The Rancher's Wager Read online

  “You think because I’m young, because I was inexperienced, that I can’t understand what I want. But I do, Jackson. I do. I have always known what I wanted. A place in this world where I fit, and to be with you. It seems to me that what you’re after is a life where you won’t regret anything. And I don’t think anyone can guarantee you that, Jackson, I really don’t. We could be together, for better or worse, like you said. And maybe sometimes it would be worse. But I think it would still be a better kind of worse than being apart.”

  “Because you don’t know what that looks like. Not really. I do. I watched my mom... I watched her wish for another life. And I was the cause of her not having it.”

  “So, we can get married. And if you were miserable, we could get divorced.”

  “Cricket...”

  “No, really, what’s your problem? You’re afraid of what? You’re afraid of failing? Because we’re not trapped. We wouldn’t be. It would be up to us. But you’re afraid of something. Otherwise...this would be a different conversation. You’re acting like I didn’t grow up around a dysfunctional marriage. So why don’t you stop hiding behind the one you grew up around. I thought cowboys were supposed to be brave.”

  Her words were like a dagger through his heart. He did feel like a coward. He felt like the worst kind of coward, standing there and offering her absolutely nothing. Standing there and failing her, except...

  He knew what he knew.

  He knew what it was to be a child who had been part of a marriage of obligation. More than that, he knew what it was to be the child who’d caused it. And maybe Creed had been willing to do that to be with his kid, but his brother had been through something entirely different. His brother had been barred from seeing his child.

  His child.

  So Jackson was going to live in a different house than his kid?

  This was why they’d done it. He could understand it. That was the thing. Standing there staring at her, and the enticement of the future they could have...

  But Cricket hadn’t said she loved him.

  She was standing there, asking for something that would make their lives easier on a surface level. The thing that so many people did. To try and make a family for a child.

  But he knew that beneath the surface of the happiest-looking nuclear family there could be rot and decay. A kind of desperate sadness that nobody saw but the people on the inside of the arrangement.

  And whatever he was, he didn’t want to be her obligation. Whatever he was, he didn’t want to be her regret.

  You’re protecting yourself...

  How? He didn’t feel protected. Not now. What he felt was angry. Infuriated and just damn helpless.

  He hadn’t done any different than his parents. And that was a galling thing. But he would do different now. He would. He would do better, for them both.

  “Do you even want to be this baby’s father?”

  “I’ll be a father. If I made a kid, I’m going to take care of the kid.”

  “It’s a shame you can’t feel a little bit of that for me.”

  “Whether you see it or not, Cricket, this is me caring.”

  “No, I don’t see it,” she said, her tone as icy as her expression.

  “We’ll find a way through this.”

  “To what? Coparenting? Sharing custody? Will we trade our kid back and forth in the parking lot of the grocery store?”

  He didn’t like anything about the future she painted with those words. He didn’t like any of this. What he wanted to do was grab her and pull her up against him, pick her up in his arms and carry her upstairs and make her his.

  He wanted to keep her.

  And she would stay.

  For the child.

  And he would still be that obligation he’d always been.

  He gritted his teeth, shoved that aside. “Whatever you need.”

  “Except a husband.”

  “It’s better.”

  “Well, if you say so. But if I were you, I don’t know that I’d lay a bet on it. Since you’d only lose. Because you know what, I got the better hand.” She stopped and looked at him, her expression almost pitying. “The thing is, Jackson. You keep thinking that you know exactly how this is going to play out. You keep thinking that you know better than me. Even from the beginning. When I won, you felt like you had another plan, and so you didn’t really lose. But you did, though, didn’t you? I got my way. So if I were you, I would maybe try to figure out what all I know that you don’t.”

  And then Cricket left.

  Turned and left him there, driving off in her great truck down the hill, taking some piece of him with her. But she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand that this was how it had to be. Because in her mind she could will all these things into fitting together, and he knew better. He’d spent his life as an obligation.

  But now he was standing there, feeling like he’d cut his own heart out of his chest, and he knew he was a liar.

  He couldn’t love her...

  He already did.

  And he was every bit the coward she had accused him of being.

  * * *

  Cricket didn’t go back to the ranch. She couldn’t. Instead, she went to Emerson’s. And it didn’t take long for Wren to show up. At this point, there was no protecting Jackson from the wrath of her brothers-in-law. And Cricket didn’t intend to try. She was too angry at him. He was being...ridiculous.

  He didn’t have a damn good reason for any of this.

  Cricket had never sulked so hard in her life. But she was doing her best to work a groove into her sister’s overstuffed, white fluffy beanbag chair with the weight of her indignant sighs.

  “So, when do we get the whole story?” Emerson asked.

  It all came pouring out of Cricket, from her lifelong crush to their love affair, to the half brother thing, and all the way to what had just happened at his place.

  “Well,” Wren said. “Creed is going to kill him.”

