through the icy parking lot toward the hotel.

  This was his reality—the old truck, the stinging snow, the cutting wind—not the fairy tale castle, not the dreams.

  “Remember that,” he told himself.

  Since Cole had made the decision last month, he had done his best to not let himself think about her at all. But tonight, despite the sting of the snow and the bite of the wind, he couldn’t banish her from his mind.

  In truth, she’d been there all day. Knowing where he’d be this evening—and its fairy tale potential— had obviously done a number on his head, opening cracks in his resistance, so that she’d been with him like a burr under his saddle since he’d been out feeding cattle this morning.

  There was nothing remotely romantic or appealing about feeding cattle in a harsh Montana winter. Ordinarily it didn’t bring Nell to mind at all, but somehow this morning he’d imagined her making up a story about it, then telling it to him as he pitched the hay off the back of the wagon.

  Later, in the afternoon, when he had spent an hour getting an ornery bull out of a thicket, he knew she would have found story possibilities then, too. She’d have seen the ice and snow and the bull snot and, instead of seeing nothing but hard work, sore muscles and drudgery, she would have found something poetical about it.

  Her eyes would have sparkled and she’d have lowered her camera, saying, “Could you wrestle him out again? I didn’t get a good angle the first time?”

  She would
probably even give the damned bull a name! Because that was what Nell did. She found the human interest—even in ornery bulls and ornerier cowboys. She told stories.

  After dragging the bull out and chivvying him back up the draw, Cole had come into the kitchen, blowing on his hands and stamping his feet to try to get the circulation back in them, he had found his grandmother making a cherry pie. “Last quart,” she’d said, a smear of flour on her nose from when she’d rolled out the dough. “To celebrate your dad’s deal with Tom McKay.” She had beamed. “Thanks to you, Cole.”

  “It wasn’t me,” he had protested.

  “Of course it was you.” His grandmother opened the oven door and set the pie in, then shut it again. “You agreed to go. And Tom’s delighted that his daughter is going to meet you.”

  “Meet,” Cole said firmly. “That’s it. I’m not interested in anything else.”

  Emily straightened, then smiled and shook her head. “If she’s as nice as her father is, you might want to reconsider.”

  “No.” He’d made that mistake once, even if no one else knew it. And he wasn’t sharing the news now that it was over. “You going to save me some of that pie?”

  “I’ll make your father leave you some.”

  “Thanks.” All he could think was that Nell had loved his grandmother’s cherry pie, too. The day he met her, when she had brought him home concussed from the Wilsall Rodeo and had sat there all night watching him to make sure he didn’t die—she had eaten the last of the cherry pie his grandmother had left him before she’d flown out to Boston to meet her first great-granddaughter.

  “This is amazing,” Nell had said. “Do you think your grandmother would teach me to make a cherry pie?”

  “Sure,” Cole had said at the time, smiling dazedly at her. Concussions had a lot to answer for. If he’d been thinking straight none of this ever would have happened.