The Soldier's E-Mail Order Bride (Heroes of Chance Creek) Read online

  Tears blinded him suddenly and Austin panicked. He couldn’t do this—show his emotions this way.

  “It’s all right,” Dan said, and he knew what the man meant to say; that if he was going to shed tears this was the place he could do it, but Austin’s training went too deep. Men didn’t cry. Soldiers especially did not cry.

  When he scraped a hand across his face, however, it came away wet. Jesus. He was making an ass out of himself. He moved to stand, but Carol’s calm voice held him in place.

  “I remember the day you three graduated from boot camp. I took your photograph and I remember thinking that out of three of you, it was likely one of you might not make it through the coming years. I prayed it wasn’t my son. Then I prayed it wouldn’t be any of you, either. Then I realized that no matter who I prayed for, some woman’s child would be hurt, or go missing, or be killed. It about tore my heart out that day.

  “But I realized, too, you could all stay home and one of you could be in a car accident. One of you could take ill. There’s no certainty in this world. There’s only this moment. This moment right now.” She slapped a hand on the coffee table and made them all jump. “That’s what I want you to remember, Austin. You have this moment. You have these people here.” She waved a hand at all of them. “You have this chance to live, love and do what you want to do. Don’t look back except at the happy times. Don’t look forward except to plan for great things. Just stay here, right here.”

  “I miss him so much,” Austin blurted out and dug his fingers into his thighs. Fuck—he was losing it.

  “I know. I know,” Carol said. She leaned forward and took one of his hands. “I miss him so much, too.”

  How long they stayed like that, Austin didn’t know. But Carol’s strength traveled through him, and Dan’s and Ella’s quiet presence got him through those next few moments. In them, he felt something click softly back into place. Was it his heart? His capacity to feel?

  His capacity to live?

  They were quiet on the drive back to the airport, Ella at the wheel this time. When they pulled into the rental car return lot, she parked the car, shut off the engine and turned to him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” He had turned a corner this afternoon. He had healing to do—lots of it—but he felt better than he had in a long time. “After the ceremony, though, there’s one more thing I need to do. Go see Edgars. It’s been too long.”

  Ella smiled. “I thought so, too.”

  Chapter 29

  ‡

  The next day there were twenty messages from Marianne and five from Anthony, as well. In Ella’s present good mood she figured she could be magnanimous and listen to a few of them. She played a few of Marianne’s, ignoring the ones from her ex-fiancé. As usual, Marianne begged her to get in touch and asked her if she’d read the script she’d sent. On a whim, Ella dialed her work number. It had been so long since they’d actually talked.

  “Finally! Do you know how many calls I’ve made to you? Have you checked your messages at all? It’s been weeks and weeks!” Marianne’s voice carried through the phone and into the stillness of the bedroom.

  “I know, I’m sorry. I needed time to work things out.”

  “Where are you? My phone’s been ringing off the hook. Everyone is looking for you—especially Anthony!”

  “I don’t want to talk about Anthony right now. In fact, this will have to be a quick call. I just wanted to tell you that I’m all right.”

  “Have you seen the press? You’re one of the lead stories—you’re a phenomenon these days! Everyone wants to know where you are!”

  “I’m sick of the press. I don’t care what people are saying. I’m all right, Marianne. That’s all you need to know.”

  Marianne sobered. “You won’t even tell me where you’re at? Are you kidding?”

  “You said Anthony’s been bugging you. If I tell you where I am, you’ll have to lie to him.”

  “I lie for a living!” Ella could picture her friend in her elegant office. She’d be dressed in a suit that was both powerful and sexy, her stiletto heels sharp enough to be lethal weapons.

  “I’m glad you got promoted.”

  “But probably pissed, too, seeing as how it’s Anthony who made it possible.” Marianne paused. “I don’t blame you.”

  “What else is new?” Talking to Marianne had never been so awkward before. It made her sad. She didn’t know if their friendship would weather this particular storm and Marianne had been such a constant in her life for so long.

  “Scripts! Piles of them. That’s what’s new. Please tell me you read the one I sent.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Why not? Ella, it’s perfect for you!”

  “I don’t intend to go back to acting.”

  A long silence ensued. “What the hell are you talking about? Of course you’ll come back. You’re an actress.”

  “I’m also married.”

  “Married!” Marianne shrieked painfully in her ear. “Married to whom?”

  “To a man… I met.” Ella didn’t want to tell Marianne the truth, but she didn’t want to lie, either.

  “What man?”

  “His name is Austin.”

  “Austin? Austin. I remember an Austin.” There was a long pause during which Ella held her breath. There was no way Marianne would make the connec—

  “The man from the Wife Wanted ad?” Marianne shrieked.

  Damn it, she should have known better than to say anything. Remembering names and circumstances was Marianne’s strong suit.

  “Uh… yeah.”

  “Are you shitting me? You married him? Like, legally married him? So what—you’re living on a ranch now? In Montana?”

  “Yes, that’s about the size of it.”

