Page 41 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

And the sudden, robust discussion of the possibility of actual fisticuffs kept Wilder from anything like nerves the rest of the way to the courthouse.

Once there, Knox took it upon himself to go and clap both Tennessee and Dallas on the back, loudly calling them brother right there on the street with an ear to ear grin that made them both look murderous.

Harlan stood with Kendall’s hand tight in his, looking amused. Zeke, Wilder couldn’t help but notice, looked distressingly smug. And awfully chipper for a dying man.

But all of that faded away when he saw Cat.

She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in all of his life. How had he ever thought about anything else when he was near her?

Today she wore a simple dress that he noted was not red, but more of a cream. She held a bouquet of bright, happy flowers in her hands, but he couldn’t have identified them if his life had depended on it. There was only her.

He took her hand when she walked to him smiling, and he forgot about everyone else.

He didn’t care about the glares he was getting from her brothers. He didn’t care about the speculative looks he was getting from his. He was happy that her mother didn’t look upset, but the truth was, he wouldn’t have cared if she had.

He took her hands in his and he played with the ring he’d put there. The moonstone gleamed. The diamonds sparkled. But nothing shined the way Cat did.

It seemed to take a lifetime before they were in front of the judge.

And Wilder liked to pretend he wasn’t an introspective man, but he was. And he knew his failures far outnumbered his strengths.

He knew that Cat deserved better.

But when the judge asked him if he would take her as his lawfully wedded wife, he didn’t have to think. He said, “I do.”

And maybe there was a part of him that hoped as much as feared that she would call it off, there at the end.

But she didn’t.

“Do you, Catalina Lisle, take Wilder Matthew Carey to be your husband?” the judge asked her. “From this day forward, to honor and cherish him, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, and will be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

And that aching in him took over the whole of his body, then, but it was as he’d told Ryder. It was like he was suspended between the sky and that water, because her eyes were so damned blue.

And when he looked at her, every time he looked at her, that was what it felt like.

Like flying.

Like he could stay there forever, and should.

And so, after she whispered, “I do,” looking straight at him, he got to hold her hands in his. He got to wear the ring she’d brought for him.

And there, before all of their families and in spite of the long-running blood feud between them, he kissed his bride and made her his wife.

Even though he knew that if he really was any kind of a decent man where it counted, or at all, he would have cut her loose instead.

Chapter Ten

After the ceremony,Wilder drove them back up the mountain. Cat used this as an opportunity to mount an argument that he could simply pull off somewhere so they could finally—finally—have sex.

“If I wanted to have sex with you in this truck,” he drawled, seeming maddeningly calm, “I would have done it already. And not when the entirety of Cowboy Point is waiting for us.”

“Who cares if they’re waiting for us? What does that matter?”

Her whole body seemed to be conspiring against her. The wedding had been a straight shot of exhilaration. Was she nervous? Was she apprehensive? Was she so excited that the blood in her veins felt carbonated? She had debated that very thing all the way down from Cowboy Point, singing along to the songs her mother played to set the mood, as she’d put it.

Then Cat had seen him.

Wilder had been standing apart from all the others, waiting. She’d found his gaze the moment she’d climbed out of her mother’s truck, and she’d known. That this wedding was only a formality. That she had already decided. That her body and blood and heart and soul had been his since the start.

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