King's Queen

by Marie Johnston

  Another short visit with Dad. I always hoped for more. Like I had with my marriage. For four years. Was Dad why I had accepted similar neglect from my husband?

  “Tell your mom and Randall hi.” Dad leaned down to kiss me and the aroma of cheap vanilla air freshener washed over me. Truck stops and vanilla-tree air fresheners would always remind me of Dad. And I was afraid that was all I would have of him.

  He rushed out the door to his semi parked at the far end of the lot, loaded with mattresses to deliver later tonight. How many more of these last-minute lunches was I going to sit through? How many more was I willing to sit through?

  My glass was refilled and I watched out the window as everyone came and went. What else should I do with my day? These were the weekends that made me miss working Saturdays and Sundays. I’d been at the library long enough that I only worked one weekend every six weeks unless I picked up a shift for someone. I would’ve, but no one took time off in the winter. The boys didn’t have a wrestling tournament and I had nothing to do but hunt for apartments.

  I moved ice around in my glass with the straw, searching my brain for errands to run. The obvious one was finding a place of my own, but my stomach clenched and my throat grew thick whenever I thought of apartment hunting.

  “Katie?”

  My head popped up at the familiar voice. My gaze landed on a guy my age. His face had rounded out since our college years, but his blue eyes were as kind as they’d always been and his grin was aimed at me. “Gabriel?”

  He laughed and held his arms out. “Been a while, right?”

  I rose and wrapped my arms around him. My college sweetheart. We could’ve been more than that, but we hadn’t gotten beyond the sweetheart stage to madly in love.

  What would it have been like if we had? Would we have found jobs in the same city? Would I have two kids by now and my own wrestling tournaments to prepare for?

  Longing tugged at my heart. When I pictured two kids running around, Aiden was in the background. It was why I’d quit imagining what it would be like to have kids with Aiden.

  Gabriel let me go, still grinning. “Small world, eh?”

  “What are you doing in town?” I gestured to where Dad had been sitting. “Have a seat.” Gabriel looked around, his gaze curious. I waved off his unspoken question. “I met my dad for lunch but he had to take off.”

  He slid into the seat across from me. “How is your dad? How are you?” He chuckled. “First question first. I had a conference in town. I’m heading back to Helena tonight. You live here though? I heard you got married.” His eyes dipped to the hand my wedding ring should’ve been on.

  My smile started to die before I caught it. “I did, and I work at the library. Dad is doing well. Caffeinated and chews through audiobooks on his long hauls.”

  “That’s great, Katie.” His head bobbed and his eyes once again dipped to my bare wedding ring finger. If it wasn’t too obvious, I’d curl my arm into my stomach and hide it. “Were the rumors true? You married Aiden King?”

  “Yes.” I wiggled my hand. Did I commit to a lie? It wasn’t a lie. I was still married. Technically. “I don’t wear the ring. It’s…” Talking to Gabriel had always been easy. He was an enthusiastic rambler like me, but he was also an active participant in the conversation. And he listened. “It made me self-conscious.”

  “Ah. The Oil King got you a rock.”

  “A boulder.”

  He chuckled. “I admit to being disappointed when I heard you were off the market, but I’m happy for you. After you, I came close to marrying once, but I chose my job again.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with loving your work.” Unless you use it to stay away from those you love.

  The waitress stopped by, digging in her waist pouch for a pen. “Can I get you anything?”

  Gabriel lifted his brows at me. “You have to go soon?”

  I shook my head. Talking to Gabriel would be the perfect distraction in my day. He ordered a bowl of chili and salad. My Diet Coke was topped off.

  “So, you two have kids?” His lips curved into a rueful smile. “Sorry. Small-town nosy. I slip into it when I’m talking to someone I know.”

  Resignation spread through me. I was a married woman in my thirties; it wasn’t an uncommon question. Most people who asked were looking for a familiar thread of conversation and grasped at the same questions they’d heard adults around them asking their whole life. I didn’t take it personally, but I avoided the topic as often as I could. Sucked that it came on the heels of my question to myself yesterday. “No kids. You?”

