The Reluctant Bride (Montana Born Brides) (2 page)

Risa stepped out the back of the workroom and into the hot Vegas sun.
Her eyes burned but she didn’t mind. She dialed Monty’s number but it went to voicemail.

“
It’s me. Risa. I need to talk to you.”

She hung up and then called the number that Laney had written down and found out more details about her parents
’ accident, and then realized she had to make arrangements for them. She started to shake but knew she had to keep doing this. Had to make sure they were brought back and taken care of.

She kept crying while she talked to the airline to arrange for her parents
’ bodies to be flown back to Florida, where her parents had lived, and picked up by the funeral home. She needed to make arrangements for herself to go to Florida, but couldn’t until she’d talked to Monty.

Her cell phone rang and she looked down at the screen to see Monty
’s smiling face. Thank God.

“
Hey, baby.”

“
Well, hello,” a stranger said.

“
Hello, this is Risa Grant. Where is Monty?”

“
He’s…he’s not available right now.”

“
Why not? Is he okay?” she asked. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear it if something had happened to him.

“
He’s fine. Just a little accident.”

“
Who is this?” she asked. The last accident Monty had been involved in had cost his friend, Lane, his limbs. What was going on?

“
This is Tony. We met in Vegas,” he said.

She remembered Tony.
Dark-haired, Italian-looking guy who’d gotten married to Della. The bride who’d wanted only purple blooms in her bouquet. Why was she remembering inane details now? He’d been one of the guys who’d helped them celebrate being engaged. God, that seemed like a lifetime ago.

“
Is Monty okay?” she asked, panic tightening her throat and making it hard to breathe.

“
He will be. He tore up some stitches he had from his recent injury and that caused a few complications. He was worried because he saw you had called him.”

“
I did. Does he need me?” she asked. She felt a sense of panic. That trapped feeling of not knowing what to do. “Is he being sent anywhere for medical treatment where I could meet him?”

“
You won’t be able to see him on base.”

“
Will he be okay?”

“
Yes,” Tony said. “Your Marine is as tough as they come.”

“
Will you ask him to call me?”

“
I will. It’s going to be a while. The doctors won’t be able to release him for a few days at least.”

What was she going to do?
She didn’t want to send a message through his friend that her parents had died. That didn’t seem fair. But, also, he’d want to know. She was confused. She didn’t want to do anything to make the situation worse for Monty.

“
I have to go out of town for a few days. Have him call me as soon as he’s able,” she said at last.

“
I will do that. Any message you want me to pass along to him?” Tony asked.

“
Just tell him that I miss him.”

She hung up the phone more confused about life and what she should do than ever.
She booked a flight to Florida, and told her boss that she didn’t know what she was going to do next.

Monty called four hours later, as she was waiting at the gate to board her flight to Florida.
He sounded tired and maybe a little scared.

“
Hey, sweetheart,” he said.

“
Hey, baby. I heard you had a little accident,” she said, not wanting to mention her parents until she knew what was going on with him.

“
I did, but I’m getting there. This is what happens when I don’t have my good luck charm with me.”

Tears burned the back of her eyes.
She suspected he was downplaying his injuries for her sake. She didn’t feel like a good luck charm tonight. She felt lost and without mooring. Like she needed to hide until she could figure out something.

“
I’m not lucky,” she said.

“
You okay?”

“
Yes.”

“
Your voice sounds weird.”

She swallowed and noticed some of the other passengers were looking at her.
Probably because she was crying. Monty had been able to talk to her parents via Skype after they’d been engaged and he’d gone back on deployment. She was so glad that modern technology had at least allowed them to talk.

“
Um…I have to go to Florida for a few days.”

“
For the holidays? We’re having a sort of Thanksgiving here, and next year we can celebrate together,” he said.

“
No, not for the holidays,” she said, wishing he were with her right now, instead of in six months or so—the time he had left on this deployment.

“
Why?”

“
Just something with my parents.”

“
Are they sick?” he asked, coughing a little. “How was their Scottish dream trip?”

“
Monty…they were killed on their vacation,” she said.

There was nothing but silence on the line, and she pulled the phone away from her head to see that the call had dropped.

She tried to call him back but the call wouldn’t connect. Maybe that was a sign.

She tried to call Monty several times over the next few days.
But his cell phone had been turned off. Something he had warned her might happen if he went out on maneuvers. Was he safe? Was he well enough to do them?

She was panicked when she thought of something serious happening to him. So scared for him.
She was like a zombie when she got back to Vegas a month later. Monty still had five more months to serve, and her boss could tell she wasn’t getting back on track for the fast pace of the Vegas weddings.

“
You need a change of scenery,” Laney said one cold winter morning. “I have a friend who’s retiring and looking for a florist to buy her out.”

