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A second passes as she digs into her pocket and whips out a stack of papers, waving them at me. “Our betrothal contract,” she huffs. “And I stopped in that little town, Upperhand? I asked around. The lady who owns the grocery store knew where you lived.”
I have no idea how she knew that. Small-town gossip travels far and wide, I guess, and I suppose I do all my shopping in Upperhand since it’s only twenty minutes away while Seattle is an hour away. And well…Seattle.
“Oh no. You’ve got me all wrong, princess. I’ll tell you a few things about me in a nutshell. One, most people would say I’m an ass and that I do insensitive things like moving away from everyone and maintaining very little communication, such that the people who love me worry even though they don’t have to. Two, they’d say I don’t march, not to my beat or the beat of anyone else’s drums. The things that are expected of me? Those are the last things I’m willing to do. And three?” I realize I’m counting on my fingers like a kindergarten teacher, so I slam my hand down quickly. “Three. Uh, three. I’m good. Just good with the life I have here right now. Lastly, four, and the most important point—well, more like an addendum to three—I’m not going to get married. Not to anyone. And not to you. Ever.”
I expect this news to be greeted with a first-class dumpster fire of a temper tantrum. Nina might not look like a princess at the moment—err, okay, so she does, and a bedraggled one at that—but she was raised in the city, spoiled, and given everything she ever asked for. Never mind that I, too, was raised in the city and kind of spoiled. It was different. I know because my parents talked about her and her family. A lot. Also? I was capable of using social media. I used to look her up sometimes. Call it researching the enemy or keeping myself in the loop. I needed to know what she was doing so I knew how to ward her off and fight what our families were trying to do to us. You can’t go into a battle unprepared without a strategy.
Her face does harden, but I can’t tell if it’s because what I said was distasteful or she realized that there’s grit everywhere, including between her teeth, and she doesn’t like the taste of it. I figure I have to drive home my point, so I do.
“People think love and marriage are the best parts of life, but they’re wrong. Love exists in some nebulous form, but it won’t ever exist between you and me. Certainly, it would never exist in a forced marriage. If our grandmothers think it would unite our families, they’re sorely mistaken. It would only drive us apart and make everyone around us miserable. As for myself, I think love is some token people use against the fear of being alone. Loneliness. They’d rather delude themselves into thinking they feel something, but really, all they feel is a bone-deep desire not to be by themselves. That’s what drives the world. It’s not romance. It’s fear. It’s the fear of failing, not making it, and not being good enough, and that, in turn, brings shame. We can’t live with those feelings, so we go out and tell ourselves that we’ve found parts of ourselves in someone else, and it’s love because it’s the soul’s reflection of one another, but that’s not what’s really going on at all. Love is just what we tell ourselves, a lie we force ourselves to believe because it makes us feel better about the inevitable truth, which is that we’re all just going to be dust and ash, and from the time we get here until the time we leave, there’s not much else.”
Nina’s eyes narrow. They look wary, and a new shadow moves into them, blocking out the sparkly gold sunshine that was there a minute ago despite the dust and grime. Her jaw gets steely, and then her brow cocks up like she’s just heard something funny. She looks at me like she can’t decide whether I’m serious or just being an ass because that’s what I warned her straight off I would do.
I stand still, holding my breath.
Behind me, the world, the farm, the chickens, the sheep, the cats, the dog, and everything go on just as they always have, oblivious to how Nina Geraldson just walked into my life like cowpat dropping from the sky straight onto my head—a cowpat of arranged marriage doom.
I need to get her out of here. I would do the getting out of here if there was somewhere to go, but this is my home. All I can do is swallow hard, roll my shoulders back, and stand my ground.
She crosses her arms and gives me one heck of a good staredown, then shrugs and grins. Yes, she freaking grins, and it’s not a crazy-ass grin for show. She really means it. Also, yup, there’s definitely grit between her teeth. “Well then, Thaddius Wonderduck, it’s a darned good thing I came here to find a wayoutof this marriage, not try to talk you into going through with it.”
