Page 30 of Seven Brides for Beau McBride (The McBrides of Montana #3)

Beau was astonished. She hadn’t struck him as the insecure sort.

“I told you I did—and I ain’t changed my mind.

Diana, I ain’t written to, or wanted anyone but you, since you answered my advertisement.

And as lovely as Junebug’s girls are, not one of them is as lovely as you.

” It was the blunt truth. The others were pretty and all, but Diana’s was a rare beauty.

Diana blushed. Not fiery red, like Ellie was wont to do; Diana’s blush was a slow rosy flush that highlighted her creamy complexion. Beau’s confidence grew as he realized that she was as nervous as he was.

He glanced at her hand.

Okay. He could do this. He remembered standing by that fence, startled by Ellie’s touch. The slow tremor that rolled through him at the brush of her fingertips, the light summery smell of her, the anticipation…

Slowly, Beau reached for Diana’s hand, his fingers brushing hers lightly, just as Ellie’s had brushed his.

Diana’s skin was smooth and cool. She didn’t jump at his touch, and time didn’t slow down the way it had when Ellie had touched him.

Her fingers simply closed around his and she smiled, pleased. He smiled back.

Oh. This was easy.

“There’s some chanterelles over this way,” he said, tugging on her hand, leading her to the little billow of mushrooms by the roots of a pine.

It was nice holding hands with her. Comfortable.

Beau relaxed, grinning. This courting business might not be so bad after all. This was nothing at all like the sweaty fluster he’d felt when Ellie had taken his hand. That had been unsettling. Discomforting. Whereas this was… nice.

“What do you mean, Ellie is missing?”

Beau pushed his wet hair off his face so he could glare at Junebug better. She’d come bursting into Mrs. Champion’s cottage with Diana while he was squeezing the water from his hair with a towel.

The rainstorm had squalled in while they were finishing their picnic, and everyone had scrambled to pack up and scamper back to shelter.

It had been chaos. All Beau’s brides had flown squealing back to the hotel, and Beau and Diana had laughed as they slogged through the mud with Mrs. Champion’s calf of a hamper.

She hadn’t been prissy about the mud or the rain at all.

“I’m a farm girl,” she giggled, when he commented on it.

It was just another reason why she was exactly the right wife for him. He’d escorted her into the hotel kitchen, where all the girls were shrieking and laughing and slopping about in their wet skirts. It had been a melee.

It was far too public a place to try kissing Diana goodbye—which he’d been considering the whole way down the hill. Instead, he’d had to settle for a surreptitious squeeze of her damp hand. She’d squeezed his back.

“I mean what I said. She’s missing!” Junebug was pinched and defensive as she confronted Beau in Mrs. Champion’s cottage, not half an hour after he’d left the hotel. “You went and lost her, damn it!”

“Shut up and tell me what happened.” Beau threw the towel down and reached for his boots. They squelched as he pulled them back on.

“I cain’t shut up and tell you what happened, idiot. It’s one or the other.”

“She’s not at the hotel,” Diana interrupted. She was still soaked through, her silvery hair plastered flat to her head, her skin milky pale. Her lips were faintly blue and she was shivering.

Beau racked his brains. Ellie had been in the kitchen with the rest of them. Hadn’t she? “She must be at the hotel.” Surely he’d seen her bulky coat, or that ugly brown dress in the mix? “She’s probably just getting changed into something dry.”

“She ain’t in her room!” Junebug stomped her foot, her boot squelching. “You think I’m so dumb I wouldn’t look?”

“I looked for her after you left, Beau,” Diana insisted. “I wanted to tell her… how well today went.” Her teeth were chattering. Beau wrapped his towel around her shoulders.

“You’ll catch your death,” he said, rubbing her arms.

“Forget about me, what about El!” Diana wailed. “She’s out there in this storm.”

“It ain’t a storm, it’s just a bit of rain.”

“What if she’s lost in the woods? Ellie’s a town girl—she’ll have no idea what to do!”

“You’re sure she ain’t in the hotel? Staring into space somewhere?

” Beau’s thoughts were racing. When had he last seen her?

She hadn’t picnicked with him and Diana—but he’d assumed she was just giving them privacy, in that matchmaker way she had.

And there’d been plenty of other blankets and plenty of other hampers.

She’d probably been sitting with some of the other girls.

“No one saw her come back to town,” Diana said desperately. “She’s out there in the woods, alone.” She gripped Beau. “You have to go find her.”

