by Hanna Hart
"Ooh! Do we get to see that part, too?" Ava whispered to Walker.
"That's tonight, at the saloon," he said.
"Cool!" she exclaimed in a hushed tone, her eyes showing her excitement. "Who wins?"
He tapped his nose at her and raised a flirtatious brow. "You'll just have to wait and see," he said.
At the end of the night, Walker took Ava back to her cabin and kissed her long and hard at the front door.
She opened her front door and turned to look at him one last time before saying goodnight.
"You did good kid," she said with the sweetest smile he had ever seen. "You did good."
Those words were like music to his ears. He felt like a small child showing a parent a crayon drawing and desperately hoping that it was fridge-worthy. He wanted Ava to like the ranch—to love it. He wanted to show her that he'd done something with his life and that if she wanted to, she could be a part of it all.
The last important person he'd been on the ranch with was Leanne. The time he spent with her on the resort grounds and in their custom-built home was special once, but he couldn't seem to look back on them now with anything but a bad taste in his mouth.
Going through the ranch activities with Ava released the ghosts and replaced his past experiences with new life. There were new memories to treasure now, new things to show Ava, and maybe even a new future for them both. And he wouldn't have it any other way.
Chapter Twelve
Ava
After just two full days on the ranch, Ava called her work and asked for a four-day extension on her project, and they graciously said that would be fine.
Their whirlwind two-day weekend at the ranch turned into an extended stay. The days rushed by with stolen kisses at midnight and riding horses in the sunny December afternoons. They spent their nights curled up by roaring fireplaces, out at the lodge restaurant eating steak and seasonal pies, and down by the communal fire, listening to actors tell stories of their time as bandits on the ranch.
Their whirlwind week was nearly over. They were leaving late Friday night, and it was currently Friday morning.
Ava stayed at Walker’s house Thursday night.
His home was stunning. It was everything they had always planned for the ranch to be—a rustic-contemporary oasis. It had all the sweeping luxuries that she’d ever dreamed of, like heated floors, a jet-pool tub, warm and wood coffered ceilings.
She stood on the balcony off the master bedroom and looked out at the sun rising over the sweeping Texas ranch land and reflected on their weekend together. She thought about what her mother would say when she got back, and what, exactly, she was doing getting tangled up with Walker again.
She couldn’t lie and say that being around him hadn’t brought up unpleasant memories.
Ava thought about their unborn child a lot while they were at the lodge. She couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like to move here with Walker, like they had planned, and raise their little son or daughter on the sweeping property.
Even after all this time, memories of her miscarriage brought her whole body to a staggering sickness.
She and Walker had jumped right back into a relationship at the first kiss, and while it hurt sometimes, the safety and love she felt after only a few weeks together were overwhelming.
"Good morning," he said, stepping into the frame of the sliding balcony doors.
She turned her profile to look at him, not wanting to turn away from the rising sun. "Morning," she smiled.
"How'd you sleep?"
"So amazing," she said. "It makes me want to stay forever."
"Then my evil plan is working," he said mischievously. "I was hoping you could stay for a while."
She grinned flirtatiously and asked, "How long is a while?"
"I don't know," he said, considering it as he leaned against the doorframe. "A couple of months? Forever?"
"Forever, hmm?" she repeated with amusement.
"You make me really happy, Ava," he said, and she knew it was true. She believed every word of it since their first night on the ranch. The way he looked at her when she first entered her cabin—the way he looked at her most days—was the look of someone who had been waiting to love her.
Walker had been waiting to let this out, to adore her, to make her a home, and now here she was.
When they first reconnected, he told her he wasn’t looking for love, but she didn’t believe it one bit. Walker had always been one of those people Ava envied—the ones who loved like open books and thrived when they were connected to someone else.
"I know you can't leave Colorado," he said, knocking her from her thoughts. "I know that's a lot to ask; it's soon, you still have a contract with the lodge. I know that, but I'd like you to," he began, then re-thought his wording. "I'd like to put the offer out there for you to come back to the ranch with me. I'll fly you back whenever you need to. I'll fly your mom out. I just don't want this to end."
"I don't either," she said and knew exactly how outlandish it sounded.
Walker stepped out onto the balcony, barefoot, with a thick blanket around his arms. He walked up to the edge of the railing with her, looking out over the exquisite property, and wrapped the blanket around the both of them.
They stared out at the orange and pink brush strokes that painted the sky and watched the way it dipped everything on the ground in honey.
He turned his head to her with a serious, lovestruck gaze. "I almost proposed to you once," he said quietly, stroking the hair out of her face.
“I know,” she admitted.
He flinched, but his calm expression quickly resumed, even as he asked, “You did?”
“I found the ring,” she said.
“And the idea of marrying me repelled you so much that you dumped me,” he laughed.
She laughed, too, but it was a subject she didn’t want to revisit.
