Choices (8 page)

Then she had heard Ben and Logan talking about why Abby was here. Her opinion changed fast. A woman shouldn’t put up with it, was her opinion, and she thought Abby should just get over the bastard, chalk it up to a lost cause and get on with her life. No matter whose fault it was, if you were unhappy in a marriage, you got out. No need to go chasing skirts behind your wife’s back.

They slowed their horses to a walk, and Abby turned in the saddle to look around. They were almost to the Yellowstone, the mountains jagged peaks in front of them.

“I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here.” Abby breathed, awestruck by the beauty around her.

“How long have you been away?” Kassey asked, guiding her horse to a stop.

“Too long. I haven’t seen my parents in almost three years, and even then they came out to Boston to see me.”

“Is it nice back East? I’ve never been out of Montana.”

“It’s nice in its own way, but it’s tame compared to this. And the mountains out there are foothills compared to here.”

Kassey took a deep breath and decided to confront the issue she had brought Abby out here for.

“Look, Abby, Logan told Ben why you were here. Do you want to talk about it?”

Abby was silent for a moment, staring off into the distance. Kassey rushed on, “He didn’t tell him just to gossip, he told him so that Ben would pass on to me a message to keep my mouth shut, but they should know me by now. I have something to say, I say it.” She fabricated it a little, but Abby didn’t know that.

“Kassey, since the moment I walked through the door, you’ve been judgmental of me. I don’t know what Logan told Ben, and what Ben told you, but my business is my own. Why should I tell you anything?” Abby said, turning to face her, her expression cold.

Kassey bristled a bit
.

“That’s fair, I guess, but I don’t have much use for the “girly” type
. I’m guessing you’re not a princess after all, and that’s my mistake. Ben told Logan that your husband was cheating on you, and that’s why you got divorced. Do you want to talk about the rest?”

“The rest of what? My husband cheated on me, we went through a long year of a contentious divorce and the phone call I got was to tell me it had been going on for two years, not just the one time that I knew of. What else is there?”

“Well, I know Logan didn’t come home last night, and he was in an awful mood this morning. I saw how you both watched each other last night at dinner. When you ran out, I told him to go after you to make sure you were okay, but he was already running out the door after you. I’ve known Logan a long time, Abby. He wants you, and he’s miserable about it.”

Despite the cold temperature, Abby felt a warmth inside of her at Kassey’s words, but it turned to ice in the next moment as she thought about the way Logan had treated her this morning; impersonal and irritated, as if he couldn’t take the time to talk to her. She looked at Kassey again, and relented. She did need someone to talk to, after all.

“Nothing really happened last night. We kissed, and then we both felt embarrassed and guilty. Then we got drunk and spent the night talking, but that was it. I want him, that’s for sure. But I also need to figure out if I’m going back to Boston, to try to work rebuild my life there, and I don’t really need to get involved with someone. I had a life in Boston.”

Kassey snorted, then nudged her horse into a walk. Abby frowned, nudging Ellie to follow behind Kassey.

“Why’d you snort? What’s so funny?”

“Why would you even consider going back?”

“I know I don’t know you, or Ben, but you seem to have a good marriage. If Ben cheated on you, and you divorced, would you leave here, just because of that?”

Kassey let out a bark of laughter.

“Honey, I’ve been in your shoes. That’s how I met Ben.”

Abby was shocked. The way Ben and Kassey had been at dinner, she would’ve thought they had been together forever. They were easy with one another, nothing like the cold politeness that was the basis of her marriage to Steve. When Abby didn’t say anything more, Kassey went on.

“I was married to my childhood sweetheart. Right out of high school, we got married. We had dated since freshman year, and we moved up to Missoula. About a year after we got married, I saw him going into the local hotel with Susan Hanks, the prom queen our senior year. Idjit didn’t even think to go to the next town over. I was hurt, and humiliated, but I stayed. Confronted him about it, made a lot of noise about leaving him, but he swore he would never do it again and broke it off with Susan. Six months later I saw him again, this time going into her house. I left him a note on the dining room table, and moved back down here with my parents. I didn’t want to go back to Missoula; there was nothing there for me but heartache. Everywhere I went, I would remember us together going to that diner, or that grocery store. I met Ben in a bar two weeks later, and have been with him ever since.”

She let Abby digest it, saw her mulling it over in her mind. They walked the horses in the silence, watched the snow falling, then Abby spoke.

“I just don’t know. I’m not a quitter, but I don’t know if I even love him anymore. Not just because of this, but I think it’s been leaving me for a while now. I doubt that he loved me, or if he ever did. If I didn’t still love him, wouldn’t all this mess I just went through hurt less? ”

“A man can do this to a woman, especially one like you, he doesn’t need to be loved. And of course it was gonna hurt; you had built a life together, and after all, you weren’t the one who cheated. You’ll probably love him for a long time, or at least remember the love you had for him.”

Abby grinned over this, what was sure Kassey’s first complement to her.

“Well, it’s a moot point. Logan may feel attraction for me, but I think he has a strong sense of honor, and that won’t let him approach me. He has this idea in his head that I have to go through this grieving period for a relationship that apparently was only one-sided to begin with.”

“Ben said something to Logan in the stable, before you came in, and it made sense. It’s probably what he felt when he met me.”

