by D. L. Roan
Clay nodded in the silence, releasing a disappointed sigh. “Yes.” Tomorrow was the day he was supposed to have flown her home. They were a day ahead of schedule, but he’d scheduled a trip to Colorado to follow up with a client on his way home. Since they’d left in such a hurry, he had to fly home first to get what he needed for the meeting. He thought about cancelling, but he couldn’t. He needed this contract. He needed every contract. He needed her.
“What time?” she asked in a drowsy whisper.
Her head in his lap, he leaned his head against the wall behind him and stroked her hair. “I’ve scheduled the flight plan to leave at noon.”
She was quiet for a long while, and he’d thought she’d fallen to sleep when she mumbled the words, “I don’t know what I would have done without you if Uncle Cade had died.”
The tightness in her voice drew his gaze to her face and he swiped a lone tear from the corner of her eye with his thumb. “Your family would have been here for you.”
After seeing her with her family, he was surer than ever he could never ask her to leave Falcon Ridge. Pops had said he’d be miserable without her no matter where he called home, and he was right, but he couldn’t leave Texas, either. Which meant long months, or even years, of a long-distance relationship he knew from experience would be doomed from the start.
She knew it, too. He could see it in her eyes when he’d made love to her the last time, the same sorrow and pain he was feeling inside, the mourning of a love that had already slipped from their grasp.
He brushed her hair from her face, tracing his thumb over her cheek, memorizing every contour and freckle. “You’re never gonna leave this place, are you, beautiful?” he asked, not truly expecting an answer.
“Never,” she said, the whispered word making his final decision for him.
He eyed the almost empty bottle of whiskey sitting beside him, then picked it up and took a long, satisfying swig. He had to fly tomorrow, so he’d been careful not to overdo it, but he needed something to numb the pain. “I love you,” he whispered into the darkness as the whiskey did its job, wishing that one day those words would find her when she needed them the most.
The sound of a message notification on his phone woke Clay the next morning. Memories of the night before pinballed around inside his skull until they were in the right order and he lifted his head, finding Dani tucked against his side beneath the blanket. He reached for his jeans and pulled out his phone to see a message from Levi.
Really, bro? On my desk? You could have at least picked up the folders.
He grinned, then frowned as he realized it was now just another memory that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He collapsed against the scattered bale of hay they’d used as a pillow, then tilted his head at the sound of an engine. The sound stopped at the front of the barn, then he heard a door open and close. Shit!
“Dani, wake up.” He shook her with one hand as he reached for his jeans with the other. “Dani.”
“Huh?” Her face twisted with a confused scowl as she squinted up at him.
“Someone’s here.” He reached for his boots and shoved his feet inside, then looked around for his shirt. “Damn.” It was in her office with her clothes.
When another door slammed, Dani jackknifed from the floor, clutching the blanket to her chest as she listened. “Shit. My dads.” She scrambled to her feet, wrapped in the blanket, and descended the ladder, Clay right behind her.
“What the fuck?”
Dani froze when she reached the bottom. “Dad, don’t!”
Clay was still three rungs up when he caught a glimpse of Mason behind him, but then the world tilted and he was eating the dirt floor, the wind knocked from his lungs.
“Dad! Stop!”
Before he could get his feet under him, Mason wrenched him from the ground, but he was awake enough now to keep up and twisted out of his way before Mason could land a punch.
Dani threw herself in front of her dad, but Clay wasn’t having it. He could fight his own battles.
“Dani, move,” he called out to her.
Mason’s shocked gaze turned black with rage.
“What the hell is going on in—” Grey froze inside the barn door, his eyes wide, his jaw clenched tight, his nostrils flaring like a bull ready to charge.
Fuck.
“Dani, go inside,” Grey ordered
“Daddy, please stop him.”
“Go inside and get some goddamn clothes on!” Grey roared.
“This is none of your business!” she shouted at both her dads, still clutching the blanket to her breasts. “I am old enough to sleep with whoever I want, when I want!”
