The Lover: Book 3 in The Bride Series

by S Doyle

  There was this one dream I had. Hope really. That maybe he would walk through the front door to find me waiting for him, and without any prompting he would tell me how much he missed me. How much he loved me.

  I heard his truck pull up and felt my stomach drop. This was it. Every practiced speech, every thought in my head of how I could make this not horrible was about to go down.

  “Ellie, you here?” Jake called out as he opened the front door.

  “In the kitchen,” I called back. I took a sip of water and I could see my hand was shaking.

  I swallowed.

  “Hey, I didn’t know this was the plan, but I like it,” he said as he bent down to kiss me on the lips. “Not working today?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to talk over the lump in my throat.

  When I could, I started with the easy stuff. “How was the trip?”

  “Hey, can you hold that thought? I just want to run out and check in with Rich first. Make sure there are no fires. Then I’ll tell you all about it.”

  I nodded and listened as he made his way out the back door.

  A reprieve. Still, the fantasy was gone. No immediate declarations of love.

  I got up to fill up my glass. There was soda in the fridge, but truthfully I had no idea what I could or could not drink yet. Alcohol was out obviously, but what about coffee or did I have to drink tea? And I thought there were new rules about lunch meat.

  I didn’t know. My head was too wrapped around what this meant for me, for Jake, that I hadn’t been ready to go into research mode quite yet.

  What was going to be a surprise was his reaction. What he did after that, was not in doubt. But I wondered if he would be angry or sad. Or if he might be happy. He’d always wanted a family. He might in some ways be thrilled, which meant I had to make sure he didn’t know how devastated I was.

  After all, it was Jake’s baby. I was probably going to love the thing.

  After another ten minutes passed I heard the back door open and close, and then he was in the kitchen. Smoking hot in jeans and a black t-shirt. The father of my baby.

  Yeah, maybe once all the sadness passed about how this would dramatically change the path we were on…I would start to think how lucky I was.

  He made his way to fridge and got out a beer. He sat down and stretched out his legs and sighed.

  “Long trip. Man, I hate flying. The seats I swear are made for five-foot, hundred-pound women and that’s it. Anybody else and you’re out of luck. And of course the guy in front of me had to have his seat back all the way. I’m serious, Ellie. Not going to lie, I get a little claustrophobic on those damn things.”

  I nodded.

  This was it. This was the moment. I just had to say it.

  “Sorry about that. I’m pregnant.”

  “So you want to know about the trip… Wait, what did you just say?”

  I took in a big girl breath and said it again. “I’m pregnant. I realized the day you left that I missed my period for May and again for June. So I bought three tests and took them and… I’m pregnant.”

  Jake

  “And… I’m pregnant.”

  It was weird, but it felt the exact way it did when Sam died. We’d been herding the cows to the south pasture. I had been maybe a half a mile away when I saw him grab his arm. Then he’d just teetered off his horse. I’d rode to him as fast as I could and by the time I got there he was dead. CPR hadn’t worked. After thirty minutes of breathing and chest compressions, I knew he was dead. And everything was changed and nothing was ever going to be like it was before.

  I had that same feeling now. Like I couldn’t process it.

  Ellie was pregnant. With my baby.

  Ellie was pregnant with my baby.

  It was shocking. It was life-altering, but it had happened.

  “Yeah. Pretty heady stuff,” she said.

  I looked up at her and thought how amazing she was. Because once again this thing happened to her. We’d used a condom every time. She didn’t want to get pregnant. Just like she didn’t want to lose her dad, or get married at sixteen, or lose half her herd. Yet every time life punched her in the face, she didn’t cry or wail or say how unfair it was.

  No, she just took it in stride and kept moving forward.

  I should have said that to her. I should have said just that. That Ellie Samson was the most amazing, strong, beautiful woman I had ever met. That I was the luckiest sonofabitch in the world because she wanted to be with me.

  That this woman was going to be mother of my child.

  I didn’t say that. Why didn’t I say that?

  “We have to get married.” That’s what I said.

  She bit her bottom lip and nodded. “That’s what I figured you would say.”

  I reached across the table and put my hand on top of hers. I had to make her understand.

  “Ellie, you know we do. This is Riverbend. People aren’t going to…”

  She slid her hand out from mine.

  Why was I talking about what people would think? Why did I care?

  I should have asked her. I should have asked her to marry me. That would have been better. But it’s not like we had a choice.

  “Yep. I know, Jake.”

  “We can go back to the courtroom. Get the judge to marry us. Howard made that all happen in a couple of weeks.”

  “Sure. But we’ve got time. I won’t show for a couple of months. I figure it happened on my birthday. Some present, huh?” She smiled tentatively and I thought that was a good sign.

  I smiled tentatively back. I didn’t want to jump up and down with joy if she was wrecked by this. Then again, I didn’t want her to be wrecked by this at all.

  “Ellie…” I swallowed. “It’s not such a bad thing, is it?”

  She stood up and came over and patted me on the shoulder. “No, Jake. It’s not such a bad thing. Listen, I’m feeling tired. I was stressing this conversation hard. And I do have to work tomorrow. I’m going to head back to my room, and then tomorrow or whenever we can start making plans.”

