Can't Hurry Love

by Molly O'Keefe

  God, as a personal favor, put a cease-fire on the rain and downgraded the deluge to a minor downpour as Jacob, Victoria, and Ruby stood watching to see if the hay would hold back the worst of the mud.

  Come on, Victoria thought as the water ran down her back in a cold stream, finally dousing the lingering heat of Eli’s touch. She knew it was stupid to have so much of her worth tied up in hay, but that’s where she was. All she had left was hay.

  And when the hay held and the rain slowed and the mud stopped running in sheets down to the verandah, pride erupted inside of her.

  “You did it, Mom!” Jacob cried, and Ruby nodded and Victoria laughed. Really laughed, the sound rolling up from her wet, cold toes, from the horrible memory of her husband’s betrayal, from her desperate gullibility with Dennis, the satisfaction of getting the best of Eli and the embarrassment of wanting his hateful touch.

  At the sound of her laugh, Jacob jumped, wrapping his arms around her waist. Her feet slipped on the unsteady ground and she fell down hard, her son right on top of her.

  But she could not stop laughing. She was drunk. Uncorked. Filthy. And it was so damn great.

  Jacob rolled away, flopping beside her.

  Victoria grinned at his mud-smeared face and scootched around to make a mud angel.

  “I was just kidding before, but you really have lost it.” Ruby picked up the shovel and half slid, half walked her way back down the hill.

  Jacob stayed with Victoria, his love so powerful it warmed her, even as she lay in the cold mud.

  “No more reacting, Jacob.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  As of this moment, she would no longer be a mouse in a maze. No more blind scrambling.

  “We’re going to make something right here. Right now. For us.”

  Jacob looked around. “Like a mud castle?”

  Starting right now, half-drunk under a low-hung moon, she would build a life from the ground up.

  Like all the self-help books she’d read in the last year had told her to, she emptied her body with a long sigh, clearing out her lungs, closing her eyes. She gripped her son’s hand and opened up her blank mind to the world. To possibility. And waited for the universe to answer.

  Right now, this minute, what do you want more than anything else?

  I want …

  I want …

  The answer crawled out of her past, a forgotten wish that she’d been too meek to reach for.

  Mud.

  Her eyes flew open.

  And her answer was right there in the moonlight, all over her little boy’s beaming face.

  Eli slammed his truck door so hard the windshield rattled. In the silence he didn’t start the pickup, didn’t do anything, really. He stared up at the rain pouring down in sheets and wondered if he was sad. Or angry. Because he couldn’t tell anymore.

  Fifteen years of this shit and he was just numb.

  Losing his job today. His chance at the land. Everything he’d been working for his whole life felt like it was buried under ice.

  The knock on his driver-side window made him jump, his heart startled out of its apathy with a heavy thump. In the shadow of the big elm, Caitlyn stood next to the truck, her palm pressed white against the window. Her raincoat hid most of her face.

  Her panic was obvious and he quickly opened the door. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry, Eli.” She stepped sideways, letting him slide out. His feet splashed in a mud puddle. “He just lost it after you left and I know you don’t like the drugs—”

  Before she was finished he’d started walking back through the twilight toward The Elms, his head bent against the rain. He shouldn’t have left those pictures.

  The white walls of Mark’s room had to stay white, his pajamas blue. The TV in the corner showed John Wayne movies and John Wayne movies only. Caitlyn was the only nurse who could feed him.

  Mark was a broken barometer, so sensitive to change that any difference sent him spinning.

  Eli pushed through the front doors, nodding to Clark, the night guard, before heading down the dim hallway toward the screaming in the farthest bedroom. He nudged the door open and stepped into the bright artificial light from the ceiling fixtures over the bed. The two new aides—Jim and Eddie, both former high school linebackers—were holding the nearly skeletal frame of the old man against the white sheets of his bed.

  “Where’s my wife?” The man bowed off the bed as if possessed. “What the hell did you assholes do with her?”

  “Christ, man, you’re gonna break something,” Eddie said. “Why the hell aren’t we giving him a sedative?”

