26. Pitch and Woo
Chapter 26
Pitch and Woo
Reece couldn’t remember when the brainstorm hit him, but at some point, he’d decided he needed to woo Neve. Make her his. This was new for him, and he wasn’t sure exactly where to start. He didn’t dare ask Shane—who had even less experience with wooing women—for advice, and the same went for his brothers. First of all, they were younger. He was supposed to be the most seasoned of the three, the leader of the band. Second, he had a relationship adviser in his head counseling him. Mostly it told him to be considerate, charming, to do little things for Neve so she knew she occupied ninety-nine percent of his thoughts throughout the day.
Technically, she was his wife, but he needed to make her his girlfriend first. Wasn’t that the usual order of things?
Were his attempts at courtship succeeding? His only measurement was the squeal of delight or the dazzling smile on her face when she discovered something he’d done for her, like stocking the fridge with her favorite brand of chocolate milk. So far, he thought he was solidly in the win column.
As for the nights, he went out of his way to be considerate in bed too. To see she was gratified as much and as often as she wanted, putting his needs behind hers. Somehow his needs were met way beyond any scale he expected or felt he deserved.
None of this was difficult to do. It came naturally and was embarrassingly easy. Did that mean he wasn’t trying hard enough?
And that annoying little detail about him leaving? He continued to shove it into the back of his mind, just like he shoved his training videos into a folder on his desktop, but it was getting harder to ignore the upcoming move as the holidays—and his departure date—inched closer.
Today Neve was beside him on one of his favorite holiday traditions. His entire family had tromped into the woods, picked out their parents’ tree, and enjoyed a round or two of hot chocolate before cutting it down and hauling it back to the Hunnicutt homestead.
The women had done most of the decorating, though he’d handled a majority of the ornaments from his childhood, each one evoking some warm memory that had lain dormant throughout the year. Surprisingly, many of those memories called up Neve, from the time she was a child to her teens and early twenties. Tucked among the happy remembrances was one sad one, when his heart had been heavy from her leaving for vet school. Had he always felt that way?
Beneath it all, though, an undercurrent of restlessness was building. Never one to sit idle for long, he could feel an itch starting in his gut and spreading out, tentacle-like, invading his bloodstream. Helping Neve in her office was one thing. Goofing around in yoga class or with her at home might have satisfied part of him, but it couldn’t completely fill a hollow spot that was yawning wider.
“Reece?” his mother interrupted his mind’s meanderings. “Help me get some of the other decorations out of the basement.”
“Sure.” He loped after her, picturing boxes of nutcrackers, boogie-woogie Santas, and cockeyed pinecone decorations he and his brothers had crafted when they were little and hadn’t thought it was girlie to play with glue and glitter. Before he disappeared down the long, narrow staircase, he caught a glimpse of Neve laughing with Hailey and reassured himself she was fine.
At the bottom landing, he rounded the corner and nearly ran over his mother. She stood facing him, feet hip-width apart and hands folded on her hips.
“Want to tell me what’s going on with you and Neve?”
“What?” he sputter-laughed.
One of her eyebrows lifted to her forehead, packed with the expectation of a genuine answer. “I’ve heard some rumblings in the town gossip mill lately. I’d like to know the truth from my own son.”
Uh-oh. “What kind of rumors?”
Now her eyebrows pulled together, causing grooves to appear between them. She wasn’t having it. “Something along the lines of you and she joined your brothers and tied your own knot in Las Vegas.”
“Who told you that?” As if he didn’t know. He was simply stalling while he ransacked his brain for an answer that might not be the whole truth but would somehow be believable.
Her eyes dipped to his left hand. “Dixie noticed some pretty fancy jewelry on both your hands.”
He flapped a hand. “Dixie notices all kinds of stuff that doesn’t tie together, though it doesn’t keep her from trying to turn it into a story. It’s what she does.”
“I’ve known that woman for … well, a lot of years, and she’s usually right. Besides, I’ve got my own powers of observation, and don’t think I haven’t noticed how you keep sneaking looks at her with your googly eyes. Something has changed between you two. It’s obvious.”
“Well, we are living under the same roof,” he deadpanned. “People tend to change their behaviors when they become roommates, no matter how temporary.”
She tapped her foot. That was a bad sign. “Are you saying you’re not sampling the milk before buying the cow?”
“Are you calling Neve a cow ?” He made a big show of looking over her shoulder toward the shelves where the decorations were stowed.