  I grasped her hand in mine. “I’m sorry you had to be alone with this for four days.”

  “It was probably a good thing. Gave me a chance to process it before I had to tell you.” Another small smile.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll call.”

  “Okay.” I squeezed her hand in mine. “We’ve got this? Right?”

  She squeezed it back. “Yeah, Jake. We’ll be fine.”

  I let her go and she made her way out of the kitchen and I heard the front door close.

  That didn’t go well. In my gut, I knew that didn’t go well, but I… what the fuck? You don’t get news that your girlfriend is pregnant and just know what to do. What to say. I said the most important thing. The thing that mattered.

  We would be married. Period. The end.

  Then the kid would come, and like everything else in our lives Ellie and I would handle it together.

  Yes, I told myself. We had this.

  Then why was I suddenly so afraid?

  Thirteen

  Ellie

  Bee du beep.

  I heard the sound of the text and cringed. Cringed. I was cringing when Jake was texting me. That was so not right.

  Don’t ask me how I knew it was Jake, I just did. As if I could discern a Chrissy vs. Maryanne vs. Denny text. I didn’t have different sounds loaded for them, I just knew.

  It was late. I was lying in bed. Everything felt unsettled, and when I heard the bee du beep, I just knew. And I cringed.

  I rolled over and picked up the phone from the nightstand. It wasn’t too late. Just after ten, but when I saw his name I knew it meant he was having a hard time sleeping.

  Hey. Checking in.

  Because that’s what Jake did. I sighed and texted back.

  All good.

  …

  …

  …

  Oh no, I thought. The dots with Jake meant he was struggling.

>   I feel like I didn’t say the right thing today.

  He didn’t. He was supposed to get down on his knees and profess his undying love for me. In a perfect world, he was supposed to do that before I told him about the baby, but I would have accepted it after as well. But there was nothing I could share with him.

  I struggled with what to text back. I was in this weird place with no outs. Before, when I knew how he felt, being trapped in the marriage, it had motivated me to find a way out. For both of us. There was no way out of this. This was a baby. So I was going to have to find a way to get over this horrible melancholy. (Please note, anytime I thought or said this word I did it the same way Will Ferrell did it in the movie Megamind.)

  I landed on the following:

  There is no right thing to say. It was big news. U did ok.

  …

  …

  …

  I want us to be happy.

  Happy. Could I get there? Could I do that knowing the man I was married to, the man who was the father of my child, didn’t love me? Or I should say, wasn’t in love with me. Jake loved me. I couldn’t not feel that. But there was something holding him back from a full-blown commitment.

  It could have been something as simple as my age. Or something as hopeless as he just never thought of me in a romantic light. That even though he wanted me physically, he still wasn’t at a place in his head where he could see me as anything other than little Ellie Samson.

  Me too, I texted him back quickly. I didn’t want him to know how much I was thinking about all of this. Jake liked to keep things simple. We had sex. We made a baby. We got married. We would be happy.

  We’re going to have a baby! he wrote.

  That made the tears come. I wiped them away and tried to sniff them back. I knew he would be thrilled by the idea. Once he got his head around the concept. Once he started thinking about what this meant. I knew it. He’d want a boy. Then he would change his mind and want a girl.

  I would get there. I would get on the JakeandElliewerehavingababy train eventually. I just wasn’t there tonight.

  We are tired again.. must be a baby thing Night, Jake

  …

  …

  …

  Night

  It wasn’t the greatest answer to his exclamation mark, but it was the best I could do for now.

  I put the phone back on the table next to the bed and then put my hand over my belly. It was just a dot right now. This bean that was going to change our lives forever. I knew eventually I was going to love it. It was Jake’s, after all. That love, my love, it would have to be enough for both of us. Yes, soon I would love the heck out of the thing. But right now I couldn’t help but think this kid had really poor timing.

  “You are the weirdest person on the planet.”

  I was sitting across from Chrissy the next day at Frank’s. I was on a shift, but taking a break and stealing her fries when I told her the situation.

  “I know, right?”

  “No, seriously,” she said. “This is like, bizarre the way bad stuff that happens to you.”

  That was my first moment of parental guilt. I didn’t want anyone to think I thought my baby was a “bad” thing that happened to me.

  “I wouldn’t say bizarre,” I mumbled.

  Slightly unusual at best.

  Then Chrissy started counting stuff off. “Your mom died. Your dad died. You had to get married at sixteen. You had to get divorced at eighteen. And now you are part of the two percent population in the WORLD where the condom didn’t do the job. And you have to marry your ex-husband.”

  When she said it like that, I suppose bizarre was back on the table.

  “And that’s just you. Jake’s mom ran out on him when he was a boy, completely wrote off her only son. His dad drank himself to death, his mentor and stand-in father died. He has to marry a sixteen-year-old so the whole town wonders if he might be a perv. Then he divorces you, which makes everyone think he’s a jerk. Now he’s knocked you up and everyone is going to think…I guess I don’t know what I think.”

