A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) (2 page)

Not that Emmy had ever Googled him.

“Something like that,” Griffin said, with that knowing look on his face that Emmy felt everywhere. The way she always had.

“
And yet you take time out of your busy
Wolf of Wall Street
day to play cab driver for me,” she said, still smiling, though she made no attempt to keep that dry note from her voice. “I feel like Cinderella on her way to the ball. Which I believe makes you the pumpkin. Or a mouse pretending to be a man. Something like that, right?”

Griffin straightened from the wall
then, and Emmy couldn’t believe she’d forgotten how
tall
he was. Or maybe it was that he’d filled out in the decade since she’d last seen him, all that lanky restlessness she remembered turned into visible, unmistakable strength and power. Her throat went dry, and she hated herself.

“
You haven’t been here in a while,” he said, low and perfectly courteous, so there was no reason at all that Emmy should feel it wash through her like that. Like a wave of pure, hot, aching sensation, with a little bit of warning besides. “So maybe I need to remind you that our grandmothers deliberately bought adjoining land in the hills outside of Marietta so they could see each other all the time. We grew up here.” He smiled at her, though there was that sharpness she remembered too well there, too, making it an edgy, challenging thing.
That
was the Griffin she knew, the Griffin she’d always wanted far more than was safe. Or wise.
Or requited,
a little voice reminded her. “Well. You were just a summer girl.”

“
Don’t revise history I can remember all by myself,” she chided him, shifting her duffel bag higher on her shoulder and tipping her chin up, like she was ready to go a few rounds with him. She thought maybe she was. The eighteen-year-old he’d abandoned so cavalierly deserved it. “You grew up in Baltimore. You went to one of those fancy New England prep schools. You lived in Marietta for exactly one semester before you went to Dartmouth.”

“
Glad to see you were paying such close attention,” he murmured, a gleam she definitely didn’t like in his eyes, and Emmy couldn’t believe this was happening again. That knot in her stomach. That pressing need to either prove something to him or prove she didn’t care about him—when she shouldn’t waste a single thought on him. Not after what he’d done. Or not done, for that matter.

It was like she took one look at this man and she was thirteen.
Again. Forever.

“
Your mother couldn’t make it,” Griffin said when she didn’t say anything. Emmy was darkly certain
he
didn’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone, ever. He never had, not even when he was young and relatively unformed. He’d still been Griffin. “Something about wildflowers.”

“
Wildflowers,” Emmy repeated. Then rolled her eyes, so annoyed with her sister’s circus of a wedding that she momentarily forgot who she was talking to. “Yes, of course. Margery wants dried wildflower centerpieces for the tables in the tent at the reception. The bridesmaids and family members are supposed to pick them every day throughout the month of May. And then maybe hold hands and sing around her like a springtime reenactment of the
Nutcracker
. That part was unclear.”

“
Sounds like Margery,” Griffin said. “She always did like the princess routine.”

Emmy didn
’t know why she felt the urge to leap to Margery’s defense then, because it was true. Margery had never met a tiara she didn’t like, had never encountered a holiday that couldn’t be tailored into a vast celebration of All Things Margery, and had been blessed with the sort of lithe, sweet, blonde prettiness that made people adore those things about her instead of attempting to beat her to death with the fairy wings she’d worn more than once and not always on Halloween.

It wasn
’t a
surprise
that she’d decreed that her wedding to Philip Rollins, the wealthy Chicago financier, should encompass whole weeks and contain so many different events that Emmy had been forced to pack all the separate, ornate invitations in their own expandable file folder. The hayride. The wedding party’s horseback ride and barbecue. A spa day. A family-only party. Etc. But that didn’t mean that Emmy didn’t dread the next three weeks. She did. She’d fumed about it all the way from Atlanta.

Griffin Hyatt
was merely the icing on the cake. The six-layer, multi-flavored, monstrosity of a wedding cake that Margery had insisted was the only true representation of hers and Philip’s deep and abiding love. That and his bank account, Emmy’s more cynical side had insisted.

“
I think I’d rather find my own way to Marietta,” Emmy said now, because her stomach was still curling in on itself and she was choosing to believe that was nausea,
not an unwieldy longing for this man she’d spent the better part of a decade telling herself she wasn’t pining for at all. “A half-hour in a car with you is about thirty minutes too long.”

Griffin laughed, which made Emmy
’s pulse rocket through her.

“
I see you haven’t lost any of your charm down there in Atlanta,” he said. “Must be that Southern influence.”

Emmy eyed him
for a moment that stretched into two. Then longer. And the past was thick between them, turning the air to a kind of fog, and she was still the same girl he’d stripped and then abandoned. Why couldn’t she remember that when she was standing in front of him?

“
What kind of charm do you think you deserve, Griffin?” she asked quietly. “All these years later?”

He was
very still then, as he looked down at her, his mouth something like grim. But he didn’t look away. He didn’t pretend he didn’t know what she meant.

