by Maisey Yates
“I hated that bitch Natalie,” Maddy added.
Lydia’s eyebrows shot upward. “Okay then. I accept either way. Thank you both.”
“Goodbye to you both,” Colton added.
“Eager to get rid of us?” Sierra asked.
“Very,” he said, looking at Lydia, and that wasn’t even part of the show. It was just the truth. He wanted to grab her and pull her into his arms and give her a kiss. He wanted to do more than that, but he wouldn’t, because she would probably get mad at him if he interrupted her workday further.
“Bye,” Maddy said, grabbing hold of Sierra and leading her out of the office.
Once they left, Lydia let out a hard breath and grabbed hold of her temples. “I feel like such a jerk.”
“Why?”
“They think I’m family.”
“Mostly, it’s the thing about how much they hated Natalie.”
“Whatever. I don’t really like tricking your sisters.”
“I don’t, either. I mean, obviously I’m not perturbed enough by it to not do it.”
She huffed out a laugh. “Eli and Sadie know.”
“Eli knows?”
“Well, I had to tell Sadie, because there’s no way she would believe that I just ran off and married you in a fit of passion, since I don’t do fits of passion.”
“I beg to differ, but go on.”
She quirked her mouth to the side and treated him to an unamused look. “Anyway. I had to tell her, and she said she tells Eli everything, so I can only assume he knows. But he was also sworn to secrecy.”
“I’m lying to my sisters,” he said. “And you apparently have a whole posse of people who know what’s going on with us.”
“But you’re the only person who knows much of anything about me.”
Those words hit him in a strange place, somewhere in the center of his chest. Made him feel like he’d suffered a crack in the retaining wall around his heart.
Her cheeks turned pink, and he could tell that she regretted the moment of sincerity. He wasn’t sure if he did or not.
He decided not to say anything. Instead, he decided to give in to what he’d been wanting to do since he first walked into the room. He moved to her desk, reaching out and taking her hand, drawing her up and pressing a kiss to her lips. “Hi,” he said.
“You greeted me already,” she said, her voice breathless. He didn’t think he had ever made Natalie breathless. Or anyone else, for that matter. It did something to him. She did something to him.
“Yeah, but not properly.”
“Now I forgot what we were talking about.”
“For the best, probably.”
She laughed. “I can’t argue with that. So, I guess there’s going to be a party at your parents’ house.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. That will be interesting.”
“You don’t talk to your dad very often, do you?”
Her words echoed his earlier thoughts. “Not really. Unless he’s issuing edicts or laying out complaints, Nathan West doesn’t have much to say to his kids. I suppose this party for you is his approval. Or it’s just revenge because he’s still angry about Natalie humiliating the family.”
“You got left at the altar and he never even called to check on you?”
It was Colton’s turn to laugh. “Why would he do that? That would imply that he was concerned my feelings might be hurt. Or that I had emotions wrapped up in this in any way at all. He wouldn’t get why I wasted any time feeling bad about a woman.”
“That seems...”
“Cold? Unfeeling? You have to remember, this is the man who had a secret affair years ago that resulted in a child. And that same man kept it a secret from his wife, from his whole family for more than thirty years. My father is not a man terribly in touch with his emotions.”
“Unlike you?”
“Next to him I look like a damn Care Bear.”
She pressed her hand to his stomach and pushed against his abs. “Aren’t you supposed to have some kind of rainbow light that shoots out of you or something?”
“I regret my choice of simile. Stop pressing on my stomach.”
“It pretty much doesn’t press. Your abs are crazy.”
“Dusty enough for you?”
She pushed him. “That isn’t fair. I don’t make any jokes about the other women you’ve slept with.”
“I know. Because you’re way too nice.”
“I am not nice.”
“Nice as peaches.”
She scowled. “Peaches aren’t nice. They’re gross.”
“Yours taste pretty sweet.”
He really was just a few seconds away from pushing her over that desk and having his way with her. He’d had her twice last night. It had done nothing to take the edge off his need. Here it was the middle of the day, he should be at work, and yet, all he could think about was her. It was like he was having some kind of delayed adolescence. The one he had never really been able to afford to have, because he had been too busy trying to be the shining example next to Gage’s tarnished one.
“That’s filthy,” she said.
“You like it.”
She looked away from him. “A little bit.” She took a breath, and met his gaze again. “So, I assume that you’re going to talk to your father at my dinner.”
“About the weather?”
“More than that. I thought you might talk to him about...about your ranch.”
He frowned, extricating himself from her hold. “Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s important to you. I understood that the first moment you showed me your barn and your horses, but yesterday...yesterday I really understood. That place is your dream, Colton. That’s where you see your life headed. Kids on that swing. That property. It isn’t at your parents’ ranch, and you know that.”