  “Because it makes him sick.” Eli’s voice brought the big men around, their faces folded into all kinds of respect. They probably thought he was footing the bill for this place.

  He flipped off the bright overhead lights and reached down to turn on the lamp on the bedside table. The gold light pooled across the table and bed, and almost instantly, the old man calmed down.

  The bright lights freaked Mark out—Eli didn’t know how many times he’d had to tell the staff that.

  “Sorry, Mr. Turnbull,” Eddie said. “We just didn’t want him to hurt himself.”

  “Fuck you!” the old man said.

  Eli smiled, but the old man didn’t see and wouldn’t care. Eli waved away the two aides. “I got it from here.”

  “Mr. Turnbull—” Eddie and Jim shared a look. “He’s pretty violent—”

  “I’ll be fine.” Eli stepped up to the bed, felt the metal of it against his legs. The light from the lamp sliced him in half, illuminating his hands and legs while shadows covered his face and chest. It looked like he was disappearing, one inch at a time.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the old man asked, his runny blue eyes searching the shadows until Eli leaned forward into the pool of light.

  There was no sign of recognition. Nothing but distrust. Eli wasn’t even aware of hoping it would be different until it wasn’t.

  Your son.

  “A friend,” he said instead, because Mark Turnbull had no memories of a son.

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “She left.” Twenty-seven years ago. But his father’s memory had folded up like an envelope, hiding the last thirty-five years as if they’d never happened. As if Eli had never happened.

  “Stupid bitch.”

  Eli hooked his boot around the chair behind him and pulled it forward so he could collapse backwards into it. “Stupid bitch” was usually the beginning of a song Eli knew by heart. But Mark wasn’t fighting anymore; he lay still and trembling against the white sheets, his blue pajamas skewed around his stomach, his ribs poking through like the ruins of a shipwreck.

  Eli, risking his father’s wrath but unable to resist, reached forward and pushed the white hair off the old man’s face. Tired, he didn’t protest, and Eli took a moment to fix his damp collar.

  His father’s skin felt like paper: too fragile a bag to hold all the hate and anger and confusion that filled it.

  “Why did she leave?” Mark’s runny eyes got runnier. Anger and grief were the only stops left on Mark’s emotional train.

  Eli’s body sagged with weariness.

  He’d already had this endless conversation tonight and he didn’t have the heart to hash it out all over again. His father was stuck in the lowest moment of his life, the days when Amy had left them.

  Eli wondered if he’d share that fate—would he grow old and senile and live in this moment forever?

  “I lost my job at the ranch. And the land,” he said, needing to say the words even though he knew there would be no reaction from his dad. “I fucked up. She’ll never sell it to me now.”

  He would have smiled had he been able; he was more like his father and grandfather than he’d thought. He couldn’t outrun it, he couldn’t change it. Despite his every intention, he was doomed to occupy the same space at rock bottom as every Turnbull man before him.

  He could fix his barn, start the bre
eding business, and become the best breeder in all of Texas, and there was a pretty good chance that none of it would matter.

  What mattered was that he’d kissed Victoria … he’d fucking assaulted her, and ruined everything.

  “Where are the horses?” Mark asked, tilting his head toward the lamp where Eli had propped up the pictures of the horses he’d bought with the money from the Angus sale.

  But the pictures were gone.

  Caitlyn must have picked them up when Mark started to lose it.

  Eli had thought the pictures of the horses might bring him some peace, bring him back to himself, even just a little.

  Apparently, he’d been wrong.

  Mark’s eyes were drifting and Eli stood up, pulling the blanket up over his father’s thin shoulders. The old man was as small as a kid, so different from how he had once been. In every way. But cataloging the changes was work for a son with something other than duty in his heart.

  “My wife,” Mark whispered, his eyelids drifting shut. “Where’d she go?”

  Mark’s breathing calmed down, his eyelids darkened with sleep, his lips fell open, and the snores fluttered out.

  When he knew the old man was fast asleep, Eli stood over him and gripped the metal rails of the hospital bed.

