A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) (4 page)

“
Frat boy, sure, a long time ago,” Griffin said mildly enough. “Hulking? You flatter me.”

He resisted the urge to flex his biceps on cue.
Barely.

Emmy met his gaze then
while Margery smirked at him, her expression a mixture of unholy glee and resignation—the usual response to a dose of Margery’s brand of sugary skewering. But Emmy went straight to his head.

And Griffin suddenly wanted nothing more in the entire world than to take Emmy up on her challenge.
To linger over a drink or two or more in a dark corner of Grey’s Saloon in town and see if he could get his fill of that decadent mouth of hers. To see if talking was enough, if he could assuage this hungry thing inside of him by subjecting himself to more of the sharp way she spoke to him, so unimpressed with him and all the things he’d accomplished and why did he like that so much? Or if it would require something else, like his mouth licking into hers, which he remembered from ten years ago with a shocking amount of clarity and detail.

Back then
, he’d been twenty-one years old and headed into his senior year at Dartmouth. He’d known Emmy had that outsized crush on him and he’d known better than to do anything about it when nothing could possibly come of it.

Yet
he’d completely failed to keep his hands off of her.

And in all the years since then
, he’d forgotten how tempting she was. How the way she moved, the way she looked at him with her dark eyes all lit up like that, made it impossible to keep his own promises to himself.

But they weren
’t kids any longer.

This time,
there’d be no need to make himself promises for her own good and no need to worry about breaking them. Emmy Mathis was all grown up. She could make her own damned rules. This time, if something started, there’d be absolutely no reason to stop until they were both completely satisfied.

And Griffin found he was grinning
like a fool when he grabbed her duffel again and followed Emmy and her sister into the house, like the obedient little bag boy he definitely wasn’t.

When he swung open the door to his cabin later that day to find Emmy standing there in the gathering twilight looking narrow-eyed and mutinous, Griffin’s entire body went into meltdown.

He stared, and hoped she couldn
’t see the worst of it. He’d been sketching a new design and had been off in that in-between place in his head when the knock on the door had jolted him back to reality. But she was a much bigger, harder jolt.

“
Apparently,” she said stiffly, “you have an extra bed.”

“
I do.” He still stared at her, like an idiot. Like there was nothing else in his head. Or maybe that was what happened when a woman with a mouth like hers said the word
bed
in front of him; he reverted to age fifteen in an instant. “But Gran Harriet has a house full of them. A much bigger house.”

Emmy shifted and let that damned duffel bag slide to her feet
with a
thunk
that echoed much too loudly in the peaceful quiet of his cabin. Then she crossed her arms over her chest, which didn’t really help things. It became almost impossible to keep his gaze from tracing the curve of her breasts. Almost.

“
Funny you should mention that.” She smiled, and it was a sharp thing, but Griffin liked the blade of it. “Margery has ten bridesmaids. Ten aside from me, that is. Many of them have husbands. Some have babies. Someone named Colette has a husband, a baby,
and
an au pair. That works out to every spare bedroom in my grandmother’s house as well as yours, which no one bothered to count until I wanted to freshen up. By which I mean, escape the endless reminiscences of college life at Sweet Briar.”

It occurred to Griffin that he was standing there in the doorway like he was blocking it
or barring her way when that was pretty much the last thing he wanted to do. He moved then, reaching out to grab her bag yet again and then jerking his chin to beckon her inside, choosing not to examine the warring factions inside of him—all of them loud and rowdy and a little more hungry than he wanted to admit as she walked past him, close enough that he could smell the apple fragrance of her shampoo.

Her staying here
was a terrible idea. Obviously. But he couldn’t see any way out of it. The Grans were historically unsympathetic to any deviations from their various decrees. This was their land. These were their houses. Anyone who wanted to come and stay here lived by their rules, or left.

“
I don’t have a second bedroom,” Griffin said as she walked into the center of the large, open plan space that took up most of the first floor and looked around. Then up toward the open second floor accessible from the open stair on the side wall. “Just a loft with a futon.”

He didn
’t know what she saw when she didn’t respond immediately; he saw the clutter of his business and his life. Everywhere. Designs and schematics spread out across the table in what was meant to be a dining area. His desk over in the corner with his big Wacom monitor that he could draw on in the center, his laptop to one side, and the twenty-seven-inch display he used with his desktop and sometimes as a television screen on the perpendicular return. There were clothing samples piled up on the couch and spilling out of a heap of boxes in the living room area and a tangle of sports equipment near the back door.

