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A Wedding To Remember
Joanna Sims
She's already forgotten, but can she forgive? After a near-fatal crash, Savannah Brand awakens to discover years have been wiped from her memory. What she does recall is her love for husband, Bruce, and their blissful life together. Then Bruce blindsides her with the news that preaccident Savannah had filed for divorce. Savannah can't believe it; she just wants to return to Sugar Creek Ranch with her husband.Bruce is hesitant, still reeling from the separation. But his love for Savannah hasn't wavered, not even during the tragedy that originally divided them—the accidental death of their baby boy. All Bruce ever wanted was Savannah back home, but she doesn't remember their loss. How can he ever disclose the reason she left, knowing it'll break her heart all over again?


She’s already forgotten, but can she forgive?
After a near-fatal crash, Savannah Brand awakens to discover years have been wiped from her memory. What she does recall is her love for husband, Bruce, and their blissful life together. Then Bruce blindsides her with the news that preaccident Savannah had filed for divorce. Savannah can’t believe it; she just wants to return to Sugar Creek Ranch with her husband.
Bruce is hesitant, still reeling from the separation. But his love for Savannah hasn’t wavered, not even during the tragedy that originally divided them—the accidental death of their baby boy. All Bruce ever wanted was Savannah back home, but she doesn’t remember their loss. How can he ever disclose the reason she left, knowing it’ll break her heart all over again?
“I didn’t file for divorce, Savannah. You did.”
Bewildered, she stared into his eyes, seeming to be searching for answers. “I did? Why? Why would I do that?”
“We had a lot of problems we just couldn’t seem to work out,” he told her honestly.
Savannah covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said, “I just want to go home.”
Bruce moved to her side; sitting on the edge of the bed, he pulled her hands down from her face and tugged her gently into his arms so he could comfort her in the only way he knew how. He ran his hand over the back of her hair, the way she always liked him to, and was relieved that instead of drawing away from him, Savannah leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Come home to me, Savannah.” Bruce hugged his wife, his eyes closed.
Savannah broke the embrace and studied his face, looked directly into his eyes again when she asked him, “Do you still love me?”
The cowboy answered firmly and without any hesitation, “Yes, beautiful. Yes, I do.”
* * *
The Brands of Montana: Wrangling their own happily-ever-afters
A Wedding to Remember
Joanna Sims


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
JOANNA SIMS is proud to pen contemporary romance for Mills & Boon Cherish. Joanna’s series, The Brands of Montana, features hardworking characters with hometown values. You are cordially invited to join the Brands of Montana as they wrangle their own happily-ever-afters. And, as always, Joanna welcomes you to visit her at her website: www.joannasimsromance.com (http://www.joannasimsromance.com).
Dedicated to my dear friend Madhu.
An exceptional woman
who recently rediscovered romance.
I love you.
Contents
Cover (#u10a70940-0ec2-5a53-85ca-3736ed84b3cf)
Back Cover Text (#uebeb375a-a0ca-51f0-901d-f7e0656f5908)
Introduction (#u32e10ad7-5c04-5d1b-9aff-5243d542167f)
Title Page (#u9fc45c98-b9a3-55f1-b4e6-479ff0d82f63)
About the Author (#u62b879f4-0740-50b7-8485-88e21d08ec58)
Dedication (#u892b99cb-db63-520c-be94-8f67d165876f)
Chapter One (#u801e40d5-50b7-520e-9c44-caffd27acbd9)
Chapter Two (#u45fcf3a9-66d5-5bba-be9b-cd8b9a4ed16a)
Chapter Three (#u3822203a-0ae2-5f19-9643-9ea30e874087)
Chapter Four (#ue1e79e56-df3f-5950-a7e6-508fcb1b3278)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ud8f01039-7dcf-54c7-b406-718b5a999281)
“Hello?”
It was the middle of the night, but for the last week Bruce Brand had been sleeping lightly, waiting for any news from the hospital. Savannah, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, had been in a coma after a near-fatal car accident.
“She’s awake.” It was Carol, his mother-in-law, on the other end of the call.
Bruce tossed the covers off his body, sat up on the edge of the bed and dropped his head into the palm of his free hand. “Thank God. Jesus—thank God.”
“She’s been asking for you,” Carol added after a pause.
Bruce lifted his head in surprise. “Asking for me?”
“Yes,” Carol confirmed matter-of-factly. “Will you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
Not thinking, just acting, Bruce stood up as he was ending the call. He grabbed his jeans, which were draped over a chair in the corner of the room, and tugged them on. With his jeans pulled up but still unzipped, he pushed the pillows off the chair, sat down and shoved his foot into his boot.
“What’s going on?” Kerri, the woman he’d been dating for the last six months or so, flipped on the light.
“Savannah’s awake.” Bruce rose after his boots were on.
In the yellow glow of the lamp, the nipples of her full, naked breasts peeking through her wavy, sun-bleached blond hair, Kerri wore an expression of disappointment mixed with resignation on her pretty girl-next-door face.
“And she asked for you,” Kerri stated in a monotone as she pulled the sheet up over her breasts and held it in place with her arms pinned to her sides.
Bruce didn’t bother tucking in his T-shirt; he ran his fingers through the front of his silver-laced black hair several times to push it off his forehead before he put his cowboy hat on. He checked to make sure his wallet was in his back pocket, then grabbed the keys to his truck off the top of the dresser.
“I’m sorry. I have to go.” When he leaned in to kiss her on the lips, she turned her head so her mouth was just out of reach.
Bruce straightened; he understood Kerri well enough to know that this was the beginning of a fight they were going to have later.
Kerri looked up at him, and he genuinely regretted the raw hurt he could easily read in her eyes.
“If this hadn’t happened,” Kerri reminded him, “you’d already be divorced.”
She was right about that. He’d spent the last two years paying for his lawyer to fight with Savannah’s lawyer. He’d received the final draft of the divorce agreement a couple of days before the accident. For now, the divorce was on hold. And, even though they hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, legally he was Savannah’s husband.
“She’s still my wife,” Bruce paused in the doorway to say. “I’ll call when I can.”
* * *
The night of Savannah’s accident, and every day since, had felt more like a surreal dream sequence than reality. For the last week, when he wasn’t working, he was with the Scott family, crammed into the small waiting room designated for families who had a loved one in the critical care unit. Truth be told, he’d never expected to speak to any of Savannah’s kin again, much less spend several hours a day in a confined space with them drinking burnt coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and trying to make sense out of the sudden detour his life had just taken.
When he arrived at the hospital, the feeling in the waiting room had changed dramatically from somber to celebratory. Savannah’s two sisters, Joy and Justine, were smiling with tears of relief and happiness drying on their faces. The peaches-and-cream color had returned to Carol’s plump face, and John, Savannah’s burly father, was actually smiling broadly enough so that the tips of his upper teeth, normally hidden from view behind his thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, were visible. But there was one person in the room who didn’t seem to be happy at all.
“Hi, Carol.” Bruce stopped next to Carol and the cowboy Savannah had been dating. He didn’t offer his hand when he said, “Leroy.”
Beside the fact that the cowpoke was dating his wife, Bruce had a hard time keeping his cool around Leroy. It was Leroy’s high-powered muscle car that Savannah had been driving the night of the accident. Leroy had been in the passenger seat and had walked away from the accident with a broken wrist and a couple of scrapes and bruises, while Savannah had shattered the windshield with her skull.
Leroy had a stricken look on his narrow face. “She doesn’t remember me.”
Carol put her hand on Leroy’s arm to comfort him. “She will, Leroy. The doctor said that it may take a couple of days. We just have to be patient and give her some time.”
