by Maisey Yates
His feelings for Sammy weren’t...marriage and kids feelings. It was nothing like his mom and dad.
It was all twisted up in the trauma he’d gone through back then. The place he’d been when she’d come into his life.
In the violence he’d saved her from.
His connection with her was feral, raw and too intense. He’d channeled it into protecting her, because that was the safest for them both.
What he felt for Sammy was all-encompassing. It was part of every breath he took.
But it damn sure wasn’t love.
“Right. That’s why you’re still here. In this house. Doing the same thing that you’ve always done. Because the domestic life just isn’t for you.”
“Running a ranch on my own terms is not the same as being answerable to a wife or kids. It’s not the same as having to take care of a pack of wild brats when you’re trying to graduate from high school.”
“Look,” Logan said. “I’m not pretending to have any idea of what you went through when all that happened.”
“The same basic thing you did.”
Logan shook his head. “No. You know that’s not true. You know it’s not. We all lost the same, but you took care of us. And I get that’s a thing. But... I also can see that Sammy means a lot to you.”
“She does,” he said, firming his jaw. “Basically everything. But that doesn’t change the reality of who I am and what I want.”
“What you want? Or what you’re not scared of?”
“I ain’t scared of shit.” He swung the ax down on the wood again, and the sound of it split the air.
Logan chuckled. “So you’re going to help her find a guy to have a baby with?”
“It was either that or she was going to leave.”
Logan shook his head. “Well, maybe she needs to leave.”
Ryder stopped, giving his friend an icy glare. “None of this is your business.”
Logan shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t care.”
“Don’t you have work to do?”
“You know you can let other people help you sometimes.”
“Have you offered any help? I’m standing here cutting wood by myself.”
“I’m pointing something out to you that you should maybe pay attention to.”
“That you think I’m in love with Sammy.” In love. That wasn’t the right word for what he felt for her. He didn’t like what he felt for her; he never really had. Because it was too big to breathe around, and he resented it. Because after his parents had died he’d been stripped of something essential, and in some ways it felt like Sammy had given it back to him. But it was on loan, and he was very, very aware of that. And if she removed herself, she would remove that, too.
And he would be right back where he started.
Hollowed out.
“Yeah,” Logan said.
Ryder shook his head. “I’m not. I... I care about her.”
“You want her.”
That was the most disturbing of the things that he’d said. That was the truth of it. Because of course he loved her. He just didn’t consider that the same thing as being in love. But he cared for his entire family. Saying that there was no love involved would be stupid. He didn’t stay here and work this land, didn’t stay near everybody, because he felt neutral about them.
Wanting Sammy felt... Hell. He thought she was beautiful. Looking at her sometimes hurt. But him putting his hands on her... No. That was like cursing in a church. Treading on sacred ground in muddy boots.
He couldn’t touch her.
So you’ll let someone else do it?
He gritted his teeth and positioned another piece of wood for splitting.
“Hey,” Logan said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong,” Ryder said.
Because being in love with somebody was domestic and sweet. Because it was a bright and shiny memory from his childhood. The way his parents had been with each other. The way they had complemented each other.
It certainly wasn’t the sharp, strange thing that he felt for Sammy. An overwhelming sense of needing to protect her. Of needing to...hang on to her.
He was everything that she avoided, and he knew it.
It was a relief in some ways that she tended to gravitate toward men that were so different than he was. Because it made his feelings for her clear early on.
Yeah, he supposed he could see where his feelings could have gone off in the direction that Logan was talking about. Yeah, if things were different. If life was different, if he was different, he could have easily fallen in love with all that bright, free-spirited beauty.
If he had been a different person with a different life. A man whose insides hadn’t been crushed, compressed until they’d gone hard like granite. Tested by loss and by the deep burden of responsibility that had been placed on him at the age of eighteen.
And the first time he had ever seen her, curled up in his barn, he thought she was beautiful. Luminous and bright and a beacon of something. Hope. A light on a hill.
And yeah, he’d thought about kissing her.
But then he had started to realize that something wasn’t right about the place she lived. That something in her life was broken. Some nights she would climb through his bedroom window and without a word, get into bed with him. And at first... At first he’d felt...tempted. To press a kiss to her head, to see where else it might go. But then he’d started to realize that she was afraid.
That when she curled up against his body she was trembling like a leaf.
And he’d known then that he could never...
That she would get in bed with him like that showed her trust in him. And he would never, ever do anything to break that trust. To violate it.
She was vulnerable, and she believed that he would protect her. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know why she had decided to come there. Why she had decided to come to him. But she had.
