Pain I can see is still residing in his eyes, though his face doesn’t look haunted, the way it did that day when I spotted him sitting by himself. That was back when everything was fresh and new, the wound not yet scabbed over. Maybe now, all he has left are scars.
And I know a thing or two about scars on a heart.
I rip my gaze away from his. “You two all set? I need to get my car, Wes. I have work to do before tonight.”
Wes and Jericho stand, and when we get out front into the sunshine, Jericho tells me she’ll let me know if our bid gets chosen among the others. She says it in this annoying way, like Wright Design + Build doesn’t have a shot in hell. I know she’s fielding other buyers, and I wonder who they are and what they’re offering.
“When are you meeting the other buyers?” I ask Wes when we’re in his truck.
He glances at me. “Next week. Nobody flew out here so quickly to see us the way you and your dad did.”
“I’m the only one-night stand popping up from the woodwork to buy your property?” I can’t help the jab. I’m feeling prickly after Jericho insinuated she doesn’t think I’ll win the bid.
Wes gives me a hard look. It’s the first time either of us has openly said what happened. “No,” he murmurs, his tone incongruent to the expression on his face.
My eyebrows lift. “No? I’m not the only one? There are more?” A stab of jealousy slices through me.
“I wouldn’t call you a one-night stand.” He says it like he’s angry.
My arms fold in front of my chest. “What else would you call it?”
He looks like he’s about to say something, but then he shuts down, as if someone somewhere flipped a switch. The truck shifts into drive and he takes us out of town, and as we pass the point where the scrubby bushes kiss the pines, it hits me.
Wes is a cowboy prince, tucked away up here in his log and stone castle. What is it he’s hiding from?
9
Wes
She’s onlya few feet away, sitting in the passenger seat of my truck, but she may as well have a force field around her. Untouchable. Unreachable.
And yet, against every cell in my brain issuing caution, I want to reach out. Hold her. Touch her. Kiss her the way I did that evening in the lake, with an urgency that propelled us to seek a bedroom.
We’re winding our way around the mountain, and pretty soon we’ll be back at the homestead, and I’m dying to say something. I can feel the hurt and fury coming off her in waves, two emotions she has every right to feel.
I need to make her feel better, I can’t stand knowing she’s sitting over there hurt because of my inability to handle my shit. I take a deep breath and start.
“You wore a short jean skirt. Your legs were tanned and looked like they could’ve been carved from sandstone. You danced with your friends and laughed. You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and it hit me that you were the reason I re-upped each time my four years were over. So people like you could keep living, keep fucking up, keep being human.” My stomach turns over as I talk, the sensation of releasing these thoughts so foreign it feels like they should belong to someone else. “You weren’t just a one-night stand, Dakota.”
You were so much more, and you terrified me.I can’t bring myself to say it out loud. She’s smart enough to put it all together, to take what I said and fill in the cracks with the words I cannot say.
“Thank you.” Her voice is soft and supple, and it brings out in me an ache for her I buried a long time ago. I thought of her constantly after that night, and eventually I knew I had to tuck away my memories of her.
I grunt my response like a caveman, because I don’t know what else to say and I feel too bare and I don’t particularly care for the feeling. Add to it the fact that—
“What the fuck?” I shout, my eyes trained on the building a couple hundred yards away from the homestead. A beat-up late-model truck is parked at an angle in front of Cowboy House, and the person who it belongs to has no business on my ranch. I step on the gas and send dirt and dust flying.
“What’s wrong?” Dakota asks. She leans forward, peering out the windshield, trying to spot an obvious problem, but there isn’t one. Not to her, anyway. There certainly is to me.
I drive up to Cowboy House and slam on the brakes, locking my arm across Dakota so she doesn’t go flying into the dashboard.
“Stay here,” I instruct, throwing it in park and getting out.
I’m livid. My fury-laced blood boils under my skin.
The hinges protest as I yank open the door to Cowboy House. “Dixon,” I bark. “Get out of here, you motherfucker.”
I cross the kitchen and round the corner to the sleeping area. Dixon slouches in a chair beside Troy’s bed. I’m too late. Troy is already fucked-up.