“Maybe she’s at Martha’s… or the mercantile… or somewhere other than the hotel? Everyone ran back, higgledy-piggledy.” Beau turned to Junebug. “She could very well be sitting by Martha’s fire with Kit and Maddy right now.”

“Do you think so?” Diana breathed. Her fingers were digging painfully into Beau’s arm.

“Sure. She’s probably talking their ears off.”

But Junebug didn’t look convinced. His sister was an annoying little cat, but she was canny.

If she was this worried, then it was possible they had left Ellie behind in the woods.

And Ellie was prone to inattention, damn it.

The fool girl was probably so deep in a daydream she didn’t even realize it was raining.

“Bug, have you counted all the other girls? There’s no one else missing?”

“No, all five of them are stripping off their wet clothes in the washroom of the hotel, safe and sound.”

There was an image. Beau cleared his throat, trying not to imagine five pretty girls dropping their petticoats just next door.

“Right, well. You grab Rigby and those old trappers—tell them to go door to door. We best make sure she’s not in town first. While they do that, you go straight to Kit and let him know what’s happened.”

Junebug gave him a suspicious look. “And what are you doing? Staying here and rubbing Diana dry?”

Beau glowered at her. “I’m going back to the picnic spot to see if she’s still there,” he growled, not appreciating the implication.

“I’ll come too,” Diana said quickly.

“Over my dead body,” he told her bluntly. “You’re frozen half to death as it is. You go get warm and dry. We’ll find her and bring her to you.” He squeezed her arms. “Trust me, if she’s out there, I’ll find her.”

Diana nodded reluctantly, her blue eyes pained. “I can’t believe I left her behind,” she moaned.

“If you’ve gone and killed one of my wives, there’ll be hell to pay,” Junebug told Beau ominously as she and Diana slipped out the front door.

Her words hit Beau right in the gut. Jesus. What if Ellie was hurt?

He hoped Junebug would find Ellie drinking tea at Martha’s, chattering away about all the romantic nonsense that filled her head.

He hoped that he was about to go thrashing through the mud for nothing and that he’d return irked and cold, but secretly glad she’d been safe all along. He had a sinking feeling, though.

He remembered the sight of Ellie daydreaming as Thunderhead Bill orated about poisonous mushrooms. If she hadn’t listened about the mushrooms, she wouldn’t have listened to anyone telling her to stay close to the picnic camp.

He could just imagine her wandering off, inattentive to the path she was taking, losing herself deeper and deeper in the thick woods.

What if she’d wandered too far from the picnic spot and couldn’t find her way back?

What if she’d fallen? Broken an ankle? Hit her head?

Hastily, Beau grabbed a lantern and a blanket.

He threw on his oil slicked coat, tucked the blanket beneath it so it would keep dry, and yanked up the hood.

Outside the rain was sheeting, squalls of wind sending water scudding sideways across the road.

The creek was surging, a couple of feet wide now, and the trees were thrashing their branches.

It was only late afternoon, but it was dark as dusk, a watery grey evening-ish light that was indistinct and grim.

Beau tucked his chin to his chest and bent into the wind.

The temperature had dropped and the rain was icy.

He slogged through the mud, past Abner’s ramshackle saloon, and up the hill—which was fast turning into a quagmire, with gushes of water carving runnels into the sludgy earth.

Damn the woman. Why hadn’t she stayed with the group?

Beau leaned into his anger—it felt better than the clenching fear that grabbed his gut whenever he thought about her lost out here in the sheeting rain.

“Ellie!” He yelled her name into the spreading darkness, the wind whipping his voice away as it left his throat.

“Ellie Neale!” He reached the picnic ground, which had become a slick of sucking black mud.

The rain was so heavy he could barely see a foot in front of him.

If he found her up here, he was going to throttle her, he decided.

His stomach churned. Please don’t let her be stranded up here in this weather. Let her be back at the hotel now. Let her be in that washroom at the hotel, climbing into a warm tub of water. Don’t let her be lost in the woods.

Damn it, he should have kept an eye on her. Or Junebug should have. Someone should have. The damn woman couldn’t even climb a paling fence without getting into trouble.

“Ellie! You answer me this minute or I’ll send Diana back on the morning train and marry someone else!”

He stopped dead. Had he heard a noise? Or had it been the wind in the pines?

“Ellie?” He worried his voice couldn’t compete with the rainstorm.

There it was again. A high noise.