With a lot of muttering, Tammy scooped ice out of the nearby trough with her hand. She put it in the same rag she’d been using to wipe down the bar, tied the ends in a knot, and then slid it to Benji, who caught it and plopped it into the cowboy’s lap.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Benji said.
As if to prove his point, the kid picked up the ice bundle and pushed to a stand. He wobbled a bit before hobbling off without a word.
All around them, people had stopped what they were doing to stare.
‘Let’s go.’
‘I’m not ready to leave yet,’ Sierra argued.
‘Sierra,’ he said slowly, quietly. ‘Do not push me right now.’
‘Or what?’ she demanded hotly. And when he didn’t reply, she flung her arms open and shouted, ‘Or what, Benji?’
And then she did the one thing neither of them could ever have expected. She burst into tears. And they were not quiet tears either. They were those aching, grief-filled sobs that he had only ever heard her make once, when she’d found out her parents had died in a car accident almost a decade prior. They were those heaving, broken sounds he’d been waiting over a year to hear again.
Benji’s anger died immediately.
He pulled out his wallet and put a hundred on the bar, pushed Sierra’s purse into her shaking hands, and said, ‘Come on, Si.’ He lifted her into his arms, cradled her like he might have cradled a child,theirchild, and walked towards the door as she buried her face against his chest and broke.
Tammy scurried around the bar to open the door. ‘You take care of each other now,’ she told him.
‘I’ll fetch her car tomorrow, Tam.’
‘It’ll be here.’ The bartender closed the door behind them.
It said something about how long he had been without her that it pained him to put her down just so he could open the passenger door of his truck. Benji did it slowly, reluctantly, excruciatingly aware of every pocket of air that refilled the spaces between them again.
Sierra swiped at her face. She didn’t look at him, only swayed on her feet, drunk as a sailor, and stared inside the truck as if contemplating whether she was going to get in or turn and run away.
It was Benji who whispered, ‘Please, Si. Don’t make me leave you like this.’
Her shoulders rounded. Her entire body shook as she fought fresh sobs. She gripped the door as if to hold herself up. There was one moment, as Benji stood behind her, waiting, where he thought she’d turn and walk away. But she used her grip on the door to climb into the truck instead.
Relief flooded him. He waited for her to settle before he reached across and pulled the seatbelt around her. He took his time buckling her in, covertly taking deep inhales of her perfume beneath the tequila.
Her signature scent was Dior and aptly named ‘Pure Poison’. Smelling it again had his sensory memory in revolt. As it entered his bloodstream, he remembered everything else. The softness of the skin beneath her breasts. The exact hammer of her excited pulse against his lips. The taste of her mouth and her body. The feel of her writhing in his hands.
Reluctantly, he stepped back, and when Sierra huddled further into her thin blazer, he shrugged out of his jacket, draped it over her, and then closed the door on the scent and on his memories. Benji walked around the truck slowly, letting the cold air nip under his shirt and along his skin, settling his body as he internally berated himself.Pull it together, asshole.
It helped. A little. And when he opened the driver’s door and climbed in beside her, the perfume settled around him rather than kicking him in the gut.
He didn’t talk as he started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. He didn’t say anything as he headed home to Hunt Ranch. Sierra didn’t need empty words and hollow comfort. She needed to grieve. She needed to break and let all that ugly, black sorrow out. And Benji had no idea how to tell her that without her shutting down again – so he didn’t say anything.
Next to him, Sierra burrowed into his jacket and rested her head against the cold passenger window. She was so quiet, so still, for so long. The only sign that she was alive at all were the little bursts of fog her breaths left on the window.
The drive took them over thirty minutes, but it was only when he entered through Hunt Ranch’s arched gates that Sierra spoke. ‘Not the ranch house,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want to put a dampener on Nina and Mav’s news.’
So, Benji kept driving. He didn’t stop at the resort either, knowing that he wouldn’t get her through to her office without running into guests and staff.
He drove her to the barn – quiet in the night – parked outside, and turned off the engine.
But he didn’t push her to get out, didn’t ask her if seeing Ty would help. He just sat next to her in the quiet, waiting. Always waiting.
He was so quiet, so calm. Being in the truck with Benji was like climbing in a hot bath after stripping your clothes in the winter. The warmth seeped into Sierra’s very bones. She burrowed deeper into his jacket, letting his familiar scent wrap around her like an embrace, and even though she knew it wasn’t fair to lean on him when she’d so routinely pushed him away, she couldn’t bring herself to walk away. She needed him. She needed his calmness, his kindness. She needed to feel his love just then, if only for a few hours, because it had always steadied her and made her feel safe.
She would have been embarrassed by her outburst had it been anyone else. But Benji had been there through far worse: When she’d thrown up at Mav’s thirtieth birthday party, when she’d been so sick with morning sickness that she hadn’t left the toilet for hours, and when she’d given birth … So, a drunk meltdown hardly embarrassed her. What it did do, was shame her.
