The Bride Wore Denim (15 page)

Finally, Mia gave the staff a rest from her inquiries and settled in for her watch shift. She turned her doctorly intensity on Cole and Harper.

“It’s nearly six o’clock, you two. You should go home and take a break. I’ll be fine for now. I’m used to long nights.”

“What about dinner for you?” Harper asked. “We can stay a while longer.”

“You think hospital food scares me?” Mia snorted. “Believe me, I’m good. We’re all in for some long days, I’m afraid. Go. Rest. You’ll be needed later.”

“Someone will come and spell you in a few hours,” Cole promised.

Mia waved a hand in dismissal. “Don’t worry about that. I got the original admitting doc to agree to come in and talk to me before he leaves for the night. He’s here until midnight. I’ll stay until I see him. If we need to leave them for a few hours overnight it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“I’ll come back first thing,” Harper said.

“Perfect.”

Hugs flew abundantly. Harper wished with all her heart that this ease with her sister would remain. Maybe it would.

“Don’t harass the docs too much,” Cole said, grinning slightly.

“What, and be untrue to my nature? Dream on,” Mia replied.

Harper turned away and sighed. It would be good to leave, she decided. Getting away from the beeping monitors, the walls steeped in worry, and her two family members wrapped in pain could only help.

“Call if you need something or if there’s news,” Cole added.

“Of course,” Mia replied. “I’m going to Skype with the triplets a little later. We’ll talk about whether they need to rotate coming up.”

“I’m sure we’ll all have to deal with our schedules as we learn more,” Harper said. “I can stay a while.”

“That’s good.” She smiled.

“Tell the movie stars I love them.” Harper offered one last hug and followed Cole gratefully from their mother’s room.

Exhaustion struck as they waited for an elevator.

“You all right?” Cole asked.

“I’m glad to be leaving. I feel awful because you and the others have been here for two days with this.”

“We’ve all had time to acclimate. You need your chance to absorb it all.” They entered the elevator. “What would you say to not going right home? I’ve been hoping you’d let me take you to dinner so we can talk away from the family.”

“I think that sounds wonderful.”

“There’s a new place in town called Basecamp Grill. They have great food and even greater cheesecake.”

She sighed with pleasure and slumped against the wall of the elevator as it finished descending. “What’s that they say in the military? You have the conn, Mr. Wainwright.”

The elevator doors parted on the main floor.

“Okay, soldier. Basecamp and cheesecake it is.”

N
OTHING SHOULD HAVE
seemed right in the midst of all the worry and uncertainty, but everything
was
right in Cole’s world with Harper at his side. They passed the closed shops on Main Street, heading for the newest eatery in Wolf Paw Pass—a converted grain mill that featured not only a firewood stove but an attached craft brewery started by a guy Cole had known back in high school.

Since the town had grown with the building of the medical center and the presence of more military, Mickey Franz’s little home-brewing hobby had become a local hit. Wolfheart, he called the stuff. To beer aficionados it was apparently top notch. And the food was excellent, too. Once inside, they were led to a corner table near a fireplace. The room smelled like a fragrant campfire, and amber light filled the restaurant, glinting off the full wall wine rack along one end. Harper collapsed into her chair and wiped her fingers across her cheeks and eyes. A sigh rolled from her lips.

“You must be exhausted.”

“Yes, but so’s everyone. I’m all right.”

“This is hard. No sense trying to pretty it up. You were great with your mom and sister, though. You talked like they were right with you, listening.”

She shrugged. “Nervous blathering.”

The emotions she’d cycled through this afternoon and evening had let him see every nuance of Harper Crockett—fear, shock, determination, despair, forgiveness, desperate need. It had been an insight into his evolving history with her. She’d been cute in high school. She’d been lovely and feisty as a college co-ed. She’d been ethereal and unreadable as a twenty-something. He’d been blown away by her passion at her father’s funeral and then by her paintings in Chicago. Now he was simply love-struck. Like a kid, like a moony-eyed calf, like a big dork. Whatever legend said about cowboys being tough and hard wasn’t true. Tonight he was living proof.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

“I’ve missed you. Thanks again for staying all day at the hospital. It would have been hard alone.”

“Happy to.”

Silence fell, the first real quiet between them since she’d flown into his arms earlier that day. He could only hope that had meant something more than a reaction to grief, but he wasn’t sure. She still held her distance. Even he didn’t know exactly when it had started for him, but since their time in Chicago, he didn’t doubt what he wanted in the least.

“Can I start you with something to drink?” A waitress in a khaki skirt, white blouse, and hiking boots stood beside the table, cheery and encouraging.

“I’ll have a Wolfheart Stout,” he said.

“Do you have a Riesling?”

“Yes. A glass?”

“I’m tempted to order the whole bottle.” She smiled faintly. “But, no. Just a glass.”

He chuckled. “You can drink a bottle, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Nope. I’m a sloppy drunk. Puts every brain cell that isn’t killed to sleep. I’ve seen enough coma-action today.”

