A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) Read online

  It was an echo of that night long ago and he saw that she remembered it when she smiled, their history a bright, hot ghost between them right there in the middle of a crowded party, their grandmothers no doubt watching their every move. Griffin didn’t care.

  Do you still have that crush on me? he’d asked ten years ago, so full of himself and so arrogant, because he’d already known the answer. It had never been in any doubt, not in years. He’d seen it all over her face every time she’d looked at him since she’d turned thirteen.

  No, she’d lied. They’d both known she was lying. She’d blushed and he’d grinned. Who would have a crush on you? You’re awful.

  He’d been close to her then. He’d propped an arm up over her head and leaned into her, his mouth so close to hers he’d been able to feel it when her breath had come in short little pants. And he hadn’t cared what he’d been supposed to do just then. He’d wanted a taste of her. He still did.

  Too bad, he’d said, because he really had been awful. I thought you might want to kiss me. But only if you still had a crush on me, of course.

  Back then, she’d called him arrogant and he’d smirked, they’d moved closer, and then she’d kissed him after all. He couldn’t imagine, now, how he’d managed to walk away.

  “No,” Emmy whispered now, still looking up at him in that way that made his chest feel tight. “I don’t have a crush on you, Griffin. That would be a whole lot easier.”

  Her meaning flowed through him, the electricity of it arcing between them, setting him on fire, making him feel something like giddy and drunk and wild all at once. His hands tightened around hers. He had to remind himself where they were, and even then, he wasn’t sure he cared.

  “Emmy—” he started, but she was smiling up at him and he didn’t know what he wanted to say, only that she felt this, too. She felt this.

  What else could possibly matter?

  “Griffin?”

  It took him a long, hard minute to place the voice. To understand that Emmy wasn’t the one who had said his name and that worse than that, he recognized who had. But it didn’t make any sense.

  He turned slightly, still holding Emmy’s hands, not really sure he was breathing properly, and so his first thought was that he was hallucinating. That all the things roaring and pounding and surging their way through him were making him lose his mind entirely.

  Because there was no way she could be walking toward him, cutting through the crowd, her eyes on him the way they were. There was absolutely no way this could be happening, especially not right now.

  Not right now.

  She was wearing more clothes than the last time he’d seen her, and he’d forgotten that she really was pretty, in that easy, athletic way he’d always liked. Her shoulders were a little broad because she was strong and she still walked like she’d rather be running, her toffee-colored hair smoothed back into a slick ponytail and that hopeful smile on her mouth, and she was the last person on Earth Griffin wanted to see.

  He felt Emmy tug her hands away and he felt nothing but empty, then, but he stood there like he’d turned to stone and waited until this particular apparition stopped in front of him.

  Not now, he thought again, but nothing happened. She was still right there.

  Her eyes flicked to Emmy and then back to him and her smile didn’t dim, precisely, but she didn’t look back at Emmy, either.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said quietly.

  “Not long enough.”

  He hadn’t meant to say that and especially not the way he did, because it sounded like he cared when he didn’t. The thing he truly cared about made a soft little sound beside him, like she’d been kicked in the stomach, and he hated it. He hated all of this.

  “Celia,” he said, and he noticed she was still wearing the ring he’d put on her finger, a detail that made him want to tear the whole place down because what could she possibly be thinking. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “What does it look like?” she replied, and she tilted her chin up like she was ready to go a few rounds, whether he wanted to or not. “You should have answered my calls. I’m here to win us a wedding.”

  Chapter Nine

  Celia was staying in the Graff Hotel, in one of the newly renovated suites that fairly burst with Old West ambiance and Victorian elegance. Griffin probably would have liked it a lot more if he wasn’t so furious.

  He stood by the windows that looked down Front Avenue, toward FlintWorks Brewery at the old railway depot where Emmy had changed everything for him and past it, to the little shop he’d put an offer on before he’d left the realtor’s office this afternoon. This was his future. This was what he wanted.

  But his past was standing behind him in a tight black dress and he supposed he’d been avoiding her long enough.

  “Where’s Henry?” he asked.

  He could see Celia in the reflection of the window, standing to one side of the couch in her sitting area, her hands wrapped around her middle. He knew what that meant. He knew she was hurting. And while that didn’t matter to him the way it might have once, he found he couldn’t pretend he didn’t care, either.

  “Who was that woman you were with?” she asked.

  He laughed as he turned to face her, though it wasn’t a good sound. “Really?”

  “You looked happy, that’s all.” Celia had the grace to look uncomfortable. “That’s what I meant. I can’t remember the last time I thought you looked happy.”

  “It doesn’t matter who she is,” he said instead of addressing that, and all the reasons he hadn’t been able to tell her how unhappy he’d been. “You scared her off. Was that the goal?”

  Emmy had excused herself, smiled at Celia as if delighted to meet her, and then fled. And the only thing he wanted to do was chase after her, but he couldn’t. Not until he put his past behind him, at last. How could he move on until he did?

  Was that what Gran Martha had been trying to tell him?

