Accounting For Lovel (Long Valley Book 1)

by Erin Wright

  “So you’d rather let the grain rot in the bins and lose your father’s farm,” Jennifer shouted, huffing as she ran, “than sell for less than what he wanted? You…this is ridiculous!” she spat.

  “It was his last wish,” he snarled, chucking his shovel as hard as he could across the field before he spun on his boot heel to growl down at her, “and I’m gonna make sure it happens no matter what! You city people just don’t get it. You’ll never understand what it means to follow through on a promise.” His face was as red as hers, his hands in fists at his side.

  The shovel went skidding across the field before hitting a clump of grass and jamming into it. The polished wooden handle quivered a little in the summer sun.

  City people…

  He was hurling the worst insult he could think of at her; she knew him well enough to know that. Questioning her parentage would’ve been less of an insult.

  What she couldn’t figure out was why. Where was this coming from? She searched his eyes, but found nothing there. Dark and oh so cold. Her Stetson was gone and she had no idea how to get him back.

  Her mind spun in circles. How could she reach him? She had to get through to him.

  “If…if you don’t sell the wheat,” she warned him, stabbing him in the chest with her forefinger, “I’m gonna have to recommend that the bank foreclose on the farm.”

  He said nothing.

  “Stetson, you’re forcing me into a corner!” she cried. How could he do this? What the hell was going on in that head of his?

  “Fine, take it!” he erupted. “It’s what you wanted all along. All this bullshit about helping people was just an act!”

  “What?! Is that what you really think?” Jennifer tried to hold back the tears, but they were just as angry as the rest of her. They leaked out of her eyes and scorched streaks down her face. She hated that she cried when she was angry. She wasn’t sad right now; she was pissed. So why did her eyes insist on crying?

  Some days, she damn well hated being a girl.

  “I think,” he hollered, jabbing himself in the chest with his thumb, “that everyone wants me to leave this farm, so why shouldn’t I? My brothers wanted me to leave, Michelle wanted me to leave, and now the bank wants me to leave. So just take the damn thing!”

  His long legs covered the last few feet to the four-wheeler and then tires were spraying dirt and grass clumps as he tore off, leaving his shovel behind. She watched him go, the endless tears trailing down her face.

  Chapter 46

  Jennifer

  She paced the front porch of the farmhouse as she tried to reason through her choices, wiping angrily at her eyes with every pass. Honestly, though, what choice did she have left?

  Not a one. Not with Stetson the Stubborn pulling stupid stunts like this.

  Hmmm…maybe she would change that to Stetson the Stubborn Shithead. It had a nice alliteration to it, even if it wasn’t a nickname she could use around Carmelita.

  Finally, her shoulders drooped in defeat. What she’d told him was true – he really was backing her into a corner. She couldn’t sell his wheat for him; she couldn’t find a group of real estate investors in the next thirty minutes who were willing to back a ski resort; and she sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to dig up a wheelbarrow full of semi-precious stones from the Goldfork Mountains and find buyers willing to pay cash for them.

  This was it. This was his only worthwhile choice, and he was throwing it all away.

  She was hurt and bewildered and angry and pissed as hell.

  She was damn glad Carmelita couldn’t read thoughts, because if she saw the swear words that Jennifer was using right now in her mind…well, she’d probably change her mind about wanting to see the two of them together. Not that it mattered, of course. Men didn’t tend to date women who were busy recommending that their farm be taken away from them, and women didn’t tend to date men who were dumber than a fencepost.

  So yeah, it was fair to call their relationship toast. Finished. Kaput.

  Stupid Stetson the Stubborn Shithead.

  Heh. Even better.

  Jennifer was relieved to find that Mike the Mechanic answered the phone on the second ring, and that her car was finished. She hadn’t worried about what was going on with it before, because honestly, where had she needed to go? Anywhere she had wanted to go, she had wanted to go there with Stetson.

  But now…well, she needed to go far, far away, and she sure as hell wasn’t taking Stetson along for the ride. Jennifer had never met Mike, but his warm gravelly voice was the one steady rock in her world right now, and she clung to it for all that she was worth.

  Mike told her that Stetson had left his credit card on file to pay for the damage, and in the mood she was in, all she could think was that he’d better sell some of that damned wheat so he’d have enough money to pay off the credit card bill when it showed up. He wasn’t willing to sell it to save the family farm, but maybe he’d be willing to sell it to pay a piddling credit card bill.

  Well, not her problem anymore, right?

  Mike assured her that he was happy to deliver the Honda out to the farm and thought he could have it to her in about an hour.

  Thanking the man, she ended the call before heading upstairs to pack her things. She threw everything into her suitcase, a jumble of clothes and makeup and toiletries, but for once, she didn’t care. Usually a fastidious packer, the tears streaming unchecked down her cheeks made it hard to see and even harder to give a damn.

  When the body shop man showed up at the farm with her car, she signed the paperwork by Braille. She never looked the man in the eye, letting her hair cover her face, afraid he’d see the trail of tears cascading endlessly down – a personal version of the Niagara Falls. She tried not to snuffle too much, but she wasn’t sure she was fooling anyone.

