Second Chance Bride (Montana Born Brides) Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouldn’t have to struggle with that on top of trying to cope with everything else. Scarlett turned away from the traffic and thoughts of home. What was the point? It would be months before she’d get home now. “Bella told you I was new. I was brand new, as it happens. You would have been my first.”
    His eyes opened wide. Really wide. “First? What, first time ever, you mean?” He sounded appalled.
    “Oh hell no,” she said, laughing. “Not that kind of first. Just first in my new ex-job. But I do feel bad about it and I just wanted you to know, it wasn’t you or anything you did, it was me.”
    Their coffees arrived and she was grateful for the interruption before she’d gone and told him how it had been damned near impossible to stop and wouldn’t that have been embarrassing? She breathed in the bewitching aroma of her coffee instead. It smelt strong and rich and exactly what she needed right now.
    ‘It wasn’t you—it was me.’
    Funny, Mitch thought, that was almost the same thing Kristelle had told him, only the other way around. It was kind of refreshing not to be blamed for something for once.
    “How about we forget about what happened before and start again.” He held out his hand. “The name’s Mitch. What’s yours?”
    She frowned a little as she regarded his hand. “Scarlett,” she said, raising her eyes as she slipped her hand warily into his. “But you already know that.”
    It took a moment for the name to register, maybe because her hand was smooth in his and came with a burst of feel good that reminded him just how good she’d felt in his arms. And because his body didn’t need a reminder of what he’d been so close to having and missed out on, he let her hand go and focused on her words instead. “Like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind ?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the very same. Mom’s the original Gone with the Wind Windie. Would you believe, I have a twin sister called Tara.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Oh yeah. Mom even has a poster of Rhett Butler hanging above her bed.”
    Her voice went quiet at the end and she lost her smile, her eyes a million miles away, her hands fiddling with the ends of the thick red braid dangling heavily over her shoulder.
    “You miss them?”
    She sighed. “Hell, yeah.” And then she looked up, a forced smile that couldn’t mask the tension around her eyes, and he figured there was something majorly unsaid right there. “But that’s normal when you’re so far from home, right?”
    “Sure it is. So where is home, Scarlett?”
    “Montana. A little town called Marietta, not far from Bozeman. Ever heard of it?”
    “Can’t say that I have. Haven’t spent a lot of time in the States, though I did get to New York once.” He sipped his coffee. He remembered it well. Kristelle had wanted a treat for their two month anniversary. A week ‘somewhere special’, she’d said.
    Looking back, he could see it had been a test. ‘How much do you love me?’ she’d been asking even then. ‘How much am I worth to you?’
    But back then it had suited him. He’d always wanted to go to New York City and why not indulge her? There were only seven days out of every twenty-one when they could even see each other, which was hardly conducive to getting to know someone.
    At that stage, he’d still thought she might be worth getting to know.
    The taste of the coffee turned bitter in his mouth.
    More fool him.
    “ Kalgoorlie reminds me a lot of Marietta, actually.” The girl alongside him looked thoughtful as she swirled her coffee cup in her hands, before she took a sip and turned her attention out the window. “All these gorgeous old buildings with balconies and verandas.” She turned to him, “Marietta started as a mining town too, you know, but not with gold like here. They found copper up on Copper Mountain and for a while the town did really well, but then the copper ran out and Marietta almost became a ghost town for a while.”
    She