by Nicole Helm
She swallowed again, and then stopped trying so hard to stem the tide of tears. Because this was about showing her emotions, not being afraid of them, of feeling. She took his chin between her fingers and forced him to look at her.
When his eyes finally met hers, some of that hard tension in his jaw loosened. “Tears are not fair,” he said gruffly.
“Nothing is fair.”
He stared at her for a long time, silent, muscles tense. “You’d really keep trying if I said I can’t forgive you and you broke my heart irreparably?”
She swallowed at the slice of pain. “It isn’t irreparable if we both want to repair it.”
He finally moved—just a slight shift, curling his hand into a fist and then uncurling it, his gaze moving past her. There was a moment she was sure he’d say no, tell her to get out of his car. A band tightened in her chest, somehow choking her breathing but making the tears fall harder.
“Besides, I need you to teach me how…how to change. I taught you how to ranch. You owe me.”
His eyes flicked to hers and finally he touched her, thumb wiping tears off of one cheek. “You are part of the reason I changed. Your strength. And then you were the thing that made losing my shit seem worth it. Being an emotional wreck who couldn’t hack it seemed worth it if it got me you.”
Oh, damn him, making her cry harder. “No! That is not right. You can’t out-sweet-talk me. It’s not fair. I’m apologizing. I should win the sweet talk.”
He took her hand, brushed his mouth across her knuckles. “It can be a lifelong contest.”
Her breathing hitched, instead of with tears with a sharp intake of breath. “What exactly does that mean?”
He looked down at her hand in his, thoughtfully, then turned it over, pressing a finger to each of the calluses on her palm. “Are you really ready to put all the hard work you put in here”—he brushed a fingertip across a broken piece of skin—“into us?”
“Yes. Absolutely.” It was a much scarier prospect than actual physical labor she could control, but it also offered a better reward. A reward that didn’t disappear if her ability to work did. She would have him. What more could she want?
“You make a compelling argument, I suppose. I think I can forgive you.” Before she could throw her arms around his neck and just hold on, he held a hand between them. “On three very important conditions.”
She nodded, probably too eagerly, but she didn’t care. “Anything.” And she meant it. She would do anything, and that made anything seem possible.
* * *
Dan had no idea what to do with her apologies and declarations of love. He didn’t know what to do with her anythings, or if forgiving her was selling himself short. He didn’t have a clue if any of this was right, but he’d gotten through the past few weeks doing what felt like the right thing to do.
And that would always be her.
“Anything?” he replied, still holding on to her hand with one of his own and holding her off with the other. “What if I said I wanted the llamas to live inside with us?”
She was leaning over the console, leaning into him. Like she really would do anything. Hell, she even smiled. “I’d take you to a psychiatrist. Lovingly.”
He barked out a laugh. The past week felt like some bizarre movie. Had this all really happened to him? Up, down, and up again. But she was sitting there saying she loved him. In Chicago. In a dress. She was telling him she wanted to work hard on them, and wouldn’t it be the stupidest thing if he let one mistake be the thing that kept them apart forever?
“Okay, really, three conditions. First, you come live with me. Permanently, unpacked bag and everything.”
She bit her lip. “I’d have to make some arrangements with Caleb, but I do want to do that.”
“Good. Second, sometime around Christmas, you come to Florida with me to visit my grandparents.”
The crying that had finally stopped didn’t start again, but her eyes got all watery. She nodded, hand in his, squeezing.
“Third…” He trailed off. Went quiet.
She let out an impatient breath after he was silent for a while. “You’re killing me here,” she muttered.
“I can’t think of anything,” he admitted. “But three seemed like such a good number.”
“Dan!”
“Okay, serious third condition.” He moved so he could have both of her hands in his, so he could look her straight in the eye. If that’s how it had ended, that would be how it began again. “When you’re afraid or panicked, when you’re sad or hurt or ecstatic or …whatever, instead of, oh, I don’t know ripping my heart out and stomping on it, or either of us running away, we could go with the easy route. ‘I’m scared.’ etc.”
Her throat moved, but she nodded again. “I will work on that. And just so you know, I didn’t relish ripping your heart out, but I was busy ripping out mine, so I may have failed to notice. Maybe we both agree to keep our hearts firmly in place.”
“Sure.” He brought her hands to his mouth, kissing both. “Except mine belongs to you.”
She wrinkled her nose, but there were tears falling over her lashes again. “Gross.”
“It can’t be that gross—you’re crying again.”
“I want to go home!” she said with a sniff. “With you.” She leaned forward, pressing her mouth to his, briefly. Far too briefly. “Let’s go home.”
Nothing could have sounded better. Well, maybe one thing, but they’d have plenty of opportunity to do that at home too.
“Sharpe.”
When he growled, she laughed.
“I just wanted you to know that I fully expect you to be able to use that name on me at some point.” She said it so archly, like a challenge.
“That name on y— Oh, no, no, no. You are not proposing to me. I will be the one proposing when we are ready.”