  He shook his head. “Maybe someday. I haven’t ruled it out.”

  We chatted through his meal and three more refills of my drink. He asked about my family and work. Bisa. Trips I’d taken since I graduated. We laughed over college memories. Gabriel was nothing more than a friend, we had a history together, but the way he knew me was comfortable. Reassuring. Our conversation was back and forth and he didn’t look at his phone.

  Would Aiden and I ever reach this point? Gabriel and I were like this even after we’d broken up. Aiden hadn’t called once since I walked out on him.

  The chances of our marriage surviving seemed slimmer than ever.

  Aiden

  * * *

  The wintry countryside passed by the window as I drove to Xander’s new place. Brittle brown grass stuck out of the snow. Green spiky bushes and ponderosa trees dotted the hills. Fence lines cut off ranchland from the road, running in clean lines between sections and quarters.

  I turned down the long road that led into the driveway of Xander and Savvy’s house. Given that my brother and his wife were millionaires, most people would assume their house was ostentatious, sucking resources down just for the right look. But their house was no different than other new builds around Billings. Savvy had gone with a two-level prefab, recycled-steel-sided home in brick red with locally sourced rock accents—she and Xander had roamed their land, digging their own boulders out of the dirt.

  Most of the interior was finished, and the two world travelers wanted to spend the winter in their home. Xander had left much of the basement unfinished to give himself something to do while Savvy ran her consulting business.

  I parked by the garage doors. The door in front of me opened, and Xander waved from the steps that led to the door to the house.

  I got out and tipped my head at Savvy’s hybrid car. “How’s that handle in the snow?”

  Xander chuckled. “She’s determined to prove that it has enough power to survive out here, but I’ll keep my four-wheel drive just in case.”

  I followed him inside. A brand-new house, yet it welcomed a person better than the one I’d lived in for years. Warmth surrounded me and the soft smells of lavender and vanilla laced the air. The walls, though, they weren’t much different than mine. The photographs that hung all over the house were Xander’s own work. Pictures of the mountain he’d camped in outside Kosovo, brilliant blue water in Sri Lanka, sweeping fields in the Philippines, it all made the place uniquely theirs.

  When Kate had moved in, she’d added to my sparse decor. Mama’s photos were displayed, some of Xander’s, and a few from amateur photographers in the area. The landscapes lining the walls of my house weren’t much different than Xander’s, but the atmosphere in each house was worlds apart. I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “I’m going to get those pretty jeans of yours dirty,” Xander said as he led me to the basement.

  “You mean when I show you how the hard work is really done?” The joke came easy. Xander and I hadn’t hung out much since I’d left home. He’d avoided the family, only coming home for weddings and the occasional spring cattle work, sometimes the fall. He and Savvy had moved to Billings, but this was the first time he’d been around for any length of time.

  I had an inbox full of work, but when he’d messaged asking if I could help this weekend, I’d traded a long day working for some brother time. I could work tonight.

&n
bsp; “Want a beer?” Xander’s voice echoed throughout the open basement. Windows let in what light the thick clouds allowed through. Small plastic domes lined tables. Each of them had something green growing inside.

  Xander pointed to them. “If you get hungry, pick a lettuce.”

  “No kidding?” I wandered over. My boots thumped over the gray flooring. Linoleum. I couldn’t believe Savvy would use a material that people remodeled to get out of their homes, but she’d rattled off details about linseed oil, ease of manufacturing, and using it as fuel when it was no longer useful.

  Xander turned into a nice-sized square room. “This is going to be my office. I wanted to finish it with my bare hands.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “I thought that being surrounded by my own creative work would get the juices going on below-zero days.”

  I lifted a brow.

  His lips twitched. “Shut up. Dick.” He went to a stack of rectangular planks. “Cork flooring. It should be easy enough to install.”