Her parents had left her a small amount on their death and she had the money to purchase Sweetpea Flowers in Marietta, Montana.
She’d thought about how she should tell Monty. She couldn’t contact him while he was deployed unless it was an emergency. So she packed up everything in her Audi convertible in the middle of January, and left Vegas and her fiancé behind.

Craptastic
.

That was the only way to describe her life this morning.
Risa Grant’s cute Audi TT convertible had been perfect in Vegas, but was as out of place as she was on this slushy Montana road that led into Marietta. It was April, so she’d thought that maybe the snow and slush would be gone; but it wasn’t.

Spring took a long time to come to this little valley in Montana.
Winter had been long and cold and she was ready for the thaw. But, mainly, she was ready for summer to come and go, so that the wedding fever that surrounded her would be gone.

“
I live here,” she said to no one. “It’s okay if I start fitting in.”

Talking to herself wasn
’t going to get her car out of the slushy mud it was stuck in. She’d pulled off the road because she’d heard something. Her father had always bragged that he knew how to identify a car problem from the slightest noise.

She put her head forward on the steering wheel, her chest tight with a combination of grief and anger.
She’d pulled over to call a man who was dead. She was an idiot.

Tears burned the back of her eyes.
She wasn’t going to cry. Not today, when she was on her way to the Barn Dance that was one of the major events to kick off the Great Wedding Giveaway. An event for which she was a sponsor and official vendor. Tonight, all the couples competing in the contest would be introduced.

Honestly, she couldn
’t count the number of craptastic things in her life at this moment. She had run away from her fiancé, and weddings in general, only to find herself smack-dab in a small town that had wedding fever. She knew it was Karma.

It didn
’t matter that her intentions had been noble when she’d disappeared. She’d known that the Universe wouldn’t let her get away with just walking away from Staff Sergeant Montgomery Davison. She wiped the tears from her face, and got out to see how badly stuck she was. At past eight o’clock in the evening, it was starting to get dark.

She had a penlight on the back of her iPhone. She sq
uatted by the open door as ta pair of headlights appeared on the horizon. She immediately got back into the car and closed the door and locked it.

She felt silly because it was Marietta and not Hendersonville, Nevada, and there wasn
’t a huge crime wave. But she was still a woman alone on the side of the road in the gathering dusk. Three complimentary lessons in Tae Kwon Do weren’t as helpful as she’d hoped, since all she could remember was a back kick that she’d used to break a piece of plywood.

Every horror movie she
’d ever seen—granted there hadn’t been that many since she didn’t like to be scared—featured this type of scenario. Creepy music drifted through her mind.

“
Stop it.”

Monty?
Doubtful he’d take a call from his runaway bride.

Freaking herself out wasn
’t going to help at all. She should call for assistance.

Who could she call?

She hadn’t exactly been burning up the social ladder since she’d arrived. It didn’t help that she was naturally more at home with her nose in a book than chatting with strangers. She’d been eating lunch at the Diner every day for the last month to try to ‘get out’ more, but she always brought along her Kindle e-book device and sat there reading, feeling awfully exposed.

Mentally she ran through the people she
’d met and the people she’d exchanged phone numbers with. The Venn diagram in her head was slim pickings. Jane Weiss.

She sort of knew Jane from the Chamber of Commerce but they weren
’t friends. Plus she’d more likely be wondering where exactly Risa was.

She
’d call the auto club. She hadn’t signed up for the service but Audi had one of those 24-hour road rescue services. In fact she should have done that in the first place. But her head wasn’t in the right place.

Nothing had been easy since she
’d left Monty.

She took a deep breath and leaned over to open the glove box to retrieve the book on the car.
Another thing her dad had been a stickler about. Keeping the glove box neat and all the car papers in it.

God, she missed him.

If he and her mom were still here…she might be married. She might not be living alone in Marietta. But she and Monty hadn’t made it down the aisle. She’d gotten scared, overwhelmed and had run. End of story.

A vehicle passed her and did a U-turn, before coming back to pull off the road behind her car.
It was a big-ass, all-weather truck that looked like it belonged on a ranch. Totally fitting in where she didn’t.

The door opened and from the interior light she saw the silhouette of a man as he grabbed a cowboy hat and donned it before walking toward her.
There was something familiar about his shape. The way he moved with the careless grace of a predator, like one of the lions her parents had studied when she’d been little and they’d lived in Africa.

He was sinewy grace.
Really? She shook her head and debated what she was going to do. She couldn’t open the door to a stranger. That had dumb idea written all over it. Maybe he was one of the men from Marietta she’d met. Like Carson Scott, who was engaged to Annie, the waitress at the Diner.

The man stopped next to her car and leaned down to peer into the window, and her breath caught in the back of her throat as his friendly smile disappeared.