A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) (10 page)

Stop,
Emmy ordered herself.
Being snide only makes you one of them
.

Margery returned her attention to Emmy
eventually, with what felt like a little touch of unnecessary theater. “Because he’s engaged, you know.”

“
Is he?” Emmy feigned a great fascination with the label on the fancy huckleberry soda she was drinking. “Why did I think that was called off?”

“
The rumor is that she cheated on him.” Margery sniffed. “But he still entered the two of them in that stupid wedding contest, so draw your own conclusions about what
that
means.” She didn’t wait for Emmy to draw any conclusions one way or another, she simply launched into her grievances concerning Marietta’s Great Wedding Giveaway, a topic she returned to roughly fifteen times a day. Even when Gran Harriet was in the room, though Margery knew as well as Emmy did that Gran was on the Marietta Chamber of Commerce along with her usual partner in crime, Griffin’s Gran Martha. “Do you really think that I would have had my wedding now if I’d known about this? If it had even
existed
eighteen months ago? I don’t understand these people. Some of us plan things in advance. Some of us actually care about our weddings and don’t leave them up to the random choices of some backwater town.”

“
You mean
this
backwater town?” Emmy asked mildly, thunking her soda bottle on the table before her with perhaps a shade too much force. “The very one where you’ve chosen to have your great three-week wedding extravaganza?”

“
You know what I mean,” Margery said dismissively. “Who comes up with these things? Why didn’t the Grans put a stop to it when they knew perfectly well my wedding was this year? And besides, what couple would think it was a good idea to throw themselves on the mercy of strangers for something as important as their own wedding? God only knows what will happen. It will be like a patchwork quilt of a wedding. Raggedy Ann Gets Married By A Committee Of People She’s Never Met.”

“
Some people like patchwork quilts. And Raggedy Ann, for that matter.”

“
Some people like Cheez Whiz, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m offering it with the canapés.”

“
Calm down, Bridezilla,” Emmy suggested, and maybe there was more snideness in her tone than she intended, because the look Margery gave her was very narrow indeed. “There are other people getting married this year. Many on the very same day as you. I know it’s hard to get your head around this, but you can’t actually reserve an entire year all for yourself.”

“
It’s obnoxious,” Margery said, and Emmy honestly didn’t know if she meant the fact she couldn’t reserve the whole year or the Wedding Giveaway itself. “It completely penalizes those of us who actually spent the time planning our weddings for ourselves.”

“
How does it penalize you, exactly?” And yes, her voice was definitely sharper than necessary. Emmy told herself it had nothing to do with the fact Griffin was competing to get a patchwork wedding all his own, a fact he’d conveniently failed to disclose before they’d slept together one or two hundred times. A fact that, when coupled with what he’d told her about his not-so-ex-fiancée, could conceivably be viewed as a rather gigantic lie.
Nothing at all.
“I think the whole thing is sweet. It’s very Wild West. Stagecoaches and top hats. And what they’ve done to the Graff Hotel is amazing. It’s gorgeous. Have you even looked inside? Mom said the renovations cost upwards of ten million dollars, and you can tell.”

“
If you can’t afford to get married, you shouldn’t get married,” said the pampered society princess who lived in the lap of luxury in a Chicago penthouse and was marrying the very, very wealthy man who funded her demanding lifestyle of daily beauty regimens and ever-changing obsessions with this or that workout craze of the moment. “You shouldn’t pretend it’s somehow romantic to let other people—total strangers and random vendors—pay for it for you.”

“
Excuse me,” Emmy said, forcing herself to smile when that was the last thing she felt like doing, because Gran Harriet would want that. She stood then, faster than she should have, because that was a better choice than punching Margery the way she’d done once before—memorably—when she’d been a very angry eight-year-old. A better choice, if far less satisfying. “I have to go to the bathroom and vomit. Then weep for your future, Marie Antoinette.”

“
Right, because I’m the bad guy for speaking a few home truths.” Margery rolled her eyes with a complete lack of concern, and then placed her hand on her chest like she was pledging allegiance to herself. “I’m
paying
for
my
cake.”

Emmy was ten long strides away from the table before she unclenched her jaw.
And she was standing in the line for the women’s room with her arms crossed tight over her chest and her hands in fists for what felt like twelve hours before she managed to pull in a deep breath and relax a little bit. But only a little bit.

She admitted to herself that it wasn
’t Margery’s usual display of astounding self-centeredness that was getting to her. That was just Margery, and most of the time, Emmy didn’t think her sister even meant the things she said. She liked being controversial almost as much as she liked attention.

Emmy knew what she was
actually
upset about wasn’t her sister’s opinion about the Great Wedding Giveaway that had nothing to do with her.

She shifted against the wall, smiling
politely at the woman behind her in line and then looking past her, back into the crowded main room of the brewery. It looked like a happy, comfortable sort of place where anyone in their right mind would love to while away a few evenings, and there was no reason why that should bother her, too. Atlanta was filled with happy, comfortable places, after all. It was a happy, comfortable city, which was why Emmy had chosen it in the first place.

But
almost ten years later, it still doesn’t feel like home. Not like this.

That felt like the punch she
’d have loved to deliver to her sister, straight into her solar plexus. The wind went out of her. Emmy was glad she was standing with a wall at her back, because she was afraid that if she hadn’t been, she’d have toppled over. She shook her head to clear it, but it didn’t help.

