Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides) (20 page)

“
Hey,” Cole said again, sensing something and stepping back, pulling her into the house after him and holding her away to look into her eyes. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“
N-nothing.” She felt like an idiot. Sam had had a heart attack, but he was alive! He was going to be okay. There was nothing to cry about. She shook her head. “Just ... overwhelmed, I guess.” She smiled a little shakily. “Glad to be home.”

Cole smiled, but it didn
’t reach his eyes. He looked as strained and fraught as she felt, and there was more reason for it. He was the one whose father had almost died today. “Yeah,” he said. He shifted from one foot to the other awkwardly, as if unsure what to do next.

“
I’m tired,” Nell said. “I feel like I could sleep a hundred years.”

“
Yeah, me, too. But I can’t,” Cole said. “I figured what with everything that happened, I’d get an early start in the morning. Mac and Chandler are coming along. I didn’t figure you’d care. I know you said you’d take Gran to the hospital. The sooner I go, the sooner I can get back. And I don’t want her and Sadie to have to deal on their own. Just in case,” he added, his mouth twisting.

Nell wanted to say she
’d stay. She wanted to stay, God knew. But the production schedule meant she needed to get things done, and productions schedules waited for no one. “That’s a good idea,” she said quietly. She rubbed his hands with hers. They both felt cold. “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

Cole hesitated.
“Your boss wants you to call him.”

Nell shook her head.
“Not tonight.”

The last person she wanted to talk to tonight was Grant.

They made love that night with an aching tenderness that Cole had never felt before. It was as if they were on the edge of a great gaping loss—could sense it there before them, and any quick movement, any hasty action might tumble them straight into despair.

Cole wouldn
’t look at it. Tried to pretend it wasn’t there. He settled between her thighs and focused entirely on Nell. His beautiful, loving, giving Nell, who looked up at him in the moonlight with a smile on her exotic yet familiar and beloved features. She pressed a palm to his cheek, then slipped her hand against the nape of his neck and drew him down into a long, lingering kiss. And then with a single slow thrust, he slid into her, watched her face, memorized it, held it in his heart as he began to move.

Nell met him with a few moves of her own. She challenged him, tormented him, shattered him, even as she shattered with him.
And then she stroked her hands down his sweat-slick back and kissed him again.

“
I love you,” she whispered.

His throat tightened.
“I love you, too.” The words were hard to get past the painful lump in his throat. He could say the words now, even when they hurt. But being able to say them meant nothing as much as doing what love knew needed to be done.

He was dressed and ready to go out the door a little after five.
He hadn’t slept. He’d wrestled with his conscience, with his desires, with doing what was best for the woman he loved. He knew what was best, what he had to have the courage to do. And yet he hoped against hope, it wouldn’t happen.

He could have just walked out and left her sleeping, left with the memory their loving, of the smile on Nell
’s face. Left her to find the divorce papers on the counter top along with the note he’d tried painstakingly to write.

But he owed her more than that, so Cole woke her up before he went.

She yawned and stretched and looked up at him with a sleepy smile in the low light from the small lamp on the dresser across the room. “You’re going now?”

He nodded.
“Yeah ... I ...”

She sat up and held out her arms to him, her honey-colored hair tumbling around her shoulders, making him remember its softness, its weight, its faint flowery scent.
Instead of bending into her arms, he caught her hands in his.

“
I put the divorce papers on the counter,” he said before he had second—or seventy-second—thoughts.

Her eyes widened.
Her smile vanished. She looked stricken. “What?”

“
I think you should sign them. I know it’s your decision,” he said quickly. “But you need to stop and think. You have a gift, a talent, a great career. You could do so much—”

“
You’ve been talking to Grant. You’ve been listening to Grant,” she corrected at once. She flung his hands away and scrambled out of bed.

“
I talked to him last night, yes. And I don’t like the son-of-a-gun at all. He’s an overbearing know-it-all. But about you—” Cole swallowed “—he’s right. You’d be wasting your talent here. You’d be turning your back on what you do best!”

“
Next thing I know you’ll be telling me I’m hiding my light under a bushel basket,” Nell bit out. She was yanking on her clothes, covering up her gorgeous nakedness, armoring herself in jeans and a shirt. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons.

“
You aren’t yet,” Cole said. “But you would be.”

“
How the hell would you know?” Nell demanded. She sat down with a thump and pulled on her socks, then stood to glare nose to nose at him. “You don’t know anything!”

In the face of her ferocity, Cole took a step back.

Nell gave an inelegant snort. “Exactly,” she snapped, and stalked out to the kitchen. The divorce papers were sitting on the counter alongside the note he’d written which said pretty much everything he’d tried to say to her now. He should’ve just let her read it.

She was reading it. Her lip curled as she did and when she finished, she crumpled it up and threw it on the floor.
“Bull,” she said. “This has nothing to do with me or my work!”

Cole stared.
“What? Of course it does!”