The cowpoke left with his head bent down, and it occurred to Bruce, for the first time, that Leroy was in love with Savannah.
“What’s he talking about?” he asked Carol.
The Scott clan closed ranks and surrounded him as if they were worried he would try to escape.
Now Carol’s hand was on his arm. “Savannah’s neurologist thinks she may be experiencing some...temporary memory loss.”
No one spoke for a second, but all of the Scotts were watching him like a cat watching fish in a fishbowl. “How temporary?”
“They don’t know.” John spoke directly to him for the first time, instead of communicating through his wife and daughters as was his usual route.
“Bruce.” Carol’s fingers tightened on his arm. “Savannah doesn’t seem to remember the divorce.”
Until right then, Bruce hadn’t felt like he needed to sit down. Now he did. Wordlessly, he took a couple of steps backward and settled in a nearby chair.
Savannah’s family moved as one unit as they followed him, making loud scraping noises on the floor as they pulled chairs closer to him, boxing him in again. Bruce realized now that Savannah’s tight-knit family wasn’t trying to protect him—they were trying to make sure he didn’t leave.
As much as his in-laws knew about Savannah’s condition and potential recovery, they shared with him. Savannah was awake and talking; her speech was a little slurred, but she was making sense. But she had lost, at least temporarily, memory of the last several years. As far as Savannah was concerned, there was no divorce, they hadn’t spent the last two years fighting through their lawyers and she had never moved out of their home. In her mind, they were still happily married. Now he understood why she had been asking for him. Savannah needed her husband.
* * *
Waking up from a coma had felt like swimming up to the surface from the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pool. Savannah had felt tingly all over right before the awareness of the throbbing, stabbing pain coming from the left side of her head along with the achiness and stiffness that she felt all over the rest of her body. She had been petrified, unable to understand why she was in a hospital hooked up to monitors with needles in her arms. She didn’t have any memory of the accident; the last thing she could remember was kissing Bruce goodbye as he left to start his day on the Brand family ranch. Her husband, her one and only true love, was the first person she asked for when she had awakened from the coma. Savannah could count on Bruce to make everything okay for her. He always did. So, when she finally saw her husband walk through the doorway of her hospital room, Savannah reached out to him weakly, palm facing up, and the tears of confusion and terror she had been holding back began to flow unbidden.
“It’s okay, Savannah.” Bruce quickly dried her tears with a tissue. “I’m here now.”
She tried to pull the full-face oxygen mask off, so she could talk to him, to tell him that she loved him, but he stilled her hand by taking it into his and holding on to it firmly.
“You have to get your strength back,” Bruce told her.
The mask on her face made her feel claustrophobic, and she wanted to talk. Perhaps her memory was fuzzy about the events that had landed her in the hospital, but she had very distinct memories of her family and Bruce and nurses and doctors all talking around her when she was in the coma. She could hear them murmuring, but no matter how hard she tried to respond, she couldn’t. Now that she could talk, she wanted to talk.
“I love you,” she said, her words muffled by the mask.
Bruce looked at her with an expression she couldn’t place. Why didn’t he respond right away, as he always had before?
Finally, he squeezed her fingers gently, reassuringly. “I love you.”
Behind the mask, her smile was frail, her eyelids slipping downward from exhaustion.
“I’d better let you get some rest.” The sound of Bruce’s voice made her fight to open her eyes.
When he tried to let go of her hand, she held on, moving her thumb over the empty spot where his wedding band should be.
“Ring?” Her voice was so raspy from having a trachea tube down her throat.
Again, an odd expression flashed in Bruce’s sapphire-blue eyes as he glanced down at the ring finger of his left hand.
“It’s at home.”
“My...ring?”
“I have it,” Bruce told her after he dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “I have your wedding ring.”
* * *
Retrograde amnesia secondary to traumatic brain injury and stroke. Bottom line, according to Savannah’s neurologist: Savannah had lost large swaths of her memory. With time and patience, some, or even all, of her memories could return. Until then...
“What are you suggesting that I do, Carol?” Bruce asked his mother-in-law in a lowered voice. “Move her back to the ranch?”
“We’ve all tried to talk her into coming home with us, but she wants to be with her husband.” Carol’s eyes were wide with concern. “She wants to be with you.”
Bruce held up his left hand to show Carol his wedding ring. “All she’s been talking about for the last two days is getting back into her own bed.”
Savannah had been moved to a regular hospital room soon after she had regained consciousness. Her appetite was healthy, she was laughing and talking. Her speech was still a little slurred from the dysarthria, her right hand was a little weak after the ministroke she had sustained, and of course, there was the memory loss. But even with all that, the doctors were getting ready to discharge her and continue with her care as an outpatient. Considering her near-death experience, Savannah was making a quick recovery.
“I know it. I know it.” Carol’s brows furrowed worriedly. “It’s gonna break her sweet heart when she finds out the truth.”
They had all hoped that Savannah’s memory would return on its own; none of them, including him, wanted to be the one to bring her up to speed on her failed marriage. But her discharge date was barreling toward them with no sign that she had any inkling that they were a signature away from being divorced.
Carol seemed to have something on her mind that she had been skirting ever since he had arrived at the hospital. He had a feeling he knew exactly what his mother-in-law was thinking.
“Would it be such a horrible thing if Savannah moved back to Sugar Creek with you?” she asked him after a couple of silent moments.
Bruce knew it was only a matter of time before Carol asked this question. It was a question that had crossed his own mind a time or two. But it wasn’t that simple. Savannah hadn’t lived at the ranch with him for a long while. And although he hadn’t changed much since she had left, she didn’t have clothing or personal items at the ranch.
“Maybe this could be a second chance for the two of you,” Carol added.
Carol had always wanted their marriage to work, and had always advocated for spending their attorneys’ fees on more marriage counseling.
“You still love her. Even after all that’s happened.” His mother-in-law looked up into his face hopefully. “Don’t you?”
“I’ll always love her,” he admitted because it was true. And even as angry as he had been with Savannah after all of the fighting and money wasted on attorneys fees, seeing her unconscious in critical care slammed home the truth for him: he still loved her.
Carol’s eyes welled with tears. She put her hands on his arm. “And she loves you.”
Savannah did love him. Again. It felt bizarre to walk into her hospital room and be greeted with that sweet, welcoming smile he’d first fallen in love with, her hazel-green eyes filled with love and her arms outstretched for a hug. In an odd twist of fate, Savannah was back to being the woman he had married. In an odd twist of fate, Savannah was back in his life.
“Now,” Bruce reminded Carol. “She loves me now. What happens when her memory comes back and she remembers that she doesn’t love me anymore?”
* * *
“I just want to go home,” Savannah complained to her husband. “I’m so tired of being here. All night long, people are barging into my room, taking my blood pressure, pumping me full of fluids! How can they expect anyone to get better in this place if they won’t let us sleep? I’m exhausted, and it’s all their fault.”
When Bruce arrived at the hospital after giving directions to his crew of cowboys at the ranch, Savannah was sitting up in a chair next to her bed.
“Can’t you bust me out of this place? I want to sleep in my own bed, with my own pillows.” His wife pointed to the small, rectangle pillow on the hospital bed. “That horrible thing is a brick disguised as a pillow.”
Every time he came to see Savannah in the hospital, she said something that made him laugh. Perhaps that was one of the initial qualities he had liked about her the first time he’d really taken notice of her. She was funny—funnier than any female he’d ever known. And although they had gone to school together virtually all of their lives, they hadn’t moved in the same cliques. Savannah had been on the honor roll and sang in the choir and was heavily involved with the school paper and the Beta Club for high achievers.
