Good Clean Dirt
SLADE
“Lila.” Her mother’s voice is perfectly controlled. “You look...” Her mouth purses while she searches for the word.
Lila just waits, face neutral, eyes glittering. She’s regal and detached as a queen.
And if she’s the queen, I can be her bodyguard.
I don’t give her mother the chance to spew her poison.
“Lila looks beautiful,” I say to her mother.
Everyone looks at me.
Good. That’s where I want their attention.
“Slade Rhodes,” I say, and don’t extend my hand because I already know it won’t be taken. I do enjoy the twist of the knife when I tell them, with a smile that doesn’t reach my eyes, “Ain’t gonna give your new son-in-law the ole’ Sherwood family hug?”
“There’s mud on your boots,” her mother observes snippily.
“Prolly some horseshit, too,” I agree. “It’s a working ranch. Dirt’s the cleanest thing around here.”
I lean against the porch rail and let the devil I keep mostly leashed off its chain just enough to smirk, to let the drawl get thick as molasses.
“Y’all better come on in. Get comfy. We’re family now, right?
Got some elk on the grill. Fresh batch of blackberry moonshine.
Then we can saddle up the horses and we’ll give you the grand tour. ”
I’m laying it on unbelievably thick, but they seem to have no clue that I’m exaggerating for effect, which might be insulting if it wasn’t hilarious instead.
Her father’s silver eyebrows draw together. “Elk? Moonshine? It’s seven in the morning, young man.”
“That mean you want a cigar too? Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, Pops.”
“I’ll take some of that blackberry moonshine,” Celia pipes up.
The other Sherwoods glare at her.
Celia shrugs a cashmere-clad shoulder. “It was a red-eye flight. I never even went to sleep. This is practically a night cap.”
“We won’t be staying,” her father says.
“Suit yourself,” I say.
Lila finally descends the porch steps, head held high. “What did you all come here for that couldn’t be said in an email?”
“You’ve been planning this.” Peter steps forward, jabbing a finger toward Lila. “You needed money. You couldn’t meet the conditions of the trust honestly. So you found the first guy who’d take you and offered him whatever it took to put a ring on your finger.”
“Excuse me?” I growl.
“Peter.” Her father’s voice is sharp.
But Peter’s already in it, too angry and desperate to mind those manners that got beat into him. “She wanted that five million dollars. That’s the whole story. She couldn’t get it legitimately so she—”
“Look around you,” I tell him. “I assume you did your due diligence on me, or your lawyer did. Lord knows you lot wouldn’t trek out to Montana without doing your homework.
So you know five mil ain’t shit to me. You know what this ranch is worth.
You know what my contract history looks like.
You, Pete, on the other hand, you sure could use that money.
Why that might be, when a couple mil is a rounding error in the Sherwood Family Trust, is the question. ”
I watch the color move up Peter’s neck.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What’s wrong?” I say. “Did Daddy here finally tap out on saving you from your own stupidity? Because from where I’m standing, the person with a financial motive in this family isn’t my wife.”
Peter takes a step forward. Sneers. “Nobody needs to wonder about your motive. Easy enough to tell what you’re getting out the deal.
You’ve been screwing my sister, and she’s been letting you because she needed a husband and you were convenient.
Dress it up however you want, but we all know what she’s been on her back for. ”
I close the distance between us in two steps and I get in his face. Not touching him, because I don’t need to touch him, because this soft-handed, yellow-bellied, poor excuse of a man is too pathetic to be punched.
His back hits the SUV.
“You will not,” I say, “speak about my wife that way. Not ever again. Not on my property. Not anywhere on this earth. Or I will track you down like the feeble prey animal you are, and I will make millions of dollars of debt the least of your problems.”
I hold him there for a long moment. Until he understands how literally I mean those words, and the little spine he has collapses. Then I step back.
I turn to Lila.
Her eyes are bright. Her chin held high. And then she smiles.
She sidles up to me, boots loud on the frozen ground, one hand sliding up my chest, and pulls me down to her. She kisses me deep and slow and thorough, the kind of kiss that has a little bit do with performance and everything to do with the fact that she means it.
I slide my hand down to her ass and pull her in closer because two can play at that game.
When she pulls back her eyes are dancing. She keeps her hand flat on my chest, fingers curled into my shirt, and tips her head back to look up at me.
“You tell ‘em, baby,” she coos to me.
I feel the laugh move through my chest before it reaches my face. I wrap both arms around her and hold her against me and look at her family over the top of her rose gold hair.
Her father’s jaw is tight. Her mother’s expression has achieved a new register of frozen displeasure. Peter is still examining the ground, hunched into himself. Celia has produced her phone and is taking pictures of the landscape, either drunk or unbothered or both.
Lila turns in my arms to face them, my hands linked at her waist, her back against my chest.
“If you all want, come inside, break some bread, have a little coffee. Or moonshine, for that matter.” She tilts her head toward the house.
“Then we can start this conversation over with an apology for how you’ve treated me just now.
