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“I’m sorry about your grandmother,” Dallas gritted out. “She was a damn good woman. She took absolutely no prisoners. The world is a little worse off with her gone.”

That seemed to set Ruthie reeling, just a little.

“Who are you?” she pleaded.

Dallas rocked back on his heels and tried to think this through. He couldn’t tell if he didn’t want to tell her because he was legitimately concerned about her amnesia here, or if he didn’t want to tell her because he was far more concerned that she would hear who he really was to her and somehow remember what a disaster he’d made of their marriage.

But he also didn’t want to lie to her, shine her on, and make her think he was some better version of himself than the one who she’d left—and rightly. The idea of her family making her think they had any right to her or her grandmother’s things made him feel sick. There was no way in hell he would put on any kind of act like that.

She deserved better.

He just didn’t know how to say I was the love of your life until I messed it all up and you washed your hands of me, and if you could remember all of it, you never would have come here.

Because he wasn’t sure if that was what he ought to say, or if saying it would actually cause her more problems.

Or, again, if he was just a coward.

But Dallas had been an Army Ranger, and he’d been good at it. He’d been trained to do hard things that no one else wanted to do. There was absolutely no good reason he shouldn’t tell her the basic facts, at the very least. Especially while she was standing right here, in Cowboy Point after all these years, begging him to shed a little light on this for her.

It was literally the least he could do.

Those beautiful eyes of hers searched his. “Please,” she said, pleading again.

Almost like she knew already, Dallas thought, and wanted him to confirm it. Or maybe she could feel what he did, that intensity that had always been there between them. That connection that time and space and profound disappointment, not to mention heartbreak, never seemed to change.

“I was your husband,” he told her then, biting the words out before he could disgrace himself and chicken out of it. “We were married for about five years.” He cleared his throat. “And technically, I still am. We still are. Because we never actually divorced.”

And then he stood there, braced for her reaction like he expected her to take a shot at him.

He wouldn’t blame her if she did.

Ruthie’s face got brighter. Her eyes got a little glassy. She shook her head, and then started to say something. But stopped.

Then she laughed, almost like it was involuntary, but she kept going even when he stared.

She laughed a lot.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to say after a moment. “I just…” She shook her head again, and it took her a moment to pull herself together. She even wiped at her eyes. “Are you serious?”

“I was an Army Ranger,” Dallas said curtly, like he was belting out his name, rank, and serial number to an enemy force. “I was in the 75th Regiment at Fort Benning. I met you in a bar in Columbus. We pretty much laid eyes on each other, and that was it.”

She stared at him for a long, pregnant sort of moment, and he expected her to explode. To burst into tears. To throw something at him, maybe. He didn’t know.

Instead, a disbelieving sort of smile spread across her face. She shook her head.

When she laughed again, it sounded delighted. “But you’re…” She let out another laugh. “I mean, look at you. You’re a Greek god dressed like a cowboy. How the hell did I manage to get you to marry me?”

Beside him, Cat muffled what sounded like her own laugh. Dallas scowled at her.

Then he focused on Ruthie again. “I’m the one who was punching up, Ruthie.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Ruthie murmured, laughing again. She looked at Cat then. “I’m sorry, this must be very upsetting if he’s your brother. But he’s…”

“Oh, I know.” Cat sounded disgusted. “You have no idea what it was like to grow up with the two of them. Girls used to drive halfway up the hill just to scream their names.”

“That happened one time,” Dallas gritted out.

And Dallas had to stand there in the wreckage of his marriage while the wife he was still actually married to and his treacherous sister dissolved into laughter that went on and on.