Southern Seduction

by Alcorn, N. A.

  “Let me guess—I’ll be seeing Mary Jane at the end of a church aisle real soon. Am I right?”

  The old coot has the gall to laugh right in my face. “Son, do I look like a stupid old man to you? Of course I’m not marryin’ you off to Mary Jane. That girl’s my treasure—I’m hardly going to hand her off to someone who doesn’t have the ability to love her. No, if you want to keep the ranch, you’ll be marrying the one and only girl that you have ever loved. You’ve got sixty days to get your ass hitched to Violet Hammond.”

  My jaw hits the floor about as fast as the bottom of my stomach drops out. Lurching forward in my chair, I slam my hand down on the edge of Uncle Zeke’s desk in shock. Of all the people in the world, my granddaddy chose the one that he should have known would destroy me. I should’ve known that something was up when Uncle Jonah didn’t show up for this will reading. Zeke, Jonah and my granddaddy did everything together. When granddaddy changed his will, there is no way that Uncle Jonah wasn’t in on it, and I see his fingerprints all over this edict. Violet’s his granddaughter, and he refuses to accept that we’re really over. All thoughts of keeping my cuss words contained fade away as I glare at Uncle Zeke.

  “He wanted me to fucking marry Vanishing Violet? Nope, I’m not doin’ that. No way, no how. My granddaddy must’ve forgotten that he didn’t raise a fool. Guess y’all better get used to the new shoppin’ center that I’m sure will go up where the ranch used to be. Granddaddy overestimated his reach with this one—I’ll offer to marry Violet Hammond again over my dead fucking body.”

  Surprisingly, he completely ignores my outburst. Lifting his shirtsleeve, he looks at his watch. “That’s fine, son. I’ll have the necessary paperwork drawn up stating that you’re not going to meet the conditions of the will and we can get the sale underway. I figured you might go this way, so Jonah is on notice that he may need to put in a call to Trapper Jones. If I call Jonah within the next hour, I’m certain he can get him on the phone today. He’s been lookin’ to get some land out this way for years for some development, so this is the quickest way to make a deal.”

  Gnashing my teeth together, I stifle a string of cuss words that would make a sailor blush.

  “Uncle Jonah and Trapper don’t get along one bit, and don’t think I don’t know that. Why is he suddenly okay with selling a piece of land in our town to him?”

  Shaking his head, Uncle Zeke smirks at me. “You got sixty days to marry the girl. Your granddaddy had the will written so that if you refused, Jonah and I got forty days to find a buyer. I can’t be sittin’ over here playin’ hopscotch, boy. If it doesn’t sell within forty days of you puttin’ your signature on the contract sayin’ that you decline the inheritance, then it goes straight to your cousin Davis. Now, we all know that no one wants that land goin’ to Dirty Davis Douglas.”

  Leaning back in my chair, I stare at Uncle Zeke in shock. These choices suck! Either I’ll be losing my family home to Trapper Jones—the asshole that buys people’s land and turns it into tract housing—or losing it to my cousin Davis. Davis is a well-known hoarder, and he’ll destroy the home that’s been in my family for five generations lickity-split. It will be worse to watch the house turn into a dump than it will be to watch it demolished. I’m totally screwed either way, really. If the house is knocked down, generations of memories go with it. If Davis gets it, it’ll be a shrine to hoarding within a matter of months. That house is my true north—the one thing that has always been my constant. How can I possibly just walk away?

  The air in the room is thick and my heart is pounding almost out of my chest. Of all the women in the world, why did they have to choose Violet? I’m not fucking over her yet. Hell, I don’t think that I’ll ever be over her. She vanished without a goddamn trace—so completely that even her grandfather didn’t know exactly where she was at first. By the time that he found out and tried to tell me, I shut him down. My dreams of a future with Violet are gone.

