The Maverick Fakes a Bride! Read online

  As Jasper talked, the wranglers ran around whispering directions in people’s ears. Apparently, one of them told Summer Knight to cozy up to Travis, because the rodeo star popped up out of nowhere on Trav’s other side.

  Like a shark gliding through deep water, the woman had gotten to him without a sound. Brenna sensed movement in her peripheral vision. When she glanced around Travis, there was Summer, up close and personal, flashing him a big, flirty smile.

  Brenna considered not reacting. But then the whole point was the drama, right? Where was the drama if she just let it go?

  She grabbed Travis’s hand.

  “What?” he whispered, which was a total crock on every level. He knew exactly what. And his whisper might not disturb Jasper’s endless monologue, but their body mics picked up every slight sound they made. Brenna just shook her head and dragged him around Fred Franklin and the twins to the far edge of the group.

  When she stopped, Travis pulled his hand free of her grip—but only so he could slide his arm around her neck and pull her in close. He kissed her cheek, a sweet little peck that she enjoyed way too much. “’Fess up, baby,” he said softly in a country twang. “You’re jealous. You know you are. But you don’t need to be. ’Cause, darlin’, all I see is you.”

  Sheesh. He should put that line to music.

  She almost laughed but caught herself and put on a sulky little glare instead.

  Objectively, she got that this was just what the director had been going for. Jasper was a pretty good talker. He made all that information as interesting as possible. But come on, listening to rules and instructions was a snooze. A little drama on the side would liven things up.

  She was just starting to feel smug that she’d thwarted the man-eater. But no. Here came Summer again, slipping into position on Travis’s other side. They ought to play the theme music from Jaws wherever that woman went. Summer flashed a radiant smile—first at Brenna and then right at Travis.

  Brenna simply couldn’t let that move stand. She had her pride, after all.

  She ducked free of Travis’s hold and slid around to his other side. “’Scuse me,” she whispered, all innocence, and eased herself between her fake fiancé and the man-stealing rodeo star.

  Summer only sighed and turned her eyes front, suddenly totally enthralled as Jasper described their first task on the show: they would each be creating their own immunity bracelet. After each major challenge, the winner would put on his or her bracelet, thus acquiring immunity from elimination during the next major challenge.

  They got to work braiding bracelets out of strips of leather using colored beads for decoration. Brenna was pretty good at it. She and Fallon had played around with making leather bracelets back in their teens. Plus, as a hairdresser, Brenna knew how to get a tight, even braid. She added purple and turquoise beads in various shapes and sizes to jazz her bracelet up a little and had it finished in no time.

  Trav was another story. Judging by his lumpy-looking effort, crafting with leather wasn’t something he’d ever tried. He got a look at Brenna’s bracelet and gave her the sexy eyes. “Gee, Bren. How ’bout helping me out a little here?”

  She showed him how to hold the leather strings with even tension and suggested he use azure-blue beads. “Because they match your eyes.”

  He gave her that smile that could melt panties at fifty paces and leaned in for a quick kiss that somehow stretched out into something longer. And deeper.

  Seriously, forget bracelet making. Maybe she and Trav could stand here kissing for the next hour or two. They could call the show The Great Romance Roundup. And forget the ranching challenges. It could be all about kissing and togetherness, about deep, meaningful sharing and beautiful declarations of undying love.

  Was it wrong to feel this good when she was kissing him? His lips played over hers. She reached up a hand and stroked the hair at his temple. He pulled her closer into the circle of his lean arms.

  About then, though, it started to seem way too quiet around them. Brenna broke the kiss and opened her eyes to find everybody watching and more than one camera aimed at them.

  Trav seemed to shake himself. “Bracelets, right? We’re making bracelets...”

  She laughed and took his bracelet from him. “Okay, pay attention, now.”

  He caught on quickly. Roberta signaled Brenna. Brenna went to give her a hand.

  An hour later, she’d helped seven other contestants make their bracelets. Wally Wilson had some experience with leatherwork, too. He’d taken Brenna’s lead and pitched in to give pointers to anyone having trouble.

  Wally ended up helping Summer, who shamelessly flirted with him the whole time. Actually, it was kind of cute watching Wally flirt back. He had that cowboy way about him, both shy and courtly at the same time.

  As soon as everyone had completed a bracelet, Jasper emerged from the canteen carrying a large, shallow wooden box intricately carved with Western scenes. He raised the lid to reveal twenty-two labeled slots, one for each contestant. One by one, he called them forward to lay their bracelets in the box.

  It was all very solemn and ceremonious. And when the box was filled, Jasper closed the lid and handed it off to one of the wranglers, who disappeared with it back into the canteen.

  “Next task,” announced Jasper. “Set up camp.”

  Jasper made a big show of inviting them into the canteen, where the piles of equipment had been arranged on the tables and labeled with their names, one for each cast member. The married couple, Leah and Seth Stone, had one pile labeled with both their names. So did Travis and Brenna.

  That was when it hit her. They were sharing a tent.

  * * *

  When Brenna turned those turquoise blue eyes on him, Travis expected her to look freaked. But in fact, on the surface, she seemed fine with the tent arrangements.