Familiar jealousy reared up inside Clay at the thought of another man touching her, but he’d have to come to terms with it if he was ever going to let her go.
“Dani, I’m begging you.” Grey’s voice was softer now, the look in his eyes more of a plea than a demand. “Clay and I need to have a long overdue talk. Now please, go inside and get dressed.”
“You knew about this?” Mason snarled at Grey.
Grey nodded, and Dani gasped.
“How?” she demanded. “Did you have one of your spies follow me to Texas?”
What? Clay looked back at Grey. Spies? Would he really go that far?
Grey rested his hands on his hips, glancing sheepishly between her and Clay. “I saw one of your text messages before you left,” he admitted.
Dani’s eyes widened with her incredulous gasp. “You went through my phone?” The shock on her face quickly turned to rage and then betrayal.
Clay reached out to her, but Mason took a threatening step toward him and he froze. He wasn’t afraid of either one of them. He’d let them beat him to a pulp if he thought it would solve anything, but Mason was itching for a fight, and the last thing he wanted was a brawl with Dani’s dads.
“Baby girl, it wasn’t like that.”
“Don’t call me that.” Dani narrowed her eyes and pointed at Grey. “You don’t get to call me that ever again.”
She stormed past Grey and out of the barn. Regret curdled Clay’s stomach. This wasn’t the goodbye he’d hoped for, not the one she deserved. She was hurting, over more than her dads’ intrusion, and it killed him not to go after her, not to at least try to take that hurt away.
“Great,” Mason snipped at Grey. “Now you’ve done it.”
“I didn’t do anything!” Grey insisted. “I didn’t go looking through her phone. She handed it to me and it was just there!”
“A text from him?” Mason drew back as though he was going to punch the stall door, but pulled the punch and spun on his heels to face Grey again. “And you still let her go to Texas with him? What the fuck were you thinking, Grey? He’s thirty fucking years old!”
“Twenty-nine,” Clay corrected him, crossing his arms over his bare chest. “Until next month.” Not that it mattered.
“You shut your goddamn mouth or the next thing to come out of it will be your teeth!” Mason lunged for him, but Grey held him back, locking his arms around Mason’s when he tried to break free. “Calm the fuck down!” Grey gritted out. “She’s made her choice!”
Clay snapped his head back, watching the two McLendons struggle. Maybe it was the leftover effects of the whiskey, but Grey was the last person he’d expected to be an ally.
When the dust settled, Grey walked Mason to the barn door. “Go tell Gabby to find Dani. She’ll know what’s going on. And for Christ’s sake, pull yourself together.”
“Gabby knows about this, too?”
“Mason, please. I’ll handle this.”
When Mason stalked off, Grey turned and ambled back into the barn, his hands tucked casually in his pockets, his gaze fixed on his boots as he walked. Clay swallowed against the dryness in his throat. He’d rather have faced off with Mason. It was the cool, confident ones who were the most dangerous. The brim of Grey’s black Stetson shielded his eyes, so he couldn’t gauge his intent, but he could feel
the air change between them as Grey got closer.
Fuck.
Maybe it was better this way. Grey’d beat the shit out of him, and he’d go home and lick his wounds. He could already feel the numbness calling to him.
“Mason will need some time to come around,” Grey said, still not looking at him as he opened a stall door and walked inside. “Took me a bit to get used to the idea myself.” Clay watched over the stall as Grey kept talking, expecting him to come out with a shotgun pointed at his chest any moment.
“I have to admit, though,” Grey continued, “I did feel a bit betrayed at first.” Clay’s last breath rushed from his lungs in relief when Grey came out holding two metal folding chairs. “See, I really like you, as a friend and a businessman.” Grey plopped the chairs down in front of Clay and invited him to sit, but Clay declined with a shake of his head. Grey shrugged, then sank down into one of the chairs and propped a boot up on the other. “But I couldn’t help thinking you used our friendship as a way to get to my daughter.”
