Cullen's Bride by Fiona Brand

Author:Fiona Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

Cullen retrieved his mobile phone from the glove box as soon as he was seated behind the wheel of his truck.

His call was picked up on the third ring without any call diversion, which meant that his cousin and company Commander, Blade Lombard, was carrying his mobile with him.

“Lombard,” a gravelly voice snapped.

“Don’t tell me I’ve caught you at a bad time again,” Cullen murmured with real amusement. In the regiment, Blade’s reputation with women was legendary. If Blade was off duty, chances were it would be a “bad time” to reach him.

There was a grunt of laughter, a rude suggestion concerning where the cell phone should go from a feminine voice, followed by a high-pitched squeal.

Blade came back on. “You’d better make it fast, mate.”

“I’m getting married next week, and I want to take some unpaid leave—seven months, give or take a few days.”

There was a stunned silence, then, “I take it this means you’re not coming on exercise with us? The Australians will be ticked. They were really looking forward to taking you down after the damage you did to their sabotage team last year. They’re still trying to figure out how you managed to do it before they’d even made it to the target.”

“I only got three,” Cullen growled impatiently. “You and the boys got the rest”

“West and I bagged one each,” Blade murmured. “Carter and Ben had to fight over who got to take the last guy.”

“Is the leave on?” Cullen asked curtly.

There was another small silence, and Cullen could almost hear Blade’s mind grinding through the regulations governing leave. “I take it there are extenuating family circumstances?”

Cullen briefly outlined the situation.

Blade muttered a string of inventive curses but, typically, didn’t hang out for details “When did you say this wedding is happening?”

“Next week. Saturday, I guess. Why?”

“Because I intend to be your best man Ring me if there’s any change of plan.”

There was a brief garbled conversation in the background, some muffled grunts as if a struggle were in progress, then the phone went dead. Cullen stabbed the transmission button, snapped the wafer-thin phone closed and tossed it on the passenger seat. Darkness settled around him, along with the relative quietness of night. He glanced up at Rachel’s flat Her windows glowed with a soft radiance. He could hear music, classical music. She would be sitting down on one of those cosy sofas, maybe reading a book, eating from the fine porcelain he’d seen set out on her kitchen table.

A sudden vision of his house, his kitchen, replaced the gentle warmth of Rachel’s.

He was going to have to make some changes. Damn, but his place was...rough. Clean, but rough. Suited to a bachelor who didn’t spend any time there except to do the basics like cook, eat and sleep.

Frustration had his hands curling into fists as he gripped the wheel He didn’t know anything about making a house into a home. And that house was going to take a substantial injection of funds to make it into anything that resembled comfortable.

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