A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) (12 page)

Or maybe that
’s just wishful thinking,
Emmy told herself sharply.
You told him this was just a fling. And he didn’t argue.

Outside of a few regrettable decisions in college
that she didn’t think counted, because everyone was an idiot at age nineteen, Emmy hadn’t ever really had a fling. It was more than a little galling to realize that she wasn’t any good at them. Surely if she was the strong, independent, take-charge sort of woman she thought she ought to be, she could march her way through any number of love affairs and casual flings without a moment’s pause. Maybe there was something wrong with her, because she wasn’t at all sure she knew how to survive this.

What
’s wrong with you is very simple,
that caustic voice inside of her chimed in then.
It’s the same thing that’s been wrong with you for more than half your life. It’s the reason you stayed away from Montana for the last ten years. It was never an infatuation. You know exactly what it is.

Emmy did know.
Of course she did. But she didn’t see any point in admitting it, because what good would come of that? She was still leaving on Monday morning, whether she was in love with Griffin Hyatt or not.

“
Are you sulking?” Margery asked, flopping down next to Emmy on the plush white chaise, wearing nothing but an inadequately wrapped towel.

“
Is there something in particular that I should be sulking about?” Emmy asked mildly.

Margery
’s bodyweight made the cushion beneath them into an incline, and Emmy did nothing to stop it when they rolled into each other. She’d been sharing space with Margery her whole life. She might never quite see eye to eye with her flamboyant older sister, but there was a bone-deep comfort and ease in curling up somewhere with her, shoulder pressed to shoulder. It reminded her of long afternoons lying out in the sweet grass on Gran Harriet’s land or huddled together under a blanket beneath the exultation of the Milky Way on those late, late summer nights when the August sun finally deigned to set. Emmy adjusted her legs beneath her thick spa robe to spare the rest of the party a Starlet Exiting A Limo experience and smiled at her sister.

“
Have you done something horrible I haven’t discovered yet? I hear confession is good for the soul. Have at it.”

“
I’ve never found that to be true,” Margery said, sipping at her champagne. “Case in point, Ella Kay.” She tilted her glass in the direction of her girls, pointing Emmy’s attention toward a tall, pale redhead with a sugary smile and over-tweezed brows. “She spends one half of her time cheating on that husband of hers and the other half weeping and confessing and dragging the both of them in front of their pastor to talk about her sins in gruesome detail. Whose soul is that good for?”

“
Maybe it’s time she considered a different, less tolerant spiritual guide,” Emmy said dryly. “Or a divorce.”

Margery laughed, and it was her real laugh, the one that spilled out like a little bit of sunshine and reminded Emmy exactly why it was so hard to stay mad at her.
About anything.

“
You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Margery asked in a low voice when her laughter faded. “I think she’s acting out because her pastor is young, hot, and single. I think she wants to be his spiritual project. And maybe another kind of project, too, while she’s at it.”

“
What about her husband?”

“
Ella Kay always liked the boys who submerged themselves in whatever drama she had going on. Doug is no different. He’ll never leave her. She’s the most exciting thing that ever happened to him in the midst of his khaki, preppy little life. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got off on all her fooling around.” She shrugged when Emmy looked at her askance. “Hey, some men do.”

“
Does Philip?” Emmy asked. She knew she shouldn’t have said it. She felt her sister tense next to her, though Margery didn’t appear to move a single languid muscle, and she hated herself for ruining a perfectly nice moment. For always having to stick the knife in. Was she that dissatisfied with her own life? But of course, she knew she was. These weeks in Montana hadn’t created that dissatisfaction, but they sure had emphasized it. “I didn’t mean that.”

“
Of course you did.” Margery sighed. “I hate to break it to you, Em, but I’m actually in love with Philip. And no, not just because he’s rich. It’s fun to pretend to be a vapid, materialistic little social climber, because that’s what people think I am anyway. But you should know better.”

“
I’m sorry.”

“
Are you?” Margery’s blue eyes were far too calm. Resigned, even, as if this wasn’t even hurtful. As if it was no more than what she expected. That made the bottom of Emmy’s stomach fall away and her cheeks feel crisp with shame. “I wonder. Don’t worry, Em, I don’t expect you to be my best friend or a cheerleader for my life. But you’re my sister. Try to remember that I asked you to be my maid of honor because I love you, not because it’s my goal in life to hurt you.”

“
Margery.” Emmy couldn’t remember a time she’d felt smaller or more wretched. “I really am sorry.”

Margery smiled as she sat up, and then she leaned over and pressed a big, smacking kiss to Emmy
’s cheek. “You should be,” she said quietly. “You’re a little snot. And your pocket is buzzing.”

And then she patted her blonde waves, all artfully arranged at the top of her head in a manner that would have taken Emmy all day
and every bobby pin ever made, and wandered back over toward the hot tub filled with her friends. While Emmy sat on the chaise, still rolled to the side as if she was sharing it with Margery’s ghost, and reflected on what a little snot she’d become, indeed.

This was Margery
’s wedding. Yes, it was over the top. Yes, it was ostentatious and ridiculous. Yes, Emmy had spent hours every morning tramping around the Grans’ land with a handful of her aggrieved and surly cousins looking for wildflowers so her already frazzled mother could make the centerpieces for the tables. Yes, she’d even spent an annoying afternoon with her parents rearranging those same tables that were being set up under the big tent out on Gran Harriet’s bluff that offered the best view down into the valley. And yes, those were outrageous things to ask wedding guests to do, even if they were family. But none of this was about her. It was time she stopped acting like it should have been. Like a spoiled little brat who took it upon herself to remind everyone how much fun she wasn’t having every five seconds.

