by Maisey Yates
The sun broke through the clouds.
He wanted Sabrina Leighton. He loved her. And he was going to move heaven and earth to make her his.
* * *
SABRINA WAS JUST closing up at the tasting room. Her mind and body felt frazzled. She felt raw, and fragile. But then, she had felt that way ever since she had walked away from Liam.
And now it was Christmas Eve, and it was even worse. Because it was Christmas, and it was supposed to be good. And there were some good things. Her father had come by the tasting room. And he had personally extended an invitation for her to come to their home for Christmas. She always did. But he never spoke to her. And he certainly wasn’t the one who invited her. So there was that. The small inroads. The rebuilding of relationships.
But not the one that she wanted most.
She could rationalize all of those things inside her. Tell herself that it was just a lingering sense of missing him, because what they had had been fun. Because she did love him, even if her destiny wasn’t to be with him forever.
But mostly, she was just starting to feel like she had played the coward all over again.
She had imagined it a brave and wonderful thing to do what she had done. To walk away from him nobly.
But in the end, it had all been about salvaging pride. It had all been about not doing what she had done when she was seventeen.
She had been young then, but at least she had been willing to make a fool of herself for love. She was questioning herself now. Questioning how honest she was. Which was funny, because it was Liam she would normally accuse of lying to himself and everyone else. But she had built herself up this convenient, tall tower to hand down edicts from. To benevolently tell Liam thank you for setting her on the path of healing, without begging him to stay on it with her.
She blinked back tears, and turned around to lock the tasting room door.
“I thought I might find you here.”
She turned to see Liam standing there on the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets. He was wearing an oatmeal-colored cable-knit sweater and she had the strangest urge to rush to him, to press her head against his chest, to curl into him.
But somehow she resisted.
“What are you doing here?” She blinked. “Are you here to check on the shop? Because...you still have a key, you know you’re welcome to go inside whenever you want. Or did you need...accounting information...? Because I sent all of that over via email and...”
“Shut up.” He advanced on her, his expression blazing with heat. “I’m not here for any of that.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then what are you here for?”
“I’m here for you,” he said.
But before she could press further, she found herself being dragged into his arms. Found herself being pressed up against his chest just as she’d envisioned moments before, his lips crashing down on hers. She couldn’t fight it. Couldn’t fight him. Even though she wanted to scream at him, yell at him, pound her fists against his chest. Because how dare he? How dare he come back for her now and kiss her like this? How dare he offer more of his body when what she wanted was his heart? His soul. All of him.
She pushed away from him. “No. Don’t. Don’t tease me.”
“Do I look like I’m teasing you?”
“I told you the way that it has to be,” she said, knowing that she sounded desperate. “I can’t... I can’t do halfway with you, Liam. I can’t. I have to be able to move on. I have to be able to find something normal.”
“You only think we can’t have that if you think we’re broken.” He grabbed hold of her chin, tilting her face up. His green eyes were wild, fierce. “I refuse to believe we are broken,” he said, his voice bleeding the kind of raw emotion she had never heard from him before. “I refuse to believe that we have to be defined by everything that has happened to us. I don’t want to be. I tried to escape it. I tried to be better than it somehow. I tried to be something more. Something different. I’m rich. I made a lot of money. I got really important in my job. It has never once fixed all the broken things inside of me. It was never enough. I can’t pretend that if I offered it to you it would be. But I can offer you me. Just me. And the fact that I love you. Whatever the hell that means coming from me. I...I don’t know how to love a woman. I’m not sure that I know how to love anyone. I don’t have any practice at it. But I want to. Sabrina, I want to love you. For all of my life. I didn’t give my heart easily. But I gave it to you a long time ago. It was you. It was always you. It could never be anyone else.”
Sabrina had started shaking some time ago. Her hands, her whole body. He wasn’t lying now, her Liam. Wasn’t protecting himself with banter or his cutting remarks or well-placed smile. He was...well, he was shaking too. He was on the edge. He was not the businessman. Not that beautiful boy she had known all those years ago. He was just...Liam.
The businessman, the boy she had known and the boy who had been so desperately, and horribly, let down by his parents. The one who had been made afraid to give anything of himself. The one who had been locked away. Who had been neglected.
That was the man who stood before her now. The man who was opening himself up, risking himself. Offering himself.
Her cheeks felt wet, cold, and that was when she realized that she was crying.
“Liam... Maybe we are broken,” she said. “I don’t know. But if we are, then we’re the right kind. Because we’re broken just right, so that we can fit each other. And that’s all I need. It’s all that I want. I was too afraid to say this the other night. I was trying to be brave, trying to let us both off easy. But I think maybe that’s not what we need. I think we need to do the harder thing. I think we need to figure out how we can make this work. Because that’s what I want. I want this. I want you. Because I love you. I love you more than I want to be safe. I love you more than I want my pride. I love you enough to stand here weeping on the street.” She laughed, watery and trembling. “And I was feeling really grown-up and mature because I watched Olivia doing this and told myself I wouldn’t do the same but...I don’t care now. I’ll cry a river down Main Street. I’ll get on my knees and beg. Whatever I have to do. Whatever you need.”
