But the heat remained, coiled in his chest like a living thing. Hot and sharp and demanding action. His jaw clenched until his teeth ached, and his hands curled into fists against his thighs.
She’d kept his son from him. For ten years, she’d let him believe he had nothing, no one, no reason to come home. While he’d been bleeding for strangers in foreign deserts, his boy had been here. Learning to ride horses, practicing roping, growing up thinking his father was dead.
Unfair. The word echoed in his mind, sharp and bitter. So unfair.
Kane’s voice drifted through his memory then, spoken over a campfire in Alaska last summer. God has a plan, Hammer. And it’s a good one. Trust Him.
Trust. Kane knew what he was talking about—the man had nearly lost the woman he loved last summer. If anyone understood the cost of love and the weight of second chances, it was Kane.
But the sermon from this morning surfaced too, Pastor Williams’s voice carrying weight across the hours. Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.
Pure in heart. Rowan almost laughed, but the sound would have been too bitter, too broken. He was about as far from pure as a man could get. Blood on his hands, scars on his soul.
The betrayal by his teammate had put a special kind of darkness in his soul.
And this felt just as black.
He stared out at the moonlit ranch, the same view he’d gazed upon as a broken teenager seeking refuge from his stepfather’s fists. Sierra’s grandfather had offered sanctuary then, no questions asked, just quiet acceptance and the kind of steady love Rowan had never known existed.
And then, she’d betrayed him.
How was he supposed to process this?
A soft knock at his door made him freeze.
“Rowan?” Sierra’s voice, barely above a whisper.
He didn’t trust himself to answer. Didn’t trust his hands not to shake again if he unclenched them.
“I’m so sorry.” The words cracked in the middle, and he could picture her standing there in her pajamas and robe, face streaked with tears, looking as broken as he felt.
Silence stretched between them, cracked only by the old house settling around them.
“I’ll…I’ll leave you alone.” Her footsteps retreated, soft on the hardwood.
No. Wait.
He was on his feet and pulling open the door before conscious thought could stop him.
Sierra stood halfway down the hall, her back to him, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Moonlight from the hallway window caught the copper highlights in her dark hair, and she looked so small, so fragile, that his anger cracked down the middle.
“Sierra.”
She turned, and the devastation on her face gutted him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, cheeks wet with tears, and she held her robe closed as if it were armor that wasn’t quite strong enough to protect her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I know you hate me. I know you?—”
He closed the distance between them in three strides. For a heartbeat, Sierra went rigid, her eyes wide and uncertain, as if she expected him to walk past her or turn away. Then her face crumpled, and he pulled her against his chest before she could finish the sentence. She melted into him, her arms wrapping around his waist.
And she sobbed.
“I don’t hate you,” he said into her hair, breathing in the familiar scent of her shampoo. “I could never hate you.”
Her body shook against his, and he held her tighter, the fury from moments before sliding away. His chest tightened with her sobs, the sound cutting through him, laying open his heart. And shoot, but she fit against him exactly the way she always had, like they’d been designed for each other.
They had, once upon a night. And if he were honest, that night had stayed with him, meant more to him than it should.
He shouldn’t have let it get that far. But that was then, and this was now. And it was time to reckon with it. He set her away from him.
