by S Doyle
He said nothing and poured me a splash of something brown.
He handed me the glass even as he took a healthy gulp of his own.
I smelled fire and fumes. Then I tasted fire and fumes. I coughed and set the glass aside.
“Okay, Ellie. We’re here. You want to talk, talk.”
“Don’t make this about me being dramatic about something. You kissed me, Jake. Not the other way around.”
His jaw clenched. “I was so… so fucking mad at you.”
“Then that’s it. That’s all it was. Because we’re getting divorced in thirty-eight days. Do you get that? That means you move out. Completely. You go to your ranch, I stay on mine and we see each other… whenever. Which with all the work you have and all the work I have means hardly ever. We will hardly ever see each other. Is that what you want?”
He started laughing that. A harsh and ugly sound. I never wanted to hear it again. He sat on the couch like his legs couldn’t hold him and looked up at me. “Are you that fucking naïve?”
That hurt. Like he’d slapped me.
“Not cool, Jake,” I said stiffly.
He sighed then and stood up. He walked over to me and took my hands. I was tempted to snap them back but I thought it would make me look immature, and after having just been called naïve, I was trying to avoid that.
“I’m sorry. I’m… I don’t know what I am. But I’ve been taking it out on you and I know that. It’s fair for you to be pissed off.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
He glared at me. “You fucking took yourself off the line, Ellie.”
“To save a calf, Jake. I’m a rancher. That’s what we do. That’s what you would have done.”
“I’m a hell of a lot stronger than you.”
This time I did pull my hands back. I didn’t want him touching me.
“I can’t control that! You know that. You know I can’t cut fence, even with those stupid wire cutters you got me for Christmas. You know I can birth a calf, but I can’t lift one clear off the ground. You know all of this. So why don’t you just say it? I can’t do this. You’re mad at me, really mad at me, because you know I can’t do this by myself and you feel guilty for leaving. Admit it.”
“Ellie… I drove out to my old home yesterday.”
He’d left. I knew that. I presumed it was to do a check in with some of the neighbors. But that made sense. The wind had been brutal. It didn’t look like we had sustained any damage to the house or barn, but where his house was located it was a little higher up on a ridge. More exposed. Of course he needed to check on it.
Still, I didn’t understand what that had to do with anything. “Okay.”
“It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“The house. The roof is gone or collapsed. The north facing side is also collapsed. It was in bad shape when I left it six years ago. I’ve only been barely doing what I could to keep it livable for when… it doesn’t matter. Now it’s gone.”
“But you can rebuild it?”
“In time.”
That muscle in his jaw was still ticking and I knew it. I knew he was seeing a completed puzzle while I was still looking at individual pieces. That was Jake. Always the man with perspective on everything.
I was sick of it.
“Fine, I’m stupid. I’m naïve. Whatever. What aren’t you telling me?”
He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t take a hard count, but it was easy enough to see… we lost about half the herd. Saved only those calves we managed to pull out that first day.”
This time I sat down. I tried to wrap my head around the numbers. I knew what we’d made last year with double that. I knew what losing so many calves would do to us next year.
I knew that in thirty-eight days I had pay Jake twenty thousand dollars he was owed so that he could buy his land.
Land that no longer had a place for him to live. Because his house was gone.
Which seemed fitting, since I knew I no longer had twenty thousand dollars to give him anyway.
Then he said the thing he’d already figured out. The conclusion I was struggling to get to.
“I’m not going anywhere in thirty-eight days, Ellie.”
I can’t explain how it hurt. It was really sharp and piercing. Like being back in the hot water when I had been so cold.
He sat down next to me and I shifted away from him. Suddenly it all made sense.
He knew what damage the storm had done. He knew he had nowhere to go and there would be no money to pay him off anyway.
Which meant there was no point in getting divorced. Which meant everyone would think…
The worst of him. That he’d been screwing me all along.
“We can still get divorced…” I said, and stopped when he put his hand on my knee.
“I’m not sure what’s worse. I stay here and we’re not married. I stay here and we are. But what I do know is I can’t leave you. Not now. You’re right, you can’t do this on your own, and now there is no money to bring someone on to help. Storms like this are once every twenty, thirty years. They happen, and ranching operations survive, but it’s going to take years, Ellie.”
I nodded. “You’re trapped. Wow. It’s like a fucking prison sentence. Sure, Jake. Marry me. Sixteen months. What’s the big deal…”
He squeezed my knee to stop me from speaking, but I couldn’t hold the words inside.
“You’ll hate me. When all this is done, you’ll resent and hate me.”
“I will not. Not ever.”
But he would. How could he not? I could feel tears happening and I swallowed a bunch of times to try to force them down. “The whole time I thought you were mad at me because… but really you’re mad that you’re stuck here.”