“It’s good to hear you joke about it.”

“Yeah? Well it makes me feel guilty.”

“Stop. Nobody will ever doubt how awful this is for you. You need to be okay, and laughing helps. However lame the joke.”

“It’s surreal, Cole. The whole thing. First Dad, now Mom and Joely. Is this some sort of end-of-the-line curse? Is Amelia right? Should the rest of us get out before Paradise kills us all?”

The words dug into his heart with surprising force. “No, honey, no. There’s no curse. Things happen, bad things. You know that. We ride it out, that’s all.” He studied the play of emotions that crossed her face. Fear, exhaustion, a touch of anger. He nearly lost it himself when the sheen of tears coated her eyes but didn’t fall. “Do
you
want to sell Paradise Ranch?”

“I . . . don’t. But if anything happens to Joely, it’s all over. There’s nobody. You said you don’t want it. We went through all this.”

“I know. I know. But this is no better a time to be talking about that than the day of your father’s funeral was. We have to let Joely and your mom heal, and then there can be decisions.”

“I know you don’t want to sell yet. But how close are you to being able to buy back the Double Diamond acres? Maybe that’s what you should do.”

His heart hurt even more. She’d hit the center of his personal dilemma and didn’t even know it. Six weeks earlier his only motivation had been getting the Double Di back. But since Sam’s death, he’d been more intimate with Paradise’s inner workings than he’d ever had a reason to be. Joely had given him the ranch’s books to look over, and she’d asked his advice on everything from cattle, to employee management, to Mountain Pacific Oil and Gas. He had some opinions about where Sam had gone a little wrong, but he’d also seen the incredibly well-oiled machine Sam had run. He still wanted his land, but in four short weeks, he’d also become invested in Paradise.

“A full year minimum. They’ve laughed me out of the bank twice already. Mostly I need to show a steady income for that much longer. Plus get together the rest of the down payment to make the loan feasible.”

“So we need to try and keep the ranch another year at least.”

“Look. Joely made a decision to try and make that work. Let’s honor her wishes and take one day at a time. What dredged all this deep interest up anyhow?”

“Death. Dying. Losing the ranch person by person. I’m scared, that’s all.”

For the second time that day, she let a tear slip from the corner of her eye. It traced half way down her cheek before she wiped it away, but another formed to take its place. Cole stood, dragged his chair around the corner of the table until it was right next to hers, and pulled her into his arms. All he wanted was to protect her. Harper looked at everything from such an emotional perspective. Her artist’s eye and her artist’s soul tried to make beauty from everything, and there was no beauty to be had in any of this.

Her body felt fencepost stiff in his embrace. He rubbed her upper arms. “Breathe, Harpo,” he said.

But once she did, a sob surfed out on a long, quivering wave of air. The sound cracked the dam she’d held in place all day.

“Okay,” he said as her body slumped. “This is good.”

She covered her mouth with one slender hand and buried her face, leaning from her armless chair to his, half-sharing his seat. Her tears fell silently with only the occasion hiccup. He nodded and mouthed it was okay to the waitress when she brought their drinks. A few people sent them empathetic glances, but he ignored them. At last, Harper sniffed a final time and straightened, covering her face with a cloth napkin.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not even going to bother stating the obvious.”

She set the napkin down, and even though her eyes were puffy, she looked clearer, more at peace, and all the more vulnerable for having showed him the tears. Normal Harper would have averted her gaze, apologetic for being too sensitive. This time she didn’t. Instead she searched his eyes, looking for something. He didn’t know how to ask her what it was, but his gut tightened, his pulse notched upward, and his instincts led him into leaning forward.

Every fraction of a second that brought him closer, he expected her to jerk away, but at the very last of those seconds she closed her eyes. He took her delicate chin in his fingers and tilted her lips to his, slipping a kiss onto her mouth with all the certainty he could fake.

She yielded. Her lips molded to his, soft and salted from her tears. He maneuvered the angle of her head with his touch, and she allowed it, following the kiss, playing along with the changes of pressure and stoking sparks. Fire flickered to life in his stomach. Unlike the potent lightning of their first kiss, this one wasn’t over in a flash. She didn’t pull away. She opened her mouth before he did.

The lightning struck then.

Deep, surprising, and hot, it left behind more smoldering and more flame, steady, bright, intense. Their tongues danced, and hers was every bit as talented, as enticing as he’d imagined. She suckled his, she gave him hers; he slid his fingers from her chin to her ear and pulled her head closer. She groaned—a tiny, satisfied sound to which his body responded with age-old life.

He pulled away slowly and then pressed back for one more tango before he relinquished the kiss.

“What is this?” she whispered. “I don’t even know if this is appropriate.”

“We’re figuring out feelings. Everything’s appropriate.”

She smiled half an inch from his mouth. “Don’t use hyperbole on me, cowboy. I can think of a lot of things that wouldn’t be appropriate here.”

“I’ll find us a place where they
would
be.”

