“Then, why did you and Mariah arrive together?” Lane asked, raising one dark eyebrow. Being a licensed psychologist, the man had a way of asking questions that cut right to the heart of the matter and in the process got the attention of everyone around him.
“You might as well tell them, Jaron,” Ryder said, grinning. “You know they won’t give you a minute’s peace until you do.”
“What do you know that we don’t?” Sam asked, giving Ryder a curious glance.
Ryder shook his head. “It’s Jaron’s news, not mine.”
“Okay, Jaron, give it up,” Sam said. “What’s going on with you and Mariah besides dancing around each other like two birds in a mating ritual?”
After explaining what happened three weeks ago at the Broken Spoke and what he’d learned about her losing her job and her roommate, he finished, “I needed a cook and a housekeeper and she needed a job. I offered her the position and she accepted. End of story.”
“And you think having Mariah in the kitchen is going to work out?” Sam laughed. “From what Bria has told me, Mariah isn’t known for her cooking abilities.”
Jaron couldn’t keep from grinning. “Yeah, I found that out when she set the kitchen on fire the first morning she tried to make breakfast.”
When they all stopped laughing, Nate asked, “Are you planning on losing some weight, bro?”
Jaron shook his head. “I made Mariah the ranch manager, and the first thing I had her do was to hire someone else to do the cooking and cleaning.”
“But you have a degree in ranch management,” Nate said, frowning. “What do you need with—” He stopped short, then, laughing out loud, got a hundred-dollar-bill out of his pocket and plunked it down on the bar. “I’ve got a hundred bucks that says you’ll be walking down the aisle by midsummer.”
“I say it’ll be sooner than that,” T.J. said, interrupting the kids’ rides around the pool table to fish his wallet out of his hip pocket. He plunked his hundred dollars on top of Nate’s. “They’ll be married by the end of May.”
“You’re both wrong,” Ryder said, looking at Jaron as if he was sizing him up. He put his money on top of the growing pile on the bar. “They’ll be married by the end of next month.”
“I’ve got this fall,” Lane spoke up, adding his bet to the pot.
“I’ll take Christmas,” Sam said, laying his money on top of the rest.
Disgusted with his brothers, Jaron shook his head as he finished off his beer. “You’re all wasting your time and money, because it’s not going to happen.”
Ryder tossed back the rest of his beer, then, throwing the empty bottle in the recycle bin, clapped Jaron on the shoulder. “If you’ll remember, we all said the same thing when we were the ones fighting the inevitable.” He laughed. “Get used to it, brother. You’re one step away from joining the rest of us in the club of the blissfully hitched.”
“Were you kicked in the head by a bull the last time you worked a rodeo?” Jaron asked. Before he’d retired at the ripe old age of thirty-five, Ryder had been a rodeo bullfighter and was without question the bravest man Jaron had ever known. But at the moment, he had serious questions about the man’s good sense.
“Gentlemen, I hate to interrupt your lively conversation, but dinner is ready,” Lane’s wife, Taylor, said from the doorway.
As he and his brothers filed out of the game room and walked down the hall to take their places at the dining room table, Jaron tried to forget about their speculation and their betting pool. Nothing would make him happier than to be free to have a wife and family like they all had. But that life would never be his, and there was no sense lamenting things that he knew he’d never have.
Even if he told Mariah about his old man and she was willing to take the chance that he hadn’t inherited some kind of latent cruel streak from him, Jaron wasn’t. There was no way he would ever subject his wife and kid to the kind of hell he and his mother had gone through. As far as Jaron was concerned, Simon Collier’s brand of crazy ended with him.
* * *
Seated at the dining room table with Bria on one side and Jaron on the other, Mariah waited until her sister was preoccupied with her son to reach beneath the tablecloth to place her hand on Jaron’s thigh. Other than clearing his throat, he remained completely stoic as he covered her hand with his.
“Bria, are you feeling better?” Lane asked.