Chapter Four
Harlan did the proposing.
Obviously.
“Will you marry me, Kendall?” he asked, quietly, of the woman who stood there in the house he’d built with his own hands, sweat, and muscle.
And maybe it was a trick of the spring light, but it almost felt like she’d always been meant to be here. With him. It was almost like he’d built all of this for her.
It almost feels like fate,he thought, but he brushed that off.
He’d never spent too much time worrying about things like proposals. Or fate, for that matter. There had never been a reason to concern himself with such things, but now there was Kendall.
And while she stood there and gazed back at him and he truly didn’t know how she was going to answer, he understood that he was far more invested in marrying her—not just in marrying, but in marrying her specifically—than he’d realized.
He wasn’t sure how that had happened. He only knew it had.
Kendall cleared her throat. Her gaze was locked to his.
Harlan had the strangest notion that this was something sacred, this stolen moment here in his house. This moment that hadn’t come around the way such moments were meant to, maybe, but here they both were all the same.
“Yes,” she said, right when he was about to wonder if she was going to answer at all. And about to have to face how he was likely to feel about it if she didn’t. Or if she said no. “I’d like that.”
And then they were both grinning at each other like they’d won something.
They celebrated their arrangement by getting back in his truck, driving off the mountain, then heading into Bozeman to get themselves a marriage license. While they were at it, they set a wedding date with the judge for two days later.
Harlan bought her a ring on the way out of town, a pretty sapphire that she said made her think of the big, blue Montana sky over all the mountains, and he caught her looking at it as they drove back down the highway toward Marietta again. Twisting it this way and that like she was trying to see how it caught the light.
It was funny how this thing they were really, truly doing was settling in him like an inevitability.
Like he’d wanted Kendall for a long time when he’d only met her yesterday.
Wisely, he kept that to himself.
It didn’t seem to make any sense for her to keep staying at the Graff when they’d decided to go ahead and do this thing. They both agreed. So they checked her out when they got to Marietta, packed her two small bags into his truck, and installed her in the spare bedroom of her choice in his house on the ranch.
“Why did you build so many bedrooms when you live alone?” she asked after he’d set her suitcases neatly beside the bed she’d chosen and they’d both stared at the bed, then at each other, and had retreated back out into the living room without looking at each other like that again.
Not until they were sitting there across the coffee table from each other like company.
She’d looked at all of the rooms he had and had chosen the one on the far side of the house from his—though he didn’t think the distance from him was why she’d picked it. Watching her make her choice, he was pretty sure that her choice revolved around the view. And that back bedroom had a good one of nothing but mountain ranges marching off into the wild blue yonder.
He’d watched her curl her fingers on her left hand, as if connecting that view to her ring.
And had been surprised at the tugging sensation he’d felt then, deep inside, like he was connecting to those things, and her, just the same.
“I’ve always intended to have a family,” he told her now, more formally. Because it was strange how it felt to say that out loud when the woman he was going to marry, and presumably make that family with, was sitting there in front of him. Right here in this house where he expected that family would live. After they got to know each other a whole lot better than they did today. Imagining all of that, thinking about what was to come, made that tugging thing inside seem to go deeper still. “I guess I like to prepare.”
Kendall gazed back at him, and he thought he saw warmth there. Or he wanted to see it. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
And it had been a long day of neglecting the ranch—he’d told his family he had a doctor’s appointment so they wouldn’t come looking for him or question why he wasn’t doing the things he normally did—so he took her with him when he went back out to see to his usual chores. She watched everything he did intently as he went about the typical evening routine. She asked good questions about the stock and the land, and when they got back to his house, she told him that if he was okay with letting her find her way around his kitchen, she would be happy to cook.
“For the record, I know how to cook,” Harlan told her as they walked from his truck to the house. Their house now, he corrected himself, and wasn’t that an odd little switch. It set off that tugging thing inside again. “I don’t expect you to move in here and become a maid.” He considered that. “Or a housekeeper of any kind. I just want to clarify that.”
“That’s good.” Kendall regarded him solemnly once they were inside, toeing off their shoes in the foyer that functioned as a mud room and kept the ranch out of the house. She nodded through to the living room and the kitchen beyond. “It looks like you keep this place cleaner than I ever would. Though I’ll try to keep up.” She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans, adjusting her left hand when her ring caught. “I’m used to moving around a lot. It sounds like fun to settle into a kitchen and see what I can do with it, that’s all. Besides, I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”
“Famished,” he agreed.
Harlan washed up, then went to get the fire going before the dark settled in and the temperature dropped as low as it usually did, and no matter that it was supposedly springtime. At this elevation warmer weather was always a gift, never a given. While he worked on getting the blaze going, he was acutely aware of Kendall moving around in the kitchen on the other side of the chimney, opening cabinets and the fridge, then banging the pots around.
