The Bride Read online

  The Bride

  S. Doyle

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Excerpt from The Wife

  Copyright © 2017 by S. Doyle

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The Bride Series

  Book 2: The Wife

  Book 3: The Lover

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  One

  Ellie

  January

  My dad died. Wait. Wow. That was really intense. I should back up.

  I’m Ellie Mason… and my dad was dead.

  Here was the super bad part. My mom was dead, too. She’d died when I was nine of cervical cancer. She must have had a thought that she was going to die young, because she had planned ahead. She had worked for the National Park system in Montana for a bunch of years before meeting my dad. She’d had this life insurance policy that when she died my dad put in a trust for me for when I was twenty-one.

  He’d said it was there to give me options. It wasn’t like millions or anything, but enough to set me up with a place and a car if I didn’t want to have to come back to the ranch after college.

  Did I mention that my dad was a cattle rancher?

  He was.

  We were.

  I was.

  Over two thousand acres in western Montana. We ran about four to five hundred head a year. We had a barn, a chicken coop, some cattle-ready horses. A wide swath of grazing land and great irrigation. A full time employee plus my dad year round. For calving season and selling season we would bring in some extra hands: Javier and Gomez, two immigrant farm workers from south of the border.

  They didn’t say much because they didn’t speak much English. But they worked eighteen-hour days. Never complained and took cash.

  Our life was good. Sure, we were miles from everything. It took me over forty-five minutes to get to our nearest town to go to school every morning. Town was another three-hour drive from any city remotely resembling civilization. The nearest one being Missoula. Yep. To get to a Target was literally a four-hour drive there and back. I know because I did it once a month with my dad.

  Except now my dad was dead.

  Only that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was I was only sixteen years and eight months old. For those of you doing the math and need a calculator like me, that was one year and four months before I was considered a legal adult.

  Which means I was an orphan. Like a for real orphan. I had this crazy urge to start asking for more and go looking for a dog named Sandy. It didn’t seem like it could be a real thing in the twenty-first century. But it was. If your mom dies and your dad dies, then you are an orphan.

  There had been no way to plan for this. My dad had died suddenly of a heart attack. Some artery that shut down. They called it the widow maker, only in this case it was an orphan maker.

  He’d been a smoker, but quit years ago. I made him eat mostly healthy food, but he liked burgers and fries like everyone else. He drank some but not a ton, and he was only fifty-seven, which didn’t even seem old anymore. Tom Cruise was in his fifties and he was still doing Mission Impossible movies.

  My dad was not Tom Cruise.

  My dad was not…

  “Ellie.”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Jake. His name was short for Jackson, which was a really cool name, but everyone who knew him since he was a kid always called him Jake.

  He was my dad’s foreman. The only full time employee who basically did everything my dad didn’t do on the ranch. He was probably worried, too. About what was going to happen.

  He nodded his chin and looked down at the rose in my hand. I was supposed to drop it on the coffin. That’s what everybody was waiting for. Instead I was staring down at this hole in the ground, thinking…

  That was it. I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I wasn’t crying, which was weird. All my friends from high school were. There were fifteen of them here, not because I was so popular, but because we had a really small class and most of us were pretty tight because we had all grown up together.

  Although I guess most people liked me. All of my classmates had said or done something. A lot of sorry texts. Even from Riley, who was a grade ahead of me.

  My friends were crying, my neighbors were crying. Jake wasn’t crying, but he was a cowboy and cowboys didn’t cry. Also he was probably really worried about what was going to happen to his job, and fear had a way of distracting you from your grief.

  I suppose I was numb. With my mom I remember being so sad, but that was after months of her being really really sick. This was like someone turned off a switch on Sam Mason.

  “We’ve got people coming back to the house,” Jake said softly. “We’d best be getting back.”

  See, he even talked like a cowboy. Which was not how most guys in my class talked, but Jake wasn’t like most guys. Not even when he’d been in high school. My dad used to say Jake had an old soul.

  “Okay.”

  It was cold too. I was in a dress, my only nice one, and my legs were freaking blocks of ice because my nicest coat only barely covered my ass. Leggings versus Montana in January #leggingslose.

  I held the rose out over the hole, careful to keep my feet on the green mat covering the ground, and opened my hand. The rose fell. I heard it hit the top of the coffin. I had this crazy idea that maybe I didn’t do it right. Maybe I should jump in, get it, crawl out and do it over again.

  But Jake put his arm around my shoulders and started moving me back to where the line of cars was waiting outside the cemetery. He’d driven me in his truck. We weren’t fancy people who needed limousines to go to a burial.

  Once I was inside, I buckled up and watched the line of people who were still dropping roses. There were a lot. That was good, I thought. It meant my dad was liked, and that was important.

  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 no
thing. 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.

  “And you are so not that guy. You see everything in perspective. I guess that’s why sometimes when you two are together, I don’t see it. But if you love her, you should marry her.”

  “A topic for another time. We’re here. People have already arrived.”