  “I know,” Cricket said. “It’s why I went to Emerson first. Because I didn’t really want him to die. I’m feeling more flexible on that subject right at the moment.”

  “So he said he can’t love you?”

  “Yes. He did. And you know what, if I believed it... then maybe I would think he was doing the right thing. But I don’t believe it. I do think he can love me. I really do. I think he might love me already. And I think he’s being afraid.”

  “Well,” Wren said, “love makes fools out of men. Trust me.”

  “Even Creed?”

  “Oh, Creed was the worst,” Wren said.

  “No,” Emerson said, “I think Holden was the worst. I told him that I loved him and he lost his mind.”

  “Yeah, Creed was not exactly receptive to me loving him either.”

  “Oh,” Cricket said, frowning.

  “What?” Wren asked.

  “I didn’t exactly tell him that I loved him.”

  “Really?” Emerson asked. “But you do, right? I mean, you have for years.”

  “I... Yes. But I...wanted to see what he would say, and I didn’t want to...”

  “Cricket,” Wren said gently. “I’d like to kill him. With my bare hands. If he didn’t think that he could give you something real he never should’ve touched you.”

  “No. I told him it was okay. He was honest with me. He was upfront. He was. He never lied to me. It’s just... I thought I could be with him and then move on. I thought I could be with him and then make it part of a phase that I moved past. But I couldn’t. I was lying to myself. He was never a phase. He was always fate.”

  “Then you need to tell him.”

  “He humiliated me.”

  “Yeah. And...sometimes we have to be fools for love.”

  “I don’t like that at all.”

  “
I don’t either,” Wren said. “But I love my husband. And I would debase myself for him a thousand times to keep him. But he doesn’t make me. Maybe the real problem is that Jackson needs to know how you feel. The Coopers are... They’re hard men. And I don’t know all of Jackson’s issues. But I do know what it looks like when a Cooper runs scared.”

  “So what? I don’t wait for him to come to me? I don’t...wait for him to say it first?”

  “You can. But I think you have a good head on your shoulders, Cricket. And you always have,” Emerson said. “You know who you are. And it would be great if relationships could be fifty-fifty, but they can’t be. Everybody has to give everything they’ve got all the time, and sometimes you’re going to have to be the one carrying your partner. No, it should never look like Mom and Dad’s marriage. Where one of them dies emotionally, without any kind of love or support. But sometimes you have to be the first one who’s willing to break. The first one who’s willing to be vulnerable. And it might be tough, but it’s best. Because otherwise you end up in a stalemate forever, and nobody wins.”

  “Maybe it’s just a bad hand. All around.”

  “No. Don’t say that. Look, he’s a good man, and you’re a good woman. And I don’t believe for a minute that the two of you can’t find a way to make something together.”

  “But...”

  “It sucks,” Emerson said, “but anything that matters is tough sometimes. The only person who ever has it easy in a relationship is someone like Dad. Someone who doesn’t care enough to be hurt. Who doesn’t care enough about someone else’s feelings.”

  Those words resonated inside of Cricket and sank down deep. She had always wanted to be protected, but being part of her family, in the way that she had wanted to be...it had been a bigger risk than she was willing to take. It hadn’t mattered enough. It hadn’t mattered enough because she hadn’t aspired to the kind of life her mother and father had anyway. So contorting herself to become part of it had seemed the opposite of a good idea. But Jackson... He was different. The life they could have—she could see it. She ached for it. A life together, one with their child. And that hadn’t been her fantasy. She had thought about Jackson, about having him. Not about domestic bliss or anything of that kind. But she wanted it. It was a future that burned bright and hot in her mind. A future that mattered.

  Because she loved him.

  And where in the world did pride fit in with love? She couldn’t protect herself.

  That was what he was doing. Whether he would admit it or not, that was what he was doing. And she wasn’t going to do that. She wasn’t going to sacrifice love on the altar of her own pride. Because this was deeper than that. It was in her bones, in her blood. Like the land. Like ranching.

  Some things simply were.

  And for her, loving Jackson was one of those things. And she was going to fight for it. Fight for him.

  Because her life mattered too much to let someone like James Maxfield twist her sense of who she was enough to prevent her from being happy even when he wasn’t around. And it was the same for Jackson, whether he knew it or not. His parents’ mistakes didn’t get to decide what he was.

  She burrowed out from the large poof she’d been sitting on. “All right,” she said. “I’m going to tell him that I love him.”

  “A good idea. Maybe not at nine o’clock at night, though,” Emerson said.

  “Why not?”

  “Formulate a plan. You got this. But it wouldn’t hurt to take some time with it.”

  Cricket nodded. “Okay. Time.”

  And that was when she did start to form a plan.

  “I’m going to need to borrow your dress again,” she said to Emerson.

  “Whatever you need.”