He’d been the captain of the football team, the popular kid, who happened to be going steady with Kerri Mahoney, the head of the cheerleading squad. He could barely remember seeing her in the halls at school when, as a junior at Montana University conducting research for a bachelor’s thesis, Savannah came out to Sugar Creek Ranch looking to study the grazing patterns of their cows. He would never forget how she looked that day—so serious with her round-rimmed glasses, loaded down with an overstuffed computer bag, and the ivory skin of her face devoid of makeup. Savannah hadn’t been the least bit interested in him. All of her focus was on his cattle. It had been a rare blow to his ego.
“Let’s get you out of this room. Go for a walk.”
With one hand, Savannah held on to the rolling stand that held her IV drip, and with the other hand, she held on to his arm. He had to cut his stride in half to make sure that he didn’t push her to go faster than her body could handle.
“I feel a breeze on my left butt cheek,” Savannah told him. “Take a peek back there for me, will you, and make sure my altogether is altogether covered.”
Bruce smiled as he ducked his head back to check out her posterior parts. “You’re good.”
Halfway down the hall, the pallor of Savannah’s oval face turned pasty-white. She swayed against him, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.
“Whoa—we’ve gone far enough for today.”
She didn’t put up a fight when he helped her make a U-turn so he could take her back to her room. He didn’t want to wear her out completely; he still needed to have a serious talk with Savannah. Her doctors were ready to discharge her, and she was ready to leave. If she still wanted to go home to Sugar Creek after he told her the truth about the divorce, he was willing to take her back to the ranch with him. But she had to know the truth. It was her right to know.
He’d already discussed the best way to tell Savannah about the divorce with her doctors and her family. They all agreed that he could tell her privately, but that Carol and John would be on standby in case Savannah needed their emotional support. Bruce had never dreaded a conversation like he dreaded the one he was about to have with his wife. He didn’t want to hurt her—even when he had been at his angriest with her, he’d never wanted to hurt her.
After he got her settled back in bed, and the nurses had taken her vital signs and administered medication, Bruce pulled a chair up next to Savannah. He took her hand in his, and it surprised him how easy it was to fall right back into the habit of holding her hand.
“What’s bothering you?” Savannah asked him.
Bruce ran his finger over the diamond encrusted platinum wedding band that he had just recently slipped back onto her finger. Savannah didn’t remember the day she had taken that ring off and put it on the kitchen counter before she left their home for good. That memory was burned into his brain. He only wished he could erase it. After she’d left, he’d held that ring in his hand for hours, plotting its demise. He thought to throw it away, crush it in the garbage disposal, flush it, melt it down or pawn it. But in the end, he’d thrown it into a dresser drawer, mostly forgotten, until the early-morning hour when Savannah asked about it.
“You’ve lost a lot of time, Savannah.” Bruce started in the only way he knew how.
Fear, fleeting but undeniable, swept over her face. She was scared—scared about the memories she’d lost—and scared that they weren’t going to come back.
“Once I get back to my own home, surrounded by all of the things that I love, I really think that it’ll all come back.” Savannah had an expectant look on her face. “Don’t you?”
He wanted to reassure her, but he wasn’t as optimistic. She’d lost so much in the accident—it was hard for him to believe that Savannah would ever be exactly as she once was.
“I’d like to think.” Bruce tried to take the long way around.
“I just need to go home,” she restated. “That’s all. I just need to go home.”
Still holding on to her hand, Bruce cleared his throat. “Well—that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”
With her head resting on the pillow, her dark brown hair fanned out around her face, her eyes intent on him, Savannah waited for him to continue.
“There’s a lot that’s gone on between us, Savannah. A lot that you don’t remember.”
Savannah’s fingers tightened around his fingers, that look of fear and discomfort back in her eyes. “You’re scaring me.”
He didn’t want to scare her—and he told her as much.
“Just tell me what’s on your mind, Bruce.”
Her entreaty was faint and laced with uneasiness. Savannah had always been a “pull the Band-Aid off quick” kind of person. She didn’t like to draw things out.
Bruce had spent the last two years fighting like cats and dogs with this woman, and now all he wanted to do was protect her from the pain they had willingly caused each other. He dropped his head for a moment and shook it. The only way out was forward.
“For the last couple of years, we’ve been going through a divorce,” Bruce finally mustered the guts to tell her. The sound of her sharp intake of breath brought his eyes back to hers. The look in her eyes could only be described as stunned.
Savannah looked down at their hands, at their wedding rings. She swallowed several times, her eyes filling with unshed tears, before she asked, “You weren’t wearing your ring. When I first saw you. You weren’t wearing it. Are we even...married?”
He held on to her hand even though it seemed as if she were already trying to pull it away. How many times had he wished for a second chance with Savannah? He hadn’t wanted it this way—never this way—but he would be a fool to let her slip away from him a second time without putting up one heck of a fight.
“We’re still married,” he reassured her. It wasn’t important, right at this moment, for Savannah to know just how close they had come to ending their marriage.
“I don’t remember...” Savannah stopped midsentence, tears slipping unchecked onto her cheeks.
“It’s going to be okay, Savannah.” He felt impotent to console her. There weren’t words that could make this right for her.
Savannah stared at him hard, with a look of distrust in her eyes. “How can you say that? We’ve split up, but it’s going to be fine? Why would you want a divorce? What happened to us?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she tugged her fingers loose from his hold.
“Tell me why.”
How could he explain the last several years of their marriage in a sentence or two? There were things that they had all agreed that Savannah didn’t need to know right now.
“I didn’t file for divorce, Savannah. You did.”
Bewildered, she stared into his eyes, seeming to be searching for answers. “I did? Why? Why would I do that?”
“We had a lot of problems we just couldn’t seem to work out,” he told her honestly.
Savannah covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said, “I just want to go home.”
Bruce moved to her side; sitting on the edge of the bed, he pulled her hands down from her face and tugged her gently into his arms so he could comfort her in the only way he knew how. He ran his hand over the back of her hair, the way she always liked him to do, and was relieved that, instead of drawing away from him, Savannah leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Come home to me, Savannah.” Bruce hugged his wife, his eyes closed.
Savannah broke the embrace and studied his face, looking directly into his eyes again when she asked him, “Do you still love me?”
The cowboy answered firmly and without any hesitation, “Yes, Beautiful. Yes, I do.”
Chapter Two (#ud8f01039-7dcf-54c7-b406-718b5a999281)
“So, this is over.” Kerri had been sitting across from him at her small kitchen table, not saying a word, arms crossed in front of her body.
Bruce sat stiffly in the chair opposite Kerri. He’d never felt truly comfortable at Kerri’s table—the chairs were too small, the table too low. Today, he felt uncomfortable for a whole new set of reasons.
“I’m sorry.” He apologized for the second time. His apology may have sounded hollow to Kerri’s ears, but it was sincere. If he’d known that he had even a fraction of a shot of winning Savannah back, he’d never have rekindled his old high school romance with Kerri. He wasn’t in the business of breaking hearts for the fun of it.
“You’re sorry.” Kerri made a little sarcastic laugh as she looked out the kitchen window. “Well, that makes it all better then, doesn’t it?”
Bruce stared at the woman he’d cared about for most of his life. Her forgiveness could be a long time coming.
Bruce stood up and grabbed his hat off the table. “I’d better go.”
Kerri didn’t look at him. She gave a small, annoyed shake of her head, but she refused to look at him even as he opened the door to leave.
“If you ever need me, I’m just a phone call away.” Bruce paused in the entranceway, the door half-open.