He’d already showed her the freezer in the garage that was really more of a workshop for the various projects that always cropped up around here. But it was also where he stored enough meat to feed an army or two, because the Careys were cattle people. There was always beef on hand.
Kendall had laughed when he’d told her that, far out in one of the more remote pastures where his father had once kept alpacas. Sweet talker, she’d teased him.
He moved to the kitchen doorway and had a sudden, old memory that bled into two memories that overlapped each other. The first when he was just a little boy, lying on the floor in front of the big fire over in the main house while his mother made the same sort of happy, meal-making noises in the kitchen there. He couldn’t have been more than six, and that meant it would be a good year yet before they knew she was sick.
His father had preferred to put his feet up after a long day on the ranch, or maybe Alice had wanted a few moments to herself. But Zeke would watch the news, muttering back at the newscasters, while Harlan flipped importantly through his picture books and the twins knocked down each other’s Lego castles and usually, also, each other.
Fast-forward about ten years to the second memory and Harlan was at the kitchen table of that same kitchen, focused on his schoolwork on those late evenings after the bus dropped him and the rest of the kids from Cowboy Point off at the General Store. By the time he made it home, Belinda was always in the finishing stages of making dinner. And his father didn’t sit and watch television. He was always handling Boone and Knox—who were technically Harlan’s half brothers, though no one had ever used the word half to describe anything in their family—or barking at the twins to stop their MMA matches all over the house.
Two sides of a coin, he thought now, remembering both of those typical family evenings. Or the memories were more like a choice laid out before him. He had the distinct impression that what he did tonight could set a precedent for all the nights to come.
That all these moments mattered, because they didn’t know each other. Because they didn’t have a history to refer back to. Because this was, technically, a second date—and here she was moved in and making dinner.
He didn’t mind the pace. But he knew he was auditioning for a third date that could go bad—that being their marriage—if he wasn’t careful.
Luckily, Harlan had always been careful. So careful and deliberate that Wilder and Ryder spent every moment they weren’t battling each other throughout their childhood making fun of him for it.
The more you mock me,he’d told them when he was all of sixteen, the more I know that everything I’m doing is right.
Not that such statements had deterred them.
Harlan didn’t go and sit in the living room to watch the news the way his dad had when he was little, and not because he was putting on a show for his brand-new fiancée. But because he never did that. He didn’t like to watch the news—any news—because he preferred to form his own opinions from facts. Not from other people’s spin on those facts.
He felt the same way about the gossip machine that fueled their little valley, and would no doubt already be churning, because he was certain at least one of his neighbors had seen him driving by with a woman in his truck.
But that was an issue for the future.
Tonight he settled in at the table he’d fashioned from reclaimed wood he’d found around the property and could remember how gangly he’d felt as a teenager. How uncomfortable in his own skin. Funny how having a pretty woman in the house made him feel that way all over again.
“How do you form an opinion?” he asked Kendall as she assembled ingredients on the counter, looking through his cabinets with the air of a person on a journey of discovery. As if she was building her own map of his spice rack in her head, and was fascinated by what she came across along the way.
“I’ve always found that it was best to keep my opinions to myself.” She glanced back over her shoulder at him, her eyebrows rising in a way that reminded him of that moment he’d first seen her. The way she’d tipped up her chin in defiance as she’d walked across the saloon toward him. “Or are you anticipating the kind of marriage where you tell me what my opinions ought to be?”
Harlan laughed at that. “Sounds pretty boring. I like a steady kind of life, because nothing that happens on the ranch is ever steady so it makes a nice change when my homelife is, but I can’t say I’m partial to boring.”
And he thought he saw her smile before she looked down and set about slicing up vegetables, then throwing them into the same big saucepan she’d set on one of the burners.
“A lot of men prefer that a woman mirror back their thoughts and opinions, and keep her own to herself,” Kendall said mildly.
Harlan watched her as she moved around the warm kitchen that looked brighter than it ought to, with her in the middle of it. She took out flour and a few other ingredients and he watched as she made a quick sort of dough, then put it in the oven.
And only when she’d cleaned that up did she go and take a package of thawed beef out of his fridge that he’d figured he’d make into a few burgers, then start browning it in the spices she’d assembled.
“Is that what you’re running from?” he asked her. “A life like that?”
She shot him a look, but then returned her attention to putting all the pieces of the meal she had thrown together into the big saucepan once the meat was drained and ready. “What I’m looking for,” she said—very carefully, to his ear, “is the kind of partnership you mentioned before. Where my opinions and contributions are valued. I think everyone’s going for that, don’t you?”
Harlan thought about his brothers, who worked the land because they felt like they were a part of it. Because while Harlan, as the oldest, had been put “in charge” of their generation from a young age, they all knew that none of this belonged to him. It was theirs.
