Montana Passions: Stranded With the Groom / All He Ever Wanted / Prescription: Love

Probably afraid she’d get spooked and shut him out again.

“Justin?” Her heart pounded painfully inside her rib cage. She had things to say and she was going to say them, but that didn’t make it easy.

“Yeah?”

“Justin, are you after my money?”

With zero hesitation, he replied, “No.”

She peered at him through narrowed eyes. “Are you sure?“

“Yeah. Money’s not an issue for me. I have plenty of my own. Now, anyway. And I earned every damn penny of it.”

Her face felt as if it had turned as red as her pajamas and her heart beat even faster. She did believe him. If that made her a total fool, well, so be it.

He added, “But don’t take me wrong. I don’t mind that you’re rich. Hey, I’m glad you are. It’s always better, don’t you think, to have money than not to?”

Katie thought about that. “Sometimes I’m not so sure. Money can…isolate a person. It can make it so it’s hard to believe that someone might like you, just for yourself.”

“Katie.”

She put her hand against her heart. Really, did it need to keep pounding so awfully fast? “Yeah?”

“I do like you. For yourself.”

She realized she believed that, too, and her galloping heart slowed a little. But she wasn’t finished yet. “There’s more.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you know that I was…?” Oh, this was so awkward.

He helped her out. “Rich?”

She gulped. “Yes. Did you know I was a wealthy woman before you got up on that stage at the town hall and ‘married’ me?”

“I did.”

She blinked. “Who told you?”

He chuckled. “Some of those spectators were pretty damn drunk. When they heard I’d be playing your groom, I got a lot of ribbing. You know the kind. How you were not only a cute little thing, you were loaded, too. How, if I played my cards right, I might catch myself an heiress.”

Katie scrunched up her nose. “A cute little thing?”

He shrugged. “Drunk talk. You know how it goes. And you might like to know, I got more than one warning that I’d better be good to you. They were joking—but the look in every eye said I’d pay if I messed with their favorite librarian.”

That brought a smile. “They did? They told you to be good to me?”

He nodded. “So you’ve got backup, in case you were worried.”

She looked him directly in the eye. “I guess I was worried. And scared. The truth is, in the past couple of years, I’ve had a tendency to let fear run my life. But I’ve had a little talk with myself. Fear is not going to rule me. Not anymore. I…well, I like you. And I think you like me.”

“I do. Very much.”

A sweet warmth spread through her. “So then. I’d like to get to know you better.”

His gaze didn’t waver. “And I want to know you.”

Chapter Five

They talked for hours, lying in their separate beds in the central display room.

Katie told him about Ted Anders. She’d met Ted at CU. He was tall and tan and blond, a prelaw student. Interesting to talk to, with a good sense of humor—and charming, too. Extremely so. Ted had lavished attention on Katie. She’d started to believe she’d found the right guy for her—until she went to a party up on “the hill,” where a lot of the students shared apartments. The place was packed, a real crowd scene. She got separated from Ted and when she found him again, he had his arm around a cute redhead.

“He was so busy putting a move on her, he didn’t even see that I was watching,” Katie said. “I heard him tell her how he’d like to, uh, ‘jump her bones,’ but he couldn’t afford to. He had a ‘rich one’ on a string and he wasn’t blowing that ‘til he’d clipped at least a couple of her millions.”

“I hope you reamed him a new one right there and then.” Justin sounded as if he wouldn’t have minded doing that for her.

She laughed—and it felt so good. To think about something that had hurt so much at the time and realize it was just a memory now, one with no power to cause her pain. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m not big on public displays.”

He chuckled. “Well, yeah. As a matter of fact, I did notice. So, what did you do?”

“I went home to my apartment. Eventually, Ted must have realized I’d left. He came knocking on my door. I confronted him then. He started laying on the sweet talk. But I wasn’t buying. Once he saw he couldn’t talk his way back into a relationship with me, he said a few rotten things, trying to hurt me a little worse than he already had. But he knew it was over.”

“And that made you sure every man you met would be after your money?”

“Well, there was another, er, incident.”

“At CU?”

“No. Right here in town, not long after I came home to stay and took the job as librarian. He was a local guy, Jackson Tully. He’d grown up here and gone to Thunder Canyon High ten years before I did. After high school, he’d moved away—and then moved back and opened a souvenir shop on Main. He asked me out and he seemed nice enough. We had several dates and…oh, he was funny and sweet and I started to think—”

“That he was the one.“

She made a face at the shadowed rafters above. “Oh, I don’t know. I thought that we had something good, I guess. That it might really go somewhere.”

“As in wedding bells and happily ever after?”

“That’s right.”

“So then…?”

“Well, he proposed.”

“Marriage?”

“What else?”

He made a low sound. “I can think of a few other things, but I won’t go into them. So the moneygrubbing shop owner proposed and you said yes.”