Chapter Fourteen #2
The Bennet brothers stepped out onto the porch. Sam’s heart clutched a little bit, in that way it did when something about Nate caught her as slightly unexpected.
Like how good he looked in a suit, or how much going to a wedding together left her feeling … a little jittery and weird about her own future.
“Good men,” Glenda rasped.
All dressed in suits and freshly shaven, they looked even more alike than they usually did. The dark hair and eyes. All tall and broad—Cal was even putting the weight he’d lost last year back on so that he didn’t look quite so … sickly.
“Not so hard to look at,” Sam murmured.
But Glenda was right. All three of them, in very different ways, had somehow taken all the bad Benjamin Bennet had thrown at them and turned it into something good.
Secrets had hurt them all. Secrets had made their lives harder. Maybe the truth hadn’t always been safe. Not when Benjamin Bennet had been terrorizing them or their mother behind the scenes, but the truth was always the real answer.
“Good men deserve the truth, Glenda.”
But Glenda said nothing in words. Just hummed a little tune under her breath Sam didn’t recognize.
And she didn’t want to push when Nate came and sat on her other side. When Cal took the seat in front of Nate.
Landon and Aly weren’t doing any attendants, so Landon kept on until he was standing under the archway with the minister, waiting for Aly.
Jill appeared and went over to the little music setup and clicked something on her laptop. The strains of the bridal march started coming out of speakers attached as Jill hurried to her seat next to Glenda.
Then Aly stepped out onto the porch.
The dress was simple, but elegant white satin in clean lines. Really beautiful. Aly didn’t wear a veil, and her red hair was carefully braided into a coil at the base of her neck. Her makeup was as simple as the rest, and it all suited Aly and Landon down to the bone.
No one walked Aly down the aisle. She proceeded herself and met Landon under the arch.
It was beautiful and perfect and none of it would have mattered anyway, because the two only had happy, loving eyes for each other, like every moment of their lives had led them exactly here, exactly where they belonged.
Sam had the strangest wave of nostalgia for the two motherless girls she and Aly had been.
Not unmarked by tragedy or the hard stuff, but still with enough hope to make being a teenager …
well, fun. Fun and somewhat carefree. Giggling together about all the roads they could take as the future unfurled out before them.
Then Marie Bennet had been murdered and everything had changed. A fifteen-year trudge through darkness and terrible things and all the hope being sucked out of life.
But then they’d found the truth. Nate had come home. Landon and Aly had finally gotten together.
The truth did all this. Sam had lost things in the truth—her father, her aunt, some of her steadfast surety—but she’d gained so much in its place.
So it felt like somehow, fifteen years later, they were mending everything that had been ripped apart back then. They couldn’t bring Marie back, but her children could find love. Happiness. Contentment.
Sam had lived without hope for a while. She knew how bleak and dark it could be.
Nate’s hand curled around hers, brought it to sit on his leg. His bad leg. Yeah, they’d all had some really dark days. So dark, it was hard to believe in the light.
But Sam wanted to. Because there was plenty of bad in this life, sacred secrets included, but who could deny that good was part of it all? Certainly not her. Not when Landon and Aly looked at each other with love and devotion in their eyes and said I do.
Not with her hand in Nate’s.
All of this had come from finally finding the truth. So she wouldn’t be convinced to stop looking for it.
Not even for Glenda’s sacred secrets.
*
The reception, such as it was, included music on a speaker being played from a playlist Jill had made for the couple on her computer. Landon and Aly danced, such as it could be considered dancing when two people just swayed together no matter the beat of the music.
Sam eventually coaxed Nate out and a few of the ranch hands danced with their significant others. Jill sat next to Grandma and enjoyed the simple, casual moment of pure light. Not shadowed by any darkness.
When Cal approached, Jill ignored the little jitter of anticipation in her stomach and smiled at him. But his gaze was on Grandma.
“Well, Glenda, I think you owe me a dance.”
Grandma made a humph noise and pointed at Jill.
Cal’s dark eyes moved to her.
Humor curved his mouth. “Oh, she’ll be next. You first.” He took Glenda’s hand and helped her to her feet.