“
That’s a subject best discussed in private,” he said, with more of that brooding jade green gaze of his, making her think of all kinds of things she’d thought she’d banished years ago. Like catching a gaze very much like this one that last summer, across the hot, dry breathlessness of a late Montana afternoon high up in the hills. “Not right here in the middle of an airport. Don’t you think?”

Ten years ago, he
’d walked away from her when she’d been naked and begging him to stay with her, to touch her, to take her. Ten years ago, she’d offered him her virginity and he’d refused. He’d broken her heart. Emmy didn’t want to
discuss
that. She wanted to continue pretending that night had never, ever happened.

Or, barring that, to continue poking at him about it without ever having to address it head on.
Discussing
it might lead to understanding and compassion. She preferred vilification and condemnation, thank you.

“
I think I’ll pass,” she said, very evenly. “And while I’m at it, I’ll find myself a real cab.”

And she pivoted and started for the exit.

Only to be stopped three steps later by a hand on her shoulder—a hand that kept her from moving in one heartbeat and took the duffel from her in the next. And she didn’t want to think about how
close
he was then, how she could smell the soap he’d used in his morning shower and the faintest hint of coffee, how it made her want to sink down into a puddle on the ground and cry the way she had ten years ago.

“
Here’s the thing, Bug,” Griffin said, his mouth in that same flat line and a very different sort of gleam in his green eyes. It made her shiver—which was better than crying. “Your mother asked me to pick your sweet ass up, and that means I’m taking you back to Marietta if I have to tie you down in the back of my truck to do it. So you should probably just go ahead and surrender to the inevitable, because we both know I’m going to win.”

Emmy
had no doubt at all that he’d not only tie her up in the back of his truck like he’d said he would, but that he’d enjoy it. Worse, that she might, too, if it involved his hands on her again. And she hated the both of them, then, almost as much as she hated this damned
hunger
that only he ever inspired in her.

“
Oh, like last time?” she asked in a hard, bright voice. “Because that didn’t end so well, did it?”

Hi
s hard, beautiful mouth shifted, he stopped walking, and everything went lethal. Shimmering hot, like it was already the height of summer. Like they weren’t standing in an airport. Like there was nothing in the world but this.

Him.
Them. That same old yearning.

“
Are you mad that I got you naked in the first place, Emmy?” Griffin asked in that low, arrogant drawl that snuck in beneath her skin and wrapped itself like smoke around her bones. “Or are you still pissed off that I left you unsatisfied?”

Emmy’s heart had just about stopped its cartwheeling and clattering by the time Griffin drove the long, dirt road that wound up into her grandmother’s land and steered his pickup truck to a stop in front of the wide front steps of Gran Harriet’s log and timber home.

God, s
he’d missed this.

Emmy gazed
at the great house that sprawled across the clearing and the mountains that framed it and rose high behind it, the spring day blue and bright all around. She’d missed the arching great sky and crisp air, the mountains and the fields. Aspen trees bursting into riots of yellow over clear streams of icy cold snowmelt. The Rocky Mountains in all their harsh, heart-stopping splendor.
Montana
.

She
’d missed the drive into Marietta she remembered so well from all her summers here, with Copper Mountain scraping up into the dizzy blue like it was lording it over the town, high above the other peaks and still draped in a coat of white this early into one of Montana’s fickle thaws. She’d missed Marietta itself, from the sweet old river that carved its way along the edge of town and reminded her of a thousand summer afternoons spent swimming and floating and sunning herself to the postcard-perfect Main Street that could have served as the backdrop to one of the advertisements she worked on back home in Atlanta, so quintessentially Western was it.

And she
’d missed the winding drive up into the hills, then onto the land her grandmother had bought with her best friend in the 1960s. She knew every curve of the dirt road that wound deep into the trees as if it had long ago been imprinted on her skin. She could smell sunshine and pine through the cracked window of Griffin’s truck, and she felt a powerful kick of something like loss, or possibly longing, reverberate through her.

This felt like a hard, deep landing.
Like coming home at long last.

And it was
his
fault it had taken almost ten years.

“
Still not speaking to me?” Griffin asked from beside her as he turned off the truck’s ignition.

Because she hadn
’t answered his question in the airport. She hadn’t trusted herself to speak. She’d attempted to convey her desire to murder him with her eyes alone—and thought she might have been successful when he’d let out a laugh—and then she’d followed him out to his truck, climbed in, and ignored him for the entire drive from Bozeman to Marietta.

Not the mature thing to do, she was well aware.
But it was better than
actually
murdering him, which she was fairly certain would result in jail time.

“
I’ll let you know when and if I have something to say,” Emmy replied now without risking another look at him. “Maybe in another ten years or so.”

She could see enough in her peripheral vision.
The way he lounged at the wheel, one strong arm draped over the steering wheel, his tattoos climbing in and around the strong muscles of his arm, making her wish she could trace all the patterns herself. She reached out for the door, ready to jump out and flee into the long lost familiarity of her favorite place on earth—but he reached over and put a hand on her arm.

And everything shifted.
Then burned white hot.

Emmy froze, horrified.
Would he
know
, the way he had ten years ago? Would he
see
the way she reacted to him, written all over her as if in flashing neon?