And her. Always her.
“This isn’t going to work, Rae. You can’t show up at my house and start talking about our honeymoon. And beds. And think that’s somehow going to make me forget what you told me last night.”
Her gaze softened, and that hit him like a punch.
Then she shook him even more, because she reached over and took his hands in hers and he … stopped breathing, maybe.
Rae held his hands between her much smaller ones as best she could. When she looked up at him again, he was reminded how tiny she was. There in her bare feet, without those crazy heels she’d been wearing lately. Tiny and delicate and still the toughest woman he knew.
He told himself he hated this power she’d always had over him. That she was one-third his size and made him feel small, just by looking at him like this.
“I don’t want to forget it,” she told him, her voice soft but her words distinct. “I didn’t come here to make you feel bad, Riley.”
“Oh, okay. I guess that’s just a happy bonus to you showing up here, then. Great.”
But he didn’t pull his hands away. And she didn’t let go.
And time seemed to flatten out between them. Or maybe that was his heart again, doing strange things to his chest.
“I should have told you the moment I got pregnant,” Rae said quietly. “I regret that I didn’t. I regret it more than you’ll ever know.”
He wanted to jump on that. He wanted to howl out all the things that were still pounding around and around inside him, making it difficult to breathe. And stand. And do anything at all but look back at her. But somehow, he couldn’t seem to find the words.
“I told you all the reasons why I felt I couldn’t last night,” she said, and he could feel her grip tighten. “And those reasons kept me from telling you all this time. But I want you to know that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t wait eight years to face all those fears. I wouldn’t try to do it alone and hurt both of us even more in the process.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.” The words were torn out of him. Again. He hardly recognized his own voice. “After all this time, even after last night, I don’t know what you want, Rae.”
She took a breath, and he could hear the shudder in it. “How could you? I didn’t know myself. For years.”
Riley pulled away then. He had to get some distance. He had to do something.
He turned away from her, retracing his tracks into the living room and shrugging out of his outdoor gear before he spontaneously combusted. He kicked off his boots and tossed off his hat in the general direction of the hook where it belonged.
And he didn’t pretend that he wasn’t collecting himself as best he could. Just like he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t hyperaware of everything she was doing. Following him into the living room and then sitting there on one arm of the couch, watching him.
As far as he was concerned, it might as well have been a declaration of war.
“Here’s what I can’t get past,” he gritted out at her when he finally faced her again, feeling like some kind of world champion that he didn’t get something to blunt the edges of … whatever this was. “You wanted to divorce me. Just like tonight, you showed up here, told me you were done, and said divorce was the only option. In case I thought you were kidding, you moved back out of your parents’ house, into town, and announced you wanted to start dating other people.”
She nodded, there on the couch. “And yet oddly enough, I never even looked up how to go about filing for divorce. And only ended up dating you.”
And Riley wasn’t calm. He wasn’t soothing. He was coming apart. “You had no intention of ever telling me. You would have divorced me, moved on, and never seen fit to tell me about something that happened to both of us, Rae. It happened to me, and I didn’t even know it.”
She was holding herself very still, her arms locked around her middle. And she gazed back at him with whole worlds in those dark eyes of hers, but she didn’t say a word.
It made him feel even more off-balance. “You can’t even defend yourself, can you?”
She swallowed hard. “I’ve already told you why. Whether that’s a defense or not, I don’t know.”
As far as Riley was concerned, she might as well have hauled off and thrown a grenade at his head. “What did you say?”
Where was the fight? Where were all her usual weapons, specifically and perfectly honed to slam right into him and jump-start his temper? He was a brick wall until she knocked a hole straight through him. He wanted that rush, that oblivion. He wanted the familiarity of it.
He wanted something to make sense again.
“I don’t blame you.” Her voice was upsettingly quiet again. With that same soft look in her eyes that made him want to kick out his own wall. “I don’t blame you for anything, Riley. That wasn’t clear these past years, I know.”
“I asked you a thousand times to tell me what happened. I begged you. And you must have wanted me to, because you came back, Rae. Over and over and over again.”
“I couldn’t stay away.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. “Did you think that sooner or later I would … guess?”
It took her a moment or so to consider that. “I think I must have.”
“All these years. All these wasted, pointless years when we could have…” But he broke off. Because it was too much, he hated it, and the loss of it all weighed on him so heavily Riley didn’t understand how he was still upright.
“When we could have … what?” Rae asked, that half smile reappearing, and he was pretty sure it was going to be the death of him. And soon. “The police haven’t had to get involved. There are no restraining orders, no cheating scandals acted out in bars, no gambling debts or drug addictions here. Compared to a lot of the other couples we know who got married right out of high school, we’re not doing so badly.”