  “Well, fuck!” Ella winced. Marianne could be crude—it was part of her charm. And now she’d be pacing her office, figuring out what to do next. “Okay, we can work with this. Just leave the cowboy on the ranch while I get you on some more interviews. Better yet, bring him along. It’ll be a big reveal—the cowboy and the movie star! It’ll be great.”

  “I’m not going on any more interviews. Remember the last one? Anyway, I promised him I’d stay on the ranch until April.”

  Marianne pounced on this new detail. “Why April?”

  Shoot. She hadn’t meant to give Marianne a single hint about their unusual arrangement. “We’ve made a commitment to our relationship. We’re going to focus on our ranch and our family for now.” That much was true, at least.

  “Your family? What do you mean by family?”

  “I mean we’re trying to have a child.”

  “You can’t have a child! The part in the script I sent you does not call for a pregnant woman!”

  Ella was thankful a thousand miles separated them—Marianne sounded apoplectic. “It’s too late. We’ve already been trying.”

  Marianne’s voice changed, a tactic Ella recognized. Marianne was trying to trip her up. “So the cowboy—he’s good in the sack?”

  They’d always talked to each other this way, sharing way too much information like women often did, but this time Marianne’s question rubbed her wrong. Ella knew Marianne would use what she said to bolster her case. She was probably penning headlines as they spoke—figuring out how best to spin this new development to the celebrity blogs.

  “He’s pretty special.”

  Marianne sighed and some of the life seemed to go out of her. “Well, I’m happy for you, but that doesn’t mean you should throw your career away.”

  “I’m done with Hollywood, Marianne.”

  “Oh, no you’re not.” Her friend’s tone was sharp. “I can tell you right now, you are definitely not done with Hollywood. Give me your address. I’m going to courier you a hard copy of this script; you won’t want to read it all on that phone of yours. You’ll change your tune then.”

  “I don’t want to change my tune…”

  “Address!”

  “It’
s a secret. I want to be left alone.”

  “I know his name, Ella. I can find that Wife Wanted ad again, and I can hunt down his damn address if I need to. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Ella sighed. It was true—she’d already blown it and she knew darn well Marianne would hunt her down if she didn’t cough up her address now. “Fine. You can send the script, but that’s it. If I don’t like it, I don’t want to hear about any more.”

  Marianne gave a little grunt of exasperation. “Fine. One script. But I’ll guarantee you you’ll be back in my office within the month.”

  * * *

  The following day, Mason whistled when Austin showed him the ring he’d bought for Ella. They stood in the stable, where Mason was rubbing down a sorrel mare after taking her out for a ride. “You got a romantic proposal to go along with that?”

  “Not really. Think I need to do something special? After all, we’re already married.”

  Mason shot him an exasperated look. “Stop going through the motions. Unless you plan to keep marrying Ella, this is the last time you’ll ever propose to a woman, right? Do it up!”

  He had a point, Austin thought. He never wanted to propose to another woman. He wanted this marriage to last. Shouldn’t he make that clear by the way he proposed to Ella?

  “So what do I do?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  It was Austin’s turn to be exasperated. “What good are you?”

  “Regan says I’m real good at a lot of things.” Mason ducked when Austin took a swing at him and chuckled. “That’s more like it. Welcome home, bro.”

  Austin rolled his eyes, but he was smiling as he walked away. He knew what Mason meant—his personality had changed after Donovan’s death and even he hadn’t liked who he’d become. He felt like since meeting Ella he’d been peeling those hardened layers back one by one to reveal the real Austin—the man who cared about the present moment and the people around him. Since his meeting with Reverend Halpern and then Donovan’s parents, he’d felt more of the layers fall away. He was coming back to life.

  He liked it.

  He did want to surprise Ella with a romantic proposal, too, but his options were limited by the fact that she never left the ranch. He couldn’t take her to a fancy restaurant, or some other romantic location. When he finally went to find Regan and told her of his problem, she had an idea.

  “It’s totally crazy,” she warned him. “I don’t know if she’ll love it or hate it.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Remember how Richard dragged her through the obstacle course the other day? He ran her ragged, but she had fun from what I could tell. How about challenging her to a race?”

  “You want me to propose while I kick her ass on the obstacle course?”

  “No, dummy. Lose to her. And then give her a prize—the ring! Then wine her and dine her, of course.”

  “That’s romantic?”

  “Trust me—that obstacle course is more romantic than you think.” She went away with a smile on her face that spoke of secret knowledge on just this topic. Austin wondered what she and Mason had gotten up to before he came home.

  Running the obstacle course was something he could easily do. Losing to an absolute beginner might prove to be somewhat harder.

