Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides) (19 page)

Nell stayed at the hospital with Sadie and Em. Cole drove back to the ranch alone. He had work to do, he told them. Sam understood.

Cole had gone back into his dad
’s room before he left. Everyone else backed away when he approached Sam’s bed, as if they didn’t want to be there for the next skirmish. Cole didn’t blame them.

“
You got a little more color in your face,” he told Sam after a moment’s silence. There. That at least wasn’t worth fighting over.

A corner of Sam
’s mouth had quirked, as if he knew what Cole was doing. “Hope so,” he’d said. Then he reached out and punched Cole lightly on the upper arm with his fist. “I’m sorry.”

Cole frowned.
“The hell are you sorry for? You didn’t do it on purpose. Not even you could have a heart attack on purpose.”

Sam laughed
—just a little. “No. Not even me.” He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “I’m sorry it’s all fallin’ on you.”

Cole rubbed a hand against the back of his neck.
“It’s okay. I can handle it.”

“
I know that. You’re a rock, just like your grandmother says. Always have been. At least you got a good woman to stand by you.”

Cole swallowed.
“Yeah.” His gaze flicked over to where Nell was standing on the far side of the room talking in a low voice with Jane and Maggie and Beth. “She’s a good woman, all right. The best.”

Now the good woman was taking everyone to dinner in town while Cole went back out to the ranch.
There were chores that needed doing tonight. And if Sam wasn’t going with him tomorrow to take the cattle up to the summer range, he might as well get an early start in the morning. He might call Dillon and see if he or one of the hands on the Sheenan place would like to lend a hand. It was easier with two. There was no reason any longer to imagine he’d get a day-long honeymoon with Nell. It wasn’t going to happen.

He knew it. He accepted it.
And he knew Nell did, too. Before he left, he had heard her telling Em she would bring her back into Bozeman tomorrow morning to see how Sam was doing.

He got back to the ranch a little past eight.
It was hard to imagine it the beehive of activity it had been less than twenty-four hours ago. It seem almost desolate now—as if it had been abandoned.

“
Wouldn’t it be cool if everyone got swept up by Martians?” he remembered his brother, Clint, saying when he was nine. At seven, Cole had thought that would indeed be cool. Now he knew it would just feel lonely.

He cleaned up the living room and dining room in the ranch house, picked up all the cups and plates and silverware sitting on the table, stuff that Em hadn
’t got to from lunch—stuff that he and Nell had left her with, he remembered guiltily. Then he washed the dishes and didn’t leave them to drain on the counter top. He knew Em. She’d wash them all over again unless he dried them and put them away.

He was just finishing when he saw headlights coming up the road.
Nell? Already? He tossed the dish towel on the table and went to open the door.

But it wasn
’t Sadie’s car. It was a truck he didn’t know. It pulled up alongside the barn, both of its doors opened, and two men wearing cowboy hats got out. In the half-light of dusk, he didn’t recognize them until they were halfway across the yard.

Then he stared.
“Mac? Chandler? What the—?”

“
We figured you needed a couple of hands for the drive tomorrow,” Chandler said. He was grinning his summer-camper grin, but he was wearing a new straw cowboy hat and a pair of Wranglers with his Polo t-shirt.

Cole frowned.
“You’re supposed to be on a plane.”

“
Missed it,” Mac said unrepentantly. “We were at the hospital, weren’t we? Matter of life and death.” He shrugged. “We’ve got a few days. So we rented a truck, brought the dogs back with us. We’d be glad to help. What do you say?”

Cole said yes.

He didn’t want to make demands on his neighbors. Dillon had his own cattle to deal with. And hell, why not? Chandler and Mac had learned a lot. A couple of days in the saddle and they’d learn a lot more—especially about sore butts. “If you’re sure?” he gave them an option to back out. “I can do it on my own.”

“
Probably faster,” Mac said before Cole could say it himself.

But Cole just shook his head. Fast didn
’t matter. “Yes,” he said. “Glad to have you. Hell, yes.”

While they remade their bunks in the bunkhouse and settled in, Cole put together provisions from the kitchen, gathering enough for
three and stowing it in saddlebags. Then he went out to the bunkhouse again and told them he’d be there at six.

“
We’ll be ready,” Chandler promised. He slanted a grin Mac’s way. “We can make Maggie and Beth get up early and fix us breakfast.”

“
They’re staying, too?” Cole was surprised.

“
Yep. They’re coming back with Jane. Everybody’s back,” Mac told him. “Couldn’t stay away.” He grinned. “See you in the morning. Oh, and Nell said to tell you she’ll be along as soon as they’ve had dinner. She’d call but in the rush to get to the hospital, she left her phone at the cabin.”

Nell
’s phone was vibrating on the counter top when Cole opened the door.

He looked at it for a moment, then shook his head and walked past it.
After a minute it stopped.

He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a beer, popped the top and carried it over to the chair by the fireplace.
Behind him the phone started vibrating again.