  “Jake is not a perv,” I said, angry at the use of the word. Then I thought about everything she listed and thought about how hard life had been for him too. I always thought about things from my perspective, but had I really considered Jake’s? I was sad that he couldn’t find a way to love me, but now I could see again why being that vulnerable would be so hard for him.

  He’d lost so much, too.

  “I know that. I’m just saying it looked… funny. From the outside. You have to admit that.”

  I shrugged. I really didn’t care what people thought about us.

  “So do you want the gig or not?” I asked.

  She smiled then. “Yes, I would love to be your maid of honor.”

  “It’s not going to be a big thing. The wedding, I mean. We’re going to do it at the court house. But I don’t want it to be like last time. I want friends there. I want it to be an occasion.”

  Karen, Lisa, Maryanne, Denny. Howard and Mirry. Frank and Bernie. Don Simpson and his wife. Rich. A small gathering. A nice dinner back at the house. It wasn’t a lot to ask. I hadn’t told Jake about my idea yet, but I was planning to next time I saw him.

  This time I was going to get a dress. Not a real wedding dress or anything, but something nice and new. I was going to hold flowers. Because this time it was for real.

  “You can pick out the ugliest dress in the world and I will wear it. I promise.”

  I swiped another fry. “Thank you.”

  “You know, if you were going to get knocked up by anyone, at least it was Jake Talley.”

  “That’s why you’re my maid of honor, Chrissy. You always see the silver lining. I better get back to work.”

  I slid out of the booth, but she caught my hand as I walked by. She had this strange expression on her face, like she was trying to be serious. Only Chrissy was never serious.

  “Ellie… I hope… I really super hope… you’re happy. After everything. You deserve it. You both do.”

  Deserve. It was such a crazy word. What someone deserved in life was pointless. Because what someone got in life… well, that was out of anyone’s control really.

  I squeezed her fingers. “Thanks. But I’m still going to make you wear yellow or maybe orange.”

  She laughed, which was my intent, and I went back to work.

  Jake

  “You need to tell Frank he has to find a replacement.”

  It had been two days since I had seen Ellie. There was a problem with a bad birth and we lost a both cow and calf. I had been dealing with that, so I hadn’t been able to make it into town. It dawned on me this morning that I needed to fix that.

  Ellie was taking her lunch break with me, and I watched her picking at her food. Ellie wasn’t a picker. She worked hard at anything she did, so she always had an appetite.

  I wondered if she was feeling sick.

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? You need to move back to the ranch. Hell, I would have had you back there today, if I didn’t know how much everyone in town would be pissed at me for inflicting Bernie on them again. But that’s Frank’s problem to solve. I’ll give you two weeks and that’s it.”

  “You’ll give me two weeks?”

  I sighed. I hated when she did that. Like what I was saying wasn’t totally reasonable.

  “Ellie, we’re getting married.” I leaned in closer because I didn’t want anyone to overhear. “You’re pregnant. We need to pack up your stuff and you need to come home. All of that has to happen in the next few weeks. Telling Frank now you’re leaving only makes sense.”

  “We have some time, Jake. It’s going to be at least another month, maybe two before I start to show anything.”

  I shook my head. “Ellie this has nothing to do with you showing anything. You need to be at the ranch so I can take care of you. Fuck that, you need to be at the ranch because it’s your damn home.”

  “You’re getting mad
.”

  I was. I was getting mad at why she was even remotely making this difficult. This was a no-brainer and I didn’t understand her reticence.

  That’s when it occurred to me. What she might be thinking.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “What? No. Why?”

  “For putting you in this situation. For…for getting you pregnant in the first place.”

  “Jake Talley, your sexist phone is ringing.”

  “Ellie, I’m serious.”

  “We did this together. We used protection. It didn’t work, but there is no blame in this. I don’t blame you any more than you could blame me for getting knocked up. It happened. I’m just thinking all of this is happening really fast. We don’t have to move at lightning speed.”

  Lightning speed was exactly the pace I wanted to go. I wanted it done. I wanted us married, I wanted her back home, I wanted her in my bed as my wife. Then our life could start. Our future. With our kid.

  Our kid. Every time I thought about it, I got a little crazy. Could I really do this? What if I was like them? What if I was the kind of person to skip out on a kid and a wife? The type of person who could forget he even had a child…

  I checked myself. I wasn’t that person. I knew I wasn’t that person. Which is why I knew marrying Ellie now wasn’t some kind of knee-jerk reaction to her being pregnant.

  “I want to marry you, Ellie. I should have told you that. I should have handled everything better but I was stunned.”

  “You do?” she asked me quietly.

  “Yes.” Wasn’t that obvious?

  She bit her lower lip and seemed to think about that. “But you didn’t want to before. When we fought about me staying in town and I asked you…”

  “You didn’t really give me time to think, Ellie. I get why you took the room over the Hair Stop. And I was fine with dating and taking things slow and wooing you, but…”

  “But I’m pregnant,” she said. Said it like it was a bad thing.

  “Ellie, I’m not marrying you because of that. I want us. Yes, and the baby. I want us to be a family. I want that now. As soon as we can make that happen.”