And then that night when he had been expecting her and she hadn’t come... And he’d just known something was wrong. Felt sick in his gut about it. And he’d found her father, pounding on her with his fists in her little trailer that she slept in on the edge of her parents’ property.
And Ryder...
Ryder had seen red.
And everything had made sense. That fear in her. That vulnerability. A man, a man she was supposed to trust had treated her with violence.
She trusted Ryder to protect her. And that day he had. Physically.
After that, she had moved the camper to Hope Springs.
Sometimes she’d still gotten in bed with him.
And it had been easy enough to take that thing inside him that wanted her, that felt sort of ravenous for her, and harden it. Turn it into a cold, dark obsidian. Sharp and unyielding. To put it between her and all the rest of the world.
Because he had experience enough with hardening the soft and weak things inside him. Because he had to do it the day that his parents had died. Because denying the things that he wanted had become second nature, and so he had simply done it with Sammy.
The idea of taking that and changing it now was unthinkable.
“It’s not like that,” Ryder said. “It’s not.”
“All right. I mean, aren’t you worried that she’s going to...do something stupid?”
“Yeah,” Ryder said. “I worry about that with all of you. All the time. Except for Iris. I don’t really have to worry about her.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, either,” Logan said. “You know, since I’m thirty-three years old.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryder said. “Old habits.”
“We’re the same age now,” Logan said. “So to speak. And I know that it’s hard for you to take that on board. But we are.”
“That isn’t how it works,” Ryder said.
“It just isn’t.”
“It can be, if you want it to be.”
“Seriously, Logan, did you want something?”
“Unclench,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes. I mean, things are settled now. Pansy’s getting married and you don’t hate the guy, which seems ideal, really.”
“I don’t know that I would have chosen him.” Still, the idea that his sister was old enough to get married was... Well, since the entire thing seemed unappealing to him, it was difficult to wrap his head around it all. Pansy was the most like him. Out of everyone in the family.
She was a straight arrow. Somewhat serious. Committed to doing the right thing.
And there was nothing wrong with her getting married to West Caldwell. It was just... It made him feel slightly abandoned and that was just stupid.
So maybe he had an issue with change.
It wasn’t like the way that he was treating the whole thing with Sammy could disprove that. Quite the opposite.
But there had been so many years of struggle. Just so many. And was it so bad to want some settled years where things just felt...good?
“I’ll tell you what,” Ryder said. “You do your job. I’ll do mine.”
“Which is?”
“Raising hamburger,” Ryder said. “Neither of us needs to give the other life advice.”
“All right,” Logan said. “Fair enough.”
“What about you?” Ryder asked. “Are you ever going to get married?”
Logan chuckled. “I can’t see it in the future.”
“All right, so why are you here harassing me about it?”
“Because you’re the best of us,” he said. “Not me. It’s not even close. I...” He shook his head. “Look, if anybody deserves normal, it’s you.”
“That ship sailed a long time ago. We were never going to get normal. Not after all that.”
“That seems a damn shame.”
“We have this place. Seems like that’s good enough.”
He looked around, took in the cloudless blue sky that was so clear it created hazy sunspots in front of his eyes. At the jagged green mountains capped with pine trees and the rolling expanse of fields all around him.
Hope Springs Ranch.
There had been a moment in his life when it had felt like all hope was dead. It had felt like this place and its name was an albatross around his neck. But gradually he had gotten used to the weight. And he had begun to find the hope buried here.
The salvation.
It had sustained him. His siblings, his cousins, his friend Logan.
And Sammy.
It would continue to do so.
He would be certain of that.
* * *
“SO ARE WE going to go daddy hunting tonight or what?”
Sammy popped into the barn late in the afternoon, and could tell immediately by the rigid line that Ryder’s shoulders created that she had led with the wrong sentence.
But really, he was the one who had said he would help her. And the fact that he intermittently acted irritated about it wasn’t really her problem.
“Can you not call it that?” he said, turning around.
She sucked in a breath, momentarily frozen by the picture he created standing there at the center of the barn, backlit by the open double doors behind him. He had a black cowboy hat pulled low over his face, and there was dirt all over those high cheekbones of his. Ending just above his whiskers. He was thirty-five, but he looked weathered in the best way possible. Years had only made him more distinct.
She had known him since that face was smooth.
And as the years wore on, as he got all the kids in the house taken care of, as he expanded the ranch and steadily dealt with financial issues and all other manner of things that came with running a cattle ranch, he had added lines. By his eyes, his mouth, at the center of his forehead, between his eyebrows.
Like hash marks for each year they had known each other. A marker of the time, the hardships and the triumphs.
She had known him since he couldn’t grow a beard. And now he needed to shave badly by the end of every day.
Ryder was part of her soul.
The fabric of who she was.
