Page 67 of Just (Fake) Married
“Did Harmony leave? Without coffee?”
Mrs. Walker nodded.
Uh oh. That wasn’t good for anyone.
I could do the town a favor and text her, see if she wanted me to drop some coffee off at the store. Although, I realized I did not have Harmony’s phone number. That seemed ridiculous, but things had moved so fast that all the normal steps in a relationship had been swept aside.
“Everything okay?” Mrs. Walker asked into my silence. She made me a plate for breakfast full of bacon and sausage.
I nodded and smiled. “Just fine.” I wondered if she had Harmony’s cell phone number, but I was not about to ask her. “Is anyone else here?”
“Carter came over this morning and is in your father’s office,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and took my coffee and my plate of cholesterol and went to find Carter.
The living room was lit by the fire and the white overcast sunlight coming in through the high windows. The room always seemed cold to me. A big two-story room full of the black, beady eyes of my father’s trophy kills on the wall. The deer heads and the brown bear in the corner. Mom had drawn the line at fishon the wall, and for that I was grateful, but it was still like being watched by vengeful animals as I walked from the kitchen to Dad’s office.
Until I got to the couch, where Harmony and I had spent part of our wedding night.
The couch was the only warm spot in the room, and I suddenly wondered if I could convince Harmony to let me give her orgasms all over this house so I could change the energy. Make this place less of a mausoleum and more of a home.
I mean…not a home for me. I wasn’t in need of a home. My home was in Seattle. A cold two-bedroom condo with my Peloton, a king size bed and a fridge full of protein shakes.
“Hey,” I said, coming into the office that still somehow smelled like my father’s cigars and the Calloway sisters’ perfume. Carter sat at my dad’s desk, stacked high with files and his breakfast dishes. He looked up over the edge of a laptop.
“Hey, yourself,” he shut the laptop and grinned at me.
I sat down in the chair across from the desk. “What are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked, and took a sip of my coffee.
“Well,” Carter said, pushing his hands through his hair. “Since the will reading, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the books. Dad held on to all of that with an iron fist, so I’m just trying to figure it out.”
“Anything to be concerned about?” I asked.
“Hmm,” Carter mused. “We bought up some land south of here. Tag thinks we should expand into grass fed beef, and I don’t disagree, but the mortgage on that land is more than I expected.”
“Anything I can do to help?” I asked blissfully, knowing there wasn’t.
I didn’t do cowboy and I didn’t do accounting.
I fixed people. That’s what I did.
“I can figure it out,” he said.
“Well, I’m going to ask a question that’s going to make me sound like a fucking idiot, but you wouldn’t happen to have my wife’s cell phone number, would you?”
Carter sat back with a slack-jawed expression on his face. “Your wife? Huh. That sounded pretty natural coming out of your mouth.”
“Relax. It’s an expression,” I said. “But I realized I don’t have her phone number.”
“Yeah, I don’t have it either,” Carter shrugged. “You can ask Tag.”
“Why would Tag have my wife’s number?”
Carter stared at me, and I realized belatedly how weirdly jealous I sounded. “Harmony’s number. Why would he have Harmony’s number?”
“Who knows why Tag does half the shit he does? You can ask him. But my guess is, he’ll have it. They’re cleaning out the bunk house today, you can find him down there.”
I left the office for the foyer. Slipped on my hiking boots and winter coat and headed out to the barn and the bunk house beyond it.