“Reece Bowen Hunnicutt, stop stalling and give me a straight answer. Are you and Neve married? ”
Matching her stance, he rested his hands on his hips. “Did you bring me down here just so you could ambush me?”
“Yes, in part, though I do need you to bring up some boxes. Your turn. I want to hear the truth. I don’t like learning something this monumental through the grapevine.”
His mother had the uncanny power to crush him with a few well-placed words. He looked toward the ceiling, which was only a few feet above his head, before leveling his gaze on hers. “Kind of.”
“That’s not a straight answer. You didn’t marry Neve?”
No wiggle room. “No, I did . We married each other. At the same time. Along with Noah and Hailey and Charlie and Joy,” he fumbled. “The thing is, I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s legal.” Only ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent sure . “We were supposed to have a Zoom call with the attorney today and get a concrete answer, but he had to bail.”
“ What attorney?”
“A guy in Las Vegas who specializes in Nevada family law.” As he uttered the words, he realized how stupid they sounded. When his mother’s eyes and mouth formed an O, he wasn’t surprised.
“You’re using someone you’ve never met before? Why didn’t you call Jill Carlisle? She’s been our family attorney forever.”
Her answer wasn’t the one he’d expected, and he tried to regain his balance. “I was trying to keep it a secret.” He added an eye-roll for good measure.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young man.” She jerked the hem of her sweater. “First of all, she’s an attorney. She can’t blab people’s business all over the place. And if she doesn’t know the answer, she’ll know where to send you—and it won’t be some fly-by-night in Las Vegas with a brand-new shingle, for heaven’s sake! Reece, sometimes I wonder if a rock dropped on your head when you were scaling mountains as a kid.”
The memory of Neve calling him a mountain goat bobbed into his brain, and he smiled to himself. Another thought ran over it and made his stomach clench. Would he be able to mountain-goat in Vermont? Stowe Mountain was a quarter the height of the peaks in the San Juan Mountains.
Okay. So their mountains are smaller, but the terrain has to be as steep if it hosts a ski resort, right ?
His mother nudged him back to the present. “So you’re not sure this ceremony you and Neve went through—the same one that’s legal for your brothers—is binding?”
He shook his head. “We kinda had too much to drink. This wasn’t planned.”
“Then make it legal!” Her face corkscrewed into a disappointed frown, and it struck him like a knife to the heart. Her anger would have been easier to face. But disappointment? That gutted him.
“Mom, it’s not that simple. And if it turns out to be real, it’s temporary.”
She tilted her head. “Temporary. I’m not sure I like the sound of that. What makes it temporary?”
“We plan to … end it. And that’s a process. We can’t just wave a wand and make it disappear.”
She tucked her arms across her chest. “Charlie and Joy’s wedding wasn’t planned either, but they seem happy enough about it. Many of the best things in life are surprises.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t think this is one of them. Neve didn’t want this. She doesn’t want to be married to me.”
“Oh, cookie crumbles! She’s wanted to marry you since the day she set eyes on you—and you were still in diapers. Don’t you remember when she used to coerce you into playing house? She declared that this was going to be real someday, that you were going to be husband and wife and raise a passel of kids. She even had the proposal all mapped out. Do you remember that? Something about you on bended knee by the creek where she claims you rescued her from the water once, with fairy lights all around. I never did understand what she was talking about, but I do know that little girl had a plan from Day One.”
He fought a sudden grin that wanted to sprout. He’d forgotten those games, but his mom was right. Neve had had a plan back then, and that plan had always included him. But they were older now; priorities had shifted seismically.
Mom continued. “I, for one, was rooting for her the whole way. I always hoped you two would marry, but the older you got, the more I lost hope you’d find anyone to build a life with.” Her voice softened, and he thought he detected a quaver, which set his alarm bells clanging at a higher decibel level. “Do you ever see yourself getting married? Raising a family? ”
The swiftness of his answer surprised even him. “Yes.” He had always envisioned himself with a wife, kids, a home. That his life didn’t seem to be tracking in that direction left him a little deflated, as though he was failing at something important.
“And what kind of girl do you picture yourself marrying in this scenario? Can you picture her?”
Dumbfounded, he stared at his mother as the shimmering silhouette of a lithe blond woman with a smile warmer than the sun popped into view.
Neve.
Instead of sharing his unexpected epiphany, however, he quipped, “Yeah. She’s pretty and she puts up with me.”
Also Neve.
“When that rock fell on your head, it knocked common sense out of it.” She pushed up on tiptoe and rapped him hard on the head.
