The Cowboy Takes a Bride (20 page)

“You wear glasses,” he said.

She snatched them off her face, hid them behind her back.

“Put them back on. They make you look all smart and scholarly.”

“They make me look like Harry Potter.”

“I like them.” He stood up, tried to reach around behind her to go for the glasses.

She clung to them. “I don’t usually let people see me in them.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “It makes me feel vulnerable.”

“If it bothers you so much, why don’t you have laser eye surgery?”

“Too chicken,” she admitted.

“Fear trumps vanity.”

“I’m not vain,” she denied.

“Then put your glasses back on.”

“Okay,” she said, “maybe a little vain.”

“Here.” He took the glasses from her hand, opened them up, set them gently on her face. “There now.” He brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, felt her shiver beneath his touch. “Isn’t it better to see what you’re looking at?”

Slowly, she shook her head. She took a step back and then another. “It’s safer when you’re all fuzzy and far away.”

“Don’t go,” he surprised himself by saying. Without even trying, she’d bewitched him and he had no idea why or how.

She was already halfway across the distance between the barn and the cabin.

“You don’t have to run away,” he said. “I won’t kiss you again.” He paused. “Until you ask me to.”

Soft laughter rolled out of her like music. She sank her hands on her hips, causing her shoulders to open wide and her breasts to lift perkily. “You’ve got a pretty big ego on you, Joe Daniels. To think you have the power to chase me off.”

The kiss had already inflamed him, but one look at those proud nipples outlined through the material of her shirt sent sizzling heat straight to his groin. Instantly, he hardened. The speed of his body’s reaction to Mariah knocked all rational thought from his brain. In a desperate attempt to hide it from her, he picked up the first aid kit, held it strategically in front of him.

He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He traced his gaze over the length of her long neck, wished it was his mouth doing the traveling. Wished he could nibble her sensitive skin, make her moan with pleasure.

She studied him.

He held her stare, but it was all he could do not to slink away. She’d turned the tables on him and he felt like a young whippersnapper—randy as hell and out of control. Once upon a time, he’d been a pretty smooth operator. But all that vanished under the intensity of Mariah’s gaze.

“This could never work.”

“What?”

“Us.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not staying in Jubilee.”

“Right.”

“So let’s just leave things alone.”

“Makes perfect sense.” He shook his head, completely disagreeing with his agreement.

“No sense starting something we can’t finish.”

“None at all.”

“No matter how pleasurable it might be.”

“Don’t even bring it up.”

“The kiss is forgotten.”

“What kiss?”

Mariah took a few steps toward the house, then stopped. “Joe?”

“Uh-huh?”

“It’s not you. It’s me.”

“You don’t have to lie.”

“It’s true though. You’re ready for a fresh start, but I’m not. I want to go back to my old life just as soon as I can. But you’re a good guy. I know that. I can tell by the way everyone in town looks at you, talks about you. There’s someone wonderful out there just waiting for you.”

“You’re pretty wonderful yourself, Little Bit.” Then before he lost all reason, gave in to his primal urges and kissed her again, Joe turned and walked away.

I
la woke up with a bad haircut and a man in her bed who was not Joe. At first she panicked, drawing the sheet to her chin, staring up at the ceiling. Wondering how she was going to get out of this. Then she remembered exactly how good Cordy had been in bed. And how unexpectedly well endowed he was. God might have shaved a few inches from his height, but he made up for it in other places.

She smiled. Just a little bit.

“Happy?”

Crap!
Cordy was awake, propped up on one elbow staring down at her.

“You have to go,” she said.

“How about I make us some breakfast?” He got out of bed as if she hadn’t said anything. “I make a mean omelet and you need to eat. You’re too skinny.”

“I don’t eat breakfast.”

Cordy clucked his tongue. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

She was so busy staring at his exquisite bare butt that the smart retort almost didn’t roll off her tongue. “Tell me, Whiteside, have you ever been mistaken for a Jewish mother?”

His grin was irritating as sunshine. “If anything about me resembles a Jewish mother, I didn’t do as good a job last night as I thought I did. Move over and let me try again.”

Ila held up a restraining hand as he made a move to slide in on her side of the bed. “Overachiever.”

“I would have let you be on top. All you had to do was ask.” He chortled.

Ila rolled her eyes and sat up, pillow cradled to her chest. “You’ve got to go. You’re simply too damn cheerful.”

“Another reason we’re perfect for each other.” He leaned over to kiss her cheek. “I’m perky, you’re bleak.”

Ila got the pillow up just in the nick of time. Holy doughnut, what in the hell had she gotten herself into? “Dial it down a notch, skippy.”

“I’m making you breakfast while you dial the hairdresser.” He pointed at her head.

She’d totally forgotten about her desperation haircut. She ran a hand through her hair, gasped. “Oh my God!”

“Hey, I think you look kinda cute with that punk rocker thing going on, but you might want to get someone to even it up.”

“This is horrible, this is a nightmare, this is—”

“Cathartic,” Cordy said, slipping into his jeans and zipping them up. “That was one way to get Joe out of your hair. Get rid of the hair.”

“Joe isn’t out of my hair,” Ila hollered as he walked out the door. She threw the pillow after him, collapsed back onto the bed. “Just because you and I had sex, don’t start thinking it means anything.”

Cordy stalked back into the room, his sunbeam face suddenly eclipsed with a cloudy frown. “I’m gonna let that crack about Joe go because I know you’ve been nursing that love a long time and it’s going to take you a while to come to terms that it’s time to let go of your fantasies and accept real life, but there’s one thing I do promise you, Ila Desiree Brackeen.”