Like the teenager she
’d been at such pains to claim she wasn’t any longer.

She was ashamed of herself, and that was why she dug into her pocket and pulled out her p
hone, so she could marinate in it and keep her face averted for a few more moments while she digested that uncomfortable truth. But she blinked when she saw her phone’s display, because it was filled with a list of texts from her coworkers.

Are you okay?
asked one of the art directors on her team.

Are
you quitting?
queried another.
I thought you were just on a vacation?

CALL ME THE MINUTE YOU READ THAT
INSANE EMAIL,
her closest friend at work and fellow copywriter, Annabel, had texted.

Frowning
, and alarmed, Emmy clicked through to her work email account and scrolled through all the messages she’d been more or less ignoring until she got to today’s. There was something about an old ad campaign, the usual annoying memos from the office manager passive aggressively cc-ed to the entire company, two requests for charitable contributions to different causes the CEO liked that therefore weren’t really “requests” at all, and then, at the top, an email from Emmy’s immediate boss, Stephanie.

The power-hungry, two-faced, untrustworthy Stephanie.

Who, Emmy saw when she scanned the email, had taken Emmy’s extended absence as an opportunity to “restructure” the team. She had to read it twice to make sure she wasn’t missing something, and then it was as if a haze of red descended onto her from the soaring high ceilings of the spa. Red and something else, something that connected hard to that clawed thing in her stomach that had made her snipe at her sister. All that dissatisfaction and fury she’d been swallowing back for years, that she would have outright denied until she’d admitted it to Griffin in the shadows of a microbrewery, because she prided herself on her practicality and practical people didn’t walk away from a good job simply because it wasn’t perfect.

She didn
’t text back any of her friends, because there was no point gossiping about this. She’d been gossiping about Stephanie for at least the last two years and what had it solved? She called Stephanie directly instead, distantly aware that she’d sat up straight on her chaise and was scowling toward the nearest delicate flower arrangement.

“
It’s Emmy,” she said when Stephanie answered her phone in her typically clipped,
I’m-too-busy
way. “I got your email.”

There was a pause.
Emmy could see the office in her mind’s eye. Stephanie’s desk in that windowless room that she treated like it was a corner suite in Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in downtown Atlanta, which it decidedly was not. Emmy’s own cubicle outside of it, where she’d been sitting for five years that seemed very long now, in retrospect. She had more experience than anyone else on their team. She’d been expecting a promotion to Creative Director in the next year or so and really, she was aware, should have gotten it already. Stephanie knew that better than anyone, as she’d been the one to institute what she called “monthly chats” but which all the copywriters and art directors referred to as “trips to the principal’s office”—and because she was the reason Emmy hadn’t been promoted already.

“
How can I help you?” Stephanie asked, in that choppy New England accent of hers that set Emmy’s teeth on edge. That and the malice behind it that Stephanie no longer bothered to conceal.

“
How can you
help
me?” Emmy repeated, fighting to keep her own voice smooth, so Stephanie couldn’t make any of her usual comments about Emmy’s attitude. “Stephanie, I’m preparing for my sister’s wedding, as you know. I’m two thousand miles away. Yet you’ve decided this is the perfect time to restructure our team in a way, I can’t help but notice, that’s a promotion for everyone else and a demotion for me.”

“
It’s my job to make sure the team runs smoothly, Emmy,” Stephanie said in her patronizing way. “That’s not something you can help with while you’re off on one of your month long vacations, is it?”

“
This is the first time I’ve taken off work since I had that flu two winters ago,” Emmy pointed out, and it was an uphill battle to keep her voice as calm as possible. “And, as you insisted, I made this personal, unpaid time. It’s not a vacation.”

“
The firm doesn’t exist to cater to your demands for personal time,” Stephanie said. “Maybe you should spend the rest of your vacation thinking about how to become a better team player.”

Make something else instead,
she’d told Griffin.
That’s what you do
.

It had never been what Emmy did.
This was the first job she’d ever had, and sure, she was pretty good at it. But while various coworkers came and went, Emmy had stayed, and the other thing she’d told Griffin was true: she was tired of it. She was tired of writing copy. She was tired of the deadline drama and the never-satisfied clientele. She was tired of Creative Directors like Stephanie who stole credit for her work and had hated her on sight simply because she’d refused to ingratiate herself the way the others had done, claiming it was
office politics
instead of
kissing ass
.

Emmy hadn
’t made it big. She’d made practical decisions, one after the next, ever since she’d found herself naked and without Griffin in that barn ten years ago. She’d resolved to keep herself safe after that scarring experience. What kind of person threw away a good job just because she didn’t love every moment of it? Emmy had never been that person. She’d told herself repeatedly that she didn’t
want
to be that person.

But she
’d also never been the kind of person who sunk so deep into a blistering three-week affair that she almost didn’t care who caught her doing it. Like last night, when she and Griffin had gotten a little too lost in a stolen kiss in his grandmother’s house that had almost resulted in them being walked in on in a very compromising position by Emmy’s aunt and uncle. The old Emmy would never have allowed that to happen. The new Emmy had laughed and hidden in a closet like a teenager.

She liked the new Emmy better
, she understood then. She liked who she was with Griffin. And she decided right there on a chaise in a Bozeman, Montana spa that it didn’t matter what happened between them. Griffin was temporary. She’d find a way to deal with that. But this version of herself—the one who did as she liked because she trusted herself enough to know she could handle the consequences—didn’t have to be as temporary as he was.