“Ow!” He rubbed the spot. “Wait. Did a rock actually fall on my head when I was a kid?”
Agitatedly, she flapped her hand at him. “Not when I was around, but one must have done so when you were out of my sight.” She pointed a finger at his face. “You need to make this right, Reece Hunnicutt.”
“By that, I’m guessing you mean Neve and I stick together?”
“Of course.”
“Look, Mom, if I decide to marry for real, Neve is the—”
“What do you two have your heads together about down here?” His father materialized one riser above the basement floor. Hands in his pants pockets, he stepped off and ambled into the room, looking between the two of them. “Is this about Reece moving?”
Reece whipped his head toward his father. He spied Noah lurking in the shadows higher up the staircase, over their dad’s shoulder, shaking his head and holding his hands up as if to say, “It wasn’t me.” Reece fired ribbon-slicing daggers at him anyway.
Reece met his father’s assessing gaze. “Who told you?”
“Wait!” his mother shrieked. “Moving where?”
Dad tucked his hands under his armpits and cut Reece a look . “He’s moving to Vermont, Marilyn.”
“What!” Her yelp was so sharp it made Reece’s ears ring. “When? ”
His father gave him a chin lift. “Beginning of the year, from what I hear.”
Reece’s jaw muscles bulged as he ground his back molars. “Where did you hear that?”
His mother closed the short space separating her from Reece. “If you were to marry? You are married. And what are you going to do about your wife when you move, Reece?”
Dad’s eyes bugged out. “Wife? What wife?”
Noah mouthed, “Oh fuck!” in the background, then spun on his heel and jogged upstairs. The coward was escaping this quickly unfolding shit-show, and Reece’s feet wanted to follow, but his dad barred the way.
Mom pulled in a lung-filling breath and slowly let it out. To her shocked husband, she said, “Dear, I think we need to have a talk with our firstborn.” Then she turned a stern stare on Reece. “And I think it’s only fair Neve is included in this conversation since it affects her too.”
The shit-show was about to become an epic cluster-fuck.
The four of them sat in Hugh Hunnicutt’s office, with its exposed log walls and a picture window looking onto an expansive lawn that gently sloped down to a stand of pines and the creek beyond.
Reece’s parents had excused the four of them from the happy newlyweds, whom his mother set to the task of decorating the rest of the house. “You boys know how I like things placed,” she had instructed right before sharing a smile with Hailey and Joy, “but of course feel free to arrange them however you like. This is your home now too.”
Reece’s father sat behind the desk in his broad, high-backed black leather chair, while his mother sat off to his side, hands twisting in her lap as she faced Reece and Neve with brows drawn together in worry.
In a show of solidarity, Reece parked himself close to Neve, their shoulders touching, supporting one another, while his hand, resting palm up on his thigh, closed around her much smaller one. Every time he squeezed her fingers, they squeezed right back .
Steepling his fingers, his father leaned back. The chair creaked as he regarded them both, his lips pursed. “If neither of you was in your right mind, and it resulted in an action neither of you would have pursued had you been sober, then I don’t understand why you can’t simply get it annulled.”
“Dad, from our research, the process will take about the same time as a divorce.” Reece felt Neve flinch at the D- word.
“Understood, but that doesn’t answer my question. Let’s keep the time factor out of the equation. Annulment seems the logical way to go. Or am I missing something?”
Reece and Neve exchanged furtive glances before stumbling over different words at the same time.
“Well, we …”
“You see, things sort of …”
His dad raised his hands in a halting motion. “Say no more. I get the picture.”
Mom’s gaze ricocheted between all three of them. “I don’t.”
“I’ll explain it later, Marilyn.” Dad sent her a sly wink.
“Oh. Oh!” She covered her mouth with her fingers. Reece averted his gaze in case he found more disappointment lingering there.
To Reece and Neve, he said, “I’m no lawyer, but I expect that by—how do I put this delicately?—taking things to the ‘next level,’ a tangled situation becomes even thornier. In other words, the defining deed is done.” He tapped his fingers on the desk. “The way I see it, whether you undo it tomorrow or months from now doesn’t make a huge difference. Better to get things right .”
“What if Neve finds someone she wants to date in the meantime?” Reece’s mother blurted. Why those words twisted his gut, he couldn’t say.
“That’s up to the kids, Marilyn, and I’m sure they can figure it out on their own.”
“Reece, I don’t understand why you have to move away,” his mother whined.
