Page 41 of Before You Can Blink
Swallowing around the lump formed in my throat, I rasped a single word. “Home.”
That’s when her blue eyes went comically large, and her plush lips parted as an exhale rushed past them. “Home?”
“I bought it.”
Her gaze volleyed between me and the wooden structure. “The cabin?”
“Not just the cabin. All the land around it too,” I clarified.
She took a steadying breath, trying to process this new information. “How much land?”
“A lot. Roughly two thousand acres.”
“Two thousand.” Near-maniacal laughter sounded in the cabin. “What in the world are we going to do with all that?”
“Breed and raise horses.”
“Hor—” Daisy’s words halted abruptly before she tried again. “What about the rodeo?”
“Daze, I’m not going back to the rodeo.”
Stunned, she stared back at me, and that’s when I saw the relief written in her eyes. “You’re not?”
“No, baby.” I shook my head. “At least not as a competitor.”
Her eyebrows drew together, causing a wrinkle to form between them. “I don’t understand.”
“Won’t happen overnight—and it’s gonna take a hell of a lot of work—but the long-term plan is to get into stock contracting, to become the ones who supply the bucking horses that rodeos use at their events.”
“And we livethere?” She gestured to the cabin.
I lifted my good shoulder. “That’s the idea. I know it’s not much—”
“It’s not,” she agreed, cutting me off. “But we’ll make it ours.”
Her words were simple and few, but they filled me with hope. Against all odds, my wife was on board and willing to stand by my side as I navigated this new venture, which would hopefully provide stability for our family.
November
My toes had gone numb, turned to cubes of ice, which forced me to crawl out from beneath the blankets to feed more firewood into the cast-iron stove set at the far end of the single-room cabin. If it was this cold in fall, winter would be brutal.
The idea of Daisy suffering through that, pregnant no less, was like having a serrated knife shoved into my gut before being twisted for maximum impact.
I hated that we were essentially roughing it, almost as if we’d stepped back in time a century and a half to when the first settlers decided to stop their wagons and make this place their home. My wife deserved so much better than this, but any time I voiced that sentiment, she was quick to shut it down, declaring that she wasn’t some delicate little flower—like her name might suggest—and that we were building this new life together or not at all.
Daisy’s determination matched my own, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s the only way this was going to work.
Padding across the bare floorboards in the darkness, I threw two thick chunks of wood into the metal drum and latched it closed again. Hopefully, that would grant us a few more hours of heat before we needed to be up and about for the day.
I snagged a thick wool sweater off the back of the couch and threw it over my head before climbing back into bed, curling around my wife’s back.
She sighed when she felt my arms loop around her waist, where they automatically found her bump. The hard ridge was becoming more noticeable by the day, and already, flutters of excitement batted against my ribcage in anticipation of the moment we’d begin to feel movement beneath the taut skin.
God, if the Jett from even six months ago could see me now.
My lips found the crown of Daisy’s head, and I murmured, “Go back to sleep.”
No sooner had those words left my mouth than a sharp knock came at the front door.
