by Maisey Yates
But now she had started, she didn’t know if she could stop. “The night that he found out about my affair with David was the night I found out about Jack.”
“So, it isn’t a recent revelation to all of you?”
“No,” she said. “Colton and Sierra didn’t know. I’m sure of that. But I found out that Gage did. I didn’t know who it was, I should clarify. I just found out that he had another child.” She looked away from Sam, trying to ignore the burning sensation in her stomach. Like there was molten lava rolling around in there. She associated that feeling with being called into her father’s home office.
It had always given her anxiety, even before everything had happened with David. Even before she had ever seriously disappointed him.
Nathan West was exacting, and Maddy had wanted nothing more than to please him. That desire took up much more of her life than she had ever wanted it to. But then, she knew that was true in some way or another for all of her siblings. It was why Sierra had gone to school for business. Why Colton had taken over the construction company. It was even what had driven Gage to leave.
It was the reason Maddy had poured all of her focus into dressage. Because she had anticipated becoming great. Going to the Olympics. And she knew her father had anticipated that. Then she had ruined all of it.
But not as badly as he had ruined the relationship between the two of them.
“Like I told you, one of David’s other students caught us together. Down at the barn where he gave his lessons. We were just kissing, but it was definitely enough. That girl told her father, who in turn went to mine as a courtesy.”
Sam laughed, a hard, bitter sound. “A courtesy to who?”
“Not to me,” Maddy said. “Or maybe it was. I don’t know. It was so awful. The whole situation. I wish there had been a less painful way for it to end. But it had to end, whether it ended that way or some other way, so...so I guess that worked as well as anything.”
“Except you had to deal with your father. And then rumors were spread anyway.”
She looked away from Sam. “Well, the rumors I kind of blame on David. Because once his wife knew, there was really no reason for the whole world not to know. And I think it suited him to paint me in an unflattering light. He took a gamble. A gamble that the man in the situation would come out of it all just fine. It was not a bad gamble, it turned out.”
“I guess not.”
“Full house. Douche bag takes the pot.”
She was avoiding the point of this conversation. Avoiding the truth of it. She didn’t even know why she should tell him. She didn’t know why anything. Except that she had never confided any of this to anyone before. She was close to her sister, and Sierra had shared almost everything about her relationship with Ace with Maddy, and here Maddy was keeping more secrets from her.
She had kept David from her. She had kept Sam from her too. And she had kept this all to herself, as well.
She knew why. In a blinding flash she knew why. She couldn’t stand being rejected, not again. She had been rejected by her first love; she had been rejected by an entire community. She had been rejected by her father with a few cold dismissive words in his beautifully appointed office in her childhood home.
But maybe, just maybe, that was why she should confide in Sam. Because at the end of their affair it wouldn’t matter. Because then they would go back to sniping at each other or not talking to each other at all.
Because he hadn’t rejected her yet.
“When he called me into his office, I knew I was in trouble,” she said, rubbing her hand over her forehead. “He never did that for good things. Ever. If there was something good to discuss, we would talk about it around the dinner table. Only bad things were ever talked about in his office with the door firmly closed. He talked to Gage like that. Right before he left town. So, I always knew it had to be bad.”
She cleared her throat, looking out across the arena, through the gap in the trees and at the distant view of the misty waves beyond. It was so very gray, the clouds hanging low in the sky, touching the top of the angry, steel-colored sea.
“Anyway, I knew. As soon as I walked in, I knew. He looked grim. Like I’ve never seen him before. And he asked me what was going on with myself and David Smithson. Well, I knew there was no point in denying it. So I told him. He didn’t yell. I wish he had. He said... He said the worst thing you could ever do was get caught. That a man like David spent years building up his reputation, not to have it undone by the temptation of some young girl.” She blinked furiously. “He said that if a woman was going to present more temptation than a man could handle, the least she could do was keep it discreet.”
“How could he say that to you? To his daughter? Look, my dad was a difficult son of a bitch, but if he’d had a daughter and some man had hurt her, he’d have ridden out on his meanest stallion with a pair of pliers to dole out the world’s least sterile castration.”
Maddy choked out a laugh that was mixed with a sob. “That’s what I thought. It really was. I thought... I thought he would be angry, but one of the things that scared me most, at least initially, was the idea that he would take it out on David. And I still loved David then. But no. He was angry at me.”
“I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
“That was when he told me,” she choked out. “Told me that he had mistresses, that it was just something men did, but that the world didn’t run if the mistress didn’t know her place, and if I was intent on lowering myself to be that sort of woman when I could have easily been a wife, that was none of his business. He told me a woman had had his child and never betrayed him.” Her throat tightened, almost painfully, a tear sliding down her cheek. “Even he saw me as the villain. If my own father couldn’t stand up for me, if even he thought it was my fault somehow, how was I ever supposed to stand up for myself when other people accused me of being a whore?”
