My brother was in full investigative mode and wasn’t being subtle. I sighed, grabbed the beer, and left the stall. “Fine, you’re right. It’s Julia. We…she’s…you’ve got to keep this to yourself.” When Brian nodded, I went on. “Julia’s pregnant. It’s mine.”
“Whoa,” Brian said, physically staggering back a step. “Wasn’t expecting that. You’re going to be a dad. Hell, we’ll be dads together. The kids will be close to the same age—next best thing to twins.”
Brian was leaping ahead to the future with a big smile on his face. “The cousins will grow up together like we did. That’s awesome. Congratulations. You should have said something at the party.”
I shook my head. “Julia’s worried about a miscarriage. She’d got some kind of condition that makes pregnancy difficult—PCOS. She didn’t think she’d be able to get pregnant at all. We heard the heartbeat, and the doc says everything’s fine, but I’ve got to respect what Julia wants.”
As much as I wanted to stand on the roof of the tallest building in town and shout out the good news, I wasn’t so hardheaded that I didn’t understand how traumatic it would be for Julia if we announced the news to everyone and the worst happened.
“I get that. So what’s the real problem?” Brian asked.
“I think we could be happy, raise our child together, be a family, but the pregnancy is making her so defensive about every little thing. I’m starting to worry that we don’t have a future.”
“And you want that?” Brian’s tone was cautious.
“Yeah, I do, but I hate fighting with her. We can’t even agree about the stud fee contract for Twister or how to breed my mares. They’remymares, and I’m going to pay her, so it’s my choice, right?”
“It is her stallion,” Brian pointed out.
“Now you sound like her,” I said, but I needed to confide in my brother so kept talking. “How am I going to care for us as a family if she fights me over every little thing? The other day I suggested that she come live here if things worked out between us, but she didn’t even want to discuss it. Are we going to endup splitting our time with our child—half the week with her, half with me? What kind of a life is that for any of us? If she’d let me manage things, I could sort it all out, and we could just behappy.”
Brian tipped back his beer and took a long drink before speaking. “You know, not too long ago when I almost lost Caitlin, you said some things that I needed to hear. And I’m grateful for that. It made me get my head out of my ass.”
“You drank half my hidden stash of whiskey that day,” I said. We’d shared the bottle after I had handed out some advice that led to Brian and Caitlin’s reconciliation.
“I got you a new one,” Brian said. “What you said was more important than the booze, and I’m going to return the favor right now. Getting a woman pregnant doesn’t suddenly make her easy to win over. If anything, it makes it harder to earn her respect and trust, because you have to prove yourself as a future husbandandfather. At the end of the day, you might have to listen and compromise.”
“I can do that, but not when it comes to the ranch. I was raised to run this ranch in a certain way. It’s my responsibility, and I owe it to Dad and Luke to do it right.” My brother had to understand how strongly I felt about that.
“Seems to me there are two different things going on here. Ask yourself this. Do you want to be right about how to breed horses or do you want to love her and be loved by her?”
I turned my head and looked down the long line of horse stalls. Most were empty since the horses were outside, but a few heads peeked out at me. The ranch was important to me, but so was Julia. Did I love her?
Love came with all sorts of complications. Somewhere inside me, I wanted to be the guy who would give it all up for love, but I knew I wasn’t capable of that. That wasn’t who I was. That wasn’t what I’d been raised to value.
Yes, my dad had loved my mother deeply, but all of his lectures had been about how the ranch came first, how the ranch was a legacy we all had to work to preserve. That had to be extra true for me, not just because I was currently the only one keeping the ranch’s legacy going, but also because Julia and I didn’t have the same kind of love that my parents had shared.
I liked being with her and thought about her at all hours of the day and night. I enjoyed making love to her and watching her come undone by my hand and mouth and… Okay, I was sort of obsessed with that, but I thought about her more pragmatically when I imagined a future for us together, because of our circumstances.
I wasn’t in love with her. Of that I was sure.
“I don’t love her, at least not yet,” I said. Maybe someday that would come, but it would be a calm, mature love founded on a shared life and children. “And I’m right about the horses.”
Brian finished off his beer, and I sensed that my brother had something important to say. I was going to get an earful, so I braced myself.
“Good luck with that then, and congrats on the baby. I better head inside to say goodbye to the guests.” With that, Brian turned and walked out of the barn, leaving me to wonder what I’d missed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
JULIA
“Can I come in?” Jake asked from the other side of my screened door the following evening.
I’d left the baby shower while he was still in the barn and wasn’t surprised when he hadn’t tried to contact me. Throughout the day, I’d thought about our disagreement. Mixing a business deal with a young relationship had its risks, and those red flags were poking at me, threatening to unfurl.
“That depends,” I said, walking closer to the door. “Are we going to talk or are you going to tell me how things are going to be again?” I could hear the frustration in my voice and knew it came from his attitude and his need to control. I refused to allow that, and if he couldn’t understand that…
“Talk.”