  And why wouldn’t she be? They were lovers, after all, and engaged to be married. Of course they would want to be sleeping together.

  But Travis knew she didn’t like it. It was one thing to have adjoining rooms with a door to shut between them. But it was another altogether to sleep side by side every night in the close confines of a tent.

  Because in real life they simply weren’t that intimate.

  He wrapped an arm around her waist, hauled her close and nuzzled her ear. “We got lucky, darlin’,” he whispered, for the benefit of their body mics.

  And they had gotten lucky, at least in terms of the tent itself. He’d expected they would have to sleep out in the open. A tent was a bonus.

  But Brenna still seemed too subdued when he let her go, so the next time she glanced his way, he tugged on his left ear, their signal for Let’s talk as soon as possible.

  Actually the talk signal was intended for emergencies, when one of them had some urgent bit of info to communicate to the other. But he didn’t have a signal for Please don’t freak out. I’ll explain why the shared tent is a good thing as soon as we’re alone. So he worked with what he had.

  “Gotcha,” she said. He took that to mean she’d understood the signal. They grabbed their gear.

  * * *

  The tents went up in a wide circle on a large, mostly cleared space a quarter mile from the canteen. Furnishings were minimal: bedrolls, sleeping bags, their packs and a battery-powered lantern for each tent. Each contestant had a camp chair to call their own.

  Once the shelters were up and ready, they all pitched in together to build the community campfire in the center of their little tent village. Like putting up a tent, building a campfire was a basic skill for all of them. They worked together smoothly, everybody pitching in. There were a few slackers, especially Dean Fogarth, a sandy-haired cowboy in his early twenties who spent a lot of time trying to impress Summer. But the job wasn’t big enough or difficult enough for anyone to care much if Dean didn’t d
o his part.

  Wally and a couple of the other guys prepped the flat, open spot in the center of the tent circle. They cleared away debris and brought buckets of gravel up from the side of the nearby creek for better drainage when it rained and to keep the heat from sterilizing the ground beneath the blaze. Most of the women, Brenna included, began gathering firewood.

  Travis helped by hauling rocks to make the fire ring. Through a cluster of trees out of sight of the camp, he found a nice stash of granite boulders at the base of a rock slide. He was hefting the first one to carry back to the campsite when Brenna popped out from behind a cottonwood.

  He almost dropped the rock on his foot. “What the—”

  She signaled frantically for silence and then waved her hand for him to follow her. He put down the rock and trailed her deeper into the grove of trees. When she stopped, she unclipped her mic from her hair, tugged it out from under her shirt and put it in her back pocket. She gestured for him to do the same.

  A quick glance around showed no cameramen, no cast members and zero wranglers. Moving the microphone to a pocket would probably mute the sound enough that they wouldn’t be heard if they whispered. And as the mic would still be operating, it would take the sound techs a while to realize that something wasn’t right.

  Travis stashed his mic. “What?” he whispered, in a hurry to know what was so all-fired important she needed to tell him right now.

  She blinked. “What do you mean, what? You signaled that you had something to tell me that couldn’t wait.”

  He winced. “Sorry, I just wanted to reassure you.”

  “Reassure me of what?”

  “That there’s an upside to sharing a tent. If we keep it low, we’ll probably be able to talk every night—you know, make plans. Strategize.”

  She looked at him the way his mom used to, back when he was little and did something only a wild-ass, irresponsible kid would do. “You pulled your left ear. That means you’ve got something you have to tell me ASAP.”

  “Uh...”

  “Travis Dalton.” She puffed out her cheeks with a hard breath. “There’s no emergency, is there?”

  “I thought you were upset.”

  Her expression softened. “Well, that’s kind of sweet—and honestly, I’m okay.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  He suggested, “Because we could tell them we need separate tents, that sex before marriage is against our beliefs.”

  She burst out laughing—and then clapped her hand over her mouth to keep too much sound from escaping. Finally, she whispered, “The way we’ve been going at each other? No one’s going to believe we’re a couple of innocent virgins. And even if we were, well, there’s no reason we couldn’t share a tent and keep our hands to ourselves. I mean, in the old days, engaged people used to share the same bed. It was called bundling. They would put a board between them so that—”

  “Stop. I know what bundling is. And no board is going to keep two sex-starved kids apart.”

  “They had integrity back then.”

  “And a bunch of unplanned pregnancies, I’ll bet. You should start worrying.”

  “About?”

  “You’re so hot,” he teased, just to watch her cheeks turn pink. “What if I can’t control myself?”

  She did blush—just a little. And then she scowled to cover it. “Save the shameless flattery for the cameras.” She reached out and grabbed him by the shirtfront, yanking him close. “And don’t mess with the signals.”

  She was one hundred percent dead-on right about that. They couldn’t afford to risk pissing off the powers that be over nothing. And she was really cute when she was mad. “Yes, ma’am.” Her skin had the sweetest flush on it. He admired the pale freckles scattered across the delicate bridge of her nose. “And come to think of it, there’s a good chance they’ve mounted a camera in these trees somewhere. Don’t look around. You’ll give us away.”

