I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I reach over and grab his hands, pulling them away from his face. “You never cry,” I say quietly.
“I never used to,” Blake says. “Until my pig died.”
I swallow, hard.That used to bother me, knowing he could spare emotion for his beloved pet—not that I’m going to criticize anyone for being attached to an animal—but not for me. Now, though, I wonder if that’s what happened at all. “Ivy told me you cried about that,” I admit. “I was jealous that you could be so upset over that but not over the divorce.”
“It was about the divorce,” he says. “It was like I held it together all that time, and then I lost the last thing you gave me.The last piece of our life I had besides the kids. Suddenly all the emotion I pushed aside when I lost you came flooding back, and I cried for days. I couldn’t stop. I thought maybe I never would.”
I grip both his hands, and he squeezes his eyes shut as more tears leak out.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You never should have had to go through that.”
Blake sniffles and takes a deep breath, getting ahold of himself again. I almost wish he wouldn’t—not that I want him to hurt, but I want him to feel like he can let me see this side of him, let me in on his pain.
This, though, is a start.
“I’m excited you want to be part of the ranch,” I tell him. “If you think this place is such a well-oiled machine, it’s only because you’ve caught us on a good day. Just wait until the next big thunderstorm hits and we’ve got a spooked horse kicking his stall apart and several cats that need to be kept from scratching each other’s eyes out and a herd of terrified dogs all trying to sleep in bed with us. Wealwaysneed help.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, okay. It’s just a lot to keep track of. I hope I can keep up.”
“I’m not worried. You caught up pretty quick when we first moved in together.There wasn’t a ranch then, but there was Chandler Bing, and he was like a ranchful of problems all by himself.”
Chandler Bing was my adorable, senior, three-legged Jack Russell terrier. A little dog with an outsized personality and a list of medical requirements bigger than he was. All of which Blake took on without a second thought—though not without a snarky comment or two about how he’d never thought that moving in with a girlfriend would involve so many applications of dog ass-medicine.
He grins. “God, he totally was. I miss that dog. And Ugly Naked Pig.”
“Me too. But you’ll love the rest of these guys. And I have binders with all the info—color-coded, of course—in case you need it.”
He rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Why am I not surprised.” But he seems happier. Less afraid.
I’ve hurt him in so many ways, hurtus, but it’s nice to see that I can get this right sometimes.
He raises an eyebrow. “Speaking of dogs climbing into bed . . .”
Oh no.
“Thatbed,” he says. “I require an explanation forthat bed.”
I groan. I knew this was coming, even before late last night when we entered my bedroom, exhausted and emotionally drained. Blake took one look at my massive canopied oak bed—carved to look like bamboo shoots and covered with script that might be Chinese but I’m not actually sure—and said, “You’re telling meall about thistomorrow,” and crawled into said bed and fell asleep.
“Yeah, so there’s a story,” I say.
“It seems like there would have to be.”
I wrinkle my nose. Do I really want to tell him this story?Then again, he’ll probably find it hilarious.
Maybe.
“So about six months after our divorce, I was talking to my friend Deena, remember her?”
Now he’s the one who groans, but with a laugh. “Yes. And somehow I’m not surprised that she’s involved in this.”
Deena was one of my co-stars way back onSpy High. I don’t see her very often, not since the show ended when I was nineteen, but I can trace many of my more regrettable life decisions back to the times I do see her, a fact Blake knows all too well.
But she’s definitely fun to hang out with.
“So Deena was giving me grief about still being hung up on you after all that time—”
“Yeah, that whole six months. God, Kim, get past that eight-year relationship already, right?” Blake tickles my side and I laugh.