“I’m not mad about that, Ellie. I promise you. You are my family. You need help right now and so I’m not going anywhere. Hell, not that I have anywhere to go to. With what your father was going to give me I barely had enough money to put down on the land. I can’t buy the land, buy cattle, and build a house from scratch all at the same time.”
He was trying to make me feel better, but it wasn’t working. I felt like shit. Then I said the scary thing. The thing I had to consider.
“I can sell it. The operation, the land.”
Jake closed his eyes. As if what I had said was blasphemous. Worse than any curse I had ever shouted. Masons had been on this land for five generations.
Until it got to me.
“Ellie…”
“No, Jake. Don’t you see? It’s the only way. I can sell it and give you the money and then you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I won’t have to lift a calf, or cut fence line or any of it… You would be free.”
He looked at me then and I could see I had shocked him.
“You would do that? You would give up all of this, your legacy, your future… you would do that for me?”
I nodded. It was only fair.
He reached up with his finger and brushed my cheek. Like I was some odd fairy he discovered in the forest. But then he was shaking his head. “Ellie, you and I both know you come into some money when you’re twenty-one. That money is there for you so you can have choices. If all we have to do is wait another three years…”
“Three years! Jake, that is three more years of your life. You’ll be thirty!”
He smiled then and I wanted to hit his arm.
Instead he bumped his shoulder against mine. “Yes, I’ll be thirty, but I won’t be dead. You do this drastic thing now, you can never undo it. We wait three years and then you’ll have the money I need…”
“It’s not enough. If you’re going to give up another three years of your life, then you deserve more. You have to give that to me. You have to make this so it’s not all about me taking, but giving back to you too.”
“Okay. We’ll talk to Howard. We’ll work something out. Something that’s fair for both of us.”
We sat there then quietly as reality
started to close in around me. I had started crushing on Jake hard, pretending I wasn’t because I knew he was going to be leaving soon. Jake knew I was crushing on him and was being gentle with me because he didn’t feel the same but didn’t want to hurt my feelings when he left.
Through it all we seemed to have had this light at the end of the tunnel. April twenty-second and it would be behind us.
Instead, it was three more years ahead of us.
“What are you mad about, then?” I asked him.
He turned his head to me. “What?”
“You said you weren’t mad about being stuck here, but you’re obviously upset about something.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I guess we have to talk about that too. I am angry with myself that I kissed you.”
“But you said it was just a reaction to the situation.”
“It was.”
“Then you don’t have to worry about it.”
“Ellie, I’m angry at myself that I kissed you. But I am fucking furious with myself… because I want to do it again.”
My head shot up but he didn’t wait to give me chance to say anything. He left and slammed the door of the study behind him.
“Oh no,” I whispered to an empty room. “That’s a problem.”
Hope you enjoyed Part One of The Bride! If you have the time reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are always appreciated.
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Don’t miss the next two in the series!
The Wife
The Lover
Here’s a preview of The Wife…
Excerpt from The Wife
Ellie
Two weeks after the storm (aka the day Jake kissed me)
So that happened.
Oh. Wait. I should probably catch you up with everything. Well, you remember my dad died, I was underage, so Jake stepped up and married me. We agreed to the arrangement until my eighteenth birthday.
Except a month before my eighteenth birthday, a major Arctic blast took out half my herd and two thirds of my calves. Oh, and Jake’s old house on the property he was going to buy back—as soon as we got divorced and I gave him the money my dad left him in the will.
No house.
No money to buy the land.
Massively in trouble cattle ranch.
What did all of that equal?
No divorce.
Which meant Jake and I were going to stay married. And you might think what was the problem with that? After all, we did it for sixteen months, no problem.
Okay, one problem. About a year in I started to have… feelings. Yeah. Those feelings. I fought it. He mostly ignored it, but I could tell he was a little upset about it. He liked me. He didn’t want to hurt my feelings when he… you know… divorced my ass.
So we pretended I didn’t feel anything, which was fine because the divorce was only a couple of months away. Then he would leave, I would get down to the business of running my ranch, and all those…feelings would fade away.
Except now we weren’t getting divorced.
Enter problem number two.
Jake had kissed me. I had unhooked my karabiner from the safe line and lost my way in the storm. Thankfully, Jake had found me. But he’d been pissed.
Super pissed.
Angrier than I had ever seen him. And he’d kissed me. It was hot. It was—well, this is probably going to sound super profound… but the kiss was about life. Two people who had survived, and while the whole feeling thing was weird between us, there was no question we loved each other.
We were Ellie and Jake. Jake and Ellie.
Now there was this elephant in the room. Because while the kiss had happened under extreme circumstances which we might have been able to write off, him telling me he wanted to do it again…
Leading to problem number three.
We’re married. Jake didn’t want folks to think he would ever take advantage of an underage girl, because he wouldn’t. Except now I was very close to not being underage, and we had kissed.
You’re thinking sex was the natural conclusion to that day?
