by Amelia Wilde
“There’s no way around it?”
“Trust me, I’ve checked.” And checked, and checked, and checked. “The deed won’t transfer to me until thirty days after the county clerk’s office receives a copy of my marriage certificate.”
His eyebrows go up again. “Why the thirty days?”
“Because if I file for divorce before then…”
“The deed is off,” he quips.
“You did not just make that joke. This is a serious situation.”
He looks at me, stone-faced. “Sometimes a good pun can alleviate the tension.”
“There are better ways to alleviate tension.”
“I didn’t say it was the best way.” Asher blinks.
“Yeah? What’s the best way?”
“If I say beating around the bush will you murder me in this bar?”
“Oh my god.”
Asher picks up his beer and drains it. “Ask me what you want to ask me, Everly Carson. You’re running out of time.”
3
Asher
Everly bites her lip and I force another breath into my lungs. Tension pulls between us like a rope hitched to my rib cage. The beer cascades over my brain in an alcoholic sheet. Ask me. I don’t know why I want her to ask me. Maybe when the question is out in the open air, we can leave this bizarre moment behind and breathe.
“What would you say to being my husband? My fake husband.” She curls her hand around the empty highball glass with the lime wedge still hanging from the rim.
The oxygen goes out of my chest in a whoosh.
When I walked into this bar, this was the last imaginable scenario. People meet in bars all the time. They take each other home. A tiny percentage of them go on to multiple dates and relationships and marriages. I never thought—I never thought—that this would happen.
Desperation shines in the pink light reflected in Everly’s eyes.
It’s wrong.
It’s wrong to pretend something like this. Certainty circles itself around my spine and hardens into something confident and forthright.
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”
She purses her red lips, and I want to trace my thumb over that cherry color more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. “No one would need to know.”
“Some people would know. And isn’t it too late, anyway? There must be a waiting period. For the license.” In New York, it’s…at least a day. Maybe two days. I can’t remember, and pulling out my phone to Google it seems like the wrong move.
“There’s no waiting period here. We’d just have to go to the courthouse tomorrow. License, vows, certificate.” Everly ticks the items off like she’s not talking about a real wedding. Now that we’re here, talking about it, my entire body shies away from the thought of getting married like it’s casual. Not even my brothers are married yet, unless they’ve all done it in secret while I’ve been gone.
And what would my father say?
I have to swallow a laugh, because as much as I try to pretend he’d be disappointed, he’s the one who’s been building secrets for years. I’ve never asked Roman outright if he knows how many outside investments and properties and connections my father has. I’m not sure I know about them all.
It nags at me again—the memory of my dad. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her, he’d said when he’d handed me the folder. The information in the folder itself didn’t give me any insight into what’s out here in Montana. There was no truly detailed information. The most important pieces seemed to be two addresses. One of them is a bank. I’ve looked it up, and the branch is in downtown Paulson. The other is a street address. I still don’t know where it is.
And even though the beer has gone straight to my head, I don’t buy that everything here is what it seems. I don’t buy that Everly didn’t know who the cowboy who came out of nowhere was.
But most of all, I want this too badly.
It’s too easy. It’s too simple. I walked into the bar with a heaviness in my chest that was more than jet lag. How many bars and restaurants and hotels have I walked into alone? How many have I walked into with a woman on my arm who won’t be there by the end of the week? How many times have I sat on a plane in silence because I’ve never felt right about inviting someone to wade knee-deep into my family’s secrets when most of my family doesn’t know about them?
When I looked at Everly sitting on that stool and cursing into her highball glass, my heart made a foolish wish. The universe handed it right back to me like it was teaching me a lesson. You wanted a wife, Bliss? How about the shape of one but not the substance?
“Everly.”
She looks into my eyes, and the dark hope there almost swallows me whole. Of all the bars in Paulson, of all the bars in Montana, of all the bars in the United States, and I had to walk into this one.
“I’m sorry.”
Everly smiles, huge and rueful. “Don’t be sorry. I came here to find a husband, right? If I was serious about the whole thing, I’d have gone to a better bar.”
I fumble blindly in my pocket and come up with a twenty. “I really am sorry.” I thought there was a chance I could go through with a lie this monumental, but there were too many other secrets. I can’t say it out loud. “The idea…”
“Silly.” She looks back down into her highball glass. “Just a silly game at the bar.”
We both know this isn’t true. We both have to know it.
“I’m glad to have met you.” Something wrenches in my chest at the thought of never seeing her again, but how? And why? I’m not staying here for longer than a day or two. You go, you make sure everything’s all right, you come back. Those were the instructions. Those were always the instructions.
For the last few months, I’ve been avoiding the just come back piece.
I can’t avoid it anymore.
It’s late—too late to be dealing with this, and too late to call anyone on the East Coast and explain exactly where I’ve been. I came here because I’m jet-lagged, because it’s morning in Paris, because checking in to the newly renovated Marriott where I booked a room on my personal card seemed unbearable.
I came here because it was the first result when I searched for a bar.
