A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) Read online

  It occurred to Griffin that he was standing there in the doorway like he was blocking it or barring her way when that was pretty much the last thing he wanted to do. He moved then, reaching out to grab her bag yet again and then jerking his chin to beckon her inside, choosing not to examine the warring factions inside of him—all of them loud and rowdy and a little more hungry than he wanted to admit as she walked past him, close enough that he could smell the apple fragrance of her shampoo.

  Her staying here was a terrible idea. Obviously. But he couldn’t see any way out of it. The Grans were historically unsympathetic to any deviations from their various decrees. This was their land. These were their houses. Anyone who wanted to come and stay here lived by their rules, or left.

  “I don’t have a second bedroom,” Griffin said as she walked into the center of the large, open plan space that took up most of the first floor and looked around. Then up toward the open second floor accessible from the open stair on the side wall. “Just a loft with a futon.”

  He didn’t know what she saw when she didn’t respond immediately; he saw the clutter of his business and his life. Everywhere. Designs and schematics spread out across the table in what was meant to be a dining area. His desk over in the corner with his big Wacom monitor that he could draw on in the center, his laptop to one side, and the twenty-seven-inch display he used with his desktop and sometimes as a television screen on the perpendicular return. There were clothing samples piled up on the couch and spilling out of a heap of boxes in the living room area and a tangle of sports equipment near the back door.

  Emmy turned back to him and he was sure she’d wiped her face clean of whatever expression had been there. He wanted to see what it had been more than was reasonable and wasn’t sure why. He had nothing to prove. He was living in this cabin because he wanted to be here. Why was he already defensive?

  “A futon in a loft sounds great,” she said, and he had to hand it to her, she sounded something like convincing.

  “You can take the bedroom,” he said, some heretofore slumbering spark of chivalry rearing itself awake.

  He could have sworn that that look in her dark eyes then was panic, and that intrigued him more than it should have.

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. So quickly he was sure it really was panic and he wanted to know why and what that meant. Easy, buddy, he told himself. This isn’t a race. “I couldn’t.”

  And then they were looking at each other, and it was a little too intense, and Griffin lost his place. It was as if he slipped sideways on an unexpected bit of ice high in the backcountry, and all he could focus on was that needy, demanding thing in him that wanted. He could remember her body against his all those years ago in the cool darkness of that barn, when he should have known better and had kissed her back anyway. The way she’d tasted him with all of that untried passion and then melted against him. The heat of her he’d held in his hand that he could almost feel again now, like a brand deep into his palm.

  He’d always thought the cabin was roomy. Comfortable. More than spacious enough for him throughout the long winter he’d spent here with nothing but his own dark thoughts. And now he thought the rough-hewn walls were closing in on him and he didn’t mind that as much as he should, not when he was looking at her. He kind of liked it.

  Emmy was watching him closely, and Griffin was sure that was fire he saw lighting up that gaze of hers then, then turning into a flush across her cheeks. He was sure of it—and equally sure that it would be a terrible idea to do any one of the vivid, starkly sexual things his imagination kept throwing at him, one after the next.

  Not yet, he told himself harshly. Not if she’s staying here. Make sure you’re on the same page this time.

  Because he wasn’t going to make a mistake the way he had with her before. And he wasn’t going to make a mistake the way he had with Celia, either. He needed to find a way to be a little less of a dumb fuck this time around.

  If that’s even possible.

  Though when her lips parted slightly, like maybe she was finding the air in the cabin as hard to breathe as he was, what page they were on was the last thing on his mind. He thought, with perfect clarity and that heavy, driving need inside making him feel crazy, that if he didn’t reach over and bring that mouth of hers to his and who cared what happened then, he might die of it.

  “Want that drink?”

  His voice was a machine gun in the stillness of the cabin, loud and harsh. She flinched slightly at the sound of it. Then blinked, as if she was dazed, too.

  Griffin didn’t really want to think about how much he hoped that was true. That she was as off-balance and wild with this crazy hunger as he was.

  He didn’t want to think about it. To picture what might happen if she was. What could happen next.

  But he did.

  “Yes,” she said after a moment, her voice thicker than it had been before. He felt it like a victory and that poured through him, electric and very nearly insane. The perfect rush. “I really would.”

  Grey’s Saloon was exactly the way Emmy remembered it and had dreamed it now and again, thank God.

  She’d eaten dinner here a thousand times before under the watchful glare of the owners, the taciturn and intimidating Jason Grey and his right hand man, the younger, hotter, and gorgeously aloof Reese Kendrick. Emmy had spent long summers making up stories about both of them in her head like every other girl in Marietta, she was quite sure. They were such men. Hard and formidable, not unlike Griffin himself, not that she wanted to think about that too closely.

  They weren’t a little bit round and very funny, like her ever-exasperated father, still an attorney in Washington, DC. They weren’t good-natured and obliging, like her grandfather, who had taken to painting large, still-life canvases in his later years and had taken over the old barn out on the edge of the property as his studio. Jason Grey and Reese Kendrick were the stuff teenage girl fantasies were made of and the scourge of the summer kids who thought their home addresses in far-off sophisticated places made them smarter than the two men who ran this historic saloon in pretty downtown Marietta—because neither one of them tolerated any underage shenanigans.

