The Cowboy's Valentine Bride

Yeah, that was an understatement. Hope, Montana, was a small ranching community, and while there were two large animal veterinarians in town, medical care for people was a little sparser. Before Kaitlyn went to nursing school, her aunt Bernice was the only other nurse in town. He’d half expected to see the older woman.

Under different circumstances, he might have considered himself lucky. He’d known Kate for years and thought of her as a little sister. She’d always been sweet with a quirky sense of humor, and until recently, he would have described her as honest, too, but she’d gone along with the lie his friends and family had told him while he was away—namely that he still had a fiancée. But Nina had married his best friend, Brian, while he’d been dodging bullets in Afghanistan, and everyone had kept silent about that little fact...so silent that he’d never suspected a thing. No one told him the truth until he’d been in the VA hospital in Fort Harrison for over a month. He’d been set to be released for Dakota and Andy’s wedding when that nasty infection set in. Nina still hadn’t visited, and he’d had enough. That was when his family admitted that Nina had married Brian a few months back.

And now Nina’s sister was going to be his nurse while he recovered? It was adding insult to injury—literally.

Brody looked past Kaitlyn to where his mother stood in the kitchen, stoically ignoring them. His mother, Millie, wore an apron over a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved turtleneck, and she was rolling out some dough on the island with enough muscle to wrestle down a steer. Whatever she was baking would be leather by the time she was done with it.

“It’s good to see you.” Kaitlyn came into the room, those big brown eyes fixed on him with a conflicted expression. “I missed you.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course. No one else lets me cheat at poker.”

She was making a joke, but he wasn’t in the mood. She’d been more than a silent bystander to the deception. She’d written him emails every couple of weeks since the day he left, and never once did she let on that anything had changed. At the end of every email, she’d said the same thing: Nina sends her love.

“You didn’t think to tell me I was writing love letters to a married woman?” he asked. He didn’t have strength for pleasantries right now. They might as well get down to it.

How many letters had he obliviously written to Nina since her marriage? Had she laughed at his humble attempts to put his heart on paper while he was out there in the desert? All of this while Nina’s own sister hadn’t even hinted that he might want to take a closer look.

“Your parents said—” she began.

“You all made a fool of me,” he interrupted. “If I’d known she was starting up with Brian, I could have saved myself some humiliation.”

“And if after you learned the truth you lost heart out there and you’d been shot?” she demanded, something close to anger sparkling in those eyes. “We’d have blamed ourselves.”

“You could have blamed Brian and Nina.” He shot her a sardonic smile. “I do.”

Kaitlyn’s eyes misted and she shot him an irritated look. “You aren’t funny, and if you’d been dead, the moral high ground wouldn’t have been much comfort. No one wanted to keep the secret, you know. We all felt terrible about it—”

“Except Nina, of course.” He couldn’t help the bitterness in his tone. Nina had been busy getting married to another guy...and not just any guy—his best friend.

“Brody, I’m not my sister.” Something in her voice gave him pause, and he heaved a sigh. No, she wasn’t her sister, and Nina was the one who started this whole thing, but Kaitlyn could have gone against the tide and leveled with him.

“It’s just that, of all people, Kaitlyn, I figured I could count on you to tell me the truth. There were a few times when I got suspicious, but then I’d get an email from you, and I’d think that it was okay because I could trust you. You’d fill me in if there was something I needed to know. But Nina always sent her love, right?”

Kaitlyn blushed and looked away for a moment. They’d been friends. He’d called her his “overly serious Kate” because she’d taken her studies so seriously, and he’d always tried to distract her while he waited for Nina to get ready to go out. He’d always won that tussle between responsibility and fun, and she’d push her books aside and turn those chocolate brown eyes on to him. Having her full, overly serious attention had felt good—too good. But he knew the line and he’d never flirted with it. Nina had always taken forever to get ready, but Kaitlyn made the wait fun. They’d laughed at the same jokes and talked about life, and he’d given her advice on some boyfriend who wasn’t up to snuff. And of all people, he’d trusted Kaitlyn to be above that kind of deception.

“We all protected you,” Kaitlyn said after a moment. “It wasn’t ideal, I get that, but it was all we could think of. Whether you believe it or not, we were doing this because we wanted you home safe.” She crouched in front of the foot stool where his leg rested. “Speaking of which, let me take a look.”

Brody sighed and nodded his approval. It wasn’t like he had much choice anyway. He obviously needed a nurse to aid his recovery, and as she’d pointed out, he couldn’t exactly be picky.

Her touch was light and discreet as she uncovered the bandaged wounds. He’d been lucky—no broken bones—but the shrapnel had gone deep into the muscle and the multiple surgeries to retrieve it had left the doctors uncertain if there would be nerve damage or not. That thought scared him. He was born on a ranch and raised on horseback. What was he going to do if he had nerve damage? Riding a horse or returning to the army, he’d need this leg to cooperate. Maybe the fact that it hurt so badly was a good sign—nerves screaming their existence, if nothing else.

“I still can’t believe Dakota married Andy,” Brody said bitterly, wincing as the gauze caught on some stiches. When he’d left, his sister thoroughly loathed Andy, and now they were married. Everything had changed in one short year, and home felt foreign.

