Ruthless: Contemporary Military Romance (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Harry Springford arched a dark eyebrow, and Holly did her best not to squirm. He was an intimidating man, her father. He was the kind of man who could make another man sweat rivers just by looking at him with those iron-gray eyes of his. Harry Springford was a hard, determined man. Holly supposed one had to be in order to run and manage a business as thriving as theirs.

Holly’s grandfather, Ronald Springford, had built the farm with his own bare hands, and then proceeded to break his back in order to make it thrive. He succeeded, and soon enough, the farm was becoming a ranch and the Springfords were becoming one of the most successful horse breeders in the State. When Harry stepped in after his father’s retirement, he worked hard and well enough that the Springfords were now one of the most successful and sought-after horse breeders in the whole country. They were now one of the richest families living outside of Austin, Texas.

Holly could understand why her father had taken on this strict demeanor of his, but she wished he was a little softer around the edges. She wished the Sutherlands had not fit in so well with the elite, high-class world that the business had plummeted them into. But they had, and as a result, her parents had expectations. Holly was twenty-one years old, but unlike most twenty-one year-olds, she did not have her whole life splayed out in front of her in the common sense. The world wasn’t hers; it was being shaped for her.

That evening, Holly had finally mustered up the courage to come tell her father that she had a design of her own in mind, but now that she was under the scrutiny of those gray eyes, she found that it was harder than she had anticipated.

“Well?” Harry Springford prompted, leaning back in his leather chair. He crossed his hands over his belly, which was still remarkably flat for a man of fifty-something.

Holly swallowed past her suddenly dry throat and took a deep breath.

It’s now or never
, she thought, and she knew that it really was. She had to take her chance now or meekly accept whatever choices her parents would make for her.

“Sit down, Holly,” her father said, nodding towards the chair across the massive mahogany desk (Harry Sutherland sure had a soft spot for mahogany).

“No, thank you, I’d rather do this standing.” She couldn’t bring herself to sit; she was too nervous.

Harry Springford’s gray eyes flashed dangerously. “Do what, exactly?”

Holly took yet another steadying breath. She could feel her heart thundering away within her chest. Her palms were sweaty. “Dad, I don’t want to marry Tim Sutherland.”

Her father’s dark eyebrows shot up, so further up his forehead that they seemed to threaten to disappear within his graying hairline. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You’re sitting here discussing ‘engagement details’ behind my back, but you didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know you were considering Tim as a candidate to be my future husband.”

“Does it really surprise you?”

Holly bit her bottom lip as hard as she could in order to keep in the insults that sprung to her mouth. No, it did not surprise her. Of late, Timothy Sutherland had been coming to the ranch more often than usual with some improbable excuses. Holly sure never thought it was to look at the horses, but she didn’t think her and Timothy’s fathers would go so far as to start making plans without discussing it with either of them first.

“Does Tim know?”

“Of course he knows,” her father huffed impatiently. “He’s been courting you for months.”

It was Holly’s turn to raise an eyebrow now. “Seriously?
That
was courting?” All she could remember were a few awkward talks from the pompous twenty-five year old Sutherland heir. She shook her head, dismissing her astonishment. “Regardless, I don’t want to marry him. And I don’t appreciate being kept in the dark when it comes to my own future.”

“I would’ve told you after I had worked out the details with Ed,” her father said. “Unfortunately, you interrupted us while we were doing just that.”

Holly did her best not to comment on the remark. “Dad,” she said again, as patiently as she could, “You need to listen to me. I don’t want to marry Tim Sutherland.”

“Well, who do you want to marry, then?”

Holly stared at the man sitting in the chair at that mahogany desk and wondered if it was really her father. Could a father really be asking that question? In the year 2015, could a father
really
be asking her twenty-one year old daughter to choose a man to marry?

Apparently, he could. Harry Springford was staring at her with genuine curiosity written all over his angular, stern face.

“No one!” Holly snapped, appalled. “I don’t want to marry anyone!”

Harry Springford sat up a little straighter in his fancy leather chair. “Holly, what are you talking about?” He asked, his voice dropping to a dangerous low tone.

“I’m talking about the fact that I’m twenty-one years old, Dad! I’m too young to be marrying anybody.”

“No, you’re not. Your mother was nineteen years old when she married me, and I myself was only twenty-two.”

“Those were different times.”

“Not so different,” Harry Springford argued. “Not in our kind of society, anyway.”

You mean the elite kind?
Holly thought bitterly, but she refrained from saying it out loud, although she had no idea where she found the restraint. “It doesn’t matter, Dad,” she said. “I don’t want to marry right now. Maybe someday.”

That seemed to set her father off on a whole other level—a deeper level, a more demanding level. A scarier level. “What do you mean, ‘maybe someday’?” Harry Springford all but growled. “Holly, marriage is not an option for you. It’s a duty. You’ll be the one running the business when I’m gone, and—”

“Exactly,” Holly cut him off, unable to keep her tongue any longer. “
I
’ll be running the business.
Me
, not my future husband. So what difference does it really make whether I marry or not?”

“You know what difference it makes.”

Her father didn’t say any more, but he didn’t need to. He was right; Holly knew exactly what difference it made. In their high-end social circles, a “spinster” was not well received. If Holly did not marry, the Springfords would lose some powerful alliances indeed.

It wasn’t that she was adverse to the idea of marriage per se; it was just that she didn’t want to marry because social rules dictated that she did. And she sure as hell did not want to marry someone that had been chosen for her by somebody else.

“Whatever,” she finally said. “I still don’t want to marry Tim Sutherland, of all people. I’ll be marrying for love, and I’ll be marrying somebody
I
choose.”

