The Bride (The Bride #1)(2)

Except I didn’t know why exactly.

“Are there a lot of people coming back do you think?” I asked.

I looked over at Jake and he just raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah. I guess so,” I answered myself. “We’ll have lots of casserole and stuff. Mrs. Petty will bring her Bundt cake. You love that cake.”

“Ellie…”

“I’m not crying. Why aren’t I crying?”

“You’re in shock still. It’s natural.”

“When are we going to talk about… you know. All of it.”

“Not today. I told Howard today was for family and friends. About saying goodbye to a good man.”

Howard was my dad’s lawyer. A friend too, and basically the only lawyer in town. He’d be the one to figure out how all of this got sorted out. The ranch, me.

Because here was the really bad thing. Beyond being an orphan, beyond being underage, what Jake said about family wasn’t really true. There wasn’t a lot. There was my mom’s crazy sister who lived in Florida, and I had only met her once at my mom’s funeral.

She’d sobbed and cried, and then I think she’d tried to hit on my dad because he’d gotten really mad at her and told her to leave and never come back.

My dad wasn’t Tom Cruise, but he had that kind of old-western cowboy look that I guess women were drawn to.

Since then, there had been nothing. Not a card, not a call. That was it. Both grandparents were deceased. My parents had met a little later in life. My mom was thirty-eight when she had me. My dad’s mom was the only grandparent I could even remember, but she had passed away before my mom did.

A lot of death. Right? I’m too young for so many to have died.

What Jake said gave me a little bit of an out. I didn’t have to be scared about what Howard was going to say today. I could worry about that tomorrow.

Ugh. Tomorrow. What a freaking orphan word.

No, I was going to try and smile, sadly of course, reassure everyone I was fine and eat some of Mrs. Petty’s cake.

“You know I’m here, right Ellie? I’m not going anywhere.”

Until someone said he had to go. Which would really suck for him. Jake had been part of this ranch for the last six years.

His dad and my dad had been friends growing up. Jake grew up on the property next to ours. The Talley River Ranch hadn’t been as large as our operation, but it was a nice chunk of property on really quality grazing land. Only Jake’s dad, Ernie, had been a drunk. A bad one. My dad had tried to support them both for as long as he could, but eventually the bank foreclosed.

After that, most folks said Ernest Talley drank himself to death.

My dad had given Jake a place to live and work. A chance to earn enough to someday buy back his family’s land. Right now we were leasing the property to extend our grazing area. But really my dad had been holding on to it until Jake was ready to buy it back.

Yeah, Jake was shaking in his boots as much as I was because we had both been reading up on things since Dad died three days ago.

Instead of answering his question, I nodded.

“Is Janet coming? I didn’t see her at the cemetery.”

“Yes. She was really sorry she couldn’t be at the funeral, but she had to work. She got someone from Jefferson to come in and cover the afternoon shift so she could come out to the house.”

Janet was Jake’s girlfriend for the last two years, and a nurse at the urgent care clinic we had in town. The only place where someone could get immediate medical care until they could be shipped off to an actual hospital.

Riverbend had just about one of everything. Doctor, nurse, lawyer, judge, sheriff. We actually had two schools. K-7, then 8-12. It had been K-8 until the numbers shifted and there more young kids then teenagers. Nothing like watching a wide-eyed eighth grader see a senior in high school for the first time.

We were small. But we were tight. It made sense why Janet hadn’t been there because getting people from towns nearby to provide coverage was never easy.

“Are you going to marry her?”

It was sort of none of my business, but I had been thinking about it lately. I knew they had been dating for a while, but I really didn’t know how serious they were. I didn’t know if my dad dying was going to mess up something else for him, too.

He shifted in his seat. One long movement of uncomfortable.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“She’s nice.”

“Do you like her?”

I made a face. He saw my face and winced. Which caused me to make another face. He saw that too.

“I don’t not like her,” I said quickly.

“You don’t not like anyone.”

It was true. When you live in a town of so few people, I found it a good strategy to like everyone. No enemies that way.

“She’s just really intense sometimes. Like everything is always this big deal. She’s the person who when you ask on a scale of one to ten, comes back and says a hundred. Or a million. Is that a nurse thing? I don’t know. Maybe that’s how she has to look at everything.”

Jake smiled. “Intense is a good word for Janet.”

He didn’t seem to be mad that I was in some way calling out his girlfriend. Maybe this was good. Maybe now that it was only me, he would start treating me more like an adult instead of his kid sister. I took the opportunity to wow him with even more astute advice.