“So I think you were about to tell me your long and complicated story,” he said, swirling the whiskey in his cup.
She leaned forward. “Here’s the deal I’m willing to make: If I tell you, then you’re going to have to tell me something.”
He sat up a little straighter. “All right. One question each, no more.”
“Fine. Deal.” She balled up the empty chocolate wrapper and attempted to chuck it toward the garbage, but it floated not far from the bed.
“Okay. So what’s the real story behind you being kept away from the day-to-day on the ranch? I know what you told me, and I believe you; I just have a feeling there’s a hell of a lot more to it.”
He sat there, waiting, watching while her eyes changed as rapidly as a storm passing across the open sky. Every ounce of laughter that she’d been brimming with vanished, and now she resembled the woman he’d first met that day she’d hired him; she was reserved and nervous, looking inside her almost empty glass of whiskey.
“I had a brother.”
He didn’t want to let on that he already knew that, so he gave her a nod to continue. His heart broke just a little when her hand shook as she tried to open a bag of Skittles.
She cursed under her breath. “My hands are too slimy.”
He silently took the bag, opened it, and handed it back to her. She didn’t meet his eyes and dug her fingers into the candy.
“His name was Joshua. He died when I was ten and he was twelve. My parents changed the name of the ranch after it happened. Josh was my best friend. He was funny and wild and loved life so much. He was one of those people who, when they woke up in the morning, hit the ground running, always into mischief. We would follow my dad around every day and were even allowed to help out on the ranch on the weekends. We took the bus together to school, and he was never embarrassed by his little sister tagging along. He got into loads of trouble with my parents—but not the bad kind of trouble, the kind that left them rolling their eyes and laughing at his antics. They were very different people when he was alive. They were happy. They would hold hands, kiss, have friends over for dinner, and go on vacations. One Saturday night…” She stopped talking and scrambled off the bed abruptly.
His gut was already in a knot, and a part of him regretted asking her about her past. He regretted the promises he’d made to himself about keeping his distance from her. Because if he hadn’t made those promises and there weren’t those restrictions, he wouldn’t have let her walk across that room alone; he wouldn’t have let her tell this story by herself. He would have held her and let her know without words that she wasn’t as alone as she thought she was.
She stood at the window, her back to him, her shoulders rigid. “Our parents were entertaining guests, and Josh came to my room and said he had a great idea and wanted to go build a campfire. It was stupid, though; it was so stupid, what he did. I knew better. If I could go back and replay that night, I wouldn’t have let him. But I thought he could do anything.”
He’d sat in many motels, with many different women—he’d have never brought a woman back to the Donnelly ranch—but this was the first time he’d spent a night just talking, and it was the first night he never wanted to end. He’d known the moment he met Sarah that she was different…different from anyone he’d met, completely different from him.
He’d been told by parents, grandparents, relatives, teachers, adults that he was worthless, stupid, and insignificant, and he’d believed it for so long. Until he was old enough to realize that the people spewing out the trash talk were the ones with the issues. It wasn’t until he’d come to Wishing River and was given a real home by the Donnellys that he found his self-worth, knew that he had nothing to prove to anyone but himself and that the world he’d grown up in—the one that didn’t give a shit about a kid like him—wasn’t the entire world. There were better people out there.
As he sat there, waiting for the most incredible woman he’d ever known to confide in him, he knew…Sarah was better people.
She turned around and crossed the room, leaning against the dresser and staring some place beyond his shoulder. “He was so sure, always so confident that nothing would happen, that I went along with it. I will never forgive myself for that,” she whispered.
He threw his legs over the side of the bed, tension in his muscles building, making it impossible to lie still anymore. His stomach churned as he waited for her to continue.
“When we got down to the river, he said he was going to take a quick swim. I told him not to. I mean, we knew you don’t swim in that river when the currents are high. It had been a rainy spring. There are rapids at certain points. Rocks. He was a good swimmer, strong, and big for his age. I stood on the bank and told him to hurry up, but he wanted me to time him to see how long it would take to get to the next clearing. But…but I lost sight of him and ran down the river, and he wasn’t there. I ran and I remember thinking that he couldn’t be far. And all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of his red shirt. He was being carried downstream. By that point, we were far from my house, and I had to make the decision of whether I should help him myself or go back for help. I knew that by the time I ran back and got help, he would have no chance. I was a good swimmer, too, but I…I waited to jump in because the rapids were carrying him too fast and…”
She covered her face with her hands. “I jumped in when I saw the blood. I almost didn’t make it. The rapids almost pulled me under, except they started slowing, and I managed to grab on to him and climb onto the bank. I flipped him over and…he was bleeding everywhere. His head. He must have hit his head. He wasn’t breathing. I was screaming. I remember screaming and I didn’t know if it was for help or because I knew he was gone. His blood was all over my hands; I felt the way his neck was bent, and I knew it was too late. I didn’t want to leave him. I couldn’t. I wanted to hold on to him. I couldn’t let him go, even though on some level I knew he was gone.
