In Bed With My Ex's Brother-in-Law novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: The Deal

I took my hand off the palomino's neck.

"Why?" I said.

"Why what, dear?"

"Why do you care where I stand at the moon?"

Noreen's smile didn't move.

"Because I don't want a scene," she said. "Kacey's young. She's emotional. If she looks out of that circle and sees you standing with her brother, she'll do something foolish, and the whole valley will have to watch."

"Something like walk back her vows."

"Something like embarrass herself."

The palomino blew and shifted under my hand.

I thought about the safe in Noreen's office.

Gray steel, waist high, behind the desk under the elk mount. I'd stood in front of it a hundred times.

Four years ago Noreen had called me from the Billings sale and read me the combination over the phone.

She needed brand papers faxed, and nobody else was home.

She'd never changed it.

She'd never once thought of me as somebody who'd remember.

"I'd want my own room," I said. "Until the moon. Not his."

Noreen's eyes narrowed a hair.

"I'd want my colts fed here. And my mares stay on this place. They're not Jessup horses, and they never will be."

"Fine."

"And I sit at your right hand at supper. Not his. Yours."

That one she liked. I watched her.

It was what she'd have asked for, in my place.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Supper's at six."

"I'll be there."

She went back to her truck.

She stopped with her hand on the door and looked at me over the hood.

"You'd have been a good Luna, you know," she said. "Five years ago. If you'd had any blood worth the name."

Then she drove away.

The mares came down off the river fence one by one.

I stood in the round pen until my hands stopped shaking.

I called the old rancher at eight.

"I'll be gone a week," I said. "Maybe less. Can you feed?"

"Where you going?"

"Back to the Jessups."

There was a long silence on the line.

"Your mother wouldn't have," he said.

"My mother never had to."

He fed.

On Sunday morning I stopped at the co-op in Riverton for wormer.

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