by Joanna Sims
After a long inhale and exhale, Savannah pulled a face before she stood up cautiously and opened the bathroom door. In her favorite flannel long-sleeved pajamas, she faced the four males in her life. Buck and Hound Dog had already staked out their spots on the bed, while Murphy, the dog that had always favored her, was waiting patiently just on the other side of the bathroom threshold. Bruce was standing on the far side of the bed—her side of the bed—waiting for her. He seemed awkward and stiff to her, and there was a concerned look in his striking blue eyes.
She spoke to the concern she saw in his eyes as she bent down to pet Murphy on the head. “I’m okay. Just really tired.”
Bruce had pulled the sheets and comforter back so she could easily slide into bed. As she walked by him, he held his body stiff and away from her. Her husband gave her a dose of her medicine, redressed the bandage on her head and then pulled the covers up to her chest after she lay back on the pillows.
“I haven’t been tucked into bed since I was a kid,” she mused, her eyes intent on Bruce’s face.
“I won’t do it anymore if it bothers you.” Bruce switched off the light on the nightstand.
“No,” she said faintly. “It makes me feel...”
Loved by you, cared for by you—
“Safe,” she finished after a pause.
In the low light from the hallway, Savannah saw the smallest of smiles drift across Bruce’s handsome face.
“Sleep well.” He turned away from the bed.
Savannah had slipped her hand out from beneath the comforter to catch his hand.
“I love you.” They had never gone to bed without telling each other that they loved each other—not that she could remember, anyway. It had been their promise to each other—never go to bed mad. Never go to bed without saying “I love you.”
Bruce turned back to her, his eyes so intent on her face. After a squeeze of her fingers, Bruce replied, “I love you more.”
* * *
After tucking Savannah into bed, Bruce went through the motions of cleaning up the kitchen, starting the dishwasher and letting the dogs out one last time. Normally, his three canine companions would stick to his side like glue, following him from room to room. Tonight was different. All three dogs opted to return to the bedroom, to get back into bed with Savannah. He’d felt so lonely after Savannah had left him, that he often found any reason not to be inside the house until he was ready to fall into bed. And he had counted on the dogs to fill some of the void left by his wife.
Now, sitting on the couch in the living room, the only light provided by the three-quarter moon glowing in the purple-black sky, Bruce felt more alone than ever. Having Savannah’s energy back in the house, when he thought to never have it back, had been more of a shock to his system than he had expected. Even though it had felt like the heart had been hollowed out of the house, he supposed he had grown accustomed to it.
He hadn’t discussed the sleeping arrangements with Savannah—he assumed that she understood that they wouldn’t be sharing a bed. He’d turned the second bedroom into a storage room, so his only option was the couch. He had moved his necessary toiletries into the spare bathroom, and that was where he prepared for bed. Wearing only his gray boxer briefs, Bruce lay back on the couch, stuffing two of the couch pillows beneath his head. With a tired sigh, he pulled the blanket draped over the back of the sofa down over his torso. The blanket smelled strongly of wet dog; Bruce pushed the blanket down to cover his groin, and far enough away from his nose not to be distracted by the smell. He’d wash the blanket tomorrow.
Arm behind his head, the cowboy stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the log cabin, his mind racing with “what if” scenarios revolving around Savannah and her missing memories. It was a good long while before he could finally close his eyes and fall into a fitful sleep. But this sleep, as restless as it was, didn’t last long. At first, he thought that he had dreamed the sound of dogs barking in the distance; it wasn’t until he felt a dog licking him on the side of his face and mouth that he began to awaken.
“What?” Bruce asked Murphy as he sat up while at the same time wiping his hand over his mouth to clean away the dog’s saliva.
Murphy disappeared back into the bedroom and joined the other two dogs barking. Bruce stood up, expecting to go tell the dogs to be quiet so they wouldn’t awaken Savannah, but then his wife cried out, the words muffled by the barking.
“Savannah!” Bruce rushed to his wife’s side.
“Can you hear me! Can you hear me!” Savannah was sitting up in bed, crying, her head in her hands. “Why can’t you hear me!”
Bruce switched on the light near the bed, and guided the dogs away from Savannah so he could sit down next to her on the bed.
“Hey.” He made her lift her head so he could see her face. She looked terrified, sweat mingled with tears on her flushed cheeks, her eyes wide.
Still crying, Savannah lurched forward and wrapped her arms around his body. “I was screaming and screaming and screaming and no one could hear me. Not you, not Mom, not Dad. No one.”
Bruce rested his head on the top of hers and let her cry it out on his shoulder. “You’re safe, Savannah. It was just a bad dream.”
After she took a couple of deep, steadying breaths, he leaned back so he could see her face. Bruce brushed the sweat-dampened hair off his wife’s forehead, then held her face gently in his hands and wiped her tears away with his thumbs.
“Please, stop calling me Savannah,” his wife said, her face crumpling as if she were about to start crying again.
Savannah pulled back from him a little; he dropped his hands from her face.
“You only call me Savannah when we fight,” she added when he didn’t respond right away.