“But they were all coming, running with flashlights. And that was it; just like that, he was gone. I could hear…I could hear my mother’s scream forever. It was the kind of scream that you would think would shatter windows, but it shattered my heart, it shattered her, all of us. It was like I inhaled it and breathed it every night. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t speak for months after he died. I was in my head. Deep in my head. I had night terrors for years.”
Hell. His hands were clenched tight into fists, and he gritted his teeth. He’d known, obviously, because of Tyler and Dean and the ranch hands, but he hadn’t realized how bad. And he hadn’t known Sarah then. Now…he knew her. He could feel how this had broken her. But everything, all those missing pieces came clicking in perfectly. The way she could ride, the freedom she’d felt that night he’d gone chasing after her, only to find her watching a sunset without anyone hounding her—it was the childhood she’d lost. Cade didn’t know what to say, but the emotion in her voice made him want to close the distance between them, to offer her comfort.
“I’m so sorry,” he said finally.
She was staring out the window, and he didn’t know what to expect, but when she turned back to him, her eyes didn’t show an ounce of tears, and her features were so controlled that he wouldn’t have thought she’d just told him the story she had.
“Thank you,” she said. “The rest of it is just people coping after a tragedy, going through the motions, never really expecting to come out on the other side, time not really healing any wounds. Time made the wounds bigger in my family because no one talked about him. No one even spoke his name. Every ounce of happiness that existed in our family was buried with Josh, and my parents destroyed their relationship. Tragedy can bring people together or tragedy can tear people apart. That’s what happened to my parents. I cried that entire first year, and then I never cried again. I never wanted to feel again. I never wanted to love someone like that again. I withdrew… I became this person who doesn’t know ho
w to talk to people or have friends. Those… Your friends tonight… I couldn’t…I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t know how to act. I don’t fit in anywhere anymore.”
He stood up, his thoughts going a mile a minute. Everything she was telling him was painfully candid and hard to listen to. He took a step toward her, and he could have sworn he saw a flash of panic in her eyes. He didn’t know if it was him or the fact that she’d revealed so much about herself. He knew he probably should have stayed on the bed, given her distance, but he didn’t want to. There was something about her, the detachment in her voice that called to him. “You fit in,” he said, knowing that she just needed more time around people her age.
She shrugged. “I felt awkward. Anyway, my parents were very overprotective after that. They didn’t care about anything else I did, but they didn’t want me in any kind of danger, and the ranch, to them, was a danger. I started getting debilitating migraines after he died. I would lose my sight for a period of time before the intense pain would hit. They were terrified the first couple of times it happened, and that basically solidified their plans to keep me in a bubble so I’d be ‘safe.’ That’s why I was homeschooled.”
Were her migraines the “medical condition” Edna had been talking about? And hell, the older woman must have seen all the family at their worst. Even Edna’s behavior made sense now, how overprotective she was. “That sounds like it must have been a pretty frustrating way to live for a kid. Do you still get the migraines?”
She nodded. “Every now and again. Much less than when I was a child. Now I can usually predict when one is coming. They’re most often caused by severe stress or if I haven’t been taking care of myself, drinking enough water, or eating some trigger foods, namely sugar, chocolate, and gluten,” she said with a sheepish half smile.
It didn’t feel right, just having her standing there. He wanted nothing more than to pull her close to him, to make her feel safe and loved and to ease that ache even just a little. But that was the worst possible thing he could do.
He placed his hands in his back pockets and racked his brain for the right words. “Basically everything you ate tonight?”
She nodded, the sparkle coming back in her eyes, and he was relieved to see it again. He didn’t realize until it came back just how much he’d wanted to see her smile again. “I’ll be fine. It’s just one night. How could one night undo everything?”
Neither of them said anything, and he couldn’t turn away from her. There was this energy between them that only seemed to get stronger the longer they spent together. He wanted her like he’d never wanted anyone, but he knew better than she did that one night could change everything.
He wasn’t willing to risk everything for one night. And he wouldn’t do that to Sarah. “Did your parents ever come around? Before they died?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “No. They became different people and stayed that way for years. We used to go on picnics by the river—that had been my favorite thing to do on the weekend—but it was just gone, all that fun. That family stopped existing. It’s not that I didn’t forgive them, but the trust was broken. I don’t think they wanted to go back to the people they were before. I stopped trying to look for the parents I knew. My dad’s gambling was out of hand.”
“Gambling?” Cade repeated. His mind raced as he thought back to what he’d found in the spreadsheets, the inconsistencies, the large sums of withdrawn cash, the random infusions of cash without a paper trail. Shit.
She nodded. “My mother didn’t know about it for a long time. The drinking was easy to spot. That’s what took us from a normal family to a completely dysfunctional one. He used to be a religious man—when times were good, when my brother was alive. But it tested his faith, and it crumbled. My mother, on the other hand, leaned in hard to her faith, except she didn’t go to church anymore, which only widened the gap between them. I bought this locket with Mrs. Casey after he died and placed his picture in it. It made me feel like he was always with me.” She stopped talking abruptly and winced. “This is boring, isn’t it?”
