Ramagos, Tonya - Strictly Accountable [Stud Service 2] (Siren Publishing Classic) (19 page)

Sabrina sighed. “I wish Serena and Susannah could’ve been here.”

“You know they both wanted to be. Serena’s got her charity work, and, though she hasn’t said as much, I think the clinic is in a bit of trouble now that she’s lost the income from her trust fund.”

“I hope you’re wrong, not that she would tell us if that were the case.”

“No, she wouldn’t. As for Susannah, she’s having too much fun playing mermaid in the Caribbean right now.”

“Yeah, can’t imagine a girl wanting to leave a paradise like that for a little thing like a family wedding.” Sabrina might have sounded sarcastic if she hadn’t let her smile widen and become more genuine than any she’d worn that day.

“Especially when it’s the second one in less than a year,” Savannah chimed in with an ear-to-ear grin of her own. Her smile faltered mere seconds later, and her gaze mixed with compassion and concern. “What are you holding back, Brina?”

Sabrina’s throat constricted, from tears or fear she couldn’t quite be sure. She wanted so desperately to tell her sister everything going through her heart, her very soul, but putting voice to it all scared her to bits. She looked back through the part in the curtains but really didn’t see anything outside. She saw only the images in her mind of how she wished today would play out and felt the heartache she would inevitably feel when it didn’t happen.

She shook her head, blinking rapidly. Crying would only ruin the makeup Brody’s youngest sister took close to an hour to apply.

“You don’t have to go through with this,” Savannah said gently. “You don’t have to marry Brody.”

“We’re already married, Vannah.” The words left her on a rushed whisper she couldn’t take back. She closed her eyes and let the rest spill. “We were married before the baby was conceived. It’s the only way Brody would agree to get me pregnant.” Savannah blinked at her, opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. “Stop with the guppy look, will you?”

“You spring that on me, and you don’t expect me to be shocked?” Savannah asked in a hushed shriek. “Brina, why didn’t you tell us?”

Sabrina sighed and told her sister everything, starting from the morning she walked into the Walmart Supercenter to find Brody standing, larger than life, and fifty times as sexy, at her kiosk and ending with now.

“Do you love him, Brina?” Savannah asked when she finished her long-winded tale.

Sabrina nodded. “With all my heart and soul.” She hadn’t said it aloud until now, hadn’t even told Kirk when he threw her an impromptu bachelorette party between just the two of them earlier in the week.

“Have you told him?”

Sabrina shook her head. “I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with him. We married for the baby, for the trust fund, for…” What? Even after close to three months and countless hours together, she still didn’t have a clue what he saw to gain from their arrangement.

“Hmm, and convincing your heart that you have no business falling for him worked amazingly well, too, didn’t it?”

Sabrina narrowed her eyes. “It really isn’t necessary to be a bitch right now, Vannah.”

Savannah giggled. “All I’m saying is you can’t control matters of the heart. Little Miss Always-So-Practical has found herself in a situation that has thrown your life into chaos and no calculator or equation on the planet is going to help you. It’s time to fall back on words rather than numbers, sis. You can’t marry the man a second time and not tell him what’s truly in your heart when you do.”

No, she couldn’t. Sabrina came around to that knowledge all by herself somewhere in the wee hours of the morning as she pondered desperately over the stupid vows Brody insisted they write themselves. In the end, she devised two sets. One she deemed the coward’s way out that would continue to keep her emotions locked in their cage and another that would reveal all. The latter kept her up the rest of the night as fear twisted with needs too strong to define and made her sick to her stomach.

“Will you two quit yammering and pay attention?” Carlotta stepped between them, an arm winding around Sabrina’s shoulder and turning her toward the door. The older woman, shorter by a good three inches, stood on her tiptoes and leaned in. “They’re ready for you out there. You look beautiful.”

Sabrina heard it then, the traditional wedding march in a lovely ensemble of flutes and horns from the sound system outside. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and readied herself to face her fate.

Her bridesmaids—Savannah and Brody’s three sisters dressed in soft purple with white ribbons and the unconventional addition of Kirk in his white tuxedo and purple tie—preceded her down the aisle.

Then it was her turn.

Sabrina stood in the doorway, seconds past her cue, her gaze fixated on Brody, who waited with his hands clasped in front of him, the picture of perfect cool. He turned his head, his eyes meeting hers, and her heart stopped.

She couldn’t do this.

She had to do this.

God, help me
.

“You’re shaking,” her father whispered as she put her hand in the bend of his arm. He covered her hand with his free one and started to lead her down the aisle.

Embarrassed heat crept into her cheeks. “You know I’ve never cared much for being the center of attention,” she told him out of the corner of her mouth. Not for the first time since all the wedding planning began, she found herself wishing with each step that they had decided to come clean about the fact they were already married so there wouldn’t have been a need for this big shindig.

“Enjoy today, though, baby girl. This is the first most important day of your life.”

The second being the day her baby would be born. Sabrina easily understood that. She heard the hitch in her father’s voice at the same time her attention fell on her mother watching them from the front row. Tears of joy glittered in her mother’s eyes. She realized then that she couldn’t have deprived them of this moment. They wanted the child in her womb. That had been what set the whole wheel in motion. But seeing her getting married, feeling with each step she took she was walking toward a life with the man she loved, was the true heart of all her parents wished for when they suspended her trust fund.