  “Did my grandmother set this up?” he asked, because this seemed unduly cruel for the Grans. They liked to push and poke, but they rarely threw their relatives off of the kind of cliff this had been tonight. And he couldn’t imagine they’d want to hurt Emmy, much less let him do it.

  “No.” Celia shook her head to emphasize that. “She told me to write you a letter if I wanted to talk to you. But I did a little looking online and I saw that you and I were entered in this wedding contest and I… hoped.”

  Griffin only looked at her. And for the first time in a long while, he let himself remember. It hadn’t all been handling and deceit. He’d loved her as much as he could have loved anyone back then, when he’d thought he had no choice but to storm his way up the corporate ladder. That version of him had meant to marry Celia. They’d talked about kids and a long future together, and he’d wanted that. He was sure he must have wanted that. But he couldn’t see any of it any longer. It was like looking at someone else’s photographs of a time he hardly remembered anymore, and that wasn’t just Emmy’s influence. It was all these long months away from a life he should have mourned and missed, but hadn’t.

  “I should have taken your calls,” he said now. “I shouldn’t have let this all drag out.”

  “You were pissed.” She shrugged, and her mouth did that thing it did when she was trying not to cry. “You had a right to be pissed.”

  “You and Henry didn’t…?”

  He had no idea where he wanted to go with that question and was glad when she blew out a breath and answered it anyway.

  “It didn’t last long.” She held herself tighter, but she didn’t look away. “I don’t think he can forgive himself for what he did to you.” Her smile then was tinged with something bitter. “I’ve always liked that about both of you, you know. You’re good, decent people. I’m really not.”

  He would have agreed earlier today, but that was his pride talking. Everything seemed a lot more complicated now. A lot more shaded with grey. He thought of all
the questions he’d wanted to ask her at different points, when he’d sat there in the cabin and indulged his temper—how long she’d been with Henry, if she’d cheated on him before, if she had, how many times—and none of them seemed worth asking any longer. What did any of that matter now? He’d moved on a long time ago. Maybe before he’d left Jackson Hole.

  She’d done him a favor.

  “You’re going to meet the right person, Celia,” he said then, and he meant it. “And it’s going to be easy. Not like us. Not all the back and forth, the fighting. It’s going to make sense.”

  “It wasn’t all bad,” she whispered. “Not all of it.”

  “No,” he agreed after a moment. “Not all of it. But if it’s that hard to do the right thing, it’s probably because it’s not the right thing at all.”

  She nodded once, jerkily, and she took in a sharp breath, and when she looked back at him any trace of emotion in her gaze was gone. He didn’t tell her that he’d always admired that she could do that, that she could hide anything, because he thought she’d take it as a dig. She stripped the ring he’d given her off her finger and held it out to him.

  “This is yours.”

  “I actually Googled that. You’re only supposed to give it back if it’s an heirloom. It’s not, so it’s yours.”

  “I can’t keep it,” she said, with a hint of the emotion he didn’t see on her face. “I’m the one who—”

  “It would have ended anyway.” She looked startled at that, and he let out a small laugh. “Come on, Celia. You know it would have. In all the time we were engaged, you never set a date for the wedding. You kept changing the subject. And I hadn’t been happy for a long time. We can stand here and blame you for it if you want, but that’s not really fair. You gave us both a way out. You picked the guy I couldn’t pretend I was okay with.” He moved toward her then and closed her hand over the ring, accepting the bittersweet thing that worked in him then, like sorrow. But softer. “Keep it. I don’t want it.”

  “Griffin—”

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  He moved to the sofa across from her and waited for her to ease herself down, like she was afraid either the pillows below her were breakable or she was. Maybe they both were, he thought. If he regretted anything, it was that he’d never understood that until now. She deserved better. But then, so did he.

  “Don’t worry,” he said when he saw the expression on her face, the way she struggled to compose herself, “the hard part is over. This is about the business. And I think you’re going to like what I have to say.”

  Margery’s wedding day dawned cold. Winter cold.

  In the tradition of Montana’s capricious springs, the temperatures had plummeted with little warning the night before and the land glittered with an unexpected frost come the morning. Emmy had spent the night—the last two nights, in fact—sleeping on the couch in Gran Harriet’s study with an inadequate selection of blankets, which meant she had a long stretch of peace and quiet, gazing out over the chilly land framed in Gran’s huge central window and deliberately not thinking about a freaking thing, before she heard someone pad up beside her.

  She knew it was Margery even before her sister sighed. She accepted the mug of coffee Margery handed to her and then they stood like that for a moment, their shoulders brushing and their eyes on the sweep of lawn out in front that rolled down toward the white tent on the bluff. Marietta looked small and cozy down below on the valley floor, with chimneys puffing out smoke here and there beneath clouds that Emmy wasn’t going to point out looked a whole lot like snow.

  “I suppose I had this coming,” Margery said philosophically. “Mom told me to do this in August when we could be reasonably sure of the weather but I refused to get married in all that humidity. I didn’t want to be sweating like a pig in all my photos. It never occurred to me I might have to wear a parka instead.”

  “On the bright side,” Emmy pointed out, “you’ll look particularly cute in a wedding dress with a parka on top.”

