One Bride for Five Mountain Men

But something else has changed, too. When Jake went to the cabin for what we thought was just a few days, just to get a break from the rest of us as he sometimes did, we had no idea what he would bring back with him. No one could have anticipated that Lola would be tossed into his arms by fate. And no one could have anticipated how she would have changed our lives.

It’s no mistake that we had a bedroom ready for her. At some point, I vaguely knew that a woman would enter our lives again. This house has thirteen bedrooms… I mean, it wasn’t much of a struggle to keep one ready, just in case. Timothy used to even joke about how he was setting up accommodations for “Little Red Riding Hood” in case she ever showed up.

But who would have thought that Little Red Riding Hood was going to be a red-haired, irresistible siren of woman? Someone who challenged every preconception I had about affection, and patience, and yes… even love.

Jake joins me in the study as he often does, silently pacing the perimeter of the room, looking out at the reporters who are not so subtle about trying to look in. He seems to have adjusted completely to our new lifestyle. No longer thought to be dead, now we are merely the weird billionaires who prefer to be recluses. It is not lost on me that we could have been that all along. Now that we have the liberty to go anywhere, we haven’t gone anywhere at all.

“Winter is coming,” he observes, squinting down at the surface of the lake. There are only two boats on the water right now. It gets cold quickly here, with a very short summer, abbreviated fall, and a long, long winter to come.

“Happens every year,” I observe.

“Do you want to stay here?” he asks. The words hang in the air.

“Jake, is there somewhere else you want to go?”

He turns to look at me, his brow knotted together. He raises his hands and then lets them drop to his thighs.

“If we stay here, we’ll be here all winter,” he says reasonably.

“Yes, that’s the way it’s always been,” I answer.

He begins to pace, his heels hard on the slate floor. Finally he turns to me again, clearly exasperated.

“If we stay here all winter,” he begins again, “we will miss all of it.”

I just stare back at him. I know exactly what he means. We will miss all of the pregnancy. She’s due in early summer, by my calculation.

“Jake, if she wanted us there, she would’ve told us.”

He points at the air between us, stabbing with his fingers. “You don’t know that! What if there were some reason… What if she felt like she couldn’t ask us?”

I shrug and sit down behind the big desk, dropping my chin into my palms.

“It’s up to her, isn’t it? She said she wanted to leave. What else could we do?”

“Fight for her!” he bellows. His voice echoes off the windows and back. “We could fight for her, Carty! How can you just sit there? Isn’t it just killing you?”

Breathing deeply, I try to settle my thoughts. It has been a struggle to not obsess on her every waking moment of the day.

“Jake, what if she doesn’t want to have anything to do with this? What if she hates us for some reason? Or what if she’s just busy? What if she’s forgotten?”

Jake arches his back, dragging his fingers through his hair and moaning in frustration.

“Carty, you’re my brother, and you know that I love you, right? But when it comes down to it, man, sometimes you are just a fucking coward!”

I stand up from the desk, leaning forward on my knuckles. “You don’t know!” I exclaim. “You don’t know how hard this is for me! That’s our child! I’m just trying to respect her wishes!”

“Fuck her wishes!” he yells, his voice so loud I can almost hear the dust sifting down from the rafters. “Carty, we are going. Whatever it takes, we are going. Tim has made all the arrangements, and you better be coming. I’ll see you on the helipad in fifteen minutes.”

As Jake storms from the room, I see Liam, Kill, and Timothy by the doorway with their arms crossed. They each shrug and nod as if to say, “Yep, that’s what’s going down.”

And yet, I have to say that the thing I feel now is relief. He’s right, and I know it. And he’s right that I was a coward, too.

We have to do this.

Chapter 20

Lola