4. Zee
Runaway - AURORA
“You can’t be serious.”
Grand-mère’spinkie finger gracefully points at the ceiling as she lifts the china cup to her mouth and takes a dainty sip of coffee.
The knuckles might be more gnarled than I’m used to, but it’s a movement I’ve seen thousands of times from her.
There should be a sense of peace in this one never-changing act, but peace flew out the window the second she laid down the law.
I’ve been fine all morning, but I can already tell the stress from this conversation is messing with me. My emotions are spiking as hard as my blood sugar, which is making this tough talk a thousand times more impossible to deal with.
“Grand-mère!”
Her wrinkled lips purse as the cup returns to the saucer. Without a clink.
“This has to be a joke,” I mumble, looking at the contracts in front of me. “This isn’t the eighteen hundreds!”
I came back because I figured the triplets had gotten into mischief and they were hiding the truth from me.
I flew here with Tee because it was supposed to be a quick trip. A few days of getting scolded for being an absent grandchild then we’d return to normalcy.
This is?—
“It might as well be 1820, child.” Her dulcet tones are so alien that it’s still jarring after a lifetime of hearing them.
She’s an anachronism—a walking reminder of the times when the McAllisters had money and she was sent away to Switzerland for her education.
It’s because of her that I know how to comport myself at a charity dinner while rubbing shoulders with local bigwigs.
It’s why the triplets, despite their rabble-rousing tendencies, can tie the neckties they never wear into nineteen different types of knots, are able to waltz and understand which flowers mean what in a bouquet.
I always railed against the confines and constrictions she placed on us, but after the fire, I found comfort in them.
Until I jumped at the first chance I got to leave...
“We need the Korhonens’ help, Susanne.”
My fingers tighten around the papers in front of me. “I’m not a pawn in this game.”
“You are. Just as all McAllisters are when it concerns the Bar 9.”
My throat clutches. “This is my life, Grand-mère. You can’t expect me to do this.”
How can I marry Colton when he thinks I’m capable of setting fire to his stables and killing those innocent horses?
How could he marry me when he believes I’m an arsonist and a horse killer?
This has to be a joke. He’d never agree to this.
“You think I married your grandfather for love? I did it for the ranch?—”
“It’s always about the damn ranch! My life is in New York. Not here. And we all know how successful that marriage was. He’s one of the reasons we’re poor!”
“Your place is in Saskatchewan,” she barks, the demure lady act finally quivering as the queen of sulfur reasserts herself. “This foolish game you’re playing in New York City is beyond a joke. It’s time you came home. It’s time you did your duty.”
“My duty?” I jerk to my feet, the chair scraping noisily at the abrupt gesture. “I will not be bartered into?—”
But I”m not the only one who stands.
Thatis when she hits me.
Her palm connects with my cheek and the pain ricochets down my jaw and to my neck, my skin burning from that one point of collision.
It”s crazy, but I think of all the times Clyde Korhonen used his fists on Colton—how did he handle that when this hurts?!
I gape at her, staggering aside to avoid another blow. But there won’t be one. She takes a seat and picks up her bone-china cup as if that didn’t happen.
Except, it did.
She hit me.
And with more bite than I’d have thought possible with her current, fragile, demure ninety-two-year-old grandma act.
Because it is an act. That’s how she rolls.
“You’re a McAllister,” she tells me, but there’s a growl to the words, transforming her from society belle to cast-iron bitch. “You belong here. This is your place.
“I should never have let you leave for university. You should have stayed in Pigeon Creek. But I gave you an inch, and you took a mile. Twenty-one hundred of them. It’s time for you to come home.”
Her stony words have me flopping backward onto the horsehair-filled cushions of a sofa that saw better days in the fifties.
Still unable to believe she hit me, I stop shielding my cheek with my hand, but the stinging continues.
She’s done many shitty things in my life, but this is the first time it’s ever turned physical.
Swallowing hard, I stare at her, but she pins her gaze on the vista beyond the house.
This is her room.
It overlooks one of the lakes that we have on our property and lets her keep an eye on the corral too.
Even as we sit drinking coffee in china cups that were hand-painted a century ago and are arguing about purely human matters which are of no consequence to the land that’s been here before the first McAllister was born and will outlive us all, a stag drifts from the forest line and lowers his head to sip from the lakeshore.
