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

  “Nell.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s her. She’s directing the episodes.” He sounded impressed. “Come a long way, hasn’t she? Doin’ fine.”

  Cole nodded. What was there to say?

  Sam regarded him for longer than was entirely necessary.

  Cole glared at him. “What’re you starin’ at?”

  Sam shook his head. “Not a damn thing.” He snapped his jacket. “I cooked. You wash up.” So saying, he banged out the door.

  Cole sat at the table until the sound of Sam’s truck disappeared down the hill. Then he got up and washed the dishes, dried them and put them away. He wiped down the old pine table and cleaned out the coffee pot, then put fresh grounds in so he could make a new pot in the morning.

  He paced the room, cracked his knuckles, threw another log on the fire and stood staring down at it hiss and spatter, trying not to think about the last time he’d had a fire here—the weekend he’d brought Nell.

  They’d snuggled on the old sofa in front of it. He’d kissed her, touched her, slowly and deliberately uncovered the sweet softness of her, and—oh hell! His body was telling him it wanted to go straight after his old man down the hill to the ranch house. His body wanted Nell. He wanted Nell.

  He let out a great shuddering breath and kicked the basket of firewood beside him. “Shit!” He’d forgotten he was only wearing socks.

  Cursing under his breath, he reached down and rubbed his aching toes. Then in desperation he grabbed a small piece of pine out of the wood basket, pulled his pocketknife out of his pocket, flung himself into the chair next to the fire and began the whittle.

  His grandfather McCullough, no fan of idleness, had taught him and Clint how to whittle when they were small. Sadie’s mother had been appalled that they carried knives in their pockets.

  “Never know when a man’s gonna need a knife,” Grandpa told her. That was, come to think of it, right before she’d taken off and never come back.

  But it was true, Cole thought. Whittling had kept him sane these past months during Sam’s heart attack and recovery, especially when he took over the bill paying and discovered how bad things really were, and particularly after his awkward phone conversations with Nell. How could he tell her how bad things were? Especially when she was doing so well herself? Was he supposed to take her away from that to ... to what? A ranch that had more chance of failing than supporting them?

  Cole’s knife whittled furiously as it always did when his brain spun through the hopelessness of the situation. He’d made a legion of small perfectly wrought Montana wildlife—moose, bear, elk, mountain lions, wolves, buffalo, trout, grayling, paddlefish—as well as miniature versions of all sorts of cowboy gear and herds of horses over the past year, pretty much everything but people—all of which he gave to Sadie to sell at one of the gift shops in town. He did the rough work on nights like this one. He did the finish detail when he felt less turmoil and had a steadier hand. Some of them made surprisingly good money.

  “Sabrina wants more,” Sadie told him often. Sabrina Kelly owned the downtown Marietta gift shop, When I Was in Paradise ... . “You should do more.”

  Yeah, when? He had more than enough to do from sun-up to sundown seven days a week. He used to have a little time of his own when Sam could pull his weight doing the heavy physical stuff. But with Sam’s heart problems, that wasn’t an option. And while the doctor in Bozeman said surgery could solve most of the problem, Sam wasn’t convinced.

  It was one thing to whittle wood, but put a human body under the knife? Sam wasn’t having any of that. But he was down at the ranch house having coffee and, no doubt, some of Gran’s apple pie tonight, talking logistics and, for all Cole knew, statistics with the TV crew. And Nell.

  The knife slipped. Damn it! Cole sucked blood from the gouge in his hand. Grimacing, he stood up, scattering the bits of wood and shavings from his lap onto the floor at his feet. Folding the blade back into the handle of his pocketknife, he tucked it into his pocket, then crossed the room to run his hand under the tap.

  It was while he was doing so that he looked at what he’d been whittling. He never had a preconceived idea. “It’s in the wood,” he always told Sadie. “I just have to find it and let it out.”

  The rough carving often surprised him. It did tonight. The wood in his hand showed the clear, unmistakable curves of a woman.

  Cole stared at it, feeling as if, when the knife slipped, it had gone right for the gut. He swallowed, then picked up the wood, ran his thumb over the rough shape, pricking himself on a splinter as he did so. Fitting, somehow. Not that Nell was the problem. It was the rest of his life—and hers—that didn’t belong together.

