Life After Wife (Three Magic Words Trilogy, #3)(37)

“Well, it don’t need a man. Me and Aunt Maud proved that,” she mumbled.

“What?” Kate asked.

Sophie explained what Elijah had said and where her thoughts had been. After all, there was precious little in her life that Kate didn’t already know, and what she didn’t, she’d bug the dickens out of Sophie until she got it.

Kate listened, alternately shaking her head and nodding. “Way I see it is that you two got a lot of baggage between you to get rid of. You don’t have to hurry. You got time.”

“Well, thank you for that. Does it mean I don’t have to go out on dates every Friday and Saturday night?” Sophie asked.

“Oh, no, it don’t mean that at all. Either you go out with Elijah, or we’re going to fix you up. It’s time you crawled out of that black hole you been livin’ in and get out into the world again,” Kate said.



The day ended just like it began: in a whirlwind of preparation for the sale the next day. It was midnight when Sophie finally crawled into bed. She figured she’d be asleep when her head hit the pillow, but one of the songs she heard played that day kept running through her mind like it was on a continuous loop. Lee Ann Womack singing “I Hope You Dance.”

She hummed the song but couldn’t remember all the lyrics, and it was driving her stark-raving mad. Finally she turned on the light, picked up her iPod, and found the song.

A dam let loose in her soul, and she wept as she listened to Lee Ann sing words that cut the chains from her heart. The lyrics said that she hoped love would never leave the listener empty-handed. When she said that whenever one door closed she hoped another opened, and asked the listener to promise to give faith a fighting chance, Sophie put her hands over her eyes and sobbed.

Lee Ann sang about never fearing the mountains in the distance and never settling for the path of least resistance. She mentioned that living meant taking chances, and loving might be a big mistake but it was worth making.

“Is it?” Sophie pulled two tissues from the box on the nightstand and blew her nose.

She hummed along with tears still streaming down her face as Lee Ann ended the song by saying that when someone got the chance to sit it out or dance, she hoped she danced.

Sophie wept through a dozen more tissues and fell asleep with a burden lifted from her soul. It was the first time she’d cried since the day the policeman came to her door with the news that her cheating husband had died in a plane crash.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


The rude alarm clock awoke Sophie at six o’clock from a dream she didn’t want to leave. It was aggravating when she sat up and opened her eyes that she could only remember it was about Elijah. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember what they were doing or where they were in the dream.

Rattling pots and pans in the kitchen said he was already up. It was Saturday and…

“Sale day!” She squeaked and jumped out of bed, forgetting about dreams, tears, and Lee Ann Womack’s song. Sale day was the single most important day on a ranch, and the sale this year was doubly important. The buyers would see a solid, unified front between the partnership and that the ranch had survived the fire.

She belted a red silk kimono robe round her middle and padded to the kitchen where Elijah was making pancakes and sausage. He turned when he felt her presence behind him and felt another tug on his heart. Sophie, all sleepy and wearing a bright red robe, was just as beautiful as Sophie in her jeans and boots. Elijah didn’t want to fall for Sophie. He wanted to buy her half of the ranch, run it with the help of a few hired hands, and enjoy the peace and quiet of ranching. That great big M word did not have a place in his plans.

“Good morning. Ready to see how we’ve done in our short time on the ranch?”

She cut her eyes up at him. “You’re the short-time partner, Elijah Jones. I’ve been here almost two years, buddy.”

“Grouchy this morning, are we?”

She air-slapped his arm. “No, I’m not cranky, and you aren’t going to rile me up. This is sale day. Something I’ve worked toward for a year, and I want to show Aunt Maud that she taught me well.”

He flipped two pancakes onto a plate, added a couple of sausage patties, and handed it to her. “She knows you are capable. Even if the sale is a complete bust, believe me, Aunt Maud knows.”

“Thank you. For the breakfast, that is. And how do you know that about her?” Sophie carried the plate to the table, sat down, and slathered the hot pancakes with pats of butter.

“She wrote me a letter once a week, faithfully. It was always dated Sunday afternoon and postmarked Monday. And after you moved to the ranch, she talked a lot about you and how you were ‘catchin’ right on,’ as she put it,” Elijah said.

Sophie swallowed the lump in her throat. So while Sophie was in Albany with her friends, Aunt Maud spent her Sundays writing letters to Elijah and saying nice things about her.

“What else did she write to you about?” she asked.

“Honey, Aunt Maud kept me so well-informed about every cow on the place, and how much hay this pasture produced or wheat that one did, that I could run this place in my sleep. I kept notes in a book because she told me to, and I’m glad I did, because now I’m not running around in the dark. She even made suggestions about which cattle needed to go to the sale today and told me to invite Theron and Hart to bring their fall culls to our sale, but not to let in anyone else. She said that Theron and Hart let her bring to their spring sales so it was a trade-off, but if we started letting every freeloader in the county into our sale, pretty soon we’d be footin’ the bill for everyone.”