My Tribal Rule Said Marry Or Matchmake novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Rule
Bentley laughs at Torrie's hometown rule and hands her engagement ring to his assistant, so Torrie ends it and books a one-way flight home, and at 2 a.m. Breanne posts the ring on her own finger.
There's a rule where I grew up.
If you're not married by thirty, you come home and let the elder pick you a husband.
I told Bentley Cromwell about it on a Tuesday, in my office, with the glass door open.
I was twenty-nine. My birthday was five weeks away.
He laughed so hard he had to set his coffee down.
"What are you, from some kind of cult?"
"A hollow in Kentucky," I said. "Thirteen families. They call themselves the tribe."
"Same thing, babe."
Out on the sales floor, people had stopped typing.
Bentley leaned his hands on my desk.
"Torrie, I said I'd marry you. I meant it."
"But you trying to force my hand? That's a different story."
He reached into his jacket.
For one stupid second my heart jumped.
It was a ring box. Navy velvet.
He flipped it open, looked at the diamond, and snapped it shut.
Then he turned around and held it out to Breanne.
Breanne Crabtree was his assistant. She was twenty-three.
She was standing in my doorway holding his salad.
"Hang onto this for me," he told her.
She took the box with both hands. Her cheeks went pink.
"I was going to propose this weekend," Bentley said to me. "But since you're acting like this, maybe we need some time apart."
Eight years.
I'd waited eight years for that box.
He'd just handed it to the girl who fetched his lunch.
He strolled out past the whole floor, smiling, and didn't look back.
Breanne stood there with the salad in one hand and my ring in the other.
Then she came in and held the box out to me.
"Torrie, I'm sure he didn't mean it like that."
I didn't take it.
"Keep it," I said. "He bought it for somebody he loves, didn't he?"
She blinked at me.
"Go on. Try it on. I bet it fits you perfectly."
The pink drained right out of her face.
I walked her to the door myself.
Twenty people on the sales floor were watching. I let them.
Sheree Thurman, our head of sales, took her reading glasses off and stood up at her desk.
"Breanne. Tell your Mr. Cromwell we're done."
I shut the door in her face.
Then I sat down and booked a one-way flight to Lexington for Saturday.
My hands didn't shake until after I paid.
I called the only landline left in my phone.
The elder picked up on the sixth ring.
He was eighty-four and refused to carry the phone out to his porch.
"Sadler girl," he said. "You sound like you've been crying."
"I haven't."
"Give it an hour."
I laughed, and it came out wet.
"I'm coming home," I said. "Put me on your list."
The line went quiet.
He'd matched half the marriages in Tilden Hollow, including my grandparents'.
He'd been asking me to come home for six years.
"You're sure, now?"
"I'm sure."
"Then I'll send the Easterly boy to fetch you at the airport."
"Jeb Easterly?"
"He's got a truck," the elder said, like that settled it.
"Don't tell Granny," I said. "I want to surprise her."
"Imogene will know before your plane lands," he said. "She always does."
***
Bentley came home at eleven that night.
I was in our bedroom with two big suitcases open on the floor.
He stopped in the doorway with his keys still in his hand.
"You left the office without me?"
That was how it always went with us.
He decided when a fight was over.
Then he handed me a way out.
I took it, and we went back to being the perfect couple at dinner parties.
"Didn't Breanne pass along my message?" I asked.
His jaw went tight.
"I'm trying to talk to you like an adult, and you have to be a bitch about it?"
I folded a sweater and laid it in the suitcase.
"Breanne's like a little sister to you," he said. "You brought her in. So what's your problem now?"
That part was true.
Breanne was from the hollow. Her granny and mine were first cousins.
When she left for college, the elder told me to look out for her.
So I paid for her books when the fund ran short.
I bought her first interview suit and took her to her first steakhouse.
When nobody in Chicago would hire her, I did.
Then I caught the way she looked at Bentley.
Then her mistakes started piling up. A wrong invoice. A client call she forgot.
I said a few quiet words to her about it, one time.
She stood at my desk and cried.
And Bentley yelled at me in front of the whole office for the first time in eight years.
"Stop pulling rank on your own cousin!"
He made her his personal assistant that same afternoon.
She followed him back to his office.
Now he stood over my suitcases, waiting.
He was ready for me to scream.
He was ready for me to ask about Breanne, or demand a wedding date.
My phone lay on the bed. The flight confirmation was still on the screen.
"You're right," I said. "I'm being dramatic. It won't happen again."
For a second he looked lost.
Then he muttered, "Whatever," and walked out.
The front door shut behind him.
He didn't come home that night.
At two in the morning my phone lit up on the pillow.
Breanne had posted a photo.
Her hand on a white tablecloth. The navy box open beside her plate.
My ring on her finger.
At the edge of the frame was Bentley's steel watch.
The caption said, "Some things are worth the wait."
Forty people from our office had already liked it.
Under it she'd posted again. "Starting Monday I'm Ridgeline's new Chief of Staff!"
I sat up in the dark.
Then I opened my laptop and pulled up the founders' agreement I wrote six years ago.
Bentley had signed it without ever reading page four.
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