The Cowboy Who Got Away

“Take a deep breath, Tabatha,” Juliette said. The minute the words left her lips, she knew they were a mistake.

“Don’t tell me how to breathe,” she said through gritted teeth. “Just fix this.”

All Juliette could do was shrug. Probably a good choice since every word she uttered seemed to be digging her deeper into trouble.

When Tabatha had noticed the discrepancy in color, she’d called Juliette, who’d suggested they meet at the wedding venue to view the shoes and dresses in the same light in which they’d be worn during the ceremony.

“Tabatha, they really don’t look bad,” Juliette said, holding a silk pump next to a dress in a ray of sunshine streaming through one of the barn’s generous skylights. “Besides, the dresses are long and people aren’t going to be looking at your bridesmaids’ feet. They will be looking at their beautiful faces. No one will notice that the color isn’t exactly the same.”

Tabatha growled. She actually growled. A guttural sound in the back of her throat that started low, then exploded in a noise that sounded like a bark. For a split second, Juliette feared she might lunge at her.

Tabatha’s mother must have had the same worry because she put an arm around her daughter, but Tabatha brushed her off and pointed at Juliette. “The bridesmaids’ shoes were custom-made in Italy.”

“I know,” Juliette said. “I told you that due to variations in dye lots and the different material of the shoes and dresses that the color might not be an exact match.”

The woman had been so smitten by the thought of buying her bridesmaids bespoke shoes that she obviously hadn’t heard a word that Juliette had said.

Or she had selective memory.

Juliette held up the shoe again, turning it every which way in the light. “It’s close—”

“It’s not close enough,” Tabatha hissed. “All I care about is how you’re going to fix this in time for the wedding. Fix it.”

Tabatha thrust the lavender shoe at Juliette and walked out of the barn.

“Oh, Tabatha. Honey...” Her mother cast an apologetic glance at Juliette and trotted along after her daughter.

Good grief.

As Juliette stood there trying to digest what had just happened, another realization hit her hard. All her life she’d been a people pleaser. In the past, she would’ve chased after the client, falling all over herself trying to make the bride-to-be happy, promising her miracles she would’ve worked magic to deliver, but today, she just didn’t have it in her.

She wanted Tabatha to have the wedding of her dreams, but the woman was out of control. She’d crossed the line. Juliette had told her about the possibility of color variations, but Tabatha had ignored her.

“I warned you,” Juliette muttered under her breath as she slid the dress back into the garment bag and draped it over her arm. Before she placed the pumps back in their box, she held one up again and tried to look at the color with an objective eye. They were pretty. Well, as pretty as purple silk pumps could be.

Even so, her job was to make sure the bride was happy. She’d call her friend Nora at Sassy Feet Shoe Repair and see if she could help.

Juliette sighed. “It’s a purple shoe. I don’t know what more you want, Tabatha. The way you’re acting, you’d think they sent you something chartreuse.”

“Does Tabatha have something against chartreuse shoes?”

The familiar deep, masculine voice wound its way around her spine and settled at the very base of her solar plexus, making her breath catch and her heart do an all-too-familiar two-step. She knew it was Jude Campbell before she turned around and saw him standing in the wedding barn’s doorway.

Her initial split-second reaction was It’s you. You’re back. She wanted to hug him and lose herself in the sanctuary of his strong arms, in the familiar feel and smell of him. But in the next blink, the intoxicating madness fell into the chasm that had been created by everything that had happened when they broke up and the ensuing years that they’d been apart since then.

“Actually, Tabatha dislikes lavender shoes. Or these lavender shoes, at least.”

“Was that Tabatha I saw kicking up gravel as she peeled out of the parking lot?”

“Oh, she peeled out, did she? Nice. I hope she waited for her mother to get in the car and close the door before she sped off.”

Jude nodded and flashed that effortless, brilliant smile that reached all the way to his brown eyes, making them crinkle at the corners. He looked exactly the same, from the top of his curly honey-brown hair to the broad, muscled shoulders all the way down to the toes of his weathered cowboy boots. Juliette’s mouth went dry and all the reasons she should keep her walls firmly in place threatened to fly out the window, but she knew better.

She prided herself on only making new mistakes.

Jude Campbell, with his hypnotizing smile and those arms and broad shoulders, would not be a new mistake.

“Why are you here, Jude?”

He shifted his weight from one foot to another. “What’s the matter, Juju? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“You’re not allowed to call me that anymore.”

Hearing him call her by the nickname he’d had for her all those years ago made something warm and forbidden blossom in her stomach.

Damn him. How was it that after all these years, after everything he’d done, he still had this effect on her? How could she still feel something for him after what he’d done to her? To them.

“You seemed like you were happy to see me when I was home for Ethan and Chelsea’s wedding. What happened?”

Reality happened. Real life happened. Three months ago, he’d waltzed back into town for one night—for his brother’s wedding to Juliette’s best friend. He’d been the best man to her maid of honor. There had been a built-in safety in that short visit. Because of the wedding, almost every minute of her time had been consumed by helping Chelsea, or otherwise claimed by the schedule of events. There hadn’t been enough time to let down her guard. But if she was honest with herself, in that short twenty-four hours the ice cap that had formed over her heart had started thawing.

He’d left so soon after the wedding there’d been no need to think about the feelings he’d stirred up in her. It wasn’t denial; it was self-preservation. It had been ten years since he’d been back to Celebration. For all she knew, it would be another ten before he passed through again.

“You were home?” she said, emphasizing the operative word. “You breezed through so fast, I wasn’t even sure if it was really you. Are you home longer this time, Jude?”

He cocked a brow. “Would you be happy if I said yes?”

Juliette didn’t answer. She busied herself wrapping the purple shoe in the tissue paper it came in and putting it back into its box.

“I am home longer this time than last.”

Damn if her gaze didn’t find its way back to him. His eyes seemed to hold a mixture of bemusement and disappointment.

He wasn’t that tall—just under six feet, which was still big for a bull rider. But he had those broad shoulders and that lean, muscled body to compensate for it. He also had those lethal, dark brown eyes and that lopsided smile that had always disarmed her.

Even after everything that had happened, her former eighteen-year-old self whispered that she wouldn’t mind a bit if he kissed her hello, but the twenty-eight-year-old she was now, the one who knew better, overruled that foolishness with a simple blink of her eyes.

This was the effect Jude Campbell had on every healthy, red-blooded woman he encountered.

And that’s what she needed to remember.

“I’d heard through the grapevine that you weren’t coming back for the ten-year reunion,” she said.

“My plans have changed. Is it too late to change my RSVP?”

Juliette shrugged. “You’ll have to call Marilyn Harding. She’s chairing the reunion committee.”

Juliette silently cursed Tabatha again. If not for the ridiculously demanding woman, she wouldn’t have been at the Campbell Wedding Barn at the precise moment Jude had chosen to make his entrance. Juliette was a wedding planner, but Jude’s sister, Lucy, owned and operated the venue. She had inherited the property after her parents had died several years ago and had turned the old ramshackle barn into one of the South’s premier wedding barns.