You would be wrong. Instead we’d rented equipment and pulled dead cows out of a pen all day, then buried them in a mass grave. Totally not sexy times. We’d fallen asleep after being dead on our feet and we didn’t talk about the kiss, his stunning confession, and his very real anger at himself for feeling that way.
Anger that kind of, sort of, leaked out towards me.
It was not fun times.
Which gets us to now.
Two weeks later.
“I don’t think I understand what that means,” I told Mr. Connelly.
Mr. Connelly was the Vice President at Heartland Bank. Heartland Bank held the note on Long Valley. I had done some research and had come up with a plan to free Jake. Jake didn’t think the plan would work. Still, he’d come with me to the bank.
“You’re asking for a loan? Correct?”
That’s what it means when you go to the bank and ask them for money. We were going to have to do this anyway. We had to buy more cows if we were going to restore the operation within the next few years. Since I was taking a major hit on what I was going to be able to sell at the end of summer, I was going to have to borrow the money anyway. Not a big deal. We had the land as collateral, and that was worth a lot.
“Yes,” I said, like he was a little thick.
“And you and Jake and have worked it out and decided to stay married? Correct?”
I hated the way he said correct after every question. But I was digressing This was part of the plan. I was just going to borrow more money than I needed. Jake and I worked out the numbers. The least amount we needed to borrow to buy the cows to replenish the herd. Then I added twenty thousand to that number.
I would pay him his money and we could get divorced.
Because FYI, being married to someone who didn’t want to be married to you… also not fun.
Which meant we fought about it constantly, because I apparently was the only one looking for a way out.
I’d told him he had a hero complex and that he should divorce me.
He’d told me to shut up.
I’d told him I was going to divorce him and he had no say in the matter.
He’d told me to shut up.
I’d told him about my bank plan, and he’d said it wouldn’t work. And now it seemed it wasn’t working.
“Uh, does that matter?”
Mr. Connelly laced his fingers together and gave me what would be my first, but not my last, what I would come to know as the banker smile.
“Ellie, I knew your dad… well, just about my whole life. He was a good man and he ran a solid cattle ranch operation.”
“Thank you.”
Jake had warned me to be polite to Mr. Connelly. I hated that it felt like Jake already knew the outcome when I hadn’t even asked the question yet.
“So you’ll forgive my… hesitancy in allowing you, a new rancher, to take on a loan of such size without knowing that you’ll have Jake’s experience working beside you.”
Jake’s experience? Horseshit. Jake was only ten years older than I was. Then I realized Jake had something I didn’t have.
A penis.
I know. Because I saw it. Naked and everything.
Not going to lie. I spent a lot of time thinking about Jake’s naked penis.
“This is because I’m a woman,” I said.
“Oh, here we go,” Jake muttered.
“Ellie, no, absolutely not. We would never make any kind of decision based on the sex, race, or sexual orientation of a person applying for a loan.”
That didn’t sound practiced at all.
Mr. Connelly continued. “You have to understand we’re a small bank, and that storm was hard for a lot of folks around here. We have to make good decisions. Giving an eighteen-year-old person a significant amount of money on the hope that you can return
the ranch to good standing on your own—well, that’s a risk we can’t take. If we knew two experienced persons were working toward that effort, we would be willing to consider a loan given the value you have in the land.”
I leaned forward to make my point. “I don’t think you get it. He doesn’t want to be married to me.”
“Ellie, shut up,” Jake interjected. “We’re fine, Mr. Connelly. We’re going to stay married for the time being. Until we can get Long Valley back to what it was. What happens now?”
The banker smile was back. Now all of Mr. Connelly’s attention was focused on Jake. Even though it was my ranch and my loan.
Mr. Connelly walked us through everything that would be required while I sat and basically seethed. Because little did Mr. Connelly know, I ran the money in our house. I would be pulling together all the documents required, filling out the application.
We left the bank and I allowed my anger to explode as I punched the air.
“That was bull! That was sexism. Ageism. All the isms.”
“Get over it, Ellie. That’s how life works.”
“So unfair.”
“It is. But it’s done. We’ll get the money, we’ll get the operation back up and running. Today was a good day.”
I looked at Jake and wanted to scream. We were trapped. Together. For the undefined future. Well, worst case was until I turned twenty-one. My mom had a life insurance policy that when she died my dad put into a trust for me. It wasn’t a ton of money, but enough to pay off Jake and the loan we just applied for.
“Want to grab some lunch?” Jake asked me.
Internally I sighed. Three years. It wasn’t that long of a time, but it was also forever. Because now we had the elephant living with us and it didn’t look like Jake had any intention of addressing it.
“Sure,” I said.
We made our way to the diner and took our normal booth. Kathy stopped by with smiles and coffee for both of us.
“What do you think people are going to say?” I asked.
“About what?” Jake said from behind his menu.
“About us now that we’re staying married.”
He shrugged.
“We could make a statement,” I suggested.