A Marked Debate (Knots & Lassos #2)

Chapter One – Lila.4

Chapter One – Lila

The bale weighed more than it should have as I dragged it maybe four feet before I had to stop, both hands braced on my knees, panting in the gray nothing before dawn.

My coat had pulled so tight across my belly I could feel the seams threatening to break.

I straightened, got my hands back under the twine, and pulled.

I stopped twice. Each time I told myself I was just catching my breath, and each time I believed it a little less.

But as the frozen mud caught my boot toe, and I went down hard on one knee, hand on my stomach, protecting her, I realized, I couldn’t do this anymore.

Tears welled in my eyes, and my lower lip began to tremble.

Why did he have to leave me? Why did he have to get in that car, driving on icy roads?

He’d been my best friend, the father of my child. Life is so bloody unfair!

I shook my head, wiped the tears with the back of my gloved hand, and closed my eyes for a moment.

She kicked hard, making me gasp. “Mama’s going to be alright, Peanut,” I said, as I tickled her foot that was currently sticking out of my stomach.

She was all that mattered now. The ranch would have to come second.

I stayed there a moment, breathing, before I got up and kept going, taking things a hell of a lot slower.

One hand under the bale, rough twine biting through my glove.

The other pressed flat to the small of my back between each heave.

“Nearly there,” I murmured, more to hear my voice than anything else.

It was so quiet here during Winter, even the horses didn’t want to come out to play.

Who could blame them, though? I certainly couldn’t.

I’d much rather be snuggled up on the sofa with the fire roaring, and a good book.

Somewhere behind me, by the far fence, the tractor sat idle and rusting at the field’s edge where Ethan had parked it back in June, meaning to service it before the season turned. The season had turned twice since then.

The barn doors were peeling; hell, they had been since before I could remember, the red paint lifting in long dry curls to show gray wood beneath.

The ranch wasn’t in the best state when we inherited it.

But, it was home. Our dream. Somewhere to raise our children and steer clear of all those Omega rules.

Hardly anyone knew what I was; I’d kept it hidden for as long as could remember; never wanting the control, or slave-like nature Omegas had to deal with.

I’d heard enough horror stories to last me a lifetime!

But since I’d found out I was pregnant, I couldn’t hide it anymore; suppressants weren’t safe for little Peanut.

So I hid here, at the ranch. Ethan had been the one to do any errands, and I’d been the one to organize the ranch.

It was backwards; I know, but I’d never been one for stereotypes.

The problem now is, I’ve lost my stamina, my muscles.

Concentrated on little Peanut more than anything else, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Until he careened off a cliff and left us alone.

I sighed. How long does grief last? I know there are stages; maybe I was still in denial, or perhaps anger sometimes.

It doesn’t matter. I have a job to do, a baby on the way in a month's time, and the online food deliveries won’t drive all the way out here, even if I begged them.

I gazed over the land, looking at all the work I still needed to complete.

Three fence posts along the south paddock leaned at angles that made them more of a suggestion than a fence.

The latch on the feed store gate needed a second key because the first one stuck unless you jiggled it just right, and the latch on the north stall was held together with a length of baler twine I’d knotted there last month when the original bolt finally gave out.

I knew every broken thing on this property the way you knew the bad step on a staircase by feel and habit.

Peanut wriggled again, kicking out.

“Don’t fuss,” I said to my belly. “I know there’s not much room left in there for you, but we’ve got a long day.”

I got the bale to the stall doors and straightened, both hands going to my lower back for a moment, pressing.

The cold settled against my face and the back of my neck.

Inside the barn, the horses shifted. One of them stamped, impatient.

I could smell the hay and the manure and the particular warm animal smell underneath all of it, and it grounded me the way it always did.

Reece’s truck came down the track a little after six-thirty.

I heard it before I saw it: the uneven idle of a sixteen-year-old’s first vehicle, and by the time he climbed out I was already dragging the second bale across the yard.

He stopped just past the gate, his too-big canvas jacket swallowing his narrow shoulders, his hands at his sides, and he took in the scene with wide eyes.

“I can get those,” he said.

I straightened, one hand flat against my belly, and shook my head without looking at him. “I’m fine. If you could just see to the horses, that’s more than enough.”

He took a deep breath. “Alright,” he said, and moved toward the stalls without another word.

I waited until I heard the door close behind him. Then I exhaled and dragged the next bale.

The rest of the morning was a sequence of tasks I worked through in order of urgency rather than sense.

The loose board on the feed store had been flexing for two weeks, the nail half-pulled from rotted wood, and I crouched with the hammer and a fistful of new nails and worked at it until my knees ached and the board held.

The first nail bent. I pulled it, started again.

The second held. I pressed my palm flat against the wood and felt it firm, and smiled at the thought that I’d finally achieved something.

The water buckets came next. Two at a time from the yard tap to the paddock troughs, the water sloshing cold against my legs when I walked too fast. I didn’t walk too fast. I moved the way I had learned to move these past months, balancing my baby bump and waddling along.

By the third trip, my lower back had stopped being an ache and become a specific, insistent pain, sitting in my sacrum like a fist punching out at me.

