Page 21 of Seven Brides for Beau McBride (The McBrides of Montana #3)

Six

“What the hell have you got in here?” Beau McBride grunted as he struggled with Ellie’s trunk. “Rail spikes? An anvil?”

Ellie ignored him, not appreciating the complaints after he’d taken so long to deliver her luggage.

He’d gone back to collect it from the station, but only after he’d settled Diana into the hotel, hauling her trunk first. He’d also taken the time to deliver Diana a bunch of “flowers”, which weren’t flowers at all, given nothing much flowered in November.

It was a bouquet of fall branches he’d snapped off.

Ellie had been hypnotized by the way the autumn leaves shone like captured firelight.

It was such a romantic gesture. Diana had accepted them gingerly, not quite as taken with them as Ellie had been.

Ellie had left them to talk, climbing the narrow flight of stairs to her attic room at the Bellevue, imagining Beau McBride out in the shadowy woods, selecting the most vibrant branches he could find. She hoped Diana didn’t give him too much of a hard time after he went to all that effort.

They must have found enough to talk about, because Ellie had waited and waited upstairs for her belongings.

She wondered if he’d forgotten her. She was grimy from travel and wished she could change her clothes.

Or at least have her books to pass the time.

As twilight gathered its lavender folds, Ellie stood at the casement window and tried to pretend she wasn’t as exhausted as she really was.

There was a little cottage next door, and she had a view of the back porch and a yard of vegetables and cooped chickens.

A paling fence separated the yard from the woods proper, which reared beyond it in a wall of dense foliage.

That must be the cottage where the housekeeper lived—where Beau would be staying.

Ellie was all mixed up with feeling. She’d come here to be with Diana, but the man she’d come to meet was a mirage. So where did that leave her?

Nowhere.

She fell into sad daydreams about having to say farewell forever to Diana. Ellie could picture her friend standing on the dirt platform at the train station, weeping, waving a lace-edged handkerchief as Ellie’s train pulled away, taking her out of Diana’s life forever…

As night spilled from the shadows of the woods, Ellie started wondering if she should just haul her belongings from the station herself.

But her trunk was frightfully heavy, and she was so very tired.

And to be honest, she was a little frightened at the thought of venturing out into the darkness alone.

This town wasn’t just in the woods, it was part of them.

She lit the lantern, and the room hugged in around her, a haven of golden light. Her stomach rumbled; she supposed she’d just have to go down to supper dirty, and in the dress that she’d been wearing for days.

Sighing, Ellie decided to scrub the dirt from her face and hands in preparation for supper.

She poured the pitcher of water into the wash basin and set to work on the travel grime.

After unbuttoning the top few buttons of her bodice, she rolled up her sleeves and gave herself a soapy scrub while she waited for Beau McBride to bring her luggage.

The hotel’s homemade soap smelled of lost summer flowers and Ellie lathered enthusiastically, filling the room with the scent of sunny blooms.

Beau McBride finally came grunting up to her room just as she was toweling her face dry.

Thank goodness, because she’d had a few stray imaginings about highwaymen holding up the station and running off with her belongings.

She didn’t know if they had highwaymen in Montana, but she assumed there was at least an equivalent.

Anyway, it was good to know her trunk had survived the trip.

And also that Beau had survived his talk with Diana.

Watching him wrestle with her trunk, Ellie was glad she hadn’t tried to do it herself. She would have done herself an injury.

“You packed everything you own, huh,” he grumbled.

Ellie held the door wide for him, wincing as he knocked his elbow on the doorframe. “It’s only a few books…” she assured him.

“How many books? Three hundred? Four?” His face was red and shiny from the effort.

She ignored that. “You can put it over there in the corner, thank you.”

Beau was in his shirtsleeves and there was a damp patch of sweat in the middle of his back. The cotton clung to his skin as he lowered the trunk to the floor. “You brought five hundred of your favorite books with you to Montana, when you weren’t even sure you wanted to stay?”

“Of course,” Ellie said primly, tearing her gaze away from his well-shaped back. “What else would I do with them?” She quickly rolled down the sleeves of her dress and checked she’d buttoned her bodice properly. It felt very intimate up here in this little room, without adding bare skin to the mix.

“They really put you up in the attic, didn’t they,” he moaned, stretching. “That was a lot of stairs.”