My heart stutters at the sight.
I used to adore the Bar 9. Now, my skin crawls being here.
The sensation jars me so I bow my head and take in the contracts in front of me.
Contracts, I can do.
Finding solace in the familiar legal terms that perplex so many, I begin rereading them. But my heart pounds once I realize what’s on the line.
When I reach the final page of the contract, she places a piece of paper on the table beside me.
Startled, as I didn’t realize she’d gotten to her feet, I pull away from her.
“Hush, child. I hit you once in your life and you react as if I’m the devil incarnate.” She harrumphs. “You were hysterical.”
“I wasn’t but I have every right to be. You’re ruining my life, Grand-mère.”
She shoves the piece of paper at me. “Read that, Susanne.”
I peer at the bank statement with dawning horror. More documents are handed to me, so I read them too—letters from our bank manager. The hand clutching the paper balls into a fist that crinkles the notes as I stare at her.
“What the hell were you thinking wasting money on airfare?”
“Clyde Korhonen paid for your ticket.”
God, we’re already indebted to that monster.
Blindly, I stare at the statements. “How did it get so bad?”
I guess I knew when she asked for help with the mortgage, but this is so much worse than I perceived.
“The price of cattle sunk. Interest waned. Everyone wants to eat vegetables and… we haven’t diversified,” she admits.
For a second, my indomitable grandmother looks every one of her ninety-two years. Yet, though her shoulders hunch as she moves over to the window, she does so with a grace that belies her age.
She presses her fingers to the glass like she’s trying to find solace in the Bar 9—the land that reared her. “It’s getting to be more than I can handle. That’s why this would be so perfect. The boys are too young to take over and say what you will about that old bastard, Colton’s love of the land is as strong as mine. As strong as yours used to be. He can protect the Bar 9 and modernize it.”
I hear her reprimand, but I don’t care.
The minute Tee and I had enough money to leave Saskatchewan behind, we did.
Tee had a scholarship for Juilliard.
I wanted away from here. Away from the Korhonens and their land and that family’s poison.
And Colt.
Who broke my heart by pretending I”d ceased to exist.
Now, she wants me to become one of them!
Worse still, wants me to be his.
“That’s why I insisted on him for you.”
I choke out, “I guess I should be honored!”
“In my day, he’d have been a prize.”
I need to puke.
My stomach twists and churns as I’m dragged back to that horrible night—the penultimate time I saw Colton in the flesh.
We’d gotten word that my eldest brother, Walker, was PKIA in Afghanistan.
That was why I ran to the Seven Cs.
I needed to escape.
The stables were a solace, not because of the horses but the boy who’d been my friend. Yet, as I crossed onto Korhonen land, I’d recognized those rolling clouds that represented a massive storm and had been relieved to find shelter.
My eyes close as I recall how the storm came in a few hours too late. How the lightning made everything worse for the fire that wrought devastation on the Seven Cs.
Shuddering at the memory of the horses screaming as they burned alive, I bite off, “Walker should be here. This is his ranch. You should never have let him enlist!”
Her sigh is loaded with fatigue. This argument is ancient. One that’s still filtered with grief. It might be unfair of me, but what’s fair about a loss that’ll haunt this family for a lifetime?
“I let you go too, didn’t I? Permitted that foolishness which earned you some paltry accreditation as a paralegal.
“All you do is help criminals evade justice. Walker was fighting for our country.” She pins me with a scorn-filled glare, one that’s full of outrage. “His was an honorable path. Yours shames the family! But then, that’s what you do best, hypocrite.
“Here’s your chance to right the wrongs of the past, but you’re too damn stubborn to see the opportunity I’m giving you?—”
Unable to stand the sound of her voice, the same old diatribe I’ve heard thousands of times during phone calls I never want to take, I tune her out and focus on the bank statements in my hand.
Here is fact. No emotion. No manipulation.
Numbers don’t lie, and these prove that the ranch is so far in the red, it’s practically exsanguinated.
“Are you listening to me?” she yells, iron-bitch mode fully engaged because I mentioned Walker—her favorite.
And yet, when I look at her next, she’s not the same Grand-mère I knew growing up.
Maybe I’m wrong about her act and can only discern what a childhood’s indoctrination demands I see, but Grand-mère looks old.