And she really hoped that he couldn’t catalog the wrinkles and years on her face quite the same way as she could his.
She moisturized. So she liked to think that she hadn’t crossed the border into rugged. It worked for a cowboy. Not so much for her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Is there something a little bit more stately we can call it?”
“I don’t know. Is there a way to make this...stately in any way?”
“Please take me out?” She gave him her best wide smile.
“Fine,” he said. “I have to shower, though.”
“Do you?”
In her opinion, dirt looked good on him.
“Hang out for a minute.”
Trailing irritation and dust in his wake, he walked past her and she followed him into the house. Then into his bedroom.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I just figured I would wait in here.” She sat on the edge of his bed.
He had moved into the master bedroom of the house out of some necessity. She knew it had made him feel weird, but the other rooms were full, and there was no reason for him not to take this one. She felt comfortable in his room.
Back when she’d been a teenager and her dad had been in a fury, she had snuck out sometimes. The first time she’d done it...she’d been sure that Ryder would send her away. She had climbed through his bedroom window and got beneath the covers with him. And he had known exactly what she wanted. To be held. To be protected. To have some strength around her that made her feel safe, rather than battered and bruised and afraid for her life.
“Fine,” he said, stripping his shirt off and taking his hat along with it, leaving both on the floor.
The wall suddenly felt slightly closer, and she didn’t know why. There was something about the way he’d been looking at her the past couple of days that made her feel...unsettled, and no doubt it was responsible for the whole thing with the walls.
He went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind him, and she got off the bed slowly. She could hear the water turn on. She bent down and picked his hat up off the floor. The band of it was damp from his sweat. And when she picked the T-shirt up, she could feel that it was damp, too.
She held on to both for a moment, contemplating that.
And then she went quickly to the peg by the door and hung his hat up, before dropping the T-shirt into the hamper.
Touching his sweat should disgust her.
It didn’t. She wasn’t sure why. But maybe it was that whole thing about him being part of her. Now, why she had wanted to—for one moment—put her face in the T-shirt and smell it, she didn’t know.
Maybe she was hormonal. Maybe that was why the whole thing with the baby suddenly felt urgent and...
She thought about what he’d said to her. About it being selfish to want a baby the way that she did. Maybe she was selfish. She wasn’t sure she cared. Life hadn’t given her much of anything. Except for Ryder. Life had given her Ryder. Hope Springs Ranch.
Through this place and her relationships with the people here she had a basis of support. The town had... The town had been there for her. She had gotten a job at one of the local jewelry stores where people had brought in artisan work, and she had developed an interest in metalsmithing and gemstones. Eventually, she’d been able to buy leftover material from her old boss and get into doing some of it on her own.
Now instead of selling other people’s creations, her own designs were in the store.
So it wasn’t that she hadn’t accomplished things. She had. But there was something in her that sti
ll didn’t feel satisfied.
She was just aching and empty all the time. And she was tired of it.
The bathroom door cracked open, and Ryder came out with a towel wrapped low around his waist. And she just stood there, frozen. Staring.
She had seen the man in a state of half-undress more times than she could count. She’d shared a bed with him when they were younger. They were platonic with a capital P. That didn’t mean she didn’t know that he was a good-looking man. She wasn’t blind. And yes, she had been slightly... Well, she had been noticing those things about him a little bit more lately. But it was all to do with the fact that the energy around him had changed. The way he had looked at her at dinner last night.
But she was human. A human woman. And he was a man with a perfect, spectacular body wandering around with nothing on and water droplets rolling down his chest. Over his muscles. So many muscles.
Really, he had the best body she had ever seen. But she avoided bodies like his when it came to sexual situations because... Because they were scary. Intimidating. Because it was something that she would never feel comfortable with.
But Lordy, she was enjoying looking at it now.
“I didn’t have clean clothes with me,” he said, grasping the towel tighter and digging through his dresser.
“Don’t mind me,” she said.
“I don’t,” he said.
She didn’t bother to look away. Because when she felt uncomfortable she tended to dig into the moment. So she supposed she would go ahead and own the fact that she was currently on a visual tour of every exposed part of him.
“Are you going to leave so I can get dressed?”
“I suppose,” she said, treating him to her naughtiest smile. But for some reason her face got hot. And her heart hammered hard against her breastbone.
“Out,” he said.
“Spoilsport,” she said, leaving the bedroom and closing the door behind her. And for the life of her she had no idea why her heart felt like it was going to escape from her chest, or why it felt like she had put her head into a bonfire.
But it couldn’t be because of Ryder’s body.
It just couldn’t be.
Because she had a mission to complete tonight, and she had plans. None of those plans included ruining the best relationship that she had.