A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides)
Read A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) Online
Authors: Megan Crane
Game Of Brides
a
montana born brides novel
Megan Crane
©Copyright 2014 Megan Crane
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: 978-1-940296-37-1
She felt him before she saw him.
It was the same as it had always been during those long, golden Montana summers when she’d been unable to escape how helpless and wild he’d made her feel as an inexperienced teenager—that little shiver down the back of her neck, then snaking along her arms, as if every hair on her body was shivering to attention.
And t
hen, because she wasn’t a teenager any longer, lower. Much lower.
Emmy Mathis scowled at the baggage carousel at the Bozeman, Montana airport, willing
her reaction away. Willing her goose bumps to disappear. Willing herself to feel none of that shimmering, infuriating
need
that curled like light deep inside her
.
Willing her absurd reaction to be nothing more than a response to the colder temperature.
I
t was May in Montana and only chilly for Emmy because she’d woken up this morning back home in much warmer Atlanta, and when she slung her duffel bag over her shoulder and turned around, he was there. Of course he was. Standing by the wall, those unfairly gorgeous green eyes fixed on her in that brooding, knowing way of his. Just like any given day in any summer of her youth.
E
specially that last summer. When she’d been eighteen and head over heels in love with him and he’d been completely out of her league—until that very last night before she’d left for college.
Her scowl deepened.
And Griffin Hyatt—the bane of her existence and one of the ten million reasons Emmy wanted to be anywhere but back in Montana, even if that meant missing her only sister’s wedding—grinned back at her.
If that was what that little crook of his hard mouth was.
He was whole lot older now than he’d been during those long ago summers.
A grown man made entirely of smooth, lean, perfect muscle packed into faded jeans and an MSU T-shirt, with intricate tattoos peeking out from beneath each sleeve and all the way down the length of one corded, masculine forearm. His ridiculous green eyes packed the same hard punch she’d never quite managed to forget, and she wasn’t in any way emotionally prepared for the way his too-long dark hair and that
mouth
of his hit at her, making her whole body feel too warm. Feverish, even. He was the kind of man who left scars. He had.
It was so unfair.
If anyone deserved to turn ugly with age it was Griffin. Emmy wanted to dump her coffee on him in retaliation for any one of a thousand old sins—and maybe mess up some of his arrogant, lazy hotness as he stood there, studying her reaction with an intensity that made her stomach curl in on itself. It took every last shred of willpower she had to restrain herself.
This was merely an unfortunate coincidence, she assured herself.
A chance encounter, nothing more. A mature person would smile, maybe even nod politely to an old acquaintance, so that was what Emmy did. And then she pretended he wasn’t there as she looked away from him, gazing around for a member of her family, one of whom had been supposed to meet her plane this afternoon.
The same way she was pretending she
’d never been naked in front of him—the way she’d
been
pretending for going on ten years now.
The baggage carousel emptied.
The crowd dissipated. Emmy checked her phone approximately twelve thousand times, but there were still no messages from her parents or her sister to explain their absence.
It wasn
’t until the carousel had stopped moving and Emmy was the only one still standing there next to it that a hideous possibility occurred to her.
She tensed.
She knew.
Then she turned slightly, stiffly, to find Griffin exactly where she
’d last seen him. Leaning back against the wall, his arms folded over his lean, hard chest and his booted feet crossed, watching her like she was the most entertaining thing he’d seen in years.
Given what she knew about him through the family grapevine that he was a part of because their grandmothers
—Gran Harriet and Gran Martha—were still the best friends they’d been when they’d roomed together at Radcliffe way back when, Emmy doubted very much that she entertained him even a little bit. She was a perfectly decent advertising copywriter who lived a perfectly nice life in perfectly comfortable Atlanta. Griffin was an extreme sports nut and athletic clothing entrepreneur who liked to fling himself down mountains and out of planes, making money and risking almost certain death every time he inhaled.
He
’d been out of her league when she’d been eighteen. He was beyond her understanding now. But no less gorgeous, she couldn’t help but notice. And even more compelling than he’d been back then.
Griffin
lifted his upper hand with the same deceptively languid arrogance he apparently still did everything else and then crooked the top two fingers. Ordering her to come to him without uttering a single word.
Every last part of Emmy protested.
Violently. Because there was too much of her that simply wanted to rush to obey him, the way she’d done more than she liked to admit to herself as a girl. And look where that had gotten her. Naked and abandoned the night before she’d left for college, and nary a word to or from this man since.
But there was no one else there who could possibly be her ride, and
so she found herself walking toward him. Reluctantly. She stopped when she was a foot or so away, and told herself her spiking body temperature had nothing to do with the frank, male appraisal in those green eyes of his as they ran over her, much less the way that mouth of his kicked up in one corner.
She wished
, with a sudden onslaught of deep fervor, that she’d dressed up to travel today, the way her mother still did. She wished she’d done something with her hair besides clip it back out of her way with that ruthless efficiency her far more feminine and sultry sister Margery liked to call her
depressing practicality
. She wished she did the kinds of things to
her
jeans that Griffin did so effortlessly to his. That she was as ordinary as ever next to all his beaming male glory poked at her. It stung in old wounds she’d imagined long since healed. Emmy tucked her chin down toward the lightweight blue scarf she’d looped around her neck and glared at him.
“
Hey, Bug,” Griffin said.
Drawled,
really.
“
Funny thing about the name Bug,” Emmy replied, which was hard, given how tightly she’d clenched her teeth together at the sound of the nickname he’d given her when she was all of seven. “It’s been ten years since anyone called me that and I still hate it. If you’ve forgotten my actual name, just say so.”
The girl she
’d been, awkward and emotional and
distraught
at the way this beautiful older boy looked right through her—until the summer he hadn’t, bristled when he studied her for a long moment. She told herself she didn’t flush. More, that she didn’t remember his hands against her skin in the dark of his grandmother’s barn. That she couldn’t still taste him the way she had the last night she’d seen him.
“
I know your name,” he said.
“
Then I have a great idea. Use it.”
“
Nice to see you too,
Emmy
,” Griffin said, with that lurking hint of laughter and a completely unearned note of authority that put her back up. “You might want to mind your manners. I’m your ride.”
“
Why?” She made no effort to keep from glaring at him. Maybe that would hide all the rest of the things that swamped her then at the idea of being alone with him in a confined space. Or at all. “Did my entire extended family die from wedding overkill already? Or have you opened up a taxi service?”
“
I’m not sure rural Montana is really the optimal place to launch a new taxi service,” he said in his lazy way that still managed to remind her that he was the one who’d been written up in
Forbes
magazine, not her. “Way to think outside the box, though. I appreciate a new business proposition as much as the next guy.”
“
Why you?” She realized how rude that sounded when his dark brows rose over that dangerous gleam of amusement in his gaze, and she forced the kind of smile she used on her awful, patronizing boss. “I mean, surely you have better things to do. Don’t you? Aren’t you some kind of mogul these days?”
He smirked, she smiled
harder, and Emmy was pretty sure both of them knew perfectly well that she knew exactly what he did. Or had done. GriffinFlight, his brand and ever-evolving product line, was turning up on every snowboarder, skateboarder, free-range skier, and surfer anyone had ever heard of lately.
Outside
magazine had called the tattoo-reminiscent designs “high-octane, a necessary blast of fresh air, and, in a word, hot.”