by Liz Isaacson
Marcy said nothing, because the words piling up in her head were not nice. She’d loved her father with everything inside her, and she didn’t want to be angry with him now, of all times. But honestly, how in the world would she have been able to get married ten years ago?
At twenty-six, she’d just finished airplane mechanics at the trade school in Amarillo. She’d been working on all their planes since, and Daddy had started training her on the business side of things a few years later.
The condition that she be married was ludicrous. Absolutely ridiculous.
And then Mama had died, and Marcy and Daddy had bonded over that. Never once had he said he’d put in his will that in order for Payne’s Pest-free to pass to her, she’d need to be married. Why did it matter anyway?
“Anyway.” Mr. Marlow cleared his throat. “You have six months, so if you have a boyfriend, you might want to talk to him about it.”
Heat filled Marcy’s face, and she hastily scrawled her name on the paper to release the personal assets. Mr. Marlow made a copy for her and she said she’d send it to Bryan that night. As she hustled out of the office building, another round of frustration and tears went with her.
Wyatt had not arrived yet, but Marcy wasn’t going to wait inside for another moment. She tugged her coat tighter around her and looked up in the sky. If she was out at the hangar, she’d be able to see every star in the sky for miles and miles.
But here, in downtown Three Rivers, at barely six o’clock, plenty of businesses were open, and light spilled up into the sky, masking the stars.
Several minutes later, Wyatt pulled up in his big, black truck. Marcy stepped toward the vehicle before he’d eased it all the way to a stop, because her whole body was shaking with the cold.
“Have you been waiting on the sidewalk this whole time?” he asked. “I’ve got your seat warmers going.” He reached for the knobs on the dash, and a moment later, a blast of heated air hit her.
She calmed instantly, partly because of the heat. But mostly because Wyatt had arrived, and Wyatt would take care of her.
Just the fact that she thought that surprised her. The fact that it was true was not surprising. Wyatt possessed such a calm demeanor that Marcy didn’t think there was anything the man couldn’t do.
“Thank you,” she said, because she suddenly found she couldn’t tell him about the stipulation in Daddy’s will.
“Where to?” he asked, both hands on the wheel, ready to take her wherever she wanted to go. “And is your car here?”
“Yes,” she said. “Can we just go to dinner? Then you can bring me back here, and I’ll get my car.”
“Sure,” he said, still looking at her.
“Pizza?”
“A woman after my heart,” he said with a grin. He eased back onto the road and hummed along with the radio as it played softly between them.
Marcy chewed on the words he’d just said. A woman after my heart.
She was after something, but it didn’t have to be his heart.
Yes, it does, she told herself. She couldn’t just use Wyatt for his last name. Marcy had been fighting something for so long, and she was so tired. She couldn’t argue with herself over this too.
She’d never given much thought to getting married. Many women did, she knew that. But she’d been wearing coveralls since the age of six, and she’d dreamt of flying over fields while other girls probably fantasized over what their wedding dress would look like.
Wyatt let her stew in silence during the quick drive to the pizza parlor. They went inside together, and Wyatt ordered a pizza they’d shared in the past. He knew what soda she liked, and he knew she’d want a side salad—no red onions—with her meat and cheese
Marcy let him take care of all of it, because a siren had started to wail in her mind, and she couldn’t think very far past it.
Wyatt picked up their tray and led them to a booth in the corner, away from the door and anyone else in the restaurant. He sat down, took everything off the tray, and set it on another table before he sat across from her.
“Okay, Marcy,” he said. “Something’s going on, and you better spit it out so we can talk about it.”
Marcy looked into Wyatt’s dark gray, beautiful eyes. He hadn’t shaved that day, obviously, because he almost had a full face of hair. He ticked so many boxed for Marcy, and she couldn’t get herself to speak.
Wyatt reached for his glass of cola and drank without a straw, his gaze never leaving hers.