“Maddy...”
“That’s why,” she said, the words thin, barely making their way through her constricted throat. “That’s why it hurts so much. And that’s why I’m not over it. There were two men involved in that who said they loved me. There was David, the man I had given my heart to, the man I had given my body to, who had lied to me from the very beginning, who threw me under the bus the moment he got the opportunity. And then there was my own father. My own father, who should have been on my side simply because I was born his. I loved them both. And they both let me down.” She blinked, a mist rolling over her insides, matching the setting all around them. “How do you ever trust anyone after that? If it had only been David, I think I would have been over it a long time ago.”
Sam was looking at her, regarding her with dark, intense eyes. He looked like he was about to say something, his chest shifting as he took in a breath that seemed to contain purpose. But then he said nothing. He simply closed the distance between them, tugging her into his arms, holding her against his chest, his large, warm hand moving between her shoulder blades in a soothing rhythm.
She hadn’t rested on anyone in longer than she could remember. Hadn’t been held like this in years. Her mother was too brittle to lean on. She would break beneath the weight of somebody else’s sorrow. Her father had never offered a word of comfort to anyone. And she had gotten in the habit of pretending she was tough so that Colton and Sierra wouldn’t worry about her. So that they wouldn’t look too deeply at how damaged she was still from the events of the past.
So she put all her weight on him and total peace washed over her. She shouldn’t indulge in this. She shouldn’t allow herself this. It was dangerous. But she couldn’t stop. And she didn’t want to.
She squeezed her eyes shut, a few more tears falling down her cheeks, soaking into his shirt. If anybody knew that Madison West had wept all over a man in the broad light of day, they wouldn’t believe it. But she didn’t care. This wasn’t about anyone else. I
t was just about her. About purging her soul of some of the poison that had taken up residence there ten years ago and never quite left.
About dealing with some of the heavy longing that existed inside her for a time and a place she could never return to. For a Christmas when she had walked down Main Street with her father and seen him as a hero.
But of course, when she was through crying, she felt exposed. Horribly. Hideously, and she knew this was why she didn’t make a habit out of confiding in people. Because now Sam McCormack knew too much about her. Knew more about her than maybe anybody else on earth. At least, he knew about parts of her that no one else did.
The tenderness. The insecurity. The parts that were on the verge of cracking open, crumbling the foundation of her and leaving nothing more than a dusty pile of Maddy behind.
She took a deep breath, hoping that the pressure would squeeze some of those shattering pieces of herself back together with the sheer force of it. Too bad it just made her aware of more places down deep that were compromised.
Still, she wiggled out of his grasp, needing a moment to get ahold of herself. Needing very much to not get caught being held by a strange man down at the arena by any of the staff or anyone in her family.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice shaking. “I just... I didn’t know how much I needed that.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You listened. You didn’t try to give me advice or tell me I was wrong. That’s actually doing a lot. A lot more than most people are willing to do.”
“So, do you want me to come back here tonight?”
“Actually,” she said, grabbing hold of her hands, twisting them, trying to deal with the nervous energy that was rioting through her, “I was thinking maybe I could come out a little bit early. And I could see where you work.”
She didn’t know why she was doing this. She didn’t know where she imagined it could possibly end or how it would be helpful to her in any way. To add more pieces of him to her heart, to her mind.
That’s what it felt like she was trying to do. Like collecting shells on the seashore. Picking up all the shimmering pieces of Sam she possibly could and sticking them in her little pail, hoarding them. Making a collection.
For what? Maybe for when it was over.
Maybe that wasn’t so bad.
She had pieces of David, whether she wanted them or not. And she’d entertained the idea that maybe she could sleep with someone and not do that. Not carry them forward with her.
But the reality of it was that she wasn’t going to walk away from this affair and never think of Sam again. He was never going to be the farrier again. He would always be Sam. Why not leave herself with beautiful memories instead of terrible ones? Maybe this was what she needed to do.
“You want to see the forge?” he asked.
“Sure. That would be interesting. But also your studio. I’m curious about your art, and I realize that I don’t really know anything about it. Seeing you in the Mercantile the other day talking to Lane...” She didn’t know how to phrase what she was thinking without sounding a little bit crazy. Without sounding overly attached. So she just let the sentence trail off.
But she was curious. She was curious about him. About who he was when he wasn’t here. About who he was as a whole person, without the blinders around him that she had put there. She had very purposefully gone out of her way to know nothing about him. And so he had always been Sam McCormack, grumpy guy who worked at her family ranch on occasion and who she often bantered with in the sharpest of senses.
But there was more to him. So much more. This man who had held her, this man who had listened, this man who seemed to know everyone in town and have decent relationships with them. Who created beautiful things that started in his mind and were then formed with his hands. She wanted to know him.
Yeah, she wouldn’t be telling him any of that.