He shook his head, this incredible weight on his chest making it hard to breathe. “Not at all.”
Her fingers toyed with the delicate locket. “When my father found it, he took it and hid it in their room. No reminders.”
She folded her hands tightly. “Anyway. I guess there’s not that much left to tell, except that the gambling and drinking got completely out of control, and one night he stumbled into the house drunk and told my mother he’d lost everything. I was hiding upstairs in the hallway, listening. My mother lost it on him. I heard glass shatter, and even though I’d missed my brother every day since he died, at that moment I would have given anything to have him there hiding with me. I had never felt so alone. He would have known what to do; he might have even gone down there and broken it up. I didn’t. I sat in the shadows and watched as their marriage unraveled, this horrid display of grief and anger and rage. God, the things they said…”
This time, when her voice trailed off, he didn’t stay on the sidelines—he reached for her, tugged her to him, and the initial contact of her body against his robbed his breath, robbed all memory of why this woman was off-limits to him. Sarah’s hands went to his waist, and she tucked into him with a trust that no one had ever given him. She fit against his body like she belonged there, with him. He’d never belonged to anyone, and here he was, wishing to belong to her, wishing that all of this wasn’t as complicated as it was.
When she leaned her head back, every ounce of loneliness, every piece of sadness was revealed to him in her eyes. The need to make that change, to make that disappear overtook him, and for the first time in his life, he wanted to step up and go all in with someone. Sarah brought out this need in him to be more than he was, to want more than the life he was used to. He held her face in his hands, one thumb gently grazing over her cheekbone, his gaze on hers, waiting and wanting.
Her lips parted, and her hands slowly traveled up his chest in a light, torturously gentle motion until one hand gripped the back of his head.
He clenched his teeth tightly, waiting until he felt that faintest tug; that’s when all bets were off, all walls came down, and all sense of rules and boundaries shattered. His mouth came down on hers, and he kissed her with every ounce of longing and desire that was in him. He kissed her with an abandon and feeling he didn’t know he was capable of. She tasted like candy and chocolate and better than anything in the world. Every hollow and curve was pressed against his body, and he memorized it, knowing it couldn’t happen again.
She clutched the back of his head like she was holding on to him for dear life, and he felt the same way. He needed to stop everything that was happening. He told himself that over and over again as his hands left her face and traced the sides of her breasts and her waist and hips, as his mouth left her impossibly soft lips and trailed kisses under her ear and down her neck. But when she whispered his name, her voice thick with desire, reality crashed over him. He dropped his hands and raised his head, finding the self-control he’d always prided himself on, even though he hated it right now.
He knew he couldn’t sleep with Sarah. He knew that would be crossing lines and would make both their lives hell. He pulled back slowly, his body throbbing, and stared into her eyes. The desire and disappointment in them made him almost rethink pulling back. So he took a physical step away from her. “I’m sorry.”
She blinked a few times and ran her hands through her hair. “Why?”
He clenched his jaw and forced himself to maintain eye contact with her. “I… We can’t get involved like that. It will make your life difficult.”
She frowned at him and crossed her arms. “My life? How?”
“If any of the guys at the ranch knew we were involved, it would look bad.”
She shrugged. “That has no effect on my life. Besides, how would they know?”
/> “They’d know. Trust me,” he said, turning his back to her because he needed more distance. He flopped down on the bed again and stared at the ceiling, noticing a few questionable splotches.
“I think you’re just trying to get out of this. Maybe it would make your life difficult.”
He kept his eyes trained on the ceiling, refusing to feel anything. “What? No. I couldn’t care less what people think of me. Never have.”
“Neither do I.”
“Yes, you do.”
She crossed her arms. “So you know me better than I know myself?”
He shrugged.
“Can you give me more than shrugs or one-line answers please?”
“Fine. I don’t want you to get hurt.” So much for keeping emotion out of things.
“Hurt? By you?”
The way she said it was almost insulting, but he chose to ignore the tone. “Yeah. By me. Because you deserve the rancher who’s going to come in and sweep you off your feet and give you everything you could ever want. Then you can get married and have kids or whatever…” He thought it wise to stop talking when her eyes narrowed and she slowly started walking toward him.
“You’re really lucky I’m not prone to violence, Cade.”
He almost laughed, but she was looking even more pissed, and her face was turning red. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Y-You should at least be sitting at attention or something when someone walks toward you with their hands fisted,” she sputtered.
He crossed one ankle on the other and tried not to let his gaze wander over her, because he hadn’t touched her in all of two minutes, and he was already longing for her, not just for the moment or the night, and that was why he linked his hands behind his head and took on the role he’d once been most known for—troublemaker.
Her gorgeous mouth curled into a half smile, and damn if he actually physically responded to the sight. Except she ruined the moment by picking up one of the decorative pillows he’d already removed from the bed. There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes as she approached him slowly.
Cowboy For Hire Page 12