“You,” he said, his voice rough. “Just you. That’s all.”
“You have me.”
“Will you have me?” he asked. “Me and all of the things that make me who I am? Messed up and broken. All my tattoos, all those things I put on the outside because I was afraid to feel them?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“I’m going to feel it all now,” he said, brushing her hair out of her face. “All this stuff I’ve been pushing away, all the feelings. And that might be a lot of trouble for you. Am I worth it? Am I enough?”
“More than enough, Liam,” she said. “More than enough.”
“I want this. I want you. I want to give you everything, and I’ve never wanted that in my life. You... You’ve shown me things, given me things, I never thought I could have. You’re my Christmas, Sabrina.”
“Your what?”
“My peace on earth. My hope. My joy. My love. All these things that I never understood until you. And you were that for me from the moment that I first saw you, but I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready then. To give everything. To ask for everything. But I’m ready now. I’m ready for this. Ready for you, finally. I wasn’t right at first. I wasn’t ready for what we could be. Now I am. I thought there was something I could do to fix the past. I thought I had to earn something, be someone different. For the first time I can recall, I want to be me. Because you love me, and I love you. That’s all I need.”
“Me too,” she said, wiping tears off her cheeks.
“You know what scared me most about you back then, Sabrina?”
“What?” she asked, the word choked.
“You wanted m
e like I was. You never asked me to change. And before you...I was convinced I was going to have to reinvent myself to be worth anything. To be worth anyone’s love.”
“Oh, Liam...”
“I did. I made myself important, successful. And my hands still felt empty. My heart still felt empty. Because love wasn’t there in that corner office overlooking Manhattan, Sabrina. It was here in Copper Ridge with you all along.”
EPILOGUE
SABRINA DONNELLY PRESSED a kiss to the tattoo on her husband’s back. Right against the tree etched into his skin, on the names that had been added to that tree over the past ten years.
Then she heard a shriek and buried her face more resolutely against him. “It can’t be time for everyone to get up.”
The thunderous sound of tiny feet headed down the stairs of the big house said differently. Not that she should be surprised. All the Donnelly children, just like their fathers, were early risers. And on Christmas morning, it was always worse.
For a start, all the kids were together in the main house on the Laughing Irish, as was Christmas tradition. And for another they were still buzzing from all the sugar they’d had the night before.
Liam rolled over to face her, a smile curving his lips upward, the lines by his eyes deepening. She loved every single one of those lines. And she knew he loved hers too. He told her often. They’d earned them together, after all.
Ten years, two kids and a whole lot of love.
Only a little bit of fighting, but when there was fighting, there was always making up. And Sabrina did like the making up.
“We probably have to get up now,” he said.
“Let’s make Violet deal with it,” Sabrina said. “It will be good practice for her.”
“She would scoff at that.”
“Maybe not.” Sabrina got up and started getting dressed. “I think there might be a proposal in her near future.”
“I think so too,” Liam said, grinning and getting up. Sabrina paused for a moment to appreciate every last one of her husband’s assets. “Because Cain was twitchy last night and I have a feeling there was a man waiting to have a very serious discussion with him.”
“That will be us in a few years.”
“A few decades,” Liam said. “And if Kelsey wants to become a spinster when she grows up that works for me too.”
“Liar.”
The two of them finished dressing and headed to the stairs hand in hand. Then walked into the massive living area that was already lit up, Cain and Alison’s three kids sitting next to Liam and Sabrina’s, three of Finn and Lane’s brood of four sitting on the floor—the baby probably still in her crib awaiting liberation. And Clara and Alex’s usually bright-eyed twins were lying on the couch wrapped in blankets, the six-year-olds a bit overwhelmed by the proceedings.
Liam wrapped his arm around her shoulders and held her tight. When she looked over at her husband, his eyes were suspiciously bright, the Christmas tree lights reflecting in them.
“What?” she asked, brushing her finger over his cheek.
“I love Christmas,” he said, his voice rough. “Never had one before I had you. And now...look at all this. It’s my favorite. Christmas is my favorite.”
Her heart felt large, full. Of her love for him, and for all the people in this house. She stretched up onto her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re my favorite, Liam Donnelly.”
* * * * *
Love Copper Ridge?
Don’t miss the all-new GOLD VALLEY series from Maisey Yates and HQN Books, where true blue cowboys find love with the last women they expect to.
Read on for an exclusive sneak peek of SMOOTH-TALKING COWBOY...
Smooth-Talking Cowboy
by Maisey Yates
CHAPTER ONE
OLIVIA LOGAN SUPPOSED it could be argued that she wasn’t heartbroken, so much as she had broken her own heart. But it could not be argued that she had flattened her own tire.
