My Alpha Stepbrother Called Me a Gold Digger, So I Bought His Father's Note novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Monday at Six

Soren walks into her scale house at six and tells her what her scent does to a room and that her tickets are being audited; she answers every line, and the bank envelope proves her mother's pension has moved.

Ridley Siding stands alone on the county road, one steel bin and a scale house the size of a garden shed.

I unlocked it at ten to six on Monday, with frost on the weigh-bed and the sky just going gray over the wheat.

I turned on the heater.

I opened the ticket book and uncapped my pen.

I hadn't slept.

At five past six I heard a truck on the gravel, and I knew before I looked up whose it was.

A Silverado, dusty black.

It stopped on the weigh-bed with its engine running, and Soren Holloran climbed down and walked into my scale house without knocking.

The room got smaller.

He ducked under the door frame and straightened, six foot four of canvas coat and day-old stubble, and he looked around at my heater, my coffee can of pens and my calendar from the feed store.

Then he looked at me.

"Wheat's coming off the Hansen ground at ten," I said.

"If you're here to deliver, pull forward.

"If you're here to talk, you're on my scale."

"I'm here to talk," he said.

"Then get off the bed."

He didn't move.

"I owe you nothing," I said.

"I know what you think I owe you," he said.

He stood there with his hands in his pockets.

It was cold in the little room, and his scent came off him in the warmth, snow and dust and that dark thing underneath, and I breathed through my mouth.

"I said what I said Saturday," he said.

"I'm not taking it back."

"I didn't ask you to," I said.

"Good," he said.

He took one step.

Then another.

There wasn't room for a third.

I was standing at the desk, with the heater at my back, and his chest was a foot from my face, and he looked down at me with his jaw tight.

"Your scent fills a room," he said.

"I smelled it from the church parking lot.

"Half the pack did."

My cheeks went hot.

I hadn't known it carried that far.

"That's what it does," he said.

"It makes a man think you're offering.

"It's been doing it to my father for eleven weeks."

I stood up.

I'm not small, but I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes, and I did.

"Your father is a decent man who loves my mother," I said.

"And you can smell that, too, if you stop sniffing for what you want to find."

His nostrils flared.

For one second his gaze dropped to my mouth and stayed there, and I felt it on my skin.

We stood a foot apart in a room the size of a closet, breathing each other's air.

I did not step back.

I'd decided that on the drive in.

I would never step back from him again.

Something moved in his face.

He leaned in half an inch.

Then he caught himself, and his mouth turned hard.

"Don't flatter yourself, settlement," he said.

"I'd have to be starving."

The word landed like a slap.

*Settlement.*

He had decided that's what I was: a payout.

"Say what you came to say," I said, "and get off my scale."

He pulled a folded sheet from his coat and set it on the ticket book.

It was on Dunmore Farmers Co-op letterhead.

"The co-op audits every outside weigh house that takes our members' grain," he said.

"You're on the list.

"Starting this week, your tickets go to my office every Friday."

"Every outside house?" I said.

"Yours first," he said.

"You've never audited Ridley Siding in five years," I said.

"You weren't family in five years," he said.

He said it flat.

I read the sheet.

There was a stamp at the bottom that said it had been signed off by the board chair.

I looked up at him and smiled, the small mean smile my father used to give a customer who thought a combine part was too expensive.

"Fine," I said.

"You'll find every pound. Come Friday and count them."

"I will."

"Bring a pencil, Soren.

"Some of it's long division."

For a second the corner of his mouth moved.

I hadn't known he could.

Then it was gone.

He had dark circles under his eyes.

His shirt collar was creased from a cot, and he smelled of the elevator office, old coffee and cold concrete.

I'd heard the pack say he slept in town three nights a week and called it work.

He turned, ducked under the door, and went out to his truck.

I watched him back it off the bed.

I sat down, and my knees were shaking, and I put both hands flat on the desk until they stopped.

Then I opened my mother's envelope.

It had come Saturday to the trailer, forwarded from the school district.

I had meant to take it to her.

I opened it now, because he had said *somebody cashed it*, and I needed to see.

It was her pension statement.

The direct deposit that had gone to her checking account on the first of every month had been redirected in July.

The new account name was printed in plain type.

HOLLORAN LAND AND LIVESTOCK.

I read it three times.

There was a copy of the change form stapled behind it, and the signature on it was my mother's.

She had met Halvard in June.

She had signed her pension over to his family's account in July, before there was a ring, before there was a date.

My mother, who drove a school bus at six in the morning and never told anyone anything, had paid the Hollorans before she married them.

I thought of Soren in the church basement.

*Somebody cashed it.*

He hadn't said who.

He hadn't had to.

I put my head down on the desk next to the ticket book.

There was something else I should have noticed and didn't.

On Sunday night at the trailer, my mother had written a check for the Ness place's propane at the kitchen table, folded it over, and tucked it in her purse.

I had seen the amount only as a long string of numbers.

I hadn't read it, because I'd been looking at her face, and she had looked so happy.

Outside, the Hansen truck pulled onto the scale, and the bed hummed under it, and I got up and went to work.

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