Her Last Make-Believe Marriage

by Liz Isaacson

  Home.

  Last Chance Ranch was his home, and he wanted it to be Jeri’s too. He wanted to build a life with her, and they needed to have a serious conversation about serious things.

  And they would.

  She was spending the afternoon with her son on his build site, and Sawyer had come to his hotel to give them some time alone. Once her son had arrived for lunch, Jeri had seemed more like the one he’d met when she’d first come to ranch. Bubbly, bright, quick to laugh. Funny, witty, flirty.

  Instead of lying down and catching the nap he needed, he dialed Scarlett instead. “Sawyer,” she said. “The bid came in.”

  Relief poured through him. “That’s great.”

  “I’m so glad you went up there.”

  He hadn’t come to make sure Jeri put in a bid on the administration project, but he just said, “Me too. Listen, I have something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Sounds serious,” she said.

  “It is.” He drew in a deep breath, wondering where to start. “It’s about a house at Last Chance Ranch. A permanent house—not a cabin—for me and Jeri.”

  Sawyer woke to the pealing of his ringtone. The hotel room had grown dark, and panic hit him squarely in the chest. He scrambled to sit up, to find his phone before the call ended. He managed to do one of those, and only closed his fingers around his phone after it had stopped ringing.

  He switched on a lamp and dialed Jeri back, still fuzzy from sleep and hoping she was still downstairs. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry, I fell asleep.”

  “I figured,” she teased. “We don’t have to go out tonight.”

  “No, it’s fine,” he said, wiping his hand down his face. “I just need five minutes to get ready.” At least physically, just to throw on his cowboy boots and brush his teeth. He needed more time than that to order his thoughts and get ready to have a serious conversation with Jeri.

  Several minutes later, he stepped out of the elevator to find her sitting on a couch in the lobby, looking at her phone. He paused, the sight of her so wonderful and so beautiful he couldn’t believe she loved him.

  Him.

  She wasn’t pretending, and neither was he. No, she wasn’t ready for marriage, which was okay. She’d started the healing process, and he still had plenty to learn about her before he was ready to be married to her.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said, approaching her. She got to her feet and he wrapped his arms around her. “I missed you so much.” He touched his lips to hers, seeking permission. She gave it, kissing him back with the passion he needed to feel from her.

  He pulled away first, knowing they were in a public place, and asked, “Ready?”

  “There’s a restaurant here,” she said. “Doesn’t look busy. Then we wouldn’t have to go downtown.” She nodded behind him, and Sawyer turned in that direction.

  “All right.” He honestly had no idea where to go for dinner. He’d told Jeri she could pick, and if this place was okay with her, it was fine with him.

  They got a table easily, and though the lighting was dimmer than he’d like, he could still see her—and the gift she brought out from her purse. The box was barely larger than his hand and wrapped in festive, red paper.

  “Jeri,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a present,” she said with a smile, nudging it closer to him. “Go on. Open it.”

  “I don’t have anything for you.”

  “Well, you still have two days.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and grinned. “Now, hurry up. The waiter will be here in a minute.”

  Sawyer picked up the package and ripped the paper off. Inside sat a package of guitar picks and a few pieces of paper that had been folded in half. “What’s this?” He opened the pages to find music written on them. Hand-written notes and lyrics. “You wrote a song?”

  “Just the beginning,” she said. “I thought you and I could finish it together. Maybe the band could play it.”

  Warmth filled him from head to toe, and he glanced back at the words. A few seconds passed as he absorbed them and their meaning. “Jeri, this is a love song.”

  “It’s our love song,” she said, leaning forward. “And when we get married, I want the band to play it.” Her eyes sparkled like stars, and Sawyer fell in love with her all over again.

  He refolded the papers and put them back in the box. “Thank you.” He kissed her quickly but stayed close to her. “You think you want to marry me again?”

  “Yeah,” she said, a tiny smile on her mouth.

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  Sawyer settled back into his seat, and the waiter arrived to take their drink orders. Once he’d left, Sawyer cleared his throat. “Well, since we’re talking about a real, long-term relationship, I think we should discuss other things that go along with that.” His eyes darted all over the booth, finally landing on her.

  He calmed. “Family. Housing.” He held up two fingers. “I’ve been working on one.”

  “Well, seeing as how it takes two to ‘work on’ a family, I’m going to guess you’ve been doing something with the housing.” At least she didn’t shut him down about a family this time. And maybe it wasn’t in their cards to have kids. Sawyer could deal with that.

  “I’d like to stay at the ranch,” he said. “I’ve been there forever, and I work there.”

  “Mm hmm,” Jeri said, lifting her water to her lips almost the moment the waiter set the glass on the table.

  “I talked to Scarlett this morning, and she said she’d talk to Gramps about selling me a modest piece of land, probably near the entrance, but not in the Cabin Community. After that, I just need someone to build us a house.”

  “Gee, I wonder where we could find someone who could do that,” she said, making him chuckle.

  “I’ll need to see a bid,” he said, grinning at her, an explosion of love hitting him when she tipped her head back and laughed. He hadn’t heard that sound in so long, and it was absolutely the best sound on the planet—especially when he elicited it from her.