  Between the two of us, we knocked out the floor in a few hours. Days like this made me hate the office, days when I could move and feel alive instead of like a mountain of paperwork would suffocate me. I lived for going to King’s Creek and helping Dawson. A few times a year wasn’t enough.

  Xander grabbed a couple of beers from the downstairs fridge and we sprawled on the floor of his office.

  “Gonna stay and help me with the trim?” he asked.

  “Is it stained already?”

  His grin was unrepentant. He had more work than just the flooring that he wanted my help with. “About that. There’s space in the garage to stain it. Just like the floor, it won’t take long with both of us.”

  I took a long drink.

  “Unless you have to go back to work.” He sounded resigned.

  “There’s always work.” I didn’t say I had to go. I didn’t want to go back to the office, or to my quiet house. My stress headache was returning.

  “Tell me to butt the hell out—because I know how Grams is—but why won’t she let you hire on?”

  Grams earned a lot of the blame we put on her, but she wasn’t the sole backer of this decision. Not for the VP of finance. The other positions were just her thinking small, thinking it was like the old days when companies backstabbed each other instead of collaborating. She thought more higher-ups meant more opportunities for subterfuge.

  “Money. Trust. Loss of control. It’s Grams; take your pick,” I answered.

  He set his beer down. “All right, then. How’s Kate?”

  I clenched my jaw. I’d rather talk about the company even after I’d just been thinking how nice it was to ignore it for a bit. “Fine. Living with her parents.”

  “Are you two…”

  “For a guy who left home and made himself unreachable for over ten years to avoid talking about his life, you’re really damn nosy.”

  “Maybe I learned that avoiding the issue made everything worse and cost me a lot of years with people I usually like to hang around when they’re not being touchy assholes.”

  Touchy asshole. Astute description. “I asked her for time.”

  “You don’t want to divorce?”

  I glared at him. First Dad. Now Xander. “No. Why would I?”

  “None of us really knew if you married for the trust or not.”

  “None of you?”

  His gaze was steady. I ground my teeth together and stared at the off-white wall across from me. Dad and my brothers didn’t think I’d married my wife because I loved her, and I hadn’t thought I needed to justify myself. Maybe a little part of me thought my actions should speak for themselves, like they had with the rest of my life. And…they had.

  “I love her,” I finally said. “That’s why I married her. It’s as simple as that.” Simple, but impossibly complicated.

  His gaze bored into me for a few moments before he said, “Did she give you time?”

  I thought back to that night I’d bared a part of me to Kate in her old bedroom. “Yes.”

  “So what are you doing with it?”

  I scrubbed my face with my hands. “I fucked it up.” We had talked. We’d taken a trip together. Then I’d done what I always had and she’d left. “How am I supposed to change when I don’t know what else I can do?”

  “Have you talked to Dad?”

  “Nope.”

  “Dawson? Beck?”

  I shook my head.

  “Anyone?”

  I meant to be sarcastic, but I couldn’t summon the energy. “Think that’s my problem?”

  Xander snorted. I shot him a dirty look, but his expression turned somber. “Maybe that’s where you need to start.”

  “I tried.”

  “You gotta keep doing it. I also wouldn’t waste that time she gave you. I saw her with another guy.”

  Fury spread through my body like a brush fire, only to be cooled by despair an instant later. Another guy? She wouldn’t move on that quickly.

  Would she? “Maybe it was a coworker.”

  “It was the truck stop with the restaurant.”

  The relief was so instant, I almost put my hand on my heart to make sure it resumed beating. “She meets her dad there.”

  “Does her dad look like he’s our age?”

  Damn. Her dad was older than ours. She wouldn’t be that far from the library for lunch with a coworker.

  Xander interpreted my silence as a no. “I was filling up and she was by the window, and I don’t know, man. She was different.”

  “How so?” I couldn’t brace myself against what he had to say. It was like my bruised pride opened up for the beating.