  I could see it. The cars lined up in front of the house. The driveway was one big long U with house at the bottom in essentially what was the swell of the valley. The Long Valley Ranch brick archway announced the start of the property. Jake stopped the car before turning in.

  “You ready for this?”

  “No,” I answered honestly. “Do we have to do this? Let’s drive somewhere and let them eat each other’s casseroles.”

  “But Mrs. Petty’s Bundt cake. You wouldn’t deny me that, would you?”

  He was smiling. Sadly. I smiled back because I knew it would make him feel better.

  “I mean it, Ellie. I promise you I’m not going anywhere.”

  Until he had to. I nodded and took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

  Two

  Ellie

  When Jake and I walked into the house, all conversation stopped. Everyone turned to me and I could see it, in each one of their faces… pity. No that wasn’t fair. Sympathy. Which I interpreted as pity.

  These were all the wives of the neighbors who hadn’t driven out to the cemetery so they could set up the… what the hell was this, anyway? The after-funeral party? The Sad Reception? Whatever it was, it was weird.

  I took off my coat, tried to rub some warmth into my legs, and walked into the living room where I imagined people would come and talk to me.

  Or did I have to go and talk to them? Was this like a wedding where I was the bride and had to reach out to the guests? Or was this more like what I had to do at the church earlier, where I stood by my dead dad as everyone shook my hand and said sorry for your loss?

  Some awkwardly hugged me, too. I mean people who would have never hugged me. Like my P.E. teacher, Mr. Kelly, was suddenly hugging me.

  Now it seemed all these people would all do the same thing, except this time there would be the prize of food at the end.

  Only no one who was already there came to see me. They were busy putting out dishes and plates and serving utensils. Jake seemed to be overseeing things, which was typical. Finally it was Mrs. Petty, of the famed Bundt cake, who found me first.

  “How about I get you some hot tea?”

  “Kay.”

  She smiled then. This really big smile, and I could tell it was because she was so happy that she could actually do something. TEA! Tea was going to make me feel better. Tea was going to warm me up. Tea was the thing that I needed and Mrs. Petty was going to make that happen.

  She brought the tea with a softer smile, and I took a sip.

  Tea did not make me feel better, but I didn’t tell her that.

  The doorbell started to ring, which was totally weird because I couldn’t remember the last time I heard it. Most people who knew me or my dad knocked real hard and then opened it. It wasn’t like the door was ever locked.

  The Long Valley Ranch was in the middle of nowhere. We never expected people to come by and rob us.

  Oh shit. I was going to have to live alone in the house. That was freaking scary. I guessed I would have to start locking doors. Keep Dad’s shotgun next to the bed.

  What if I had to shoot someone?

  “Ellie?”

  I looked up. It was Mrs. Nash.

  “Hi, Mrs. Nash.”

  She opened her mouth and then shut it. I could see she’d been crying. This was super awkward too, because Mrs. Nash, who had been my freshman English teacher, had also been banging my dad.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she finally managed.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I’m so…”

  “Sorry. Yep. I guess… Well, you know. I’m sorry too. For you.”

  She looked at me and I could se
e she realized that I knew about her and my dad. For a moment she looked alarmed. Like I would start telling everyone my dad had been banging a married woman.

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  “Did your father…”

  “No. He never said anything. It was an accident that I knew. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  My dad had this hunting cabin on the property. A one-room cabin with limited amenities. I can’t even remember what had caused me to head out there. I’d been riding Petunia—yes, my horse’s name was Petunia—and I’d figured I would check to make sure the cabin was stocked in case Dad wanted to go hunting as the season was coming up. I saw his truck parked out front and then I watched as Mrs. Nash drove up and got out of her car.

  The reason she was called Mrs. Nash was because of Mr. Nash.

  Mr. Nash ran the grocery store in town that everyone was always complaining about because he only ever had two of any one brand. If you didn’t plan your food shopping around restock day, then forget getting your hands on Kraft Mac N Cheese. You got the generic brand instead, which tasted like shit.

  Shit. My dad didn’t like it when I cursed.

  Anyway I’d sat on Petunia from about fifty feet away on an overhang and had watched the whole thing go down.

  Oh no, gross. Not the WHOLE thing!

  I meant I saw my dad open the cabin door and let Mrs. Nash inside. He patted her on the ass—I could tell she’d liked that—and then he’d closed the door.

  Luckily, I was a sophomore when this happened so I didn’t have to worry about my grades being corrupted by how good or bad my dad was in bed.

  Everybody seemed to know Mrs. and Mr. Nash were not a happy couple. But they had two kids, so I guess they wanted to stick it out for them. Neither Mr. Nash nor the kids were here today.

  Today was for her.

  She patted my shoulder and then she walked away. I could hear her hiccup a sob into her handkerchief.

  See she was crying. I should be crying.

  There were more comers. More I’m sorrys. My friends stayed on the other side of the room, all huddled together. Talking and whispering. Sometimes daring to look over at me. I felt like I had this contagious parent dying disease they were all afraid of catching. I wasn’t mad. I figured I would feel the same way if one of them had recently been made an orphan.