  “Uncle Zeke…. How do you think this could possibly work? Even if I cave in and allow myself to be bossed around—think about it. Violet’s already demonstrated how she feels about marrying me. She’s not going to agree to this. Hell, even if she does, we all know damn well that it’s more likely than not that she won’t show up at the church. I’ve already got one Dear John letter from her—I’m not lookin’ to start a collection.”

  Uncle Zeke smiles at me like I just told him that all systems were go. “Good news. Violet is already on her way home with Daisy. They’re fixin’ to move into their grandpa’s, but Vi will obviously be movin’ in with you instead. You leave getting’ her to the altar up to Jonah. If you agree to this, he’ll get her there. If, for any reason, she doesn’t agree or fails to follow through—there’s a back up plan. I’m not at liberty to tell you what that is, but it does exist.”

  I’m shocked that Violet’s coming back to Harmony—and I’m upset that she’s comin’ to live here again but didn’t even care enough about me, about my granddaddy, who she called Uncle Weston—to contact me and pay her respects. A little over a month after she disappeared off the face of the earth, she started sending me letters each week. I didn’t open even one, because in my mind, the original Dear John was enough. If she really wanted to talk to me, really cared about what she did, she would have called or showed up to do it face-to-face. How ‘real’ was our relationship if she never bothered to do me the courtesy of talking to me in person?

  It’s been three days since my granddaddy passed and I haven’t heard a damn word from her. My stupid ass thought for sure that this time, she would call me, and when she didn’t, I was broken all over again. Her lack of contact right now just shows me, one more time, that she isn’t who I thought she was. It’s like a nail in my heart to realize that what I thought about Violet and the truth are poles apart.

  Forcing myself to stop thinking about her emotionally, I shut my emotions down and grab onto the lifeline that Uncle Zeke just gave me without even really knowing it. There is no way that Violet is going to agree to this insanity, and that means I’ll be off the hook. It’s simple, really. Vi will say no, and I’ll be free of this crazy ass request.

  It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I left Uncle Zeke’s office, and things are moving at warp speed. My luck being what it is, according to Uncle Jonah he’s somehow managed to talk Violet into this insane plan. To hear him tell it, she’s on board and will be living here at the farm in Harmony with me now, as my wife. Yesterday I didn’t even know where she was or what she was doing, and today she’s coming home.

  At any moment the traitor I once loved more than anyone else in the world comes back into my life, and it’s messing with my head.

  I’m jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof waitin’ for Uncle Jonah to arrive with her, and it’s pissing me off. Why am I nervous about seeing her? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? After all, she’s the asshole that left the ring I gave her, along with a Dear John letter, propped up on my kitchen counter before she hightailed it right the hell out of the South and disappeared off the face of the earth. That letter is my Achilles heel and I’ve read the damn thing so many times that I don’t even have to look at it to recall every word.

  Ryder,

  I’ll always love you, but I can’t marry you. We just aren’t meant to be together forever. Please don’t come after me. You need to accept this and go on with your life, without me. Find happiness, Ry. You deserve it more than anyone else in the world. I’m sorry. -Violet

  Of course I went after her. Violet was my entire life—she had been since we were kids. I love—dammit, I mean I loved—Violet because she’s a part of my very soul. I never envisioned, nor did I want, any kind of a future where she wasn’t by my side. We shared everything with each other—first kiss, first love, first time. I believed in our forever. At first, even the letter didn’t change my belief that we were meant to be together. I thought that it was a bump in the road—a case of pre-wedding jitters. Her grandfather had no idea where
she was and—in a surprise to absolutely no one—her mother was no help at all. I knew that Violet wasn’t at her mother’s house in New York City because I showed up there enough to be certain of that, but that was all I knew.

  I spent a ridiculous amount of money and took a hell of a lot of time off from the ranch driving to New York trying to locate her, but I came up empty handed. After two weeks of looking high and low and not finding her, I finally had to admit defeat and accept the truth for two reasons. First, I’m not a millionaire and I didn’t have the money or the time to drive all over hell’s half acre searching for someone that didn’t want to be found. Second, I had to admit that Violet didn’t want to be my wife, had to accept that she didn’t love me the way that I loved her. If she really loved me at all, I’d have rated higher than a Dear John letter. I didn’t understand then, and I still don’t understand now.

