The Unexpected Bride (Montana Born Brides)
Read The Unexpected Bride (Montana Born Brides) Online
Authors: Joanne Walsh
The Unexpected Bride
a
montana born brides novel
Joanne Walsh
The Unexpected Bride
© Copyright 2014
Joanne Walsh
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
978-1-940296-35-7
To amazing Jane Porter, and the wonderful team and authors at Tule Publishing. Thanks for giving me another chance. It’s a privilege to work with you all.
Welcome back to another instalment in the story of Marietta, Montana.
Laurent in
The Unexpected Bride
, is part of the Fletcher family. (You might have already met his older brother, Ren, in Lilian Darcy’s
The Sweetest Thing
, and followed how he fell in love with Tully Morgan.) Laurent has inherited more than a little charm and passion—and his dark good looks—from his French mother Pascale, but when
The Unexpected Bride
opens, he’s not in great shape. His wife Brooke died two years ago and he’s struggling to bring up two lively toddlers, Evie and Jerome, and deal with his grief. However, when Emma Peabody, the new nanny from England arrives at Copper Creek, his and his kids’ lives are transformed. Emma is a ray of sunshine who drives the clouds away, and soon Laurent finds himself wanting her to stay forever. But his loyalty to his late wife won’t let him move on. Torn, he comes up with a practical plan to keep Emma close—marry for the sake of his children. But Emma’s not sure she can survive an apparently loveless marriage…Will she stay or will she go?
It’s a great privilege to be part of the
Spring Brides
series, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed spending time in Marietta and meeting its amazing inhabitants. I hope you will, too.
With warmest wishes
Joanne Walsh
Laurent Fletcher stood in the dining area, surveying the unbelievable mess that had resulted from trying to get his kids to sit down and eat lunch. There was food on the floor, and food on the walls; a chair had been knocked over. Pierre, his son’s favorite knitted toy rabbit, lay grubby and discarded in a corner. The only remaining diner was the family’s dog, Bobo, who was standing on another chair on his hind legs, paws on the table, busy demolishing some leftovers on a plate with gusto. Laurent raked his hand through his dark black hair, then massaged the back of his neck. The nanny who his father, Robert, had hired was due to arrive in the next couple of hours. Robert had gone to pick her up from the airport in Bozeman. Though she’d had a long journey from England via Los Angeles, she’d have to hit the ground running. He looked out of the window to the back yard, where three-year-old Evie was galloping around and screaming and Jerome was toddling after her as fast as his two-year-old’s little legs would carry him. Though he hadn’t welcomed her hiring, Laurent had to admit that he would be relieved if the English nanny got to grips with his terrible twosome right away.
They weren’t bad kids, just confused and running wild without their mother around.
Laurent shut his eyes and tried not to think about Brooke, but those familiar, insistent feelings of guilt and emptiness began filling his body. She’d been gone just over a couple of years now. With an effort he willed the feelings, and her, away and opened his eyes, catching sight again of his son who had fallen over and was now yelling at the top of his lungs as his older sister prodded him with a stick. Jerome was the image of Brooke, with his thick blond hair and slight limbs. Maybe it was little wonder that Jerome and Evie were all over the place, with the number of well-meaning people, all with different views and ways of doing things, who’d been in their lives trying to help them, and him, into living and coping after their bereavement. His dad, a plain-speaking Montana business man who, as ex-military, favored a disciplined, just-get-on-with-it approach to grief and child-rearing, and had nagged him to get in some help shortly after Brooke passed away. But Laurent had refused: pride, and a stubborn determination not to let Brooke down had kept him trying to juggle the kids and work mostly by himself, with the occasional intervention of others—his French mother, Pascale, who’d been a rock with her gentle, intuitive, creative support, his mother-in-law, Dianne, a fussy, determined divorcee, who flew in when she could from San Diego, and his brother, Ren, an attorney at law, who was having his own marital difficulties, but who was on hand to babysit now and then. Then there had been the professionals, with their various systems and theories on how to raise two motherless kids—occasionally useful, but mostly hopelessly inflexible and impractical. Laurent knew he shouldn’t be ungrateful. He was lucky to have a network and people who cared. It was just that, sometimes, he longed for a respite from the babble of voices around him, and also the critical voices in his head that told him he wasn’t doing any of this right.
He
galvanised himself and walked over to the table, grabbing Bobo’s collar and gently hauling the black, brown and white crossbreed terrier away from devouring his spoils. Then he strode outside onto the porch, Bobo barking at his heels, and prepared to go separate his feuding children.
Emma enjoyed the drive from the airport in Bozeman, chatting to Robert Fletcher as they travelled along Highway 90 towards Paradise Valley.
Robert had been in the military and stationed in Europe in the nineteen seventies—that was how he’d met his French wife, Pascale—so they had plenty to talk about. Emma could also see the magnificent south-west Montana scenery rising on either side of them—snowy, wooded and mountainous—and she was in awe. It felt good to be in these wide-open spaces, far away from England.
About twenty minutes after having skirted the town of Marietta, they turned right off Highway 89 at a suspended wooden sign that had the name
Copper Creek
carved out on it, and then up a long driveway that had been plowed of snow towards a traditional-style, modern-built rancher house, surrounded by a barn, other outbuildings and pastureland.
As the SUV drew to a halt, Emma saw three pairs of brown eyes peering at her through a five-bar gate and her heart melted. They belonged to a small girl with a tangle of dark curly hair and dressed in muddy overalls and a checked shirt, a toddler with a thatch of shaggy blond hair, also in overalls, with tear-tracks marking his grimy cheeks, and a small dog of indeterminate breed.
The two children weren’t wearing sweaters or coats, even though it was mid-January and there were piles of fresh snow on the ground. All continued to stare at her silently as she got out of the car and walked towards them.
She squatted down, so that she was at eye-level with the girl through the gate’s bars.
“Hi,” she said softly. “You must be Evaline.”
The little girl surveyed her solemnly for a moment.
“My name is
Evie
. Where’s your umber-rella? Mary Poppins had an umber-rella and she could fly. Can you fly?”
“Well, Evie, I flew to Bozeman in a plane.” Emma smiled warmly.
“Will that do?”
Evie considered this for a moment, then nodded her head.
“Miss Peabody?” Emma looked up when she heard her name spoken in a slow Western drawl, as rich and delicious as strong coffee. She saw a tall man, with thick, black hair, short at the sides and longer and slightly spiky on top, and a day’s growth of beard, his broad, muscular frame encased in a sheepskin jacket, and his long powerful legs snug in worn denims. Her breath caught in her throat. Was this Laurent Fletcher, her new boss? Though his clothes and setting said ‘cowboy’, his sensitive olive-skinned features reminded her of one of those medieval princes she’d seen in paintings back in Europe.
Her eyes stayed locked with his—they were a startling shade of golden-brown, like a fine malt whiskey—for countless seconds, then the spell was broken by the sound of the little boy crying.
The toddler raised his arms up to his father, his face red and contorted. For a moment, Laurent looked weary, then he bent over and picked up his son. He looked at Emma and said apologetically, “I’m afraid Jerome needs his diaper changed. We’d better head inside.”