The Cowboy's Valentine Bride. Patricia Johns
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kitchen, fragrant with baking bread. The last time she’d been in this room, they’d been having a meeting of sorts—the Mason family and the Harpes. That was the evening when Mr. Mason outlined the plan to get Brody home safe. Nina and Brian had already moved to the city, so Kaitlyn’s father, Ron, filled Nina in on her part of the deal later—to keep her relationship with Brian a secret and to answer Brody’s emails so he wouldn’t suspect anything. It had been an order, not a request. Nina hadn’t wanted to go along with it—she was about to get married, after all, and she wanted to announce it to the world. But if she announced it, then Brody would hear all about it, and that could be devastating. Brody had to be the priority, and Nina would just have to get married quietly.
Kaitlyn hadn’t been back to this ranch since that solemn meeting of minds, but she and Dakota had run into each other around town a few times, and a tenuous partnership was born. They both wanted Brody home safe—which he was. Kaitlyn could only hope that the deception had been worth it.
“Hi,” Kaitlyn said with a quick smile. “I’ve got the pills.”
“How’s his leg?” Dakota asked. “He wouldn’t let me see it. Said he’d wait for a medical professional because I didn’t know squat.”
Kaitlyn smiled wanly—that sounded like Brody, always the tough guy. Maybe he’d been trying to protect his sister—that leg wasn’t pretty.
“It’s...not great.” His leg, from thigh to calf, was covered in jagged cuts and stitches. Some of the wounds had already healed over—more or less—from his first surgeries, but others were fresh from retrieving the deeper, harder-to-reach shrapnel. She could tell how much pain Brody was in, and if his leg got infected again, it could be fatal. He’d been right about one thing—proper medical care was a necessity if he wanted to walk again.
“He’s mad,” Dakota said. “About Nina and all that.”
Kaitlyn was still angry with her sister about her infidelity. Brody was strong, sweet, handsome, kind... He was the perfect guy, and Kaitlyn had been in love with him from afar for a couple of years before he asked out her sister. But he was two years older than Kaitlyn, and she hadn’t even registered on his radar. He’d made his choice—a perfectly understandable one. Nina was the beautiful sister—a redhead with soft green eyes and a voluptuous pinup-girl figure. She turned heads everywhere she went, and Kaitlyn hadn’t, at least not when her sister was anywhere near. Kaitlyn was confident in her own looks—she was beautiful, even—but she’d been quite solidly in her older sister’s shadow.
So why couldn’t Nina wait for him? Kaitlyn had been through it a thousand times. If it had been her, she’d have waited as long as she had to...but Brody wasn’t hers. He’d never seen her that way, and there were lines that Kaitlyn would never cross.
“So who had to tell him about Nina?” Kaitlyn asked. It was the conversation they’d all been dreading.
“Me.” Dakota winced. “Just before the wedding. He kept asking where Nina was, and I think he suspected. I mean, how many fiancées do you know who don’t bother visiting their wounded man in the hospital? When I told him, he just sort of deflated. He didn’t look surprised, just...silent.”
“Imagine if that had happened over there,” Kaitlyn reminded her. “Nina’s such a selfish—”
“It’s done, it’s done...” Dakota shook her head. “And Nina isn’t your fault. We’re all just trying to pick up the pieces, and this was the plan, right? He needed to find out here, so we could get him through it.”
“He’s mad that we hid it.” Kaitlyn lowered her voice further.
“I know.” They exchanged a long look, then Dakota nodded in the direction of the sitting room. “He’s waiting.”
Kaitlyn got a glass of water from the sink and headed into the sitting room. Brody was sitting forward, leaning toward the fire. He didn’t hear her at first, and he was so close to the flames that they reflected against his face.
Brody had changed since he left—there were lines around his mouth that weren’t there before, and his eyes had lost that boyish twinkle. There was nothing boyish left in him—he’d hardened, stilled. If Nina could see what she’d caused... But this wasn’t all because of Nina. This was also because of the war. Soldiers saw things that civilians couldn’t even imagine, and when they got home again, it sure didn’t help to return to a nasty surprise.
Should I have told him?
How could she ever be sure? What she knew was that Brody was home, and her job had just begun.
“Here are your pills,” Kaitlyn said, setting the glass of water next to him and unscrewing the cap to the bottle. “Now, it’s important that you never take more than the recommended dose of these. They’re strong.”
“I’m not suicidal.” Brody held out his hand for the pills, then tossed them back with a sip of water. “Thanks.”
“I was more concerned with addiction,” she retorted.
Brody laughed softly. “I’m not an addict, either.”
“Good.”
He turned toward her, dark eyes locking on to her face. “Did you think I’d change that much?”
Brody had been a fun-loving guy with an infectious laugh. He’d been tall and muscular, but he’d bulked up even more since he left, and his lean muscle had turned hard and thick. His hair had been a tousled mess of glossy curls, and now he had that standard-issue army buzz cut—but it didn’t hurt his looks any. It seemed to suit the new him.
“I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “Life changes everyone, and you’ve seen more than most.”
“Yeah, well...” He leaned back in his chair, wincing as he got settled. “You’ve changed, too.”
“Have I?” She grabbed his medications chart and wrote in his dose. “I feel like the only one who hasn’t changed around here.”
“You grew up.” His voice was low and quiet. “When I left, you were a kid.”
“When you left, I was a woman,” she replied evenly. She’d been twenty-two when he left for the army, and that hardly constituted a “kid.” But she’d never looked quite as womanly as Nina had. Nina had eclipsed her quite easily, it seemed, all pouty lips and swaying hips. Kaitlyn hadn’t had a chance. She had been a tamer version of her sister in every way. Her hair was dark auburn compared to Nina’s fiery red, and her figure was slim, her breasts smaller, her expression direct and frank. Nina had a way of looking up through her lashes that stopped men in their tracks. When Kaitlyn was a teenager, she’d tried to imitate her older sister’s sultry pout in the mirror, and she’d cracked herself up. She looked ridiculous, and she’d decided then and there to simply be herself—a brave stance for someone in the shadow of Hope, Montana’s sexiest available woman.
But not so available anymore.
While Kaitlyn had resented what her sister did to Brody, having Nina both married and moved to the city had been a strange relief. For the first time in her life, Kaitlyn felt like she could breathe a little deeper, expand a little more. With Nina in the room, there had hardly seemed to be enough oxygen for the both of them—and what Nina wanted, Nina got.
“Last year I missed our dads’ birthdays,” Brody said after a moment. “I kept thinking of the feast you all would be eating.”
Kaitlyn’s father, Ron, and Brody’s father, Ken, had birthdays in the same week. The men had been close since elementary school. For as long as Kaitlyn could remember, both families had been celebrating those February birthdays together with a trail ride and a massive meal.
“Last year half of us got food poisoning, so you weren’t missing out on as much as you thought,” she replied with a wry smile. “Someone thought clams would be a great birthday meal. Wow. It was bad... The trail ride didn’t happen. Brian landed in the hospital with some Gravol