  I’ve known Violet forever, and losing her was like losing a limb. Even when we were kids, I knew that she was important. Back then, Violet, her older brother Dustin and their younger sister Daisy spent every summer at their grandfathers ranch, and for almost the entire time Vi and I were in high school, they had lived there full-time because their dad was ill and there was worry about their safety being around him. About a year after he died, Vi’s momma took Dustin and Daisy back to New York with her, but allowed Vi to finish out high school here.

  It was inevitable that I would be close to the Hammond kids, and Violet in particular because we’re the same age. In addition to the fact that our granddaddies were best friends, her family ranch and my family ranch share a border. We were destined to be in each other’s lives—but we took that closeness to another level. At least I thought we had.

  I can’t remember the first time that I ever saw Violet, we were just babies, but I’ll never forget making love with her for the very first time on a blanket underneath ‘our’ tree, the sunshine warming our skin as we took what I thought was our first big step to forever. Five years later, we took another big step when I dropped down on one knee under that same tree and asked her to marry me. It physically pains me to remember that moment, because there was absolutely no hesitation. She said yes before I had the question all the way out, and she cried tears of joy for hours. When I asked Violet to be my wife, we were just twenty years old. I did it during the summer between her sophomore and junior year at college, and we decided to wait until Vi graduated to tie the knot.

  It sucked having her at college in New York City, but we got through it. A lot of people have problems with long-distance relationships, but Vi and I knew the drill from the times that she lived with her momma instead of being on the farm. As opposed to growing apart, we always seemed to get even closer because we worked harder at it and valued the time we had together more. At least… it felt like we had. Now, I question that.

  Violet had changed during her final year of college, although not toward me. If anything, she had needed me more than ever. It all started when Vi’s older brother, Dustin, committed suicide. He did it while their momma, Greta, and her husband James, were on vacation in Europe. Dustin went to their apartment on the Upper West Side and hung himself. Violet’s little sister, Daisy, was the one to find him. Of course after she called the police, she called her big sister, and Vi went runnin’. She told me later that they were in the process of taking Dustin’s body down when she got there, but she still saw everything.

  Vi is one of the strongest people that I’ve ever known, but she crumbled emotionally from the shock of seeing her brother like that. The hours it took for me to get on a flight and travel to New York ripped me apart inside because I knew my girl was falling apart. As soon as I got there, she attached herself to me and made me tell her, over and over again, that we would make it through together, no matter what. I’d never seen her like that, not even when her daddy had killed himself. In fact, when he went, Vi was surprisingly calm about it—although I guess that makes sense seein’ as how he had tried more than a half dozen times before.

  After Dustin’s funeral, Vi’s emotions seemed to be stabilizing, but then things got worse again when Daisy up and left home at eighteen. Just got up and left with her skeezy club-promoter boyfriend. She dropped her little ass right out of school and moved out like it was nothin’. Vi was beside herself, and I didn’t blame her one bit. I love Daisy like a little sister, and her leaving with some scumbag didn’t sit well with me at all.

  I spent just about every other weekend flying to New York City that year because Vi needed me with her, but just like every other situation we’d ever been through, it brought us closer together. Or, it did… until things went to shit five days before our wedding and she left me. Yeah, she’d been actin’ high-strung, but it wasn’t anything horrible. We went from planning for a tiny wedding with just the people closest to us to planning a wedding with two hundred guests. Vi was definitely feeling the pressure from Greta, who wanted some type of royal wedding for her daughter—even though Vi is country through-and-through and had only ever wanted the simplest of ceremonies.

  Some couples would have fought about the big change in plans, but not Vi and I. The two of us were always on the same page, and if planning a big wedding made her feel closer to her momma, then so be it. The only thing that has ever mattered to me is Violet’s happiness, and the wedding was no different.

