A Cowboy in the Kitchen (9 page)

Chapter Six

T
rue to his word, West had made all the arrangements. He'd booked a hotel room—one room, he'd told Annabel, so they'd have a chance to get used to “living together,” prepaid for a four-fifteen time slot at an elegant chapel without a theme or a costumed officiant, and after a quick trip to the marriage bureau for their license, they had almost an hour to get ready.

Annabel looked around the fancy hotel room—West had spared no expense—her gaze stopping on the closed bathroom door. West had disappeared inside with his garment bag, containing his one suit, she assumed—and for that she was grateful. Getting used to living together by sharing a bedroom was one thing. Watching him take off his traveling clothes, seeing West even just half-naked, and getting dressed for their wedding was another.

She couldn't stop staring at the king-size bed in the middle of it all.

Tonight, when it was time to lie down in that bed, she'd be Mrs. Annabel Hurley Montgomery. How many times had she doodled that on her notebook paper while doing her homework in middle school and high school? Thousands of times.

“It's fine with you if I keep my last name as my middle name?” Annabel called through the bathroom door from where she stood staring out the window at the Las Vegas Strip, at the throngs of people walking, the lit-up fancy hotels and fountains and glamour. “I figure the Dunkins will expect me to be Annabel Montgomery. But I don't have a middle name, so I like the idea of keeping Hurley.”

“Of course,” he called back. “Annabel Hurley Montgomery, it is. It's probably better for business too.”

Business. Right. It was good that one of them was constantly reminding her what this marriage was about.

When he came out, he wore a tuxedo and shiny black shoes, and he looked so damned handsome she gasped. “I clean up well, don't I?”

She couldn't take her eyes off him. “You sure do.”

He laughed. “Your turn. Unless you want to get married in a tank top and flip-flops.”

She smiled and grabbed her stuff and headed into the bathroom. She hung up her garment bag with Gram's dress and veil. Wrapped up inside were a pair of peau de soie peep-toe pumps that Clementine had had to buy once as a bridesmaid. Luckily they wore the same size shoe.

Something old: Gram's dress and veil.

Something new: the lacy bra and panties she'd bought in Dallas but had never worn.

Something borrowed: Clementine's shoes.

Something blue: her mother's diamond and sapphire bracelet.

She slipped out of her clothes and into the fancy lingerie, then put on the beautiful paper-thin lace dress, like something Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn might have worn. It was tea-length and sleeveless and so beautiful that Annabel almost burst into tears. Her grandmother had married the love of her life in this dress fifty years ago.

Annabel was marrying the right man, in the right dress, for sensible reasons. She slid the veil on and fluffed it back and almost cried again. She looked like a bride.

She wished her gram and her sisters and her parents were here. She'd promised Clementine behind-the-scenes pictures, so she snapped a couple of selfies, which was so silly it made her smile. A light dusting of makeup, a spritz of Chanel No 19, the bracelet and shoes on and she was ready.

When she opened the door and stepped out, West stared at her—hard.

“Oh my God, Annabel. You look absolutely beautiful. Too beautiful.”

She managed a smile, afraid to get all choked up and end up with mascara tracks down her cheeks.

“Let's go get married,” West said.

* * *

When the officiant called their names, Annabel looped her arm through West's and headed into the small chapel. A narrow red velvet carpet, appropriate, since Annabel did feel a bit like an actress, led from the door to where the officiant stood in front of a stained glass window—church effect, Annabel supposed—and an arrangement of exquisite red roses. The officiant, a woman in her fifties, wearing a mint-green suit and veiled hat, introduced Annabel and West to their witnesses, since they brought none of their own, a couple whose job it was to attend quickie weddings, sign licenses and snap photos.

Annabel stood across from West, glancing around as he was doing. She got it. It wasn't easy to stand across from the person you were vowing to love, honor and cherish till death did you part when those vows were actually about something else.
Annabel: I vow to make healthful breakfasts for your daughter, make sure her hair is knot-free and weed her closet of raggedy, holey pants. West: I vow to keep Hurley's Homestyle Kitchen afloat
.