“Yeah?” she said truculently, folded her arms over her chest, glared at him.

He crawled up on the bed, cradled her chin in his palm, stared her straight in the eyes. “Listen to me and don’t you forget it. Make no mistake. What we did last night means
everything.
From here on out,
I’m
your man.”

F
or the next week, Mariah kept busy waiting tables at the Silver Horseshoe and tried her best to stay out of Joe’s way. It was easy enough. She worked nights and he spent his days training Miracle for the futurity and running his ranch and he never once set foot inside the bar. At least not during Mariah’s shifts.

Whenever they passed on the road into town, he’d honk and she’d wave or vice versa, and they’d both paste polite smiles on their faces and quickly drive on. Thankfully, Joe must have solved the problem of Miracle’s Houdini-like skills because the stallion did not return to her barn.

Unfortunately, Lee Turpin did show up at the Silver Horseshoe. He was there every night, giving Mariah the eye and flirting with her outrageously, but he didn’t touch her again. She owed Joe for that.

She struggled to stop thinking about Joe, and the kiss they’d shared behind her house, but time and time again, she found her thoughts straying to him. She would be serving a pitcher of beer, see a young man kiss his wife or girlfriend, and her knees would melt as she remembered exactly how Joe’s lips had felt against hers.

No matter how many times she told herself to stop thinking about him, she couldn’t seem to stop poking at the idea of them doing far more than kissing. Joe’s wicked tongue had roused something disturbingly unpredictable inside her.

“Can you work Sunday night?” Clover asked her on Friday.

“We’re closed on Sundays.”

“To the public yes, but we’ve got a private wedding reception and I want to make sure we have enough waitstaff. It’s a big party. Couple hundred guests. We host a lot of wedding receptions. Thirty or forty a year. The Silver Horseshoe is one of the few places in town that can accommodate big wedding parties.”

“Oh, okay, sure. I’ll work Sunday.” Better to be working than rambling around the empty cabin alone. Without a television set or the Internet, there wasn’t much to do there anyway. Her cell phone had 3G service, but surfing the Internet on that tiny screen was frustrating. “No problem.”

But a wedding reception in a roadhouse just felt . . .
wrong.
It grated against Mariah’s belief that weddings should be magical. Special. Hopefully, a once-in-a-lifetime event. Weddings were about memories. The best possible memories, and they shouldn’t be shortchanged. But here in Jubilee, no one seemed to care about magic unless it was in relationship to a horse.

On Sunday, she arrived at the Silver Horseshoe to find Clover in the dining room moving tables around with the bartender, Bobby Jim Spears.

Mariah took in the setting. Neon beer signs on the wall. The stained paisley carpeting. The suede curtains trailing fringe. The saloon-style doors that led into the big room. It was fine for a cowboy nightclub, but for a wedding reception? The decor made her feel sad for the couple.

“What do you need for me to do?” she asked Clover.

“Set up the tiered cake tray and put out the Twinkies and Ding Dongs.”

Mariah blinked, thinking it must be some kind of odd Jubilee code. “I’m not following you.”

“See those boxes of Twinkies and Ding Dongs stacked up on the bar?”

“Yes.”

“The Twinkies are the bride’s cake, the Ding Dongs are the groom’s cake.”

“You’re serious?”

“This is Jubilee, not Chicago. People are on a budget. They don’t spend a lot on fluff stuff.”

Yeah, because they spend all their money on cutting horses.
“They could have gotten cakes from Wal-Mart just as cheaply,” she said.

“These were free. The groom’s mother works at Mrs. Baird’s day-old bakery and they were about to throw them out,” Clover said.

Too stale for the day-old bakery, so serve them to the wedding guests. Gotcha. My Big Fat Redneck Wedding.

Okay, that was snotty. But there were tasteful ways to do a wedding on a budget and still be true to the bride and groom’s roots.

“We’re simple people here,” Clover said. “It doesn’t take much to make us happy.”

“I’m not saying people should change who they are, just that, well, that a wedding should be special. Something you can think back on fondly with pride instead of embarrassment.”

“That’s one point of view. Some people figure, just get hitched and then throw a party and invite all your friends.”

“It’s supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Was she being narrow-minded? She tried out the concept of a wedding being no more special than any other party. She turned the idea around in her head, and then rejected it. Most likely it was simply a matter of a tight pocketbook. All the brides she’d ever known wanted their wedding day to be special; they might settle for less, but they wanted more. They wanted the dream of lifetime love launched by a magical wedding day. The key was showing a bride how she could make that happen on a tight budget.

Trying her best not to cringe, she set up the cake tier and began arranging the Twinkies and Ding Dongs as artfully as she could. “What now?” she asked Clover when she finished.

“Beer fountain.”

“Excuse me?”

“In place of a champagne fountain. No one around here drinks champagne.”

She forced a smile. “I’m on it.”

Mariah had to keep reminding herself she wasn’t in Chicago anymore. That she was no longer involved with high-society wedding planning. It was hard letting go of something she’d done her entire adult life. She’d gone to work for Destiny Simon when she was sixteen, her first real job besides helping her mother clean houses.

She’d met Destiny through the Willowbrands, the family she and Cassie had been living with at the time, when the Willowbrands’ oldest daughter, Felicity, had gotten married. Mariah had been fascinated by the elaborate process, leafing through the bride’s magazines Felicity left scattered about, and she found herself dreaming wedding bell dreams. Eavesdropping at the door whenever Destiny came to the Willowbrands’ house loaded with sample books. Volunteering to go shopping with Mrs. Willowbrand and carry packages.