Best Man Rancher
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Maisey Yates
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HarlequinOne
“Six inches is too long!” Shelby Sohappy glared across the table, across all the flowers piled on the table, across the tulle and the candy strewn over the table, to her older sister.
But it wasn’t Juniper’s reaction to Shelby’s words that caught her attention, and held her there.
She felt it before she saw it. His response. His, always his. The change crackled through the air. And she told herself not to look. She told herself to keep her focus on Juniper, the bride, her sister, her best friend, and direct all wedding preparation complaints to her.
But she turned her head anyway.
As if he’d put his finger beneath her chin and swiveled it toward him. That’s how powerful the impulse to look was.
Kit Carson.
Damn Kit Carson.
Her eyes clashed with his, electric and upsetting. And his mouth curved—even more upsetting. “Six inches is too long? Maybe that’s why I’m still single.”
That earned a round of groans from the table—and Shelby should also groan. But instead she felt like her body had been lit up.
She had learned a lot since middle school.
That you didn’t actually need algebra. That body glitter wasn’t worth the hassle. That the girls who wouldn’t let you sit with them would—in fact—peak once school ended and spend their adult years trying to reconnect with people they had once been mean to so that they could sell them lip gloss, leggings and the secrets of success and wealth and sisterhood, as long as you bought their weight loss shakes.
She’d learned that she was stronger than she’d imagined. That loss wouldn’t kill you, even if you might wish it had.
But she hadn’t learned how to control her physical response to Kit Carson, a man who was soon to be practically family, the best man to her maid of honor, her longtime, shame-fueled object of lust.
Yeah. She hadn’t learned that.
“That’s not why you’re single, bro,” said Chance, her sister’s fiancé, and everyone laughed.
So Shelby laughed too. What choice did she have?
She felt like a foreign tourist pretending they understood what was happening around them. She was just lost. In ribbon curls and Kit Carson’s excess of six inches.
How many inches more?
She didn’t need to know the answer to that.
She didn’t even need to wonder it.
Nope.
“Six inches,” Juniper said, holding up a ribbon and a pair of scissors, and letting the edge glide effortlessly across it, resulting in a rather impressive curl, “is not too long at all.”
Shelby ignored Chance and his brothers chuckling at that.
So did Juniper.
Shelby wondered, not for the first time, how the hell this had happened.
The Carsons and Sohappys had been enemies for generations. To the degree that the first time she’d spotted Kit Carson at a football game when she’d been in seventh grade and he’d been in tenth, she’d felt a deep, instinctive recoil in her soul.
At least, she liked to tell herself that’s what it was.
Because it couldn’t possibly have been anything else. She’d been dating Chuck already by then. Well, dating was a strong term. They’d been twelve, after all. They’d walked down to the diner in Lone Rock and had shared a milkshake with money Chuck had gotten collecting bottles and taking them to the can return.
They’d gone down to the river and skipped rocks.
They’d held hands. And he’d kissed her.
They’d started having sex when they were way too young, but hey, she’d been certain she’d marry him so the moral risk had seemed worth the reward.
And she’d been right.
She’d married Chuck pretty much as soon as high school had ended. She’d been so ready for that life. She’d loved him. Deep and uncomplicated.
And if she’d sometimes... If she’d been unable to keep herself from thinking of the man who’d first created a shiver of awareness inside her before she’d known what it was, she’d just blamed it on having been with only one man. Dismiss it as adventures she’d chosen not to have.
There had been moments in her marriage when she’d wondered if they’d done it too soon. If not dating other people had been a mistake.
When Chuck had died, she’d been so glad they’d had that life. That whole brilliant life.
From twelve to twenty-six. Thank God for all those years, because they hadn’t gotten to grow old together. Just older.
She really didn’t need to be thinking about any of this now.
But it was a wedding, so it was unavoidable.
And it was her sister’s wedding, which made it more poignant.
Her sister’s wedding to a Carson. That’s what tipped it over into improbable.
“Who would have thought you’d be a bridezilla,” Shelby groused.
Juniper was an EMT, and in general a very practical and nonsentimental soul. Before her engagement to Chance, anyway. Now suddenly it was all sentiment and fluffy dresses and ribbon curls.
“I haven’t even begun to bridezilla,” Juniper declared from her end of the table, which had all the Carson men looking worried.
The lone Carson girl—Callie, who had gotten married a while back and moved to Gold Valley, Oregon, a few hours away—was grinning. “I love this! I need more women in the family. To cause chaos and mayhem.”
“You don’t need any help with that, sis,” Boone Carson said.