But Nell was shaking her head implacably.
“No, it doesn’t. It has to do with you. You’re afraid to trust me. You’re afraid that if you let me stay now, you might actually get to like me here, to like me—“

“
I love you!”

Nell made another disparaging noise.
“You’re afraid of loving me!”

“
The hell I am!”

“
Really?” She dismissed his protest instantly. “I don’t believe that. I think you’re terrified that you might come to depend on me, on our relationship—and that I might change my mind, that I might leave!”

Cole stared at her.

“And you’d be in the same boat Sam has been in. Cut to shreds by loving a woman who didn’t love him back.”

“
That’s not—”

“
It isn’t? That isn’t why you want to get rid of me rather than live with the fear that I might leave you?”

“
Nell!”

“
So you push me into a divorce so you don’t have to worry that someday I’ll do what your mother did, what Sadie’s mother did, what you’re sure Jane is going to do! Well, fine—” she grabbed a pen out of the drawer, flipped through the pages of the divorce document until she got to the end and scrawled her signature on it, then thrust the papers at him. “Here’s your damned divorce!”

“
Nell!”

She stuffed her feet into her boot
s and grabbed her jacket off the hook by the door. “If you want it you get it. If you want me ... if you love me ... if you dare to trust me, you know where to find me!”

If she thought he’d come running after her, she was sadly mistaken.

But Nell hadn
’t thought that. She knew Cole well enough to know he believed what he had told her. The trouble was, he didn’t know her as well as she’d hoped.

So she went back to L.A. that afternoon.
She didn’t make excuses to Em and Sadie. She didn’t tell them anything about what had happened up at the cabin.

Let Cole tell them. It was all his idea.

She just drove Em to the hospital as she had promised, wished Sam the very best, gave them each hugs, and caught a cab to the airport.

She didn
’t cry. She didn’t look back.

She focused only on the great yawning emptiness that was now her future.

But really, what else could she have done? Nell asked herself over and over during the following days. If Cole really believed in her, really trusted that she was committed to their marriage the way he wanted her to be, he wouldn’t keep shoving divorce papers down her throat every time the waters beneath their marital boat got the least bit choppy.

It was no way to live.

But what she was doing day after bloody day—reviewing footage, editing, discussing, reviewing more, editing again, mixing sound, finding music, doing more and even more editing, all the while drinking endless cups of coffee that, even with milk, made her stomach hurt—didn’t have much to recommend it, either.

She tried not to be short-tempered with anyone she worked with. Except Grant. She didn
’t mind lambasting Grant whenever the occasion called for it.

He was a bit taken aback that she seemed to, as he said,
“have her feathers ruffled.” She ought to be grateful, he told her. He didn’t push the careers of just anybody.

Only those people whose marriages you want to wreck
, Nell thought bitterly. But at the same time she thought that, she knew it wasn’t really Grant’s fault. If it hadn’t been Grant and his job offer, it would have been someone or something else that would have triggered it.

Still, it was nice to snap at him occasionally. She liked seeing the surprise on his face. It made her feel a tiny bit better for an instant. And then she felt simply awful again.

Her only consolation was that the episode came together beautifully. The stories of the couples all wove together as if she’d planned it.

“
You mean, you didn’t?” Judy, Grant’s assistant, said when she watched it.

“
Nope. It was the people themselves.” Which just proved that some people could get it right, even people who started far apart like Mac and Maggie.

She knew they
’d spent several days back at the ranch, helping out. She knew Mac and Chandler had been going to the summer range with Cole. She wanted to know how things had gone, how the cattle drive had been, how Sam was doing. And Cole.

She wanted to know about Cole.

But she didn’t call anyone. She had said what needed to be said. She had to cut the ties now or she’d be dragged back in, and just as Cole had feared, they would only hurt each other worse in the future.

So she drank coffee and edited and mixed and edited some more, and tried not to remember when she saw the ranch and the people, how much she missed them
—especially one bone-headed jerk in particular.

When she got off work, she went to home to her tiny studio apartment in the South Bay and went down to the beach to walk miles along the ocean.
It was the only place she could get a decent horizon. And Nell found she needed a horizon, even if she didn’t know what was waiting beyond it.

She wasn
’t so much a city girl anymore.

The hell of it was, Cole decided after arguing with her inside his head for the first three days after Nell left, was that she was right.

In his fingers, the knife his grandfather had given him whittled furiously at the soft pine. He’d created a Noah’s Ark of animals in the days since she’d walked away, keeping his hands busy, keeping him from pacing the floor, keeping him from going after her, from making an even bigger mistake.

He hadn
’t wanted to admit his fears. What guy did? Who needed to face his weakness when his weakness was a woman who could break his heart if he let her in? The trouble was, somewhere along the line, he had let her in.

Had it happened back in Reno? Or before?
Had it happened when she’d refused to sign the divorce papers when he’d sent them to her, but instead had chosen to confront him where he lived?

He didn
’t know. He supposed it didn’t matter. She’d cracked his heart open and got in.

And she didn
’t show any signs of leaving.

