“I love you, too, baby girl.” His voice is getting sloppy. “Don’t let Ry get on a plane. I’m gonna be okay.”
“I love you, too, you know,” I tell him. “Even when I want to strangle you.”
“Same.” He takes a deep breath. “Gonna sleep now. Night.”
He hangs up, and I throw my phone across the room into the couch and then pace away from Willow. My brother is in a goddamn hospital bed, and he doesn’t want me to come to him.
He could have died today.
He could die every day. That’s the truth of his job, and it’s something that I always have in the back of my mind, but Jesus, I hate what he does for a living.
“Ry.”
I hold up a hand and continue to pace.
“Why.” I swallow hard and then try again. “Why won’t the people I love let me help them?”
I stop and face her and watch as a tear falls down her perfect cheek.
“Even my birth mother.” I keep pacing, pushing my fingers through my hair. “Ibeggedher to move away, to stop bringing the men home, to be happy with just the two of us.”
I’ll never forget her face, broken and bloody. She was still convinced that the man who did that shit loved her and she couldn’t live without him.
“But she didn’t listen, and she stayed until it killed her.”
Willow shakes her head. I don’t know if I’ve ever told her that story before.
“My dad. Ray. I asked him a hundred times if he needed me to come home to help him after Mom died, and he always said no, which we know now was a huge fucking lie. I could have hired people for him. I could have come here myself and taken care of him.”
I am so goddamnpissed.
“Gideon is lying in a hospital bed somewhere, and he won’t let me come help him. Do you know how absolutely hopeless it feels to know that someone you love is hurting and they won’t let you do anything to fucking help? And then there’syou.”
“Me?” She blinks rapidly as she brushes away her tears.
“Your fridge died, your kid feels safe here,youthrive here. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
I should probably stop yelling and take a deep breath, but goddamn it, I’m so fucking pissed off.
“I have an amazing house with everything we could need or want. I want you with me, always. I want Aiden. And you’re fighting me on it, as if you planned to just fuck around with me this summer and then—what? Get me out of your system? Once upon a time, I might have been down for that with someone, but not with you, and not now.”
“That’s not—”
I pace over to her. “Maybe my feelings aren’t reciprocated like I thought they were. Apparently, you don’t feel the same.”
I turn to pace away, but she catches my wrist in her hand, keeping me close.
“It’s my turn to talk,” she says. “You had your say, and now I’ll have mine. Iknowyou’re upset, and I agree with you. Gid should let you go out there, even if it’s just for a few days.”
I pull out of her reach. I can’t let her touch me right now.
I feel too raw, too vulnerable.
“Please let me touch you.”
“Not yet.”
“You’re a fixer, Ryker. That’s who you are as a human. It’s who you’ve always been, and it’s one of the things that I love the most about you. If I got hurt on this ranch when I was a kid, you were the first one there to help me get cleaned up. When my bike had a flat tire, you fixed it. When I dropped my journal in the creek because I thought it would be magical to sit on a rock and write down all my feelings, you swam in to get it for me and then painstakingly used my blow-dryer to get every page dry, and you swore you didn’t read it.”
