“Some say you’ll sell, others say you Bennetts are like your mother, that Freedom Valley is where you’ll settle. That means you’ll be meeting Gwyneth upon occasion. Can you handle that? Or have you moved on since the last time you were moaning about how much you loved her?”
“Love can be evil and cold,” Tanner said, tilting his cola high. “It’s better to leave it behind.”
They sat on the stack of new lumber, facing the Smith ranch and sipped their colas in the shade of Anna’s biggest oak tree.
Tanner took a long, assessing look at his friend and Koby smirked knowingly. “Nope. Never thought about asking Gwyneth out. Rejection isn’t good for my psyche and besides that, it would seem incestuous, starting up with a good friend’s woman. But if we’re going to debate on the logic of women, we should do it in comfort—food, music and beer to ease the pain? In a righteous place where men come to understand the meaning of life and the intricacies of the female mind?”
Tanner lifted his eyebrow. “The Silver Dollar Tavern?”
Koby chugged the remainder of his cola and grinned. “I’ll make a few calls. The Women’s Council needs a little competition and we’ll have our own meeting. Now that you’re back, the rest of the pack will want in on this.”
Is the Women’s Council still shoving men around?” Tanner remembered all that his mother had said about the ten women who had come from all parts of the world to settle in Freedom Valley. They’d banded together for protection, setting the rules for potential suitors who had to pass standards before marriage.
“You betcha. My sister, Rita, wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s a widow now, with kids and a small farm, and she’s active in the Women’s Council. My brothers, Adam and Laird, scoff at the tradition and Rita jumps them. Those ten women in the 1880s may have needed protection by sticking together, but Freedom Valley’s women still have a fist hold on how a man treats a woman he wants. Our families are descended from those stubborn women who came to Montana and banded together, and times haven’t changed much.”
“So much for man’s country. Did you court your wife according to the Rules for Bride Courting?”
“I did, and so did any man around here who wanted to stay on the good side of the Women’s Council. You, my friend, did not. You rushed Gwyneth into marriage, and you’ve got a big red “Cull” marked on your backside. You may get a notice from the Women’s Council to appear before them, just to set you straight. They really enjoy defining the rules of a Cull to someone who’s been away. And you’re prime for their picking. I’m not coming to the funeral.”
Tanner took a long, deep breath filled with the scent of the newly mowed lawn. “Sometimes I wonder if things would have worked out—if I had followed the Rules for Bride Courting with Gwyneth… If I hadn’t pushed her into marrying me so quickly.”
Koby shrugged again, a man who had lost a wife and a baby. “You’ll figure it out. Every man has to come to terms with the past and the here and now.”
“You don’t intend to marry again, do you?” Tanner asked his friend.
“Nope. I had a good marriage. I was happy. That’s enough for me. It’s more than some people have in a lifetime. Your mother was like that—happy with what she had. You still have a football we could toss around later, old man?”
Tanner sat brooding, dawn filtering through the lace curtains of his mother’s quiet house. After the Bachelor Club’s impromptu reunion at the Silver Dollar, he’d picked up a few bruises in the late-night football game. He couldn’t sleep, his mind restless. He ran a finger over his mother’s journals, neatly stacked on the polished dining room table that had been passed down from Magda Claas, an ancestor on his mother’s side. Beside Anna’s journals was the prized English style teapot of a great-great grandmother on his father’s side. Lined across the antique buffet were small framed pictures of the Bennetts and their ancestors.
Memories circled the rooms, his sisters’ filled hope chests waiting upstairs in their rooms. Miranda and Kylie cared little for the tradition inherited from the Founding Mothers. His sisters had sprung into the outside world as he had done, only coming back to Freedom Valley to visit Anna. But his mother wanted them to have hope chests as she had had, and so for her, they embroidered hastily without really intending the use.
Young Gwyneth had fretted about her lack of a hope chest—old Leather hadn’t allowed her to spend “silly time embroidering and such.” Gwyneth had wanted to wait, to fill her hope chest as Tanner’s sisters were doing—but there wasn’t time and he’d pushed her….
Tanner ran his fingertip across the pineapple design of the table’s doily, his mother’s hook always flashing, a certain peace wrapped around her as she crocheted in the evenings, after the work was done. She’d learned from her mother and so on, the patterns handed down from Magda Claas. Kylie and Miranda never took time to learn, both of them too impatient.
He traced the frayed corners of the journals, letting his mother keep her secrets, her life, the thoughts that a woman would have at the end of the day. He’d seen her writing late at night, sometimes in bed. What gave her such strength to face raising her children, providing for them without a complaint?
Restless and unanswered questions prodding him, Tanner stood abruptly and scrubbed his hands across his unshaven jaw. Kylie and Miranda had promised to come back, to help sort their mother’s things, but right now, Tanner needed answers to the past. He stretched out his fingers, missing the boats that he loved to build, the smooth wood sliding beneath his touch. He placed his open hand on one journal, wishing his mother were here, alive and smiling, baking bread…
Was it his right to read his mother’s journals? Her private thoughts should remain her own and yet, he ached for his mother and wanted to hold her close.
He inhaled sharply and gently with one finger and the sense that he was prying, Tanner eased open one journal. He gently stroked the dried lavender stalk she’d pressed within the journal, the delicate fragrance wafting around him like memories. My Life his mother had written on the title page, the date just one year ago. “That night three years ago is stormy, just as my thoughts remain about the evil those men did to a sweet girl. I have never felt such anger in my life as when Gwyneth ran to me that night. The sight of her, torn and bleeding by those men’s rough hands, just three days before she was to marry my son haunts me,” she’d written in her precise, feminine hand. “I begged her to tell him before the wedding, and she couldn’t bear to hurt Tanner. She talked to me of it, how she tried to push herself, and knew she should tell Tanner. Yet she couldn’t. I kept my promise not to tell my son, but knew it was so wrong.”
Tanner frowned and with a sense that his mother had reached out to him, to help him understand, sat down to read.
Three
Men have dark sides, deep brooding creatures that they are, filled with arrogance and swaggering when they are proud of themselves. But if a woman can capture a good man, she can tame him with the softness of her heart. Men go in packs sometimes to protect themselves from being captured. They’re vulnerable creatures, needing petting and care, though they won’t admit it. The boy within the man wants to play, while the man has headier thoughts that can make a woman’s head spin.
—Anna Bennett
“Tanner Bennett, you are going to die,” Gwyneth muttered as she peered out her kitchen window into the stormy dawn. In the half-light, Tanner’s shaggy hair lifted in the wind and the powerful set of his broad shoulders stretched his T-shirt as he turned to set the plow’s tines into the earth. As if in rage, his metal tractor-monster tore by her ancient one, which had sputtered and died before finishing the new garden.
An experienced man from the country, Tanner knew how to tear away and open earth as though he were laying siege to her land…and