  Carmelita didn’t seem to be in the house, and for that, Jennifer was eternally grateful. She didn’t know how to explain what had happened to the housekeeper, mostly because she didn’t know herself. She kept blinking and looking around, fully expecting to wake up from this nightmare. It was just a nightmare, right?

  But she wasn’t waking up and she didn’t know how to function in this new world, this new reality she found herself in.

  Even as her mind was following the same loop that went nowhere, frantically running in place and gaining nothing, she couldn’t help scolding herself for her hero complex she’d somehow taken on. She thought she could solve a problem that no one else could. She thought she’d found something that Stetson had somehow overlooked.

  A silo full of threshed and cleaned wheat? Had she really been so naïve and eager for a happy ending that she’d assume that he would completely forget about 30,000 bushels of wheat? He was a stubborn asshole, not an amnesiatic asshole, for hell’s sakes.

  She thought back through their tour of the farm. He’d never mentioned the silos, although it was hard to miss them, considering how gigantic they were. She’d been the one to bring them up, asking him what was stored in them. He’d said wheat, after it was harvested, and then…they were talking about something else. Smooth as butter. Never missed a beat.

  He’d absolutely known about the wheat, had been reminded about the wheat in case he’d somehow forgotten, and still chose to keep it to himself. The one thing that would save five generations of Miller’s work and sweat and tears from the grasp of a bank wanting to develop a high-end ski resort.

  How? Just…how? That was what kept tripping her up. She hated things that didn’t make sense, that didn’t fit into her neat columns and rows in an Excel sheet.

  She found that she kept bouncing between mad as a wet cat, and heartbroken that she was leaving Stetson behind. Or, more accurately, she was heartbroken to leave what she thought they had behind.

  His eyes, brown and warm and caring, telling her how beautiful she was to him. His eyes, brown and vulnerable and hurting, telling her how he wished he could just tell his mother he was sorry.

  Sorry…r />
  Never once, through everything that had happened between them, had he ever actually said the words, “I’m sorry” to her. He’d gotten close, but to Jennifer’s new way of thinking, close only counted with hand grenades and horseshoes. From here forward, she wasn’t going to put up with a man who refused to admit when he was wrong.

  In fact, Stupid Stetson the Stubborn Shithead better be ready to downright grovel if he ever wanted to speak to her again. She’d accept nothing less. She deserved nothing less.

  That was, if he ever did want to speak to her again.

  The tears ran faster down her face.

  She could only be grateful that traffic was light, because she honestly couldn’t remember much about the actual drive back to Boise. Pine trees and rocky hillsides and a deep ravine with a rushing river cascading through it ran alongside the road, but it was just there. Picturesque scenery flying by that she’d normally be oohing and aahing over, but now…

  She just couldn’t care.

  By the time she reached the outskirts of Boise, she was completely numb, a state of being she was happy to embrace. She didn’t want to feel or worry or think.

  A part of her – a tiny part of her that she just couldn’t bring herself to listen to – was trying to warn her that she needed to go into work. Greg was probably frantic by this point. She had no doubt that he’d called her a half dozen times just that morning, but she’d turned her phone off hours ago.

  If he wanted to talk to her, he could listen to her happy, professional, upbeat voicemail message and have a discussion with her there. She could give him nothing more than that; she had nothing else to give.

  She crawled into bed, pulled the covers up over her head, and embraced the darkness. Here, nothing could hurt her.

  Sometime later – hours, weeks, months, she couldn’t tell – she rolled over and pulled her phone out of her laptop bag, where she’d thrown it on the floor when she’d come home. She turned it on, waiting for the Apple logo to disappear and the phone to come to life. The clock on her nightstand said 6:32, but she didn’t know if it was 6:32 at night, or 6:32 in the morning.

  Finally, her phone was alive. It was 6:32 in the morning, and it was Friday. That meant…she forced her brain to work, scrambling to put times together…she’d been hiding in bed for a little over twelve hours.

  No wonder her bladder hurt so much.

  She forced herself to make a trip to the bathroom, and then she snuggled back down in the bed. It was safe here. No one could touch her.

  The part of her brain that was yelling at her to deal with the shitty situation she’d found herself in was yelling louder, though. It was right – she did need to do something.

  So she did.

  Ignoring the eleven voicemails from her boss, she called into the HR department for the bank and left a voicemail, stating that she’d caught a cold and didn’t want to pass it along to others. She’d be back to work on Monday. Considering how obnoxiously awful she sounded in that moment, her throat raw from crying and cursing Stetson’s stupidity, she was pretty sure they would believe her.

  If only it was true. She would have much rather had a cold than a broken heart. A cold would go away. This…never would.

  She laid there and thought about calling Bonnie to whine and cry her heart out, but the idea of having to explain it all to someone else…she was too tired. She would explain it later. When she could move and think and breathe again without pain.

  Plus, Bonnie had to go to work. She couldn’t just sit around and act like a human Kleenex, soaking up all of the pain inside of Jennifer.

  No, it was better to just keep this to herself. She’d already forced Bonnie to live through the tail-end of one break-up with a boyfriend. She wouldn’t force her to live through two.