“I suppose I’m lucky they had a room for me at all, given your—”

“Don’t say it.” He gave her a dark look.

“—harem.” Ellie didn’t mind being up in the attic; she liked the romance of its sloping roof and casement window. Imagine having a bed all to herself and being able to read all night without worrying about waking someone else up.

“It ain’t my harem,” Beau said gruffly. “If it’s anyone’s, it’s Junebug’s.”

“Well, so long as it doesn’t remain your harem, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t imagine Diana will hold with being one of many.”

A shadow chased his face. “Yeah, she wasn’t too pleased.”

Ah. So that was why he’d taken so long to come back with her trunk.

“You told her everything?” She felt rather sorry for him, all boyish there in his shirtsleeves, rumpled, stained, his hair disheveled. Today certainly hadn’t gone the way he’d planned it. But then it hadn’t gone the way she and Diana had planned it either.

“Yeah. I told her about the bet and all.” He ran a hand through his curls.

“I explained my part in it—and Junebug… well, I explained best I could about Junebug. She ain’t a bad kid, you know.

She’s just…” He shrugged. “We did the best we could with her, but what do any of us know about raising a girl? Especially a girl like Junebug…”

“How did Diana take it?” Ellie’s mind was racing. She should probably rush straight to Diana’s side to offer succor. Diana had been dreaming about her wedding to Beau McBride and her new start in this wilderness. She would be devastated by the day’s events.

Ellie would be a mess if this had happened to her.

Although it had kind of happened to her…

How odd to think that she’d been intended to be Beau’s bride too. Or one of them. Ellie stared into space. Imagine. All that time she thought she was coming here for his brother, when she was actually coming here for him .

She remembered all those poetic letters he’d written Diana and his promise of the cottage with its wild roses…

“I thought Diana might go straight back to the station and buy the first ticket out of here,” Beau said miserably, breaking Ellie’s reverie. “But I swore to her that she was the one. The only one.” His dark eyes met Ellie’s. “This is more of a Junebug problem than a me problem…”

“You made that bet,” Ellie reminded him tartly. “So I think it’s definitely a you problem too.”

He frowned at her. “That’s what Diana said.”

Ellie nodded. Of course. She and Diana were utterly simpatico. “Because it’s true.”

“Fine. It’s a me problem too. But it’s more of a Junebug problem. Without Junebug in the mix, I’d be married to Diana by now and we’d be home in Buck’s Creek.”

Ellie was shocked. “Surely you weren’t going to marry her straight off the train?”

“Of course I was.” He gave her an odd look. “When we were downstairs, you suggested I take her straight to church and marry her, so I don’t see what’s so shocking about it.”

“But I said that because of your harem,” she told him. “You didn’t know about the harem before today. Yet you planned to meet her at the train and just marry her ?”

“What else would I do?”

Ellie had plenty of ideas. And she was happy to share them with him.

“A wedding takes planning,” she told him.

She’d had a lot of time to think about Diana’s wedding, to make it perfect in her mind: a ceremony outdoors in his mountain meadow with the evening light hazy like a veil around them.

She described it to Beau McBride. Vividly.

And then she explained that Diana would need time to make up her gown, that she would require a bouquet of roses—

“The wild roses finished flowering months ago,” Beau interrupted.

Ellie waved him away. “I can imagine roses if I want to. And none of your flat-faced wild roses, these are proper roses, fat as cabbages, in all shades of pink, from the palest pearly dawn pink to the lushest, darkest sunset pink. Diana is in white lace—”

“Her hem will get awful muddy out there in the meadow.” But he was sounding interested, like he was catching a glimpse of how enchanting it could be.

Encouraged, Ellie persisted. “And she’ll be as beautiful as the first spring day after winter, her hair falling loose around her shoulders—brides should wear their hair loose, don’t you think?”

He nodded, looking quite struck by the idea.

“And you’ll be in that blue coat you wore today, but with all the dirt cleaned off, and you’ll have a lovely white rosebud in your lapel—”

“No fat pink rose for me?” He sounded faintly amused.

“Oh no, it would be too much.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Sometimes I think Diana should also have a veil with scalloped lace edges, and as she walks down the aisle—”

“There ain’t no aisles in a meadow.”

“Of course there are, for a wedding. There are people in two blocks of seats, with an aisle down the middle. You must have an aisle for a wedding, or where’s a bride to walk?”

“Fair point, I suppose.”