“I’ve spent more than thirty years not discussing any of those things with him. I don’t know why I would start now.”
“Because you were just talking yesterday about how—”
“I mentioned it to you yesterday. That doesn’t make it new. Just because you heard about it for the first time doesn’t mean it’s anything but business as usual on my end.”
“So what was the point of telling me? Are you just going to invest in something you don’t even care about for the rest of your life?”
“I’m going to do the right thing. Because sometimes you have to stand by your family even if it isn’t comfortable.”
His words had been chosen carefully to silence her. He knew that phrasing it that way would tap into her own guilt. And he felt like an ass for doing it, but really, there was no other choice.
“Your dad can’t put someone else in charge? I don’t believe that for one second.” Lydia, it turned out, was not so easily cowed.
“That isn’t the point. It’s the West family legacy. It can’t be handed over to someone who isn’t a West.”
“Your sister Madison isn’t available?”
“He’s not going to put Maddy in charge of the construction.”
“As if she couldn’t do it? I’ve only met her twice, I grant you that, but I’m pretty sure she could order men around on a job site if she really wanted to.”
“Even if she could, my father wouldn’t allow it. That isn’t how it works. My family has been in Copper Ridge ever since the town’s inception. Our ranching operation has passed from father to son over all those years. My father is hardly going to change it.”
“So what?” She said the word so easily, as if they could simply dismiss generations of tradition. As if they could wipe away an entire legacy.
“So, it’s up to me to keep everything together. If I don’t carry on the family legacy, then no one else will. If I don’t sta
y and take care of my mother, my father certainly isn’t going to do it. If I ostracize myself from him, then my sisters have to have another brother that’s outside of the family. And we’ll be splintered even more than we already are.”
“So you have to sacrifice everything for everyone else’s happiness?”
He curled his hands into fists. “Yes. Absolutely. And it isn’t like I’m unhappy. It’s all ranch work. It’s splitting hairs to care about whether it’s at his property or mine.”
“It’s not splitting hairs. It’s splitting your dream.”
“Fine for you to get principled, I guess. You left your family.” He was pushing hard now. He was being something far beyond an ass. And he couldn’t stop himself. Not now. “You left, so you don’t see why it shouldn’t be simple for me to do the same.”
“You think it was simple? You think it was easy to leave home? To gradually decrease contact with my family because every conversation was like walking back into the past? Because walking around my own home was like wandering through a mausoleum? If you think that was easy, if you think losing my sister to a terminal illness that ate away at her slowly somehow made my choice to try and find my own life simple? You’re kind of an idiot.”
Her words hit him like a slap, echoed in the room, made him feel every bit the small, mean jackass that he was. “I’m just saying it isn’t an option for me.”
“You’re making it sound like talking to your father about you doing what you want is the same as cutting him out of your life forever. Which, by the way, is not what I did with my parents. I moved away. A lot of people move away.”
“Opposing my father does mean cutting him out of my life. Worse, it means cutting my mother out of it. And that’s what I care about more than anything. She’s lost enough. That’s why we’re involved in this marriage, in case you forgot. On my end? It’s about protecting her. She can’t lose another child. She can’t have the family upset any more than it already is. You expect me to cause a giant rift while she’s dealing with finding out her husband had an affair?”
“There’s always going to be a wound, Colton.”
He pushed his hand through his hair, pacing the length of the room. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re using yourself as a Band-Aid. Trying to cover everyone’s pain, everyone’s injury. But there’s never going to be a point where everything is magically okay. There’s always going to be another wound. But at some point you have to stop.”
“I can’t listen to this. I have to work.”
“Oh, that’s hilarious. I just have to sit here and braid my hair. I have to work too, but I feel like this is something we should discuss.”
She was getting too close to something. Something that he couldn’t quite put a name to. Something he didn’t want to think about too deeply. He clenched his jaw, taking a step back. “You seem to be forgetting, Lydia, we don’t need to discuss anything. You’re not my damn wife. Not really. Just because we’re having sex doesn’t mean it’s different.”
And then he turned and walked out of her office, and he didn’t look back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SHE WAS BAKING revenge zucchini bread. She had no idea if that was mentally balanced or not, but Marlene had brought five zucchinis into the office this morning, and Lydia had left with her arms full of the offending green vegetable.
And now she was in Colton’s kitchen, up to her elbows in flour—flour she had purchased with her own money—putting together loaves of sweet, cinnamon-infused bread. Because Colton had said she wasn’t his wife. So her very logical, noncrazy response was to go straight into his kitchen and act as much like a housewife as possible.
“You’re crazy,” she muttered, pulling the first pan of finished bread out of the oven.
Yes, she was. It didn’t stop her from baking.
She heard the front door slam shut. So obviously, her husband, who didn’t think of himself as her husband, was home.
