Page 34 of Seven Brides for Beau McBride (The McBrides of Montana #3)

“I’m decent,” she called out to Beau, wincing as her voice did a weird high cracking thing. She concentrated on squeezing the rainwater out of her braids, so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye.

“I found the good stuff,” Beau announced, emerging from the back room with a bottle of whiskey, looking flushed and awkward. He snagged their shot glasses off the bar and joined her by the fire.

Outside the storm had intensified, if such a thing was possible.

The wind screamed through the cracks and knotholes in the walls, sending the flames leaping and the shadows jumping.

The rain sounded like an avalanche of stones on the roof and the thunder cracked overhead so hard the oilcloth shivered in the windows.

“I reckon we’re stuck here for a while,” he sighed. “I hope Kit and the others didn’t head out into the woods looking for you too.”

Ellie’s mind swam with awful visions. “You don’t think they’ll hurt the bear, do you? I mean, it didn’t hurt me. It was only being its bear self.”

“I’d think you might be more worried the bear would hurt my brother. Especially since he’s out there looking for you , in a storm.”

“You don’t know that,” she protested, as she watched him fill their glasses. “Maybe he’s smarter than you and knew to stay inside during a storm.”

“I was rescuing you.” He handed her a glass and their fingers brushed. Ellie felt it like she’d thrust her hand into the fire.

“A sane person would be thanking me right now,” he complained, “not insulting me and my family, accusing us of imbecility and potential bear abuse.”

Ellie sniffed suspiciously at the glass.

“It shouldn’t taste like kerosene this time. It’s better than the last one.” He put the bottle and glass on the mantle and shrugged out of his coat. He hung it on a bar stool. Then he rolled up his damp sleeves and sat down to pull off his saturated boots. He groaned as they came off.

Ellie took an experimental sip of the new whiskey and wrinkled her nose. It was better, but it was still stronger than anything she was used to. The most she’d had before tonight was a snifter of Mrs. Tasker’s sherry at Christmas and on her birthday.

Beau stripped off his sodden socks and rolled his pants up to the knee.

His legs were muscular and furred with dark hair.

He gave a blissful sigh as he wriggled his bluish toes in front of the fire.

Ellie drank half the whiskey in her glass.

She held her breath as it burned down her throat.

Her stomach felt like she’d swallowed hot coals.

But at least it had melted the iceberg lodged in there.

“Sorry if my feet smell,” he apologized.

“I can’t smell anything but this cabin right now. It’s got its own perfume.”

“At least its ventilated,” he told her dryly, eyeing the flapping oilcloth in the window as he downed his shot. “Imagine how bad it would smell otherwise.”

Ellie stretched her own feet out beside his.

The fire toasted them nicely. She sipped at the whiskey and felt herself growing pleasantly warm.

“I don’t suppose Abner has any food lying around?

I missed the whole picnic,” she said regretfully.

“Was it terribly fun? I imagined it must be, with all the blankets spread out like rafts on an ocean of grass.”

“It’s an ocean of mud right now.” He refilled his glass.

“But it wasn’t before it rained.” She shook her head when he tried to offer her more drink. She was feeling quite lightheaded enough. “I kept imagining everyone stretched out, eating raspberry tarts and drinking cordial.”

“I ate a lot of chicken,” he told her, as though that should satisfy her imagination. He downed another shot.

“And did you do what I told you to—with Diana?” Ellie bit her lip. She’d spent a lot of time up that tree, listening to the bear grumble, thinking about Beau romancing Diana. “Did you take her hand?”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Only you talked it up too much. You got me nervy about it, like it was a big thing. In the end it was simple. I just reached out and took it. She smiled. That was it. We walked around, hand in hand, picking chanterelles.” He shot her a dark look. “Which are not red and not poisonous.”

Ellie stared at the fire, feeling an odd, unsettling sensation in her bones. She should be happy they’d held hands. She was happy. How perfectly lovely for Diana.

“I did what you said. I asked her a lot of questions about herself,” he said. Then abruptly he changed the topic of conversation. “These stools are goddamn uncomfortable.”

