The Bride (The Bride #1)(39)
“I’m not mad about that, Ellie. I promise you. You are my family. You need help right now and so I’m not going anywhere. Hell, not that I have anywhere to go to. With what your father was going to give me I barely had enough money to put down on the land. I can’t buy the land, buy cattle, and build a house from scratch all at the same time.”
He was trying to make me feel better, but it wasn’t working. I felt like shit. Then I said the scary thing. The thing I had to consider.
“I can sell it. The operation, the land.”
Jake closed his eyes. As if what I had said was blasphemous. Worse than any curse I had ever shouted. Masons had been on this land for five generations.
Until it got to me.
“Ellie…”
“No, Jake. Don’t you see? It’s the only way. I can sell it and give you the money and then you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I won’t have to lift a calf, or cut fence line or any of it… You would be free.”
He looked at me then and I could see I had shocked him.
“You would do that? You would give up all of this, your legacy, your future… you would do that for me?”
I nodded. It was only fair.
He reached up with his finger and brushed my cheek. Like I was some odd fairy he discovered in the forest. But then he was shaking his head. “Ellie, you and I both know you come into some money when you’re twenty-one. That money is there for you so you can have choices. If all we have to do is wait another three years…”
“Three years! Jake, that is three more years of your life. You’ll be thirty!”
He smiled then and I wanted to hit his arm.
Instead he bumped his shoulder against mine. “Yes, I’ll be thirty, but I won’t be dead. You do this drastic thing now, you can never undo it. We wait three years and then you’ll have the money I need…”
“It’s not enough. If you’re going to give up another three years of your life, then you deserve more. You have to give that to me. You have to make this so it’s not all about me taking, but giving back to you too.”
“Okay. We’ll talk to Howard. We’ll work something out. Something that’s fair for both of us.”
We sat there then quietly as reality started to close in around me. I had started crushing on Jake hard, pretending I wasn’t because I knew he was going to be leaving soon. Jake knew I was crushing on him and was being gentle with me because he didn’t feel the same but didn’t want to hurt my feelings when he left.
Through it all we seemed to have had this light at the end of the tunnel. April twenty-second and it would be behind us.
Instead, it was three more years ahead of us.
“What are you mad about, then?” I asked him.
He turned his head to me. “What?”
“You said you weren’t mad about being stuck here, but you’re obviously upset about something.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I guess we have to talk about that too. I am angry with myself that I kissed you.”
“But you said it was just a reaction to the situation.”
“It was.”
“Then you don’t have to worry about it.”
“Ellie, I’m angry at myself that I kissed you. But I am fucking furious with myself… because I want to do it again.”
My head shot up but he didn’t wait to give me chance to say anything. He left and slammed the door of the study behind him.
“Oh no,” I whispered to an empty room. “That’s a problem.”
*
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Don’t miss the next two in the series!
The Wife
The Lover
Here’s a preview of The Wife…
Excerpt from The Wife
Ellie
Two weeks after the storm (aka the day Jake kissed me)
So that happened.
Oh. Wait. I should probably catch you up with everything. Well, you remember my dad died, I was underage, so Jake stepped up and married me. We agreed to the arrangement until my eighteenth birthday.
Except a month before my eighteenth birthday, a major Arctic blast took out half my herd and two thirds of my calves. Oh, and Jake’s old house on the property he was going to buy back—as soon as we got divorced and I gave him the money my dad left him in the will.
No house.
No money to buy the land.
Massively in trouble cattle ranch.
What did all of that equal?
No divorce.
Which meant Jake and I were going to stay married. And you might think what was the problem with that? After all, we did it for sixteen months, no problem.
Okay, one problem. About a year in I started to have… feelings. Yeah. Those feelings. I fought it. He mostly ignored it, but I could tell he was a little upset about it. He liked me. He didn’t want to hurt my feelings when he… you know… divorced my ass.
So we pretended I didn’t feel anything, which was fine because the divorce was only a couple of months away. Then he would leave, I would get down to the business of running my ranch, and all those…feelings would fade away.