“We broke up eight years ago,” Riley bit out. “All of this has just been you trying to make yourself feel better about keeping your secrets. It’s been your guilt, plain and simple. All this time, I thought that if I weathered the storm, it would change. But it was never going to change.” He shook his head then like he was shaking sense into himself. “I thought I was waiting you out. You were waiting to come up with a good reason to divorce me.”
Rae didn’t deny any of that. Making it all that much worse, to his mind.
“Despite all that, you still came back here tonight,” he said, his words like bullets. And he was aiming straight at her; there was no pretending otherwise. “This time you want to talk about our honeymoon, for God’s sake. One of these nights, I wish you would show up with a gun, shoot me in the head, and be done with this, Rae. I want to be done with this.”
That was exactly the sort of statement that would normally make her scream her head off at him. Charge him. Do something.
But she only stayed where she was. So still. So unlike the Rae he knew.
And while he watched, her eyes filled with tears.
For him.
He knew that without question.
Riley could feel it coming at him then. A freight train barreling down a questionable track, but aimed straight for him.
He felt the walls closing in on him. Or maybe that was his chest, shutting down at last because his heart was out of control. All he could see was Rae. All he could see was all that emotion in her gaze.
Worse still, he could feel it. He could feel far too much.
Somewhere inside, he kept taking swings, desperate with it—
His fingers curled into fists. He wanted to batter down whatever he could reach. He wanted to yell, break things, break himself—
Still, there was only Rae.
Quiet in the middle of this storm.
Waiting for him.
Slowly, horribly, Riley understood that he didn’t have it in him to rage like a hurricane on his own.
And on the heels of that realization came another: they had always stor
med together.
Always.
Where he was thunder, she was lightning. Together, they made their own rain.
And that had been the way of things from the start.
It had been true long before she’d lost their baby and kept it to herself.
He remembered, with a sudden rush of embarrassing clarity, shouting matches in high school hallways. Dramatic breakups that ended with one or the other of them getting loud and sloppy in public and private spaces alike. Everything had been high stakes. Everything had always been the end of the world.
In retrospect, none of it had been that bad.
They’d gotten together as teenagers. Married as kids.
And they’d dealt with what came at them with the tools they’d learned. Like kids in a corridor, yelling that no one understood their precious feelings.
There were other realizations hovering there, and his mother’s words echoing in his head, but Riley couldn’t handle any more just now.
Because the longer he and Rae stared at each other while he battled storms he couldn’t control, not without her, he found himself losing his grip on the one thing that had always made him feel powerful in these moments.
Not his control, because he always had precious little of that around her.
But his anger.
He felt it drain away. And Riley didn’t understand why he was rooted in place, but all he wanted to do was hold on to it. Get a hold on it however he could.
Because anger was fuel.
Anger was the indignation that had buoyed him for years.
Anger made him drink, and anger made him fight, and anger kept him nice and comfortable keeping his vigil in this house.
Anger meant it was her fault. Anger meant he never had to talk about it, never had to accept any of these heartbreaking realizations, and could keep humming right along on the force of it. Forever.
Feeling it fade away inside his own body felt like losing himself.
And she knew. Damn her, she knew.
Riley watched her pull in another shuddery breath, then she covered her mouth with her hands. But not before he saw a tear ease its way out of one eye and slide down her cheek.
And that pulled the plug.
All the rest of it poured out of him. Temper. Anger. Fury. All that outrage he’d been living with all this time, telling himself it was his right as the wronged party. That she deserved every bit of what he might throw at her and more.
He’d made anger his one true love, and when it drained away, for a moment, there was nothing.
Nothing.
Except Rae, looking at him with so much compassion it made everything inside of him a terrible, tangled mess.
“Don’t—” he tried.
Riley staggered back a step. And then Rae was on her feet, crossing toward him, and he warded her off with one hand raised.
“Stop.”
She stopped. But that didn’t help.
Because all of his anger was gone.
And there was nothing for it but to face what remained.
Whether he wanted to or not.
It flooded in, filling him, making him feel chopped into pieces, that mess in him—that mess that was him—taking him over. Taking him down.
And all the while, Rae stood before him, waiting. As if she knew exactly what demons he was fighting now.
When he would have said his only demon was her.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I hope you know that, Riley. I’m so, so sorry.”
And he could have taken a hit. Even now, when he felt so outside himself, so lost, Riley could have risen to the occasion if it were a fight.
But he had no defense for her apology. It punched right through him as if he really were the ghost here. Like he’d been one all this time.
It all seemed to explode inside him then, in a sick kind of slow motion. There was no avoiding any part of it. There was only facing it, like it or not.
God help him, but he didn’t want to face it.
“You thought I wouldn’t love you,” he managed to say, though the words themselves tasted sour. “You thought telling me you were pregnant would be the end of us.”
She nodded jerkily, and he could see too many things on her face now. His beautiful Rae, still and always the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. But he could see the fear too. The naked panic.
He could remember it all too well.
