A mixture of responses swirled through my mind and died on my tongue.
I’m not yours to lose.
You knew I would leave.
I can’t stay.
I told you not to fall in love with me.
I told you.
I fucking told you.
My head dropped to his chest as a sob escaped me, my shoulders jerking and body caving from the force of it.
I tried to summon the girl I’d been before I met Sawyer. Tried to force myself to say any number of the things I needed to—words that would mean nothing when it came to this man . . . to us. He would know they held no weight.
“This will only get more painful,” I whispered against his chest. “Let me end this now.”
“Having you here and not being able to touch you would be a hell of a lot more painful,” he argued. “Let me have you as long as I can.”
My head shook against him as my responses caught in my throat. As my heart rebelled against the thought of doing what I needed to.
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
Goodbye.
“Jesus, there y’all are!” a feminine voice called out, sending a jolt of shock through both Sawyer and me.
Ripping us from the moment and grounding us in the present in an entirely jarring way.
How could I have gotten so caught up in this that I’d forgotten where we were and why we’d come out here? How could the mass of people and music once again fade away to nothing until it was only Sawyer and me and this baring, excruciating conversation?
“We were wondering where y’all went,” she said, voice closer than before.
“Not now, Em,” Sawyer said, his gruff voice seeming to snap something inside of me.
My chest jerked with a ragged exhale as if I’d been holding my breath, and I hurried to wipe away the tears staining my cheeks, thankful that Sawyer was blocking me from view.
Emberly scoffed, but her tone was bright and carefree when she continued. “You can’t keep Rae all to yourself, Sawyer. People want to officially meet the stranger in town.”
“I said not now,” he repeated as Emberly appeared beside us long enough to grab my arm and begin pulling me. “Emberly.”
“Now isn’t a good time,” I said a little frantically as I stumbled away from Sawyer’s hold and after Emberly.
“This is the perfect time, everyone’s here.” From her singsong voice and the way she was practically dancing away, towing me behind her, it was clear she’d somehow missed what she’d walked up on.
But I couldn’t be thrown into a group of people like this.
“Really,” I began, but Sawyer’s harsh demand had us coming to an abrupt halt.
“Emberly, stop.”
Emberly slowly turned to look at him, eyes wide with surprise and irritation, but her attention snapped back to me. “Are you—why are you cry—” She cut a hard glare in Sawyer’s direction. “Why is she crying, Sawyer? What did you do?”
“No, nothing. He did nothing,” I said on a rush. “It wasn’t him.”
I could feel Sawyer watching me. Every part of me ached to look at him, to study his expression, but I didn’t know what would happen when I did, and the possibilities scared me.
“It’s me,” I continued. “That’s why this isn’t the best time for me to be . . .”—I gestured toward the vehicles and people—“in the middle of that. But you guys should go—you need to. I’m gonna—”
“Come with me,” Emberly said firmly, leaving no room for argument. “Nothing a night on the ranch can’t cure.”
“Let me take you back to my place,” Sawyer offered, speaking over his friend. “Or Blossom. Anywhere.”
“What? No!” Emberly nearly shouted.
“Em, give me a goddamn minute,” he begged, the steel in his words barely concealing his pain.
Emberly’s expression fell as she finally read the situation for the first time since she’d interrupted us. Her attention darted between us a few times before she stepped away, nodding as she did. “Yeah, of course.”
Once she’d given us enough room, Sawyer stepped close, arms easily slipping around me, as if he were afraid to let me go again. “Let me take you away. Let me have as much time with you as I can.”
My head shook as he spoke, ‘No’ repeatedly falling from my lips. “Can’t you see how much worse that will make this? If you spend each moment waiting for when the last moment will come, what happened between us tonight will be nothing compared to how we will explode. And this?” I glanced to the side, to where everyone was gathered. “It’s your tradition, you have to be here.”
“Fuck the tradition.”
“You wouldn’t be saying that if what happened tonight hadn’t,” I said softly. “My leaving can’t be your main thought or reason for spending time with me, it shouldn’t even be in the back of your mind.”
“You leaving is always in the back of my mind.”
“Not like this. Not how you’re trying to make it.” I pressed my palm to his cheek and lowered my voice as I repeated my earlier words. “All I wanted was for you to be there. So be here. Be present.” Taking a step away, I shrugged hopelessly. “Or it’s going to destroy every time we are together until neither of us will be able to handle a next time.”
“And what if I don’t hold anything back? I told you I can’t pretend anymore, so what if I tell you exactly what’s on my mind . . . how I feel?” The emotion swirling in his eyes conveyed exactly what he meant.
“I love you, Rae.”
I love you, I love you, I love you.
Goodbye.
I tensed as memories and my nature clashed with his earlier declaration and tried in vain to push it all away—to keep the past separate from Sawyer.
“Will that destroy our time together?” he asked.
“I can’t change who I am or how those words trigger a flight instinct,” I said simply, withholding that even hinting at it had just done the same. “You know why now . . . whether or not you’re faced with that reaction again is up to you.”