Kaitlyn replaced the gauze and taped it back down. “Something happened on that cattle drive—that’s all we know. What can you do?”

“He single-handedly ruined our land,” Brody said. “She can’t be in love with him.”

Kaitlyn rocked back on her heels and eyed Brody for a long moment until he looked away. Then she sighed and pushed herself to her feet.

“A lot has changed,” she said quietly. “And I don’t even know if you’re glad to be back or not, but I’m glad.”

“Are you?” She looked like the same old Kaitlyn—gentle, sweet, doe-eyed—and yet she was different, too. She was stronger, more confident somehow. Situations had changed, but so had people.

“I am.” She fixed him with her direct stare. “So you go ahead and be mad at this whole blasted town because I’m happy you’re back in once piece.”

“Give or take,” he said with a wry smile.

Kaitlyn smiled and shook her head. “I’m going to get your prescription for pain meds refilled, and over the next few days we’re going to get you walking.” She looked down at his medication log. “You’re due for another dose in an hour.”

“The sooner the better on those meds, Kate. It hurts pretty bad.”

“Okay.” She looked as if she wanted to say something more, then gave him a nod and turned back toward the kitchen.

Brody gritted his teeth and gently lowered his leg to the floor. The pain was so intense that it turned his stomach, but he wasn’t about to lie around bemoaning his tattered state. He needed to recover, because once he was back in shape again, he knew exactly where he was going.

This ranch and this town didn’t hold anything for him anymore. He was going back to the army to finish what he started. In the army the truth had been ugly, but no one had lied to him.

* * *

WHEN KAITLYN RETURNED from the drug store with Brody’s pain prescription, Dakota opened the door for her. Kaitlyn stepped into the warm kitchen, fragrant with baking bread. The last time she’d been in this room, they’d been having a meeting of sorts—the Mason family and the Harpes. That was the evening when Mr. Mason outlined the plan to get Brody home safe. Nina and Brian had already moved to the city, so Kaitlyn’s father, Ron, filled Nina in on her part of the deal later—to keep her relationship with Brian a secret and to answer Brody’s emails so he wouldn’t suspect anything. It had been an order, not a request. Nina hadn’t wanted to go along with it—she was about to get married, after all, and she wanted to announce it to the world. But if she announced it, then Brody would hear all about it, and that could be devastating. Brody had to be the priority, and Nina would just have to get married quietly.

Kaitlyn hadn’t been back to this ranch since that solemn meeting of minds, but she and Dakota had run into each other around town a few times, and a tenuous partnership was born. They both wanted Brody home safe—which he was. Kaitlyn could only hope that the deception had been worth it.

“Hi,” Kaitlyn said with a quick smile. “I’ve got the pills.”

“How’s his leg?” Dakota asked. “He wouldn’t let me see it. Said he’d wait for a medical professional because I didn’t know squat.”

Kaitlyn smiled wanly—that sounded like Brody, always the tough guy. Maybe he’d been trying to protect his sister—that leg wasn’t pretty.

“It’s...not great.” His leg, from thigh to calf, was covered in jagged cuts and stitches. Some of the wounds had already healed over—more or less—from his first surgeries, but others were fresh from retrieving the deeper, harder-to-reach shrapnel. She could tell how much pain Brody was in, and if his leg got infected again, it could be fatal. He’d been right about one thing—proper medical care was a necessity if he wanted to walk again.

“He’s mad,” Dakota said. “About Nina and all that.”

Kaitlyn was still angry with her sister about her infidelity. Brody was strong, sweet, handsome, kind... He was the perfect guy, and Kaitlyn had been in love with him from afar for a couple of years before he asked out her sister. But he was two years older than Kaitlyn, and she hadn’t even registered on his radar. He’d made his choice—a perfectly understandable one. Nina was the beautiful sister—a redhead with soft green eyes and a voluptuous pinup-girl figure. She turned heads everywhere she went, and Kaitlyn hadn’t, at least not when her sister was anywhere near. Kaitlyn was confident in her own looks—she was beautiful, even—but she’d been quite solidly in her older sister’s shadow.

So why couldn’t Nina wait for him? Kaitlyn had been through it a thousand times. If it had been her, she’d have waited as long as she had to...but Brody wasn’t hers. He’d never seen her that way, and there were lines that Kaitlyn would never cross.

“So who had to tell him about Nina?” Kaitlyn asked. It was the conversation they’d all been dreading.

“Me.” Dakota winced. “Just before the wedding. He kept asking where Nina was, and I think he suspected. I mean, how many fiancées do you know who don’t bother visiting their wounded man in the hospital? When I told him, he just sort of deflated. He didn’t look surprised, just...silent.”

“Imagine if that had happened over there,” Kaitlyn reminded her. “Nina’s such a selfish—”

“It’s done, it’s done...” Dakota shook her head. “And Nina isn’t your fault. We’re all just trying to pick up the pieces, and this was the plan, right? He needed to find out here, so we could get him through it.”

“He’s mad that we hid it.” Kaitlyn lowered her voice further.