“Holly—”

“
Listen
, Dad!” Holly snapped again. This wasn’t going well. She had rehearsed the whole speech for days, and it was supposed to sound nothing like this. It was supposed to sound calm and mature, cool and collected. Presently, she was just all over the place and blinded by rage at the unfairness of it all. “I’ve made a decision. I know you love me and that you want the best for me…” She wasn’t entirely sure, not anymore, but she said it anyway. “…but I have to live my own life. I have to choose my own path. This is not what I want. I don’t want to marry at twenty-one, and I don’t want to run the family business.”

Harry Springford’s sun-tanned and weather-marked skin paled gradually. “What did you just say to me?” He asked, his voice almost breaking.

Holly swallowed hard. She had expressed her wishes of a different life to her parents from time to time, but never so directly…and never in such a way that implied she would indeed not be taking the reins of the ranch in a near future—or in
any
future, for that matter.

“I love you,” Holly said, and that much was true. “But I’m not you. I don’t want to be stuck here for the rest of my life. I want to see the world and work as an artist.”

“Oh, Holly, for God’s sake!” Her father finally snapped, slamming a fist down on the desk. “Not this again!”

“Yes, Dad,
this
again,” Holly replied, unfazed. “I know you thought it was a phase, but it’s not. I want to paint. Which is why I came here tonight to tell you that I’ve made a decision to apply to art school in New York.”

“No, you will not.” Harry Springford stood up and walked around the desk. He didn’t advance upon his daughter, however, merely standing by the desk like a towering figure of barely contained fury. “I forbid you to actively chase such nonsense. You will stay here, and you will do what you were born to do. You will marry, and you will have children, and I will teach you everything you’ll need to know about running our family’s business. Is that understood?”

Holly gulped. She clenched her jaws together so hard that she could hear her own teeth screeching against each other. “No,” she heard herself say, surprising even herself with this refusal to be intimidated. “It’s not. I will not marry, Dad, not right now. I sure as hell won’t marry Tim Sutherland. I won’t take over the family business. It’s not what I want.”

“Holly, you’re my only child,” Harry Springford said, his voice hard. “You’re the only one who can take over.”

“No, I’m not, Dad,” Holly tried to reason. “You can hire someone. You can nurture them and make them grow, professionally. You can teach them.”

“I won’t have a stranger managing what my father built with his own bare hands,” Harry Springford said, all but spitting out the words. “How dare you even suggest that?”

“How dare you suggest that I marry some idiot you hand-picked for me? How dare you plan out my life for me?”

“Holly, enough.” Harry Springford did not yell. He didn’t need to. There was an authority of steel in his voice, and he knew he would be heard whether he screamed his throat raw or not. In fact, his not screaming made it so that he was heard even better. “You are going to marry Tim Sutherland, and you are going to take over the ranch. You will make sure that this business continues to thrive, just as I have. You will respect the horses, just as I and my father before me have, and you will respect the livelihood they bring us. You will have children, and you will teach them how to take over once you have to step aside.”

Holly could feel tears spring to her eyes. She somehow managed not to let them fall, although that was all she would have wanted—to cry and scream and throw a tantrum the way she did when she was a toddler. But she wasn’t a baby anymore, as her father seemed to have so keenly noticed when he decided she was old enough to be married off.

She lifted her chin a fraction and swallowed the enormous lump in her throat. “You can be sure of one thing, Dad,” she said, relived when her voice did not shake or break. “If I ever have children, I won’t be choosing their path for them. I won’t trap them somewhere they don’t want to be. I will not kill their spirit. I will never, ever insult them the way you are doing to me.”

She didn’t wait for her father to say anything—not that she thought her father would; he had said plenty already. She turned on her heels and walked out.

CHAPTER FOUR

It wasn’t until the next morning at the very crack of dawn that the realization of what had really happened the previous day hit him in full force. Matt sat bolt upright in bed, heart hammering in his chest. He looked around in dismay, barely taking in the room bathed in the soft the gray/blue-ish light of pre-dawn. His sister had come home after spending one month in the hospital undergoing yet another round of chemotherapy. As if that wasn’t cause enough of celebration, she had also brought good news with her. And Matt had not felt a thing.

He sneaked out of the house before anyone could get up, although he suspected it wouldn’t be for another few hours—Becky would be worn out, and Joe had taken a few days off work to be with her—and he proceeded to wander aimlessly through the town. He spent the rest of the hours that separated him from the beginning of his work day in a diner, nursing one single cup of black coffee and not giving a damn that the staff was giving him the stink eye.

He went to work in a daze, and he worked in a daze all day. Ironically enough, however, his thoughts were clearer than they had been in weeks. His five a.m. “a-ah!” moment stuck with him throughout the hours, and the more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that he had found the very source of all of his suffering past and present.

He was a terrible person.

There was no other explanation for what was going on. His sister was home from the hospital, and the odds of her battle against brain cancer ending with a victory on her part were looking good for the first time since the diagnosis. And Matt could not feel anything. He could not give in to hope or joy or even a hint of relief. He felt nothing.

Either he was a horrible person, or he was even more fucked up than he thought which would be saying a lot. Whichever the case, he had the sinking feeling that his time at his sister’s house was coming to an end. He couldn’t even contemplate the thought of looking her in the eye tonight. Becky had no idea that her brother couldn’t even bring himself to rejoice at her coming home. Becky thought her brother was normal…a little damaged, perhaps, but generally normal. Matt was just becoming to realize that she was wrong. His reaction—or lack thereof—to the recent events was anything
but
normal.

Matt spent the whole day trying to find a solution. The first thought that popped into his head was that he should give therapy another shot, but he quickly dismissed the notion; he and the local psychologists and psychiatrists had told each other all there was to say. The second thought was that he should leave town. He should pack his military rucksack, give his sister a kiss, and drive out of her life.

The more he thought about it, the more it sounded like the only sensible thing left to do.