His head moved in reluctant acceptance. “Is there anything I can say to convince you to go home with me right now?”
“You need to be here.” When he began denying that, I continued over him. “If Hunter sells tomorrow, you will regret leaving now.”
“Tomorrow?” he confirmed after a few moments. When I nodded, he released a heavy sigh, rubbing at his jaw as he moved to stand beside me. “Then I want you here.”
From his tone and expression, he didn’t expect me to stay and it was paining him.
“Keys are in the truck,” he murmured, further confirming his expectation. “Take it.”
My body shook with the heaving breath that fled from me once Sawyer walked away.
After taking a moment to steady my chaotically-pounding heart, I turned, only to find Emberly standing there, watching me expectantly.
“You mean a lot to him,” she said when the silence between us started getting to be too much.
“I know . . . but I shouldn’t.”
Emberly’s shock and confusion were palpable. “What? What do you mean?”
I warned him against it.
I don’t deserve him.
He was never supposed to mean anything.
“He asked me to stay,” I said instead of answering her.
“Tonight? You should.” When I didn’t respond, she lifted her chin, as if to stare down at me. “In Amber?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that you don’t plan to,” she said dryly.
“I can’t, and he knows that—he knew that.”
She glanced behind her, in the direction Sawyer had disappeared, then jerked her head that way, waiting until I’d made it to her side before she started walking.
“Falling for someone only to have them leave would be hard for anyone,” she began softly. “For Sawyer? Sawyer hasn’t cared about anyone this way in so long, and letting himself care for you w
as something he fought hard against. After that . . .” She fell silent. Just as we reached the outer edge of the vehicles, she touched my arm to bring me to a stop and caught my eye. “He won’t let you go easily, but he will let you go. You mean too much to him to keep you somewhere you don’t want to be.”
She patted the tailgate of the truck we were near, eyebrows lifted knowingly.
Sawyer’s truck.
But I couldn’t focus on his truck or what her expression meant. I couldn’t focus on anything other than the way my stomach had dropped and my chest had twisted in agony at her words.
I needed Sawyer to let me go . . . one day soon, he would have to.
But somewhere I didn’t want to be? Whenever Sawyer wasn’t with me, I was anxiously waiting for when he would come back to me. I felt a sense of peace I’d never had before when he was holding me. I wanted every second of his time as much as I wanted to keep my distance, to remind us both that we couldn’t let what we had evolve into something more.
Anywhere without Sawyer sounded like a place I didn’t want to be.
But Amber . . . Amber would soon be a place I couldn’t remain.
Chapter 29
Rae
Emberly’s laugh seemed to rise above everything else—the party and music, the swarm of questions buzzing through my mind—as she tugged me behind her. Expertly weaving us through people and trucks until she reached her destination.
I didn’t look at the truck she climbed onto the tailgate of, I didn’t ask whose it was, I just followed after her, releasing a weighted breath once I was seated beside her.
“A little much?” she asked, a smile in her voice.
“A little?” I countered with a wide-eyed look. “You didn’t say you were feeding me to the dogs. Sawyer didn’t say anything about this when he . . .”—I waved my hand at the party happening around us—“I’d thought their curiosity had died down by now.”
Emberly just leaned back as a body-shaking laugh burst from her.
She didn’t need to respond to let me know the town’s curiosity hadn’t. She and I had barely made it to the first group of people when what felt like the entire party enclosed on me, throwing questions out faster than I could answer.
“Why are you here?”
“Why Amber?”
“What exactly is going on with you and Sawyer Dixon?”
“Do I know you?”
“Are you having an affair with Beau Dixon?”
“Why were you talking to that developer?”
“Are you a spy for their company?”
“Have I met you before?”
“What is it you do anyway?”
Each time we’d made it away from one group of hounding people, another would be waiting to bombard with eerily similar questions. I’d never been so flustered—coming off the emotional conversation with Sawyer surely hadn’t helped. Emberly hadn’t stopped laughing.
“They’ve been waiting to talk to you since you came into town. Tonight’s their first chance,” Emberly finally said.
“Why tonight?”
She looked out over the large patch of grass the trucks had formed a circle around, where a group of guys was playing football—Sawyer included—and shrugged. “Anyone can take a wrong exit, get lost, and accidentally stumble into town. If they do, they usually want coffee. People staying at Blossom tend to stick around there, my place, or the diner. So, while the town will watch and whisper, they won’t outright approach and demand to know all the things.”
“The way you did that first day?”
She sent me a wry look, her voice easily matching my lighthearted tone. “You were in my shop, I’m allowed. But this . . .”—she gestured to everything around us—“Sawyer bringing you here means something. Someone who is just a guest at Blossom wouldn’t be here tonight.”
I watched Sawyer for a while before whispering, “Understood.”
“Should I not have said that?” she asked hesitantly, her berry-tinted lips twisting into a grimace.