  His fingers wrapped around the carving, hard enough that it bit into his palm. Cole carried it back across the room—and pitched it in the fire.

  Chapter Four

  Was it possible that she would be on the McCullough ranch for ten days and never see Cole at all?

  By Tuesday night Nell began to think so. He hadn’t appeared the day she arrived, though even his socially reluctant father had put in an appearance that night, turning up at the ranch house after dinner to see that she and the crew had everything they needed.

  His arrival seemed to surprise both his mother and his daughter. But Jane from the Chamber of Commerce seemed unamazed at his arrival.

  “Sam will help you out if you need anything,” she had told Nell that afternoon. She had been waiting for Nell and the crew at the Graff when they’d arrived.

  Nell had been glad to see her, but had no idea who Jane was talking about. “Sam?” Of course, she only had one man on the brain, and that wasn’t his name.

  “McCullough,” Jane said patiently. “The guy whose ranch you’re using.”

  Nell remembered her jaw dropping. “Oh, um, right.” Then she ventured, “I thought he wasn’t exactly a fan.”

  “He had some reservations,” Jane admitted. “But we’ve chatted about it.” She gave Nell a determinedly satisfied smile.

  “Well, great.” Nell had pasted on her best get-along-with-the-locals smile and reserved judgment. But apparently Jane had worked a miracle. When Sam had showed up, he had been polite if not effusive. He’d sat down at the table with them and had a piece of his mother’s pie and some coffee while he answered all their questions.

  If he had not seemed thrilled at the prospect of having his life and his ranch disrupted for the next couple of weeks, at least he hadn’t fired a shotgun and thrown them off the property. In fact, before he left, he and Jane even went out with Nell and the lighting guys and the cameramen to look at spots that they would have to light for some of the night or low light shooting.

  “See?” Jane said when Nell and the crew came back inside and Sam’s truck could be heard disappearing down the lane. “I told you he’d help.”

  “Thank you for that,” Nell said, and she had meant it. “I was surprised to see him,” she had gone on. “I thought that ... maybe his son ... would ...” But her voice trailed off as she didn’t know quite how to finish what she’d started.

  “His son?” Jane looked momentarily perplexed. Then, “Oh, Cole? I think he’s pretty busy.” She gave an awkward little wave of her hand, then looked around the room, noting that Sadie was talking to the cameramen and that Emily was at the sink doing some washing up before moving closer to Nell and confiding quietly, “Everybody acts like it’s Sam who’s anti-social, but compared to his son, I think he’s a hale-fellow-well-met.” And she’d nodded her head firmly for emphasis.

  “Really?” Nell murmured.

  Jane lifted her shoulders. “Well, I don’t know him, really. I haven’t been here that long. And he’s busy. He has to do most all of the ranch work since Sam had his last heart attack. So maybe it’s not fair to say that. Maybe he’s charming. But he took off the night of the ball, sort of left Tom McKay’s daughter in the lurch.” Her voice had trailed off, too. Then, “You can let me know,” she suggested with a conspiratorial grin.
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  “I may never see him,” Nell said.

  “Oh, you will.” Jane was confident about that. “Someone has to teach those tenderfeet how to be cowboys.”

  Nell wasn’t sure it would be Cole, though.

  “Talent,” Nell had long ago decided, was a misnomer.

  The couples who arrived on Wednesday were obstacles. They made everything more difficult, complicated, distracting. The crew could set up and take down with ease and speed. They could do their jobs with virtually no interference from her.

  It was the ‘talent’ who complicated things every time. You lit a set; they threw unhelpful shadows. They talked and their voices were carried away by the wind. They grumbled, shivered, muttered, got in the way, needed the bathroom, had opinions that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation, and could be heard regretting out loud and within earshot of Sadie and Emily among others that they had “come to this godforsaken part of the world” in the first place. The fact that their involvement had originally been their idea seemed to get lost in the process.

