Montana (Modern Mail Order Bride Book 2) (2 page)

Deep fried anything wasn’t her cup of tea, but she was hungry enough to eat a bear.  “I could eat something,” she told him.

Gently, he pulled her up by the hand and into the kitchen.
My kitchen.
  A bright bold kitchen with yellow walls, ridiculously white appliances, a farmhouse sink, and lots of bins full of root veggies.  There was something welcoming and special about the kitchen that called to her. For the first time on that Tuesday morning, she smiled.

Billy Joe was enjoying seeing her lips in a position other than a frown or a scowl as he handed her a small saucer holding a chicken drumstick and a biscuit.

“Is this all I get?”

“For right now; I mean, I don’t want you to eat too much and then I jostle you all up and you get sick on me,” he said matter-of-factly.

The chicken came to a stop in midair. “What do you mean jostle me up?”

“Our wedding nuptials!  I want to get to that part right away.” Again, he did the head nod for punctuation.

She started to look around the room
.  Nope. No one is here to rescue me
. And there was that look on his face once more. The uncanny hopes of the fat lady meeting her long lost pork chop look.

“Don’t I get some sort of romance before you jostle me up, Billy?” she said with some attitude in her voice.

“Whaddya need with romance? We are married.”

She was feeling more like herself with each passing moment, “Not for long if you keep it going at this rate.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I think we have some wine around here somewhere,” he told her.  What he had was a bottle of Beaujolais that had more dust on it that some of the senators in congress.  When he opened it up, Pecola could smell the vinegar from across the room. She stood there watching him as she gnawed on the chicken leg.  It was some of the best fried chicken she had ever eaten. At this point, she as feeling like the fat lady and reached over to grab one of the pork chops. Her husband was not done yet; the man was truly going to try his best to make his new bride comfortable.  He found a bottle of what looked like corn liquor that he held up as if he had uncovered the mother lode.  Disappointment rained on his face when she shook her head no. Pecola wanted to at least be awake when the jostling began.  The search for a romantic enhancer continued as he found a record also covered in a layer dust.  His hands held the round disk as he leaned forward to blow off a coating or three of the dusty film before putting it on the record player. It was only a matter of seconds before Patsy Cline came through the speaker.

“Aww, hell no!  You are trying to seduce me and make me feel comfortable with our upcoming
jostling
with a bottle of fermented vinegar and Patsy Cline?” Pecola began to look for her purse.  One shoe on and a white dress, she would get out that front door and start walking.

“Pecola, whaddya want me to do?  I want to make love to you! It’s our wedding loving time!  I am at a loss here,” he said sadly.

It was the tender eyes that made her pause. She exhaled lightly and picked up a biscuit, biting into the discus and plopping down in a chair. “This is the best damned biscuit I have ever eaten,” she told him as she took another bite. She needed to explain herself a bit more to her confused husband. “I am refusing to believe, based on everything you have said to me today that you are the same man I have been writing.”

“I have every letter in the other room,” he said staring at her, waiting for an opportunity to change her mind then get her into that bedroom.

She shook her head no, “You have used the word ain’t several times.  There is no way you have a master’s degree in comparative literature using the word ain’t!”

“I live on a ranch! And by the by, I don’t have any sheep, but you saw the caliber of people I was talking to on that sidewalk.  Compound words confuse them,” he told her.  He inhaled deeply and carefully phrased his words, “Are we not going to consummate this marriage?”

“Is that all you can think about?” she asked in disbelief.

“Right now, yeah!” he said as he stood up. He ran his fingers through that thick black hair. “I really don’t want to talk right now.  I want to be in our bedroom making you my wife!”

She shook her head no. “Those same fancy words you used to seduce me in those letters to get me out here better start rolling off your lips or you
ain’t
getting nothing from me but some attitude and my other shoe in your face!”

“Is that a New York thing, throwing your shoe at people?”