Clay shook his head. “No, sir. I respect the hell out of you and your brothers. One has nothin’ to do with the other.” He had taken advantage of an opportunity to see Dani, but now wasn’t the time to be splitting hairs. None of it mattered anyway.
“Do you love her?”
Clay’s head shot up at the bold, straight-to-the-point question. “I love her more than I’ve ever, or ever will, love anyone.” His affirmation was instant, an instinctual response he could no more restrain or deny than the rising of the sun.
“Are you planning on marrying her?”
Another to-the-point question. Unable to look the man in the eyes and lie, Clay dropped his chin, staring at his boots. An ache bloomed in his chest as he thought about the ring in his pocket and the thousand different reasons he would never see it on Dani’s finger. He tried to think of the words to say to make his rejection more palatable, but nothing came to mind that didn’t make him want to puke. He sucked in a breath and looked up at Grey, and couldn’t do it. He couldn’t lie.
“I was,” he finally admitted, the words both freeing and heartbreaking.
“Was?” Grey dropped his foot to the ground and shifted to the edge of his seat. “She turned you down?”
“No.” He tipped his head back as the ache in his chest turned into a venomous sting. Staring up at the rafters, he blew out a breath and blinked away the burning in his eyes. “Her heart is here,” he finally said when the knot eased in his throat, “and I’m not. I can’t ask her to make that choice.”
Grey was silent so long Clay thought he was finally alone when he lifted his head, only to find Grey still there, sitting quietly, relaxed against the back of the chair with his hands still shoved inside his pockets.
“So, you’re just going to walk away from her, then?” Grey asked, his steely gaze riveted to Clay’s.
“I told you,” he insisted, ready for this to be over. “She’ll never leave here, and I can’t ask her to.”
Grey considered him a moment, then pulled his hands from his pockets and pushed to his feet. He picked up a chair and folded it, then did the same with the second one, stacking them both against the stall before turning back to Clay.
“The kind of love I want for my daughter—the kind she deserves, isn’t a choice.” Grey walked up to Clay and looked him in the eyes. “If that’s the kind of love you have for Dani, then you’ll ask her to be your wife, with our blessing. The only thing I ask is that she finish college first.” He offered his hand to shake. Clay stared down at it, unable to move. “If loving her is a choice that you can walk away from,” Grey continued, “then I’d appreciate you giving her a chance to find what she deserves with someone else.”
There was no one else who could love her as much as he did. No one. As Grey’s words sank in, Clay’s entire body began to vibrate with hope. If loving her wasn’t a choice for him, then it shouldn’t be for her either. Of course he couldn’t just walk away from her, no more than she could walk away from him. It didn’t matter how many miles or obstacles were between them, as long as they were on the same planet, their love would always exist. True, real, and undeniable. Not a choice.
He shoved his hand into Grey’s, nearly choking on his own tongue as he gave it a jolting shake. “Thank you,” he finally managed, his feet already pushing him toward Dani. “Thank you!” he shouted to the rafters as he sprinted from the barn.
Chapter Thirty
Dani stripped another row of clothes from the hangers in her closet and stuffed them into her suitcase. When it was bulging at the seams, she zipped it closed and grabbed another from the top shelf, tossing it onto the bed.
“Dani?”
“Go away, Mom.” Unless she was there to help her pack, she didn’t need to hear another word.
She’d never have a life of her own if she continued to live on the ranch. Working there would be hard for a while without speaking to Grey, which she had no intention of doing again, ever. And if she couldn’t do that, then she’d consider taking Clay up on his job offer. Anything was better than this.
“It’s about Uncle Cade, honey,” Gabby said with another cautious tap on the door. “I need to talk to you.”
She reached the door before her mom had finished speaking and wrenched it open. “What happened? Is he okay?”
Gabby marched in and closed the door behind her, then eyed the suitcases on the bed. “Where are you going?”
“Mom, Uncle Cade,” Dani insisted.
