Czytaj książkę: «The Cowboy's Gift-Wrapped Bride»

Matt didn’t ordinarily shave at eight o’clock at night.

It had been one hell of a day, though. Driving through a blizzard. Pulling an unconscious woman out of a snowbound car. Finding out that that woman didn’t remember who she was. Bringing that woman home with him…

Definitely not a run-of-the-mill day. But no real reason to shave at the end of it, either. So why was he doing it?

Because in just a few minutes he’d be seeing her again.

That was the crux of things, wasn’t it? She was a beautiful woman. Trim and petite, with those perky little breasts just hinting from behind her shirt in a way that stirred a man up without even trying. And all that red hair. And skin like porcelain. And those soft, pink lips.

Oh, yeah, those lips…

The Cowboy’s Gift-Wrapped Bride
Victoria Pade

www.millsandboon.co.uk

VICTORIA PADE

is a USA TODAY bestselling author of numerous romance novels. She has two beautiful and talented daughters—Cori and Erin—and is a native of Colorado, where she lives and writes. A devoted chocolate lover, she’s in search of the perfect chocolate-chip-cookie recipe. For information about her latest and upcoming releases, and to find recipes for some of the decadent desserts her characters enjoy, log on to www.vikkipade.com.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 1

Matt McDermot didn’t need the voice coming from his truck radio to tell him he was in one of the worst blizzards Wyoming had ever suffered. He could see it for himself, right out his windshield. It was about all he could see as snow blew straight at him and left his visibility at maybe ten feet.

He was new to Wyoming. New to weather like this. He’d driven through Texas ice storms during his years growing up and living there with his family but even that hadn’t been as bad.

Welcome to Wyoming, he thought, wondering if it had been such a good idea to move to the small town of Elk Creek after all.

Nah, on second thought he didn’t really believe the move had been a bad idea. Not when all three of his brothers and his sister, too, were there. Not when it gave him a chance to get to know the grandfather he’d only met a few years ago.

And not when it gave him a chance to get far, far away from Sarah and the havoc she’d wreaked on his life.

Besides, he liked Elk Creek and up to now the change of seasons had been pretty pleasant. What was one bout of bad weather? Next time he’d just take the predictions more seriously than he had today.

But for now, here he was, only a few miles from Elk Creek and home, and he’d driven right into the worst of the storm.

If he hadn’t stopped to put the chains on his tires he wouldn’t be moving at all. And he had to keep moving, he knew, or risk not getting through.

The weatherman came on the radio again, announcing that this storm could dump a full thirty-six inches of the white stuff before the next day and another foot to two feet by the morning after that.

No doubt about it, they’d be having a white Christmas this year, the radio announcer promised, because even when the snow stopped, frigid temperatures were headed to the area for the week until the holiday. Which meant Cheyenne and its outlying suburbs and farmland would be in the deep freeze and wouldn’t see much melting to speak of.

Matt didn’t mind that part of things. He was looking forward to his first white Christmas. He just hoped he got back to the ranch in one piece to enjoy it.

The news report turned into a traffic update then, listing road closures due to high winds and drifting snow.

The highway Matt was driving wasn’t on the list but probably only because it was an isolated country road without enough usage to get it mentioned on the radio.

“Or maybe it’s officially closed and I just don’t know it,” he said to himself, realizing that his truck was the only vehicle on it.

But no sooner had he thought that than he spotted the weak flashing of red lights up ahead. They looked as if they might belong to another car but they seemed to be at an odd angle so he didn’t veer toward them. Instead he concentrated on staying centered between the tall poles of the streetlights on either side of the highway—his only way of judging where the road was.

It was a good thing he didn’t let the flashing lights throw him off course because as he neared them he saw that they were indeed coming from another vehicle—a small beige sedan that had gone into a ditch off the side of the road, nose-first in a deep drift.

Apparently the car had been there awhile because the battery was dying, the rear lights dimming even as Matt approached.

It was dangerous for him to stop and he knew it. A slow, steady progression was his best hope of getting through this storm. If his truck stalled in the cold or just got stuck in the snow that could drift around it within minutes, he would be stranded.