“Were you jealous? Because there is nothing between myself and Lane Jensen. First of all, anyone who wants anything to do with her has to go through Finn Donnelly, and I have no desire to step in the middle of that weird dynamic and his older-brother complex.”
It struck her then that jealousy hadn’t even been a component to what she had felt the other day. How strange. Considering everything she had been through with men, it seemed like maybe trust should be the issue here. But it wasn’t. It never had been.
It had just been this moment of catching sight of him at a different angle. Like a different side to a prism that cast a different color on the wall and made her want to investigate further. To see how one person could contain so many different things.
A person who was so desperate to hide anything beyond that single dimension he seemed comfortable with.
Another thing she would definitely not say to him. She couldn’t imagine the twenty shades of rainbow horror that would cross Sam’s face if she compared him to a prism out loud.
“I was not,” she said. “But it made me aware of the fact that you’re kind of a big deal. And I haven’t fully appreciated that.”
“Of course you haven’t,” he said, his tone dry. “It interferes with your stable-boy fantasy.”
She made a scoffing sound. “I do not have a stable-boy fantasy.”
“Yes, you do. You like slumming it.”
Those words called up heated memories out of the depths of her mind. Him whispering things in her ear. His rough hands skimming over her skin. She bit her lip. “I like nothing of the kind, Sam McCormack. Not with you, not with any man. Are you going to show me your pretty art or not?”
“Not if you call it pretty.”
“You’ll have to take your chances. I’m not putting a cap on my vocabulary for your comfort. Anyway, if you haven’t noticed, unnerving people with what I may or may not say next is kind of my thing.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You do it too,” she said.
His lips tipped upward into a small smile. “Do I?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know. You’re way too smart for that. And you act like the word smart is possibly the world’s most vile swear when it’s applied to you. But you are. You can throw around accusations of slumming it all you want, but if we didn’t connect mentally, and if I didn’t respect you in some way, this wouldn’t work.”
“Our brains have nothing to do with this.”
She lifted a finger. “A woman’s largest sexual organ is her brain.”
He chuckled, wrapping his arm around her waist and drawing her close. “Sure, Maddy. But we both know what the most important one is.” He leaned in, whispering dirty things in her ear, and she laughed, pushing against his chest. “Okay,” he said, finally. “I will let you come see my studio.”
She fought against the trickle of warmth that ran through her, that rested deep in her stomach and spread out from there, making her feel a kind of languid satisfaction that she had no business feeling over something like this. “Then I guess I’ll see you for the art show.”
Nine
Sam had no idea what in hell had possessed him to let Maddy come out to his property tonight. Chase and Anna were not going to let this go ignored. In fact, Anna was already starting to make comments about the fact that he hadn’t been around for dinner recently. Which was why he was there tonight, eating as quickly as possible so he could get back out to his place on the property before Maddy arrived. He had given her directions to go on the road that would allow her to bypass the main house, which Chase and Anna inhabited.
“Sam.” His sister-in-law’s voice cut into his thoughts. “I thought you were going to join us for dinner tonight?”
“I’m here,” he said.
“Your body is. Your brain isn’t. And Chase worked very hard on this meal,” Anna said.
Anna was a tractor mechanic, and formerly Chase’s best friend
in a platonic sense. All of that had come to an end a few months ago when they had realized there was a lot more between them than friendship.
Still, the marriage had not transformed Anna into a domestic goddess. Instead, it had forced Chase to figure out how to share a household with somebody. They were never going to have a traditional relationship, but it seemed to suit Chase just fine.
“It’s very good, Chase,” Sam said, keeping his tone dry.
“Thanks,” Chase said, “I opened the jar of pasta sauce myself.”
“Sadly, no one in this house is ever going to win a cooking competition,” Anna said.
“You keep me from starving,” Sam pointed out.
Though, in all honesty, he was a better cook than either of them. Still, it was an excuse to get together with his brother. And sometimes it felt like he needed excuses. So that he didn’t have to think deeply about a feeling that was more driving than hunger pangs.
“Not recently,” Chase remarked. “You haven’t been around.”
Sam let out a heavy sigh. “Yes, sometimes a man assumes that newlyweds want time alone without their crabby brother around.”
“We always want you around,” Anna said. Then she screwed up her face. “Okay, we don’t always want you around. But for dinner, when we invite you, it’s fine.”
“Just no unexpected visits to the house,” Chase said. “In the evening. Or anytime. And maybe also don’t walk into Anna’s shop without knocking after hours.”
Sam grimaced. “I get the point. Anyway, I’ve just been busy. And I’m about to be busy again.” He stood up, anticipation shooting through him. He had gone a long time without sex, and now sex with Maddy was about all he could think about. Five years of celibacy would do that to a man.
Made a man do stupid things, like invite the woman he was currently sleeping with to come to his place and to come see his art. Whatever the hell she thought that would entail. He was inclined to figure it out. Just so she would feel happy, so he could see her smile again.
