She jerks her wrist out of my hand. "Do you ever think maybe I don't want to talk because giving voice to my thoughts makes them real?" She starts pacing in front of the built-in bookcase. "Right now, they're just shadows in my head. But the moment I speak them out loud, they take form. They breathe. Theyexistin a way I can't take back." She stops before looking me square in the eye and adding, "And I'm not ready to let them out of their cage."
"From where I'm standing, keeping them caged inside isn't working. They're eating you alive from the inside. They're already real, sweetheart. They're destroying you in silence. So tell me, what scares you more: telling me the truth or realizing you're giving these thoughts exactly what they want by keeping them locked away?"
She drops her head, and I watch her shoulders curve inward like she's trying to make herself smaller. When she finally speaks, her voice is barely above a whisper.
"My father sent me away after the accident. Both of my parents said it was to keep me safe." Her fingers twist together, and her knuckles go white. "A year later, my mother died, and I rarely got to return to Fairfield. When I would visit my father on breaks, it was always at our property in Louisville, or we'd vacation somewhere else. Anywhere but home."
She drops her hands to her sides and heads to the window. "For the longest time, I didn't question it. I missed everything: my mom, the ranch, the life we had. And because I missed it so much, I assumed he did too." She presses her palm against the glass. "I thought being there was just as hard for him. That's why whenever I'd bring up my mother or ask about the year she died, he'd shut down, change the subject, because remembering was too hard."
"But?" I prompt, moving to the other side of the windowsill.
"But that excuse only works for so long, doesn't it? After high school, after the accident..." She wraps her arms around herself. "It's felt like more than grief. The fact that he's been adamant, almost borderline obsessive, about keeping me away from the ranch. Now I know part of it was because of the lease, but even without that…" her voice cracks. "He's different with me. Like we're strangers living in the same house. Passing ships in the middle of the night."
So much of who she is and why she's so addictively stubborn makes more sense the more she talks, and I hate that she won't let me in. I want to be the one to help her, but fuck, I understand why she doesn't want help. Why she doesn’t trust it?
"And now this." She laughs, but there's no humor in it. "He practically hid a whole existence from me."
I close the distance between us, needing to be closer even if she's not ready to be touched. "You still haven't told me what you think he's hiding."
She meets my gaze, and for the first time since we started this conversation, I see real fear there. "My mother's death certificate." Her voice is steady now, too steady, the kind of calm that comes before a storm. "Coroner reports. All her medical files." She takes a breath. "They're sealed."
"Sealed." I shake my head, not following why she’d even go down that rabbit hole. "I thought you knew how your mother died."
"I was told she died in her sleep from a stroke. I only started looking after my father shut me out one too many times. I wanted to know if she was sick. What she was like before she died. Was she happy. And when I started looking, that's what I found." She lets out a sigh like she's glad to finally speak the words that have been gnawing away at her sanity for more years than she's probably letting on. "Why would they be sealed unless someone has something to hide?" She moves past me, agitation rolling off her in waves.
Fuck. I've always known Asha Fairfield had layers, but this...
"You think your father had something to do with your mother's death?" I let out a long slow breath. "That's why you asked me to lie. Why you wanted this marriage to look real. You want to break him so you can get your answers."
She spins to face me, and the truth is there in her eyes. Her father hates me. Really hates me. Not the way she does, which feels performative at best. This runs deeper. This is the kind of hatred that roots itself in a man's chest and never leaves, and she married me to exploit it.
"I don't know what I think anymore!" Her hands shake as she throws them up. "All I know is I've been questioning how much I really know the man I call Dad for months—years, even—and now there's this." She gestures wildly at nothing and everything. "And I don't know what's real anymore. What if everything I remember about them, about us, is a lie?"
There it is. The real fear. Not that her father is guilty, but that her entire childhood was built on deception. I move closer and feel the charge in the air between us. Her eyes flick between mine, wide and wary.
"This right here, right now, us." My voice drops lower. "This is real."
"No, Trigg. It's fake. One?—"
"Stop." The word comes out rough, and I watch her breath catch. I run my hands down the sides of her arms and feel her shiver beneath my touch, and I don't know if it's from anger or something else entirely. When I reach her shoulders, my fingers flex, holding her in place. "You don't get to put me in the same category as everyone else who's hurt you."
She tries to look away, but I'm not having it.
"Penn was a coward who didn't deserve you. Emma was a snake who'd sell her own mother for social currency." I step closer, eliminating what little space remains between us. Her chest brushes against mine with each breath she takes, and I can feel her pulse hammering beneath my fingertips. "Your mom? That wasn't a choice; she didn't leave you. She was taken. And you still have Laney. You don't get to write her off just because she married my brother and life got complicated."
My thumb and forefinger catch her chin, tilting her face up to mine. Her skin is soft, warmer than I expected, and when her lips part slightly, it takes everything in me not to get distracted.
"And the jury's still out on your father."
Warrick Fairfield has done nothing to earn me giving him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not doing this for him. I'm doing it for her. I don't want the woman I care about to lose the one person I know she loves so deeply. Her love for her father is why she's hurting now, and I refuse to let it break her.
"Maybe I'm not the guy you pictured standing beside you through this. This whole situation is fucked up and messy andnot what either of us planned." My other hand slides up to cup her jaw, my thumb brushing across her cheekbone. "But I can be the one person who doesn't lie to you."
She looks at me like she wants to believe me but doesn't know how. "It's never that simple."
"It doesn't have to be hard," I say, leaning deeper into our closeness, drawn in by her fear and the need to erase it. "I'm not going anywhere." I lean in until I can feel her breath on my skin. "You keep waiting for me to become another person who hurts you, but that's not who I am. Stop pushing me away. Stop fighting me and making me the enemy." My forehead touches hers. "Let me in." My thumb drags over her bottom lip, and her eyes drop to my mouth. "Let me prove we can be something else." My words are barely a whisper as her mouth is so close I can practically taste the kiss she hasn't granted me.
Then she closes her eyes, and the gloss of her lips barely grazes mine before the door to the study opens. "Oh, I'm sorry," a man who looks like he might be one of the ranch hands says, removing his hat. "I was looking for Dar."
