“You’re going to marry Hilde?” Ian asked, the conversation and attention immediately switching to Conrad.
Trey let it too, because he’d said enough. They all knew now.
“Guys, guys,” Lawrence said, waving them all into silence again. “This isn’t about Conrad and Hilde.”
Trey pinned him with a murderous glare. “Listen,” he said. “Mom and Dad know too. You guys know. No one else can know.” He looked around at the seven of them. Some he trusted more than others. “No one. When we enter that horse, the rumors are going to fly. She’s telling her family too, but I’m serious when I say no one else can know. We want everyone else to think the marriage is real.”
“Can I tell Tam?” Blaine asked. “She won’t tell anyone, Trey.”
“And Olli,” Spur said. “I have to tell her.”
“I worry about Olli,” Trey said. “She’s so quirky. She knows so many people.”
“Not horse people, though,” Spur said.
Trey nodded, his teeth tightening against each other. “You can tell your girlfriends if they can promise to keep it all to themselves. I wanted you guys to know, so I don’t have to lie to you.”
“I can’t believe this,” Ian said, standing up. “You’re going to have her sign a prenup, right? I mean, she could say anything she wants later on, Trey, and then you’re screwed.” He wore absolute fury on his face.
“I’m handling it,” Trey said. He hadn’t even considered a prenuptial agreement, if he were being honest.
“That means no.” Ian made a scoffing sound of disgust. “I can’t believe this. After what I went through, you’re just going to marry some woman you don’t even know. Unbelievable.” He left his pizza on the plate on the table and stormed away.
The slamming of the door leading into the garage made Trey flinch, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of eating more pizza.
He kept his head down, his hat providing some privacy for himself. “I prayed about it,” he said very quietly. “I felt like it was the right thing to do. Period. The end. I’m going to do it. I’d like your help and support, because I’m not stupid. I don’t think it’s going to be easy. But I’m going to do it, because I feel like it’s the right thing to do.”
He stood up too. “Now you know. Thanks for carving a few minutes out of your lives to come listen to me.” He took his plate into the kitchen, sensing and hearing movement behind him.
When he put his uneaten pizza back in the appropriate box and turned around, all six of them stood there too.
“Ian will come around,” Duke said. “He’s just really sensitive about this.”
“I know,” Trey said.
“We’ll be here for anything you need,” Cayden said.
“One hundred percent,” Blaine said, and as the most sensitive and most touchy-feely of all the brothers, he stepped out of the crowd and hugged Trey. “For anything.”
“Thanks,” Trey said, and that got everyone else to huddle up right there in the kitchen.
Several seconds of silence pressed on them, and then Spur asked, “What about you praying about it and getting an answer? That’s pretty incredible.”
That cracked the tension, and someone chuckled. Before he knew it, Trey was too, and as the group broke up and went back to their pizza and soda, he couldn’t help thinking that yes, the answer to his prayer was pretty dang incredible.
* * *
“Are you sure?”His mother looked up from her computer, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.
Trey looked at Beth, who turned and looked at him. They held hands right out in the open for his mom and dad to see, and Trey wasn’t even embarrassed.
He thought about that warm feeling, that easy feeling, he’d experienced on the deck almost a week ago now. “I’m sure,” he said.
“Me too,” Beth said. She turned back to his mother, who’d set up a little cockpit for herself. She said she’d text some of her friends while others would get an email.
As Trey and Beth were up against the clock, when he’d asked his mother to help them get the word out quickly, she’d risen to the occasion.
“You know what everyone is going to think,” she said.