He began setting out kindling to make a fire in the fireplace. Nell might like one when she got back.
Since they weren’t even going to have a day’s worth of honeymoon, maybe a fire would be a nice gesture. And it gave him something to do until the phone stopped vibrating.

When he got it going, Cole shed his boots and sprawled in the chair in front of the fire, balancing the beer bottle on his belt buckle as he stared into the flames.
He didn’t see them. He saw his dad, starkly pale and oddly apologetic. So not Sam. Damn it!

The phone started vibrating again.
What the hell?

He ground his teeth.
Who would be calling at this time of night? Over and over and over? He tried to blot it out. Not his business, he told himself.

But Nell was his business.
What if that was her, having borrowed someone else’s phone, trying to call him?

His own phone was dead, a not unusual occurrence. It was old and tired and had spent much of its life looking for satellite signals that were few and far between.
Nell knew that. She had a sleek new fancy phone that did more things than a trained seal. It obviously had plenty of battery life because, damn it, it had stopped ringing moments ago and almost at once began again.

Cole cursed under his breath, got up and grabbed the phone.
It wasn’t Jane or Maggie or Beth or even Sadie. The caller ID said Grant. Cole cursed again. Out loud this time.

The phone kept vibrating in his hand. He regarded it as if it were a rattlesnake until it stopped.
What the hell did her boss want with her on a Saturday night? How urgent was it?

Pretty urgent apparently.
The phone was already vibrating again.

Goaded, Cole answered.
“What do you want?” he barked.

There was a split second
’s silence. Then Nell’s boss said, “Who’s this? The husband?”

Well, at least he knew she had one.
“That’s right.”

“
Where’s Nell?”

“
None of your business. It’s Saturday night,” Cole told him. “She doesn’t work for you 24/7. She’s not a slave. It can’t be a matter of life or death!”

“
It’s a matter of her career,” Grant said sharply. “If she still wants to have one, that is. I presume she does?” He made it sound like a question.

Cole knew it wasn
’t. His fingers tightened on the phone. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“
It means she had better stop playing games. I can’t keep putting her name out there to the studio for the European adventure job if she keeps saying no.”

What European adventure job?
Cole didn’t ask. Instead he said, “Maybe you should listen to her.”

“
Maybe you should stop complicating her life,” Grant snarled back. “Or maybe you should get on a plane and go with her if you two are so much in love.”

Cole
’s teeth came together with a snap. “She quit her job!”

“
Yes, so she keeps telling me. And what kind of damn fool does that? Not a woman with more talent in her little finger than most of the people I work with every day! Why the hell do you think I’ve promoted her so damn fast? Why do you think she’s already directing whole segments of the show? Because she’s good! Damn good! She knows people. She knows possibilities. She knows how to put them together and make them work. And she’s not afraid to take a chance!” Pause. “At least she wasn’t.” The cold insinuation was like a knife between the ribs.

Cole felt it go in, felt it twist.
Gritted his teeth. Didn’t say a word.

Nell
’s boss didn’t speak either, not for a long moment. Perhaps he was wondering if he’d overstepped his bounds. No, Cole decided, a man like Grant would never think he’d overstepped anything.

“
You need to talk to her,” Grant said finally, and his voice had moderated now, though Cole could still hear the implacable command in it. “You can’t let her throw this away.”

“
Nell’s her own person,” Cole began.

“
Not now she’s not,” Grant snapped. “Now she thinks she has to give up everything she’s worked for to play nursemaid to some cowboy and a bunch of cows.”

Cole swallowed.
“It’s her choice.”

“
Is it? Is that what you’re telling yourself? Try looking at it sensibly, why don’t you? She’s got a gift, an amazing talent—and I don’t throw those words around lightly. She is the best storyteller I know. And she works well with people. She gets the best out of them.” He paused. “She should be doing that.”

Cole shut his eyes.
He heard more than Grant’s words, he heard the truth in them.

“
Don’t hang up on me,” Grant said sharply to the silence.

“
I didn’t hang up,” Cole said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, then pressed his fingers against his eyelids.

“
She’s doing this for you,” Grant went on relentlessly. “Giving up everything for you. Losing the best part of herself. For you. Think about that.”

Then Grant hung up on him.

Nell got home—and she did think of the cabin as home already—just past eleven.

The light that shone from the front windows drew her like a beacon, ready to wrap her in the warmth that waited.
She had driven Sadie’s car up from the ranch house. Now she got out and hurried up the steps as the front door opened.

“
Hey,” Cole said. He was standing there in his socks, silhouetted by the fire in the fireplace, and she practically ran those last few steps and flung herself into his arms. They closed around her instinctively, wrapped her tightly, held her close. She felt his cheek against the top of her head. She nuzzled against his hard chest, rubbed her cheek against the soft flannel of his shirt and drew in the scent of leather and beer and that something that was indefinably Cole. She felt her throat tighten and knew tears threatened to spill.