Page 19 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Pastor Aldridge’s church, a clapboard building with a steeple that leaned about two degrees east from a windstorm that had blown through the previous spring, perched at the top of Pitkin’s one real street.
Nobody had ever gotten around to fixing the old building.
In a mining town turned ranching town, a crooked steeple ranked somewhere below fence repair and above painting the saloon on the list of community priorities.
The inside smelled like old hymnals and lemon oil and the particular mustiness of a building that was only filled with warm bodies one morning a week. Six rows of pews lined up on either side of a center aisle, and a wooden cross hung above the pulpit on a nail that could’ve used replacing. No stained-glass windows, of course.
Logan stood at the front in his best shirt—the one he saved for Sundays and funerals. Well, and the occasional trip to the land office in Gunnison. He’d pressed it that morning with extra care, heating the iron on the stove until it hissed against the damp cloth, and the creases ran sharp enough to satisfy even his own standards.
Beside him, Pa stood stiff in his church coat, and Mason and Thomas flanked the front pew with the baby bundled between them in a nest of blankets. Thomas held the child like a man holding a jar of something that might explode, while Mason poked at the blankets every few seconds to make sure she was still breathing.
Grace stood beside him in the same dress she’d arrived in.
Apparently, according to her, she owned only two, and she’d chosen the nicer of them to make her way to their door. However, shedidwash it and dry it, somehow, in the hours between last night and this morning. Logan suspected she’d used the pressing iron to dry it, but that would’ve taken hours, and she looked completely rested.
Did she even sleep?
She’d pinned her dark hair up with a wooden brooch shaped like a rose. Under the light breaching the aisle in stripes, her skin caught the warmth of the sun, and those freckles of hers stood out across her nose and cheeks.
Pastor Aldridge, a thin man with spectacles and a voice better suited to a room three times this size, opened his Bible and began.
The ceremony took all of eight minutes.
Standard vows, regular scripture, usual pronouncement. Logan repeated the words when prompted, and listened to Grace repeat hers, trying not to think too hard about the fact that his mother’s name had been spoken in this same church at her funeral, from this same pulpit, by this same pastor, and now here he stood pledging himself to a stranger while a foundling baby gurgled in the front pew.
Why did my life have to get this strange?
“You may kiss the bride.”
Right. That part. He’d completely suppressed it all day long until now. He’d had to. How was he supposed to kiss her? They were performing a fake wedding so that she could work a job. Kissing her would be completely improper.
Gotta do something, though.
He couldn’t back out or refuse to kiss her. They had to finish the ceremony.
Then, Grace turned to face him. This close, he could count the freckles on her face if he’d wanted to. The window light caught in the brown of her eyes and turned it to honey at the edges, and she held still, watching him with an expression that gave nothing away.
Wait… Aldrige just said kiss. It doesn’t have to be on the lips.
So, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to her cheek.
Just the cheek. Brief. Proper. The kind of kiss a man gives his aunt at a holiday supper.
But, where his mouth met her skin, where she smelled faintly of the soap she’d brought in that carpetbag, her cheek softened under his lips and made his chest jump. Then he pulled back, like touching a doorknob in winter after scuffing across a wool rug. There and gone. Over before he’d fully registered it.
He straightened up. She blinked. And then she almost smiled, just a twitch at the corner of her mouth, quick as a trout in a creek before she turned away to accept Pa’s handshake and Mason’s enthusiastic clap on the shoulder.
From his spot in the pew, Thomas caught Logan’s eye and raised one eyebrow. Logan gave him a look that communicated, in no uncertain terms, that he ought to keep whatever observation he’d just made to his own self.
***
By afternoon, the ceremony had faded into the catalog of the day’s concerns, somewhere between mending the north fence and ordering feed from the supply depot in Gunnison. In truth, that suited Logan just fine, because the catalog had grown long enough already without adding whatever that jolt on his lips had meant.
Because, on top of a new wife, a new baby, and two brothers, he still owed a reckoning. The ranch needed tending.
Italwaysneeded tending.
Predators and bad winters had thinned the herd over the last two years, and the spring calves numbered fewer than he’d projected, which meant less to sell come autumn, which meant a tighter year than the one before it. The north fenceline sagged in three places where the posts had rotted through. The barn roof leaked when the rain came from the east.