  Eleven

  Jackson was no stranger to grief. But what surprised him this time was that the situation with Cricket felt more like death than he’d anticipated anything like this could feel. He had reached the end of his rope and he knew he had two options. Reach for the bottle of whiskey, or reach for his car keys. He opted for the car keys, and found himself driving down from the ranch and heading to where his father was, at the tasting room, and that was how Jackson ended up pounding on the door. He knew he’d woken up the old man, but he didn’t really care.

  “Jackson? Is everything all right?” Cash asked, tying his robe hastily as he pulled open the door.

  “Cricket is pregnant,” Jackson said.

  “Well hell,” Cash said. “You really did need to know who her father was.”

  “I told you I did.”

  “You didn’t waste any time.”

  “It was inevitable. But it doesn’t matter. I need to know something else from you, and I need to know it now. Why did you marry Mom if you couldn’t love her? Why did you do it for me? Because you know what, it doesn’t feel very good to be the reason your parents are miserable. To be the reason that they’re together. To know that you’re why they are not happy.”

  “You were never why we weren’t happy,” Cash said. Then he sighed wearily. “Come in.”

  Jackson stepped inside, enveloped by the sense of strangeness he always felt when he entered his childhood home. He had sat at the dining table countless times with his mother. He had opened Christmas presents in the corner, right there by the fireplace where the tree always was. He had read to his mother while she lay on the couch, while she wasn’t well. While he was losing her, watching as she slipped away.

  He couldn’t be in here and not...feel.

  “You need to understand that we weren’t unhappy,” Cash said. “Not always. Just like we weren’t happy always. And look, the pain that your mother felt, that was my fault. We had a bad fight. Must’ve been...fifteen, sixteen years in, and she told me how much she hated the winery, and at that point, it had made us so much money, it felt like the best thing I’d ever done. But she said it just reminded her that my whole life was built on the foundation of trying to win back another woman.”

  Cash shook his head. “And I... I let that sit inside me. I let that fester. And I figured... It would’ve been a lot easier to be married to Lucinda Maxfield. But I know better than that. I mean, I know better than to believe that being with Lucinda would’ve fixed all my problems. Because you can’t compare a childish infatuation to a marriage that spans decades. You just can’t do it. Every what-if supposition your mother and I ever had about if we hadn’t been together... We were never with anyone else for all those years. I didn’t have children with anyone else. The stresses and pressures that time in a family put on you can’t be compared to anything else. We grew up with each other, for better or worse. We changed together, in sickness and health. We were part of each other.”

  “You were together because you felt obligated,” Jackson said.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Yes. You should be with someone because...hell, because you love them.”

  “Where the hell did you get the idea that love didn’t come with obligation? Loving a child is full of obligation. A marriage is filled with obligation. Obligation is not a bad word. It’s bad people that turn away from it, don’t you think?”

  “I can’t say that I ever thought of it that way.”

  “We weren’t perfect. We weren’t blissfully, perfectly happy. And I carry so much guilt for all my feelings. For the kind of husband I wasn’t. It’s not that I couldn’t have loved her, it’s that I chose—we chose—to let certain things affect what we believed. To let certain feelings grow rotten and determine how much and how little we could feel and forgive.”

  “When she told me that you only got married because she was pregnant with me—”

  “Maybe,” his dad said. “Maybe that’s true. But she doesn’t know that. Not even I know that. We could say that, shout it at each other at the worst of times, and we certainly did. But that doesn’t make it true. That doesn’t ma
ke it a sure thing that we can know. We loved each other then.”

  “Well, you were only with mom because Lucinda Maxfield married James.”

  “This is the problem,” Cash said. “I don’t know the way things would’ve gone, or could’ve gone if we’d done things differently. If we’d been less stubborn. Less self-righteous. But we weren’t. And that’s my burden. It’s not yours or anyone else’s, and she shouldn’t have put it on you. But there’s a lot of things I shouldn’t have put on her... You shouldn’t have been the person she had to talk to. But the problem is—this is all ‘should have,’ ‘could have.’ And you drive yourself crazy with it, Jackson. Believe me. I’ve done it. For years and years, I’ve done it. And most of all since she passed.”

  “Why since then?”

  “I told you. Guilt. And regret. Because at the end of the day, I loved your mother very much. And what I didn’t do was show it. Because I kept expecting it to feel the same as something I felt when I was young, something I felt that was impossible and painful, and wonderful in its way...” He shook his head. “And then, I wonder what could have been between us now and that makes the regret even worse. Because I can hear her in my head, saying I was just waiting for her to die so I could be with the person I really wanted. But that’s not the truth of it. It just isn’t.”

  Jackson let out a long, slow breath and rocked back on his heels. He didn’t know what the hell to do with any of this. Cricket looked at him and talked about fate. She had talked about him and her as if they were something preordained. And his dad was making this all sound a lot like choice. And a whole collection of hard ones at that.