“Whoa. What happened to my sensitive, take-it-slow cowboy?”

“He’s my alter ego. I sent him to the corner.”

“Can I talk to him again?”

“Aw, hell.” He grinned, loving this side of her. “What do you need him for?”

“To tell him it’s time to order cheesecake. Maybe real food, too, but I definitely like cheesecake after a cowboy kisses me. With lots of chocolate.”

“Hmpf. So much for the seductive power of the bad boy. Where’s a dumb romance novel when I need one?”

She only giggled at him.

They ordered and ate their meals, keeping the light, teasing tone they’d adopted after the kiss and limiting their conversation topic to Harper’s new relationship with Cecelia Markham, the woman Cole had met at the gallery showing.

They finished dinner and the waitress took their cheesecake orders, clearly relieved that everything remained all right after the earlier crying spell. Once she was gone, Harper excused herself to the ladies’ room, and Cole finally took his moment to cover his eyes and blow out the confusion of the day. For all his bravado, he didn’t feel that confident about what to do with his growing feelings for Harper. He could see the looming problems. She wasn’t staying. He wasn’t leaving. Was it really fair to start anything when it was doomed to fail? A relationship that had never been truly real with Amelia had been strange enough. Trying to make a real relationship with Harper couldn’t help but be a cosmic mistake.

But how could he stop?

“Cole—look what I found.”

She slid into her seat, handing him a large blue-and-green poster advertising the Lion’s Club high school art competition.

“Where’d you steal that from?”

“The front desk.” She gave a guilty smile. “I’ll bring it back, but this is in less than two weeks. Do you know if Skylar ever talked to her mom about getting in?”

“Not a clue. Nothin’ she’s mentioned to me.”

She thought a moment. “How is she? Skylar?”

He almost didn’t understand the question. How was Skylar Thorson? She was a fourteen-year-old nice kid. “She’s . . . fine? She still has that stray pup—”

“She does! Her folks let her keep it?”

“Yeah. She named her Asta. I guess it’s the name of Bjorn’s childhood dog, and he couldn’t say no.”

“See! You do know how she is.”

“I know she has a dog.” He truly was bewildered at the conversation.

“But she wanted so much to be in that art show.”

His head spun at the topic change. “Okay. How do you know that?”

“From the look in her eye when she saw this poster the day she found her dog. And from the disappointment when she saw the contest was for public school students.”

Well that explained it. She’d deduced something from nothing. He didn’t know any more about the way women worked than most men did, but he understood that women had some sort of belief in the gods of voice tone and eye rolls.

“Sure. Of course.”

“You’re such a guy. Don’t you pay attention?”

“I’m real glad you noticed I’m a guy. And I believe the right answer here is, ‘no, I admit I never pay attention.’ ”

Her smiles, after all the tension and worry that had kept them at bay since she’d arrived home, were a relief. She aimed one at him now filled with mock pity.

“You’ve been trained up well by someone, cowboy. Lucky for me.”

“Long as you’re happy, sweetheart.”

Their cheesecake arrived, hers topped with extra chocolate and his with butterscotch and walnuts. She dug in without hesitation, and when she closed her eyes and groaned, he only wished he could make her react that way again for him. He forced the thoughts away.

“Seriously,” he said, returning to the unsexiest topic he could. “Why are you thinking about Skylar?”

A wisp of embarrassment crossed her features but then she looked him in the eye. Her lips closed over her fork a second time and slicked it clean. He swallowed.

“I know it sounds dumb,” she said, mumbling over the mouthful of cheesecake. “I feel a connection with her. She’s a lot like I was when I was kid—a little lost and kind of misunderstood.”

“I shall call her Mini-Me.” Cole used his best Dr. Evil voice.

“Don’t you dare make fun of me.”

“I’m not. I couldn’t resist, sorry. I’ll be good, but you didn’t honestly feel lost and misunderstood, did you?”

She said nothing for a long moment. She didn’t even take another bite of cheesecake.

“You wouldn’t know because you were the only one who ever
seemed
to understand. You stuck up for me when people made fun of my daydreaming and my drawing.”

“I did?”

Harper had been famous for having her head in the clouds and her nose in a sketchbook, but he’d thought everyone found her cool and insightful and nice. That was simply how he’d looked at her and why he’d liked being around her. And what he found so steady about her now. She hadn’t changed. He teased her, but her concern about Skylar and everyone and everything else was what made her special.

“Until you started dating Amelia.” She averted her eyes with a self-conscious smile. He caught her chin again.

“Really?”

“This is stupid. It was more than a dozen years ago.”

“But I want to hear. Was I a jerk after I dated her?”

“No! No. You were . . . busy. That’s about the time we stopped riding around the two ranches like wild cowboys and grew up, that’s all. I missed my friend. But here he is, so it’s all good.”

He glanced around their table. Nobody was looking. He shoved his chair back, grabbed her hand, and removed the fork from her fingers. With a firm tug he pulled her to a stand and backed her into the hidden corner behind their table.