More, he could remember his own certainty. What he wanted, what he didn’t. What his life would look like. What their life would become.
He knew she’d had every reason to think that telling him she’d broken one of his rules might be the thing that tipped them over the edge and into a fight they couldn’t come back from.
Riley’s throat worked. “But you were going to tell me, anyway.”
“I was. I really was.”
“And then…”
Rae nodded, the tears were pouring down her face, and he didn’t know whether those tears were for him or her. For them both.
Or for the life they’d lost.
The life they’d created.
The life they’d lived since, bruised with secrets and laced through with anger in place of … this.
Sadness. Regret. Longing and loss.
And beneath it all, the reason he felt any of those things.
Love.
Riley found himself lurching forward as if he were drunk and unsteady on his feet. And he held her gaze, this woman who he had pledged himself to long before he’d taken the vows that made them husband and wife. The only woman he’d ever intended to marry. The only woman he’d ever promised himself to, for better or worse, little realizing they would have all these sad and twisted opportunities to explore what those words really meant.
And he was done being angry, but a far sight from grace, and he didn’t understand what he saw in Rae’s dark, endlessly soft gaze.
He took her hands again. And then they were both moving, or they could no longer stand, and whether it was weakness or want, they were both there on the floor together. Riley wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in her hair.
And he held her while she shook with sobs she didn’t let out. He held her the way he should have all along.
“I left you alone,” he managed to say. “I left you alone through all of this, from losing our baby to losing us. I’ll never forgive myself.”
“That’s what I came here to tell you,” she whispered, then pulled her head back so he could see her face. So she could look straight through him. And into him. So she could see every part of him. “I’ve already forgiven you. And I hope that someday, you’ll see your way—”
And he got it now.
He understood.
“Rae,” he said, with all that frustrated, overwhelming love and none of the anger that had been a place to hide it all this time. “Rae. I love you. I’ve always loved you. You don’t need my forgiveness, but you have it. You have everything, and you always will.”
And there on the floor of the house he’d built for a different life from the one they’d lived, Riley let go of all those things he’d imagined mattered to him, back when he was young and too sure of himself.
All the frustrations and fears. All the secrets and the lies.
What he’d kept from himself and what he’d kept from her.
He held the love of his life in his arms, and together they mourned their losses, at last.
Because on the other side of loss was life.
And hope.
And the two of them together again, where they belonged.
22
Rae woke up in the dark and, for a moment, didn’t know where she was.
But then she did. It was the brush of the soft, flannel sheets against her bare skin. And the pillows that smelled like him. Like love. She reached out her hand to find him, but she already knew that he wasn’t there.
Because Riley was better than a furnace, and the bed was only faintly warm, not hot.
&n
bsp; She sat up, waiting for her eyes to adjust, but when they did, she didn’t see Riley in any part of this large, comfortable room she’d once considered her favorite place on earth.
They had held each other for a long time out there on the floor. Then they’d come in here and had held on to each other as they lay here, twined around each other in that particular interlocking puzzle that had always been only theirs. There beneath the angled skylight that kept snow off and let the stars in, where they’d spent so many of their best nights together.
Rae hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She’d forgotten what it was like to sleep here, but climbing out of the sweet, warm embrace of this bed was as hard as ever. She swung her feet out of bed and blew out a breath against the cold. She moved quickly to the chair in the corner and pulled on the leggings and heavy socks she’d worn beneath her boots earlier. She shrugged into her discarded long-sleeved T-shirt and pulled on one of Riley’s flannel shirts as a kind of robe.
And it smelled like him too.
It all felt so familiar that she would have cried a week ago. But tonight, it made her smile.
She ignored the mess of her hair, rolled up the sleeves that drooped far below her fingertips, and wrapped the shirt tight around her as she padded out into the rest of the house to find him.
There was a low, smoldering fire in the big fireplace. The woodstove was pumping out heat. Everything was warm and cozy, but there was no sign of Riley.
Rae moved over to the windows and peered outside, her heart kicking at her as she looked to see if he’d gone off somewhere. Driven away to put some distance between them—and she couldn’t really hold it against him if he had. Not when she’d done the same thing so many times herself.
But his truck was still parked out front, at an angle to hers—a lot like he was making sure she didn’t do any running off anywhere. It made her feel warm inside. It made her grin to herself, like the silly girl she’d always been when it came to Riley Kittredge.
What does it matter where he parks in his own yard? she demanded of herself sternly.
Deep down, however, she could admit it felt like a sign.
And the minute she thought about signs, she knew where he was.
She went over to the mat near the door and shoved her feet into her boots. Then she went and climbed up the stairs to the smaller second floor of the house. Riley was using it for storage these days, she saw, the way they always had when she’d lived here. And she was pretty sure that if she looked closely, she’d see boxes she’d put up here herself.
Secret Nights with a Cowboy Page 26