“I’m happy to contribute to family chaos!” Juniper said.
And Shelby couldn’t help but feel just a little bit outside of all of this. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Especially not Juniper’s. Her sister deserved happiness. So much happiness. She had been there for Shelby in a profound way when Shelby had lost Chuck. And in all the time since. Juniper was her best friend.
But that didn’t mean that Shelby couldn’t find a way to have complicated feelings about this.
It made her think about her own wedding. And the terrible thing was... She didn’t have a very clear memory of that day.
Which had seemed fine in the decade since it had occurred, when Chuck was still with her. She’d had the marriage. She hadn’t needed more than good feelings and a few photos of the day.
She couldn’t remember if they had sat around making wedding favors. She didn’t think they had. Nobody should get married when they were eighteen. That was a whole fashion disaster. Shelby had worn a princess dress and a tiara. The entire thing had been a debacle. But of course, when you were eighteen, what you wanted out of the wedding was to be a princess. You thought a lot more about the wedding than you did the marriage. Not that her marriage hadn’t been good. It had been. It had been great. Chuck had been her best friend, well, her other best friend, apart from her sister.
It was just, when you were eighteen you didn’t really know what the rest of your life meant.
You still don’t.
No. She didn’t. Because her husband had gone and died and made her a widow in her midtwenties. But what the hell was she supposed to do with that?
Make ribbon curls, she supposed.
“We need to have all the wedding favors ready by tonight,” Juniper said.
“Or heads will roll,” said Chance, looking at Juniper as if seeking approval.
“That’s right,” Juniper said. “Heads will roll.”
“Good luck with that,” Shelby said.
“Yeah,” Kit agreed, and she did her best to stop herself from looking at him, but much like her first best, this was not enough. Because she ended up looking at him. And he smiled. And she felt it. Hot and slow as it moved through her.
“If you make my bride upset,” Chance said, looking right at his brother, “it’ll be your head.”
“If your bride can be upset about ribbon curl... I don’t know, man.”
“When was the last time you ever loved anything?” Chance said to his brother.
“I had a pretty damned good cheeseburger at about one o’clock today,” Kit said. “I think I might’ve loved that.”
She couldn’t help it. She found herself laughing. And their eyes clashed again. This time, the electricity sent a shower of sparks through her, settling down between her thighs, and it made her twitchy.
This was the problem. When she had been in middle school, she had been able to write off the things that Kit Carson made her feel, but as she had hurtled toward adulthood, it had been impossible to pretend she didn’t know.
But it was... It was wrong. It had been wrong because he was her enemy—by virtue of his family connection, nothing personal—and then it had been wrong—very wrong—because she was in love with another man.
Married to another man.
She gritted her teeth together. No. She wouldn’t even think about it. She got up from the table, heading over to one of the coolers that were set around their little gathering. They had tables placed all around the yard, where different family members were helping with wedding favor assembly, and all around that were coolers with different beverages, and there was also a table full of snacks. She decided that it was definitely refreshment time.
She felt hot and unwieldy. Lost in the memories of the past, and the debate over ribbon curls, was the double entendre that had passed between herself and Kit. Well, not lost. It was just not the big thing that remained in the forefront. But the slow burn of it was left behind. She was uneasy, and she needed a moment with it.
She reached into the cooler and took out a bottle of beer. And then she heard footsteps, and straightened, looking across the cooler to see none other than Kit himself.
“Anything good in there?”
“They have the kind of beer that you would expect from a couple engaging in this level of wedding frippery. Does that answer your question?”
“Oddly, yes it does.” He grinned, then reached down into the cooler, and took out the first beer his hand closed around.
She felt like saying something sharp. She felt like being mean and making him walk away from her. But the truth of the matter was, all of this stuff... This stuff was one-sided. He didn’t know that she had a long-standing hated attraction for him. And yes, they had clashed on a few occasions. So there was... There was a thing.
Though, she denied it. And had denied it on multiple occasions. In fact, she could remember clearly one time when they had been down at the Thirsty Mule, and he had been goading her, while offering to buy her and her friends a round of drinks—it had been girls’ night out. And Kit had kept on making comments about how Shelby and he didn’t normally get along. There was a whole situation with her, and she didn’t like him. On and on. Until she had screamed at him at the top of her lungs: you and I do not have a situation.
Of course, for the rest of forever, everyone in town had convinced themselves that there was a situation.
Chuck had just laughed about it. Thankfully. And he had written off her umbrage as the normal sort of umbrage that her family felt whenever the Carson name was mentioned. And she had never had to admit that it wasn’t just Kit’s name that made her feel all out of sorts. It was the man himself.