When Zeke passed on—and he winced, not wanting to think about that too closely, or the fact that far-off day was closer than it should have been—it would belong to all of them equally.
It mattered. Belonging mattered. He tried to think what it would be like not to feel so rooted to this place. To this particular stretch of land. To his brothers and the mountains, as if they were all part and parcel of the same thing.
Because, he supposed, they were. Careys had been here so long they might as well be geological.
He didn’t have it in him to be quite so imaginative, he found, no matter how hard he tried. He was rooted too deep, right here where he’d always been, and he liked it that way.
“Why did you move around so much?” he asked her instead.
Kendall pulled the bread she’d made out of the oven and cut it up, then brought it over to the table on a plate. She put out the crock of fresh butter from his brother Boone’s dairy cows beside it.
Then she went over and ladled out huge helpings of the meal she made and brought that over too, pulling up her own chair at his table.
Harlan was used to living alone. He enjoyed his own company. His brothers liked to poke at him about it, but he always pointed out that having all of them in his face all the time was why he liked being on his own.
But this was better, despite that tugging, deep within. Or maybe because of it.
“Call it a chili soup,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as she looked down at her bowl. “It would have to sit longer, and thicken, to be chili. But it works well as a soup, too.”
“I don’t care what you call it. It smells fantastic.”
It tasted better still.
And it didn’t occur to him until the next morning when he was out in the cold, doing his usual chores before dawn, that she had never answered that question about why she’d moved around so much.
Deliberately, he was inclined to think.
They drove back up to Bozeman on the appointed day and got married in as economical a fashion as possible. Kendall wore a dress. It was light green and made her legs the focal point, which he couldn’t complain about. Harlan wore his best jeans, his fanciest boots, and the cowboy hat he kept for special occasions.
There was a quick little ceremony before the judge. And all he could remember of it, afterward, was that kiss.
That brief little kiss.
The way her eyes had met his, somehow hot and solemn at once. How she’d moved close and he’d let her set the pace of it, waiting as she lifted up on her tiptoes to brush her lips across his.
Damned if he didn’t feel it all the way down to his toes, a kind of humming that set up shop there, like it was never going away.
And the funniest part was that he didn’t mind.
He tried to shake it off. Or stop focusing on it, anyway. On the way home, he asked if she wanted to stop in Livingston to have a celebratory kind of meal, but Kendall looked at him from the passenger side of his truck, busy putting her hair up on the top of her head.
“Surely there’s work that needs doing back at the ranch,” she said.
“You are a girl after my own heart, Kendall Darlington,” he told her as she finished tying her hair into a knot and settled back against the seat.
“Kendall Carey,” she corrected him, and then laughed. “I think it’s almost completely official. I have to send in a few forms, that’s all.”
Then they sat there as they drove down into the splendor of Paradise Valley in what felt like a companionable enough quiet. Harlan, for his part, found himself thinking about the fact she’d changed her name. Or was planning to change it.
They hadn’t discussed it. And he hadn’t known, until that very moment, how much he was going to like the fact that she’d gone ahead and done it anyway.
He would have said that a name wasn’t particularly important.
But he liked his on her all the same.
They spent the next couple of days getting used to each other, inside the house and out. The simple fact of another person in the same space took some adjustment, though Harlan found he liked it. What he couldn’t tell was where the line was for her—was she being careful because this was new? Or was she… jumpy?
On Sunday, Harlan figured it was high time he introduced his family to his wife.
“You didn’t tell them you were getting married?” Kendall asked in astonishment on the drive down to the main house that Sunday afternoon. “I… don’t know how to respond to that.”
“I told you that my father made his announcement.” Harlan felt almost defensive, and that was unusual for him. He typically stood behind his own decisions one hundred percent, no matter what anyone else thought. “They’ve all met me. They should have expected I would get moving on it as soon as possible.”
“Exactly how competitive are you with your brothers?” she asked after a moment, frowning at him, but more like she was trying to figure him out than anything else.
“I’m not competitive with them at all,” Harlan said. But then he grinned. “Because I always win.”
Kendall laughed, and he realized once she did that he’d wanted that. That it mattered to him that she was happy. That this was working for her, this marriage thing.
Maybe what mattered was her, plain and simple.
And part of this was that he had to consider the choices he made, the hows and the whys of it all, in the new light, didn’t he? Because he had to explain what he did to the woman beside him and he wasn’t sure how to do that. He didn’t know how to tell her that he hadn’t told anyone she was coming. That he hadn’t considered it and more, he hadn’t told anyone about her at all.
He wanted to drop a bomb.
And he wasn’t sure he could articulate why.
“I need to make a confession,” he told her as he parked outside the main house in his usual spot.
“Already?” Kendall shook her head, but she didn’t sound concerned. “We haven’t been married a whole weekend yet.”
