The Marine's E-Mail Order Bride (Heroes of Chance Creek Book 3) (27 page)

“Y
ou did what?”
Ethan Cruz turned his back on the slate and glass entrance to Chance Creek, Montana’s Regional Airport, and jiggled the door handle of Rob Matheson’s battered red Chevy truck. Locked. It figured—Rob had to know he’d want to turn tail and head back to town the minute he found out what his friends had done. “Open the damned door, Rob.”

“Not a chance. You’ve got to come in—we’re picking up your bride.”

“I don’t have a bride and no one getting off that plane concerns me. You’ve had your fun, now open up the door or I’m grabbing a taxi.” He faced his friends. Rob, who’d lived on the ranch next door to his their entire lives. Cab Johnson, county sheriff, who was far too level-headed to be part of this mess. And Jamie Lassiter, the best horse trainer west of the Mississippi as long as you could pry him away from the ladies. The four of them had gone to school together, played football together, and spent more Saturday nights at the bar than he could count. How many times had he gotten them out of trouble, drove them home when they’d had one beer to many, listened to them bellyache about their girlfriends or lack thereof when all he really wanted to do was knock back a cold one and play a game of pool? What the hell had he ever done to deserve this?

Unfortunately, he knew exactly what he’d done. He’d played a spectacularly brilliant prank a month or so ago on Rob—a prank that still had the town buzzing—and Rob concocted this nightmare as payback. Rob got him drunk one night and egged him on about his ex-fiancee until he spilled his guts about how much it still bothered him that Lacey Taylor had given him the boot in favor of that rich sonofabitch Carl Whitfield. The name made him want to spit. Dressed like a cowboy when everyone knew he couldn’t ride to save his life.

Lacey bailed on him just as life had delivered a walloping one-two punch. First his parents died in a car accident. Then he discovered the ranch was mortgaged to the hilt. As soon as Lacey learned there would be some hard times ahead, she took off like a runaway horse. Didn’t even have the decency to break up with him face to face. Before he knew it Carl was flying Lacey all over creation in his private plane. Las Vegas. San Francisco. Houston. He never had a chance to get her back.

He should have kept his thoughts bottled up where they belonged—would have kept them bottled up if Rob hadn’t kept putting those shots into his hand—but no, after he got done swearing and railing at Lacey’s bad taste in men, he apparently decided to lecture his friends on the merits of a real woman. The kind of woman a cowboy should marry.

And Rob—good ol’ Rob—captured the whole thing with his cell phone.

When he showed it to him the following day, Ethan made short work of the asinine gadget, but it was too late. Rob had already emailed the video to Cab and Jamie, and the three of them spent the next several days making his life damn miserable over it.

If only they’d left it there.

The other two would have, but Rob was still sore about that old practical joke, so he took things even further. He decided there must be a woman out there somewhere who met all of the requirements Ethan expounded on during his drunken rant. To find her, he did what any rational man would do. He edited Ethan’s rant into a video advertisement for a damned mail order bride.

And posted it on YouTube.

Rob showed him the video on the ride over to the airport. There he was for all the world to see, sounding like a jack-ass—hell, looking like one, too. Rob’s fancy editing made his rant sound like a proposition. “What I want,” he heard himself say, “is a traditional bride. A bride for a cowboy. 18—25 years old, willing to work hard, beautiful, quiet, sweet, good cook, ready for children. I’m willing to give her a trial. One month’ll tell me all I need to know.” Then the image cut out to a screen full of text, telling women how to submit their video applications.

Unbelievable. This was low—real low—even for Rob.

Ready for children?

“You all are cracked in the head. I’m not going in there.”

“Come on, Ethan,” Cab said. The big man stood with his legs spread, his arms folded over his barrel chest, ready to stop him if he tried to run. “The girl’s come all the way from New York. You’re not even going to say hello? What kind of a fiance are you?”

He clenched his fists. “No kind at all. And there isn’t any girl in there. You know it. I know it. So stop wasting my time. There isn’t any girl dumb enough to answer something like that!”

The other men exchanged a look.

“Actually,” Jamie said, leaning against the Chevy and rubbing the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand. “We got nearly 200 answers to that video. Took us hours to get through them all.” He grinned. “Who can resist a cowboy, right?”