  Nell loved her job, loved telling the stories, putting the pieces together and getting something more than the disparate pieces they shot. But sometimes she wished the talent was a little more, er, cooperative. Of the four couples, Amy, a hairdresser, and Keith, a recurrent lifeguard and motorcycle mechanic, were the easiest to get along with. The snippiest was fashion designer Beth who glowered a lot at the camera and at her trust fund fiancé, Chandler. Nell had yet to figure out why Chandler, who could have bought and sold them all several times over, had agreed to be any part of a reality TV gig. He was the quiet man in the group, a little standoffish. While Chandler wasn’t exactly an audience favorite—Nell suspected that most wanted to see him get his comeuppance for having been born wealthy—she personally appreciated him because so far he had never made a fuss.

  The other two couples, Seth and Bella and Maggie and Mac, were the larger-than-life personalities that gave reality TV its reputation. The men knew it all and always seemed to have an ax to grind or an ace up their sleeve. The women ran on emotion, coffee, diet pills, red wine and tears.

  Since they had arrived tears and wine seemed to be the order of the day. The weather had, so far, been as big a challenge as anything else. The snow, which had been spitting all morning, had begun to come down in earnest by mid-afternoon. And by the time everyone arrived from the airport in Bozeman, Nell was glad they had made it over the pass at all.

  Or she thought she was.

  She had hoped to introduce them to the McCulloughs, see them settled into their accommodations—the girls in the house, the guys in the bunkhouse—then feed them the chicken fried steak dinner Em had cooked, and go over the plans so they could get an early start in the morning.

  But after listening to Beth complain that she had to share a room with Amy who talked in her sleep, and Bella whine about her luggage getting lost, after dealing with the guys’ reaction to the discovery that indoor plumbing was not part of the bunkhouse amenities, and Lisa, the wardrobe girl’s consternation upon realizing that she hadn’t brought warm enough jackets and had never actually considered that anyone might need long underwear or anything more substantial than decorator western-style boots, Nell wondered if the whole thing was going to be a disaster.

  The upside of the whole venture had been her expectation that she would be able to have some face to face time with Cole.

  And she wasn’t likely to now. It was past eleven. The crew had decamped shortly after nine, leaving her one of the trucks to get back to the hotel in. Jane, who had come out to welcome the cast to Marietta and had been invited to stay for dinner, left shortly thereafter. Nell knew she should have gone with the crew or with Jane, but she’d still been hoping that maybe Cole would stop by, the way Sam had stopped by last night. He hadn’t.

  No one else missed him. After dinner the cast had spent the evening sitting around the living room with Jane and Sam, talking, laughing, arguing and telling ever more outrageous stories about the snow they’d encountered going over the pass. Sam laughed at them and told even more outrageous stories.

  None of them seemed to notice that Sadie and Em were cleaning up and doing all the dishes. No one offered to help. Of course they’d never been in a situation on the show where it had been part of the experience before. On the other challenges they had stayed in motels where pitching in was not expected.

  Nell supposed it wasn’t expected here. Em and Sadie hadn’t indicated they needed any help. It was that she saw them as people—as family, come to that. They were Cole’s, so they were hers. She offered a hand.

  But Em had just shaken her head. “You ride herd,” she’d said with a wry smile and a nod toward the living room.

  Nell felt as if she had been doing exactly that. Now Sam had gone back to the cabin—without a single mention of Cole—and the last of the men had just headed off to the bunkhouse. Upstairs the shower was running, and Bella was in the hall complaining to all within earshot that when she’d showered there had been no hot water.

  Whether Em and Sadie heard this, Nell didn’t know. They had long since disappeared because they were obviously well aware of how early the alarms would go off in the morning. Before she went upstairs, Em had said she would cook everyone breakfast. “The crew, too.”

  Nell had protested that the crew could eat at the Graff.

  “If you want them to, of course,” Em said. “But you can’t count on cows calving between nine and five.”

  Nell hadn’t thought about that. Of course they didn’t work nine to five, either. More like seven to seven—and often longer. But it probably would be good to have the crew on site eating breakfast in case something happened early.

  Nell didn’t want to think what time Em would be getting up to start on breakfast preparations. Hoping that the noise quieted down soon, she bundled into all her winter clothes, tugged her watch cap over her ears, shoved her hands into her mittens and went out to start the truck.