Someone had left something sharp in the road for her to drive over with her little, unsuspecting car. Because people were eternally irresponsible, and Olivia never was. She never was, and still, she often got caught up in the consequences of said irresponsibility. Because such was life. That the idiot who left something treacherous on the road wasn’t the one with the flat tire was another painful metaphor.
Olivia had had quite enough of life being a pain in the rear. If there was a reward for being well-behaved, she hadn’t yet found it.
She got out of her car to look at the flattened tire in the back on the passenger’s side, bracing herself against the frigid wind that whipped up right as she did so. The typical chilly, Oregon January weather did nothing to improve her mood.
And there it was. Silver and flat, sticking into her tire. A nail.
Of course. She was running late to work down at Grassroots Winery and she had a flat tire as well as a broken heart. So, all things considered she wasn’t sure it could get much worse.
She scowled, then looked down at her phone, trying to figure out who she should text. Normally, she would have texted her boyfriend Bennett, but he was now her ex-boyfriend because she had broken up with him last month at Christmas.
She had her reasons. Very good ones.
She couldn’t text him now, obviously, though. And she probably shouldn’t text his older brother Wyatt, or his other older brother Grant, because they likely had loyalty to Bennett that could not be moved. Even poor pitiful Olivia and her flat tire.
She was pondering that, sitting on the outer edges of Gold Valley with her car halfway in the ditch, when a beat-up red truck came barreling down from the same direction she had just come from. Her stomach did a strange somersault and she closed her eyes, beseeching the heavens for an answer as to why she was being punished in quite this way.
There was no answer. There was only a flat tire. And that red truck that she knew well.
Oh, well. She needed rescuing. Even if it was from Luke Hollister. She moved closer to the road, crossing her arms and standing there, looking pathetic. At least, she had a feeling she looked somewhat pathetic. She felt pathetic.
Luke would stop, because despite being a scoundrel, a womanizer, and the only person who could beat her at darts, he had that innate sense of chivalry that cowboys tended to possess. All yes ma’am and opening doors and saving damsels from the railroad tracks.
Or the side of the road, in this case.
The truck came closer, and she registered the exact moment Luke saw her. Felt it, somehow. She took a step back, making room for him to pull off and up next to her car.
His truck kept going.
She took a step closer to the edge of the road, looking after him, and she knew the expression on her face was incredulous now.
“He didn’t stop!”
She had been incredibly peeved that Luke Hollister had been the salvation she hadn’t wanted, but she was even more peeved that he had declined his opportunity to be said salvation.
Then she saw brake lights, followed by reverse lights.
Slowly, the truck backed up, easing its way slowly up beside her.
Luke leaned across the seat, working the crank window so that it was partway down. And then he smiled. That slow, lazy smile of his that always made her feel like he had spoken an obscenity.
“Olivia Logan, as I live and breathe. You seem to have gotten yourself in a bit of trouble.”
“I didn’t get myself into any trouble,” she said crisply. “There was a nail in the road, and now I seem to have a flat tire.” He just looked at her, all maddeningly calm. “You weren’t going to stop,” she added, knowing she sounded accusing.
“True. But then I thought better of it. I’d hate it if you were eaten by wolves.”
“There are no wo
lves here,” she said, feeling impatient.
“They recently tracked one that came down from Washington. Just one though, so probably the worst that would happen is you’d get gnawed on, rather than eaten in your entirety.”
“Well. I’m glad you decided to help me avoid a vicious gnawing,” she said grumpily.
“I could change the tire for you,” he said.
“Do you want to pull off the road, before we have this discussion?” she asked.
He looked in his rearview mirror, then glanced back at her. “There’s no one coming. It’s not exactly rush hour.”
“There is no rush hour in Gold Valley.”
But that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t be pulling up behind him on the narrow two-lane road soon enough.
He still didn’t move his truck, though.
“Luke,” she said, “I need to go to work.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Do you have a spare tire?”
“Yes,” she said impatiently.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll drive you down to work, and then when I head back this way back I’ll fix your tire.”
She frowned, suspicious at the friendliness. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m going that way anyway,” he said. “You still work at the winery?”
She nodded. Grassroots Winery sat in between the towns of Copper Ridge and Gold Valley, and Olivia worked predominantly in the dining room at the winery itself. It wasn’t, she supposed, the most ambitious job, which usually didn’t bother her. She liked the ambiance of the place, and she enjoyed the work itself. But she had always assumed that she would marry a rancher, and help him work his land. Make a home for them. The way her parents had done. That seemed...silly now that she was single, and there was no rancher in her future.
But then, a month ago she was working there to bide her time until Bennett proposed to her. And now... Without their eventual marriage to look forward to she wasn’t really sure what she was doing with herself. That made her feel small, silly. And anyway, she was the one that had broken up with him. Because of the fact that he hadn’t proposed yet. After all that time. And she had been sure that by now he would have come back to her. Was sure that breaking up with him would make him realize that he had to commit or he could lose her. Except he seemed all right with losing her. And that was terrible, because she was not all right with losing him and that vision of her future that she had held on to for so long.
