She moved past him and went down the stairs. Then she stopped and texted Clara.
She would meet her at the bakery. And she would kill two birds with one stone.
Because she couldn’t be miserable and inefficient.
So she would just settle for miserable efficiency. It was the best she could do.
CHAPTER TEN
WOLFFOUNDHIMSELFstaring down a crowd of very judgmental family members only twenty minutes later. But he had told Violet he would handle this. So he was going to.
“Look, Sadie,” Wolf said, “I like you. But your meddling has caused a little bit of a problem.”
“My meddling is the reason you’re here,” Sadie said. “And if I didn’t...would she even have told you?”
“Fine,” he said, holding up his hands. “Fair enough. But you need to keep it quiet. All of you.”
“None of us are gossips,” Kate said. “Well... Sadie is.”
Sadie shot her sister-in-law an evil glare. “I wouldnotgossip about this,” Sadie said. “I swear we will keep it quiet.”
“She’s coming back to Four Corners with me.”
“But...” Sadie looked aggrieved.
“It’s fine,” Eli said. “We’ll get somebody on a short contract basis to take her place. That way...if it doesn’t work out, she has a job to come back to.”
If it doesn’t work out.
That meant if they couldn’t stand each other, or she lost the baby.
The idea made him feel grim.
But then, there was nothing to feel but grim about the whole thing. He hadn’t asked for this. He wasn’t an optimist. Why the hell would he be? Life had never given him a reason.
He hadn’t wanted this, but he had known the minute he walked into that bed-and-breakfast and seen her there that she was pregnant.
She was ashen; she looked... Well, she was so beautiful, but she looked terrible. And he had also known that there was no question about whether or not he would be involved in the child’s life. Also, Violet needed someone to take care of her. She looked like hell. And he had caused it. And that meant that he was going to step up and do what a man needed to do.
On that, he completely understood Sawyer.
Sawyer had immediately stepped up taking care of his child; he had made a decision. He had done what needed doing. Because their old man had been incapable of that. He’d been a wishy-washy leader on the ranch who had failed at the most basic of tasks. The cattle had thinned, the fences gone into disrepair. He hadn’t innovated. He hadn’t figured out how to weather different issues, because it all required thinking on your feet. Moving with the times. He hadn’t been able to do it, because it had required doing. And he just hadn’tdone.
It was the same thing with Sawyer’s mother. With Wolf’s mother.
With Elsie’s mother.
Women who had all been pregnant with his children, and he hadn’t even made a commitment to them. He had brought them onto the ranch and just...let them sit there. He’d had affairs; he’d cheated as the opportunity arose. And even that was lazy as hell. None of it was decisive. None of it was being a man, in Wolf’s opinion, and he just wouldn’t be that.
He’d always known that.
But he had seen to making sure it didn’t happen by always being scrupulous and careful in his sexual encounters. But he’d failed Violet. He had utterly failed, and it was his own damn fault. And he would face the consequences. And he wasn’t going to hem and haw about what the right thing to do was, not when it was so clear.
He would marry her. Assuming it was a healthy pregnancy.
He wouldn’t expose her to any kind of censure. He wouldn’t get her kicked out of her family’s home. All things that he knew his own mother had faced. And then she’d had to make a decision. Be stuck there forever, be a single mom on her own out there in the world, or leave Wolf and go back home. She had chosen to go back home. Gone back to her parents, the only way that they would accept her.
She had chosen family over him. Even though he’d been family.