  The snow squeaked beneath her feet, but it had stopped coming down. The wind was blowing out of the north. She worried the truck might not start. But when she turned the key, it coughed and finally sputtered to life.

  Just as she was about to put it in gear, though, she saw a light moving and bobbing out toward the barn. She squinted at it, watching it come closer. As it did she saw it was a flashlight, being carried by—

  “Sadie?” Nell wound down the window of the truck. “Is that you?”

  It was indeed Sadie, wrapped up to the nose in a scarf. “Just leaving?” she asked Nell, her voice muffled.

  “I was. What are you doing out here? I thought you went to bed.”

  “My turn to check on the heifers up at the shed.”

  Sam had explained over dinner about trying to make sure they got the cows closest to delivery in the calving shed before they went into labor.

  “Beats delivering ‘em in the pasture,” he’d said, then grinned at the four guys. “You’ll be hopin’ we haven’t missed any.” One of their challenges was delivering a calf.

  Now Nell realized that what Em had hinted was quite possible. No one promised that the calves wouldn’t be born in the middle of the night. “Well, I hope they wait til morning,” she said now.

  Sadie shook her head. “Not this one. Cole’s there. I called him and told him. I’m just going to get him some coffee.”

  “Cole’s in the calving shed?” Nell felt her heart quicken as she glanced that way. At Sadie’s nod, she said, “I’ll take him the coffee.”

  Sadie’s brows inched up into her hat. “You sure? I thought you’d be wanting some sleep.”

  “You need it as much as I do.” Nell shut the truck back off and climbed out. “Come on.”

  There was, she was beginning to discover, almost always a fresh pot of coffee going in the ranch house kitchen. While this one wasn’t absolutely fresh, it was still hot. Sadie poured the thermos full, then screwed the cap on tightly and handed it to Nell.


  “Thanks.” Nell started toward the door, then turned back for a moment. “I hope this isn’t too much for you and your grandmother. The girls are a little bit much sometimes. They don’t think. And they don’t see that it’s their responsibility to help.”

  “It’s not,” Sadie said. “It’s our job.”

  Nell wanted to argue, but Sadie looked adamant. And Nell supposed it was true, what Sadie said: they had contracted not only to let the television company use the ranch, but to provide the lodging and make the meals as well. It was business. It just felt personal.

  Sadie wouldn’t understand that, though. She had no idea she was talking to her sister-in-law.Nell so wanted to tell her. She didn’t dare.

  “See you in the morning.” She opened the door and headed back out into the cold. She walked quickly along the path that had been shoveled between the house and the outbuildings. Her pulse quickened and her stomach knotted as she went.

  It was what she wanted, after all, to see Cole. And yet the closer she came to the shed, the tighter her nerves seemed to wind.

  Taking a deep breath, she undid the latch and pushed open the door. It swung open with a thin squeak. Inside the shed was only a little warmer than outside. Two single bulb shop lights hung from the rafters, bathing everything in a sort of dim golden glow, outlining the cow who was on the ground and the man sitting sideways in the straw next to her with a wriggling newborn calf in his arms.

  “‘Bout time, Sade,” he said without turning around to look. “Could use that coffee. We got us a little girl.” And Nell heard a weary satisfaction in his voice.

  Trepidation vanishing, Nell hurried to see the newcomer. She knelt beside Cole. “Oh, she’s beautiful.” He was wiping her off. The new mother, struggling to her feet, turned her head to supervise. She looked at Nell with suspicion.

  Cole’s head whipped around. He stared at her with shock. “Nell?”

  “I ran into Sadie when she was going in. I said I’d bring you the coffee.” As she spoke Nell stripped off her mittens and uncapped the thermos. She was grateful her hands didn’t shake as she poured the cap full of coffee. “I’ve never seen a brand-new calf before! I’ve never seen a brand-new anything before—well, except for Kieran.” And her brother Brent’s son had been half a day old, bathed and dried, when she’d seen him the first time. She leaned closer, sighing with delight as she studied the small calf, its eyes blinking, its legs moving awkwardly in Cole’s arms.