  Or any shenanigans at all, come to that.

  All that and Grey’s served a mean cheeseburger, if she remembered it right.

  Emmy smiled as she stepped into the familiar dimness and found both men right where she’d left them a decade ago when the only naughty thing she’d been permitted to order in this place was the huckleberry pie Margery had always claimed could make a girl fat if she so much as thought about eating it. Jason stood scowling in the gloomy shadows at the far end of the bar while Reese served drinks next to a third remarkably attractive bartender with a cheerful Australian accent, as if only stunning men applied for work in this place.

  “Are they still so…” she asked as they walked toward the long, gleaming bar and couldn’t quite pick the right word in the face of all that obviously unfriendly yet undeniably attractive manhood on the other side, “…growly?”

  “Absolutely,” Griffin muttered, directing her toward a set of bar stools with a light touch to the small of her back that she shouldn’t have felt at all, much less the way she did. Like a bolt of lightning. “It gets worse by the day.”

  This time, Emmy was going to be able to order something other than a diet Coke, at last. She felt as excited about that as she had about ordering her first legal drink on her actual twenty-first birthday in Atlanta all those years ago.

  And then Griffin slid onto the barstool next to her and she allowed as how her excitement was a many splendored thing, indeed.

  He’d thrown a hooded sweatshirt on over his t-shirt and he should have looked like an adolescent hooligan. Or something other than the successful owner of a vastly expanding, international business that he was. But he didn’t. He did something extraordinarily male with his chin and a particular look, and the Australian bartender slid him a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass. And then wh
en Griffin did something with his eyebrows, a second one.

  “You really do ruin everything,” she said crossly when he poured out two shots and nudged one toward her. “I’ve been looking forward to ordering a drink here since I was ten years old.”

  “Then by all means,” he said in that smoky way of his that threatened the integrity of her bones, turning all of them to mush even as she tried to sit up straighter. “Let this be apology number one.”

  He lifted up his shot glass and Emmy did the same. She felt something darker than mere heat wind through her when he tapped the two together, yet never moved that intent green gaze of his from hers.

  She tossed her shot back and let the whiskey roll through her, a mellow fire that wasn’t at all helpful when it tangled with all that heat already inside of her. Not helpful, but it made her feel bold. Softer around the edges, especially after a long afternoon spent dunked neck deep in the sea of Margery’s college friends.

  I just don’t understand you, one of them had cooed at Emmy, her head cocked to one side so that Emmy had been all but mesmerized by the cunning placement of the barrette that swept her glossy light brown hair back in a kind of wave from her forehead. You’d be so cute if you let yourself.

  Emmy will never let herself be anything she can’t control and call practical, Margery, the raging control freak in the Mathis family by such a large margin it was almost funny, had trilled with no apparent sense of irony.

  Everyone had laughed, including Emmy after receiving a warning look from her frazzled mother from across Gran Harriet’s large and comfortable living room, and Emmy still didn’t know which part of that she found more annoying. That the most controlling woman she’d ever known, who had been like that when they were both under the age of ten, dared say something like that to Emmy in front of all of her friends? Or that she was currently sitting much too close to the reason she’d decided recklessness was for idiots like the one she’d been at eighteen, and since then had set about making only decisions that might keep her far safer?

  In other words, if she was controlling, then that was probably Griffin’s fault.

  She licked her lips because they burned from the whiskey, and felt the kick of it when Griffin’s green eyes followed the motion like he couldn’t help himself. She was suddenly afraid she might slide right off the barstool, boneless and lit on fire, which would no doubt count as one of the shenanigans Jason Grey and Reese Kendrick discouraged. It was a measure of how out of control simply being in Griffin’s presence again made her that she couldn’t find it in herself to care.

  “I want to sleep with you,” he told her, and for a moment, while her heart pounded so hard it actually hurt, she thought she’d fantasized that. But then he reached over and traced the lips she’d just licked with the calloused pad of his thumb, and she felt a bolt of sensation sear through her, so bright and hot there was no possible way she’d made it up in her head. “Soon.”

  Emmy thought she might faint. Instead, she reminded herself that he’d said things like that before, and to only sad and painful ends. There was no point getting excited about something he might change his mind about. Again. So she shrugged as if men like him said things like that to women like her seven times a night.

  “Noted,” she replied flippantly.

  And Griffin grinned. A real grin, hot and male and wow. Like he’d thrown down a challenge and she’d met it, and this was a game they were playing. A game with only one possible conclusion.

  It took everything she had not to shiver so hard he’d see it. Or fall off her seat to the floor beneath her into an inelegant heap.

  “I last saw you when you were eighteen,” he said.

  “I remember, thank you.”

  A little crook of his hard mouth. “We’ll get to that night. First, tell me what’s happened since. Job. Major life events.” His gaze hardened. “Husband?”