Kerri hadn’t said a word, hadn’t looked his way once, and there were tears flowing freely onto her cheek.
“Take care of yourself,” Bruce said before he ducked out of the door, choked up at the sight of Kerri’s tears. He cared an awful lot about Kerri. He always had. But Savannah was his heart.
* * *
“Home!” Savannah exclaimed as she walked through the back door of the modest log cabin they had designed and built together. “I’m finally home!”
Bruce had never thought to hear those words come out of his wife’s mouth again. He followed her into the mudroom, carrying in each hand two heavy suitcases packed by her family. They were greeted by three dogs, mutts all, tails wagging, barking excitedly. Savannah immediately fell to her knees and hugged the large dogs around their necks, calling two of the dogs by name, and laughing as the rescue mutts knocked her backward while fighting for the chance to lick her on the face.
Bruce dropped the suitcases with a loud thud so he could intervene. “Whoa, sit, boys!”
“I’m okay.” Savannah reassured him, now sitting cross-legged on the wood floor, her arms still wrapped around Buckley’s furry neck. “I’ve missed you guys so much!”
Savannah had never shied away from the dogs giving her a tongue bath on her face, not since the first day she had come out to Sugar Creek. Bruce decided to join in on the reunion instead of trying to control it. He rubbed Buckley between the ears, his favorite spot, while Savannah showed some individual love and attention to Murphy.
With a happy laugh, Savannah turned her attention to the dog he had rescued off the side of the road. “And who are you?”
“That’s Hound Dog.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Hound Dog.” His wife smiled at the tan-and-black dog with long floppy ears before she turned her eyes his way. “How long have we had him?”
Bruce stood up and held out his hand to help his wife onto her feet.
“I haven’t had him for all that long. Six months, maybe. Found him on the side of I-90, dehydrated, half-starved. An infection in one of his paws so bad the vet thought we might have to amputate.”
Bruce rubbed Hound Dog’s head. “It shows you what a little love can do.”
Savannah gazed up at him with an appreciative look in her eyes. She tucked her hand under his arm and leaned into his side. “You’ve never been able to ignore an animal in need.”
Instinctively, his body tensed. Yes, he had become used to holding Savannah’s hand in the hospital, and, yes, he still loved her. But he was having a difficult time accepting all of those little intimate touches that were a part of married life. It had been years since Savannah wanted to touch him; post-accident, Savannah seemed to want to touch him all the time, like she had when they were first married. It was unnerving.
Bruce tried not to be obvious when he took a step away from her. “Let’s get you settled.”
Once in the master bedroom, he hoisted the two suitcases, one at a time, onto their queen bed. Savannah had opened the door to the cedar-lined walk-in closet and strode inside. He found her standing in the center of the closet, quietly staring at all of the empty rods and shoe racks on what had been her side of the closet.
“Everything okay?”
The color had drained from her face; her arms were crossed tightly in front of her body. Her slender shoulders were slumped forward, and she seemed to be emotionally swallowed up much in the same way her torso was swallowed up by the sweatshirt she had insisted on wearing home. “I really left.”
It was a statement, even though there was a question in her voice. She wanted to know what had happened—she wanted to know why she had left. But they had all agreed—her doctors, her family—that it would be better on Savannah to wait a couple of weeks before that subject was broached.
“Hey.” Bruce wanted to distract her before she started to ask the next inevitable questions. “Why don’t we tackle this later? I’m starved. How ’bout you?”
Savannah shrugged noncommittally. “If you’re hungry, I’ll try to eat.”
Bruce held out his hand to his wife, palm facing up. After a moment, Savannah shut off the closet light and slipped her hand into his. At least for now, he had diverted her from the inevitable conversation about the reason behind their split. For now, he had his wife back.
* * *
Her first night out of the hospital was a strange mixture of joy, relief, confusion and discomfort. As much as Bruce tried to act “normal” around her, his body language didn’t lie. He felt uncomfortable having her back in the home, and she knew it by the little nervous laugh he would make after trying to explain the changes in their home. At first glance, the house had seemed the same. But after the initial blast of relief subsided, Savannah started to notice little differences. She loved to collect refrigerator magnets, and all of her magnets were gone from the simple black refrigerator in their galley kitchen. Her favorite “chicken and egg” salt and pepper shakers she had picked up in a yard sale had been replaced with generic shakers from the grocery store. How could all of those little touches make such a big difference in the feel of the home? It was as if she had been deliberately erased.
For a moment, she closed her eyes, pushing back a wave of sadness. What a cruel trick, this head injury. She could remember the early part of their married lives together, but couldn’t remember what led them to separate. She couldn’t remember ever being apart from Bruce. It was so...unfair.
“D’you get enough to eat?” Bruce broke her train of thought.
Savannah opened her eyes and put her hand on the spot on the fireplace mantel where their mismatched compilation of family photos had once been kept. She nodded her head, not turning to face him. Suddenly, the excitement of being home and the realization, if not the actual memory, that she had left the home she had built and loved, struck her like another blow to her head. Her fingers tightened on the rough-hewn mantel that Bruce had crafted by hand; she felt herself sway and the room began to spin.
“Whoa!” She heard Bruce’s deep voice, felt his large, warm hand on her elbow to steady her. “What happened?”
Savannah closed her eyes and swallowed back the feeling of nausea. “My head is killing me.”
“We overdid it.”
“Yes.” Her response was weak, more from sadness than loss of strength.
Bruce put his arm around her shoulder for support. “Let’s get you to bed.”
She nodded her agreement. Bed was exactly what she needed. She wanted to snuggle down into her own bed, with her own mattress and pillows, and pull the comforter up over her head so she could shut the world out for a bit. Savannah left Bruce and the dogs in the bedroom while she got ready for bed in the bathroom. She had never shut the door on her husband before when she moved through her nightly routine, yet tonight felt different.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Bruce told her through the closed door.
“Okay,” she said after she spit toothpaste into the sink.
After she was done digging out her toiletries from her small carry-on bag, Savannah sat on the edge of the tub and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She tried to tuck her longish bangs behind her ear so she could lightly touch the large, rectangular bandage on her forehead. The right side of her face was still puffy with green-and-yellow bruising around her right eye and cheek. Small cuts and scratches on her nose and chin, already on their way to healing, had scabbed over. In her opinion, she looked like a hot mess, but not just because of the bruises and scratches and bandage. She didn’t like her hair at all; sometime during the lost years, she had decided to go with bangs, blond streaks and layers. Three of her most hated hairstyle don’ts! What had possessed her to do that? It looked awful.
After a long inhale and exhale, Savannah pulled a face before she stood up cautiously and opened the bathroom door. In her favorite flannel long-sleeved pajamas, she faced the four males in her life. Buck and Hound Dog had already staked out their spots on the bed, while Murphy, the dog that had always favored her, was waiting patiently just on the other side of the bathroom threshold. Bruce was standing on the far side of the bed—her side of the bed—waiting for her. He seemed awkward and stiff to her, and there was a concerned look in his striking blue eyes.
She spoke to the concern she saw in his eyes as she bent down to pet Murphy on the head. “I’m okay. Just really tired.”
Bruce had pulled the sheets and comforter back so she could easily slide into bed. As she walked by him, he held his body stiff and away from her. Her husband gave her a dose of her medicine, redressed the bandage on her head and then pulled the covers up to her chest after she lay back on the pillows.
“I haven’t been tucked into bed since I was a kid,” she mused, her eyes intent on Bruce’s face.
“I won’t do it anymore if it bothers you.” Bruce switched off the light on the nightstand.
“No,” she said faintly. “It makes me feel...”