But what if the other car’s driver or passengers were still in it?

It was possible they’d already been picked up by another passerby and had left the lights flashing to warn any on-coming vehicle, but the odds of that didn’t seem good.

And Matt knew he couldn’t drive by without checking for people who might be still inside and hurt from that deep dive into the ditch that left the car’s rear end at a sharp upward pitch.

So he carefully came to a stop, turning on his own hazard lights and hoping they were bright enough to warn anyone else who might come up from behind him—as unlikely as it was that anyone else was crazy enough to be out in this mess.

He left his engine idling and reached across to the glove box, popping it open and retrieving a flashlight from inside.

It was only midafternoon but the clouds were so dense and the snow so thick—not to mention that it was piled up almost completely over the other car—that he thought he might need some extra light to see inside the vehicle.

He set the flashlight in his lap, flipped up the fleece collar of his suede shearling coat and pulled down on the brim of his Stetson to keep it securely on his head. Then he opened the door and hopped out of the truck into wind so fierce it had turned the snowflakes into shards of glass against his face.

Luckily he knew exactly where his shovel was—just behind the truck’s cab—so he reached blindly for it with one gloved hand, pulling the tool out from beneath its wintry blanket.

Carrying the shovel and flashlight, Matt plowed through snow that was nearly knee-deep in some places, making his way as fast as he could to the side of the road.

The wind was a howl that obliterated any other sounds, but he was reasonably sure no one was calling for help from within the car. He had to dig to get to the driver’s side door, then he managed to break its frozen seal and pull it open to shine the flashlight into the interior.

It was a good thing he’d taken the trouble.

Inside the car was a woman hunched over the steering wheel, her head bloody against the windshield.

She didn’t move and Matt had a moment’s sick feeling that he was too late.

He yanked off one glove and pressed two fingers to her neck, just under her jawbone.

There was still some warmth and softness to her skin, telling him right off the bat that she was alive, and when he found her pulse, he had it confirmed.

But she was hurt. There was no doubt about that. Badly enough to be unconscious.

He knew it wasn’t good to move her but what choice did he have? Even if this had been a sunny day in May he’d have had to call for a helicopter rescue because they were too far from the nearest hospital for an ambulance to reach them with any speed. In this weather neither a helicopter nor an ambulance could risk it, so he was the only help this woman was going to get.

And the longer he spent pondering it, the more danger they were both in.

So he switched off the flashlight and slid it into his coat pocket, jammed the shovel into the snow like a stake claiming land and replaced his glove. Then he eased the woman out of the car and into his arms as cautiously as he could, gently hoisting her up against his chest like a fragile sack of grain.

She wasn’t much bigger than a minute. He’d carried calves and foals that weighed more. But since she was still unconscious, she was dead weight.

Her head fell limply to his shoulder and her right arm swung outward like a loose gate. He kept his head hunched over her to provide as much protection as he could from the elements he knew were biting through the simple wool coat she had on. She wore no gloves to cover her hands or hat to conceal the long fall of curly burnished red hair.

She moaned when he lifted her into the passenger side of his truck, but she still didn’t regain consciousness.

“You’ll be okay. I’ll get you to a doctor,” he told her anyway, thinking maybe the reassurance would penetrate somehow. Then he reached behind the seat for the emergency blanket he kept there and covered her with it, cranking up the heat before he closed the door and went back to her car.

A quick scan of the inside of the topsy-turvy sedan showed him a black leather purse and a single suitcase on the rear floor.

There was no telling when anyone would be able to get out here again and he knew she was likely to need her things so he grabbed the purse and the suitcase to take along, too. Then he retrieved his shovel, closed the door and finally high-stepped his way to his truck once more, hoping he could make good time getting his unplanned passenger to help.

The first thing she was aware of was an unrelenting headache that started in her temple and wrapped around the side of her head like a vise.

The second thing she realized was that she was very, very cold even though it felt as if there were heavy blankets covering her. So cold her fingers and toes ached almost as bad as her head did.

She could hear the sound of voices and a telephone ringing, but it was all from a distance. Muted. She couldn’t make out any of what the voices were saying.