  Chapter 30

  ‡

  Marianne’s package arrived via a courier company a day or two later, and while Ella dreaded opening it, she found herself curious about the script inside. Was it as good as Marianne had said? Late in the afternoon, with dinner cooking in the oven and Austin still hard at work with Mason, she brought the package into the bunkhouse’s bedroom and opened it. Settling on the bed, she began to read, intending to return to the kitchen to make a salad in a few moments. Now that the men had tiled the kitchen floor, the room was usable and they could cook for themselves. Milo heaved himself up on the bed next to her and nuzzled her hand until she began to scratch him absently behind his ear.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ella rolled over onto her back on the bed and held the script over her, too engrossed in the story to sit up properly or to remember to pet the dog still pressed against her side. It was one of the best she’d ever read, and the part Marianne had marked for her was the kind of part she’d always dreamed of playing. A smart, sharp, modern woman facing gritty real-life problems as her community—and family—fell apart around her. It was a species of disaster movie, but not the usual kind of Hollywood flick where the climate changes overnight or super-earthquakes tear apart the fabric of the earth’s crust. Instead it was a thinking-man’s vision of how things might change if the resources most people relied on got scarce to the point that they were out of reach of middle-class America.

  The movie took place some years in the future, and centered on a couple in their late twenties who were planning their wedding. Laura Holden was a high school English teacher who wanted the same kind of ceremony and reception her deceased mother had thirty years before, but her timing couldn’t have been worse. A disastrous few growing seasons and an economic recession had fueled shortages of all kinds of basic goods. At first Laura thought she could weather the difficulties, but as food prices shoot up, her catering bill rockets right out of reach. As soon as she scaled back on the food she’d planned to serve at the wedding, she learned that cut flowers from South America were no longer being imported to the United States. Laura found a solution to each glitch in her wedding plans, but as her frustration grew, the story revealed that the problems were much more systemic than Laura had first though. It also became clear that Laura was using her wedding woes to hide from a truth too frightening to face—that her world would never be the same again.

  Just how bad was it? Laura’s husband-to-be, Walter Collins, found out. When he lost his job as a financial manager, then as a bookkeeper for a local manufacturing plant and finally a third job at a grocery store, Walter realized the future would be much grimmer than he ever imagined. As Laura struggled to hold her wedding plans together, Walter began to draw up plans of his own—to turn their suburban quarter acre into a mini-farm. He suspected the food they grew might be the only thing that would save them from starvation when large-scale migrations, rising crime and a failure of the electronic grid threatened to change their way of life forever.

  What Ella liked most about the script was how the changes happened incrementally. Life deteriorated around the characters as they tried to maintain the status quo, but they adjusted, and that would allow the audience to adjust, too, until one last camera shot at the end of the movie brought it all into focus. When the wedding finally took place—drastically pared down from an extravagant party to a simple and moving ceremony that celebrated survival in the impossible times—the directions in the script told Ella that as the camera pulled out from the scene, the audience would get a broader view of the neighborhood the characters had come to live in—and would realize how much it had reverted to the traditions of a hundred and fifty years ago. Gardens filled every backyard. Clothes hung on every clothesline. Children—lacking televisions and gadgets—played outside. After a movie full of frightening incidents, it was a surprisingly homey scene, and while the question wasn’t asked outright, it was there all the same: were things really so bad?

  When she finished the script, Ella had tears in her eyes. This—this was the part she was meant to play. Why, oh why hadn’t it come before now?

  “Hey,” Austin said, coming into the room. “I wondered where you got to. Dinner smells good.”

  “I’m just taking a break. It’ll be ready in a minute,” she said, scanning the last lines over again.

  Austin sat down on the bed. “What’s that you’re reading?”

  She stifled a sudden urge to hide it. “It’s a script,” she said reluctantly. “My agent, Marianne, sent it to me.”

  “Your agent knows where you are? After we’ve worked so hard to keep it a secret?”

  “In a way, she’s the one who sent me here. I mean… she sent me a link to your
Wife Wanted ad as a joke, right before my last disastrous talk show appearance. She always does stuff like that to loosen me up. I didn’t see it until afterward, though. Then it seemed like a good idea to get in touch.”

  “So she already knew where you went.”

  “It would have been easy enough for her to find me. She asked if she could send me this script and I said yes. I didn’t think it would be interesting.”

  “You seem interested in it.”

  His tone told her that worried him. She knew why. Ella shoved the script away. “It’s pretty good.”

  “Good enough to make you want to leave?”

  “I promised you I’d stay, so I’ll stay.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “These last few weeks I thought you wanted to stay.”

  “I did. I do,” she corrected herself. “It’s just—I didn’t know Hollywood would sympathize with me. I thought the tabloid machine would tear me to pieces over what happened between me and Anthony. That’s why I came here. Instead, I’m being offered the best parts ever. It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

  “You could go back.”

  She turned on him. “No, I can’t.” She took a deep breath. “I love you, Austin. I thought you knew that.”

  He took her hand. Brought it to his lips and pressed a kiss against her palm. “I do. But I want you to be happy. I don’t want to keep you from something you love.”

  She met his gaze. “It’s an interesting script. That’s all.”

  “Think about it. Really think about it. Make the decision you want to make—not the one you think I need you to make, all right?”

  “Okay,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

  * * *