“Hi, honey,” she said, making her voice as singsong as possible. “I’m just in the kitchen.” Something evil entered her mind just then. “Barefoot.”
As suspected, he appeared very quickly after that. “And?” he asked, looking very concerned.
She smiled, letting the silence stretch between them. “And nothing,” she said finally, after he had gotten a little bit pale.
Were she in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant as she knew she had just made him suspect, she would be the one who was pale. He had a swing. She didn’t want to swing, so to speak.
“What are you doing?”
She smiled even wider. “Baking.”
“Did you put arsenic in the bread?”
“Just cinnamon. That you know of.”
“Why are you in my kitchen baking me bread? I was an ass to you earlier.”
She threw a dish towel on the floor. “Because. I wanted to have you come in and see me being a 1950s housewife. I wanted to give you a heart attack.”
“Well, I don’t believe you’re here being domestic, so my first thought is that you’re going to poison me. Congratulations, I do feel a little bit unsettled.”
She stamped, bending over and picking up the dish towel.
“You are horrible. And vile.” He crossed the space between them, advancing on her, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her up against him. Which he had a bad habit of doing. She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you dare,” she warned.
He didn’t listen. His mouth crashed down on hers, his kiss hard, swift. Toe curling. “I’m mad at you,” she hissed.
“I’m mad at you.”
“Why? All I did was give you advice. Good advice. You...” She poked him in the chest. “You were mean and you said mean things.”
“And that was different to the way we interact usually how?”
She wiggled out of his arms. “I know that I’m not your wife, you moron. Not in a real way. I get that. That isn’t where my advice was coming from. I thought that maybe we were... I don’t know. Friends, maybe?”
“I’m not sure that I would call us friends.”
“Well—” she threw her hands up, then slammed them back down on the counter “—nobody else here knows about Frannie. You’re the only one. And then, when I tried to help you out with your issues, you use that against me. How dare you do that to me? How dare you?”
His face changed. His expression suddenly looked...contrite. At least, she thought that’s what it might be. She had never really seen Colton contrite, so it was hard to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have used that against you.”
Her head was spinning. Because not only had he looked sorry, he had said sorry. One was rare enough; the other was basically unheard of. “Good,” she said, “you should be sorry.”
“Everyone in town knows that Gage left. So it isn’t like you’re the keeper of any of my deep dark secrets. But I’ve never talked to anybody about the position I feel that puts me in. So no one has ever tried to give me advice about it. It turns out, I don’t like being told things that I already know, but don’t want to do.”
“Well, nobody likes that.”
“Is the zucchini really poison?”
“It’s revenge bread.”
“How is it revenge bread? Does it have itching powder in it, laxatives... Will it kill me?”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s revenge bread, because I was trying to unsettle you with my housewifely ways.”
“You realize that’s a really unappealing name for a baked good.”
“Then don’t eat any. And my revenge will be complete.”
A smile curved his lips upward, and something in it drained the rage straight out of her. That smile, that slightly cocky, arrogant grin, used to w
ind her up like nothing else. It certainly wouldn’t have defused her anger a month ago. Was the sex making her mushy? Was it just impossible for her to have a sex-only relationship? Maybe.
Except she knew that was selling it short. They didn’t just have sex. They shared secrets on a swing, and he had told her about what he really wanted. About the children he hoped to have. It reluctantly made her understand why he had been willing to enter into a marriage that was less than a wild and crazy love match.
He hadn’t seen much in the way of love being demonstrated. Not in his family. She understood what it was like to turn away from strong emotion. And she knew what it was like to grow up in a situation that was less than functional. So she could see why he had opted for something else. Why he had thought maybe the answer would lie in a sensible union. One with someone he was compatible with.
So that he could have kids to use that swing. So that he could have his home the way that he saw it, at least, as much as he could without feeling like he was betraying his family.
She really didn’t want to understand him. The problem was, she did.
“I would like some of your zucchini bread,” he said.
“Fine. If you die it’s coincidental.”
He only smiled again and everything inside of her sighed. He crossed the kitchen and retrieved a knife, cutting a slice of bread off the fresh loaf, and then another. Suddenly, her plan was backfiring, because she had a sexy man serving revenge zucchini bread to her. And it was not being served cold.
“Coffee?”
“Do you have anything sweet to put in it? I’m kind of a wimp.”
“I actually noticed that. I bought some peppermint syrup the other day at the store.”
And that right there made her internal organs feel like they were about to take flight. “Oh. That’s...very nice.”
He flipped the switch on his electric kettle, bringing some water to a boil and starting a French press. Suddenly, she felt like the one who was getting a joke played on them.
This felt like the kind of domestic bliss she had spent years trying to avoid. Sharing space. Peppermint syrup in his house because she liked it. And he was preparing everything for her.