The officiant called for the rings, which until this moment Annabel had completely overlooked. But West pulled two rings out of his pocket, a plain gold band and a beautiful gold band dotted with diamonds. He must have bought them before they arrived.

“Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?” the officiant asked West, nothing about vowing to love or cherish her.

West took Annabel's left hand in his, sliding the stunning diamond band halfway on her finger. He cleared his throat. “I do.” He slid the ring the rest of the way. It fit perfectly, which meant he must have asked Clementine for her ring size.

Annabel tried to hold West's gaze, but she glanced at her ring, then at her peau de soie shoes and tried to breathe.

West handed Annabel his ring and held out his hand. She took the ring and slid it halfway up his ring finger.

“And do you, Annabel Hurley, take this man, Weston Dallas Montgomery, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

She hadn't known his middle name was Dallas. She was marrying a man, right this moment, whose middle name she hadn't known.

She looked into West's driftwood-colored eyes, intense and soft on her at the same time, and part of her wanted to shout,
Of course I do! He's West Montgomery.
But the rest of her knew that he wasn't marrying her because he loved her, and standing here, actually marrying him, felt terribly wrong. So wrong that her stomach turned over and tears pricked the backs of her eyes. She looked down, blinking the tears away.

“Annabel? You okay?” West whispered.

“Just a little overwhelmed with emotion,” she managed to squeak out. She glanced at the officiant, then at West. “I do. I do take this man.” She slid the ring fully on his finger.

He kept his eyes on hers and nodded, giving her hand a little squeeze.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the officiant said. “You may now kiss the bride.”

West leaned over, taking her face in his hands, and kissed her—passionately. Annabel leaned into him, kissing him back, feeling herself swoon. There was nothing fake, nothing temporary, nothing businesslike about the kiss. It showed his passionate appreciation, she realized. But then it was over, West pulling back.

The witnesses took lots of pictures with West's and Annabel's phones, and West sent a couple of shots right away to Lucy, via the Dunkins' email since she was staying with them for the night. Then the officiant called for the four-thirty couple, and Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery found themselves outside the chapel.

A limo passed them, a woman flashing her breasts and drunkenly shouting, “Whoo-hoo! Vegas, baby!” out the window. Up and down the Strip, Annabel could see a few brides in all different kinds of gowns, one groom in a New England Patriots jersey and helmet. “So, Mrs. Annabel Hurley Montgomery, for your wedding night, would you like a wild night on the town or quiet room service on the balcony, just the two of us?”

“Which would you prefer?” she asked, hoping he'd go for door number two.

“Just the two of us.”

“Me too,” she said.

They walked back to their hotel, just a short distance away, folks congratulating them along the way.

But all the way up in the elevator to the seventeenth floor, she kept thinking about how they hadn't ironed out the sex issue. Was West expecting a real wedding night? Was she? Was it better not to start something she wasn't sure should continue? Would sex complicate what was a temporary business arrangement?

What didn't sex complicate?

But as West stood so close beside her, all six feet three inches of him, the delicious clean soap smell of him, she saw herself beneath him in the hayloft, the guy of her dreams, now her legal husband. Her
husband
. She wanted him—desperately.

* * *

On the balcony, West took a few selfies of the two of them holding up their rings. Then room service arrived, and they decided to get out of their fancy clothes before eating. West headed into the bathroom with his overnight bag and returned wearing a pair of very sexy jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. Annabel grabbed her own bag and shot inside, closing the door and sucking in a deep breath. She carefully removed her dress and hung it back in the garment bag with the shoes and veil, then changed into skinny jeans and a ruffly white tank top, leaving her hair loose.

For a second she was about to slide off the ring but realized it was meant to stay on. She stared at it, wondering how long it would take to feel comfortable on her finger, to feel as though it belonged.

She found West on the balcony, pouring two glasses of champagne. He handed her one, then held his own up to her.