“Not until you tell me what this is all about.”
Dani squeezed her eyes closed and growled in frustration. She pulled her phone from her pocket and started to dial Jonah, but her mom took her phone. “What the—”
“Sit,” Gabby ordered, pointing to the bed.
Tears burned the back of Dani’s eyes and she blinked them away. Was she serious?
“Uncle Cade’s fever has gone up again, but the doctors are telling Daniel that it’s not as bad as last time,” she rushed on when Dani began to cry.
She breathed a sigh of relief and took her phone back from her mom, shoving it back into her pocket. “I’ll drive into town as soon as Clay leaves and I dump my stuff at Con and Car’s.”
“Is that where you’re going?”
“For now,” she said. “Until school starts.”
“Honey, this thing with your dads—”
“Don’t.” Dani emptied the contents of one drawer into a suitcase and turned back for another. “You’re always defending them, Mom, and I don’t care what you say, there’s no excuse for Grey going through my phone.”
“That’s not what happened, Dani.”
“And they’re out there right now doing their stupid macho best to ruin my relationship with Clay, probably beating the shit out of him for daring to touch their precious little girl. I can’t take it anymore.”
Gabby stepped in front of the suitcase and took the drawer from Dani’s hands. “Please sit down and talk to me.”
Dani’s arms fell to her sides in defeat and she plopped down on the edge of the mattress. Gabby brushed a strand of Dani’s hair from her shoulder as she sat beside her. “Grey saw the message from Clay come in when he was talking to you about going on the trip,” she began. “He said you’d handed him your phone, because I’d hidden his to keep him from calling Clay and cancelling the trip without talking to you first.”
Dani thought back to the day before she left for Texas, remembering handing him the phone. Oh my God.
“What did he see?” Panicked, she pulled her phone from her pocket and thumbed through her messages from Clay, scrolling and scrolling, trying to find the ones from that day, but she couldn’t even remember what the date was.
“He never told me, honey, only that he’d put two and two together, and he knew something more than a business relationship had developed between the two of you.”
Dani scowled. That didn’t make sense. “And he still let me go?” He’d practically ordered her to go, now that
she remembered. And the morning she left… “That’s why he wasn’t here when Clay picked me up.” He knew.
Gabby drew in a long breath and laid her arm across Dani shoulders. “He wasn’t helping the neighbor round up cattle. He was down by the creek, letting you go the only way he knew how.”
Dani dropped her head into her hands. The betrayal she’d felt subsided, but anger and frustration flooded into the vacancy at the memory of Clay being pulled from the ladder. “He obviously didn’t tell Mason,” she scoffed and pushed from the bed.
Gabby braced her hands on the side of the mattress and sighed. “That would be my fault,” she admitted. “Grey was having a hard enough time coming to terms with the idea, and with Matt’s surgery and Mason leaving for his conference…I asked him not to tell them. I also didn’t think it was Grey’s place to tell them, or mine.” She looked up at Dani with a weak smile. “This is your life, honey. It should be up to you to decide those things.”
“Gabby?” Matt called out from downstairs.
Gabby’s head fell forward and she groaned. “He’s determined to get outside today,” she said and paced to the door. “He’s as stubborn as you are.” She opened the door and shouted down the hall. “I’ll be right down.”
“Does Matt know?” Dani asked.
Gabby nodded. “He was surprisingly okay with the news, but I think the pain meds are helping him cope better than Mason.”
“Tell Dani that Clay’s here,” Matt yelled back, “and if she doesn’t get down here soon, this poor sap is gonna wear a hole in your newly polished floors.”
Dani rushed out of her bedroom and down the stairs, expecting to see Clay’s face beaten and bruised.
“Mornin’, honey,” Matt said as she reached the bottom step.
She stopped, surprised to see him out of bed. “You’re up and walking.”
Matt grinned, then grimaced and clutched his groin. “I think the walkin’ thing is a bit of a stretch.”