“Is it?” Walker asked. “Why you dumped me, I mean?”
“No,” she said. “That’s what made it harder.”
“I don’t want to mess it up again,” he said, and she felt her stomach tighten.
These small admissions from Walker had been sprinkled into their conversations since the first day they reunited at the coffee shop—his feelings of guilt or assumptions that he made her unhappy back then.
He didn’t make her unhappy, at least, not in the way he thought. She wasn’t lying when she said she needed time alone.
"If you want to move here,” he began slowly, “to move in with me, or move to your own place in Texas, even half the year, and I could come to Colorado for the—”
"Walker," she said with a soft laugh. “We can’t do that.”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “We can.”
She wanted to say yes right then and there.
Nothing was keeping her in Colorado, she reasoned, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth. She still had her mother and her job, and then there was Tibby and her other friends.
But she so desperately wanted to say yes.
If Walker was the one, she thought, then she'd found 'the one' when she was only eighteen and she'd been too stupid to realize it back then.
She wanted to say yes. She wanted to pick up where they left off and follow him back home to Texas.
But if they were going to start up again for real, that meant she had to do things right with him. She would have to be honest about the past and she didn’t know if she was ready to do that.
Chapter Thirteen
Walker
"Was it weird?"
This was the question asked by Rhys when Walker told him he'd gone back to the ranch, not to take care of some business before January, as he'd told the rest of the family, but as a weekend escape with Ava.
But he didn’t care. He wanted to be with Ava.
Walker shrugged in response to his brother's question. "It felt right," he said.
Having Ava at the ranch was better than Walker could ever have imagined.
It confirmed for him what he'd been thinking for weeks now: he didn't want this to end. He wanted her to stay at the ranch and start a life together there.
Rhys wasn't the type to stick his nose in where it didn't belong. For the most part, Walker assumed his brother couldn’t care less what he did with his time.
But the question wasn't entirely unwarranted. Going to the ranch was therapeutic and invigorating, but he'd be lying if he said it didn't bring back haunted memories.
Ava was the first woman to ever break Walker.
He'd dated girls in high school, but none he thought he loved. None he ever said the words aloud to. But he loved Ava. Despite what she thought, she was easy to love. She was easy to plan a future around—but she was hard to read.
Things were going so well between them that it was hard to remember the grief she had brought into his life.
He stood in front of his parents’ home, fresh from being with Ava, and looked up at the sky. There were some stars only visible in winter, like the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. He blew a visible breath into the cold night air and could distinctly remember that last cold winter he'd ever spent with Ava.
The two had never lived together officially, but Ava kept clothes and other belongings at his house, and he regarded it as their shared apartment. She had a key and was there most nights.
Near the end, she'd spent more and more time at her place.
She had just yelled at him outside the country bar just the weekend prior, her telling him that maybe she didn’t remember what a relationship was supposed to be like and ripping his heart out.
He tried to call her the next day, and her reception was frosty at best, so when Walker came home that night days later and saw her shoes by the front door, he was elated.
He closed the door behind him, pulling off his winter jacket and draping it on the console table in the entryway. He removed his shoes and walked upstairs.
The first door at the top of the stairs was the washroom.
Walker could distinctly hear Ava crying behind the closed door. It wasn’t like anything he’d heard before.
When Ava cried, it was soft and stubborn, just like her. But this? This was a full-body sob.
The higher he climbed up the stairs, the louder it got.
Ava let out an exhausted set of cries the sounded out as she exhaled, three loud croaks in a row.
Walker felt his heart sink at the sound of it. He slowed his pace and stopped at the top of the staircase, unsure of what to do.
In days past, he would have come to the door and asked if Ava was alright. He would have turned the knob to see if it was open, walked in, and scooped her up into his arms. He would relish the feeling of her small frame pressed up against him.
But these days, he didn’t know what Ava wanted. He didn’t know why she was crying and if it was about him, her mother, or something else entirely.
He wanted to go to her, but the way she behaved these days made him feel like she would be angry if he stumbled upon her private moment.
Walker quietly descended the staircase, deciding that pretending he’d never been witness to her tears would be the kindest thing he could do.
Once at the bottom of the stairs, he pulled in an uneasy breath. He opened the front door and closed it loudly.
“Hey, Babe, you here?” he called up the stairs.
Her crying ceased immediately. “Yeah,” she called back. “I’m just about to take a shower.”
“I’ll start some dinner,” he called back, and she didn’t respond.
Walker chopped up onions, peppers, chicken, garlic, and threw some spices into a pan for an easy dinner. He mixed in some cooked pasta and cream for a makeshift Mexican dish.
He topped the concoction with sour cream and shredded cheese, drizzling hot sauce on Ava’s, knowing she liked things extra spicy.
