He Sold My Mother's Farm, So I Got Engaged to His Best Friend novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Dress

Lainey takes her mother's dress back from Kaylee, leaves her childhood home, and makes a deal with Hayes in his kitchen, three rules and a ring that was already in his pocket.

I took the front stairs two at a time and shoved my bedroom door open.

Kaylee was standing in front of my mirror with my mother's dress pressed against her.

It was ivory silk with long lace sleeves, and it still smelled like the cedar chest.

My mother had given it to me the last summer she was alive, folded in tissue in a white box.

"For when you need it," she'd said.

Now the box lay open on my bed, and the tissue was on the floor.

My clothes were piled beside it in a heap, hangers and all.

"It's a little long," Kaylee said to the mirror. "I'll get it hemmed."

"Put it down."

She turned around with the dress held up under her chin.

"Something old, right? It's not like she's using it."

"Put my mother's dress down, Kaylee."

"Boone says everything in this house is his now." She smiled. "So I guess it's mine."

I crossed the room and took hold of the silk at the waist.

She didn't let go.

"You'll tear it," she said.

"Then let go."

I'm a vet.

I've held a stallion's head while someone stitched his shoulder.

I took her wrist in my other hand and pressed my thumb into the tendon until her fingers opened.

She yelped and fell back against the dresser.

I folded the dress over my arm before she could reach for it again.

"Boone!" she screamed. "Boone, she attacked me!"

He was already in the doorway.

I didn't know how long he'd been standing there.

He looked at Kaylee rubbing her wrist, and then at the dress over my arm.

"She came at me," Kaylee said. "Look at my arm."

"Let her have the dress," Boone said.

"It's my room!"

"It's your room," he said. "The dress is hers."

He looked at me. "Get your things, Lainey."

"And the pearls?" I said.

Kaylee's hand flew to her throat.

"Take those off, Kaylee," Boone said.

"You gave them to me."

"Take them off."

She didn't.

She just stood there with her chin up, and he didn't make her.

Boone looked at me for a long second, longer than he needed to.

His eyes went to my mouth, where Hayes had kissed me, and then away.

He walked out without another word.

I packed a duffel in four minutes.

Jeans, boots, scrubs for the clinic, my phone charger, and the photo of my mother on Clover, her old bay mare.

I didn't take anything else.

I wasn't leaving it to her.

I was coming back for it.

Dot Carmack was waiting at the bottom of the back stairs with her arms crossed.

Dot had run my mother's barns for thirty years.

She was sixty-one, short and wiry, and she always had a peppermint in her cheek.

"Child," she said, "have you lost your entire mind?"

"Probably."

"Hayes Ransdell." She shook her head. "Lord. Well, at least he's got all his teeth."

She put a peppermint in my hand and squeezed my fingers shut over it.

"Your mama would've laughed till she cried," she said, and her own eyes went wet.

Hayes's truck was idling at the end of the drive with the passenger door open.

He drove me the mile and a half to Ransdell Hill without saying a word.

His kitchen was enormous and old, with a long scrubbed table and copper pots hanging over the stove.

He hung my mother's dress on the pantry door.

Then he poured two cups of coffee instead of bourbon and slid one across to me.

"All right," he said. "Let's hear the plan."

"Why did you say yes?"

He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms.

"Because a beautiful woman asked me in front of half the county, and I'm not a fool."

"Hayes."

"Because I've watched Boone make a mess of himself for a year," he said. "Somebody ought to stop him."

"I want the farm back," I said.

"I know you do."

"I don't have fourteen million dollars."

"No," he said. "But I do."

I stared at him.

"I'll make the Louisville people an offer they'd be fools to refuse," he said.

"When they take it, I'll put Ashcraft in your name. Call it a wedding present."

"Why would you do that for me?"

He smiled into his coffee.

"Because that spring house is on every bottle I sell," he said. "I'd like it in friendly hands."

That, I could believe.

"Then I have rules," I said.

"I figured you might."

"One. We kiss when people are watching. Never when they aren't."

"That's a shame, but all right."

"Two. Separate beds."

He sighed through his nose. "This house has eleven of them. Pick one."

"Three. It ends the day the farm is in my name. Then we break up, and you tell everybody I broke your heart."

"You would," he said. "Fine. Now I've got one."

"Go on."

"You live under my roof until it's done, because this county talks," he said. "And you wear my grandmother's ring."

"I can buy a ring in Lexington tomorrow."

"Every woman at that supper can spot a fake diamond at forty yards," he said. "You'd be found out by Tuesday."

I didn't have an answer for that.

"Deal," I said.

Hayes reached into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket.

He set a small, worn velvet box on the counter between our cups.

He was still wearing the jacket he'd worn to supper.

That ring had been in his pocket the whole time.

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