  “I certainly will,” Margery said, a smile in her voice if not on her face. “Which is what matters.”

  “That and the love, of course.”

  Margery’s shoulder pressed hers that little bit harder. “And that.”

  And Emmy decided she didn’t have any time to think about that deep note of contentment in her sister’s voice, or reflect on how little of that was likely to sound in her own, because there was a raucous family breakfast to sit through. Within an hour of her getting up there were cousins and aunts and uncles chattering in every available room. Guests stopped by to drop off gifts. Emmy took delivery of the flowers from the very nice Risa, the new owner of the florist’s shop in town. She helped her mother put the final touches on the centerpieces and oversaw the placement of all those vanity chocolates in their pretty copper boxes.

  She was already worn out when she retreated to the farthest reaches of the finished basement downstairs in search of a dog toy Gran Harriet was certain had been left there and needed immediately, for some reason, to find her father smoking one of the cigars he’d been supposed to give up years ago.

  “Busted,” she said.

  Her father rolled his expressive eyes and blew a stream of smoke out of an open storm window.

  “If a man can’t have a cigar on his daughter’s wedding day, when can he have one?”

  “An argument you clearly didn’t make with Mom or you wouldn’t be hiding in the basement,” Emmy said dryly.

  Her father only smiled. “Marriages are only strengthened by the secrets we pretend to keep,” he said. “She will pretend not to smell my sin on my clothes and I’ll pretend it didn’t happen and this, my darling girl, is how we’ve remained together for thirty years.”

  “Lying?” She couldn’t help herself, then. She thought that if lying was what it took for a happy marriage then Celia—the astoundingly attractive Celia, a small fact no one had mentioned—and Griffin must be destined for deep and abiding bliss, and it made her want to scream. Or break things. “And here I would have thought lying was a bad thing.”

  “Lying is a bad thing,” her father said. “No one’s lying. But the deliberate decision to choose not to bring up something that will only cause a fight? That’s marital harmony right there. You’ll see.”

  She decided not to tell him that she very much doubted she ever would.

  Emmy had spent the past two days in a state of numbness. She’d walked out of the Italian restaurant in town after Celia’s appearance and had found herself staring up blankly at St. James’s Church while the spring evening stayed blue and bright—when all she wanted was to be hidden away in shadows. Hidden somewhere so far away that what had happened inside the restaurant couldn’t touch her.

  She’d found herself wandering the streets of Marietta like this was some kind of country song, and had acted like she’d meant to be there when she’d run into some of her cousins outside of Gray’s Saloon. She’d eaten dinner and smiled and drank a little too much beer, and then, when her cousins had dropped her off at the cabin, she’d sat on the couch in the great room and stared at all the places she and Griffin had come together.

  It was going to be fine, she’d told herself. Griffin and Celia needed to talk about some things, obviously, but then he’d come home and they’d finish the conversation they’d started in the restaurant, and everything would be fine.

  But when she’d woken up the following morning, her head had pounded and her mouth had been too dry. She was still on the couch, in a weird position that suggested she’d simply slumped to one side there, and she was still in the clothes she’d worn out the night before.

  And Griffin wasn’t there.

  She’d packed up her things on autopilot, she’d stood in the shower and forced back all the memories of sharing it with him, and she’d told herself she should have known better. This was what he did. He always left when it would hurt her the most. Always. How had she managed to forget that?

 
She supposed she should count herself lucky that she’d actually left that restaurant last night still wearing her clothes.

  Only when she’d realized that she was dawdling in his kitchen, obviously killing time in the hope he’d turn up with explanations and declarations and all the rest of the things she’d imagined he’d do ten years ago, too, and he hadn’t, had she forced herself to drive back over to Gran Harriet’s in the ratty old car that she’d been borrowing this week, telling anyone who asked—and a few who hadn’t—that she’d sleep here through the wedding, the better to be right on hand as maid of honor.

  How thoughtful of you to be such a rock for your sister, Gran Harriet had said placidly, eyeing Emmy over the top of her Kindle screen.

  I’m nothing if not thoughtful, Emmy had replied. Through her teeth.

  She convinced herself that she was fine. She’d head home on Monday as planned and wasn’t that great? She’d finally had a full-fledged fling. She’d finally burst out of her sheltered little bubble and lived a little. Surely all the strange things she was feeling was nothing more than joy. Pure, unadulterated, excruciatingly painful joy.

  Even when Griffin had failed to show up for the Grans’ party that next night, she didn’t fall apart, or torture herself with a thousand images of what was very likely keeping him away.

  Something came up with his business, his mother had said, not that Emmy had been loitering near the appetizers for the express purpose of eavesdropping on that conversation, because that would be crazy. He’s sorry to miss out, but he’ll be here for the wedding on Saturday.

  Part of being as fine as she was, Emmy told herself, was that she didn’t get as drunk as she wanted after hearing that and she didn’t render herself paralytic when the day before the wedding dragged on by and he didn’t so much as shoot her a text. No one else might realize the heroics involved in behaving as if she was the same old Emmy she’d always been, if dolled up in a bridesmaid’s dress and wearing too much makeup, but she knew exactly how hard this was.