It could be the stark lighting from the window...
No.
She’s frailer than I’d like. Her shoulders not as straight as they once were.
Her face is more lined than the last time I was guilt-tripped into coming home for Thanksgiving too.
Her clothes sit more loosely on her frame.
Ninety-two years of grief and life and misery and stress are a burden I can tell, for the first time, she’s struggling to carry.
It’s a notion that amplifies the churning in my gut.
She’s too old to be fighting like this. To be worrying about her land, her home—her family’s future.
Biting my lip, I flick another glance at the contract and all the myriad concessions we earn if the Seven Cs and the Bar 9 merge… What they gain and what we retain.
I try not to think about Clyde Korhonen’s stipulation that an heir be born of the marriage.
Once upon a time, I wanted nothing more than to be Colt’s.
To be his wife and the mother of his children.
How bittersweet life can be.
This contract presents me with everything my teenage self dreamed of having.
But here, now, the prospect of it all has my lungs feeling like they’re being compressed. My mouth is drier than the Canadian tundra. Never mind my racing heart.
I’m either going to faint or?—
“I want an expiration date.”
She jolts as those words explode out of me. “There’s no expiration date on a union such as this. We’re talking about the Bar 9!”
Good God, she won’t even concede that!
“If we have a child,” I whisper, feeling sick to my stomach despite knowing I have to do this, “then what does it matter? Everything goes to them in the end, no?”
Her gaze locks on mine and I can see her sag with relief. For all that she presented a stalwart facade, for all that she’d have argued and fought with me until the first spring showers next year, she didn’t think I’d do it.
I don’t know whether that makes me insane or not.
What I do know?
She’d die if I took her away from the ranch, and the bank manager’s note tells me the creditors are inches from hounding us off Bar 9 land.
She’s too old to be sheltering this kind of burden, even if she’d never admit it.
God help me but it’s my turn to step up.
I’m her oldest surviving grandchild—who else is there to do it?
“A child of your union would inherit it all,” she confirms.
“Do you think Colton would sign to agree to that?”
I don’t know why I need to lock this into place but I do.
I’m acting on instincts that are centuries old, as old as those of the original McAllisters who made their way out west and staked a claim on a patch of land that they turned into the Bar 9.
“Ensuring the Korhonen legacy is the only thing that matters to him, and they’re closer than they want to admit to the end because their numbers aren’t sustainable. But the McAllister legacy is what matters most to us too. Ensuring his ensures ours.”
“My child will inherit both ranches, then.”
“Yes.”
Having received the verbal confirmation I need, I nod. “I want it in writing, Grand-mère.”
“I have it.”
On shaky legs, she walks to the table holding the coffee tray so she can pass me another slip of paper, proof that this deal has been in the works for longer than I want to know.
But it isn’t a piece of Korhonen paperwork she shows me.
“Colton insisted on this when he learned of the deal.”
Three signatures—my kid brothers’—accepting Grand-mère’s gift deed and promising to never contest it as she transferred ownership of the Bar 9 to the four of us. Where I inherit 55% of the company and they each inherit 15% a piece.
Even the triplets are in on this nightmare—they lied to me.
The betrayal cuts deep, but not as deep as the knowledge that the Bar 9’s future rests on my womb.
Everything inside me clutches in horror at what’s happening, but I still rasp, “All right. I’ll sign.”
Her knees buckle as she flops onto the nearest sofa, but her relief doesn’t bring me much peace. Even if I am partially doing this for her and for the legacy I never asked to be a part of.
I scratch out a few lines that will act as an addendum Colton will need to sign—a divorce after a baby is born and a statement that the first child of Colton Dean Korhonen born from Susanne Felicia McAllister will be the sole heir of the Seven Cs and the Bar 9.
Getting to my feet once that’s signed, I throw the documents on her lap. “Confirm that a baby is enough of an expiration date, and I’ll see this through to the finish line.”
She snags at my hand, but I ignore her and shove past, toward the door.
“Susanne, thank you,” she warbles, more of her relief sinking into her words, but that’s cold comfort to me.
I don’t stop walking until I’m outside where, finally, I can breathe.
Everything about the Bar 9 is massive.
Always has been.
I tend to forget that, though.