She opened her eyes into slits that let in stabbing white light. But she couldn’t bear the bright fluorescent glare and had to scrunch them closed again in a hurry.

That was when a deep male voice said, “Are you finally going to join us?”

The voice wasn’t familiar. Not at all. But it was smooth and full-bodied and confident, and it reminded her of dark molasses.

Then she heard a few footsteps, a door opening and the same voice said, “I think she’s coming to,” before the click of boot heels brought the man to stand near her again.

Painful or not, she decided she didn’t have any choice but to open her eyes again. By very, very slow increments, allowing in only as much of the light as she could endure and adjusting to it before raising her lids more, until she finally had them completely open.

She found herself looking up into a face of chiseled planes and rawboned, ruggedly masculine beauty.

“Don’t be afraid, Jenn,” the man said. “You’re okay. You were in a car accident but you’re safe now.”

Jenn? Had he called her Jenn? The name didn’t ring a bell.

“Jenn?” she repeated.

“We had to get into your purse and look at your driver’s license to find out who you are. I’m sorry for poking into your things, but—”

“Jenn,” she said again, alarm building in her voice to match what was building inside her as it began to sink in that the name didn’t mean anything to her.

“Jenn Johnson—it’s on your driver’s license. Along with your picture.”

“You think that’s me? Jenn Johnson?”

“That’s what we’ve pieced together. Isn’t it right?”

“Is it?” she said with growing agitation. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

Her heart was racing now. She could hear the rush of blood through her veins and it crossed her mind that maybe she was dreaming. Maybe she was having a very vivid nightmare. A very vivid nightmare in which she’d somehow forgotten who she was.

But her head hurt too much for this to just be a dream.

“I don’t know if that’s the right name or not. I don’t know that name at all. I don’t know if it’s mine,” she said, sounding on the verge of hysteria.

“You don’t know who you are?” he asked as if he doubted his own comprehension of what she was saying.

“I really don’t know!” she said, the full force of her own panic echoing in her voice.

He must have heard it, because he said, “Okay, okay. Don’t get riled up. Your driver’s license says you’re Jenn Johnson,” he said soothingly. “Your car went off the road in a snowstorm. I found you inside, slumped over the steering wheel, unconscious and bleeding from the head. I brought you here—you’re in a doctor’s office. No one recognized you from around these parts so we looked in your purse for identification and that’s what we came up with—a Colorado driver’s license with your picture on it that says you’re Jenn Johnson.” He explained everything in such detail, no doubt hoping it would make her recall something.

But it didn’t. And she felt a fear so intense it was palpable.

She tried to sit up then to combat her own sense of extreme vulnerability.

But when she did, her head started to spin and she thought she’d pass out.

The man seemed in tune with what was going on with her because he stepped even closer to the examining table and put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “I think you’d better stay lying back until my brother gets a look at you. He’s the doctor. We’re in his office.”

Something popped into her head then, as she looked at the man claiming to be her rescuer. But it didn’t have anything to do with her. It was some kind of odd flash that instead made her think she knew him. Although that didn’t make sense.

“Are you Matt McDermot?” she asked tentatively.

He looked almost as confused as she felt. “That’s me,” he confirmed.

“And we are in a place called Elk Creek? In Wyoming?”

“We are,” he said.

“Did you just move here? From Texas?”

His lips stretched into a smile as his full eyebrows creased over dark green eyes the color of fir trees. “Right,” he said, clearly surprised and somewhat confused.

Another of those strange flashes hit her, causing her to recall him saying his brother was the doctor here.

“Bax McDermot—is that your brother?”

“Did I hear someone say my name?”

The voice coming from another man suddenly standing in the doorway startled her so much she jolted as if she’d been hit. But one look at him and Jenn knew he was Matt’s older brother.

He stepped into the room then with a warm, friendly smile on a face that bore a striking resemblance to Matt’s.

And behind Bax McDermot came an attractive auburn-haired woman with topaz-colored eyes.

“Carly Winters,” Jenn said as much to herself as to everyone else.

“You’re close. Carly McDermot,” the other woman amended.

