"Okay."
"I'm not the same guy I was back then. I won’t pretend I wasn't a menace. Treating women like notches on my bedpost. But I'm not him anymore."
She goes still against my shoulder.
"I haven't been that man for a while now. But it’s hard to get people to forget. Especially ones in a small town."
Her hand roves over my chest, palm flat over my heart. “Then who are you now?”
I stare at the fire.
"I'm a man who talks to his horse more than he talks to people," I say slowly. "I cook for one and I'm getting tired of it. I've got a list in my head of every dumb thing I did between nineteen and thirty-five that I'd undo if I could, but I can't, so I'm trying to make up for those things while I can." I pause. "I'm a man who came home to Hollow Peak since I didn't have anywhere else to go, and stayed because I remembered all the reasons I loved it."
Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt.
"That's who I am now," I say. "I want different things than the cocky kid you keep hearing stories about. I want one woman, a porch we can sit on at the end of the day and a kitchen that smells like something I made for her.” I pause. “And a big bed she falls asleep in beside me after we’ve made love. Maybe a child. But it’s okay if we just have horses or cows or chickens. I'm not picky.”
When I'm done, the silence stretches out long enough that I think maybe I said too much.
Then I brush some stray hairs from her face, caressing her face. "Who areyounow?"
She lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. "Beck."
"What? You asked me. It's a fair question."
She's quiet as her thumb moves once against my chest, as if she's bracing herself.
"I'm a woman who likes lists, color-coded organization, and systems that make my life easier to manage. Hell, my meticulously curated binder helped win my divorce, though my ex’s cheating did the heavy lifting on that one,” she says, and there's that dry catch in her voice that tells me she's trying for light. "I'm a sister and a daughter and a damn good trainer. I'm also a country girl who could shoe a horse before she could drive a car. That's the easy version."
The fire pops.
"The harder version is—I'm a woman who married a man much too young because he was charming and full of plans. Six months in he asked me to quit training. Said the travel was hard on him. So I gave it up for two years. I went from being a woman with a life to being a wife, and I didn't notice it happening until I started feeling as if I was disappearing inside my own house."
She takes a deep breath.
"I came back to training part-time eventually. Built it back up the best I could on the side. And the first time I asked Cole about his assistant he told me I was paranoid. SaidIwas the problem. And Iapologized." She huffs a sound. "I apologized to my cheating husband for listening to my gut. That's who I was a year ago."
I tighten my arm around her.
"Who I am now is somebody trying to put herself back together out of mismatched parts. And the worst of it is that I knew. I just kept making excuses, since the alternative was admitting I'd built my whole life around a man who was lying to my face." Her voice lowers. "So now I’m having a hard time trusting myself.”
She angles her face up to mine. “I look at you and I think you’re a good man, Beck. But now there’s this other voice saying,that'swhat you thought about Cole."
"I get it, darlin’,” I say on an exhale. “But you wanna know what I think?"
She blinks up at me. "What?"
"I think your gut wasn't wrong about him. I think your gut told you years before you listened. Maybe in the beginning, you were just young and stupid. Like me. " I tip her chin up so she has to face me. "Your gut works fine, Laurel. You just gotta listen to it more closely."
Her big green eyes are shimmering.
"And if your gut tells you I'm worth a shot, someday, then I'll be here….waiting.”
She smiles. “You’d wait for me?”
“Of course. But if you keep looking at me like that, I may not make it very long.”
She chuckles and her hand slides up and into my hair. “I don’t want to wait.”