Under no circumstances should I be walking out in the grips of a fake engagement.
I stand up from the barstool.
Everly’s eyes flick upward at the motion. “Bye, Asher.” There’s such a familiarity in her voice that it stops me short.
Almost.
I’m three steps from the door when I hear her footsteps behind me. My body turns against my will, and there she is, one of the napkins from the bar folded in half in her hand. “Listen.” She hesitates, then lets out a big breath and starts again. “Listen, I know—this is crazy, and you have nothing to gain from it, and we don’t know each other. But if you change your mind, call me.”
I shouldn’t take the napkin.
I should hold up my hand and gently decline her number.
I should do what I came here to do, and I should go back to Bliss, where I’m supposed to be.
The napkin feels sturdier in my hand than I thought it would. It’s high quality for a bar napkin. “Goodnight, Everly.”
She doesn’t say anything back.
The rental car’s wheel is slick under my hands. It’s such a new model that it doesn’t have many miles on it, but the way the wheel slips beneath my palms makes the whole business of driving on the open roads under the blue Montana morning feel risky.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t really slept. The hum of the air conditioner couldn’t soothe my frantic, Everly-drunk brain until the sun was up, and crashing out for a couple of hours doesn’t count. At least, not according to my body and soul.
The address from my father’s folder is programmed into my phone, and the GPS has taken me out of Paulson and out past rolling fields. Ranches. These are the ranches. This is probably where that cowboy was headed when he left the bar l
ast night.
The GPS beeps. “Turn left in four hundred feet,” the woman’s voice says, placid as ever. I can see a driveway up ahead. My heart leaps and stutters and wishes I was on a plane back to New York. What did my father send me to check on here? A ranch? What do I know about ranches?
I make the lefthand turn onto a pressed dirt drive and pass a sign that says Sweetwater Ranch.
What? I blink twice. That’s what it says.
The drive dips, going down a low hill, and then it crests another one.
The house comes into view.
It’s a farmhouse.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but it is a farmhouse. White wood siding. Bright red shutters. Weathervane up top, spinning lazily in the breeze.
A police car out front.
A…police car out front?
I wipe a hand across my eyes, my pulse pounding, the throb loud in my ears. The bottom of my right foot aches. I want to throw the car in reverse and get out of here.
The siding. The weathervane. The policeman’s navy uniform, stark even in the shade of the front porch. The sun cuts down on the roof of the house, bright and blazing.
I stop the car and snatch the paper with the addresses from the passenger seat.
The address matches the iron numbers nailed next to the front door.
The weathervane, the uniform, the numbers.
And Everly, standing in the doorway, looking like she’s witnessing the end of the world.
4
Everly
This is, without a doubt, my life’s finest moment. Finest. Moment. Send the photographers, print that shit out on canvas, and hang it over the mantel.
“I’m sorry to have woken you.” Kevin Lassiter shifts his weight from foot to foot out on the porch, one hand resting awkwardly on his heavy police belt and the other pinning a folded white sheet of paper to the front of his navy uniform shirt.
I swallow the sourness on my tongue and resist the urge to pat at my hair. “You didn’t wake me, Kev. It’s all right.”
His eyebrows go up just enough to let me know he doesn’t believe me, and he’s right not to. I did just wake up. Rolled out of bed in yesterday’s clothes. Did I expect one Kevin Lassiter of the Paulson police department to be on my doorstep? I did not, otherwise I’d have taken the time to brush my hungover teeth.
The rest of me is hungover, too. It turns out that the outer limit of my tolerance is right around the fifth cosmopolitan. I have a vague memory of Greg putting me into a cab and another one of shouting at my sister, Brooke, when I came through the farmhouse at two in the morning.
The only saving grace is that she’s not here now to witness this sorry show.
“Well,” Kev says with a heavy sigh. “I know who you are.”
“That’s right,” I croak. “You better not have forgotten.” Kevin is obviously here on official business, but it’s so weird that my skin feels tight all over and my head throbs with the cognitive dissonance of seeing a guy like Kevin Lassiter dressed up in a police uniform, much less wearing one because it’s his actual job. He used to sit behind me in science class junior year. We spent most of our time making up vaguely sexual innuendos to take the place of all the boring science-y terms.
“I didn’t forget, Ms. Carson.”
I make a face. I can’t help it. Hearing Ms. Carson out of his mouth makes me feel a thousand years old, in comparison to the hundred years old I already felt from the hangover. I have an achy chest and an achy back, too, and I’m willing to admit in the privacy of my own thoughts that getting rejected by Asher Bliss stung. It was an absurd proposition in the first place, and yet…
Kevin unfolds the paper and clears his throat. “I’ve been asked by the county clerk’s office to inform you, in person, that a scheduled transfer of property is due to take place tomorrow, unless a marriage certificate is supplied to the clerk’s office by five p.m. local time. Any occupants will have seven days to vacate the property after the transfer is complete.”
“That’s a nice way to put it, Kev. A scheduled transfer of property. It almost sounds like this whole thing isn’t batshit crazy.” Disbelief climbs up my spine like a monkey and wraps its arms around my neck from behind.