Billy Joe took a seat in the chair next to her.  He lowered his eyes as he thought about what he could say or do. It had not occurred to him that his wife would require being wooed.  It had not occurred to him either that she would see him and not desire to be intimate with him right away.  A great number of things never occurred to Billy Joe Johnson, but one thing that did occur to him immediately was that he liked her more in person than he did on paper. He could even see himself loving her as she brought his sons and daughters into this world. Moreover, he could see himself enjoying a life with her.
If this is what it takes to keep her, I will do my best.

He took to one knee before her and held her hand. In French, he began to quote his favorite 14
^th
-century poet, Louise Labé, with a piece about him kissing her into submission.

Las, te plains-tu? ça, que ce mal j’apaise,

En t’en donnant dix autres doucereux

Ainsi mêlant nos baisers tant heureux

Jouissons-nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise
.

Her head cocked to the left and he deftly recited the words. It was working.  He spoke French like a native. She watched his eyes when she asked, “You want to soothe my pain with ten kisses which are the sweetest so that we may enjoy each in bliss?”

A cocky grin showed up on his face giving her a glimpse at what had to be the prettiest set of teeth she had ever seen on a man.  Then there were those eyes, gray eyes which sparkled when he said, “Loosely translated, that ain’t half bad.”

“How many other languages do you speak?” she asked as he removed the one shoe that was still on her foot.

He stayed in the zone as a professor, “Four if you count country grammar and English.  I also speak Italian and Spanish,” he told her as his hand touched her calf.

Her leg warmed under his touch. She asked in amazement, “Really?”

“I can sing a little as well in a pinch,” he told her as he leaned forward, reaching behind to the back of her dress, tugging at the zipper.

“In a pinch?”  she said as she stared into the nurturing eyes.

He leaned forward as he kissed her softly.  He pulled away, humming something she didn’t know but figured was a country song. A soft tenor came from his mouth as he crooned the words to something she had never heard.  Those damned eyes of his held her transfixed like a baboon waiting for the banana to drop from the hole in the wall of the research lab.

She scratched at her head like suddenly a family of fleas had moved into her scalp. It was the eyes that were getting to her in person. His words were what got her across the country. The singing was going to get her in his bed.
Damn, he is adorable
.

“Honest, Pecola, if I don’t make love to you soon, I think I might just burst wide open right here on this floor,” he told her.

Damn you ugly women!  This is what I get for not minding my own business.
He took her by the hand and pulled her up from the couch and led her down the hall to the master bedroom. The farmhouse bed was waiting for them with the covers turned down.

This was all wrong.

This is not how the story was supposed to go.

And it definitely wasn’t the wedding night she had envisioned in her head.  Hell, it wasn’t even night, but the middle of the afternoon. The whole thing happened so fast that she got caught up in the world of living out the stories which made her a New York Times Best Selling author.  Under the pen name of Montana Hart, she was famous for writing about mail order brides. Now, all because of two ugly women, she was married to a man who was taking her to his bed to jostle the hell out of her. By the looks of the expression on his face, she was going to be ridden hard and put away wet. The nurturing eyes that had gotten her down the hall had turned wolfish. 
Scratch that. I am going to be rode wet and put away hard.

“Jesus build a fence,” she mumbled as the bedroom door closed behind them.

M
ay 2010, Havre, Montana

“I expect your papers on my desk no later than 5 pm on Monday.  Classes end on Wednesday and I have to have grades posted by the following Tuesday. No lates, no excuses, no failures, understood?” Assistant Professor Johnson told his class. It was grammatically incorrect, but it didn’t matter; the message was sound.

Amidst a flurry of grumbles, he ended his last class at the Montana State University at Northern Campus at Havre on a positive note.  Two weeks before, he had gotten the call from his father to come home to the ranch. The ranch was a place of many wonderful childhood memories and he often dreamt of returning there once he’d scored a book deal.  In his long-term plan, he wanted to turn the ranch into an upscale writing retreat for authors from all around the world. The Rocking J Writer’s Ranch was doodled on many notes and an entire notebook that had been dedicated to the project.  He’d even gone as far as having the engineering and architecture students to redesign the main house that sat on the family ranch. 