  They spent the next evening with Randy, Pearl, and her family, and Sawyer was glad for a chance to just sit back and fade away. Watching Jeri interact with her son was eye-opening, and she was strong and capable and extremely nurturing too. Sawyer knew she didn’t think of herself as a good mother, but he reasoned it was only because she hadn’t had the real opportunity to be one.

  He could see her as his wife, the mother of his children, and he closed his eyes and thanked God for the opportunity to be at Last Chance Ranch, and that He’d guided Jeri into his life.

  “Do you want to play?” someone asked, and his eyes flew open. One of Pearl’s nieces stood in front of him.

  “Play what?” he asked, smiling at the towheaded little girl. Jeri’s daughter would never have hair that color, but the child was cute.

  “Ping pong,” she said. “We have a table downstairs.”

  “Sure,” he said, scooting forward to get off the couch. “But I’m really bad at ping pong.”

  “You can be on my team,” she said as if she won national tournaments.

  He chuckled as he followed her to the steps. He turned back and caught Jeri’s eye, mouthing that he was going to go downstairs and play ping pong with the kids. Their joyful yells coming up the steps told him he’d only be able to play one game, maybe two.

  At the bottom of the steps, the little girl handed him the paddle. “Here you go,” she said. “You just hit it back and forth.” She was so matter-of-fact, as if he’d never heard of or seen ping pong before.

  “You go first,” he said, and she bounced the ball and hit it. It didn’t go over the net, and she couldn’t reach it. Sawyer collected the ball for her and handed it back. Two boys stood on the other side of the net, at least five years older than this little girl.

  Sawyer suddenly felt fiercely protective of her, and he said, “You’ve got it.”

  She hit it again, and the ball went over this time. One bo
y scrambled to hit it back, which he did. Sawyer bumped the ball right back over, at a steep angle, and it went flying off the table.

  The little girl cheered as she jumped up and down, and footsteps came toward them. Jeri arrived first, with her son and Pearl behind her. They became the audience in a rousing match between Sawyer and the two twelve-year-olds.

  Lizzy hit a few balls, but it happened more out of dumb luck than anything else. Still, Sawyer gave her high five and told her how amazing she was after every play.

  The game ended—they lost by two points—and the kids ran for the stairs, saying, “Time for ice cream and presents!”

  “Ice cream?” Sawyer asked, looking at Pearl.

  “Yeah,” she said. “My mother always has cake and ice cream for our Christmas Eve present celebration.”

  “But it’s not Christmas Eve,” Jeri said, frowning. “Isn’t that tomorrow?”

  Sawyer sure hoped so, because he needed to find a present for Jeri, and the stores would surely be closing early.

  “Yeah.” Pearl shrugged and smiled. “But my brothers are going to their other families tomorrow night. So we’re doing our celebration tonight.” Randy took her hand and squeezed.

  “Other families?” Sawyer asked, noting the tenderness between Pearl and Randy. He hoped they could hold onto it, cultivate it, and grow together.

  “Yeah, you know,” she said. “My brother’s wife. Her family. Sasha is from here, and they’re doing a dinner over there tomorrow. And Ryan is going to his girlfriend’s.” She looked at Randy. “We didn’t have other family…until now.” She looked at Jeri with a warm smile. “I’ve been telling him to call you, you know?”

  She said “you know” a lot, but in that moment, Sawyer didn’t care. Jeri looked like she might cry, and she lunged forward to hug Pearl and then Randy. Sawyer said nothing. He did nothing. He was just there, and when Jeri sat back down beside him, he took her hand and squeezed it.

  She laid her head against his bicep, and he was the luckiest man in the world.

  Chapter 23

  Jeri didn’t care that the sun was going down. It had been doing that so early over the past couple of months, making her days shorter than she liked. She was a month behind schedule on the dog enclosures, but no one except her cared.

  And she just had one last thing to do….

  She bent to swipe the final square of adhesive over the waterproofing she’d laid down earlier this week. One more panel of flooring. Then the last dog enclosure in the expansion would be finished.

  Done.

  Well, the building inspector was scheduled to come out tomorrow morning, and once they got his final approval, dogs could be sheltered here. Oh, and Lance needed to rework the fencing, so this enclosure would be included in the huge dog run and roaming land that took up a large part of the north end of the ranch.

  She fitted the last piece of flooring into place and set it. “There.” Stepping back, she felt a keen sense of accomplishment and loss at the same time.

  Finishing a project was a huge deal. She celebrated every time she did, and that night, she and Sawyer had movie tickets and dinner plans. Neither of them had said anything about their marriage, impending divorce, or living together. She lived in her cabin, he lived in his.

  She kissed him good morning and good-night—and every time she went down into Pasadena to see a marriage and family counselor. Which was so strange to her. She wasn’t married—not really—and she didn’t have a family. Not really.

  Yes, she and Randy texted every day now. He was a brilliant man, with a brilliant mind, and while she wanted to support him in whatever he wanted to do, she’d asked him why construction. When he could literally do anything, why had he chosen that.

  “Because you do it, Mom,” he’d told her. She still warmed every time she thought about it. As if summoned by her thoughts, her phone dinged, and she looked at it to see a text from her son.