“Of course,” Jenn nearly whispered. “You just married the doctor.”

The two new arrivals to the room both smiled but they looked as if they were waiting for the punch line to a joke.

The trouble was, the joke was on Jenn and it wasn’t a very nice one. Her mouth went dry and her heart started to pound all over again in a fresh wave of alarm at the thought that she still couldn’t tell them anything about herself.

“Uh, we have a bit of a hat trick going on here,” Matt McDermot offered then, his expression once more showing his own confusion. “Our girl seems to know everyone but herself.”

The intensely attractive cowboy went on to explain what had transpired since Jenn had regained consciousness. All the while Jenn let herself focus on him as if he were her anchor.

He was a big man with wide, straight shoulders and a broad chest that narrowed to a sharply V’d waist. His hips didn’t have an ounce of spare flesh—or any room for more—in the tight jeans he wore along with the plaid flannel shirt that stretched across the muscles of his upper body.

And as for his face…well, it was about the best face she’d ever seen on a man. At least as far as she knew. With a high forehead and a long, thin, slightly pointed nose; straight, not-too-thin, not-too-full lips; a strong, square jawline; and a chin with a slight dent in the center of it.

He had great hair, too—thick, coarse and shiny golden-brown in color. He wore it short around the sides and a little spiky on top.

And there were also the eyes she’d noticed before. Slightly soulful, kind and amused at once, and as dark a green as a dense mountain forest.

When Matt McDermot had finished updating his brother, the doctor switched into a more businesslike mode, drawing Jenn’s attention with questions aimed directly at her.

“You can’t tell us anything about yourself? Where you live? If you were on your way to Elk Creek or would have just passed through?”

Jenn again tried to reclaim the information from the storehouse of her brain as Bax McDermot shined a light in her eyes and took a closer look into them. But it was as if that part of her mind was locked behind a steel door to which she didn’t have the key.

“I know I should know and somewhere I do, but I can’t get hold of it,” she confessed with a hearty portion of frustration in her tone.

Bax McDermot shined the light higher up, into the hair he parted with his fingers, looking at about the spot from which her headache seemed to originate.

“How about numbers? Can you remember your phone number or your address?”

Once more Jenn tried. And failed. And felt another surge of panic at the further evidence that she didn’t know the most rudimentary things about herself.

“Do you know your mother’s name? Or your father’s? Or a friend’s?”

Jenn shook her head slowly, feeling tears of pure fear well up in her eyes. But she couldn’t lie there and cry like a baby, she told herself. No matter how terrified she was of what was happening to her. So she worked hard to blink the moisture away and tried to keep her voice from quivering. “No. Nothing. I don’t remember anything.”

“Except a whole lot of details about us and our lives,” Matt reminded from the opposite side of the examining table where he still stood, almost with an air of protectiveness.

“Do you know how you know so much about us?” Carly inquired.

But Jenn didn’t have an answer for that, either. In fact, it was just another thing that unnerved her.

“Could you have been coming to Elk Creek to visit someone for Christmas?” Carly suggested in what seemed to be her capacity as assistant to her husband who was ordering Jenn to follow his finger with her eyes and generally examining her while they all talked.

“Christmas, “Jenn repeated. “Christmas is in a week,” she said, remembering that at least and hanging on to that small victory. “I guess I could have been coming to visit someone for the holiday.” But that was as far as she could go in answering the other woman’s question. And even that had no basis in fact.

“Do you think you’ve been to Elk Creek before?” Matt asked. “Maybe you grew up here or have family here?”

It was as if this had become a guessing game.

Jenn tried to play along, considering the possibilities presented to her as if she were trying on clothes to see how they fit. Wishing something would fit. But again she just drew a blank.

“I can’t be sure if I’ve ever been here before or not. And as for family, I just don’t know.”

“How about anything about where you came from?” the doctor tried. “There’s a Denver address on your driver’s license but we haven’t been able to try contacting anyone there because the phone lines are down. Do thoughts of Denver spark any memories?”

Jenn could only shake her head woefully.

