Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides) Read Online Free PDF

Grant. If she wanted to confront Cole, she’d have to do it while she was working.
    So here she was. And she ’d fully intended to see him tomorrow. To talk to him. To listen to him. To argue with him, no doubt. But she’d be prepared. Not knocked sideways from having come almost face to face with him in the middle of a dance floor—with his arms around another woman!
    “ You’re like some wild thing,” Grant said. “You have been since we got here. Always looking over your shoulder—or in this case, my shoulder. This is your neck of the woods, isn’t it, Corbett? This was your idea. So what’s spooking you?”
    “ I’m not from here,” Nell said, splitting hairs. “I grew up in Bozeman.”
    “ Right. You were born in Korea. You lived in New York, in Missouri, in Leeds, in Antwerp, and you ended up in Bozeman, forty miles away.”
    Trust Grant to have a photographic memory when it came to CVs.
    “It’s different,” Nell said. “Bozeman is ... different. But nothing’s spooking me.” She gave herself a deliberate shake, as the cold began to seep into her bones. “I’m fine. I just ... needed some air, that’s all. It’s hot in there.”
    Not to mention that the heat from Cole ’s gaze boring into her had threatened to send her up in flames. Now, though, the opposite reaction had set in: her teeth were chattering and she was shivering. Crossing her arms, Nell tucked her hands against her sides and pressed her teeth together.
    Grant grunted. “Ah. Cooling off, are you?” He gave her a sardonic look, that intensified and narrowed as he studied her flaming cheeks and her jaw which she’d clamped shut.
    Hoping he couldn ’t hear her teeth chattering, Nell gave a stiff jerky nod. But even so, she was in no hurry to go back inside and come face to face with Cole—and the woman he’d brought to the ball.
    She hadn ’t known what to expect when she saw Cole—but she had never expected that. The sight of Cole with another woman in his arms was like a physical blow. It left her gasping in disbelief. But on another level, seeing him with her suddenly made everything—from his increasing remoteness during their telephone conversations, to his awkward answers to any questions about when they could finally be together, to the unexpected arrival of the divorce papers and his terse little note about them being ‘for the best’— made horrible mortifying sense.
    “ You’re not going to tell me,” Grant said. It sounded as if they were having a perfectly normal conversation.
    “ It’s not your business.” There was no point pulling punches with Grant.
    He laughed. “It’s my business that we’re standing in the snow, though.”
    “ You can go back in.”
    “ I will ... when you do,” he said easily, obviously prepared to wait her out.
    Nell sighed irritably, then shifted, trying to glimpse past Grant ’s rangy six foot two inch form to see if she could spot Cole in the lobby. She didn’t see him, and she dared to breathe a little easier though her teeth were chattering again. “F-fine. We can go back in now.”
    “ You’re sure it’s safe?” Grant’s tone was still sardonic, needling, and not for the first time did Nell think he was the last man on earth who should be producing a show called The Compatibility Game .
    Grant Merrick didn ’t have a clue about compatibility. He thought it was just another term for everyone thinking the same way he did. “Your teeth are chattering,” he said, as if she didn’t know it. His gaze narrowed suspiciously. “You’re not sick, are you?”
    Nell ’s first instinct was to deny it. She wasn’t sick, except at heart. But if Grant thought she was, maybe she could escape, go to her room, get a little breathing space—at least until she figured out what to do next.
    “ You know,” she said faintly, “I’m not ... really.”
    Grant ’s blond brows drew down. “Well, you can’t be sick,” he said, as if his decreeing it would make it so.