The Bride (The Bride #1)(40)

Except now we weren’t getting divorced.

Enter problem number two.

Jake had kissed me. I had unhooked my karabiner from the safe line and lost my way in the storm. Thankfully, Jake had found me. But he’d been pissed.

Super pissed.

Angrier than I had ever seen him. And he’d kissed me. It was hot. It was—well, this is probably going to sound super profound… but the kiss was about life. Two people who had survived, and while the whole feeling thing was weird between us, there was no question we loved each other.

We were Ellie and Jake. Jake and Ellie.

Now there was this elephant in the room. Because while the kiss had happened under extreme circumstances which we might have been able to write off, him telling me he wanted to do it again…

Leading to problem number three.

We’re married. Jake didn’t want folks to think he would ever take advantage of an underage girl, because he wouldn’t. Except now I was very close to not being underage, and we had kissed.

You’re thinking sex was the natural conclusion to that day?

You would be wrong. Instead we’d rented equipment and pulled dead cows out of a pen all day, then buried them in a mass grave. Totally not sexy times. We’d fallen asleep after being dead on our feet and we didn’t talk about the kiss, his stunning confession, and his very real anger at himself for feeling that way.

Anger that kind of, sort of, leaked out towards me.

It was not fun times.

Which gets us to now.

Two weeks later.

“I don’t think I understand what that means,” I told Mr. Connelly.

Mr. Connelly was the Vice President at Heartland Bank. Heartland Bank held the note on Long Valley. I had done some research and had come up with a plan to free Jake. Jake didn’t think the plan would work. Still, he’d come with me to the bank.

“You’re asking for a loan? Correct?”

That’s what it means when you go to the bank and ask them for money. We were going to have to do this anyway. We had to buy more cows if we were going to restore the operation within the next few years. Since I was taking a major hit on what I was going to be able to sell at the end of summer, I was going to have to borrow the money anyway. Not a big deal. We had the land as collateral, and that was worth a lot.

“Yes,” I said, like he was a little thick.

“And you and Jake and have worked it out and decided to stay married? Correct?”

I hated the way he said correct after every question. But I was digressing This was part of the plan. I was just going to borrow more money than I needed. Jake and I worked out the numbers. The least amount we needed to borrow to buy the cows to replenish the herd. Then I added twenty thousand to that number.

I would pay him his money and we could get divorced.

Because FYI, being married to someone who didn’t want to be married to you… also not fun.

Which meant we fought about it constantly, because I apparently was the only one looking for a way out.

I’d told him he had a hero complex and that he should divorce me.

He’d told me to shut up.

I’d told him I was going to divorce him and he had no say in the matter.

He’d told me to shut up.

I’d told him about my bank plan, and he’d said it wouldn’t work. And now it seemed it wasn’t working.

“Uh, does that matter?”

Mr. Connelly laced his fingers together and gave me what would be my first, but not my last, what I would come to know as the banker smile.

“Ellie, I knew your dad… well, just about my whole life. He was a good man and he ran a solid cattle ranch operation.”

“Thank you.”

Jake had warned me to be polite to Mr. Connelly. I hated that it felt like Jake already knew the outcome when I hadn’t even asked the question yet.

“So you’ll forgive my… hesitancy in allowing you, a new rancher, to take on a loan of such size without knowing that you’ll have Jake’s experience working beside you.”

Jake’s experience? Horseshit. Jake was only ten years older than I was. Then I realized Jake had something I didn’t have.

A penis.

I know. Because I saw it. Naked and everything.

Not going to lie. I spent a lot of time thinking about Jake’s naked penis.

“This is because I’m a woman,” I said.

“Oh, here we go,” Jake muttered.

“Ellie, no, absolutely not. We would never make any kind of decision based on the sex, race, or sexual orientation of a person applying for a loan.”

That didn’t sound practiced at all.

Mr. Connelly continued. “You have to understand we’re a small bank, and that storm was hard for a lot of folks around here. We have to make good decisions. Giving an eighteen-year-old person a significant amount of money on the hope that you can return the ranch to good standing on your own—well, that’s a risk we can’t take. If we knew two experienced persons were working toward that effort, we would be willing to consider a loan given the value you have in the land.”

I leaned forward to make my point. “I don’t think you get it. He doesn’t want to be married to me.”

“Ellie, shut up,” Jake interjected. “We’re fine, Mr. Connelly. We’re going to stay married for the time being. Until we can get Long Valley back to what it was. What happens now?”