The Rocking J was one of the first cattle ranches in the state of Montana.  Years of Johnsons had ridden the land, grown crops, and raised children there. He planned to do the same, but in a different way.  Herding livestock was no longer lucrative.  It wasn’t good for a man’s health either.  Based on the call he’d received two weeks ago, his father had been thrown from his horse that was spooked by a rattlesnake, and now he was laid up flat on his back.

Chadwick, his older brother, had come home from Afghanistan a much different man than the one who had gone over.  Something was off about him.  His focus was solely on money.  He wanted the Rocking J as well, but only to dismantle it and sell it off in pieces to land developers and drilling companies.  There was too much fracking going on as it was, and the people of Helena didn’t deserve that sort of life. The portion of the 75 acres that Chad wasn’t planning to sell to oilers, he was going to turn into some fancy resort.

“Chad, I think we have a similar idea; maybe we can come to terms with it,” Billy Joe told his brother.

“The only terms I am interested in are your unconditional surrender, college boy,” Chad spat at him.

“Daddy doesn’t want us fighting...” he tried to tell his brother.

“Fine. Give up your share of the ranch and that will end the fighting,” Chad pushed.

“I can’t do that.  It’s as much my birthright as it is yours.  To sell it off to the highest bidder almost seems blasphemous, especially considering everything our parents and grandparents went through to hold on to this place,” he tried to reason with his brother.

“Case in point.  That is why we should sell it.  I see no reason to waste my life sitting atop a horse, pushing along cattle that are too dumb to know they are food,” Chad boasted.

“We can turn the ranch into something else and evolve the dream, but keep it in the family,” Billy Joe tried again.

Chadwick walked up real close to him, breathing the sour stench of his breath into his face, “When that old man dies, so does this family, college boy, and I am selling my half.  I can buy you out or you can share your half with riggers and Los Angeles types who want to get away from it all.”

The only thing Billy Joe wanted was to get away from Chad.  The three-month sabbatical that he took from the University turned into a year. At the end of the year, he buried his father in the family cemetery next to his mother as the mourners passed by to shake his hand and offer condolences.

Chad hung around the ranch long enough for the family attorney to meet with them.  To his surprise, Robert James Johnson did not leave the ranch to both of his sons; he only left it to one. Billy Joe was the sole heir to the family property that was heavily mortgaged and behind in taxes and that hadn’t turned a profit in years.

Billy Joe spent the next year trying to fix those issues.  With the help of his cousin, Avery, he was able to set up an account for online sales and began to sell some of the items that were of no use.  There were many items in the home that had no real value to him but to antique dealers, they were a treasure trove. In less than six months, the back taxes were paid off and everything was up to date.  The miscalculation of the gravity of the situation came when he went to refinance the mortgage.

His parents had taken out a second and third mortgage to pay for his college education. 
I had no idea
.  This also explained the reason for the loss of ranch hands and the reduction in livestock as well as Chadwick’s resentment.  All of the family’s resources were invested in him as if he were the last bastion of hope for the family to continue and thrive. There was far more truth to that than he realized.

One evening in the local bar, Billy Joe found, after liquoring up Ruddy, a family friend, that his brother Chadwick was unable to have children. Chad didn’t discuss whatever happened to him over there, but Ruddy, who was nobody’s buddy, had served with Chad and mentioned the injury. 

“If it were me, I would have let them put me down.  I can’t have a mangled piece of man meat to live with. Never being able to enjoy the pleasure of a woman again...would be too much for me,” Ruddy Kingman said.

“Let’s not speak of this again.  Chad doesn’t need to know that I was made aware,” Billy Joe told him.

“You talk real fancy,” Ruddy told him as he mocked his use of language.  “If you plan to get anything done around these parts, you might want to drop that college boy talk.”

The problem was Ruddy was right.  Even when he dialed down the talk, it didn’t smarten up the people.  Some of the women, beautiful and smart in their own ways, were not the caliber of woman he wanted at his side to build his vision of the writer’s retreat. Dating had become a burden to him.