CHAPTER 3
Nina
Thaddius doesn’t look like a farmer. Yes, he’s got the faded, stained jeans on, and yes, they are deliciously sinful despite me clearly being decisive about not noticing or caring about stuff like that. He’s more football quarterback in the body than old farmer tough, but maybe that’s because he hasn’t gotten to the old yet. Yes, he’s got the windswept chestnut hair, side parted. It’s long enough that the half mess and half curls somehow equal totally sexy. And yes, strands of it do fall over his forehead. I suppose that’s more backwoods than preppy jock, but he’s also got the bone structure of all the gods, at least when it comes to his face shape, cheekbones, and nose. His jaw, while angular, isn’t too sharp or abrupt. It’s also covered in a fair amount of scruffy beard, not chestnut but a few shades lighter. Beards are entirely nasty, in my opinion, but this scruffy thing that brackets perfect lips? I don’t hate it. Frick, I don’t hate it, just like I don’t hate the fitted grey T-shirt with the dirt smears across the front.
All in all, my betrothed is pretty damn hot.
My ovaries are overly appreciative. Ha, the puns. God, I’m killing myself here. It’s literally been one hell of a journey. I have to do something to amuse myself.
Shit, I forgot his eyes. They’re not piercing dark. They’re light caramel, shaded by auburn brows that match his beard. He has the direct kind of stare that means trouble for all involved. Right now, his eyes are really good at telling me off. They’re snappy, and they’re hooded by his brows just enough to make it obvious that glares from Thaddius could dothings—scary or sexy or glaring things—but they’re lit up by surprise as well.
“That’s right,” I tell him, rolling with that momentary speechlessness he’s been struck with. It’s kind of nice. I don’t need another lecture on the fallacies of love from Mr. Hot Philosopher Farmer Pants over here. “We have to figure a way out of this. You have your own money, or so I’ve heard.” My eyes flick up, and I look over his shoulder at the white dots grazing on the other side of the field. “And you have your sheep. You don’t need your family’s wealth. I don’t currently have much of that myself, and I am still a year away from graduating college, but I can figure out a way to make it on my own after that. I don’t need my granny’s money either.”
Thaddius’ jaw sets hard, making his stubble look extra bristly. I kind of want to rub my palms over it and my cheek against his cheek. I think I’d like the burn.
Damn it. It just has to figure that he’d be hot. But he warned me about his not-so-nice nature. He might just be trying to chase me away, but if we’re going with sheep metaphors and cliches here, I’ve heard enough to decide that he’s definitely the black sheep of the family.
“My parents might stay mad at me for the rest of my life,” I go on. Silence makes me nervous. He’s too quiet. “But I can’t live my life just to make them happy. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to either of us that our parents drew this up at our grandmothers’ insistence. Like seriously. It’s just weird and all kinds of wrong. I came because this is the real deal. Both of us need to take it somewhere, get it amended, and sign it to say we’ll never marry each other. Or maybe we can take some of your plentiful wads of cash and bribe someone to give us a blood test and forge the results to say we’re not so distantly related. They can’t make us get married then.”
“I see.”
He sounds more like he’d rather be licking the side of a sheep than talking about this with me. His eyes drop down to my feet, where my fuzzy flip-flops are barely recognizable. They’re more like a not-so-fuzzy muddy monstrosity.
“I think we can just call it off,” he goes on. “Without anything official. You didn’t have to drive all the way here. It was a waste of your time. I would have agreed over the phone. Or even over an email.”
“I think we need a contract. You have no idea the lengths our grandmothers are willing to go.”
Emotional blackmail would probably be the first step, like disinheriting my parents.
“Oh, I think I do. Mine calls me the devil for moving out here and thwarting her. She doesn’t really mean it, but still. You should have just told your family to pound sand because this whole thing is insane. You could have told them you weren’t interested. This signing business isn’t going to happen because we don’t need to find a lawyer to refuse to get married. I might not have taken this seriously ever since I found out when I was a kid. Not until recently, at least, and still, I was never going to let my family force me into marrying someone I didn’t love.”
“That would be no one then because you don’t believe in love, or so you just said.” I deliver that with a surprising lack of snark. I’m just pointing out the facts here. It’s my policy to only use sarcasm as a form of laughter, not as a weapon. “Trust is a lie, and you don’t believe in romance.”
“To be fair, I had some help,” he replies indignantly, and shit on a stick, I think he’s going to be goaded into telling me what happened to give him such a bleak outlook on the matter. “Let’s just say I found out that the woman I thought I loved was actually just a gold digger who was running an elaborate con on me while she had another boyfriend all along. It was my family who found out and forced her to confess everything to me. This was after I’d been very secretly dating her for over ayear.Secretly, because I didn’t want them to find out.”
What exactly am I supposed to say to that? I know Thaddius doesn’t want sympathy, and he’ll probably rip me a new one if I try to tell him that I’m sorry, that I feel sad for him, and that I’d like to find the con woman and make her suck on my dirty flip flops.
