Victoria Pade - The Cowboy's Gift-Wrapped Bride

A beat-up shaving kit.

The brown leather was soiled and ashy, and one side showed signs of having been crushed and then pulled back into a semblance of its original shape.

Jenn pulled it out, reassessing the other articles of the suitcase to be certain that nothing else in it belonged to a man.

It didn’t.

So why did she have this ratty old Dopp kit?

She set it on top of the other things in the suitcase so she could open it. It wasn’t easy. The zipper was rusty and stubborn. But she finally managed to force its teeth apart.

And when she did, what she found inside was not shaving gear.

The kit was full of money.

Lots of it.

Jenn turned the shaving kit upside down and shook it, causing a fluttering green rain of bills to fall onto the quilt.

There wasn’t anything else in the kit. Just cash.

She did a quick count—$2,157—none of it in anything larger than a twenty.

Traveling money? Her savings? Or maybe moving money? Maybe she’d been on her way to Elk Creek to live.

But would she have traveled with so much cash? And if she’d been moving to Elk Creek, why did she only have one small suitcase rather than a whole carload of belongings?

Maybe she’d come to Elk Creek to buy something. But why in cash? If she were making a large purchase wouldn’t she use a check or a credit card?

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the seller wanted cash.

But the one thing that made none of those possibilities click in her mind was that something about the money triggered an unpleasant feeling in Jenn. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but she had the sense that it wasn’t hers.

And that gave her pause.

Because if the money wasn’t hers, then whom did it belong to? And why did she have it?

Of course just a sense that it wasn’t her money and a bad feeling about it didn’t make it true. Maybe it was hers but it was all she had in the world because she’d lost her job and needed to start a whole new life. Maybe what she’d been feeling before the accident was depression or despondency or natural concern and so the money had triggered a negative feeling now as a remnant of all that.

But somehow she didn’t believe it.

She didn’t feel any kind of ownership over the cash. Instead she felt as if she wanted to hide it away. As if she were ashamed of it.

And why would she be ashamed of it unless it was ill-gotten gains of some kind?

That thought didn’t sit well, either.

Was she a thief?

Oh dear.

What if she was a horrible person who had stolen money? Or swindled someone out of it? What if she hadn’t been headed to Elk Creek at all but had just been on her way through it to somewhere else? Somewhere she was running to escape something terrible she’d done?

Except if that was the case, why did she know so much about Elk Creek and the people who lived there? But then that had been the million-dollar question all along.

Or maybe it was just the $2,157 question.

So what was she going to do with it? she asked herself as she stood there staring down at all that cash on the bed.

She didn’t know much, but suddenly she was very sure of one thing: It didn’t seem like a good idea to tell Matt McDermot or anyone else about it.

It was possible that she couldn’t really trust everyone around her, that someone might help themselves to the money if they knew it existed.

Okay, maybe now she was being crazy. She didn’t actually believe anyone—especially Matt McDermot—would take anything from her.

On the other hand, she couldn’t help being concerned with what Matt might think about it—and her—if she also let him know her negative feelings about the money.

Sure, he might give her the benefit of the doubt. To a man with his kind of wealth $2,157 wasn’t that big a deal. It probably was just traveling money to him.

But what if he didn’t think that? What if he thought she might have come by it by less than honest means?

It was bad enough to worry that she might be a thief, but to have Matt even consider that a possibility, too? To have his opinion of her tinged?

She just couldn’t stand that idea.

Not that it had anything to do with that warm, tingly feeling she’d had earlier in the truck on the way home or when she’d taken his hand to get out of it, she reassured herself. Those feelings had just been part of the mental fog she’d been in since regaining consciousness.

She just didn’t want to inspire any mistrust on his part. After all, she was a guest in his house. A perfect stranger he was allowing into his home, around his family.

And she needed his hospitality. His help. Certainly she didn’t want to alienate him.

So that was all there was to it. She was sure of it.

She gathered up the money in a hurry, as if someone might come in any moment and see it, and she stuffed it back into the shaving kit. Then she hid the shaving kit deep beneath the clothes in her suitcase.

Maybe the sense that the money didn’t belong to her was a mistake anyway, she thought as she did. It wasn’t as if she were cooking on all burners. She was recognizing people she didn’t know even while she couldn’t remember her own name. She was attracted to a man she’d just met. A man she’d just met under the worst of circumstances. So who was to say that nothing more than a bad feeling about the money gave any credence to its origin or what her having it meant?

“It’s probably nothing awful,” she said out loud, as if that would chase away her negative feelings.

It didn’t, though.

Something about that money rubbed her the wrong way.

But it was better that it rubbed her the wrong way than that it rubbed Matt McDermot the wrong way.

Because as much as she wished it weren’t so, the one thing she knew without a doubt was that she cared a whole lot about what he thought of her.

A whole lot more than she wanted to care…?.

Matt didn’t ordinarily shave at eight o’clock at night. Unless there was something special going on, he didn’t usually shave more than once a day.

But there he was, standing in front of the mirror in his bathroom, shaving. At eight o’clock at night. With nothing special going on.

Well, not anything he would have normally considered special, like a holiday or a dinner or a meeting or a party or a date.

It had been one hell of a day, though, he had to admit. Driving through a blizzard. Pulling an unconscious woman out of a snow-buried car. Finding out that that woman didn’t remember who she was but that she did know who he was, and who Bax and Carly and Buzz were. Bringing that woman home with him…

Definitely not a run-of-the-mill day.

But no real reason to shave at the end of it, either.

So why was he doing it? he asked himself.

“As if you don’t know,” he answered, speaking to his reflection as if it were another person in the room.

He was shaving because in just a few minutes he’d be sitting down to supper with Jenn Johnson.

Not that Matt was happy to admit that that was his motivation. Because he wasn’t.

It was one thing to help someone who was hurt and stranded in a snowstorm, to bring her home with him when she had nowhere else to go. That had only been the neighborly thing to do and Matt was nothing if not neighborly.

But it was something else again to be shaving for her.

And thinking about her every minute since he’d set eyes on her.

Those were above and beyond the call of being neighborly. And he knew it.

Yet there he was, doing both.

And why? Was it going to help her remember who she was? Was it going to give him some idea of why she’d been on her way into or passing through Elk Creek?

No. His shaving didn’t serve any purpose at all.