Fortune's June Bride (Mills & Boon Cherish) (The Fortunes of Texas: Cowboy Country, Book 6) by Allison Leigh

excited.” She stole a glance at his suntanned chest, intriguingly dusted with a swirl of dark hair, before stepping behind the changing screen. Would that chest hair be soft under her palms, or crisp?
    She shook her head sharply and hurriedly kicked off her discount-store tennis shoes, which Roselyn would’ve never been caught dead in. Then she was annoyed for still allowing the other woman to even intrude on her thoughts. She yanked down her khaki Bermuda shorts and bumped her head loudly against the wall when she leaned over to pick them up.
    “You okay back there?”
    She straightened, rubbing her head. “Yes. Just clumsy. You ever had anyone in your life who gets on your nerves no matter what?” She draped her shorts over the top of the screen, which was much too tall for anyone to see over. “Probably not,” she answered her own question. She tugged her T-shirt over her head and flipped it, too, on the top of the screen, then unclipped her bra since she couldn’t wear it without the straps showing with the costume.
    “Why probably not?”
    She could hear him rummaging through the drawers. “If you’re looking for your string tie, try the bottom drawer on the left.” She unzipped the wedding gown and stepped into it, wiggling the boned corset up over her hips until she could slip her arms through the lace band that served as the top of the dress, stretching from one shoulder to the other. “The director for the
Sunday Go to Meeting
choir uses it and that’s where he always sticks it.” She heard him slide open another drawer. “Because you’re so even-tempered I can’t see anyone ever getting on your nerves.”
    “Good call. On the tie, that is.”
    She pushed aside the long strands of glass beads that hung from the lace band and began working up the hidden zipper beneath her arm.
    “But I don’t know about being all that even-tempered,” he added.
    She twisted her torso until she could see what she was doing in the narrow excuse for a mirror that someone had tacked against the sliver of wall in the confined space. “Seriously? Even when you went to the town meetings about Cowboy Country and were adamantly against it being opened here, you didn’t lose your cool.” The zipper stuck partway up as it often did, and she carefully worked it back downward again to start fresh. “Daddy, now. He was another story. When I told him I was coming to work here, I thought he’d split a vein.”
    “Didn’t want to lose his best ranch hand?”
    “I s’pose.” The zipper caught a second time and she exhaled. Began again.
    “So who is it that’s getting on your nerves?”
    She twisted a little more and realized the zipper was catching on a thread where the satin stitching was becoming frayed. “It was more rhetorical,” she muttered. Her neck was starting to hurt from craning her head around the way she was and she lowered her arms, shaking it loose again. “Cowboy Country brings people from far and wide. That woman I was with at the Foaming Barrel was my old college roommate.”
    “What woman?”
    She caught her reflection in the cheap mirror and made a face at herself to stop the sudden silly smile. “Doesn’t matter.”
    Feeling immeasurably cheered, she went to work on the zipper again and this time, made it all the way to the top. She fluffed the tulle skirt that extended to her ankles below the edges of the scalloped lace overskirt and stepped out from behind the screen. “Almost ready. Where’s Frank?”
    “Saw him out by the buckboard already.”
    Which was a good reminder how far behind she was running. She always beat Frank to the buckboard. “I am not going to be late because of Roselyn St. James,” she vowed and shoved her feet—white crew socks and all—into the old-fashioned boots in record time.
    Galen retrieved the ringlet-curled hairpiece that was hanging from a display of them while she quickly twisted her ponytail into a knot. “That’s her name?” He handed her the