Chapter 9
aria
My head is splitting clean down the middle.
I manage to kick off my boots and stumble into my room. Once the door shuts behind me, I crumble.
It took every ounce of strength not to completely fall apart earlier. But I know men like Maverick, they thrive on exploiting weaknesses.
If he was going to go on the attack like he did, why did he give me painkillers?
It was three pills of Tylenol. Don’t make a big fuckin’ deal out of it, yeah?
The migraines began shortly after I left Colorado. At first, I thought they were just bad headaches from stress or lack of sleep, school, long shifts in the vineyard, and the pressure to prove I could make it without Papa and Longhorn.
Years later, the migraines haven’t disappeared—they’ve just become rarer.
But now, when they strike, they’re more violent than ever.
The pain doesn’t creep in anymore; it slams through me. Auras spark like static behind my eyes, nausea hits without warning, and the headache itself is so sharp, so blinding, it feels like something’s ruptured inside my skull.
The migraine leaves me useless, flattened.
Doctors have decided they are stress-induced.
I agree.
I have learned to live around them.
I do what I have to—keep meds on hand, wear sunglasses, even indoors sometimes, and excuse myself from meetings and work when my vision goes sideways.
I barely manage to get some prescription medication inside me and get all my clothes off before my body folds onto the bed like the strings holding me up have been cut.
I bury my face into the pillow and exhale through the pain, both in my skull and my chest.
The pressure behind my eyes is a dull, relentless throb, but it’s not just the migraine.
It’s his words.
I like my women soft. Classy.
Not angry little girls….
Same tone. Same judgment. Different man.
Hudson had said it with a different kind of venom, like he was explaining a math equation. As if it were obvious that I was too much, too hard, too loud. Not enough.
Hudson hadn’t even looked guilty when he told me he made a mistake asking me to marry him. That I was better at working like a day laborer than being someone’s wife.
Then he packed up his bag and walked straight into Celine’s bedroom—and stayed.
I’d been twenty.
Madly in love for the first time in my life.
I brought my fiancé home to show him off.
He fell in love with my sister. Knocked her up.
Papa told me to face the facts and stop whining. “You couldn’t keep the man, take it on the chin like a big girl and move on.”
According to Papa, Hudson cheated on me because I was lacking, not because he was weak, not because my sister’s morals were nonexistent.
Celine had taken one look at him, his Rolex watch, and found out his family had money, and I hadn’t stood a chance.
I like my women soft.
I’m not feminine. I’m not beautiful. Is that the reason I can’t have the life I want? Marriage. Kids. A man to love me.
But all that requires me to trust, and Hudson took that from me. What he did, what Celine did, what Papa did, burned a hole right through my belief in forever.
I tried to be in relationships, but they didn’t work out.
One man wanted more, which I couldn’t give him. He called me emotionally stunted.
A man I’d gone out on a date with said that my body resembled an ironing board when I told him there was no way in hell I’d sleep with him, despite him taking me out for dinner.
Is that what Maverick sees? A woman who is tall and flat with a plain face that she doesn’t even bother to put makeup on. A body that is strong but not curvy. Hands that are calloused, not supple. A face that’s weathered, not pampered.
I press the heels of my palms to my eyes, trying to push back the tears, but it’s useless. They slip out anyway, hot and humiliating, soaking into the pillow.
I cry quietly—just a few trembling breaths and tears you try to wipe away because there are so many of them.
If Papa were alive, he’d mock me for crying.
Celine cried and probably still does at the drop of a hat—but she had permission to be weak, I didn’t.
I can’t be strong all the time. I just can’t.
I buried my father just now, but I lost him years ago.
I let the ache swallow me, because at least here, in the dark, no one sees, no one tells me to stop feeling.
I wear my sunglasses in the dining room where breakfast is served. Yeah, it is served. We’re bleeding money, and Celine wants every meal at home to be a performance…staged in a room too big for the cast.
The dining room, Mama’s pride and joy, is grand, featuring a polished walnut table that seats twelve. A vase of fresh-cut flowers from the orchard sits in the center, pretending everything’s fine.
Sunlight filters through lace-trimmed windows.
Vera pours me coffee, despite my saying I can do it myself.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly.
“Just a headache,” I murmur.
I drink my coffee, grateful that it smells so damn good.