“Okay,” she said, reaching for her own soda glass. “This is going to be so crazy. Like, I can’t even believe it myself.”
“Do tell,” he said, his eyes glittering, almost like this was a game he wanted to win.
Marcy tried to smile, but she couldn’t pull it off.
“So it’s bad news,” Wyatt said.
Marcy nodded.
“Maybe I could guess,” he said. “I mean, you were at the lawyer’s office, and I’m guessing there’s a problem with the will.”
“Sort of,” she said, seizing onto his words. “The personal assets are fine.” Before tonight, Marcy had never used the word assets before. “It’s the business that’s going to be tied up for a while.”
Six months.
And then she’d lose Payne’s Pest-free—if she wasn’t married.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
Marcy took a long drink of her soda, relishing the burn of the carbonation as it slid down her throat. She set the glass down, willing the words to order themselves properly. “I’m going to lose the crop-dusting business,” she said.
Wyatt’s whole demeanor changed, almost as if he himself had lost something precious to him. “You are? Why?”
“I have to be married to keep it,” she said.
His eyebrows flew toward the ceiling. “Married?”
A teen girl arrived with their pizza, chirping out, “Pepperoni, black olives, mushrooms, sausage, and green pepper.” She put down two plates and set the pizza up on the stand in the middle of the table. “Side salad. Everything good?”
Neither Wyatt nor Marcy spoke, and the girl took a few seconds before she walked away.
Marcy glanced around and looked back at Wyatt again. “Married. Daddy put it in the estate that the dusting business goes to me, but only if I’m married. If I am at the time of his death, great. I get the business immediately. No problem. If not, I have six months to get the job done, or poof. Everything I’ve worked for during my entire life is gone.”
“Gone where?” Wyatt asked, sitting very, very still. His mouth barely moved when he spoke.
“The estate will sell it,” she said, a sob forming in her chest and working its way up her throat. “I’ve worked there for twenty years,” she said. “I went to college to get a business degree and I went to trade school to be the mechanic.” She shook her head, her hair brushing her face.
She finally reached for the serving spatula and put two pieces of pizza on her plate. “What am I going to do?”
Wyatt took the spatula from her and put three slices of pizza on his plate. “What are you going to do? You’re going to marry me.”
Marcy choked, though she knew he’d say that. She’d actually been hoping he’d offer. “Wyatt, be serious.”
“I am being serious,” he said. “This isn’t a problem at all. I’ll marry you tomorrow.” He took a bite of his pizza and watched her.
“Wyatt, it’s not that simple.”
“Why not?” he asked, leaning forward. “Although, I will say that I learned from my brothers that you need to apply for a marriage license in the state of Texas, and that takes three days to go through. So I can’t really marry you tomorrow—unless you want to go to Vegas.” He actually raised his eyebrows as if she’d say, Sure! Let’s go to Las Vegas and get married.
She couldn’t believe this was her life. She didn’t recognize it at all, from a world without her parents in it to one where she had to get married to keep the family business that she loved.
> “We’re not going to Vegas,” she said through a narrow throat. “And I can’t marry you.”
“So you’ll lose the business?” he asked. “Marce, this is a technicality.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
“Why not?”
“I have to be married for a year,” she said, dropping the final bomb. She watched him, and he definitely flinched when he realized what that meant. “Yeah,” she said. “Just…yeah.”
Chapter Five
Wyatt kept thinking that his stomach would settle down if he took another bite of pizza. Another bite. Then another, while Marcy continued to talk.
“Get married within six months,” she said. “And stay married for at least a year, or I lose it all.”
He couldn’t let that happen, and he saw an opportunity here that made him feel like a real jerk.
“A year is a long time,” he said. “For a fake marriage.” But he’d still do it. Heck, he’d been shadowing Marcy for over a year already.
Marcy stabbed at her salad, clearly unsure of what to say.
“Marcy,” he said, pushing his pizza away. It had not settled his stomach at all. “We could do this. I don’t want you to lose Payne’s.”
