The Bride (The Bride #1)(37)

Fear of the cold for a rancher in Montana was not a good thing.

When I shared this with Jake I got a very sympathetic… “You’ll get over it.”

I know, I know. You don’t want to hear about all the gruesome shit. The dead calves, the dead cows, the brutal work of clearing it all out.

You want to know about the kiss.

We couldn’t talk about it. I think we were both too raw from the experience in general. Jake had not been wrong. I could have easily died. There was emotional fallout from that.

I tried to tell myself the kiss wasn’t really anything.

Like on a scale of one to ten, maybe like a five. Sure, it happened. It was weird for us. But it had more to do with me almost dying than any feelings Jake had for me. Or I had for him.

Still, it was a pretty hot kiss. My hottest kiss ever. Sure, I had kissed guys. Four of them, if you want a running total, but nothing in my life had prepared me for that. That was… that was…

Intense.

Okay, so maybe it was more like a six on the scale. It was an event. It happened. It was powerful but it didn’t have to change anything.

Unless it changed everything.

We were at thirty-eight days. Thirty-eight days until my eighteenth birthday. Until I was legally an adult.

Thirty-eight days until Jake left.

“Stop,” I called out to him.

He turned around. “We have to do this, Ellie.”

“I know, but we have to do the other thing too and I want to do it first.”

He put his hands on his hips, then he turned around and started walking toward me. The crazy thing was, every time he did that now, any time he started moving toward me, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to kiss me again.

Fine. On a scale of ten our kiss was probably more like a seven in terms of overall life impact.

Instead of kissing me (which I knew he wasn’t going to do) he grabbed my hand and pulled me back toward the house. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well be warm.”

THIS. Suddenly that word had colossal meaning in my brain.

This could mean hashing it out, which is what I intended.

This could mean more kissing.

This could mean sex.

Because kissing led to sex. Because I wanted sex. Because secretly in that place I don’t like to think about too hard, I wanted sex with Jake.

There, I thought it. I don’t know how it happened. It wasn’t seeing him naked. It wasn’t any one thing. It was that day in and day out, he’d become the one person who understood me. The one person I wanted to see in the morning, the one person I wanted say goodnight to at night. When we watched TV on the couch, I wanted to cuddle. When we drove into town, I fantasized about holding hands.

When we went to Howard’s Christmas party, I’d pretended we were a real couple. Only in my head.

Because I knew he didn’t feel the same way. Worse, not only did he not feel the same way, he knew how I was feeling. So embarrassing. I guess men have a sense of things when they know a woman wants them.

He’d been walking on eggshells around me for months, while I desperately tried to tell myself I didn’t care that he didn’t want me. I didn’t care that we were going to get a divorce. I didn’t care that I was going to have to do this all by myself.

We still had no foreman, because Jake had dismissed all of the candidates as either too inexperienced (young) or too creepy (which who knew what that meant) or too set in his ways (he didn’t do things like Jake wanted him to do them).

Javier and Gomez agreed to come back in May to help me out, but they were always going to be temporary, as neither one was willing to commit to full time. Probably because full time meant legal papers neither one of them had.

So all of this had been building up and building up. Then the storm happened and Jake kissed me and now we needed to talk about it. Because it was day thirty-eight and this was more important than a lot of dead animals.

This was good. I was angry. I was pretty sure this whole conversation would be better with pissed me than pathetic me.

We were inside the back room, going through the routine of taking off our coats.

“I need a drink,” he said.

“It’s eight in the morning.”

He hit me then with his expression. “Are we going to have the conversation I think we’re going to have?”

“Yes,” I snapped, my arms crossing over my chest.

“Then I need a fucking drink.”

The only place we kept real alcohol was my father’s study. A room we never went to because I think it hurt us both too much to be in there without him. Any bookwork we did was always at the kitchen table.

Across from the living room Jake opened the door to the study and made his way toward the bar in the corner. The same one Howard had gone to the night of Dad’s funeral.

“Make mine a double.”

Jake glared at me.

“Oh you get to drink, but I don’t?”

He said nothing and poured me a splash of something brown.

He handed me the glass even as he took a healthy gulp of his own.

I smelled fire and fumes. Then I tasted fire and fumes. I coughed and set the glass aside.

“Okay, Ellie. We’re here. You want to talk, talk.”

“Don’t make this about me being dramatic about something. You kissed me, Jake. Not the other way around.”