The Flood Stranded Me With Three Ranch Men, So I Kept All Three novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Ruth's Bed

Emmett's POV

I had not opened the door of my own bedroom in three years, and that night I opened it for her.

The foreman's cottage sat across the yard from the main house, a low frame place August Rasmussen had shaken my hand on twenty years ago.

"The cottage and the creek forty are yours when I'm gone," he had said.

He never put it on paper, and I never asked him to.

A man's word was a man's word, I thought.

Then the old man died in May, and the lawyer read the will in the kitchen, and my name was not in it.

I put the lamp on the dresser.

Ruth's quilt was still on the bed, the blue and yellow one, folded back as she had left it.

The room smelled shut up and clean.

Jess stood in the doorway in my flannel shirt with her hair drying in curls around her face.

"You don't have to," she said.

She had seen my face when I turned the knob.

"I know."

"Emmett. This is her bed."

"It's my bed," I said.

"She'd have liked you. She'd have said you were too thin."

Jess smiled, and it wobbled.

She crossed the floor and put her hands on my chest, over the ring on its chain.

"I'm not here to take her place."

"I know that too," I said.

"Then what am I here for?"

I did not have an answer for her.

I picked her up instead, and laid her on the quilt.

I stood looking down at her with my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

She had been in my house for two days.

She had made me eggs.

She had cried out my name on a mattress by the stove.

Then she had gone to the barn and cried out Dutch's, and let Nels tie her up.

I should have been jealous.

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