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

shoulders. His black dress shirt, its cuffs fastened by tiny copper branding iron cuff links, lent an air of danger to his dark good looks, a danger that the narrow blood red silk tie only emphasized.
    Did she know Cole McCullough? Really?
    Last year Nell would have said so. They’d only dated a single summer. But from the first there had been a connection. The same things made them laugh. The same dreams made them smile. When they touched, something electric seemed to shimmer through the air. And when they kissed ... no one had ever kissed her the way Cole had, no one had made her toes curl and her heart hammer and her body want more and more of the man making her feel like this.
    She would have said he was her soulmate. He was certainly the man she hadn ’t forgotten when she’d gone back to San Francisco for her second year of film school despite Cole’s assurances that she would. He was the man she’d dropped everything to meet again in Reno when he’d come there last April to buy that bull. He’d said, “Can you meet me?” and she’d been on the train. She’d flown to his arms and when they’d wrapped around her, she’d felt as if she were complete again, as if part of her had been missing.
    Twenty-eight hours later she had thrown caution to the wind, had listened to her heart and had married him.
    Now she wasn’t sure how much she knew—and how much she’d merely hoped.
    But she wasn ’t going to find out by talking to him in front of a third party—particularly not one as avidly interested as Grant. “I know him,” she assured her boss now. “It’s fine.”
    Grant looked dubious, but he also looked longingly toward the ballroom.
    “You’ll see she gets to her room?” he said to Cole as the call button light went off and the elevator doors opened. “Because if you will, I really should get back and—”
    “ I can see myself to my room,” Nell said sharply. “I’m fine. Go.” Nell would have pushed him if she’d dared. As it was she gave him a quick smile and stepped into the elevator, then pressed the button for her floor. Immediately Cole stepped in, too. He reached down to press the button to close the doors immediately.
    Grant gave her a brows-raised silent query. “If you need anything—”
    The doors slid shut in his face.
    “That’s your boss?” Cole looked appalled.
    “ That’s my boss,” Nell said firmly. “You have a problem with it?”
    He shrugged his shoulders against the back wall of the elevator. “He always sounded like some little wimp.”
    “ Er, no. But if he were, what difference does it make?”
    Cole shook his head. He was staring at her in the mirror on the elevator wall, not face to face. She saw his mouth twist. She heard him crack his knuckles. The last time she had been in an elevator with Cole McCullough, it was the night they got married.
    Their room had been on the 12 th floor. There had been one other person on the elevator, too. She’d got off on five. And the minute they were alone, Cole’s fingers had been in her hair, his lips on her jaw, her cheeks, her mouth. He had insinuated a knee between hers, pressing close, close enough that she had felt the hard urgency of his arousal. And Nell had tugged his shirt tails out of his jeans, had slid her hands up beneath them, letting them rove over the heated skin of his back, then brought them around to stroke across his hard belly and dipped a hand beneath his waistband, brushing against him, making him moan.
    Now the silence was deafening. He didn’t touch her. She didn’t move. They couldn’t speak.
    She ’d waited months for this moment—when at last they were finally together again—and now it felt as if there were a wall of glass between them. And nothing at all to say.
    No, that wasn ’t true. There were a thousand things to say. The question was: where to start?
    She couldn ’t count on Cole to start. God knew he wasn’t a talker. She had learned that the first day she’d met him at