Loved by you, cared for by you—
“Safe,” she finished after a pause.
In the low light from the hallway, Savannah saw the smallest of smiles drift across Bruce’s handsome face.
“Sleep well.” He turned away from the bed.
Savannah had slipped her hand out from beneath the comforter to catch his hand.
“I love you.” They had never gone to bed without telling each other that they loved each other—not that she could remember, anyway. It had been their promise to each other—never go to bed mad. Never go to bed without saying “I love you.”
Bruce turned back to her, his eyes so intent on her face. After a squeeze of her fingers, Bruce replied, “I love you more.”
* * *
After tucking Savannah into bed, Bruce went through the motions of cleaning up the kitchen, starting the dishwasher and letting the dogs out one last time. Normally, his three canine companions would stick to his side like glue, following him from room to room. Tonight was different. All three dogs opted to return to the bedroom, to get back into bed with Savannah. He’d felt so lonely after Savannah had left him, that he often found any reason not to be inside the house until he was ready to fall into bed. And he had counted on the dogs to fill some of the void left by his wife.
Now, sitting on the couch in the living room, the only light provided by the three-quarter moon glowing in the purple-black sky, Bruce felt more alone than ever. Having Savannah’s energy back in the house, when he thought to never have it back, had been more of a shock to his system than he had expected. Even though it had felt like the heart had been hollowed out of the house, he supposed he had grown accustomed to it.
He hadn’t discussed the sleeping arrangements with Savannah—he assumed that she understood that they wouldn’t be sharing a bed. He’d turned the second bedroom into a storage room, so his only option was the couch. He had moved his necessary toiletries into the spare bathroom, and that was where he prepared for bed. Wearing only his gray boxer briefs, Bruce lay back on the couch, stuffing two of the couch pillows beneath his head. With a tired sigh, he pulled the blanket draped over the back of the sofa down over his torso. The blanket smelled strongly of wet dog; Bruce pushed the blanket down to cover his groin, and far enough away from his nose not to be distracted by the smell. He’d wash the blanket tomorrow.
Arm behind his head, the cowboy stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the log cabin, his mind racing with “what if” scenarios revolving around Savannah and her missing memories. It was a good long while before he could finally close his eyes and fall into a fitful sleep. But this sleep, as restless as it was, didn’t last long. At first, he thought that he had dreamed the sound of dogs barking in the distance; it wasn’t until he felt a dog licking him on the side of his face and mouth that he began to awaken.
“What?” Bruce asked Murphy as he sat up while at the same time wiping his hand over his mouth to clean away the dog’s saliva.
Murphy disappeared back into the bedroom and joined the other two dogs barking. Bruce stood up, expecting to go tell the dogs to be quiet so they wouldn’t awaken Savannah, but then his wife cried out, the words muffled by the barking.
“Savannah!” Bruce rushed to his wife’s side.
“Can you hear me! Can you hear me!” Savannah was sitting up in bed, crying, her head in her hands. “Why can’t you hear me!”
Bruce switched on the light near the bed, and guided the dogs away from Savannah so he could sit down next to her on the bed.
“Hey.” He made her lift her head so he could see her face. She looked terrified, sweat mingled with tears on her flushed cheeks, her eyes wide.
Still crying, Savannah lurched forward and wrapped her arms around his body. “I was screaming and screaming and screaming and no one could hear me. Not you, not Mom, not Dad. No one.”
Bruce rested his head on the top of hers and let her cry it out on his shoulder. “You’re safe, Savannah. It was just a bad dream.”
After she took a couple of deep, steadying breaths, he leaned back so he could see her face. Bruce brushed the sweat-dampened hair off his wife’s forehead, then held her face gently in his hands and wiped her tears away with his thumbs.
“Please, stop calling me Savannah,” his wife said, her face crumpling as if she were about to start crying again.
Savannah pulled back from him a little; he dropped his hands from her face.
“You only call me Savannah when we fight,” she added when he didn’t respond right away.
It was true—he called her “Beautiful.” He had rarely used her first name during their courtship and their marriage. But for the last year, he’d called her Savannah exclusively.
“All right,” he agreed. What else could he do but agree?
Savannah went to the restroom while he went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water. When he returned, his wife was back in bed surrounded by his traitorous canines.
“Guys, you need to get down,” Bruce said to the dogs. Savannah barely had enough room to sleep.
“No,” Savannah said quickly, almost dribbling her sip of water. “I want them here.”
At this moment, he would have granted Savannah just about anything. He hated to see her cry—it broke his heart when she cried.
He waited while Savannah finished the glass of water; he took the empty glass. “Better?”
She nodded, pulling on a loose thread in the pattern of the comforter. After a minute, she looked up at him. “Where were you?”
Bruce was about to switch off the light again, but straightened instead. He sent Savannah a questioning gaze.
“When I woke up, you weren’t in bed.” Her eyes slid over to the undisturbed pillows and comforter on his side of the bed.
They hadn’t discussed the sleeping arrangement—she hadn’t brought it up and neither had he. Perhaps it was sheer cowardice that had stopped him from broaching the subject; he figured that Savannah would assume that he would be sharing their marital bed as usual. He’d known all along that he intended to sleep on the couch.
Bruce swallowed hard and pushed his hair back off his face. “I think I should sleep on the couch for a while.”
Savannah couldn’t hide the hurt she felt, and he closed his eyes for a split second to block out the pain he could see in her eyes before he continued. “I know this is hard for you, Savannah,”
She had dropped her eyes, but raised them when he used her first name.
“Beautiful,” he corrected. “I’m sorry. I just need a minute to—” he paused, his forehead wrinkled with his own pain “—adjust.”
They said good-night for the second time that night; the three dogs stayed faithfully with Savannah while he returned, alone, to the couch and the smelly blanket. If their first night was any indication of how difficult it was going to be to have Savannah back at Sugar Creek Ranch, it promised to be a tough row to hoe—for the both of them.
Chapter Three (#ud8f01039-7dcf-54c7-b406-718b5a999281)
“Well, where the hell is she?” Jock Brand demanded. “Why the hell didn’t you bring her with you?”
Bruce arrived at Sugar Creek’s traditional Sunday brunch without Savannah, much to the unabashed displeasure of his father.
As Jock’s eldest of eight children from two marriages, Bruce had learned to ignore most of his father’s bluster and salty language long ago. He leaned down to kiss his stepmother, Lilly, on her soft, light brown cheek, before taking his seat at the long formal dining table.
“I let her sleep in,” Bruce told his father. “She needs the rest.”
He didn’t add that he didn’t want Savannah to feel overwhelmed by his family right off the bat; Sunday brunch was the one time when they converged on the ranch. And when the talk turned to politics, as it often did, yelling and fist-banging on the table were as common a fare as eggs and bacon.
“A hearty breakfast and hard work,” Jock countered loudly. “That’s what she needs.”
Jock never used an “indoor voice,” and his answer for all things was a good breakfast followed by hard work. And Bruce had to acknowledge that his father led by that example. Jock wasn’t a man known for his kindness or his forgiving nature, but he was known for throwing his back into every aspect of his life. Years of working in the harsh elements of Montana were carved into his narrow face by deep wrinkles fanning out from his eyes and crisscrossing his broad forehead. His nose was prominent, strong and slightly crooked, with a hump in the middle from a break that hadn’t been set properly. His hair, thin and receding at the temples, had long since turned white, as had the bushy, unruly eyebrows framing the deeply set, sapphire-blue eyes. At one time, Jock’s skin had been fair, but decades of work in the sun without any sun protection had given his leathery skin a brownish-ruddy hue.