Air,
she decided. She needed air.

She bolted out of the line and followed the hallway until it
ended in a propped-open door to the outside. She pushed through it, breathing in deep as the cooler outside temperature hit her. The old railway depot seemed mysterious and grand in the long blue of a late spring night.

Emmy didn
’t know what made her walk away from the building, out toward the railway tracks and away from Front Avenue, which was still relatively busy this early on a Thursday evening. The Graff Hotel rose up to her left down past the green of the small park that separated it from the old depot, looking much more polished and inviting than she remembered it from her youth. If she followed the train tracks down to the right she’d find the Wolf Den, the seediest bar in Marietta—which was helpfully located across the street from the old Catholic church and the police station, should the sins carried out within by the usually rough customers need addressing on either the spiritual or civic level. But she didn’t move. She stood there for a moment, breathing, and then something made her turn back and gaze up into the lit windows of what looked like a sprawling apartment above the brewery and the couple that she could see clearly inside.

They weren
’t touching. The man was tall and blonde and had the sort of powerfully rugged athleticism that only a dead woman would fail to notice. Emmy definitely wasn’t dead. He had his arms crossed over his chest and a small smile on his face as he listened to whatever the small blonde woman was saying to him, as if he found every grand, illustrative gesture she made with her hands a kind of poetry.

It was one of the most intimate things
Emmy had ever seen, private and perfect, and she didn’t understand why she felt so shaken when she turned away again. She swallowed, hard, then looked around as much to blink back the odd swell of emotion that threatened to spill from her eyes as anything else, and that was when she saw him.

She knew it was Griffin even though he stood in shadows further along the tracks, turned away from her, his gaze somewhere high on Copper Mountain, which thrust up into the sky above the town looking moody and
indigo in the evening light. That punch she’d suffered inside FlintWorks still shook through her and she hurt, like she’d sustained a serious bruising from something that hadn’t even happened, and she walked toward him anyway.

Because she didn
’t seem to know how to do anything else. Because he felt like home, too, and that was the most dangerous thing she’d thought yet.

He didn
’t acknowledge her when she came to a stop at his elbow. He didn’t look away from the mountain. She had a brief and vicious fight with herself, but common sense won. Only a crazy psycho would confront a man about his past a mere ten days into whatever their thing was. Because only a crazy psycho, a boiler of bunnies extraordinaire, would fail to recognize that doing so was an expression of pure, unearned jealousy.

And Emmy might have spent some time detailing
for Margery how far behind her she’d left her teenage years, but that didn’t mean she was unaware that when it came to things like this, it was always, always better to play it cool. It had been true in the seventh grade and it was true now.

So it came as a great surprise when she opened her mouth to make a
witty observation about something like the weather and that wasn’t what came out at all.

“
I hope you and your apparently not-so-ex-fiancée win the Great Wedding Giveaway, Griffin,” she heard herself say instead, with a biting sort of mock cheerfulness that would have made her flinch if it hadn’t been coming out of her own mouth. “You two lovebirds definitely have my vote.”

“
Perfect,” Griffin bit out into the blue night air surrounding them, shaking his head at the brooding mountain in the distance that didn’t give a single shit what was happening to what was supposed to be his quiet, peaceful life. “That’s fucking perfect.”

Emmy stood next to him, every inch of her practically vibrating with tension, and he
’d been standing out here for too long already. He had to go back inside and continue his painful dinner with Gran Martha whether he wanted to or not, because a man did not abandon his grandmother no matter how irritating the conversation. And he should have been deeply alarmed by the fact Emmy had mentioned the wedding contest thing at all, especially in that tone. Where was that siren that always went off inside of him when women got the wrong idea? When it was made clear that intentions had veered off in directions he didn’t want to go? Where was his sense of self-preservation?

When did you become someone things simply happened to?
Gran Martha had asked, and he still couldn’t answer the damned question. Because he still didn’t know.

But Emmy, by God, was not one of those things.
He’d wanted her for a decade. She was a choice, not a consolation prize.

“
If you want to ask me a question, Bug, you should go ahead and ask it. I don’t do too well with the mind games and passive aggressive bullshit.”

He felt more than saw her bristle beside him.

“I thought I was pretty clear,” she said in the same sharp tone that despite himself, he didn’t hate the way he knew he should, because it was such a novelty to have someone come at him directly. No tiptoeing around him. No placating him. Emmy and Gran Martha were the only ones who had in years. “I’m accusing you of lying to me. Of pretending to have broken up with your fiancée so I’d sleep with you when really, you’re hoping to win a grand wedding at the Graff Hotel with her before you ride off into a great big Montana-flavored happily-ever-after.” She shifted so she could glare at him. “I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on that. What with the pointed sarcasm.”

“
Gran Martha just spent the better part of the last half hour eating my fries and ripping into me in her own, inimitable way,” Griffin commented, returning Emmy’s glare without bothering to hold himself back at all. It occurred to him that there was no one else on earth he was so completely himself with. That had been true when he’d been sixteen and that self had been seventy-five percent conceited jerk and it was true now. He didn’t know how to feel about that, so he kept going. “You think you can follow her act? She’s had a couple of decades more practice.”