And now he was supposed to tell her…Hey, we aren’t married because we were both too shit-faced to check the freakin’ permits.

Yeah, that would go over well.

Don’t be a jackass. Tell her the truth. Tell her you love her. Tell her you want to marry her for real this time. A real wedding ceremony that she’ll remember, with her family and all your friends in attendance. With a wedding dance, a honeymoon, the whole shebang.

No. Celia would rather save face than admit the marriage wasn’t a love match.

But still, he’d have to tell her the truth soon. The devil on his shoulder poked him hard.

Or would he?

Kyle was awful damn good at playing dumb—not that it was always an act. Since their discussion about money, Celia hadn’t mentioned needing the marriage license to change her name on her driver’s license or her Social Security card.

So, realistically, he could pretend that with all the crap they had to deal with regarding the ranch he’d just “forgotten” all about getting a copy of their official marriage license…until she brought it up. Or he could bring it up at the six-month mark. Then they could discover together—snicker—that the paperwork had never gotten filed. That would give him a perfect opening to confess his love for her, and ask her to marry him for real, forever, because he couldn’t live without her.

That could work.

That had to work.

Kyle was in a foul mood.

Celia had known it would happen sometime. Except for the couple of times she’d caught him brooding in the barn, he had been far too even-keeled about his ranch heritage and the massive changes and responsibilities in his life in the last six weeks. Naturally his anger issues had to happen on a day when she was feeling less than confident about the changes in their relationship. He’d gotten quiet when she’d brought up the financial deadline for fall class registration.

He’d been pissy about a lot of stuff the last few days.

So she got pissy right back. “For the third time, Kyle. What do you want to do with all this stuff?”

Kyle scowled at the pile of clothes on the bed. “How the f**k should I know? I’ve never cleaned out my dead father’s closet before.”

She was tempted to mimic him. Instead she just tore off an oversize garbage bag and started jamming clothes inside the thick plastic.

“What are you doin’?”

“Stuffing a turkey, what does it look like?”

He made a snarling noise instead of laughing. “It looks like you’re throwing it away.”

“I am. I made an executive decision. You don’t want this shit, I don’t want this shit, so I’m tossing it.”

Kyle stomped over and ripped the garbage bag from her hands. “I didn’t say I wanted to just shitcan it. I said I don’t know what to do with any of it. Can’t we take it to a shelter or someplace?”

The shelter comment reminded Celia of the bags of clothing that had filled the basement of Abe’s house for months and then had mostly ended up in the trash anyway. She retorted, “A bum wouldn’t even wear this crap.”

“Nice shot, Celia.”

“It’s true.” She snatched a brown-and-yellow-checked flannel shirt from the pile and shook it at Kyle. “Do you really see yourself wearing this? Even for chores? It’s missing buttons. It’s got rips in the elbows, not to mention it’s freakin’ huge. It hangs to your damn knees.”

“Are you sayin’ I’m a shrimp or something?”

She stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Sensitive much? Obviously Marshall was a rotund guy. You’re not.”

He mumbled and turned away.

Oh joy, he was muttering now. “Does that mean you don’t want my help?”

Kyle shrugged.

Instead of giving into her increasingly violent temptations, like whipping a hanger at the back of his head, she chose to take the high road. Let him stew in his own crabby juices for a while. She headed for the room they’d set up as an office. In the closet she’d found more boxes of worthless crap. Why would anyone keep broken eyeglasses? The bottom of one box was filled with boxes of rubber bands. All the same size. Maybe there’d been a huge sale on them. A long time ago if the disintegrated condition of the rubber was any indication.

Celia threw away faded receipts. Newspaper articles. Yellowed recipe cards. Green Stamps booklets and coupons that had expired two decades ago. Had all this stuff belonged to Marshall’s wife? It looked like he’d dumped out several junk drawers straight into the box and shoved it in the closet.

She found nothing of a personal nature, which made her sad, and she saw no reason to keep any of it. With that mind-set she was able to get through all but two boxes before Kyle came looking for her again.

The hard set to his mouth indicated that his mood hadn’t improved a bit.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to make it better. Cajoling hadn’t changed anything. Silence hadn’t changed anything. Being rude hadn’t changed anything. She hadn’t tried smacking him upside the head with a cast-iron frying pan either, but if he kept it up she might be tempted to do just that. At some point during her mental back-and-forth, Celia realized it wasn’t her job as his wife to make that change in attitude happen. It was his problem.

She reminded herself that married people fought. It was the ebb and flow of finding the fine lines in a relationship. How could she know which line not to cross if she didn’t step a toe over that line once in a while? Things were bound to come to a head between them because they both seemed to sport that attitude. So chances were high if they continued testing those lines they’d be in for a helluva fight.