“She needs her rest,” Lilly said in her soft, steady voice as she poured coffee into the cup at Bruce’s place setting.
Lilly was Jock’s second wife, and the entire family still marveled at the match. Jock was loud and abrasive; Lilly was quiet and sweet. Jock believed in “spare the rod, spoil the child;” Lilly believed in the power of kind words and affection. Jock was a sworn atheist; Lilly, on the other hand, was a very spiritual woman with a deep connection to the land. A full-blooded Chippewa-Cree Native American raised on the Rocky Boy reservation, Lilly Hanging Cloud was an undeniable beauty—kind brown-black eyes, balanced, even features and prominent cheekbones. Her hair, always worn long and straight, was coal black with silver laced throughout. Yes, Lilly was his stepmother, but his memory of his own mother was so faint that Lilly was truly the only mother he’d ever known.
“Morning!” Jessie, Jock’s only daughter and the youngest of the bunch, breezed into the dining room, her waist-length, pin-straight raven hair fluttering behind her. Their baby sister was sweet, but had been spoiled by all of them, including him. She had always been too adorable to scold, with her mother’s striking features and her father’s shocking blue eyes.
Now that Jessie was here, Jock’s attention would turn to his favored child, and Bruce would be able to eat in peace for a moment or two.
“Hi, Daddy.” Jessie leaned down and kissed their father’s cheek; she was the only one of his eight children who got away with calling him “Daddy.” All of the siblings, including him, called the patriarch of their family “Jock” or “sir.”
Jessie then kissed her mother “good morning,” plopped down in the chair next to him and bumped her shoulder into his. “Hi, dork.”
Bruce wrapped his arm around his sister’s shoulder, pulled her close for a moment and kissed the side of her head. “Mornin’, brat.”
A steady trickle of Brand siblings filled the empty seats at the enormous dining table. One of his full brothers, Liam, was the first to arrive, followed by their half brothers Colton and Hunter. Shane and Gabe, his other two full-blooded brothers, were missing from breakfast, as was his youngest half brother, Noah. Gabe, a long-distance trucker, was out of town, and no one expected Shane to show. Shane was honorably discharged from the army; diagnosed with PTSD, he was often missing from family events. Noah, a private first class in the Marine Corps, had been recently deployed to South Korea.
As the long dining table filled with his children, Jock presided over Sunday breakfast like a king over his court. Bruce was happy to drift into the background while his siblings dominated the conversation, each one louder than the other, trying as they always did to get the loudest and the last word on all subjects. They were a competitive bunch—but tight as family could be when push came to shove. When the conversation, as it often did, turned to politics, Bruce found his thoughts returning to his wife. The shock of her coming back to Sugar Creek Ranch hadn’t worn off; he knew that she must feel the distance between them. He could read the pain in her eyes when he avoided touching her or stiffened when she innocently placed her hand over his. He wanted to open his heart to her again, but he couldn’t. Not yet. The first time she’d walked out of his life and into the arms of another man, it had left him feeling like an empty eggshell—cracked, fragile and good for nothing. He had to protect his heart. What other choice did he have?
“Savannah!” his sister screamed over the din of voices.
Everyone at the table stopped talking and turned their attention to the entrance to the dining room.
Bruce had caught the expression on his sister’s face, lit up with happy surprise, before he turned his head to look at the doorway to the dining room. Savannah, her slender body engulfed in one of his denim button-down shirts, was standing in the doorway appearing peaked and frail. She had an uncertainty in her body language, a nervousness in her half smile and forward-slumped shoulders that Bruce read right away. Savannah knew in her mind that she had been absent from Sunday breakfast for a long time; it would be normal to wonder about how the family would receive her. And she had some reason to be concerned—several of his siblings were still raw with Savannah and her lawyer, so they weren’t ready to welcome her back to the fold with open arms. Their father had no such reservations.
“Daughter!” Jock bellowed as he thrust his seat back and out of his way so he could wrap a possessive, welcoming arm around Savannah’s shoulders. Sugar Creek was Jock’s ranch—if he said Savannah was welcome, she was welcome.
“Good morning, everyone,” Savannah said with an unusually shy smile and a quieter than normal voice. She leaned into her father-in-law’s embrace, but her eyes had sought out his.
Bruce had stood up at the same time as his father; it was instinctive, natural, to protect his wife—to stand between her and her critics in the room. Even if those critics were his own kin.
“You need something to eat,” Lilly observed.
Before his wife could respond, Jock waved his hand over the table. “Everyone move. Move! I want Savannah to sit down right here next to me.”
“No, don’t do that...” Savannah tried to intervene, but Jock’s will was the will of the family.
Everyone on the right side of the table, including him, moved one seat down to make room for their father’s most-favored daughter-in-law.
Bruce had gathered up his dishes, swapped them for a clean set and held the chair for his wife to sit down.
“Sorry.” Savannah apologized to the table at large.
“Don’t you go apologizing for nothing,” Jock ordered gruffly. “It’s been far too long since we’ve had you at this table.”
The mood at the table changed; the conversation seemed stilted and stiff to Bruce, with his siblings focusing more on their food than talking. Savannah, who used to be a ray of sun shining on Sunday breakfast, had now become a bit of a spoiler. One by one, his brothers finished their meals and dispersed. Liam, his junior by only one year and always the peacemaker, made sure to say a kind word to Savannah, wishing her a speedy recovery, before he left. Jessie was the only sibling who seemed to have made a seamless pivot now that the divorce was on hold; she talked in a stream of consciousness, bouncing from one topic to another, seeming to want to catch Savannah up on the missing years in one sitting.
“Come up for air,” Bruce told his sister. “She’s not going anywhere.”
Had he just spoken the truth? The truth from somewhere deep inside? Or was that hopeful thinking?
Instead of making a quick appearance at breakfast as he had planned, Bruce sat beside his wife while she ate two full helpings of scrambled eggs, a heaping scoop of cheese grits, a biscuit slathered with butter and honey, and drank a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He’d never known her to be much of a breakfast person.
“I’m stuffed.” Savannah groaned, her hands on her stomach.
“You sure you can’t eat a few more spoonfuls of grits?” Bruce teased her. “I’d hate for those couple of bites to go to waste.”
Savannah pushed her plate away and scrunched up her face distastefully. “I may not eat for the rest of the day.”
“I haven’t seen you eat that much in a day before,” Bruce mused.
“A hearty breakfast is exactly what you needed.” Jock gave a nod of approval.
Rosario, the house manager for years, and one of her subordinates, Donna, came into the dining room to begin clearing the table.
“Breakfast was good?” Rosario asked, her hand affectionately on Jock’s shoulder, while Donna began to clear. Rosario had been with the family for decades, and the house manager had long since become more family than employee.
“It was damn good.” Jock tossed his crumpled napkin onto his plate.
“I’m glad.” The house manager’s eyes crinkled deeply at the corner when she smiled. “It’s good to see you at the table again, Miss Savannah.”
Savannah placed her neatly folded napkin on top of her empty plate. “It’s good to be seen, Rosario.”
“We all missed you,” Donna said as she reached around in front of Savannah to get her plate.
“Oh...” his wife said, and he could tell by the confused look in her eyes that the memory of Donna had been ripped away, like so many others, by the crash. “Thank you.”
“I think I’d like to go home and rest now.” Savannah put her hand on his arm.
Bruce gave her a nod of understanding; he said, as he pushed back his chair, “You outdid yourselves as usual, ladies.”
Savannah gave Jock a hug and a kiss, said goodbye to everyone in the room, and then, arms crossed in front of her body, she walked into the grand, circular, three-story foyer.
