Page 17 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
I don’t cry. Let the record show it. I’ve been not-crying in front of this man and men like him for forty years, and I don’t break my streak over breakfast.
I should’ve known it would get worse. With this family, this train, this woman, it always gets worse.
Bettina’s party is that evening, the one she threatened over the pudding, every single thing about her, held in the lounge carwith the good champagne out and the lamps low. I almost don’t go. Except not-going would be a story, and I’ve just enough pride left to refuse to be a story.
So I put on the green silk she’d sent to the cabin, the woman having of course chosen what I’d wear, and I let her girl do my hair, and I walk in on Loukas’s cold courteous arm and perform being adored by a man who informed me this morning that I was a passing view.
He disappears halfway through.
I tell myself I don’t notice, but I do, the way the tongue goes back and back to the gap where a tooth’s gone, constantly, against my own better judgment, and after twenty minutes of Artie’s stories and the young Amarillo rancher very carefully not coming near me, I go looking. We’re meant to be a unit. The performance requires it. And I’m apparently incapable of leaving well enough alone.
I find him in the observation car, in the dark, where the party isn’t.
I find him there with Bettina.
I see it in pieces, the way you see the worst things, out of order and too bright. Her arms up around his neck. The red of her dress against the white of his shirt. Her mouth on his.
The two of them close in the black glass with the country streaming by behind them, and the champagne still cold in my own hand, and the green silk she chose for me gone all at once into the most humiliating thing I’ve ever worn, a costume for a part I was too stupid to understand I’d been cast in.
I don’t make a sound. That, at least, a lifetime of swallowing things has taught me. You don’t let them hear it strike.
I just turn, very carefully, the way you carry something filled to the brim, and walk back the way I came, past Artie laughing, past the good champagne, past the young rancher who takes one look at my face and starts to rise, and I make it all the way to the cold gap between two carriages, the roaring place where the cars couple and uncouple and nobody can hear anything over the wheels, before my legs decide they’ve carried me far enough.
He was always going to choose her, some calm ruined voice informs me, out where the wind can have the words.
Not Bettina. Not the woman. Her specifically. He was always going to choose the version of this where nothing was real, where it was a passing view and an arrangement and a strange few days in close quarters, and the only fool aboard this train was the forty-year-old who let a man gentle her open in the dark and mistook careful hands for a promise.
I take off the ring there, between the carriages, the wind trying to tear the words out of my mouth, and I close it in my fist so hard the old stone bites, and I stand in the roaring dark a long time, and I do what I swore at thirty I’d never do again for any man living.
I let myself want him, openly, with nothing held back. Just for tonight. Just this once, where no one can see.
And then I promise myself, with the cold clean calm of a woman who’s finally run out of road, that the moment this train reaches the next stop, with his money or without it, I’m getting off.
Chapter Thirteen
BETTINA KRAUS HAD WAITEDa long time for the observation car to go dark and empty, and she didn’t intend to waste it.
She came at Loukas as she came at everything she wanted, all at once and certain of her welcome, her arms going up around his neck before he could read her intent, her mouth finding his in the dim glass with the whole black country streaming behind them.
He didn’t startle. That wasn’t in him. What he did, in the half-second before he moved, was master the urge to shove her bodily off him, his mouth going tight to keep it from curling into the contempt he could feel rising. A man didn’t let his face do that to the wife of his oldest friend. Not even now. Not even her.
He took Bettina by the wrists and firmly put her off him, setting her back at arm’s length the way a man sets down something he’s found in his food.
“No.” There was nothing courteous left in his voice now, none of the careful diplomacy he’d shown this woman’s husband all these years. “Not now, not on this train, not on any day ever made, Bettina. I’ve told you in every language I know. The answer doesn’t change.”
Her lovely face did something ugly. “What’s wrong with you?” she breathed, reaching for him again, and she got no further, a familiar voice speaking from the doorway behind them, quiet and terrible.
“You are.”
It was Artie.
He stood in the doorway with the light of the party at his back and an expression Loukas had never once seen on his old friend’s open, trusting face, and Bettina went the color of the tablecloth. For a moment nobody moved. Then Artie came into the dark car, and he didn’t look at Loukas at all. He looked at his wife.
“You’re what’s wrong, Bettina.” His voice didn’t rise, and that was the worst of it, a loud man all his life and now, when it cost him everything, gone quiet. “Loukas tried to tell me. More than once. I wouldn’t hear it, because the alternative was more than I could carry.” A breath. “I can’t go on not hearing it. And I find I no longer want to.”
For the first time since Loukas had known her, Bettina had no script ready. The poise dropped clean off her, and underneath it was a woman scrambling.
“Artie—Artie, it isn’t, you’ve misread it, he kissed me, ask anyone—” She heard how thin it sounded even as she said it, and her face changed, the fluster hardening into something colder. “You’d take his word. Naturally. All these years married to me, and you’d take his word over your own wife’s.”