As far as Ethan was concerned, plenty of women could. Lacey certainly had resisted him. Hence his bachelor status. “So you picked the ugliest, dumbest girl and tricked her into buying a plane ticket. Terrific.”

Rob looked pained. “No, we found one that’s both hot and smart. And we chipped in and bought the ticket—round trip, because we figured you wouldn’t know a good thing when it kicked you in the butt, so we’d have to send her back. Have a little faith in your friends. You think we’d steer you wrong?”

Hell, yes. Ethan took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. The guys wouldn’t admit they were joking until he’d gone into the airport and hung around the gate looking foolish for a suitable amount of time. And if they were stupid enough to actually fly a girl out here, he couldn’t trust them to put her back on a plane home. So now instead of finishing his chores before supper, he’d lose the rest of the afternoon sorting out this mess.

“Fine. Let’s get this over with,” he said, striding toward the front door. Inside, he didn’t bother to look at the television screen which showed incoming and outgoing flights. Chance Creek Regional had all of four gates. He’d just follow the hall as far as homeland security allowed him and wait until some lost soul deplaned.

“Look—it’s on time.” Rob grabbed his arm and tried to hurry him along. Ethan dug in the heels of his well worn boots and proceeded at his own pace.

Jamie pulled a cardboard sign out from under his jacket and flashed it at Ethan before holding it up above his head. It read, Autumn Leeds. Jamie shrugged at Ethan’s expression. “I know—the name’s brutal.”

“Want to see her?” Cab pulled out a gadget and handed it over. Ethan held it gingerly. The laptop he bought on the advice of his accountant still sat untouched in his tiny office back at the ranch. He hated these miniature things that ran on swoops and swipes and taps on buttons that weren’t really there. Cab reached over and pressed something and it came to life, showing a pretty young woman in a cotton dress in a kitchen preparing what appeared to be a pot roast.

“Hi, I’m Autumn,” she said, looking straight at him. “Autumn Leeds. As you can see, I love cooking…”

Rob whooped and pointed. “Look—there she is! I told you she’d come!”

Ethan raised his gaze from the gadget to see the woman herself walking toward them down the carpeted hall. Long black hair, startling blue eyes, porcelain-white skin, she was thin and haunted and luminous all at the same time. She, too, held a cell phone and seemed to be consulting it, her gaze glancing down then sweeping the crowd. As their eyes met, hers widened with recognition. He groaned inwardly when he realized this pretty woman had probably watched Rob’s stupid video multiple times. She might be looking at his picture now.

As the crowd of passengers and relatives split around their party, she walked straight up to them and held out her hand. “Ethan Cruz?” Her voice was low and husky, her fingers cool and her handshake firm. He found himself wanting to linger over it. Instead he nodded. “I’m Autumn Leeds. Your bride.”

Autumn had never been
more terrified in her life. In her short career as a columnist for CityPretty Magazine, she’d interviewed models, society women, CEO’s and politicians, but all of them were urbanites, and she’d never had to leave New York to get the job done. As soon as her plane departed LaGuardia she knew she’d made a mistake. As the city skyline fell away and the countryside below her emptied into farmland, she clutched the arms of her seat as if she was heading for the moon rather than Montana. Now, hours later, she felt off-kilter and fuzzy, and the four men before her looked like extras in a Western flick. Large, muscled, rough men who all exuded a distinct odor of sweat she realized probably came from an honest afternoon’s work. Entirely out of her comfort zone, she wondered for the millionth time if she’d done the right thing. It’s the only way to get my contract renewed, she reminded herself. She had to write a story different from all the other articles in CityPretty. In these tough economic times, the magazine was downsizing—again. If she didn’t want to find herself out on the street, she had to produce—fast.

And what better story to write than the tale of a Montana cowboy using YouTube to search for an email-order bride?

Ethan Cruz looked back at her, seemingly at a loss for words. Well, that was to be expected with a cowboy, right? The ones in movies said about one word every ten minutes or so. That’s why his video said she needed to be quiet. Well, she could be quiet. She didn’t trust herself to speak, anyway.