I look at the food on the table and grimace. It looks like the fucking continental breakfast at a five-star hotel. Scrambled eggs, bacon, homemade biscuits, and some kind of fancy fruit arrangement, Celine probably demanded to make breakfast feel more Aspen brunch than ranch breakfast.
“Where do Earl and Tomas eat?”
“In the kitchen.” Vera looks at the entryway to the dining room and lowers her voice, “They’re not allowed anywhere else in the house but there.”
Like mother, like daughter.
Mama also had a thing about the help being kept at a distance, which is bullshit because the help they so condescend, makes sure we can keep the lights on.
“Why do we have so much food?” I whisper because loud voices feel like spikes through the soft tissue of my brain.
My migraine has now come down to the level of a nasty hangover. Another few hours and it’ll pass, which I’m grateful for.
I want to be alert during the will reading, which is scheduled for later this afternoon.
Jack McCready, who goes by Mac, is one of Papa’s oldest friends. He’s part cowboy, part lawyer, the only man Papa trusted to handle his legal affairs. I know Mac fairly well. He called me right after Nadine did to ask if I’d be coming over for the funeral.
“Of course,” I say.
“Good,” he replies.
I can hear the commotion of a ranch on the line, and it makes me smile.
Someone is yelling at a dog, there’s the sharp clank of a gate swinging shut, and the low, restless bellow of cattle in the distance.
Those sounds—so distinctly ranch life—instigate memories pulled straight from my bones.
Dust, sweat, animals, and men cursing under their breath.
You could drop me anywhere in the world, but one stray moo and the metallic squeal of a worn-out hinge, and I’d know I was home.
“Look, I need you to be there for the will reading in person, so don’t run off right after the funeral, yeah?”
“I have no such plans. I intend to stay for a little while.”
“That’s excellent.” He pauses and then adds, “Rami missed you a lot.”
I don’t say anything. What can I? If he missed me, all he had to do was ask me to come home. But he didn’t.
“He made a promise to Frances that he’d keep Celine happy, and he kept it,” he continues.
Frances Ackerman Delgado, my mother, was cold, elegant, and emotionally distant, at least with me. She saw me as the reason her life was ruined—and she saw in me, Papa, so different from her in looks and personality.
When Celine was born, she looked like a doll. I fell in love with my baby sister, until I was kept away from her. Mama said she was afraid I’d hurt Celine and so began my second-class citizenship life at Longhorn.
“And is Celine happy?” I ask. It’s churlish because it isn’t Mac’s fault that Papa decided to honor his dead wife rather than his very much alive daughter.
Mac chuckles. “You’ll have to ask her.”
He’s not offended in the least. I didn’t think he’d be. It’s been many years, but I can still see him in my mind’s eye. A weathered, lean man who’s never dressed like you think a lawyer would. Jack ‘Mac’ McCready is a cowboy through and through.
He is no-nonsense and principled with a bawdy, dark, and dry humor that not many people find amusing.
He’s a mix of a judge with a gavel and a trail boss with a rifle. Mac also knows where all the bodies are buried in Wildflower Canyon as he handles the legal affairs for most of the ranches—which allows him the privilege of calling out everyone’s bullshit.
I hear the sound of heels on hardwood and brace instinctively.
I haven’t talked to my sister in a decade. And the only reason I spoke to Hudson on the day of the funeral was because he didn’t give me a choice.
This had been the tipping point for Papa. He didn’t care that my heart was broken—for him, it was about family, and Celine was going to have a baby, and that was that.
Celine walks into the dining room and takes a seat at the head of the table. “Good morning, Aria.”
I think about not responding and then decide that I don’t care enough about what she and Hudson did any longer.
“Morning,” I say casually, and pick up a biscuit, put it on my plate.
I don’t want to eat, but I also don’t want to run. I’ve been running long enough, ever since the day everything changed.
The sun’s been burning up everything to dust and bone. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and the land shows it—cracks sliver across the earth, the grass brittle.
Hudson and I have been at Longhorn for two months during our summer vacation.
We met in California. He’s studying business at UC Santa Barbara. I’m working on a degree in agricultural sciences at Cal Poly, so I could come back and support Longhorn, work with Papa.
Hudson says he wants me to do what I want. I tell him I want to live and work at Longhorn. He says he’ll follow me, be with me. I’m so excited.
I was such a fool.
I take a bite of the biscuit and look out onto the porch that wraps around the house through the large glass windows of the dining room.
The past plays like a movie in my head—one I remember all the lines of.