  “Dad,” he whispered, as if trying it out. But it didn’t work in his mouth. Tasted like shit.

  Eli shut the door to his father’s room and walked down the long hallway toward the central nurses’ station. The heels of his boots sounded like gunfire in the silence, but there was nothing he could do aside from crawling to be any quieter. So he just walked as if he didn’t realize how loud he was. How disruptive.

  Caitlyn was at the station, talking to one of the other nurses. A blonde, who smiled quickly when she caught his eye but then gathered a tray and some files and left.

  “You got the pictures?” he asked, and Caitlyn’s hand disappeared into the pocket of her sweater, only to resurface with the stack of photos.

  “Really wound him up,” she said, handing them to him.

  “I’m sorry. I was hoping …” It wasn’t even worth finishing the sentence and she knew that.

  Her smile changed her plain face into something sweet and kind, wise in ways his brain just couldn’t comprehend. Immediately, he felt that tug he always felt toward her.

  It was like she was the picture you got when you bought a new wallet. A smiling, round-faced woman, with a kid in her arms. All the love in the world in her eyes.

  And the purchase of that wallet somehow bought you the rights to that kind of woman. That kind of life. Normal. Simple. Happy.

  Loneliness was a sharp pain in his chest. As if she knew, and she probably did—Caitlyn had a nurse’s instinct for people in pain—she grabbed his hand, touching him where he held on to the photos. Her eyes were shining.

  “I get off at ten. You want to get a drink? I think I owe you for last time.” Her offer was shy despite what had happened last time, or maybe because of it.

  They hadn’t even made it back to her place after dinner. He’d had her stretched out across the front seat of his truck in the bar parking lot.

  He thought about saying yes, but then the memory of Victoria’s lips, her agonized surrender against his body—the way he’d forced her into a situation she’d hated as much as she’d wanted—burned through him and he knew he wasn’t good enough for any woman right now.

  And in truth, if he took Caitlyn out and she ended up across the front seat of his truck, she would be a substitute. His mind would be on Victoria, and he didn’t want to treat anyone that way.

  Especially a woman as sweet as Caitlyn.

  He dropped her hand.

  This had been inevitable—it always was. And he didn’t have to say anything, not really. Women had a sixth sense about being dumped.

  After a moment, after the disbelief, shock, and then hurt crossed her plain face, Caitlyn tossed back her brown ponytail and met his eyes. He could see it was hard for her, that she was nervous about him. She always had been and he didn’t know how to change that. How to be … softer.

  “So this is it?” she said through her teeth.

  “This was always going to be casual.”

  “There’s a difference between casual and what you and I …” She shook her head as if she’d already gone down this road with him. “Everyone warned me about you, Eli. ‘Don’t get close. He doesn’t like it when people get close.’ ”

  “We had a lot of fun together, Caitlyn.”

  “Fun?” She arched an eyebrow. “I think you mean to say sex. We had a lot of sex.” She licked her lips, as pink as her scrubs, and he felt bad for dumping her at work. “You know, you’re … great in bed, Eli. You’re a freaking sex rock star but you’re … you’re the angriest man I’ve ever met.”

  Her laughter was a knife, and to his shame he could tell she was hurt. That he had hurt her without ever meaning to. When he was actually trying to be kind.

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know how to make this right. How to make anything right.

  “Just go. Just … leave.”

  He shoved the pictures back in his pocket. “Thanks for your help with Dad.”

  He turned on his heel, flipping his denim jacket’s collar up against the rain, knowing that he’d done the right thing. She’d get over it in time, realize what a mistake hanging her heart on him had been.

  Stepping out into the rain, he realized that in a world gone to shit, doing the right thing felt good. Made him proud.

  And he hadn’t been proud of himself in a very long time.

  chapter

  7

  Celeste followed Ruby into the sun-splashed office where Victoria had summoned them bright and early on Thursday morning. Just from looking at Victoria, Celeste could tell something was going on, something … big.

  Apparently stopping that mud slide last night had lit a fire in Victoria, and now she looked like a jack-o’-lantern, light spilling out of her mouth and eyes. Even her hair glowed.