“To you,” he said. “If it weren't for you...” He glanced away, down at the sparkling lights of the Strip, then cleared his throat. “Sometimes I can't believe that we really had to resort to such a drastic measure.”

Sometimes Annabel thought West shouldn't talk so much.

“I mean, I really thought I was done with marriage,” he went on. “Once burned, twice shy and all that.” He sat down at the little round table on the balcony, removing the lid on his dinner: prime rib, classic wedding entrée.

“How were you burned?” she asked, realizing she knew very little about his marriage to Lorna. She removed the lid on hers, not much appetite for the delicious-looking lemon sole.

“Maybe we should have our toast first,” he said, clinking her glass. “To...this marriage doing its job.”

Good Lord. The less he talked the better. Annabel wondered if the room service menu had earplugs.

It wasn't that she didn't understand that this was a business deal, a temporary one, at that. But they were legally, lawfully wed, husband and wife, and they'd be sharing a home, a bedroom, acting in public like a happy married couple. He could at least...something. Ugh. This was so frustrating. Although...did she want him to pretend to love her? Of course not.

He sliced into his prime rib. “I married Lorna because she was pregnant. To be honest, at the time, I didn't even like her. But she told me she was pregnant with my baby, so I proposed marriage. You know what her answer was? ‘If you can get me the two-carat ring I want from Blue Gulch Jewelers, size six, okay, I'll marry you.' I sold my one and only head of cattle, and I bought her the ring she wanted.”

“So she wouldn't have married you if you didn't buy her that ring?”

West laughed. “Honestly I don't know.”

“You said ‘at the time' you didn't like her. Things changed between you?”

If things changed for the better with him and Lorna, maybe there was hope that things could change for them. Maybe.

“She had her good points,” he said, biting off the head of a stalk of asparagus. “Very soon after Lorna told me she was pregnant, my parents moved to Austin and said I could have the house and their small herd of cattle. A wedding present, I guess. Lorna hated the idea, but it was either that or moving in with her folks, and she thought living on a ranch might be fun.”

Annabel tried to imagine Lorna Dunkin on a ranch with her three-inch heels.

West looked down at the lights of the Strip, waiting for a limo beeping to the tune of the Wedding March to pipe down. At least it made them both smile. “Anyway, for most of her pregnancy, Lorna did seem to like it okay. But she got sick of it. Right before she was due, she wanted to move to town, which I couldn't afford. And my parents had died just a few months before that. There was no way I was selling my family homestead with my brother and my parents both gone. The house, the land were the only things I had left of my family, even if we didn't get along.”

“I can understand that,” she said. “When my parents died it was hard to leave the house we grew up in and move to Gram's Victorian. Clementine took that the hardest.” Annabel thought of Clem, having shuffled from foster home to foster home, losing the adoptive parents she thought would be her forever family.

West nodded. “Then when Lucy was born, I was so madly in love with that little six-pound baby that I desperately wanted things to work out between Lorna and me. She could be fun, had a good sense of humor, liked to have a good time. And here and there, she'd dote on Lucy. But she hated the ranch, wanted to go out with her girlfriends, starting staying in town more and more instead of coming home at night. I tried to make her happy any way I could to keep her home for Lucy's sake, but a year ago, right before the accident, she told me she couldn't take another minute of her life, she loved Lucy but she couldn't be a good mother if she was miserable, so she was taking off for New York City to try to become a singer.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine just leaving your kid?”

“No. I really can't.” It was unfathomable.

He took a swig of champagne. “In that moment, when Lorna told me she was leaving Lucy—a five-year-old—any feelings I had for my wife turned to ash.”

She didn't know what to say, so she sipped her own champagne, her appetite totally gone.

“At least now I know what I'm dealing with,” he said, holding up his left hand, the gold band glinting with the sunset. “Believe me, I prefer this. We know exactly what we are doing here, how you feel, how I feel.”

“Oh?” she said before she could stop herself. “How do I feel?”