He
’d gone through the entire ride to the summer range in almost complete silence. He’d hoped it would be a good time spent with Mac and Chandler. It was good of them to volunteer and he was grateful they’d been willing to do it. But he’d hardly been able to say so. He couldn’t seem to dislodge the lump in his throat to say more than a word or two.

“
Man, you really are the strong silent type, aren’t you?” Mac had teased after most of a day had gone by without him saying fifty words.

“
He’s just mad ‘cause he has to spend his honeymoon with us instead of Nell.” Chandler grinned.

Cole had tried to smile.
But the way they had looked at him, wary and a little worried, told him he wasn’t doing too good a job of it.

“
He’ll be okay. Your old man, I mean.” Mac had said, apparently deciding that Sam’s heart attack was the reason for his moodiness.

Probably he would. Nell had the right of it. Sam seemed to have more lives than a cat.
Cole’s knife flicked off the wood shavings at a furious rate. He’d got out of the hospital in three days and was now, to Cole’s amazement, living at Jane’s.

“
What do you mean, he’s gone to Jane’s?” Cole had demanded when Em told him. She had been making coffee and set a plate of chocolate chip cookies on the table, nodding to them as an invitation for him to take one. But everything tasted like sawdust these days, so Cole had shaken his head. “What’s he doin’ at Jane’s?” he had persisted.

“
He said it would be easier on me,” Em replied with a little huff of annoyance. “As if I can’t take care of my own son.”

“
Well, he probably figured you’d hover,” Cole said, “which you would.”

“
I would not!” Em protested. Then she’d added, “As if Jane isn’t.”

“
She can’t seriously still be contemplating marrying him?”

But Em had nodded.
“She is. He tried to talk her out of it. Told her he wasn’t good for anything with his heart the way it is.”

“
Which is true,” Cole said baldly.

“
And Jane said, ‘Well, then get it fixed.’ And he is.”

Cole had almost reeled in shock.
“What?”

“
He told the doctor he’d have the surgery.”

Cole hadn
’t believed it. How the hell many times had Sam been offered that option before? And how many times had he said no? He asked Em that and she just shrugged.

“
He didn’t see the point before. Now he does. Now he has someone to live for,” she said simply.

“
He had us,” Cole reminded her flatly.

Em smiled one of her wise grandmother smiles.
“Oh, get over yourself, Cole. You know it’s not the same. You matter, but Jane makes his life worth living. You know how you feel about Nell.”

Yeah, he did, Cole thought now as he stared into the flames of the cabin
’s fireplace. He knew he loved her. He knew he’d lost her. Which was probably why the knife slipped and he gouged the palm of his hand.

It was all well and good to believe what she wanted him to believe, Cole told himself. But could she really find something for herself here on the ranch?
She had a gift. Everyone said so. Even Mac and Chandler had said how good she was at getting their reactions to what was happening, challenging them to dig deeper, find themselves.

“
She’s amazing,” Chandler had said. “I figured she came by all the stuff she’s good at naturally, but she told me that wasn’t true. She said she’s a good swimmer now, but she was deathly afraid of water as a kid, had to really work at getting past it.”

Cole hadn
’t known that about her. There was so much about Nell he didn’t know. Would never have the chance to find out. He scowled and shoved his hands into the back pockets of his Wranglers, a car coming up the road to the cabin catching his eye. For a moment he felt a welling of hope, the fleeting notion that it might be Nell coming back to him.

But Nell wasn
’t coming. She’d made that clear. “You know where to find me,” she’d said.

When the car got close enough to make out clearly, he saw that it was Sadie.

“Hi!” She bounced out of the car with a big smile on her face. “What’re you doing home? It’s the middle of the day.”

He hadn
’t moved back to the ranch house since Maggie and Beth had left. He didn’t want to face the constant scrutiny he would get from Em and his sister. He didn’t want to answer questions about Nell—how she was, what she was doing, when she was coming back. He didn’t want to tell them she wasn’t coming back.

Besides, he couldn
’t quite bring himself to leave the cabin. It was like closing a door he didn’t want to close just yet—just like the divorce papers still in the desk drawer where he had shoved them after she left because he wasn’t ready to file them yet.

Now he shrugged off Sadie
’s question. “Want some coffee?”

“
No, thanks. Don’t have time. I have to get to work. I just came by to pick up whatever sculptures you’ve got for me. Sabrina says she’s really got a market for them. There was some guy from Venice—Venice, Italy,” Sadie clarified “—in there the other day who wanted to talk to you about them.”

Cole grunted.
He had no interest in talking to any guy from any Venice in the world about his sculpture. They were whittlings. They didn’t matter.

“
Fine, be that way.” Sadie didn’t care. “And I brought you this.” She thrust a newspaper in his hand. “Thought you’d like to read all about Gran. It’s great stuff.” She was scooping Cole’s Noah’s Ark worth of animals and cowboy boots and hats and saddles into the tote bag she’d brought in. “Thanks,” she said when she’d cleared the counter and started for the door. “How’s Nell?”