He grabbed one of the bottle openers from the top of the cooler and popped it easily. Then he reached out to grab her beer out of her hand. A few things happened simultaneously. The first was that his fingertips brushed hers. They were hot and rough, the way a man’s hands were when he worked the land.
She didn’t comprehend what was happening in the moment, and she did not release the hold on her beer.
Each of those realizations and moments occurred in one breath, and she found herself being dragged over the cooler into Kit.
“Easy,” he said, taking hold of her arms. And she got an even more intense taste of the roughness of his hands. The heat there.
Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, save her.
She was being tested, and she was failing. Here, at the preparation for her sister’s wedding, she was having a full-blown attack of lust for a man who was about to be family-by-marriage. The man whom she had spent all these years pretending she had no situation with.
It was a situation.
“What the hell were you doing?” she asked, still clinging to her beer, still being held on to by him.
“I was gonna open your beer, Shelby,” he said, peeling the bottle from her hands, while he set her back onto her feet. “Just a beer. Not a situation.”
That bastard.
He had gone over that same night. Those same words.
It did something to her.
Meant something to her.
She wished it didn’t.
“I didn’t say that I needed help with the beer,” she said.
He moved the edge of the bottle opener beneath the perforated cap and flipped it up. “No, you didn’t. But I’m nice like that. A real gentleman, some might say.”
“Who? Who has ever said that?”
“Not entirely sure.”
“No one has ever said it.”
He shrugged. “Someone must have.”
“Not me.”
“You’re the president of my fan club. At least I thought so. If not, this is awkward. Because I thought...”
“You did not.”
And she felt herself getting red, because... Because, all this banter was just a little bit too close to reality.
“We’re not enemies anymore, or did you miss the memo.”
“I missed zero memos. Believe me. And I tried to talk my sister out of this whole thing. You know, back when she lied to your brother about being her ranch hand when he had amnesia. And then fell in love with him. Yeah. I tried to interfere with all that.”
“When you put it like that, it sounds vaguely ridiculous.”
“It does,” she said.
But ridiculous or not, it had occurred. That could honestly be the subtitle of a movie about her life. Ridiculous or not, it had occurred.
He lifted the beer bottle to his lips, and she couldn’t help but watch the movement of his mouth, his throat working up and down as he took a long pull off the bottle. Why was he so damned compelling. Why? He didn’t have any right to be. He was just a cowboy. They were a dime a dozen around here. Hell, he was one of six boys. There really was no call for him to be all this compelling. She had been married to a rancher. This one shouldn’t stir...
She didn’t want to think about this. She didn’t want to be anywhere near Kit Carson while she was dealing with marriage and wedding feelings. She didn’t want to think of him in a game of compare and contrast with Chuck and what she had felt for him.
She had loved Chuck. The love of her life. That phrase couldn’t be truer about anyone or anything than it was about Chuck. She had loved him from the time she was twelve years old. And was certain that she would marry him from that same time. She had loved the man until the day he had died, and in all the days since. Kit Carson wasn’t owed the same mental airspace as Chuck.
“You got your speech all nailed down?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied. “It’s going to be the best speech.”
“And you’re ready for the bachelorette party?”
“More than ready.”
They would be hosting the bachelor and bachelorette parties at the wedding venue. Which was going to be at a ranch about an hour away, up in the mountains, Green Springs Ranch. They were all going to stay in the different buildings on the property, and the wedding would take place in one of the main barns. As maid of honor, it was up to her to plan the bachelorette party. As best man, it was up to Kit to do the bachelor party.
“How did you end up being the best man, anyway?” she asked.
“I drew the short straw.”
“What?”
“It’s true. We never really figured on any of us getting married. Not us boys. I mean, there’s Callie, but... Well, we didn’t really figure on her getting married either. But she did. But you know, as far as the best man thing goes, we drew for it. I drew the short straw.”
“Doesn’t that imply that it’s a bad thing?”
“I’m paying for the bachelor party. I’d say that’s the short straw.”
Suddenly, she felt boxed in. Observed by too many people, or maybe it was just him. The way that he always looked at her. Like he knew. But nobody could know. Nobody could ever know.
“Better go,” she said. “The ribbons aren’t going to curl themselves.”
“Nope.”
She turned away from him, and she ignored the way she could feel his gaze resting between her shoulder blades. Like a touch. A caress. Yeah. She ignored that because to acknowledge it would mean acknowledging the spark between them. And she absolutely refused to do that.