It was true—he called her “Beautiful.” He had rarely used her first name during their courtship and their marriage. But for the last year, he’d called her Savannah exclusively.
“All right,” he agreed. What else could he do but agree?
Savannah went to the restroom while he went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water. When he returned, his wife was back in bed surrounded by his traitorous canines.
“Guys, you need to get down,” Bruce said to the dogs. Savannah barely had enough room to sleep.
“No,” Savannah said quickly, almost dribbling her sip of water. “I want them here.”
At this moment, he would have granted Savannah just about anything. He hated to see her cry—it broke his heart when she cried.
He waited while Savannah finished the glass of water; he took the empty glass. “Better?”
She nodded, pulling on a loose thread in the pattern of the comforter. After a minute, she looked up at him. “Where were you?”
Bruce was about to switch off the light again, but straightened instead. He sent Savannah a questioning gaze.
“When I woke up, you weren’t in bed.” Her eyes slid over to the undisturbed pillows and comforter on his side of the bed.
They hadn’t discussed the sleeping arrangement—she hadn’t brought it up and neither had he. Perhaps it was sheer cowardice that had stopped him from broaching the subject; he figured that Savannah would assume that he would be sharing their marital bed as usual. He’d known all along that he intended to sleep on the couch.
Bruce swallowed hard and pushed his hair back off his face. “I think I should sleep on the couch for a while.”
Savannah couldn’t hide the hurt she felt, and he closed his eyes for a split second to block out the pain he could see in her eyes before he continued. “I know this is hard for you, Savannah,”
She had dropped her eyes, but raised them when he used her first name.
“Beautiful,” he corrected. “I’m sorry. I just need a minute to—” he paused, his forehead wrinkled with his own pain “—adjust.”
> They said good-night for the second time that night; the three dogs stayed faithfully with Savannah while he returned, alone, to the couch and the smelly blanket. If their first night was any indication of how difficult it was going to be to have Savannah back at Sugar Creek Ranch, it promised to be a tough row to hoe—for the both of them.
Chapter Three
“Well, where the hell is she?” Jock Brand demanded. “Why the hell didn’t you bring her with you?”
Bruce arrived at Sugar Creek’s traditional Sunday brunch without Savannah, much to the unabashed displeasure of his father.
As Jock’s eldest of eight children from two marriages, Bruce had learned to ignore most of his father’s bluster and salty language long ago. He leaned down to kiss his stepmother, Lilly, on her soft, light brown cheek, before taking his seat at the long formal dining table.
“I let her sleep in,” Bruce told his father. “She needs the rest.”
He didn’t add that he didn’t want Savannah to feel overwhelmed by his family right off the bat; Sunday brunch was the one time when they converged on the ranch. And when the talk turned to politics, as it often did, yelling and fist-banging on the table were as common a fare as eggs and bacon.
“A hearty breakfast and hard work,” Jock countered loudly. “That’s what she needs.”
Jock never used an “indoor voice,” and his answer for all things was a good breakfast followed by hard work. And Bruce had to acknowledge that his father led by that example. Jock wasn’t a man known for his kindness or his forgiving nature, but he was known for throwing his back into every aspect of his life. Years of working in the harsh elements of Montana were carved into his narrow face by deep wrinkles fanning out from his eyes and crisscrossing his broad forehead. His nose was prominent, strong and slightly crooked, with a hump in the middle from a break that hadn’t been set properly. His hair, thin and receding at the temples, had long since turned white, as had the bushy, unruly eyebrows framing the deeply set, sapphire-blue eyes. At one time, Jock’s skin had been fair, but decades of work in the sun without any sun protection had given his leathery skin a brownish-ruddy hue.
“She needs her rest,” Lilly said in her soft, steady voice as she poured coffee into the cup at Bruce’s place setting.
Lilly was Jock’s second wife, and the entire family still marveled at the match. Jock was loud and abrasive; Lilly was quiet and sweet. Jock believed in “spare the rod, spoil the child;” Lilly believed in the power of kind words and affection. Jock was a sworn atheist; Lilly, on the other hand, was a very spiritual woman with a deep connection to the land. A full-blooded Chippewa-Cree Native American raised on the Rocky Boy reservation, Lilly Hanging Cloud was an undeniable beauty—kind brown-black eyes, balanced, even features and prominent cheekbones. Her hair, always worn long and straight, was coal black with silver laced throughout. Yes, Lilly was his stepmother, but his memory of his own mother was so faint that Lilly was truly the only mother he’d ever known.
“Morning!” Jessie, Jock’s only daughter and the youngest of the bunch, breezed into the dining room, her waist-length, pin-straight raven hair fluttering behind her. Their baby sister was sweet, but had been spoiled by all of them, including him. She had always been too adorable to scold, with her mother’s striking features and her father’s shocking blue eyes.
Now that Jessie was here, Jock’s attention would turn to his favored child, and Bruce would be able to eat in peace for a moment or two.
“Hi, Daddy.” Jessie leaned down and kissed their father’s cheek; she was the only one of his eight children who got away with calling him “Daddy.” All of the siblings, including him, called the patriarch of their family “Jock” or “sir.”