“Of course,” she said, all wide-eyed innocence. “Who said anything about proposing?”
He took her face between his hands. “You are a giant pain in my ass, and I love you with everything I have.”
She grinned. “Yes. You do.” She took a deep breath, the grin softening into something sweeter. “And I love you with all I am.”
The kiss was close enough to coming home; he didn’t even care that they probably wouldn’t be back to Blue Valley before tomorrow. She was here. She was his. And that was more than enough to get them through.
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Outlaw Cowboy
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Read on for an excerpt from the next book in Nicole Helm’s Big Sky Cowboys series:
Outlaw Cowboy
Caleb Shaw stared at the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It sat, innocently enough, on the table next to his snoring father.
In his mind’s eye, he unscrewed the black plastic cap and poured himself a double. And then another. The scorching heat of the amber liquid would dull away all the sharp edges inside of him.
Next to the bottle was that damn scrapbook Dad paraded out whenever he was drunk and sad. It was happening with increasing regularity. Caleb never wanted anything to do with the scrapbook. In fact, for an uncountable amount of time, he thought about tossing the damn thing in the fire.
In fact, he wanted both items gone. Banished forever. Hell, at this point in his life, he’d as soon use the alcohol to amp the blaze than drink it.
Liar.
Fair enough. His mouth was watering, and the edgy, simmering anger threatened to spill over. No amount of good seemed a match for it. And there had been good the past few months.
But it seemed like with him, bad always lurked in the shadows.
What would be the harm in one drink? His older sister would never know he’d broken his promise. She didn’t live here anymore. She’d left him w
ith all of this for love.
“Caleb?”
Summer’s hesitant voice was enough for him to close his eyes. Christ, Summer. She was a blessing and some kind of curse, this younger sister he’d only found out about last year. Somehow she was managing to fill some of the holes Mel’s marriage and move had left in his life.
But, damn, he missed Mel. Sure, it wasn’t as if he never saw her. She was only across the valley on her husband’s strange little llama ranch, but he’d never felt responsible for Mel, and rarely felt like he needed to soothe her. Summer was in constant need of both.
It’s in you.
The voice that had haunted him growing up—the voice he thought he’d erased—had returned with Summer’s appearance and Dad’s confession. Honestly, it had resurfaced before that, when Mel had trusted him to be in charge when it was the last damn thing she should have done. No one should ever trust him. Hadn’t he proven that by now?
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Summer continued, her voice wavering.
Summer was constantly sorry. Sorry to be a burden or distraction. Sorry she didn’t know everything. If she wasn’t sorry, she was delighted: by the horses, by the mountains, by family.
She cooked and kept the house clean, for him and the father she’d only just met—the father who admitted she was his, but refused to have any interaction with her. Though, to be fair, Dad didn’t interact with much of anybody. Not since he’d been paralyzed six years ago.
It’s in you.
Mom’s voice. Mom’s accusation. The evil. It’s in you.
“I’d go away. It’s just…”
“Just what?” Caleb snapped, immediately wincing. Losing his temper with Summer was like losing his temper with a puppy. Puppies and Summer Shaw could not take harsh words. They cowered.
It was hardly her fault she reminded him of…that.
“I think someone’s in the cabin.”
He let out a breath. No Jack for him. Which was good. He hadn’t had any in nine months. Nine long, sober months living with that boiling anger, a constant presence he had to fight back. But he hadn’t broken his promise, so at least there wasn’t new guilt to mix in with the old anger. “Someone?”
“I went back to my caravan for lunch—”
“You can eat here, you know.” Something about the way she acted like a maid in a house that was very much owed to her always rubbed him the wrong way. She wouldn’t take Mel’s old room and she wouldn’t eat lunch at the main house. She’d only eat dinner with him if she’d cooked it. She slept in a little caravan she’d arrived in last year, parked at the edge of the property.
She was a Shaw, and she acted like an employee inside these four walls.
He hated it, and he had no one to tell. Mel was gone, a new focus in her life. Dad was…gone in his own way. And Summer cowered against his temper.
So he kept the anger inside. He tried to freeze it out, muscle it away, but it lingered, in him. Always.
“I…” Summer’s mouth curved into a smile. She looked so much like Mel, like his fuzzy memories of Mom. “I kind of like being by myself every once in a while. I wasn’t allowed to be alone much before…I left.”
His estranged mother had disappeared when he was five, pregnant with Summer. Then twenty-some years later, Summer had left Mom to come here and find the rest of her family. And shocked the hell out of them with her appearance, since none of the other Shaws had known about her existence.
Except Dad.
Dad had sacrificed Summer to keep Mel, and all because of him. It’s in you.
“Are you all right?” Summer asked in a hushed whisper. She reached out to squeeze his arm. She was always so…touchy. Touchy. Smiley. Sorry. She gave him a headache, a guilt he didn’t understand, which melded with the anger he figured must be in his blood. Bad, bad blood.
He stepped away from her. “Why do you think someone’s in the cabin?”
