The Bride (The Bride #1)(31)

Yeah, but I made sure she had time to study every night. And I made sure she at least thought about college, even though it probably wasn’t an option for her. I couldn’t see her trusting the ranch to anyone she hired after I left, enough to actually move away to college.

In a few years, after she got some of her mom’s life insurance money and was comfortable with whoever they hired, maybe.

The point was, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this. Not Christmas, not whether she would like what I got her as a present—I knew she wouldn’t. I had done it intentionally too. I wanted to get her something practical rather than something sentimental that would make her cry. The day was going to be hard enough for her.

Thanksgiving hadn’t been easy. Christmas would be just as bad.

I went with a pair of smaller wire cutters I thought she might be able to use to work the fence. I had no doubt she was going to bitch about them all morning because she hated working the fence. Mostly because she didn’t have the hand strength to do it.

The wire cutters might help.

Except I wasn’t thinking about any of that. Instead all I could think about was that my life with her was going to be over basically in another four months.

Four months, which meant we needed to bring someone on soon. We had decided in addition to Javier and Gomez, we would add that potential full time person for calving season. This way we could see how he handled himself over the next few months before making a decision to pull the trigger.

It was complicated. I wanted someone older and more seasoned. Someone who could be a mentor to Ellie. Someone like her father.

The problem was, a man like that might be unwilling to live in the bunk house. Especially he might be unwilling to share space with Javier and Gomez, even if it was on a part time basis.

Maybe a divorced rancher? Although I had to say there weren’t many people that fit the bill around these parts. We were going to have to make our search country wide. Thankfully with the internet, that wasn’t as much of a problem as it might have been in the past.

Then there was the Ellie factor. I didn’t often let myself think it, but there were times I couldn’t avoid it. She was beautiful. Not just pretty. Not just cute. She was beautiful and growing more so each day as she matured.

She was going to be eighteen. The sole owner of a multi-million-dollar cattle ranch, and stupid hot.

The man we found who was going to work for her, respect her, keep his hands off her… Well, I wasn’t sure who that was other than me. Which is why I was going for age. The older the better.

For her.

“Drink?” she asked me. I gave her a chin nod and she was off. She knew what I liked. A while later she came back with a Corona and lime for me, lime already pressed inside, and a cup of what appeared to be punch.

“Is that spiked?”

She smiled a did this jiggle thing with her eyebrows. “You bet your ass it is. And not a word from you. It was spiked last year too, and Dad didn’t have any problem with letting me have a cup or two.”

She was only going to be eighteen in the next few months, not twenty-one, but still I didn’t really have a problem with it. I had started drinking when I was eighteen and no one thought anything of it.

In fact, unless you were being unusually stupid the twenty-one age limit was for the most part ignored in these parts.

Pete’s was the only bar in town, and on Friday nights it was filled with as many under-twenty-ones as over. If you got stupid and got kicked out, your fake ID was confiscated. Otherwise, Pete looked the other way.

It occurred to me I might actually run into Ellie at Pete’s once we were divorced. I had only been a few times in the past year, but it was a place I liked to go on occasion. I hadn’t let her, but once she graduated that’s were where her friends would most likely hang out on the weekends.

She would want to hang out there too.

That would be cool. Sharing a beer with her out in town. And strange, because she would also be my ex-wife.

Because it was one of those things I thought about all the time when she counted down the days.

I thought about getting my hands on twenty thousand dollars. I thought about the feeling I was going to have when the land was mine again. I thought about how the hell was I going to fix the house, because it was a mess, find enough cash to start buying up cattle, and have a place to actually move into. I thought about a lot of things. Exciting things. Things that drove me forward to making my own dream come true.

And then I thought about how I would miss Ellie. Miss her. It wasn’t wrong of me to think it. We lived together. She was my roommate. We ate together, worked together, watched TV together. Of course I would miss having her in my life.

Had things been weird since the towel incident? A little.

I struggled for a while to figure out what it was. I knew she was a virgin, so yeah my dick was the first one she probably saw. Maybe that had freaked her out. Or the weirdness of seeing me basically naked. We’d always been close but never intimate.

Since then I could tell she was more cautious around me. She had this sweatshirt thing I’d never seen before that she started wearing at night, complaining the house was too cold. When the temperature had never bothered her before.

When I said something she decided was sexist—I did it a lot mostly to egg her on—she used to rub my arm and tell me what caveman I was and how sorry she was for my next wife.