shreds and there was nothing he could do to hide it.
He clenched his fists against his biceps as he forced a breath into his burning lungs. Tension rolled off his shoulders, leaving his neck stiff and unmovable.
He hated when people stared at him. This whole experience made him feel more like he was on a chopping block than the auction block. He wasn’t much in the mood for community events these days, especially because he was pretty sure he could guess what was going through the crowd’s minds right about now.
Poor Tanner. His wife went and left him without a word about where she’s gone. Why’d she do it? It is always hard to tell in cases like these. It could be she was at fault. Then again, maybe Tanner had somehow run her off.
Run her off?
No.
He gritted his teeth even harder to keep from shouting that one single, defensive word out loud.
No.
He might be guilty of a thousand things in his relationship with his wife—many thousands of things, if he were being honest—but not that. He hadn’t told her to leave.
He hadn’t told her anything.
Most of these folks from around here knew who the true injured party in his relationship with his wife was—and it wasn’t him. Maybe it was his pride talkin’. Maybe not. He’d had plenty of time to mull over what had gone on between them during the rough times, and even though he knew they had more than their fair share of problems and trials for a young couple, he still couldn’t imagine what could have suddenly set Rebecca off to the point where she would purposefully choose to ignore the wedding vows she’d made to him to love him for better or for worse.
Where were those vows now?
He couldn’t say. He didn’t even know where she was.
He would admit, but only to himself, that maybe what they’d been facing at the time had been worse for both of them, especially Rebecca, but he wouldn’t have run away from their problems, no matter what. When he’d said, To have and to hold, from this day forward until death do us part, he’d meant every single solitary word.
Rebecca, on the other hand? Not so much.
So they’d drifted apart in those last few months before she’d left him. That happened at some point in every marriage, right? It wasn’t all roses and sunshine all the time.
He was a simple rancher with an equally simple philosophy about how to love his God and live his life. A man dealt with whatever circumstances God gave him without complaining. Sometimes it was good, sometimes not so much. Some things a man could plan for, see the storms coming so he could batten down the hatches. Other times things came unexpectedly, or didn’t come at all. Sometimes life swung a fisted punch in a gut which was hard to recover from, and no doubt about it. But a real man had to pick himself up, dust himself off and keep on keeping on. That’s how he ran his ranch, and up until a short while ago, that’s how he’d believed he’d kept his marriage alive and stable.
Maybe not, though. If he’d paid more attention, maybe—
But a dozen maybes wouldn’t bring Rebecca back to him.
Even with all the problems between them, most especially the heartbreaking pain of them suffering through the seven months’ stillbirth of their firstborn daughter, whom they’d named Faith before they buried her in the ground, he never would have imagined Rebecca would out-and-out abandon him.
But six months ago, she had.
After they’d buried their daughter, Rebecca had spent weeks in bed, not even allowing him to open the curtains to let some sunshine in or turn on the lights. She didn’t want to have anything to do with her life anymore—or with him. He’d taken to sleeping on the couch so as not to disturb her. She took pills for anxiety and insomnia, but they didn’t really help her.
And then he’d come back in late from his ranch work one evening and she’d been gone. No note or anything. No explanation.
Just gone.
She’d disappeared to no-one-knew-where, not even her mother, and she’d only called him once since the day she’d walked out on him.
She had been reaching out to him with that one phone call, and in hindsight, he realized he should have taken the time to listen to her, to try to talk through their problems and bring her back home. But she’d caught him off guard on an evening when he was already feeling down. And when he’d picked up the telephone and heard her voice, he’d been so angry he hadn’t even let her speak. He’d understood why they called it seeing red, because that’s exactly how it felt.
And to his shame, he hadn’t let her say a word. He just hung up on her.
He didn’t know whether to be glad or sad or mad that she’d taken the hint and hadn’t attempted to reach out to him again.
Probably a mixture of all three.
In any case, he didn’t belong up here on a bachelor’s auction block. He was a man unhappily separated from his wife and he didn’t want anything to do with women. Full stop. It didn’t matter to him that every man in Serendipity, married and single alike, was offering his services for this very special auction.
Tanner just wanted to go home. Alone. To grieve in private.
If he hadn’t promised Jo Spencer, the boisterous old redhead who was both organizer and auctioneer, that he’d do his part for charity, a fund-raiser to build a local senior center recently approved by the town council, Tanner wouldn’t be here at all. He would have stayed home at his ranch where he belonged. At least out on the range with his horse and the cattle he could nurse his broken heart in peace and quiet.
Well, not exactly peace, anymore. Nor quiet, for that matter.
He no longer had that luxury.
“Uncle Tanner! Uncle Tanner!”
He looked down to the front row of the crowd to see his three-year-old niece, Mackenzie, madly giggling, bouncing up and down and waving at him, as excited about this outing as Tanner was not. Tanner’s mother-in-law, Peggy, Rebecca’s mom, was attempting without much success to corral the small girl, whose blond curls bobbed right along with the rest of her body. She had more energy in her pinky finger than Tanner had in his whole body on a good day. She also had the biggest blue eyes Tanner had ever seen—and she knew just how to use them to melt his heart.
But it wasn’t her fault none of the adults around her could get their lives together.
Mackenzie deserved his very best, so he made a gigantic effort to smile and wave back at her. Hopefully it looked like a smile and not a grimace, for the child’s sake.
Five months ago, Tanner’s sister, Lydia, had landed in jail for the second time on drug charges, leaving her daughter, Mackenzie, temporarily in Tanner’s care, as he was the only other living relative. Two major life changes in six months was two too many, but Tanner was determined to do whatever it took to protect and provide for Mackenzie. He was incredibly grateful for Peggy, who had cheerfully moved to the ranch to help with the round-the-clock care the preschooler demanded.
Peggy