  “She was laughing and talking and gesturing with her hands. She’s so reserved around us, like she wants to engage more than she does. Do we intimidate her?”

  “No. I do.” I drained my beer. Had she moved on? Did I think we had more time while she was living the life she’d been missing out on? Like lunch in the middle of the day, at a place where she could get the greasy diner burgers and crispy fries she loved. When was the last time I’d met her for lunch?

  Xander rose in one swift move. “Well, she’s not here, but I am. Practice talking to me. Removing the stick from your ass is going to be hard, but I’ve got some ideas.”

  But doing something with my hands was better than listening to the litany of my own faults I could recite in my sleep.

  As I went up the stairs and through his house to the garage, my gaze caught on a picture of Savvy laughing in a meadow, her arms spread wide and her hair streaming behind her. Beside it was another casual photo of both Savvy and Xander in front of a small cabin. Several more photos of them with their friends surrounded it.

  That was it. The difference between his decor and mine.

  Other than a wedding photo over our mantel, there were no other pictures of me and my wife.

  Chapter 12

  Kate

  * * *

  It was dark out by the time I parked in the driveway of my old house. The magnetic pull this place had on me would lure me inside to stay if I let it. When Aiden had first brought me here, I’d thought it was the most magnificent house I’d seen. Simple, but majestic. It blended with the rugged beauty of the hills and buttes around Billings. The deep blue of the siding on the peaks above the door and the garage paralleled the Yellowstone River that ran a ways behind the house.

  I missed my home.

  If only I was coming here for any other reason than to talk about our divorce. Aiden hadn’t called. He’d messaged. Can you come talk tonight?

  I hadn’t heard from him for days and now he wanted to talk? It wasn’t a good sign. Good thing I’d been in my bedroom in the trailer. The tears had been instant and plentiful.

  There was a tap on the window. I screeched and jumped.

  Aiden held his hands up. “It’s just me.” His eyes crinkled at the corner with his almost smile. “Sorry. The stars are out, so I came out to wait for you.”

  Aiden was taking time t
o admire the stars? It was after eight, but that was early for him to be home.

  I got out and he shut the door behind me. His breath puffed around him, mingling with mine. He wasn’t wearing more than the Princeton hoodie that Beck had gotten for him and blue jeans. His feet were bare on the frigid concrete.

  His gaze raked down my body, making the winter coat I wore feel invisible. The light from the house cast shadows over his face, but not enough to hide the heat in his eyes. Warmth spread through my body in all the right places. I scurried away.

  No calls, no messages for days. I was imagining the heat. My attraction to him clouded my judgment and I needed to be at full capacity when we talked.

  The front door was unlocked. I left my winter coat on a hook and stepped out of my ankle boots. He followed me in and up the stairs.

  I wanted to sink into the couch, find a show, and enjoy the peace. The library was quiet, but the reference desk required constant energy and brain power. Some days I didn’t get more than a few minutes to myself at the desk. I didn’t mind, but eight hours of it could be taxing. The feel of my house sank into me, soothing my bones. It wasn’t a cluttered house, full of memory-laden knickknacks. I would’ve liked to do more, but Aiden had seemed to prefer the starkness.

  A blanket and pillow rested on an armrest of the couch. Had he been sleeping out here?

  I didn’t sit. I couldn’t.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I whirled around and stumbled back. He was close, towering over me in a way I loved too much.

  “Why were you out with a guy the other day?”

  “Gabriel? How did you…”

  “Xander saw you.”

  The truck stop was on the same side of town where Xander lived and Billings wasn’t a big city. It wasn’t a surprise he fueled up there. How had that looked to him? Gabriel and I had laughed a lot while we were together. To Xander, I’d probably looked like I was having the time of my life. “I had just finished lunch with Dad and then Gabriel happened to stop in. He’s an old…friend.”

  “I don’t recall a Gabriel.”