She’d never been so near a cowboy before. Her best friend, Becka, helped shoot her video response, and they’d spent a hilarious day creating a pseudo-Autumn guaranteed to warm the cockles of a cowboy’s heart. Together, they’d decided to pitch her as desperate to escape the dirty city and unleash her inner farm wife on Ethan’s Montana ranch. They hinted she loved gardening, canning, and all the domestic arts. They played up both her toughness (she played first base in high school baseball) and her femininity (she loved quilting—
what an outright lie
). She had six costume changes in the three minute video.

Over her vehement protests, Becka forced her to end the video with a close-up of her face while she uttered the words, “I often fall asleep imagining the family I’ll someday have.” Autumn’s cheeks warmed as she recalled the depth of the deception. She wasn’t a country girl pining to be a wife; she was a career girl who didn’t intend to have kids for at least another decade. Right?

Of course.

Except somehow, when she watched the final video, the life the false Autumn said she wanted sounded far more compelling than the life the real Autumn lived. Especially the part about wanting a family.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want a career. She just wanted a different one—a different life. She hated how hectic and shallow everything seemed now. She remembered her childhood, back when she had two parents—a successful investment banker father and a stay-at-home mother who made the best cookies in New York City. Back then, her mom, Teresa, loved to take Autumn and her sister, Lily, to visit museums, see movies and plays, walk in Central Park and shop in the ethnic groceries that surrounded their home. On Sundays, they cooked fabulous feasts together and her mother’s laugh rang out loud and often. Friends and relatives stopped by to eat and talk, and Autumn played with the other children while the grownups clustered around the kitchen table. All that changed when she turned nine and her father left them for a travel agent. Her parents’ divorce was horrible. The fight wasn’t over custody; her father was all too eager to leave child-rearing to her mother while he toured Brazil with his new wife. The fight was over money—over the bulk of the savings her father had transferred to offshore accounts in the weeks before the breakup, and refused to return.

Broke, single and humiliated, her mother took up the threads of the life she’d put aside to marry and raise a family. A graduate of an elite liberal arts college, with several years of medical school already under her belt, she moved them into a tiny apartment on the edge of a barely-decent neighborhood and returned to her studies. Those were lean, lonely years when everyone had to pitch in. Autumn’s older sister watched over her after school, and Teresa expected them to take on any and all chores they could possibly handle. As Autumn grew, she took over the cooking and shopping and finally the family’s accounts. Teresa had no time for cultural excursions, let alone entertaining friends, but by the time Autumn was ready to go to college herself, she ran a successful OB-GYN practice that catered to wealthy women who’d left childbearing until the last possible moment, and she didn’t even have to take out a loan to fund her education.

Determined her daughters would never face the same challenges she had, Teresa raised them with three guiding precepts:

Every woman must be self-supporting.

Marriage is a trap set by men for women.

Parenthood must be postponed until one reaches the pinnacle of her career.

Autumn’s sister, Lily, was a shining example of this guide to life. She was single, ran her own physical therapy clinic, and didn’t plan to marry or have children any time soon. Next to her, Autumn felt like a black sheep. She couldn’t seem to accept work was all there was to life. Couldn’t forget the joy of laying a table for a host of guests. She still missed those happy, crowded Sunday afternoons so much it hurt her to think about them.

She forced her thoughts back to the present. The man before her was ten times more handsome than he was in his video, and that was saying a lot. Dark hair, blue eyes, a chiseled jaw with just a trace of manly stubble. His shoulders were broad and his stance radiated a determination she found more than compelling. This was a man you could lean on, a man who could take care of the bad guys, wrangle the cattle, and still sweep you off your feet.

“Ethan, aren’t you going to say hello to your fiancee?” One of the other men stuck out his hand. “I’m Rob Matheson. This is Cab Johnson and Jamie Lassiter. Ethan here needed some backup.”

Rob was blonde, about Ethan’s size, but not nearly so serious. In fact, she bet he was a real cut-up. That shit-eating grin probably never left his face. Cab was larger than the others—six foot four maybe, powerfully built. He wore a sheriff’s uniform. Jamie was lean but muscular, with dark brown hair that fell into his eyes. They had the easy camaraderie that spoke of a long acquaintance. They probably knew each other as kids, and would take turns being best man at each other’s weddings.