Jill felt kind of silly. Okay, a lot silly. She didn’t want to dance with Cal, except she kind of did, but he was just doing some kind of … make the rounds, host of the party thing.
Apparently his current role was going around to every unattached woman and entertaining them with a dance.
Jill watched him with Grandma. The easy way Cal moved with her, even though Jill knew there were complicated feelings between the two of them. He even made Grandma smile, and Jill just didn’t know what to do about that.
He was a complicated guy. One she didn’t fully understand, and she was worried the desire to was tied up in the fictional world she was creating around his very real-world issues.
She didn’t want to be that person, but when the song ended and he walked with Glenda back over to their seats and turned to her … well, Jill forgot all about her book.
“Alright, Jill Harrington. You’re up.” He held out his hand.
All gallant charm meant to amuse. Since it seemed to give him some satisfaction to amuse, she went ahead and slid her hand into his.
Much larger. Rough—probably from helping around on the ranch even if he didn’t do it much. Oh, he was all big-city lawyer polish, but underneath all that was a boy who’d grown up right here.
Under some really awful circumstances.
As if he understood the wave of sympathy she felt for him, he twirled her, and she couldn’t hold back a laugh of surprise or delight. The awful floating away in amusement.
She’d been in Montana for years now, and she’d had moments of fun and entertainment and even joy. But it had all felt like it existed in a weird kind of isolation. This—the wedding, the dancing—it all felt a bit more like … life. The kind of three-dimensional life an adult should have.
And to think, she’d found it way out here in Montana, in the shadow of taking care of her ailing grandmother.
But she wasn’t thinking about Grandma or the past or anything when Cal easily pulled her into his arms for the slow dance. Like he danced with women every day. Like it was commonplace to have one of her hands in Cal Bennet’s, while his other rested lightly on her waist.
He was tall. Nothing about the past year could take that away, and even when he was a little gaunt, he was handsome. And knew it. He had a poise and self-possession the other two Bennet brothers didn’t carry the same way.
Landon knew exactly who he was and where he belonged, but he didn’t much care for how that looked to anyone but Aly. Nate … well, Nate was more closed off. But there was an alertness, always, that spoke to a man who always knew where he was and what he was doing.
Cal’s confidence was all on the outside. He knew how to smile, deflect, argue, maneuver. All to keep anyone from looking too deeply at that mess going on inside.
She had a soft spot for messes. Grandma, case in point. She nearly laughed at the thought. They were awfully alike on the inside, and even how they dealt with people—knowing just what buttons to push to keep people at a distance.
Would either of them see that?
“I’m working my way up,” Cal told her quietly, a glimmer of mischief in those usually somber or haunted or pissed-off brown eyes as he looked around the makeshift dance floor.
“Sam’s next—can’t wait to see how Nate takes that.
Then the pièce de resistance, I will dance with Aly and do everything I can to make Landon’s head explode. ”
Jill shook her head. She wanted to scold him, but she also knew this was kind of his weird love language to his brothers, and more, there was a … lightness in him she didn’t think she’d ever seen.
She didn’t claim to be any great friend of Cal’s, but they’d crossed paths enough in the past year. She’d seen the aftereffects of everything he’d remembered. She’d watched the weight drop off. She’d seen him in the aftermath of being shot to help save Aly and Landon in the summer.
This was a different Cal than any of those times. Like seeing Aly and Landon vow to love each other forever actually made him really happy.
“I read your chapters.”
Broken out of her reverie, she narrowly missed stomping on his foot. “What?”
“I read them,” he said, his grip tightening on her—presumably to save his feet. “Last night.”
Jill swallowed the sudden nerves that fluttered in her throat. “Oh, well.” She cleared her throat, not at all sure what to say about it.
“You made him seem like a decent guy. The … Gage character.”
She could only stare at him. That this would be his takeaway broke her heart a little bit.
“Well, he is,” she managed to say, though her voice croaked on the words.
“I like that.” He smiled down at her, and something uncomfortable and very … awkward shivered in her chest. “I’d like to read the rest when you’ve got it,” he added.
She was afraid to speak, so she nodded. Sure, Cal could read the rest when she wrote it.
But she was starting to worry that a little too much of her real life would leak into all that fiction.