Three sets of eyes fastened on him. “I can’t just sit around town.”
“You’ve been keeping yourself busy,” she argued, “and it’s not as if you need the money. You’ve done very well with the trust fund your grandparents left you. ”
Reece slid Neve a sidelong glance, but her face was impassive. “Be that as it may, and as much as I enjoy working at the clinic and helping the town, it’s not the same. I want to give back to my community, really make a difference, like I was before. Working part-time for Noah or Charlie or Neve, hanging lights in town, and maintaining trails doesn’t cut it for me.”
Mom crossed her arms over her chest. “So tell me this, Reece Hunnicutt. Just how is doing search and rescue on the other side of the continent giving back to your community here in Fall River?”
Neve sat forward, drawing attention away from Reece. “If I may …” She slid Reece a nervous glance, and he offered a subtle dip of his head. “You raised Reece to be a giver, someone who finds fulfillment in helping others in meaningful ways. He has trained for over many years for the work he does to give back to his community. Yes, he does for this town by stringing Christmas lights and helping out where it’s needed, but he has a special set of skills few others can boast, honed by years of experience in the field. He’s regarded as the best in San Juan County. Did you know that?”
She paused, and both his parents blinked but remained silent. “I know I’m speaking for him, but this is what I see. His motivation is fueled by a bottomless well of honor and commitment, and that’s something rare that you instilled in him. This drive of his, perfected by years of training, makes him uniquely qualified to help others in ways regular folk simply can’t, no matter how much they might want to. It’s his ‘highest and best use,’ if you will. Anyone can string lights and work on trails. Reece will waste away if he can’t put his rescue knowledge to use. The right opportunity to do that doesn’t exist here in Colorado anymore, so he had to look elsewhere, and he’s found it at Stowe Mountain. And they’re no dummies. They recognize what they’ve got, and they’ve made him a great offer because they want him. They need him. And he, in turn, needs what they offer.”
She slid back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap.
Mouth parted, Reece looked at her, trying to convey with his eyes the gratitude that overflowed his heart and filled his chest with pride. Neve got him.
Silence buzzed in the air. As a collective, the four of them seemed to hold their breath. Finally, Neve straightened and, in a small voice, added, “I’m so sorry, Marilyn. Neither of us meant to do anything that would let you or Hugh down or cause you pain in any way. I hope you can see your way clear to forgive us—to forgive Reece especially. He needs your support now more than ever.” The devastation on Neve’s face nearly undid him. Before he could act on natural instincts, his mother stood and pulled Neve from her seat and into a fierce hug. “Now you shush, honey. You haven’t let us down. I just wish things could be different for you kids, that’s all.”
Reece dared a glance at his father, who was smiling fondly at the two women. Then he turned his hawk-eyed gaze on Reece. His father was a master at cloaking his feelings, and Reece had never learned to decipher what streamed behind his eyes, but right now he was pretty sure they held a message packed with judgment. When his father opened his mouth, he proved Reece’s theory right.
“Look, you two, I know you’re adults and you’re not asking for my advice, but I’m giving it to you anyway. Reece, you go on out to Vermont and honor your commitment. Give it six months, a year. At least. Neve’s life here doesn’t have to change in the meantime. She still has her clinic, her friends.”
His gaze sharpened on Reece and hardened. “Fulfillment is an interesting word. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? But it’s nothing more than a PC way of saying egocentricity. Reece, these people in Vermont went out on a limb and extended you this job opportunity in good faith, over and above other candidates, and you accepted it—supposedly also in good faith. You committed to them. They’re counting on you. You have an obligation to live up to your commitments, no matter what kind of foolishness you got up to afterward.” He shot an apologetic look Neve’s way. “No one in this family backs down from a promise. Is that understood?”
Reece bristled at his father’s words, his nerves raw and frayed at their edges. What about the promise he’d made to Neve when they’d stood in front of Elvin? “Understood,” he gritted out.
His father’s eyes shuttered as he rose from his power chair. “What was said in this room stays here. No one else needs to know. Now, I think it’s time we got back to the festivities and the reason we all came together today.” He could have just as easily said, “Meeting adjourned.”
But then he slid a heavy arm around Neve’s shoulder and dropped a kiss on her head, like she was part of the family. Hell, she had been part of the family her whole life. And though the rings might be locked up in her vault, somehow Reece felt more tied to her now than he ever had. Perhaps because she was tightly woven into his past.
It struck him that he wanted her woven into his future too.