Page 55 of The Rancher's Wedding

They ate lunch with Estelle and took a ride for old time’s sake. Jacob rode Orion, his old horse, while Michael took Buttercup again, and they raced each other through the open plains, laughing and playing like they were children again. To Michael, it felt like making up for lost time and evoked a feeling he’d thought he had outgrown. He’d become so accustomed to work and the daily routine that he’d forgotten how important it was to have genuine fun and play for the sake of playing, just as the animals did when left to themselves.

They took the ride back to the ranch a bit slower, though, and focused on talking to each other.

“She’s special,” Michael said. “Estelle, I mean. She arrived here and she was so beautiful, and unlike any woman I’d ever seen outside of pictures with that fancy city dress. She’s completely transformed from that woman since then and I think she’s even more beautiful now.”

“She’s helpful around the ranch?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. She’s smart as a whip and picked up everything real quickly. Even the tasks she wasn’t so excited about at first, like cleaning the stables or feeding the hogs, she didn’t make excuses or nothing. She treated them like anything else around here and did a fine job, if I may say so myself.”

Michael wondered if she could be truly as perfect as he saw her or if it was just the love talking. Maybe it was her being perfect that made him love her. He looked at Jacob, who offered a light and somewhat awkward smile, as if to indicate he appreciated many of Estelle’s good qualities but didn’t hold her in as high an esteem as Michael did.

“She’s quite a special lady,” Jacob agreed.

“That she is.”

Michael knew that if he kept going on about Estelle, he probably wouldn’t stop, so he shifted the conversation toward Jacob and his interests.

“She told me you’ve been corresponding with Megan,” Michael said.

Jacob shifted in his saddle and wiped his forehead as his cheeks got rosy. “Yes, we’ve been exchanging letters.”

“How’s that been going?”

“Oh,” Jacob said, “it’s hard to tell in these letters without getting an idea of how she’s really reacting. It’s all there in ink, but I can’t see that thing that’s between the words like you get in normal conversation.”

Ain’t that the truth, Michael thought. It wasn’t so long ago that his and Estelle’s relationship was solely based on pen and paper. When she arrived, it wasn’t that she had misrepresented herself, but it still seemed like she was a different person. The woman in the letters was almost imaginary, but the one who had arrived and married him felt real.

“You know,” Michael said, “the way you two are getting along, it might be a good idea to propose to her.”

Jacob got real shy, looking off in the distance at the long shadows. “I don’t know about that.”

“If you wait too long, it might be that someone else will snag her.”

“I don’t think she’d want someone like me.”

“Jacob,” Michael said, “I have it on good word that she’d say yes. The question is whether or not you want to marry her. If you knew she’d say yes, would you ask her to marry you?”

“I suppose so,” he said.

“Well, if you only ‘suppose so,’ then maybe I misjudged the situation and never mind.”

The horses trotted alongside each other, clip-clopping their shoes against the dry, hardened ground.

“I’d expect that you’d be a bit more enthusiastic, is all I’m saying,” Michael said.

Michael knew it would be hard to get this out of Jacob and perhaps he was teasing him a little bit, but it was for his own good. Women, he knew, wanted to feel loved and important. And he knew that Megan wanted Jacob to propose to her, though he also knew she wouldn’t say yes if it sounded like a business agreement or something of the sort. She had to feel like she was the most important woman in the world to Jacob.

And, fortunately for her, she was. Jacob just wasn’t very good at expressing it.

His mind, as it had been doing lately, turned toward Estelle and he realized he should be taking some of the advice he offered his brother. How loved could she feel? He kissed her and he had saved her, but what was he doing to tell her she was special every day? Had he ever even told her how beautiful she was?

“All right,” Jacob said, “you got me. Yes, I want to marry her. I can’t imagine why she would say yes, but if she would take my offering to let her be my wife, I’d be the happiest man west of the Mississippi.”

“She’ll say yes, Jacob. I promise you. She’s just waiting for you to ask her.”

“You telling me the truth?”

“I wouldn’t lie,” Michael assured him. “And when she says yes, she’ll be a very lucky woman.”

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