“Hold up.” Jock stood up so he could say what he intended to say in a lowered voice.
Bruce waited for his father’s next words; the patriarch made a little motion near his mouth. “She sounds kinda funny when she talks. You gonna get that fixed?”
“It’s in the works. We’re just waiting for insurance to shuffle things around. I’m hoping to get her to therapy starting next week.”
Jock gave a nod of understanding accompanied by a single pat on the shoulder.
Savannah was waiting for him on the wide porch that ran the length of the expansive main house. She was sitting on the top step of the wood stairs with their three canines gathered around her; she was staring out at the fields in the distance with the slow-moving herd of cows as they grazed in the early-afternoon sun.
Bruce knelt down so he could greet the dogs. “You all right?”
It took her a couple of seconds to nod “yes,” but he didn’t believe it. The breakfast had rattled her; being with his family had rattled her.
Her body was curled forward like a turtle shell; it seemed to him like she was trying to disappear into his shirt. Acting, not thinking, Bruce held out his hand to his wife.
“Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
Savannah had turned her head away from him; when she turned it back, there were tears clinging to her eyelashes. She lowered her head and wiped the tears on the sleeve of her borrowed shirt.
“I don’t want to go back to bed,” she finally said.
Bruce looked down into her face—a face he had both loved and resented. “What do you want to do, then?”
“I don’t know.” Savannah’s eyes returned to the horizon, her arms locked around Hound Dog’s thick neck for comfort. “Sunday was always our day.”
Bruce stood up to full height and slid his hands into his front pockets. Sunday had always been their day—a day they reserved for their relationship. But that had been a long time ago.
“When’s the last time we spent a Sunday together?” she asked him without looking at him.
With a frown, Bruce answered her honestly. “I can’t remember the last time.”
Savannah gave a little sad shake of her head. “For me, it was just last week.”
* * *
Her husband had offered to stay with her—to reboot their Sunday tradition. But it felt forced to her, so she declined. Bruce had a list of chores he had planned for his Sunday, and she didn’t want to keep him from his work. Murphy and Buckley followed behind her husband; Hound Dog stayed with her. Perhaps he sensed that she was new to the dog pack, like he was. She was grateful for the company, now that she was feeling, for the first time, like a stranger in her own home.
Her sisters had always been her solace, so she called her youngest sister, Joy, who had returned to Nashville, Tennessee where she was attending graduate school at Vanderbilt University.
“It was terrible,” she recounted for her sister. “Everyone stopped talking when I walked in, half of his brothers looked at me like I’d grown devil horns and a tail—they hate me now—and I didn’t recognize this lady, Donna, who works there who obviously knows me. I felt so nervous that I ate enough food to feed a small army...”
“I’m sorry, Savannah.” Her sister, Joy, said in a sympathetic tone. “It’s like a bad dream.”
Savannah was standing by the picture window, watching Bruce unload wood from the back of his truck and carry it to his workshop.
“It was like a bad dream,” she said of the breakfast. “Like that dream when you wake up late and you rush to work and everyone is staring at you like you’re a freak, and then you realize that you’re naked.”
“I’ve never had that dream before.”
“Well, I have. It’s the worst.” She sat down on the couch with Hound Dog faithfully parked at her feet.
Savannah sighed, noticing that her head was throbbing again. “I don’t know, Joy. I didn’t know it was going to be this way. I don’t know what I was expecting...”
“For things to be normal.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah. I guess so.”
After a silent moment, her sister probed. “Do you still think you’re ready to find out why the marriage fell apart?”
Before she had left the hospital, she had argued with her family about just this topic. She had been so certain that she could handle anything that she found out about her marriage. But now? One awkward breakfast had made her feel so depressed, so disconnected from the Brand family. She used to be a favored sister to Bruce’s brothers. Now, the way Gabe and Hunter had looked at her...
Joy added when her sister didn’t respond right away, “If you want me to tell you what happened, Savannah, you know I will.”
“No,” Savannah said with a definitive shake of the head. “I’m not ready. Not yet.”
* * *
She had sulked for a while after she had placed calls to both sisters and her mother. But then Savannah decided that moping wasn’t her idea of making use of a beautiful Sunday. She found her way out to a patch of ground that was her kitchen garden; she loved to cook with fresh, homegrown vegetables picked right out of the garden. The garden was overgrown with layers of weeds; the pretty little white picket fence Bruce had built and painted as a surprise for her was dirty and unkempt. With her hands on her hips, Savannah shook her head. The fence, once her pride, was leaning in places; pickets were broken from animals and weather.
“What a mess.”
The garden seemed to be a metaphor for her marriage. Would she ever get used to seeing things so changed, when in her mind, it was just yesterday when her life was perfect? Her marriage had been full of laughter and romance and lovemaking; she’d been a beloved member of Sugar Creek Ranch and her garden had been teeming with fresh veggies, ripe for the picking.
“How do you eat an elephant, Hound Dog?” she asked her companion.
She was going to clean up this garden, one weed at a time. Savannah found her toolshed virtually untouched; she pulled on her gloves, and retrieved hand tools and a sturdy hoe. Armed with her weapons to beat back the weeds and decay, she stepped into the garden, reclaimed the ground as her own, dropped to her knees and began to yank out the weeds. A couple of weeds into the process, sweat began to form on her forehead and on her neck. It felt good to sweat; it felt good to take out her frustration on these stupid, creeping weeds that had ruined her beautiful garden.
“What are you doing?”
Savannah had been deep in thought, focused on ripping as many weeds from the ground as possible; she hadn’t heard her husband approach. She sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her brow before it rolled down into her eyes.
“Pulling weeds.”
Bruce—to her, the most handsome man in the world—had his shirt unbuttoned and his stomach, chest and neck were covered in sweat. Normally—at least the normal she remembered—she would have stood up and wiped that sweat from his neck and chest with her hands, stealing a kiss along the way. It hadn’t taken her long at all to figure out that this sexual flirtation wouldn’t be welcome. Not long at all.
“You have a concussion, Savannah,” he reminded her in a slightly condescending way.
She stared at him in response.
He added, a little less bossy, “The doctor said you needed to rest.”
“This is how I rest,” Savannah argued. She turned back to her weeds. “If I go to bed now, I’ll be awake all night. You know that’s true.”
Silence stretched out between them, and then she heard him walk away. She didn’t glance behind her to watch him; she focused on the blasted weeds instead. She hadn’t expected him to join her—they didn’t spend Sundays together anymore. And yet, he did return. Wordlessly, Bruce came back to the garden with Buckley and Murphy following at his heels. He knelt down in the dirt and began to pull out the weeds in the second row.
They worked like that silently, side by side, until they had completely cleared the first two rows of her garden of the layers of overgrowth. Bruce stood up and then offered his hand to her, which she accepted. Toward the end of the row, she was beginning to feel exhausted and woozy. But she was determined to finish at least one row before she gave in to her body.
“Well,” Savannah said, more to herself than to Bruce. “It’s a start.”
Bruce was staring at her face with an inscrutable expression in his slightly narrowed, bright blue eyes. “Yes,” he agreed after a moment. “I suppose it is.”
Chapter Four (#ud8f01039-7dcf-54c7-b406-718b5a999281)
During the first week that Savannah was back at the ranch, Bruce watched her slowly, day by day, reclaim their log cabin as her own. She had unearthed their framed wedding pictures in one of the drawers in the living room and put them back in their original spot on the fireplace mantel. One of her antique bud vases, a least favorite that she had left behind, was back on the kitchen windowsill with a sprig of wildflowers soaking in the morning sun. The more his wife settled back into their marital home, the more accustomed to sharing the space Bruce became.