“There was a light inside last night. Real quick, but I know I saw it. And I thought I saw someone in the yard this morning. The snow around the place is all weird. It could be an animal, or just how it’s melting I guess, but—”
Caleb strode past her—out of the living room, through the kitchen, and into the mudroom. He plucked the keys to the gun safe from under a tub of rock salt and shoved it into the lock as Summer caught up with him.
Summer released a shocked exhale. “Oh. I don’t think you’ll need that. I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You think women can’t be dangerous?”
“Well, of course they can. I am very well aware they can be, but…”
He grabbed the shotgun and locked the safe again. “Show me,” he instructed.
Summer blinked at him as she worried her hands together. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Someone is prowling around that old cabin, only a few hundred yards from where you currently sleep, and you shouldn’t have said anything?”
Summer grabbed her coat from the hook and pulled it around her. “I don’t think she’s—”
“She’s—if it’s a she—trespassing, and needs to be scared off.”
“A gun seems harsh.”
“What, you think this is Goldilocks and she’s lost and looking for some warm porridge?”
Summer stuck her hands in her coat pockets, her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth pressed into a line. He supposed this was Summer angry. It was like a spring shower compared to the raging thunderstorm of the other Shaws’ tempers. Slow and quiet, not one flash of lightning or boom of thunder.
Summer was silent, with none of her normal chatter—nervous or otherwise—as they got in his truck and drove through the slushy spring snow to the other side of the Shaw property where the old cabin was.
The cabin looked the same as it had since Grandpa died fifteen-some years ago. The Shaw men had never lived to a ripe old age, and had never been any good at housekeeping. The windows were dusty, everything slumped and old. The rough-hewn logs supposedly chopped down by some ancestor were weathered by age and harsh winters.
But there was a definite disturbance to the snowpack around the cabin, and while any number of wild animals could be walking around the area, infesting the cabin, wild animals didn’t typically attempt to cover their tracks.
And they certainly couldn’t open doors. The sagging lump of snow on the left-hand side of the door was unmistakable.
Someone was in there, and that someone didn’t want anyone to know.
“Go to the caravan,” Caleb ordered, hopping out of the truck. He left the safety on the gun. He doubted whoever was hiding wanted trouble, but he’d been involved in a little too much trouble back in the day to entirely rule it out.
Summer was shadowing him, decidedly not going to the caravan. “You can’t go in there alone.”
“Why not? I’m a man with a gun.”
“You’re the one who said she could be dangerous!”
“I repeat, I am a man with a gun.” He strode toward the cabin door, but Summer kept following him. He was sure he could yell and she’d stay put, but that seemed like an overreaction. This was probably as simple as someone looking for a warm place to stay.
He tried to peer in the window surreptitiously, but both the grime and the tattered curtains blocked any view of the interior.
“I’m going to ease my way in. You stay outside. Got it?”
She clutched her hands together in front of her, eyes wide and worried, but she nodded. He had to resist rolling his eyes. Lord knew he’d faced a lot more potentially dire situations than some random person in this long vacated cabin.
It’s in you.
Every once in a while that was all right, wasn’t it? Every once in a while, he got it in his fool head to save somebody, and the not-so-nice pieces of himself came in handy.
Of cou
rse, his help rarely really solved anything.
Focus.
He eased the door open, his finger on the gun’s safety, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light inside. He noticed a long, denim-clad leg dangling over the back of the couch.
A flash of sunlight hit the bottom metal of a boot, and he saw an inscription on the sole.
He lowered his finger away from the safety. He knew that boot and its inscription: fuck off in flowing script. He considered keeping the gun up, because Lord knew this woman was dangerous. “Damn it, Delia.”
“Hello, handsome,” she drawled, not moving off the musty old couch so he could see the rest of her. “Took you a little longer than I expected.”
* * *
Delia’s heart hammered in her chest. It was a lie. She hadn’t been expecting Caleb at all. She thought she’d been so careful.
Despite the thunderstorm of fear and nerves inside her, she remained still, except for her foot, tapping absently in the air. She had been bred to weather every unexpected confrontation with a mask of calm and poise.
Besides, she’d known this could happen. It wasn’t ideal, but she had a backup plan. She wouldn’t be trespassing if she didn’t have a backup plan. She wouldn’t be Delia Rogers if she didn’t have a backup plan.
“Who is she?” a voice whispered.
A female voice.
That had Delia moving. A woman could put a wrench in her backup plan. She pushed into a sitting position, scooping her hair out of her eyes.
Oh, Caleb. Handsome boys who turned into handsome men simply weren’t fair. His hair was still golden and wavy, whiskers glinting almost red in the sun. His shoulders were broader, but his hips were still narrow. Even under the heavy winter coat, she could tell he packed a lot of strength in that lean frame. Adulthood and bad choices had given his face character. The sharp swoop to his square jaw was covered in appealing stubble, his nose was slightly crooked, and she remembered the day that slash had been put in his eyebrow.