“Where are you going?” she asked as he stood up.

He just grunted.

“What kinds of questions did you ask?” she called after him as he disappeared into the back room.

Her head was stuffed with visions of Beau and Diana holding hands, roaming through shafts of autumnal sunshine—even though she knew perfectly well there’d been no sunshine today.

Sometimes that happened. She imagined a thing so hard it seemed more real than reality.

That’s what had been happening with all her dreams about Beau…

“I asked her all the questions. About the farm she lived on. About the mill. About you.”

“About me ?” Ellie squeaked. Her squeak turned into something a little more violent when she saw what he was dragging out of the back room.

It was a bed.

“If we’re stuck here, we might as well be comfortable,” he said, sounding pleased with himself. “Git out of the way.”

She dragged herself and her stool out of his way as he lowered the very narrow iron bed sideways in front of the fire.

“You want me to share a bed with you?” She felt herself turning red.

He practically flinched. “No! Goddamn it, what do you take me for? We can use it as a sofa.”

“Right. But it’s a bed. ”

“Not if you sit on it like this, it ain’t.” He sat himself down on it, sideways. “See? It’s a sofa.” He was sitting at the head end. He pulled the pillow out from under him and tossed it in the middle of the bed, leaning sideways against the iron bedhead and stretching his feet back out.

It did look more comfortable than the stools. It had a puffy ticking mattress. Gingerly, Ellie crept over to join him. The minute she sat down at the other end of the bed, he leapt to his feet.

“You wanted food!” he blurted. “I forgot, with all your talk of hand holding.”

Ellie settled in down her end of the bed… uh, sofa. She pulled the pillow closer and wriggled all the way up to the iron bars of the baseboard. She watched as he rummaged around the bar.

“There’s peanuts?” he offered.

Her stomach rumbled so loud he laughed.

“Peanuts it is.” He brought a burlap sack of them over to the bed. Sofa, not bed. He dropped the sack between them on the sofa and the peanuts rustled.

Some of the edgy tension left Ellie as she opened the sack. Lord, she was hungry. She threw the shells in the fire as she husked them.

“You make a lot of happy noises when you eat,” he observed, also taking a handful.

“I love food,” she admitted. “We had some hungry years when I was a kid, and then the boardinghouse was stingy with feeding us.”

“We had some hungry years too,” he sighed.

“You said in your letters you had a winter where you almost starved?” She prodded, desperate to learn more about him.

“Diana let you read my letters?” He sounded surprised. “You two really are close.”

Yes. Yes, they were. And Beau was marrying Diana .

Ellie was only having saucy dreams because she didn’t know many men, she told herself firmly.

Beau was handsome. And she had come to discover that he was also smart, and funny, and kind—it made sense she was having some teensy feelings for him.

But they weren’t real feelings. He and Diana were real.

This was just… friendship. The kind you had with your best friend’s fiancé.

“It’s a bit embarrassing, you reading them,” he said, rubbing his face.

“Oh no,” she protested. “They were wonderful.”

He winced. “They weren’t. I sounded like an idiot, rambling on.”

“No, they were poetic! I felt like I’d actually been to Buck’s Creek,” she said warmly.

“And when you wrote about that winter where you ran out of food because you hadn’t stocked the root cellar, I got so hungry I had to sneak into the pantry for some late-night bread and butter.

Mrs. Tasker would have died if she’d known.

Well, she would have denied me bread and butter for the rest of the week and then she’d have died. ”

“Your boardinghouse rationed your food?”

“Well, they gave us what we paid for, and no more.” She explained how the system worked, how their pay was docked for room and board.

When he poured her another glass of whiskey, she took it, even though she was aware it was loosening her already loose tongue.

“I often wished I could pay more so I could eat more—but I didn’t really have the money, because I had to send it to my mother and the kids. ”

He cocked his head. “Tell me about that.”

She flushed. “Oh, you don’t want to hear about that. It’s depressing.”

“You tell me about that, and I’ll tell you about our winter of starvation.”