  She stiffened and kept her eyes locked with his. “Fine.” He bent a little closer. “What are you up to?” Her whisper sizzled with suspicion.

  “Ask yourself, what do lovers do when they manage to steal a moment alone?”

  And then she smiled. “Got it.” She lifted her head up that extra inch so their lips could meet.

  Yeah.

  Kissing Bren. He was getting way too used to it. And it felt too damn good, dangerously so.

  But he’d never been the kind of guy to let a little danger stop him. He had a part to play, after all. He ran his tongue along the sweet seam where her soft lips touched. With a sigh, she let him in.

  He took shameless advantage, tasting her deeply. She sighed again, like she couldn’t get enough.

  Really, they were so good at this kissing thing. Too good. More and more lately, he forgot that she was still little Brenna O’Reilly and he’d always vowed never to make a move on her. Somehow, the longer they pretended to be crazy in love, the harder it got to stop his mind from spinning fantasies about what it might be like, the two of them, together. For real.

  He imagined taking it further, maybe letting his hand slide up from where he clasped her waist—up over the slim shape of her beneath her soft plaid shirt, up and up, until he cupped her breast. He would tease her nipple with his thumb until it got hard and tight and he could feel it even through her bra.

  Damn. He really needed to dial it back. He was getting excited—and she knew it, too. A sharp gasp escaped her. For one delicious second, she surged even closer, pressing her hips to the growing hardness at his fly.

  And then she yanked those soft hips away. Breaking the kiss, she stared up at him. He tried to force an easy grin when all he really wanted was to pull her back good and close, cover those fine lips again and kiss her some more.

  He would kiss her all over, take her down to the mossy ground under the cottonwoods and not let her up until he’d had a real taste, a deeper taste. A taste that included every smooth, pretty inch of her.

  Still staring wide-eyed, she let go of his shirt. Her breathing was agitated. But she was still Bren. In a split second, she pulled it together, giving him a crooked grin and advising, “I think you’d better pull your mic out of your pocket now and get back to hauling boulders.”

  * * *

  A couple of hours later, the community campfire had a ring of boulders all the way around and a fire laid, tepee-style, all ready to go. Wally did the honors, striking a storm-proof match from the boxes that had been provided in their piles of equipment. The dried leaves inside the tepee of sticks caught fire.

  Dinner was canned chili, which they heated over the fire along with mini hot dogs, also from a can. Real Deal provided all the water anyone could drink, offered in ten-gallon watercoolers. For cleanup, they carried their pots and plates to the creek down a gentle slope west of the campsite. And when nature called, a pair of porta-potties rigged up to look like old-time outhouses waited on the far side of the stream.

  After dinner, they relaxed by the campfire. But the day’s work wasn’t done. One by one, they were called for OTFs—individual on-the-fly interviews.

  “You pulled Travis away from Summer this morning outside the canteen when she moved in close to him,” Roger said to Brenna when it was her turn. “And then, when she followed you and Travis to the edge of the group, you got between her and your fiancé. Why?”

  It was after nine at night. Brenna sat in a camp chair just outside the canteen. The camera was on her. Roger was a disembodied voice beyond the circle of light.

  Behind her they’d set up what they called a green screen so they could digitally add the background later. They’d lit the night around her in a sort of golden glow, and she assumed that if any of this interview made the show, she would appear to be sitting in front of a campfire.

  “Summer’s a big flirt,�
�� she said. “If she comes after my man, she’ll be dealing with me.”

  “Is that what you were doing this morning?”

  She nodded. “That is exactly what I was doing.”

  “You seemed real calm, real purposeful, when Summer moved in on Travis, but how were you feeling inside?”

  “When Summer put her move on Travis at the canteen this morning, I tried to keep a smile on my face, but inside I was angry.”

  “Do you have a message for Summer?”

  “I do.” Brenna looked directly into the camera and played her part for all she was worth. “Watch yourself, Summer. Nobody likes a man-stealing tease.”

  * * *

  Travis ducked into their darkened tent. “Alone at last,” he whispered.

  “Find any recording equipment?” she asked. He’d gone out to pee—and to check the perimeter for hidden recording devices. They’d already painstakingly checked their packs, the tent, their sleeping bags and bedrolls and the lantern as well, and found nothing. But you just never knew.

  “I couldn’t find anything suspicious nearby,” he said. “But we should keep it down, just in case.” He closed the tent flaps and got into his sleeping bag next to her. Only then did he take off his clothes, pulling each item out of the sleeping bag as he removed it.

  Surprisingly, it was fine, cozy. Just her and Travis, finally able to whisper what was on their minds at the end of the day. She couldn’t believe that the idea of sharing a tent with him had made her nervous at first. She didn’t feel the least bit edgy now. There was nothing to be nervous about—not as long as she didn’t let herself dwell on that smoking-hot kiss he’d given her that afternoon.

  “I would kill for a bath about now.” She pulled a hank of hair in front of her nose. “I smell like a campfire.”

  He chuckled, the sound low and rich in the darkness. “They’ve got some sort of outdoor shower setup by one of the barns, so eventually we’ll get a turn at those. But still, you need to get used to that grubby feeling. It’s only going to get worse.”