  Emmy leaned her elbow against the bar, swiveling around on her stool so she could face him. She didn’t pretend not to understand what this conversation was about. Not a getting to know you, but a removal of obstacles. She told herself she was offended by his arrogance—

  But she wasn’t. She hadn’t been ten years ago. She certainly wasn’t now, when anything that might have been glib or reckless in him back then had been so deliciously tempered by the passing of all that time. And experience, a little voice whispered.

  “I went to Emory and majored in English so I could read books all day,” she said, managing to sound calm and cool when she was neither. “I liked Atlanta, so I stayed there afterward. I got a job in an ad agency and have been writing copy for them ever since.”

  She waited, and so did he, and she would have sworn neither one of them breathed.

  “No husband,” she said after a moment, and she wasn’t sure why it felt like the worst kind of obvious flirting to say that. Or like a green light to a very slippery slope—and she already felt like she was tipping over the edge of it and about to start sliding down. “I broke up with my last boyfriend a few months back. It wasn’t very dramatic. He thought we might as well get married. I realized I wanted something else. Like a man who wanted me more than might as well.” She slid her glass back toward Griffin and waited while he poured her another shot. “I’ve heard he’s already talking an October wedding with my replacement.”

  “You might as well have been a sofa, then. What a thrill.”

  “That was my thinking.” She twisted the shot glass around, watching the amber liquid catch the light. “I’m sure this means I’m a narcissist, but I’d rather not be quite so easily replaced.”

  He laughed, and she caught her breath at what genuine humor did to that face of his. That beautiful face of his that she worried was imprinted inside of her somehow, making it impossible to really see anyone else. Was that why no one else had ever appealed to her the way he had? Throughout all these years?

  Emmy had always told herself he was a childhood addiction that she’d conquered by avoiding him. But she’d been equally sure that if she saw him again, the spell would be broken. Childhood myths and legends were nothing more than favorite stories once you grew up, weren’t they?

  Tonight she thought that maybe she’d been lying to herself for a very long time.

  “I got engaged last June,” Griffin told her in that low, sexy rumble of a voice, and she hoped he hadn’t seen any of that imprinting nonsense on her face. “We’d been together for a few years, she worked in my company; it was all a big, happy team.” He tossed back his second shot, then slapped the glass down on the wood in front of him. “Then one day in the middle of September we got in a fight, which wasn’t unusual. She said she was moving out. She did that a lot, too. Then two days later she and my best friend Henry—who’s also my CFO—took me to dinner. I thought he was there to mediate.”

  Emmy pulled in a breath. “Oh, no.”

  “They told me they were thinking they might date someday, since she and I had finally run our course, which was news to me.” His smile was fierce and beautiful at once, and something hollow and hot scraped through her, making her wonder how anyone could leave this man. For any reason at all. “But when I dropped by Henry’s place later that night, she was there. And they weren’t dressed. It’s hard not to draw a few conclusions about how long that must have been going on, looking back.”

  “That all sounds unduly civilized,” Emmy said after a moment when he didn’t elaborate. “Did you have a polite chat over wine? Compare notes? Are you all robots?”

  “I left out the part where I punched him in the face and called her a few names I’m not too proud of.” Still that hard smile. And it felt even more like a very focused kind of flirting when he reached over and drew a pattern on the back of her hand, the way he’d doodled on every available surface when they were kids. It felt like more than flirting. It felt like history and need, and his green eyes were so warm it made it hard to breathe besides. “I’m trying to make a good impression on you.”

  “To
talk me into sleeping with you.”

  “God, yes.”

  “By talking about your ex? Pretty risky move. Amateur, even. Huge potential for that to backfire in a major way.”

  “There’s no way you’ve forgotten the fact your sister mentioned my supposed broken heart earlier,” Griffin drawled. “Even if you’ve shoved it to the back burner, it’s still there. Unless you’ve undergone a complete personality shift, you don’t forget a single thing. I figured I’d approach it head on.”

  Emmy studied him for a moment, aware that everything felt taut. Pulled tight, stretched thin. And yet too full besides, with a kind of happy glow that he remembered her personality at all.

  “I think I’d draw serious conclusions about the length of their relationship and then fire the both of them, for good measure,” she said, her tone light. “You’re the boss, right? You can do that. I bet that would be even more satisfying than name-calling. Or face-punching.”

  “Punching him in the face was pretty satisfying. I can’t lie.”

  “I can see that. I think any reasonable person would call that a justifiable face punching, really, given the circumstances.”

  That hard mouth of his shifted into the small crook that was his usual smile, and Emmy’s heart flipped over in her chest. She told herself it was the whiskey.

  “I’m considering my options.” He studied her face for what felt like a very long time. “I don’t care that they’re together anymore. I’m sorry to disappoint the Grans and your sister, who all love a good tragedy, but I’m not brokenhearted.”

  “I’ll be sure to pass that on the next time you come up,” Emmy assured him. “Which will probably be every five minutes or so, now that all the bridesmaids got a good look at you. I’ll have to break all of their hearts and tell them you’re fine. No need for their tender loving care.”