Or pretty much always, while we’re at it.
” She pauses. “But if you’re here to pretend this is about anything other than all of you being the richest penny-pinching cheapskates I’ve ever met, then forget it.
If it’s all down to Celia’s vacation home and Peter’s debt and the embarrassment that’s causing all of you, then I don’t have anything left to say.
” She leans back into me, easy and settled. “Your call.”
Her sister just looks at her. “What did you do with the money, Lila?”
Her mother’s gaze moves over Lila slowly. Down and back up, cataloging the the muddy boots, the flannel, the wind-loose hair, with methodical disapproval.
“Good question,” her mother says. “Because it certainly doesn’t seem you spent any of it on yourself.”
“No,” Lila agrees. “I spent it on people who needed it. Funny how that works.”
Her mother’s mouth thins.
“The trust money’s gone,” Lila tells them. “All those Sherwood dollars are currently circulating through food banks and animal shelters and disaster relief funds. So if you came here to get it back, good luck to you.”
The eyes all land on me again. And I realize all at once what the plan is. What it’s probably been from the moment they did some research on me.
“You may not have that money anymore,” Celia says. “But your fake husband has plenty more where that came from.”
Her father’s expression doesn’t change. “Our position,” he says, measured and final, “is that this marriage was fraudulent from its inception. The trust distribution was obtained under false pretenses. And as Lila’s family, we have both the legal standing and the moral obligation to pursue every avenue available to us to ensure she is protected from further exploitation. ”
“Exploitation,” Lila says flatly.
“Yes.”
“By my husband. Who has more money than God and zero financial motive to exploit me.”
Her father ignores her and reaches into his jacket, producing an envelope.
“Our attorneys filed this morning,” he says. “Annulment on grounds of fraud.” He holds it out. “Emergency hearing. End of the week. Whatever this is,” he says, “A judge is going to take a very close look at it. I’d prepare for that if I were you.”
Lila freezes in my arms and my grip tightens around her.
“No,” I say.
Her father blinks. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t know your daughter. You’ve never tried to. You don’t know what she’s built here, what she is to the people around her, what she is to me.” My voice drops. “And you sure as hell don’t get to come onto my land and tell me about my own damn marriage.”
I look at the envelope still in his hand.
“File whatever you want,” I tell him. “What happens between Lila and me is none of your concern. I will spend every dollar I have and every minute of my life making sure you stay out of my family’s business.”
“Lila,” her mother says, not pleadingly but icily. “We are your family. Not this man.”
Lila’s hand squeezes mine as she gazes at me. “I made my own family.”
I’m about to tell the rest of them to go fuck themselves, in case it wasn’t clear enough—and that’s when I see the bear.
It’s the same young black bear who’s been hanging around for months now. It’s not charging. It’s just here, curious, ambling toward the house on no particular mission.
“Everyone needs to step inside,” I tell them.
Her father keeps talking. Something about depositions.
“There’s a bear,” I say pointedly.
Her mother looks up. Her father glances toward the tree line and then back at me with confusion. “So?”
Jesus. City folk.
I usher Lila towards the front door. The shotgun is where it always is. I’m back outside in under a minute, the gun over my arm, loaded, because I’ve done this before and the window is always shorter than you think.
“Get. The fuck. Inside,” I tell them.
They keep talking. Her parents, Peter, all of them still circling the same legal argument like the bear is a minor inconvenience in an otherwise important meeting.
The bear ambles closer.
Celia’s eyes widen. She takes three fast steps toward the SUV. Apparently she’s the only the smart one out of the bunch.
The bear swings its head toward the movement.
I raise the shotgun straight up into the Montana sky and pull the trigger once.
The crack splits through the air.
That gets their attention.
“What the fuck?” Peter screeches.
And then they scatter.
It’s something to witness. Her father, who came here with the posture of a man who has never let anything ruffle his feathers, scrambles for the passenger door like a startled rooster.
Her mother actually dislodges not just one but several hairs out of place as she dives after him.
Peter trips over his own loafers. Celia is already in the backseat with the door pulled shut, and I’d bet money she’s the one who locked it.
The SUV peels down the drive in a spray of frozen gravel.
Meanwhile, the bear startles. Swings its heavy head. Lumbers back into the tree line without a backward look.
Then I turn around. Lila is watching me.
And then she starts laughing.
A full, helpless, bent-double laugh that starts in her chest and takes over her whole body, and I feel something unknot in my chest at the sound of it, something that has been wound tight since Dad’s name appeared on my phone screen this morning.
I pull her into my arms and let her laugh it out, her face pressed into my chest, her shoulders shaking, her fists balled in my shirt.
“Thank you,” she finally manages, muffled against my chest. “Can you chase them off that way every time?”
I press my lips to the top of her head. Feel her warmth against the cold morning air. The frost is melting off the grass, the clouds dissolving like spun sugar in front of the sun.
“There is nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you,” I tell her.
Soon, she’s going to find out just how deeply I mean it.