“No, no, it’s fine,” I hurried to assure her. After everything Sawyer had laid bare, she couldn’t shock me much more. “Speaking of my first morning here . . .” I pulled my legs up onto the tailgate and crossed them as I turned to face Emberly, laughing at her comically worried expression. “You already know quite a bit about me, and I don’t know much of anything about you.”
She snorted. “You could’ve literally asked Sawyer anything you wanted to know about me.”
“That I knew,” I conceded. “But I don’t even know how old you are, or . . .”—I pretended to search for another topic when I was really struggling not to demand answers to key questions—“I don’t know, anything about your family other than you co-own Brewed with your mom.”
“I’m a year younger than Sawyer,” she said with a shrug, then hurried to add, “We grew up together—same grade and everything. Our birthdays just fell that way.”
“Yeah, I don’t actually know how old Sawyer is,” I admitted.
I didn’t say that I didn’t care how old he was, or that I desperately wanted and needed to know her age.
Her expression shifted with surprise. “Really? He’s twenty-seven. Wait, how old are you?”
“Thirty,” I said flippantly as I did the math and tried to fit it to the timeline. As I thought of all the possibilities.
“Maybe don’t tell Sawyer,” Emberly said. “He won’t let you near Hunter.”
I shifted my attention back to her when her joke finally registered through my thoughts. “Wait, what? Why?”
“Because Hunter’s single and your age, and Sawyer would get annoyingly possessive if he thought for a second that Hunt had set his sights on you because he’s known as the sexy Dixon.”
A startled laugh tumbled from my lips. “That can’t be possible.”
“It’s the jaw,” she said and feigned swooning. “Think Beau’s jawline, but swap out the murderous look for a constant smolder.”
“You do realize Beau and Sawyer are nearly identical.”
Emberly jerked back, that same look of disgust from the times I’d mentioned anything Sawyer crossing her face. “Ew, what? No.”
My shoulders shook with the force of my near-silent laugh. “Yeah, well, anyway . . . there isn’t a chance of that happening, so Sawyer can get over it. And what do you mean Hunter is my age? Wasn’t there another one in there?”
All humor drained from her face and left a hardened mask. “Cayson.” She cleared her throat, head bobbing a little as she did. “Yeah, he, uh . . . he’s between them. But those boys were all born a little over a year apart from each other.”
“You don’t like Cayson?” I assumed, drawing the words out a little.
A harsh breath burst from her, but it was a while before she responded. “He made it his mission to make my life hell.” She waved off the path our conversation had gone down. “Anyway, I’m twenty-six, if you didn’t already figure that out. And I don’t have anyone other than my mom.”
“Oh . . .”
“No, that wasn’t for sympathy or anything,” she said quickly. “It’s always just been my mom and me. That’s the only way I need it.”
I hadn’t meant for my reaction to come across that way. I’d still been stuck on the Cayson thing, trying to figure out what he could have done to make her hate him so much.
But her last words had me second-guessing everything.
My plan.
My need for an explanation.
My reason for staying.
“Yeah, I didn’t really have parents either,” I said so she would know I hadn’t been pitying her.
A soft, understanding smile crossed her face. Her gaze fell away as if she were contemplating something, and then she offered, “My mom left my dad before I was born. Apparently, he was really abusive. She told me one night—just a few years ago actually—that she was always afraid the next day would be her last. Soon as she realized she was pregnant, she left.”
“What?”
The question came out entirely too sharp coming from someone who was supposed to be an outsider, but I wasn’t able to care.
“I know.” She sucked in a large breath before releasing it. “So, screw him, right?”
I’d gone utterly still during her confession, and then, little by little, my entire body began vibrating.
Never in my life had I wanted to scream in anger and pain, but at that moment, I did. It felt like my soul already was. But I was sure if I didn’t release my pent-up and building rage soon, I would explode.
To let out a lifetime of heartache and insecurities and wondering what I could possibly have done to deserve the constant abandonment. To take years of fear and fleeing and twist it into blame.
Everything I was sure I had left far in my past . . . until a few world-shaking sentences.
“Right,” I said, teeth clenched tight. “Right.”
Before I could do anything—like actually go scream on some secluded part of the ranch, or release my anger on Emberly and possibly say a dozen things I knew I shouldn’t—yells and cheers from a few clusters of people forced through my angered haze and captured my attention.
My head jerked up, narrowed gaze snapping toward them only to follow their line of sight . . . to Sawyer, running across the grassy field with a few guys sprinting after him.
When one came rushing in from the side with Sawyer in his path, I held my breath, sure I was about to watch Sawyer be tackled without any kind of gear on. But in an instant, he stopped, spun away from the other guy’s reach, and was running again before the others behind him ever had a chance to catch up.
It wasn’t until the air that had been tightly trapped in my lungs released on a rush that I realized I was no longer trembling with growing frustrations and rage. I wasn’t struggling to calm myself and swallow accusations and detrimental truths.
My heart was still racing, but it was in that way I was becoming exceedingly familiar with. That punishing pattern that both thrilled and terrified me because it meant one thing.
Sawyer.
Sawyer.
Sawyer.
Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set Page 161