“I don’t want to ask you do this,” she whispered, keeping her head down. Her pretty blonde hair formed a thin curtain between them, and Wyatt wanted to lift her chin and reassure her that everything would be fine.
“I’m offering,” he said.
“Is that a proposal?” she asked, and Wyatt was surprised by the slight teasing quality in her voice.
“I mean, we should talk about this,” he said. “Make a plan we’re both comfortable with. But I’m totally fine with a pretend pledge.” For now, he thought. He leaned forward and kept his voice low when he said, “Marcy, my brothers have done this exact thing. Four times. Each of them have done a sort of fake marriage, and they’ve made it work.”
Marcy coughed, her eyes bright and wild now. “Made it work?”
Wyatt realized too late what he’d said. “I’m just saying, we can do this.” His phone rang, but he ignored it. “Why did you call me?”
“What?”
“When you found out about the stipulation in the will. Why did you call me? You have cousins you could’ve brainstormed with over pizza.” He leaned back in the booth, a measure of anger simmering in his veins. He was tired of playing games with Marcy, and he thought he’d been ultra-patient with her.
Marcy remained quiet for several long seconds. She seemed to be angry as well, and Wyatt would take that over distant or silent. “I called you, because you always know what to do,” she said, her voice shaking. “You make me feel safe, and I don’t know. I wanted to talk to you.”
“I don’t always know what to do,” he said, starting a prayer in his heart that he would know what to do in this situation. He knew what he wanted to do, but he also wanted to do what God wanted him to. What was right.
“To me, you do,” Marcy said. “But I’ve been a mess for a while now.”
“You’re not a mess.”
She gave a short laugh. “I kind of am, Wyatt.”
“A beautiful mess,” he said.
Marcy shook her head, but a small smile sat on her mouth. “Maybe we should think about this,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, his mind already whirring. But not about whether he should do this or not. But how he should do it. He’d known enough women to know they liked the romance of things, and every female he’d ever met who’d been married had an engagement story.
He could do that for Marcy. He could throw the biggest wedding Three Rivers had ever seen and not even miss the money. He could help her with the hangar, the business, clearing out her father’s house, all of it.
All she had to do was say yes.
“I’ve got a demo tomorrow,” he said. “But after that, I could meet you at your dad’s place to start going through things.”
“Sure,” Marcy said, and Wyatt counted that as a huge step in the right direction. He didn’t have to ask her to marry him tomorrow, even if he wanted to. Even if he didn’t have a giant crush on the woman, he could give her a year of his life to make sure she got her planes. He knew how much she loved those planes, and he couldn’t let her lose them.
So he’d find a way to convince her that marrying him was the lesser of two unideal situations.
Surely she’d see reason and say yes to his pretend proposal. Please help her see, he prayed, glad when she asked him about the demo so they could talk about something else for a few minutes.
“Oh, Ethan’s going to turn this into a sideshow,” Wyatt said. “It’s going to be terrible.”
Marcy giggled, a sound Wyatt hadn’t heard her make in a while. “You like the sideshow.”
“I do not,” he said, gaping at her.
“Wyatt, you so do,” she said. “I’ve seen you transform from this sort of quiet cowboy to a superstar rodeo king in less than a second.”
“That doesn’t mean I like it,” he said, puffing out his chest. “It means I had a very good manager who taught me how to charm the crowd.”
“And you like charming the crowd,” she said.
“I prefer no crowd at all,” he said.
“Sure,” she said, her tone dry and sarcastic. “Tell me more about this manager.”
“Oh, Jim was a bear,” Wyatt said. “An absolute bear.”
That got Marcy to laugh, and Wyatt sure did like that. He went on to tell her about the man who’d made sure Wyatt got entered into all the best rodeos, with the right events that would take his career to the next level. And then the next. And then the next.