  Thinking of asking Pearl to marry me. What do you think?

  He’d sent messages like that over the past three months too, and they always made Jeri smile. Instead of texting him back, she called.

  “Can you talk?” she asked by way of hello.

  “For a few minutes,” he said.

  “You’re in love with Pearl?”

  “I think so.”

  “She loves you?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re not even twenty-one yet.” Jeri let the words sit there, because they spoke all of her concerns. She could’ve said more, about how he had his whole life ahead of him. He could do anything, go anywhere. He hadn’t finished school yet. All of it.

  But she understood better than most that sometimes life didn’t have to be all planned out. That life rarely went the way she wanted it to. That rash decisions—

  “I just don’t want you to rush into anything,” she said. “When you’re young, you don’t have to go a hundred miles an hour.”

  “I haven’t even been seeing her that long, either,” he said. “I just…I like being with her. I figure if we like being with each other so much, what’s so bad about getting married?”

  “There’s nothing bad about it,” Jeri said, though she’d done it twice, both times for the wrong reasons, and she still wasn’t sure there was a good reason—for her.

  “You and Dad got married young,” Randy said.

  “Oh, honey, that wasn’t even a real marriage.”

  “You were together for five years.”

  “Yeah.” Jeri sighed. “But Randy, you know why we got married, right?”

  Several beats of silence came through the line. “Were you pregnant with me?”

  “No.” She exhaled. “I can’t believe your father hasn’t told you this.”

  “He didn’t talk about you much,” he said. “Unless I asked and asked. Then he’d show me your website, and your picture, and talk about what you did. Buildings you worked on. That kind of thing.”

  Jeri had made peace with Howie’s actions. She couldn’t go back and change them anyway. “Well, we were out with some friends,” she said. “I’d been out with your dad, oh, probably a dozen times. He was a nice guy. Smart as a whip. Worked hard in school. But, there wasn’t a huge spark there. A little sizzle.”

  She let her mind flow back to that time. “And the guy we were with started teasing your dad. Saying how he’d never get married, never get anyone to commit to someone like him. It was quite hurtful. Anyway, to help your dad out, I stepped up and said I’d marry him. It became a contest after that, and we ended up getting married a few weeks later.”

  Saying it out loud sounded so, so stupid. What had she been thinking?

  “I didn’t get pregnant with you until a few months after that,” she said. “And honestly, Randy? We stayed together as long as we did because of you.”

  “Why’d you leave?” Randy asked, his voice almost a whisper. She’d been anticipating this question when she’d gone to Oregon over Christmas. But he’d never asked.

  “Your dad asked me to,” she said simply. “He was finishing law school, and I didn’t want to leave California. I’d been building my construction firm here, and we fought all the time. All the time.” She swallowed, remembering those bitter days. “And he asked me to please, just let him have you, take you to Oregon, and raise you. I was weak. I walked away.”

  Scuffling came through the line, and he spoke to someone on his end. “Sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Love you,” she said.

  “Love you too.” He hung up, and Jeri looked at her phone, her mood darkening quickly.

  “He still blames you for leaving,” she said, picking up the tool she’d used to lay the floor. “And that’s fine. He needs time to heal, just like you do.”

  As she loaded everything in the back of her construction truck, her phone dinged again. Randy had sent another message.

  I don’t blame you for walking away, Mom. I love you.

  Light filled Jeri’s whole being, and s
he felt the sweet release that only came from forgiveness. Tears filled her eyes, and she faced the heavens, with their glorious spring sunshine. “Thank you, Lord,” she said. “Thank you.”

  A few weeks later, Jeri lounged in the shade near where Sawyer was working out in the pasture with the llamas. She’d won the bid for the new administration build-out, but the funding hadn’t come in yet. In the time since she’d finished the dog enclosure, she’d been getting her business set up. She’d applied for her business license again and dedicated a space in her living room to business things by buying a desk and putting her paperwork there.

  She’d been looking for other jobs that were bigger, and thus taking bids for items that didn’t start for months and months.

  She walked Blue, though the dog got more exercise than he needed just from running around the ranch. She got another chicken and kept it in the coop with the ranch hens.

  She’d kept busy for the most part, but sometimes, she just hung out with Sawyer and watched the man use those glorious muscles.

  Her phone rang, and she swiped on a call from Scarlett. “Did the funding come through?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I’m calling for two reasons. You have an interesting piece of mail here from the State of California. And the bridesmaid dresses are here.” She actually sounded more excited by the first item.

  Jeri wasn’t. She knew what that piece of mail held. An official notification that she and Sawyer were now divorced. Of course, maybe that was more exciting than squeezing herself into a bright blue bridesmaid dress.

  “I’ll come over,” she said, getting up. She signaled to Sawyer and told him where she was going, and then she started down the road.

  Adele would be coming back to the ranch for the wedding in just a few days, and while Jeri hadn’t been besties with the woman, she’d liked her. Oh, and she made the best hamburger on the planet.

  Jeri went up the steps and into the house through the back door without bothering to knock. Scarlett stood in the living room with Sissy and Amber, both of whom already had their dresses on.