I set the buckets down at the trough and stood with both hands pressed behind me, breathing through my nose until it softened, and when I stood upright I gripped the fence with one hand and breathed through the dizziness until it passed.

“We’re fine,” I said, to Peanut, to myself, to the cold air. “We’re fine.” Leaning against the fence, I took a few minutes to catch my breath. “Your daddy would’ve had all this done by breakfast,” I said, and then sighed, swallowing back the tears.

My jaw tightened. I stood at the paddock fence and looked out at the frost-grey field, at the tractor going brown at the edges, at the fence posts leaning like tired men who hadn’t decided whether to fall yet.

The second pair of work gloves still hung on the hook by the barn door, brown canvas, stiff with dried mud, right where he had left them.

I had moved everything else, but not the gloves.

Four months. The ranch had been running on what I had in me, and most mornings I could convince myself that was enough. It had to be enough, at least for now.

I picked up the empty buckets and cleared everything away. Behind me, from inside the barn, I could hear Reece moving through the stalls, talking to the horses in words too low to make out. I did not look back as I walked towards the house, almost too tired to put one foot in front of the other.

I entered through the back door and stood in the kitchen for a moment without turning on the light, just listening to the boards settle and the wind starting to push at the eaves, my coat still on, my boots still carrying the cold in from outside. Then I reached across and switched on the light.

The overhead light came on and made the windows into mirrors.

Ethan had added reflective film, so the sun didn’t turn the place into an oven during the winter.

I stood reflected in them for a moment and, hell; I looked a state!

My belly was bulging against my coat, my long, light brown hair wispy and windswept.

Pale skin that represented the hermit I’d become since I’d had to come off my suppressants.

I looked away and put the kettle on. Reece was outside leading the horses out to pasture.

I smiled. He was a good kid, a friend of Ethan's family, and more importantly, he knew I was an Omega, so I never needed to hide around him. I bit my lower lip. To be fair, though, the whole town probably knows now: a young, pregnant Omega living on her own on a ranch she can’t handle.

Huffing, I lifted the kettle and made myself a cup of tea.

They can think what they want. It’s not like any of them visit to see how she is or if she needs anything.

Hell, they won’t even deliver my food here.

I sat down at the table, staring across at where Ethan used to sit.

The chair was at a slight angle, not pushed in all the way, as though someone had just gotten up.

I kept meaning to straighten it. But I never did.

The baby monitor sat on the counter in its box, beside a set of rompers I’d bought for Peanut during my last trip into town.

I’d put them away, but I was always too tired when I’d finished the ranch work and spent most of the afternoon collapsed on the sofa.

Running my finger along the rim of my cup, I stared at the yellow folder on the table.

It’d sat there since the week after the funeral, when the solicitor had sat across from me and explained, in the measured tone of a man delivering bad news, exactly what the ranch’s finances looked like.

I had listened and nodded and thanked him, and not cried.

I had been not-crying for four months with a diligence that took more effort than anything else I did.

Now I cried multiple times a day. Bloody hormones!

Well, there was no time like the present!

I spread everything out: the overdue notice from the feed supplier, red-stamped and blunt, the amount circled by someone’s hand.

The letter from the bank, handwritten in a way that meant it was worse than a form letter.

The envelope I had opened and folded and refolded so many times that the paper had gone soft along the crease.

And the ledger, its columns of figures, adding up to the same answer they always added up to. I was screwed.

Somewhere outside, the wind picked up and found the gap in the north-facing eaves it always found, a thin, persistent whistle that I had been meaning to stuff with something.

I rested my hand on my belly without thinking.

I think I did it for my comfort more than mine, after all how much can she understand right now.

My pen was still on the page in the ledger, the tip resting on a number I had circled twice in red because circling it was easier than knowing what to do about it.

I stared at the number. My face went before I could stop it.

Not slowly, there was no gradual dissolution, no dignified welling.

It just went, the way a held breath finally goes: all at once.

I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth, and my shoulders came up.

My eyes squeezed shut, and for a moment there was just that: the pressure of my wrist against my lips and the sound of the wind outside and the light buzzing overhead, thin and fluorescent and indifferent.

Then the tears came. Fast this time, sliding down and dropping onto the open ledger, small dark circles appearing on the page, blurring the ink at the edges.

I didn’t make a sound. I had gotten good at crying without sound, the way you get good at anything you practice enough. My shoulders shook. My breath came in the short, caught way it did when there was nowhere for the feeling to go. I pressed my wrist harder against my mouth and let it happen.

I sat with it. I didn’t stop. My hand was flat on my belly, and I let myself cry the way I hadn’t let myself cry in longer than I could name, fully and without an audience.

The wind found the gap in the eaves again and held the note. My tea was lukewarm. The ledger was wet in three places, the figures slightly smeared, the circled number still there and still the same.

Then, slowly, from somewhere beneath my palm, Peanut moved. A small, deliberate pressure against my hand, there and gone. I pressed back. My breath caught differently this time.

“Alright,” I said, to her. “Mama’s going to be alright now.” My voice was ruined and soft, and I didn’t try to straighten it. Instead, I picked up the pen, and I kept going.