Kevin has the grace to blush, and it deflates the cheap helium balloon of my anger right down into shame.
“I don’t want to do this either, Mallory.” The softness in his voice is somehow worse than the official tone he used to read the notice. “It’s not like I want you and Brooke to lose—”
The smooth rumble of a rental car cresting the hill of my drives interrupts him. I have a single shining moment of relief—at least my old buddy Kevin doesn’t have to keep expressing how sorry he feels for me—until my brain kicks into gear. Who’d be driving a rental car down the long driveway toward my house.
“Uh—” Kevin folds the paper and hands it to me. “Here. This is for your records.”
I shove it haphazardly in the direction of my pocket without looking. I’m waiting for the sun to get the hell off the windshield of the rental so I can see inside. Waiting, waiting…
Then it’s gone, and my stomach turns inside out in an internal version of a blush that sweeps across my cheeks like an instant sunburn.
Asher Bliss.
I gave him my number, not my address.
His expression is fierce and he guns the accelerator a little, hustling up the driveway.
“I’ll be going.” Kevin takes his hand off his belt and tips his hat.
I shoot him a look. “The hat tip? Really?”
“Oh, give me a break, Mal.” There’s the Kevin I know.
He straightens up. “I’ll get my car out of the way of your guest. And…you’re welcome. I was supposed to come closer to five, but I wanted to give you extra time to… you know.”
“Live in this nightmare.”
He lifts both hands, palms up. “Your dad was a piece of work.”
“You can say that again, Officer Lassiter.”
Asher parks his car behind the police cruiser and his front door pops open without a moment’s hesitation. He shades his eyes with his hand. The poor guy probably can’t believe the disheveled creature standing in front of him is the same sexy vixen who wanted to marry him last night.
“Everly?”
I raise my hand. “Yes. It’s me.”
Asher jogs around the back of the cruiser and Kevin goes around the front, eyeing him with the narrow-eyed suspicion of a hometown Paulson boy, born and bred. I won’t take this opportunity to remind Kev that he was, in fact, born up the other side of the bay in Dayton Greens. Look—it was a long year in science class.
“I’ll see you around,” Kevin calls, and I hear the warning in his voice. My own heart is flailing around with a warning of its own. It desperately wants me not to notice how ridiculously fine Asher is looking this morning, which is quickly verging on afternoon. His blue eyes lock on mine and he takes the porch steps in one long leap. Drunk Me wasn’t wrong about his abs. Somehow, his button-down gives me an even clearer idea of what they look like. My palms itch to lift the hem of his shirt.
Now I really wish I’d brushed my teeth. But I lean against the doorframe. Casual. Perfectly casual. “Hey.”
“What’s going on?” Asher turns to watch the cruiser head back down the driveway. “Was there trouble?”
I brandish the folded paper. “Just a kindly reminder from the Paulson PD that this property will officially become theirs at five tomorrow.”
“He came here to evict you?”
“He came here to give me formal notice that…” I unfold the paper and the words swim in front of my eyes. “…that a scheduled transfer of property is due to take place tomorrow.”
“And then what?”
I shrug and stuff the paper back into my pocket. “Then I have a week to get my stuff, including my ass, out of here.”
He drags his eyes away from mine, and for the first time I notice that he’s got his own folded paper. “Is this
your address?” Asher thrusts it into my face too vigorously and I have to grab his wrist and push it back. I can feel his pulse through my fingertips and the throb echoes my own racing heart.
I drop his wrist and clear my throat, fixing my eyes on the paper. “Yeah. That’s my address. This address.”
He flips it over and peers down at it like the letters and numbers might rearrange themselves. “My father sent me here. For work.”
“To my house?” A matchstick that feels curiously like hope flares to life in the center of my chest. “What could your job here possibly be?”
Asher searches my eyes. I don’t know what he’s hoping to find there. I don’t have any answers about what his father wants with my house. A tingling sets in on the backs of my hands. Maybe I should come clean about exactly who lives next door.
But…no. That has to be a coincidence. A crazy, rare coincidence. The man standing on my front porch right now has nothing in common with anyone I’ve ever met in Paulson, except for one thing, and honestly, it’s probably just my mind playing tricks on me.
“My job is to look after my father’s interests. My family’s interests.”
“Your family from upstate New York has interests in Paulson?”
His brow furrows, frustration in every line. “Apparently we have interests in a lot of places, but I’m short on details.”
“Maybe we should call and ask. Your father, I mean.”
“I would. Trust me, I would. But he’s dead,” he says flatly. “And the only instructions he gave me…” His voice trails off, but disbelief hangs in the air.
“What?” I’m on the verge of death with the hangover as it is, and now the anticipation might do me in. “What were they?”
“To make sure everything’s all right, and go back home.”
There’s a moment of windblown silence, and then a huge laugh throws itself out of my mouth. “Oh, man. Well, I don’t know who your father was, but things are not all right here. Not by a long shot. We’ve talked. You know.”