I’m used to New York. Yet as shiny and expensive as things are there, big in its own way, that’s nothing to the sheer expanse of space that is McAllister land.
Two hundred and ten thousand acres—that’s how much we own. Even more than the Korhonens. Manhattan itself is only fourteen thousand acres.
“How the hell are we at risk of losing it all?” I ask myself as I storm toward the lake where the stag had lapped from the shoreline earlier.
Along the way, I throw my jacket onto the ground.
Next comes my camisole.
I can see the ranch hands spying on me as they come in for lunch, but to be honest, I don’t care. I hear the rumble of an engine being gunned so that means my audience is increasing, but again, I. Don’t. Care.
If I’m having to marry to save this fucking piece of land, then if I want to freak out by bathing in the lake, I will.
My skirt and tights shimmy down my hips next, and I kick off the heels I only wore to avoid Grand-mère’s ire, uncaring that one splashes in the water.
I hear her shriek from the porch: “What are you doing, child?!”
Ignoring her, I carry on, wading into the biting cold lake in my underwear, hoping it will do the impossible—stop me from throwing up. Stop me from wanting to faint. Stop me from wondering if this is a nightmare.
But, it isn’t.
This is reality.
My grand-mère sold me to the rancher next door.
The rancher who hates me and thinks me capable of the worst type of crime—equicide.
Worst still, my brothers agreed to it.
Walker wouldn’t have.
He’d have fought for me.
Tears swarm my eyes when I hear the chatter at the shoreline, but I ignore the gathering crowd to swim deeper into the center of the body of water that stole my mother”s life.
Because, despite that, I feel safe here.
Clyde can’t get to me when I’m in the lake.
It’s well known that he can’t swim.
Grand-mèrewon’t touch me either—she hates the lakes now. Has since Mom died.
“Child, come on out of there before you freeze to death!”
And it’s as if a lifetime of fear has been washed away.
Uncaring if she is Satan’s lieutenant, I holler, “Worried I won’t make it to the altar in time?” I don’t care that the staff will hear our business, though I know she’ll loathe it.
Sounds of splashing follow my words, so I tilt upward, frowning when I see a mop of black hair bobbing in the water as a ranch hand swims toward me to save me.
Ha.
Too late for that!
A few feet away, his head finally breaks through the surface.
It isn’t a ranch hand.
Everything inside me stills and flickers to life all at once.
My feet cease treading water as I go rigid, then my chin bobs beneath the surface and they start up again before my head goes under fully.
Him.
The reason I survived adolescence.
The reason I ran away.
The reason I”m coming home.
My eyes lock on a face I haven’t seen in over a decade, yet it’s one I’ll always know—will never forget.
It’s different now—older. Scars on his throat from the fire. Lines from exposure to the elements.
Beautiful, nonetheless.
As I hover there, locked in the flames of his regard, he rumbles, “Considering she brokered the deal, I think you not making it to the aisle is a definite concern, but no more so than for me, Susanne.”
“What are you doing here?” I spit, jerking away from him when he grabs one of my arms.
“Same could be asked of you. Why are you in the middle of a lake in April? They only just melted. You must be fucking freezing.” He slicks his hand over his drenched hair. “I know I am.”
“Then get out. I never invited you in here. It’s still McAllister water until you hitch your wagon to mine.”
“We’ll be doing more than that.” His eyes narrow and the lick of distaste I see in there would’ve broken my foolish heart if he hadn’t shattered it a long time ago. “You sign the contract yet, Susanne?”
I have no idea why I hiss the words at him, but I do anyway: “It’s Zee.”
“You want me to call my future wife ‘Zee?’”
What I want is to shove it in his face how different I am. I want him to know that he was wrong not to believe in me.
All I can do is bark, “That’s the only name I’ll answer to.”
I’m not the girl you used to know.
His nostrils flare as he sluices water from his face. “I forgot how annoying you are.”
“I didn’t forget how annoying you are.”
My bottom lip trembles in misery, and when he spies that faint motion, he heaves a sigh.
Before I know it, I’m being drawn into his arms. His body against mine. Rough against soft. Hard lines against gentle curves. But it has nothing to do with ‘saving’ me and everything to do with hugging me.
My mind blanks.
“You don’t have to be scared of me…” He hesitates. “Zee.”
I blink at him and the only thing I can think to say is: “I want a divorce.”