Page 3 of A Reckless Memory

I finally glanced at Cody. His jaw was set, but I didn’t miss the regret in his gaze when he looked at me. “I was always suspicious of Barron’s interest in you. Then I found swaths of missing money and did some digging.”

“You did some digging,” I echoed. Because he wondered, like everyone in town, if my family’s money was the only reason a handsome charmer like Ansen would be interested in the only daughter of crusty Barnaby Knight. I pretended to be oblivious, but I heard the whispers at the grocery store and during dart nights at the bar.

That Knight girl doesn’t pay one ounce of attention to her looks, while Ansen Barron can flirt the halo off an angel.

“Barns is paying him to marry you,” Cody announced.

I barked out a laugh. “Come on, Cody. We don’t do dowries these days. It’s not like Mama’s books.”

“Cody,” Daddy’s pack-a-day-roughened growl broke in, and I jumped. For a large, imposing man, he moved quietly. I pressed against the doorframe, but he stayed in the hallway and faced the room, sandwiching me in the middle of the conflict. “Why the hell are you bringing this up?”

My brother straightened the coat of his tux, back to being the unflappable brother. “Aggie deserves to marry a guy who loves her, not one who’s being bought by you.”

My groom was being paid off? I tried to laugh again, but Ansen’s ashen face robbed me of air. No.

Horrible realizations clicked into place. The way he suddenly made me feel like the only woman on earth after he’d already been working for Daddy for six months. He’d looked right through me, then, one day, I was all he saw. He’d seamlessly swept me off my feet, and it had felt like a country fairy tale. Instead, I might as well be on an episode of Yellowstone. “Ansen?”

“Aggie, listen—”

“For fuck’s sake, girl,” Daddy broke in. “You want to marry him or not?”

“Not if he’s being paid.” My breathing quickened, and I gripped the skirt of my dress, crushing the unblemished satin. I was probably leaving prints with my sweaty hands, but the sinking sensation in my stomach suggested it might not matter.

Mama’s voice rang in my ears. She’d abandoned the ranch and my brothers quit talking to her, but I never did. Months before she died, she was still giving me warnings. Never let a man influence your future, Aggie. Listen to me. Never give them power over you. They’re selfish creatures.

“Aggie...” Ansen hooked a hand on his hip. I knew that stance. It was his how do I pass on bad news pose. He did the same when he had to tell Daddy a horse that could’ve brought in tens of thousands of dollars had a personality trait that made it unlikely to succeed in the competition rings.

It was true. All of it. Heat wicked up the back of my neck, and that burn in my stomach cranked up another ten notches. “How much?”

His jaw clenched, and his gaze dropped to the floor. “It doesn’t matter. It’ll be our money once we’re married.”

“She’s got enough,” Daddy grumped, ever bitter that Mama left me the life insurance money that sat untouched in my account instead of splitting it among me and my brothers.

If something happens to me, she’d told me once, I want you to have it. Money buys freedom, and Barnaby will use his funds to take that freedom away from you.

My insides were splintering apart. It was amazing I wasn’t seeing double. Triple. Like the room wasn’t a kaleidoscope. “You want to marry me for how much?”

He didn’t answer, his attention still on the floor.

“So it was all a lie?”

His gaze shot up, his jaw set. “No. I’m not a liar.”

“Well, you aren’t telling the truth!” My world shattered, inside and out. I’d been devastated when Mama left and again when she died, but I wasn’t destroyed and betrayed like I was now.

My chest tightened, and my brain circled like wheels in a mud pit. Ansen first asked me out after I told Daddy I was going to move to Bozeman. I wasn’t so much interested in college as in getting Daddy to let me be a bigger part of Knight’s Arabians and Cattle Company. I thought he’d compromised since he wanted me to stay at the ranch, but I had Mama’s money. I could call his bluff, and I could actually go to school if needed.

Instead, he’d found a way to keep me on Knight land. Ansen had so many convenient plans. “I’m...I almost...I stayed in Buffalo Gully for you. So we could train horses and build a business together.”

“And you’d be close to home,” Daddy finished. “I did what I thought was best for you.” He glared at Cody, but my brother was unrepentant.

“By selling me off? Like I couldn’t get a husband on my own?” Humiliation seared hot in my blood. As soon as I’d seen Ansen, I’d written him off as unattainable. Guys like him with panty-melting grins and bodies built for sin weren’t interested in plain girls like me wearing their old 4-H T-shirts, plain Wranglers, and high-quality but well-worn cowboy boots. Then he’d smiled at me, and it was like the wildflowers grew in our pastures just for him to pick and give to me.

Daddy’s scornful chuckle shifted something inside me. Something I wasn’t sure would ever fit back into place. “Agatha, please. You’re needed around here, and school would be a waste of your time and your mama’s money. I can teach you anything you need.”

Only he hadn’t. He’d spent time with my brothers. Made their lives hell and left me to run like a wild pony. As an adult, my brothers didn’t think I was capable of doing more than chores on the ranch. I wasn’t allowed to break the horses, and when we worked cattle, they put me on Mathilda, my old reliable horse, at the back. I didn’t get to do the vaccinations, the records, the branding, or anything where I might get in the way. My plans with Ansen were a way to be a part of something. To give myself control.

I stared at Ansen. His gaze was stuck on the floor, at my feet, in front of the white, sparkly boots I bought just to wear for our first dance together. The girliest thing I’d ever owned.

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