Jessie then kissed her mother “good morning,” plopped down in the chair next to him and bumped her shoulder into his. “Hi, dork.”
Bruce wrapped his arm around his sister’s shoulder, pulled her close for a moment and kissed the side of her head. “Mornin’, brat.”
A steady trickle of Brand siblings filled the empty seats at the enormous dining table. One of his full brothers, Liam, was the first to arrive, followed by their half brothers Colton and Hunter. Shane and Gabe, his other two full-blooded brothers, were missing from breakfast, as was his youngest half brother, Noah. Gabe, a long-distance trucker, was out of town, and no one expected Shane to show. Shane was honorably discharged from the army; diagnosed with PTSD, he was often missing from family events. Noah, a private first class in the Marine Corps, had been recently deployed to South Korea.
As the long dining table filled with his children, Jock presided over Sunday breakfast like a king over his court. Bruce was happy to drift into the background while his siblings dominated the conversation, each one louder than the other, trying as they always did to get the loudest and the last word on all subjects. They were a competitive bunch—but tight as family could be when push came to shove. When the conversation, as it often did, turned to politics, Bruce found his thoughts returning to his wife. The shock of her coming back to Sugar Creek Ranch hadn’t worn off; he knew that she must feel the distance between them. He could read the pain in her eyes when he avoided touching her or stiffened when she innocently placed her hand over his. He wanted to open his heart to her again, but he couldn’t. Not yet. The first time she’d walked out of his life and into the arms of another man, it had left him feeling like an empty eggshell—cracked, fragile and good for nothing. He had to protect his heart. What other choice did he have?
“Savannah!” his sister screamed over the din of voices.
Everyone at the table stopped talking and turned their attention to the entrance to the dining room.
Bruce had caught the expression on his sister’s face, lit up with happy surprise, before he turned his head to look at the doorway to the dining room. Savannah, her slender body engulfed in one of his denim button-down shirts, was standing in the doorway appearing peaked and frail. She had an uncertainty in her body language, a nervousness in her half smile and forward-slumped shoulders that Bruce read right away. Savannah knew in her mind that she had been absent from Sunday breakfast for a long time; it would be normal to wonder about how the family would receive her. And she had some reason to be concerned—several of his siblings were still raw with Savannah and her lawyer, so they weren’t ready to welcome her back to the fold with open arms. Their father had no such reservations.
“Daughter!” Jock bellowed as he thrust his seat back and out of his way so he could wrap a possessive, welcoming arm around Savannah’s shoulders. Sugar Creek was Jock’s ranch—if he said Savannah was welcome, she was welcome.
“Good morning, everyone,” Savannah said with an unusually shy smile and a quieter than normal voice. She leaned into her father-in-law’s embrace, but her eyes had sought out his.
Bruce had stood up at the same time as his father; it was instinctive, natural, to protect his wife—to stand between her and her critics in the room. Even if those critics were his own kin.
“You need something to eat,” Lilly observed.
Before his wife could respond, Jock waved his hand over the table. “Everyone move. Move! I want Savannah to sit down right here next to me.”
“No, don’t do that...” Savannah tried to intervene, but Jock’s will was the will of the family.
Everyone on the right side of the table, including him, moved one seat down to make room for their father’s most-favored daughter-in-law.
Bruce had gathered up his dishes, swapped them for a clean set and held the chair for his wife to sit down.
“Sorry.” Savannah apologized to the table at large.
“Don’t you go apologizing for nothing,” Jock ordered gruffly. “It’s been far too long since we’ve had you at this table.”
The mood at the table changed; the conversation seemed stilted and stiff to Bruce, with his sib
lings focusing more on their food than talking. Savannah, who used to be a ray of sun shining on Sunday breakfast, had now become a bit of a spoiler. One by one, his brothers finished their meals and dispersed. Liam, his junior by only one year and always the peacemaker, made sure to say a kind word to Savannah, wishing her a speedy recovery, before he left. Jessie was the only sibling who seemed to have made a seamless pivot now that the divorce was on hold; she talked in a stream of consciousness, bouncing from one topic to another, seeming to want to catch Savannah up on the missing years in one sitting.
“Come up for air,” Bruce told his sister. “She’s not going anywhere.”
Had he just spoken the truth? The truth from somewhere deep inside? Or was that hopeful thinking?
Instead of making a quick appearance at breakfast as he had planned, Bruce sat beside his wife while she ate two full helpings of scrambled eggs, a heaping scoop of cheese grits, a biscuit slathered with butter and honey, and drank a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He’d never known her to be much of a breakfast person.
“I’m stuffed.” Savannah groaned, her hands on her stomach.
“You sure you can’t eat a few more spoonfuls of grits?” Bruce teased her. “I’d hate for those couple of bites to go to waste.”
Savannah pushed her plate away and scrunched up her face distastefully. “I may not eat for the rest of the day.”
“I haven’t seen you eat that much in a day before,” Bruce mused.
“A hearty breakfast is exactly what you needed.” Jock gave a nod of approval.