“What do you think?” Matt’s query was aimed at his brother, but Jenn’s glance went to the doctor, too, hoping he had an answer not only to Matt’s question, but to her own dilemma, as well.

“I don’t have a lot of experience with this but I’d say we’re looking at selective amnesia,” Bax McDermot said to the room in general. Then more directly to Jenn he said, “There weren’t any signs of a concussion when I examined you when Matt brought you in and there still aren’t now even though you took a bad bump on the head. And because it doesn’t appear to be an injury serious enough to have caused the amnesia on its own, I’m wondering if you may have suffered something emotionally disturbing or traumatic. Maybe something that spurred you to come to Elk Creek in the first place if this is where you were actually headed. Maybe that, coupled with the blow to the head, has put you into a psychological amnesia. But one way or the other, amnesia is a tricky phenomenon that can obliterate certain parts of memory while other portions are left intact. I’m guessing that’s what we’re dealing with.”

“So what do we do about it?” Jenn asked, hating that she sounded so weak, so small, so afraid.

“We’ve already sent word to the sheriff. He’ll be here any minute,” Carly offered. “But what if we get a message to the local radio station and have them put out an announcement asking if anyone knows a Jenn Johnson?”

Both men agreed that was a good idea and Jenn was more than willing to go along with it. To embrace it, in fact, hoping someone would come forward and fill in a few blanks for her.

And while she waited, left alone in the examining room to rest, she put some effort into working up to sitting in a chair without feeling as if she might faint and regaining some warmth by sipping hot tea that Carly brought in to her.

When the sheriff arrived he asked her much the same questions the doctor had, with no more success. Then he confirmed that with the phone lines down their hands were tied for the time being in regards to trying to reach anyone in Denver. But he assured her that as soon as possible he’d do what he could.

Carly dug up a portable radio for Jenn to listen to after the sheriff left so she could hear the message the disc jockey sent out after each song. Over and over again the D.J. gave her name and pertinent information and asked anyone in town who knew anything about her to get word to the station.

But at the end of two hours there hadn’t been any notification of either to the radio station or the doctor’s office and it seemed clear that no one listening to the radio knew who Jenn Johnson was or why she’d come to Elk Creek.

And even though by then Jenn had managed to gain some control over her fear and come to grips with what was happening to her, she still felt like a lost puppy at the pound that nobody had claimed.

Until Matt McDermot seemed to do just that, reappearing from somewhere outside the examining room as sounds of the office closing for the day drifted in to her.

And even though she didn’t understand it any more than she understood what was going on in her brain, seeing him again made her feel infinitely safer.

He leaned a broad shoulder against the door frame, crossed his arms over his chest and said, “Doesn’t look like anything’s going to break for the time being to let us know who you are. Bax says what you really need for tonight is some sleep, so what would you say to coming out to the ranch and staying there until we sort through this or you get your memory back? There’s plenty of room and nothin’ we McDermots like better than having a pretty woman around or a puzzle to solve.”

“I seem to qualify as a puzzle all right.”

He smiled, and when he did, the left side of his mouth went higher than the right, giving it an appealing tilt. “Is that a yes?”

She didn’t have to think about it. Although maybe she should have when she realized that the thought of remaining anywhere near Matt McDermot went a long way toward making her feel better.

She didn’t think about it, though. She just said, “That would be really nice. Thank you. And thank you for everything else, too. I think you saved me from freezing to death.”

“It all worked out,” he said, seeming slightly uncomfortable with her gratitude and with taking the credit he was due.

For a moment their eyes locked and Jenn felt a kind of connection to him that she couldn’t fathom. A nice kind of connection that helped stave off the fear that kept threatening a return.

But Matt McDermot only lingered over that glance for a moment before he drew himself up to what looked to be his full six feet two or three inches of height and said, “Let’s get going, then. Elk Creek’s plow has just made a swipe at the roads so we should be able to reach the ranch if we leave before too much more snow accumulates.”

And with that Jenn seemed to become Matt McDermot’s charge.

Something that felt more right and more comforting than anything had since she’d opened her eyes.

She just hoped that she could trust her instincts more than she could trust her memory.