Emmy turned back to him and he was sure she
’d wiped her face clean of whatever expression had been there. He wanted to see what it had been more than was reasonable and wasn’t sure why. He had nothing to prove. He was living in this cabin because he wanted to be here. Why was he already defensive?

“
A futon in a loft sounds great,” she said, and he had to hand it to her, she sounded something like convincing.

“
You can take the bedroom,” he said, some heretofore slumbering spark of chivalry rearing itself awake.

He could have sworn that that look
in her dark eyes then was panic, and that intrigued him more than it should have.

“
Oh, no,” she said quickly. So quickly he was sure it really was panic and he wanted to know why and what that meant.
Easy, buddy,
he told himself.
This isn’t a race.
“I couldn’t.”

And then they were looking at each other
, and it was a little too intense, and Griffin lost his place. It was as if he slipped sideways on an unexpected bit of ice high in the backcountry, and all he could focus on was that needy, demanding thing in him that
wanted.
He could remember her body against his all those years ago in the cool darkness of that barn, when he should have known better and had kissed her back anyway. The way she’d tasted him with all of that untried passion and then melted against him. The heat of her he’d held in his hand that he could almost feel again now, like a brand deep into his palm.

He
’d always thought the cabin was roomy. Comfortable. More than spacious enough for him throughout the long winter he’d spent here with nothing but his own dark thoughts. And now he thought the rough-hewn walls were closing in on him and he didn’t mind that as much as he should, not when he was looking at her. He kind of liked it.

Emmy was watching him closely, and Griffin was sure that was fire he saw lighting up that gaze of hers
then, then turning into a flush across her cheeks. He was sure of it—and equally sure that it would be a terrible idea to do any one of the vivid, starkly sexual things his imagination kept throwing at him, one after the next.

Not yet,
he told himself harshly.
Not if she’s staying here. Make sure you’re on the same page this time.

Because he wasn
’t going to make a mistake the way he had with her before. And he wasn’t going to make a mistake the way he had with Celia, either. He needed to find a way to be a little less of a dumb fuck
this time around.

If that
’s even possible.

Though when her lips parted slightly, like maybe she was finding the air in the cabin as hard to breathe as he was,
what page they were on was the last thing on his mind. He thought, with perfect clarity and that heavy, driving need inside making him feel crazy, that if he didn’t reach over and bring that mouth of hers to his and who cared what happened then, he might die of it.

“
Want that drink?”

His voice was a machine gun
in the stillness of the cabin, loud and harsh. She flinched slightly at the sound of it. Then blinked, as if she was dazed, too.

Griffin didn
’t really want to think about how much he hoped that was true. That she was as off-balance and wild with this crazy hunger as he was.

He didn
’t want to think about it. To picture what might happen if she was. What could happen next.

But he did.

“Yes,” she said after a moment, her voice thicker than it had been before. He felt it like a victory and that poured through him, electric and very nearly insane. The perfect rush. “I really would.”

Grey
’s Saloon was exactly the way Emmy remembered it and had dreamed it now and again, thank God.

She
’d eaten dinner here a thousand times before under the watchful glare of the owners, the taciturn and intimidating Jason Grey and his right hand man, the younger, hotter, and gorgeously aloof Reese Kendrick. Emmy had spent long summers making up stories about both of them in her head like every other girl in Marietta, she was quite sure. They were such
men.
Hard and formidable, not unlike Griffin himself, not that she wanted to think about that too closely.

They weren
’t a little bit round and very funny, like her ever-exasperated father, still an attorney in Washington, DC. They weren’t good-natured and obliging, like her grandfather, who had taken to painting large, still-life canvases in his later years and had taken over the old barn out on the edge of the property as his studio. Jason Grey and Reese Kendrick were the stuff teenage girl fantasies were made of and the scourge of the summer kids who thought their home addresses in far-off sophisticated places made them smarter than the two men who ran this historic saloon in pretty downtown Marietta—because neither one of them tolerated any underage shenanigans.

Or any shenanigans at all, come to that.

All that and Grey’s served a mean cheeseburger, if she remembered it right.

Emmy
smiled as she stepped into the familiar dimness and found both men right where she’d left them a decade ago when the only naughty thing she’d been permitted to order in this place was the huckleberry pie Margery had always claimed could make a girl fat if she so much as
thought
about eating it. Jason stood scowling in the gloomy shadows at the far end of the bar while Reese served drinks next to a third remarkably attractive bartender with a cheerful Australian accent, as if only stunning men applied for work in this place.

“
Are they still so…” she asked as they walked toward the long, gleaming bar and couldn’t quite pick the right word in the face of all that obviously unfriendly yet undeniably attractive manhood on the other side, “…growly?”