Jim had been a good friend, and Wyatt missed the man as he memorialized him for Marcy.
After driving her to her car and then heading back to the ranch, Wyatt let his mind wander. It was the moments of subconscious thought that would help him come up with a great way to ask Marcy to be his pretend wife.
“A pretend pledge,” he muttered to himself as he walked into the homestead. He could do that, because he knew it would become real soon enough, and he really wanted a shot at genuine, true love with Marcy.
Wyatt stood at the ironing board, his mind focusing on making sure his blue jeans looked pristine. In the back of his subconscious, he thought about the date he’d had with Marcy last night. Yes, in his mind, he’d categorized their dinner at the pizza parlor as a date. He’d picked her up and dropped her off. He’d paid. They’d talked, and she’d even laughed and teased him.
“You’re ironing your jeans?” Jeremiah paused as he came into the kitchen. “Why?”
“I’m doing a demo today,” Wyatt said. “Trust me, the jeans need to be ironed.”
Jeremiah started laughing, the sound starting low and increasing over several seconds. Wyatt smiled, because he was aware ironing denim was ridiculous.
“No wonder you were the most popular cowboy in the rodeo,” Jeremiah said as he moved into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee.
“Hey,” Wyatt said, though he couldn’t deny what Jeremiah had said. “I know how to look like I know what I’m doing.”
“Wyatt, I’ve seen you on a horse. You know exactly what you’re doing, pressed jeans or not.”
“Maybe,” Wyatt said. He hadn’t been on a horse much in the past five months, and while he’d done a little bit yesterday, he certainly wasn’t where he’d been while he’d ridden on the circuit.
Jeremiah put cream and sugar and chocolate syrup in the coffee, which meant it was for his wife. A flash of jealousy moved through Wyatt, and he almost blurted out that he might marry Marcy to make sure she got to keep the crop-dusting business.
At the last moment, he sucked back the words, making a gasping sound that Jeremiah definitely heard. He let a couple of seconds pass while he stirred the coffee too much. “You okay?”
Wyatt finished with the pantleg and set the iron upright. “Jeremiah,” he said slowly. “Why did you…I mean, why did you and Whitney
get married?”
Shock entered his brother’s face, and Wyatt watched him closely. “You know why.”
“Because I said you were broken.” Wyatt nodded, sharp regret lancing through him. “How did you get Whitney to go along with you?”
“Wyatt,” Jeremiah said. “What’s going on?”
His phone bleeped out the alarm that he needed to get going, but Wyatt simply slid his finger across the screen to silence it. “This is a secret,” he said. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Wyatt, come on,” he said. “I’m the best secret-keeper in the family.”
Wyatt shook his head, chuckling. “You’re better than the twins, that’s for sure.”
“And Rhett. That man can’t keep anything to himself.”
“True.” Wyatt stepped into his jeans and buttoned them up. “Okay, but I just need you to listen for a minute. Literally, a minute. I can’t be late today.”
“I have a minute,” Jeremiah said, still stirring Whitney’s coffee.
“Marcy found out yesterday that she can’t inherit Payne’s unless she’s married. For a year.”
Jeremiah was already nodding. “And you want to marry her so she can keep her family business.”
“Yes,” Wyatt said, though there were other reasons. He didn’t need to get into those right now. There wasn’t time, for one. And for a second, he wasn’t even sure what they all were.
“And she’s resistant?”
“I think she doesn’t want to ask me to do it.”
“Oh, this is an easy one,” Jeremiah said, stepping toward Wyatt. He patted Wyatt’s chest and said, “You ask her.” He grinned, stepped past Wyatt, and went down the hall.
Like it was so simple.
Wyatt drove out to Three Rivers and Bowman’s Breeds, his new shirt tucked in perfectly, and his bull riding championship belt buckle gleaming like the stars. He pulled up, noticing all the extra cars and trucks in the parking stalls in front of the stables. His nerves pounced, but he smoothed them back.