  Aside from wedding planning, the biggest stressor for her was the distance between us while she was at school for those eight months after Dustin passed. Once she got home, you could almost see the weight lifting off of her shoulders. I truly thought that being home for good was makin’ her happy, but when her momma rolled into town to ‘help’ with the final wedding preparations, Vi got all keyed up again.

  Still, I didn’t get upset because I figured that her momma was puttin’ wedding pressure on her. To be blunt, Greta isn’t my biggest fan. She’s always said that I’m nothing but a middle-class cowboy who isn’t good enough for her daughter. It hurt the first dozen times she said it—until Uncle Jonah explained to me that Greta didn’t hate me, she hates the town of Harmony and everything that it represents.

  Greta is a city girl who married a country boy with mental problems. She truly believes that living in, “bum-fuck nowhere” made Jonah Jr. crazy, and she didn’t want her children to choose a life in the country. It never mattered what Greta’s prejudices were because Violet was always adamant that the life her momma wanted for her wasn’t the life that she herself wanted.

  Her runaway bride act says that being a rancher’s wife wasn’t really what she wanted after all.

  The whole thing is fucked up, and I’m not looking forward to her arrival. In ten days, we’re to be married down at the courthouse. She’s not even here yet, and I’m already steeling myself to be left at the altar again. I wish that I’d managed to forget—to change—the way that I feel about her, but so far, I haven’t had any success.

  The truth is that my memories of Violet aren’t just in my head— they’re in my heart. I can drink until I fall down and black out—trust me, I’ve done it—but I can’t make my heart forget that its mate is gone. My heart is a stupid, stubborn son-of-a-bitch that just wants its other half back.

  The sound of tires on the gravel comin’ down my driveway alerts me to the fact that she’s arrived. Every step I take toward the front door makes me nauseous, and I hate that my hands are shaking. Clenching my jaw and my fists, I roll my my neck on my shoulders and mentally holler at myself to man the fuck up. Forcing my face to adopt a bland expression, I open the door to see Violet coming up the front walkway, a large piece of rolling luggage trailing behind her. She’s as beautiful as ever—her long reddish brown hair shines in the sunlight and her jean shorts and crop top fit like a dream. Damn her, she’s even wearin’ what she knows is my favorite pair of her cowboy boots, and my dick is threatening to wake up in a big way.

  When she looks up and I see her beautiful hazel eyes for the first time in three months, my heart stops beating and I str
uggle to catch my breath. It’s like a kick in the gut to see her—not ten feet from me—and know that if our future had unfurled the way it was supposed to, I’d be looking at my wife. Damn her to hell, she destroyed me, destroyed us, by leaving.

  Hardening my heart to her, I step out onto the wrap-around porch to greet her. Ignoring the sheen of tears in her eyes— either guilt or, worse, pity for me, I’m sure—I show no emotion at all.

  Giving a stiff nod of my head I say, “Violet.”

  I don’t elaborate or say more—that’s on her. Looking over her shoulder, I see Uncle Jonah and Violet’s sister, Daisy, watching us from the front seat of his car. Uncle Jonah stares at me for a few seconds—a look that seems to be meant to convey something, but what, I don’t know—and then he puts the car into gear and pulls away.

  Turning back to Violet, I watch as she brushes a stray tear from her cheek. Every fiber of my being wants to comfort her, but I force myself not to act on it. Violet and I are over, and the sooner I find a way to be okay with that, the better off I will be. No matter if she marries me now or not, I know better than to let my guard down around her.

  I startle when she takes a step toward me and raises her hand toward my face. Taking a step back I snap, “Don’t touch me.”

  She lets out a choked sob as two more tears run down her cheeks. “Ry… please—don’t do this. I’m so sorry that I…”

  I’m not interested in her apology at all. If anything, the idea of her givin’ one to me makes me feel like I just drank a fifth of some cheap ass rot gut. “Really, Violet? Really? You’re sorry?”