  And the sad truth was, Victoria’s happiness was usually a precursor to disaster.

  “Uh-oh,” Ruby said, sliding a dark look over at Celeste. “Last time she looked like this we got held hostage.”

  “Please, Ruby,” Celeste said as she sat in one of the chairs in front of the big desk Victoria was currently glowing on. She crossed her legs and then uncrossed them. Varicose veins were a constant threat—a shark under shallow waters. “We weren’t held hostage. We were hiding under the dining room table.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes, indignant at Celeste’s efforts to rain on her Mexican soap opera theatrics.

  But Ruby wasn’t wrong; as disastrously as that Dennis affair had ended, Celeste wasn’t all that convinced Victoria had learned her lesson. Women like Victoria were always going to be motivated by men. Celeste knew, because she was the same way. She just did everything in her power to stop herself.

  “This isn’t about a man,” Victoria said.

  Celeste arched a doubtful eyebrow.

  “I swear.” Victoria sighed. “This isn’t about a man.”

  “Well, hurry it up.” Ruby sat down into the black leather chair beside Celeste. The sequined Our Lady of Guadalupe on her T-shirt glittered like a holy disco ball in the sunlight. “I have a pie crust in the oven.”

  Victoria looked down at her desk, at a list she had there. Her lips moved as she read it. And then she shook back her hair and faced Celeste and Ruby.

  “There have been some changes here at the ranch. As you probably know, Eli sold most of the cattle a couple weeks ago and laid off many of the cowboys.”

  “The boy is trying to lose his job,” Ruby grumbled.

  “Yes. Well, about that.” Victoria’s smile was self-deprecating. “Yesterday, I fired him.”

  “Eli?” Ruby asked, and when Victoria nodded, Celeste swallowed her own gasp. This early morning meeting was certainly getting interesting.

  “Why?” Celeste asked, and the sudden blu
sh on Victoria’s cheeks was damning.

  “Personal reasons,” she said, folding and unfolding the edge of the list.

  “Who will care for the ranch?” Ruby asked, as if the ranch were now orphaned and wandering the desert.

  “Well, there’s not much of a ranch to care for anymore.” Victoria circled to the front of the desk and leaned back against it, crossing her legs at her ankles, a position Celeste had seen Victoria’s father assume countless times.

  As angry as she had been with Lyle after their marriage fell apart, watching Victoria find her inner Lyle Baker—which was to say, her inner asshole—gave Celeste hope for the girl. Now if they could just get her out of those ridiculous clothes she wore. Her pink blouse was Prada and her black pants were Gucci, but it was as if someone had pointed her in the direction of those labels and blindfolded her. And then she had managed to pick the ugliest, worst-fitting items available by sheer bad luck.

  The girl had a gift, truly.

  “I’ve leased most of the land except for about a hundred acres around the house, including the river,” Victoria continued. “Eli owns four of the horses in the barn, so they’re going to go with him whenever he picks them up. Which leaves us with six. We have about fifty head of cattle left. And … we have the house.”

  “Are you firing me?” Ruby surged to her feet.

  “Oh, calm down, Evita.” Celeste tugged Ruby back down. “Let her finish.”

  “No one else is getting fired. Actually, I’d like to offer you an … opportunity.” Victoria’s level gaze nailed Celeste to the wall. “Both of you.”

  “I don’t know anything about cows,” Ruby cried. “Or horses. I hate horses.”

  “I am not fond of them either,” Celeste said, in case Victoria had some sort of Band of Cowgirls vision in her head.

  “No.” Victoria straightened the already straight cuffs of her silk blouse but then stopped herself. “I want to offer you the chance to invest in a business venture.”

  “In a hundred-acre ranch?” Ruby asked.

  “No. In a spa.”

  Celeste and Ruby gasped together.

  The gasps cemented it. The Crooked Creek Resort and Spa was a crazy idea. Victoria had known it the moment she woke up this morning—last night’s big dream had looked silly and insubstantial in the daylight.