“What went wrong?”
“She’d lied about what she really wanted, but not maliciously. I think, first and foremost, she’d lied to herself. Looking back now, I think that pretty soon after the wedding, she began to realize that being a rancher’s wife didn’t work for her, after all.”
“She told you this?”
“Not till much later. Not till the end. She’d thought she wanted a settled-down life, but then she missed the action, the variety of the rodeo circuit. She craved excitement, and she wasn’t getting it living with me on the Double J.”
“Then why didn’t she just start entering rodeos again? Why couldn’t she be a rodeo star and your wife, too?”
“It’s a good question. If she’d faced the problem early on and told me about it, maybe we could have worked it out. But in hindsight, I would say her pride wouldn’t let her do that. She’d really come on strong about hating the rodeo life, being sick and tired of living from one win to the next, wanting to make a home, have a family. Before we got married, she insisted that she wanted to start trying for a baby right away.”
“And you...?”
“I agreed.”
“Because of what you said at New Year’s, right? That you want kids, the whole family thing.”
“Right. But somehow, time went by and Maybelle never got pregnant.”
“How much time?”
“Three years.”
“Did you guys see a doctor, find out what the problem might be?”
“After we were married a year and a half or so, I suggested that. She put me off. She said everything would be fine. We just needed more time, she would get pregnant eventually, we would have the family we’d planned for. I didn’t push. I’m not sure why. I think I was also having second thoughts about our marriage, second thoughts I didn’t want to admit to, not even to myself. I should have been more focused on what was really going on between the two of us. That should’ve come first. But instead, I was all about ‘making a family,’ as though having kids is how you build a relationship.
“It wasn’t really working between Maybelle and me and I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, I did finally start realizing that having a baby when everything felt so up in the air wouldn’t be a solution to anything. Maybelle and me, we weren’t big on communication. We were drifting apart, and I knew it and I let it happen.”
Vanessa laid her hand on the side of his face. “I’m so sorry, Jameson.”
He turned his mouth into her hand, breathed a kiss in the heart of her palm. “I didn’t fight for her, for what we had. Somehow, by the time a couple of years had passed, whatever connection we’d shared at first was pretty much gone—and then, near the end of the third year, I found the discarded packaging from her birth control pills.”
Vanessa’s eyes got extra wide. “Wow.”
“Yeah. That’s when I finally decided to talk to her about it.”
“Well, that’s good, that you two started talking, right?”
“It should’ve been, but I was pissed—more than pissed. I was furious. I demanded to know how long she’d been on the pill. She gave my attitude right back to me, said a better question would be when had she ever beenoffthe pill, because she hadn’t.”
“Omigod.”
“Yeah. It was bad. I was mad enough to spit nails, and even though I’d also had second thoughts about her and me, about rushing toward parenthood rather than figuring out how to live and work together as a couple, I didn’t admit any of that. I made no effort to try to talk to her honestly about it. I went straight to an ultimatum. I ordered her to throw her pills away immediately, or it was over between us. And she said, ‘Fine. Have it your way, then. I want a divorce.’”
“Oh, Jameson...” Vanessa cuddled in close. Tucking her head under his chin, she pressed her lips to the side of his throat. “How awful. I truly am so, so sorry...” The words were warm and comforting, like her breath against his skin.
He stroked her hair, then caught her earlobe between his thumb and finger and rubbed it gently. “Yeah, it was a bad moment. I was an ass. Maybelle was scrappy as ever.” Looking back now, after the anger and the emptiness that followed, after the divorce and the slow realization that he and Maybelle never really had a chance, he could almost smile at the memory. “She said it was just as well I found out that she’d never stopped taking her pills. Said she couldn’t go on living this boring life, said that yeah, she was still kind of crazy about me, but being a ranch wife? Not for her. She told me straight out, ‘Jameson, I need this marriage to be over or I will start to hate you, and there’s no good in that.’”
“So...?”
“So, it was more than apparent to both of us by then that the marriagewasover—that it was pretty much doomed right out of the gate. She’d lied to me. Looking back, I get why she wasn’t real big on open, honest communication. She’d spent her whole life fighting to make her own way and she had no communication skills whatsoever. Frankly, I was no better. I was a bad husband to her, a guy who never made the effort to find out what was going on with her until it was way too late. I gave her the divorce. We agreed on a onetime settlement. I paid her off, and that was that.”
“How long ago did all this happen?”
“She moved out two years ago. Haven’t seen her since.”
Vanessa tipped her head back. Those dark eyes gleamed at him. Sometimes when she looked at him, he felt she could see inside his head.