“They not only don’t know we’re married, they don’t know you’re coming at all,” Harlan told her. “I didn’t tell them I was out looking for a wife. Or how I went about it. Or that I met you.”
He didn’t know what he expected by way of a reaction. He figured most women would get a little upset. And rightly.
But Kendall eyed him in that way of hers, as if he was a set of mathematical equations that never added up to the same thing. “Maybe you should tell me what you’re hoping to get out of Sunday dinner today. That way I can try to help you get it.”
“You don’t have to do anything but be married to me.”
Funny how that sat there between them like some kind of vow. And echoed inside his body like that kiss again, a deep, reverent hum that made his bones ache.
“I don’t have a big family,” she told him, after letting his words sit there a moment. “I don’t have any brothers. Just one sister and a pack of girl cousins we avoid. But somehow, I think it’s going to be a little more complicated than that.”
“Maybe so,” Harlan conceded. “But that’s on me.”
“That’s on us,” she countered. “We’re either a team or we’re not, Harlan.”
“I guess it’s time to find out.” And he watched, bemused and touched in a way he couldn’t explain, as she reached out and very gently touched her fist to his. “Is that… a secret handshake?”
“It doesn’t have to be a secret.” Kendall smiled at him and that humming in him shifted into a full song. “I just think that some things require a little more punctuation.”
Harlan could see from the collection of trucks that they were the last ones here. That alone would have been worthy of comment from the rest of his family. He was always the one who said that being on time was ten minutes late.
He couldn’t have been more of the eldest son if he tried.
As they walked across the yard for the door, he took Kendall’s hand in his. And he flashed back, instantly, to that moment down in Grey’s Saloon when he’d covered her hand with his and felt it like an electric charge.
It was the same now.
It was the same, but brighter. Hotter.
And it was its own melody, weaving into that song in him and making him wonder how a man could possibly be expected to keep all of that inside.
He caught her looking at the place where their hands were joined, then up at him, and that electric charge almost seemed to shimmer in the air between them, out in the yard beside his childhood home.
Harlan found himself wondering about things he’d tried to keep firmly on the back burner, because they weren’t supposed to be the point. Or not so soon, anyway.
How she would taste, for example.
Not just that mouth of hers that he was pretty sure he’d dreamed about, but all the rest of her, too. When he thought about Kendall, when he watched her move, he found that the way he wanted her was… comprehensive.
He was a methodical man.
And Harlan couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to practice his form of methodology on her.
Inch by inch, until they were both shaking.
But he was prepared to wait for that. As long as it took.
Here, now, there was an entirely different gauntlet to run.
He led her inside, into this house that never changed. Oh, maybe there were different pictures on the walls than the ones he remembered from when he was a kid. But still smelled like the same house, like sunlight and butter, wood and earth. The light and shadow still chased each other through the airy rooms the way they always had.
And he could hear his brothers’ voices from the kitchen in back, tangling together in the usual mixture of laughter and good-natured complaint.
Harlan held on to her hand as he took her with him through the house, not letting her stop to look closely at the pictures showing him in various states of youth. There would be time for that. Or, maybe there would never be time, because he wasn’t sure he needed her looking at him, toothless and proud as a little kid in his daddy’s cowboy hat and nothing else.
It hadn’t occurred to him to get out ahead of those sorts of embarrassments. He’d never brought a woman here before.
But it was too late now. Everyone was in the kitchen. This was happening.
And he really was going to have to ask himself why, exactly, he’d decided to do this in the most dramatic way possible.
Not now,he told himself.
He took Kendall to the arched entrance into the rambling kitchen that opened up to fields and mountains and, closer in, the vegetable garden, and waited there.
For a moment, no one looked up.
Belinda was at the stove, and whacked Zeke’s hand with a wooden spoon when he tried to grab a tidbit from the roast. His brothers, the three of them that lived here and were in town this weekend, were sprawled around the kitchen table looking like various versions of the same general theme. All tall. All rangy. All dark blond, though Harlan and the twins had dark eyes like their mother, while Boone and Knox had a darker version of Belinda’s hazel eyes that tended toward gold when she was happy and copper when she was mad.
He knew the exact moment everything went still.
The quiet rolled out while, one by one, everyone turned to look.
To stare.
And Harlan had always prided himself on being the very opposite of theatrical, an accomplishment in a family like his.
But he sure had set this up for maximum drama, hadn’t he?
And there was still no time to question it. It was done.
“Hope we can set another place at the table,” he drawled, and enjoyed the way everyone stared at Kendall, then back again at him. “I’d like to introduce you all to Kendall. My wife.”
And then, bomb dropped, Harlan settled back to enjoy the first mess he’d made in his long career of otherwise entirely blameless behavior.
Because it turned out, it felt real good.