“How long where you in that stall?” Abby laughed.

“Long enough. Ben told him, and I’m paraphrasing, If a man cheats on his woman, he’s lost all right to her. It’s true. He lost all rights he had to you, including your emotions and feelings when he cheated on you, let alone when you divorced. Your husband treated you like you were a possession that he could throw away when he got tired of it, like a little boy with his toys. He has no right to claim you back when someone else wants to pick you up and dust you off.”

“Thanks, I think. I still think it doesn’t matter. Even if I decided-“Abby broke off when Kassey threw her a disgruntled look.

“If, or when, I decide to go back, and make a decision to come back here and relocate or stay in Boston, Logan isn’t still going to want me. As soon as I went back to Boston to finalize things, he would forget about me. There’s attraction there, but you need feelings for someone, and despite what I feel, that doesn’t mean he feels it too.”

“And what do you feel?”

Abby thought long and hard about that.

“I don’t know. It’s true that from the moment I first looked at Logan, I felt like a new person. On my way out here, driving all those miles, I felt that my life was over, like the moment I found out Steve had cheated on me, my life ended. I was on auto-pilot, not feeling anything, everything was by rote. Then I got here, and saw Logan, and I lit up. I haven’t felt anything like that before.” Abby smil
ed, thinking back to the first moment. It had felt like everything she had done in her life had led to that moment, that everything in her past had been rehearsal until then.

“Sounds like you’re in love.”

Abby looked at her sharply, Kassey’s words sending a fissure of disquiet into her stomach.

“How can I be in love with someone I barely know, while I’m still getting over a man that I was married to and thought I loved for 13 years?”

“Because sometimes, our hearts know what’s right long before our brains do.”

Chapter Five

Abby pondered over Kassey’s words as she brushed down Ellie, finding comfort in the long smooth strokes of the brush down the mare’s gleaming coat. In love with Logan? After only knowing him for 2 days? How could that be?

She stopped what she was doing, and laid her head on Ellie’s side. Just more to think about, adding to the turmoil already in her poor, beleaguered brain. She thought back to when she met Steve, and the multitude of emotions that she had felt then. Excitement that a man of his looks and breeding had paid attention to her, pride of having him as her man, but she had never had that feeling that a person was supposed to have when they met the person they were going to spend the rest of their lives with. She didn’t immediately look at Steve and think,
“That’s the man I’m going to marry”. It just came with time, as if it was a step on their way to becoming responsible adults, like a check list. Dating, check; moved in together, check; marriage, check.

When she first saw Logan, when he had stood and turned around and looked at her with those penetrating eyes, it was as if he had looked into her soul, and she had felt as if she had finally found what she was looking for. That was something she had never felt with Steve, didn’t believe it had even existed.

Even thinking about him now, her blood ran hot, her pulse quickened, and he wasn’t even near. She was smart enough to realize that was a carnal reaction, and it was a deep ache she longed to ease, but beneath that was something else, a fierce need to know everything about him, his wants and dreams, what drove him.

God, girl, you are in love with him. What a fine mess. Until a week ago, she had thought she had made a decision to get her life in order, not turn it upside down, mooning over a cowboy with gr
ay eyes and black hair.

She straightened, and led Ellie back into her stall, her mind made up. She would go back to her cabin and call her lawyer in Boston, start
wrapping up loose ends, sell her townhouse, find a competent accountant to run her finances. Whether or not Logan wanted her, this was something she needed to do. She knew now she couldn’t go back to Boston, not with the new understanding that she most likely never loved him the way you should love a man that you vowed to spend the rest of your life with. Kassey was right. The divorce hurt so badly because it was a destruction of more than just a marriage, it destroyed everything she had in Boston.

She walked out of the dimness of the stable and crossed the main paddock. She raised a hand in greeting to Jake, who was riding in from west. She took it as a good sign that he waved back without falling out of his saddle.

As she walked the path back to her cabin, everything seemed brighter, more in focus. The snow had stopped and the sun had come out, bringing with it birds that wheeled across the sky and sky-rocketed into the branches of the spruce that lined the path. Through the trees, she could see antelope grazing on a high ridge, and off in the distance, the mournful sound of an elk bugling.

She came to the cabin and let herself in, having not even bothered to lock it. She noticed a hot pink piece of paper on her kitchen table and
crossed over to it. It was a flier for a Valentine’s Day dance at a neighboring ranch. Kassey must’ve been in with more towels and brought it over. A gentle nudge, perhaps?

She hadn’t been to a barn dance since she left to go to college. She thought back to all the Valentine’s Day dances she had been to at neighboring ranches when she grew up, and knew them to be
a Sadie Hawkins type of affair. She would tell Logan then, that she had decided to come back, and make her life here.

She walked over to where she had her cell plugged in to charge, and did a little boogie dance, thinking that she was way too happy for a woman about to uproot her entire life and move back to the antithesis of everything that she had grown to become accustomed to. But it also felt like the first right decision she had made since she had met Steve. No, the first right one would’ve been deciding to come here, a place she had looked up on the internet at home. That decision seemed guided now, as if an invisible hand had pushed her to click the link on the website that brought her to Logan’s ranch of all the places she could have chosen.

She took a deep breath and dialed her attorney, sealing her fate.