He was becoming accustomed to having Savannah’s toothbrush, face creams, perfumes and deodorant on the bathroom counter next to his small array of toiletries; he was becoming accustomed to the sound of music playing when he arrived home. It was good to have music back in the house.
“Smells good in here.” Bruce hung his cowboy hat on the hook inside of the door.
Today his wife was in the mood for Fleetwood Mac.
Savannah appeared from the kitchen, surprised by his early arrival.
“I wasn’t expecting you until later,” she said with a small smile, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
Bruce walked the whole way to her side; he had been trying to open up more to Savannah. She had, understandably, pulled away from him once she began to live the truth of their separation, even when her brain wouldn’t remember. So they stood, rather awkwardly, a foot apart, without kissing each other in greeting as they always had.
“I decided to knock off a little early today.” He leaned down to pet Hound Dog, who was now glued to Savannah’s side.
She nodded wordlessly, her smile not completely reaching her eyes.
“What’s cooking?”
Now her smile widened. “Guess!”
Bruce played along, looking upward in thought. “It’s not... Buffalo Pockets?”
Beef, assorted vegetables and seasonings baked in foil pockets. One of his favorite meals—easy, hardy, but so damn good.
“I wanted to say thank-you—for helping me with the garden.” Savannah turned to walk back to the kitchen.
Hound Dog left him and followed behind her.
He wasn’t sure how to respond. How many times had he looked out at that garden feeling guilty about letting the elements and the wild animals have their way with it? Savannah had loved that garden, and it was one way, a petty way, to strike back at her.
“I’m gonna clean up,” Bruce told her. “For dinner.”
On the way into the bedroom, the bedroom he hadn’t slept in since Savannah’s return, he picked up a pair of socks and a pair of boots—she had never been able to get her clothes in the hamper or her shoes back in the closet. She often just left her clothes where she stripped out of them; it had always annoyed him, and perhaps it still did, but not with the same force as before. How many times had he missed her jeans on the floor after she left? Many times.
What Savannah lacked in housekeeping motivation, she made up for tenfold when it came to cooking. Man, had he missed his wife’s cooking, and he told her so.
The good smells emanating from the kitchen had gotten him to speed up his shower, get dressed quick, so he could take his seat at their kitchen table. While Savannah had been gone, this table had been used as a catchall for the mail and any junk he accumulated in his pockets during his workday.
“I love cooking for you.” Savannah smiled at him sweetly as she collected his empty plate.
“That was one hell of a good meal, Beautiful.” He leaned back, feeling stuffed after two heaping servings. Bruce had been subsisting on frozen meals for a year. Yes, he could have had dinner at the main house, but his father’s loud and consistent disapproval over his divorce had deterred him pretty quickly.
“I hope you left some room for dessert,” Savannah said as she carried their dishes the short distance to the kitchen. “Lilly and I stopped off at the bakery on the way home.”
Bruce followed her to the kitchen, his hands full with as many items as he could carry. Jock had never once helped wife one or wife two in the kitchen, but Bruce had always considered it to be part of marriage. It had always been those little things, like Savannah cooking while he did the dishes, that had made him want to be a married man. And for a while there, he had managed to have a perfect marriage, to the perfect woman for him. For a while there, he had managed to marry his best friend.
“All I have to do is pop them in the oven.” Savannah held up a plate of raspberry chocolate turnovers, freshly made from his favorite bakery.
Bruce filled the sink with water and soap and set the dishes in the hot, sudsy water to soak. He wiped his hands off on a dish towel, his mouth watering for the tangy, sweet dessert, but his stomach needed a little extra room before the next course.
He smiled his thank-you. “You know what I love.”
Bruce saw a pretty flush of color on his wife’s cheeks before she turned away to put the plate on the counter. “Should I heat the oven now? Or wait?”
It had been such a long time since he wanted to pull Savannah into his arms and kiss her. But, oh, how he wanted to kiss her right at that moment. The kindness of her gesture, the sweet blush on her cheeks that spoke of her ability to have a reaction to being in close quarters with him. He felt her attraction for him, just as strong as when they were first married. And in turn, his body, his mind, his heart, were all reacting.
“You up for a walk?” he asked her, not at all sure that she would accept. Nothing was certain with Savannah. With a nod to the plate of pastries, he added, “I need to make some room for at least three of those.”
Walking after dinner had been one of their marriage staples; they both loved to walk in the evening with the dogs, hoping to catch a colorful sunset. Even the rain hadn’t deterred their evening routine; they had just grabbed raincoats and gone.
Bruce held the door open for his wife, and then grabbed his hat off the rack as he stepped out onto the porch. As usual, the dogs happily mobbed Savannah, who greeted them as if she hadn’t seen them in days, not just an hour.
“Which way?” she asked at the bottom of the steps.
“Cook’s choice.”
They headed toward the west, toward the setting sun and toward one of the many pastures where some of the herd of black Angus were lying down after a day of grazing. They would have held hands—they always had—but this time, she didn’t reach for his hand, and he couldn’t bring himself to reach for hers.
Silently, they walked together, side by side, until they reached the pasture fence. With a sigh, Savannah leaned on the fence to admire the view. Perhaps he was biased—most likely he was—but Sugar Creek Ranch was heaven on Earth. A landscape seemingly touched by God’s hand, it featured flat pastureland abutted by an expanse of gently rolling hills leading up to the base of royal Montana mountains far off in the distance. Tall grass on the hills swayed, almost imperceptibly, in a calm breeze floating across the hills, and the soft echo of the water flowing over rocks in the wide stream that crossed the ranch like a snake uncurling itself. It was the kind of landscape that would inspire painters like Winslow Homer or Georgia O’Keeffe to unroll their blank canvases and take out their brushes.
“I never get tired of this,” Savannah mused. “It never gets old.”
“For me, either.”
There was much that he resented about his father—Jock was harsh, cold at times and unable to admit wrongdoing or express regret—but he’d gotten it right when he’d bought this land. And though maybe Bruce hadn’t gotten everything right in his own life, either, he knew, as he admired his wife’s profile in the early-evening light, that he had gotten it right when he married Savannah.
“I need to go back, I think.”
“You okay?”
She nodded, her arms now crossed in front of her body as she turned away from the view. “I suddenly feel so tired. It’s been a long day.”
“You overdid it.” Bruce fell in beside her. “Cooking me dinner.”
A shake of her head. “No. That was fun. It’s not that. It’s that I seem to be going from one appointment to the next to the next now. I can go years without so much as a cold, and yet now, it seems, that’s all I’m doing.”
Bruce whistled for the dogs playing in the pasture to follow them back to the house.
“Your limp is less noticeable,” he told her. “Already.”
The bruises on her face had faded to a light yellow and a faint green, a sign of healing, but her speech was still affected, a little slurred and slushy, and as far as he knew, Savannah hadn’t had any memories, not even flashes, of the last several years. All of her childhood memories, the memories of her young adulthood, and even the early years of their marriage were still, thankfully, intact. But Savannah still did not have recent memories about the darkest period of their marriage.
“Don’t get me wrong—I’m grateful for the help.” She ascended the stairs, holding on to the railing, much more slowly than she had descended. “I just wish I didn’t need the help.”
* * *
The first time she mustered the nerve to drive herself into town after she was cleared to drive by her neurologist, Savannah decided to meet her friends from work at one of their favorite spots on Main Street.
“How are you?” her friend Maria, a speech-language pathologist at the elementary school where Savannah had worked before the accident, asked after the waitress took their orders.

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