  Chapter 47

  Jennifer

  By lunchtime on Monday, her finger hung over the keyboard like the blade of a guillotine. Her hand slowly lowered and her eyes closed on their own. She felt her finger make contact.

  Well, I guess that’s it.

  She’d done it. She’d filed the damn report that would take the farm away from Stetson the Shithead and Carmelita the Cind. Karmelita the Kind?

  Hmmmm…that alliteration wasn’t exactly working out the way she’d wanted it to.

  She waved the hazy thoughts away. Everything was in a haze, really. She tried to care about the world around her, but it was like peering through cloudy glass, covered in hard water deposits. It was there, but not.

  Greg had been buzzing her office every 30 minutes since she’d shuffled through the front door that morning. He was, of course, threatening that if she didn’t send him that report right away, he’d fire her on the spot, which had the unexpected result of making her laugh out loud. He was making the fatal assumption that she gave a damn.

  She didn’t.

  She’d hung up, listening to his tinny voice let out a blistering tirade all the way down into the phone cradle, and then his voice was gone.

  She wished it was that easy to get rid of him in real life.

  But, she’d finally done what he was demanding – the only thing she could do under the circumstances. For once, this wasn’t Greg’s fault. She couldn’t point her finger at him and ask him how dare he do what he was doing. No, the only report she could give to the bank just happened to also be the report that would make Greg happy.

  Some days, life sucked.

  Pressing the intercom button, Jennifer buzzed the receptionist.

  “Susan, Greg is going to buzz my line – again – in a few minutes. Will you be kind enough to tell him that the report is in his inbox and that I have gone home sick?”

  Back to my bed, to darkness, to where nothing can hurt me. After having spent three days hiding in bed, she was finding that she didn’t like the outside world all that much. She wanted her cocoon back.

  “Actually, you can’t leave just yet. You have an appointment. A client called this morning and asked to meet with you today; he said it was urgent. He’s here now. Should I send him back?”

  I swear to God, if Paul walks through that door, there is no way I am not going to jail today.

  “Yeah, send him back,” she said heavily, before taking a deep breath and putting on her happy customer service face.

  A man stopped just inside her office door, a bouquet of flowers covering his face.

  Jennifer froze, and for the second time that week, her whole world shifted to the side, cockeyed and weird and out of focus. This couldn’t be…it wasn’t…

  But even with the flowers covering his face, Jennifer absolutely knew who it was.

  But I just sent that report! Oh Stetson, you’re too late! Too late by only minutes, but no, that wasn’t true because even if he was bringing her flowers, that didn’t mean he was also coming to pay off the farm, so actually, minutes, hours, days, it didn’t matter when he came with flowers.

  He’d forced her to ruin his life, and she wasn’t sure who would hate who more once that came out – if she’d hate him more for making her do it, or if he’d hate her more for actually doing it.

  “What…” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat to try again. Do not cry! “What are you doing here?”

  He slowly lowered the flowers until she could see his dark brown eyes, warm and haunted and worried, but she could read him again. He wasn’t looking at her like she was the enemy.

  Not yet.

  “I came to tell you…” He paused, swallowing hard, shifting from foot to foot as he stared at her. “I came to say that I am sorry.”

  He said it. She couldn’t believe he’d actually said it.

  She blinked. The swirl of emotions inside of her was overwhelming everything and she just froze in place.

  “Have you ever watched the movie Love Story?” Stetson asked, apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever.

  She blinked.

  “Made in the 1970s; an adaptation from a book?” he prodded her.

  She finally shook
her head. She felt slightly ill. Was this a hallucination? She felt like she might be hallucinating. It was the weirdest hallucination ever, but then again, wasn’t that kinda the definition of a hallucination?

  “My dad loved that movie,” Stetson said, not moving a muscle, holding the flowers, just standing there as he talked. “Rough ’n tumble farmer, but he thought Love Story was the best thing since sliced bread.”

  She blinked.

  “There’s a line at the end of it. The guy tells his dad, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ That’s how I was raised. My dad took pride in never telling us kids that he was wrong, or sorry, or that he’d screwed something up. You know how I told you that my dad said that I was his do-over, his chance to do things better than he had with Declan and Wyatt?”

  She nodded numbly.

  “He never told them that. He only told me. If he’d told them that, then he would’ve had to admit to their faces that he’d made a mistake in his life. My parents were married for 22 years. My dad never once told my mom he was sorry, because he’d never been wrong, you see.” He gave a sarcastic twist of the lips to that idea.

  “I might just have more pride than my dad, and I promise you, that’s saying somethin’. I’ve only ever said I was sorry to my brothers, and it was only after I was beaten with a belt into doing it.

  “But Jennifer…I’m sorry. More sorry than I have the words for.” His cheeks flushed red, and his eyes seemed to take on a suspicious sparkle, as if they were filling with tears.

  Jennifer was willing to bet her right arm that he cried even less often than he said he was sorry.

  Suddenly, her gaze jerked to her office door, where people were walking past, discussing interest rates and what the bond market was going to do…He moved out of the way as she hurried to the door and shut it, leaning against it for support as she stared up at Stetson. She didn’t exactly want the entire office to hear this discussion.