Her step faltered when they reached Brody. Her pulse pounded through her veins with enough force to make her light-headed. She couldn’t hear anything around her, couldn’t feel beyond the touch of his hand as her father did his duty of handing the bride off to her groom. The smile that unfolded on Brody’s lips came slow and faint and dazzled her soul.

“Dearly beloved.”

The preacher’s raised voice broke through her shocked system only to deliver another surprise when she realized it was the same preacher who married them the first time. Though she struggled not to let her astonishment show, she figured it must have when the faint smile on Brody’s lips turned to a discernible twitch.

Sabrina zoned out as she attempted to control her racing heart and mind. She figured she was managing to do pretty good until Brody started to speak.

“My idea,” he said on a heavy sigh. “I had to follow my sister’s advice and insist we do this ourselves, didn’t I?”

“Second thoughts?” Sabrina asked, tongue in cheek. It helped to see his embarrassment.

“I’ll never live this down.” He took a deep breath, squeezed her hand and raised his voice. “I suggested we write our own vows because the traditional ones didn’t seem to fit, especially since we’ve already said them once.”

Sabrina’s gasp got lost in the low murmur of surprise among the guests. Her heart tripped. Her eyes widened a second before she narrowed them suspiciously. What was he up to?

“Keeping secrets, from one another or our families, is no way to start a life together. It’s no way to bring our baby into the world. Blackmail isn’t a good basis for a marriage either, but I sure used it as a foundation.”

Sabrina’s head spun. She understood secrets. She kept a truckload of things from him herself. But blackmail? She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, but he stopped her.

“It’s not your turn to speak yet.” His eyes twinkled with a hint of humor despite the firmness of his tone. “You wanted a baby for your own reasons. I wouldn’t give it to you unless you married me. We were married in secret, kept it from our families on the off chance I couldn’t get you pregnant. But here’s the thing, I never intended to divorce you, Sabrina. Baby or no baby, trust fund or no trust fund, I’ve never planned to let you go. I used our baby, the possibility of a baby, and your need for your inheritance to lure you into marrying me because I love you.”

Sabrina’s jaw dropped as tears blurred her vision.

“I reckon I should’ve told you long before now.”

Sabrina gave a watery laugh and nodded as a tear slipped down her cheek.

Brody shrugged. “I’m banking on it being better late than never. When we say I do this time, it’s forever. There aren’t any stipulations. There won’t be a time frame. There won’t be a divorce sometime after Rufus is born.”

Sabrina briefly closed her eyes in mock exasperation, unable to let that one pass. “We are not naming this child Rufus,” she muttered and heard a few snickers from their family in the front row.

His lips twitched, but his tone and the intense look in his eyes took her breath away. “Sabrina Gibson, I’m claiming you as my wife from this day forward, to have and to hold, to love and cherish for the rest of my life. If you’ll have me.” His voice dropped to barely above a whisper on the last, only loud enough for her to hear, and those final words welded every sliver of doubt in her soul into a certainty of a love like no other.

She swallowed hard and cleared her throat. The words that came weren’t any she had written the night before, but the ones winding around her heart now. “Brody Holt, you are one maddening, unpredictable cowboy who will no doubt keep me on my toes for the rest of my days. You stole my heart despite by best efforts to guard my emotions, shot down every practical intention I had, and have made me the happiest woman in the universe today. I’ll take you and every crazy surprise you dish out and promise to love you for the rest of my life.”

Epilogue

Sabrina shut the cover of her laptop and rubbed the back of her neck. Though it took her longer than expected tonight, she could leave the office knowing everything to implement her new plans for her accounting firm were in place and ready to rock. It felt good finally seeing the pieces of her future fitting together like a perfect puzzle once more. A different puzzle than she originally planned, a much better puzzle than she intended.

She smiled as she straightened behind the desk and looked around the office she’d taken over as her own. She hadn’t changed much of the décor from the way it looked when Brody’s father used the office. She’d shuffled things around on the bookshelves, added her accounting and tax manuals, put in another filing cabinet and added a colorful throw to the back of the sofa sitting along the far wall. It felt right. It felt like hers, she thought, just as everything else did about Holt’em Up Ranch.

“Because it’s home.” A home, she noted as she angled her head and listened closely, that was currently silent. The realization barely had time to form when she heard a soft knock simultaneously with the door opening.

“Time is up, Mrs. Holt.” Brody closed the door behind him as he entered the office, his steps not faltering a bit on his way across the hardwood floor in a direct path to her. “It’s quitting time for the day.”

“Oh, it is, is it?” Sabrina got to her feet, her arms reflexively lifting to circle his broad shoulders when he reached her and pulled her into an embrace. “Is Rapunzel down for a while?”

Rachael, not Rufus, had been born six months earlier and instantly wrapped Daddy around her delicate finger despite his protests throughout her pregnancy that the baby would be a boy.

“Sleeping like the beautiful princess she is.” He smiled and kissed the tip of her nose. “We had a long talk, and she sweetly agreed to stay that way for a few solid hours so Mommy and Daddy can have some us time.”