By the time the meal was ready, Ava was downstairs. She was wearing pajama shorts with an overly long drawstring and an old, baggy pajama shirt that said ‘loco for cocoa’ and had a picture of a snowman themed coffee mug on it.
Her hair was wet and wavy. It dripped water on the floor as she stepped toward the kitchen island and grabbed her bowl of pasta.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem” he smiled politely. “You want to eat at the table tonight?”
Ava was already walking toward the couch, turning on the television as she said, “I thought we could just watch something. Is that okay?”
He nodded. “Sure.”
The shower was brilliant, he thought. Her face was damp and clean of makeup, creating the perfect distraction from how red her eyes had been from crying. It also offered her a couple of minutes to compose herself before seeing him face to face.
Her plan worked so well that Walker wondered how many times she’d done it before.
Walker toyed with his food as they watched television and wondered whether he should try to initiate conversation.
The two had made a habit of going to the 16th Street Mall for New Year’s. Forty-two cafes lined the property, twelve movie theaters, endless restaurants, and a pedestrian path that sprawled out over three bridges.
There was a clock tower outside the mall that was a two-thirds replica of the Campanile of St. Mark's in Venice, along with more than two-hundred trees dressed in rainbow twinkle lights that lined the promenade. This made it the perfect place to start a brand-new year with the one you love.
Ava hadn't been in the best of moods, and Walker wondered whether he should ask about their plans, but took a chance.
"Sixteenth this Wednesday?" he asked, trying to sound casual.
Ava's eyes flicked to his, and she raised both brows. "They say you will spend your next year however you ring in the new year."
"And I'll be spending mine watching fireworks and kissing you," he grinned. "Can't complain about that."
They watched television for hours that night. He asked her how her day was, how her mom was doing, and what she wanted to do for the weekend, but all his attempts at conversation were met with an indifferent, evasive response.
She pointedly avoided his touch, flinching at his kiss and forgoing their usual rituals of her putting her legs over his lap, requesting gentle tickles, curling into his chest, and resting her head in the crook his neck.
"You never seem to touch me anymore," he said, and Ava promptly laughed.
"What are you?" she snorted. "A girl?"
"Nope," he said, clipped. "Just a guy who misses his girlfriend."
She crawled onto his lap and tapped him on the nose. "Well, I'm right here," she enunciated.
He smiled. That was the playful Ava he knew.
Walker leaned in and brushed his lips against her cheek, landing a kiss. He ran a hand through her hair and found her mouth with his, slipping a tongue into her mouth and taking comfort in her warmth.
She kissed back, but it was brief. Then she excused herself from the couch entirely, taking their plates into the kitchen to wash.
An argument spiraled from there, and Ava slammed the door hard when she left. They didn't speak at all the next day, which had seldom happened in the history of their relationship.
The following night, Walker lay in bed, falling in and out of sleep. He felt like he was living on the edge of his dreams, with one foot in dreamland and the other firmly planted in reality.
He woke somewhere around two in the morning. After much tossing and turning, he pulled his phone from the wall charger and opened his texts.
“I missed you,” he wrote to Ava, knowing she kept her ringer on overnight and that she would probably get his message immediately.
“I can't sleep when you're gone,” he added.
“I can never sleep,” she wrote.
“You could tonight,” he sent. “Come over.”
She didn’t.
Something between them was off, but Walker couldn’t pinpoint what.
The next night was New Years, and while Walker knew Ava
was having her doubts, he didn’t expect her to bail entirely on their big night out.
He waited by their spot all night, holding out hope until the bitter end that Ava would come through for him. But she didn’t show up for that either.
When he got home that night, he imagined Ava would be waiting on the front step, having lost her key. She would have an amazing excuse for why she didn't show up. But there was no Ava. There was no call, no text, no smoke signal. No explanation.
He stood in front of his door for a long while, staring at the red paint, his body growing colder and his mind angrier. Finally, he doubled-back into his car and drove to Ava's.
Walker rang the doorbell and knocked on the door incessantly. His heart pounded harder the longer his calls and knocks went unanswered.
He sat on her front step with his head in his hands, refusing to give up. He stood and kicked her front door hard with his boot. That got her attention.
Within a minute, she swung the door open, and he marched inside, shielding himself from the snow.
“What are you, crazy?” she said furiously. “I have neighbors, you know!”
"Where were you?” he said quickly, his eyes darting back and forth from hers, trying to get a read on her. “Were you with someone else?”
“What? No!” she said, incensed. “I never said I was coming out, Walker.”
"What's going on with us?” he pleaded, setting a hand on the half wall in her entryway. “Is it your mom? Is she sick?”
"I never said I was coming!” she said, louder then.
Walker set his jaw. "You said the way you spend new years is the way the rest of your year will go. The people you spend it with, the time you have together.”
"Yeah,” she said with a breath, her eyes wide as she stared into him, waiting for it to click. “Read between the lines, Walker.”
