She remained quiet for several long seconds before finally saying, “You’re right. It’s harder than it sounds.”
Tarr swallowed, his nerves suddenly lodged in his throat. “I know we’re still new and all, Briar,” he said. “But I do have a goal to get married—doesn’t have to be like, this year or anything, but I sure do like you more than anyone I’ve ever dated before.”
She lifted her head then, and Tarr felt her watching him before he granted her the gift of opening his eyes. “Have you ever thought about getting married?”
“A long time ago,” she whispered back. “When I still believed in things like that.”
“What would it take to make you believe in that again?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I swore off cowboys when I left Canada, and yet, somehow I’m dating one again.”
Tarr nodded. “So maybe we’ll just keep talking through things and see how things go,” he said, though he didn’t want to admit how shattered he would be if he and Briar didn’t work out. He’d already started thinking more long-term, but he watched when the slender column of Briar’s neck shifted as she swallowed, and then he ran his hand along her lower jaw and guided her mouth to his.
He kissed her exactly how he wanted and for as long as he wanted. When he finally pulled away, he murmured, “Happy New Year, sweetheart.”
“Happy New Year to you too, Tarr,” she said, and then kissed him again in that needful way she had that told him she had more to say and didn’t want to say it. He wasn’t complaining…for now.
twenty-five
Briar knew she couldn’t keep kissing Tarr without telling him more. She always seemed to have more to talk about than he did, though he’d just admitted that one of his goals for next year was to get married.
Briar had given up on marriage a long time ago—maybe even before her first serious boyfriend. She’d been stunt riding since the age of ten, and as her talent for it became more and more obvious, and the spotlight shifted away from her parents and their roles in the rodeo to their star of a daughter, her mother had started telling her that men only wanted one thing from “girls like her.”
At the time, she hadn’t been sure what a girl like her was, but her more casual dating had told her that men liked her curves and were sometimes more interested in kissing her than anything else.
She’d put up a pretty impenetrable wall at that time, which had only been reinforced by her mother telling her that marriage would only trap her in a place or tie her to a person she might not want to be trapped or tied to forever. When her parents had gotten divorced, Briar, once again, wondered why anyone would get married.
She’d started dating a man seriously after that, and he’d been like a child in a big body. She didn’t want to mother her husband. Yet, every man she’d dated seemed put together on the outside but could barely function inside his private life.
She’d told Tarr almost nothing about the men she’d dated and why she didn’t like cowboys, and how she’d nearly lost everything after trusting one with a boyish face, a quick smile, and sugared lips.
She finally got control of herself and stopped kissing Tarr. She loved being physically close to him, but she’d be lying if she said it was enough. She knew it wasn’t, and Tarr did too, though he’d kept his promise and had never pushed her to tell him more than she was ready to tell him.
She pressed her lips together and swallowed. “I think maybe I could believe in love and marriage again,” she said. “With the right person.”
Tarr simply hummed and rubbed his thumb up and down from her elbow to her wrist, where he circled the bone there and then let his fingers start the journey again.
“I dated a lot of losers,” she said. “Two bull riders and one roper.”
Tarr said nothing, and Briar took a deep breath to center her thoughts. “But it wasn’t just them that broke my confidence that men could be good, and that someone could love a woman for more than her status.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Tarr said, his voice somewhat defensive.
Briar didn’t need him to reassure her, but she gave a quick nod against his chest. “Anyway, my parents didn’t have a good marriage,” she said. “And my mom told me she wished she’d never married my dad. She said men—especially cowboys—just want their women in the kitchen, and I was meant for greater things than that.”
Briar closed her eyes, and once again, she simply let the memories wash through her, hoping they too would drain away the way the ones at Christmas had. “For a long time, I believed her,” she said. “I was stuck-up and snobby. I didn’t have any friends, only people who wanted to be associated with me because I was good at stunt riding.”
Tarr slid his hand down past her wrist, aligning his fingers between hers.
“I let myself feel like I was more important than them,” she said. “And I trusted the wrong people. Then, of course, after the accident, I realized that I had created the bed I now found myself sleeping in.
“Of course no one was going to be on my side. I had never been on theirs. They weren’t going to back me up. I had been taking from them at every opportunity. I think most of them were delighted to see me fall, though they probably didn’t wish two broken legs and a hip replacement on me to do it.”
“I don’t know that woman at all,” Tarr said.
“I’m a completely different person now.” Briar’s voice turned tinny as she struggled against her emotions. “But Tarr?—"
Her voice quit, just simply quit on her, and her throat had narrowed so much she couldn’t even swallow. She felt like she might choke, and panic reared through her. She sat up and sucked at the air.
