by Maisey Yates
But it reminded her of that night. That night that he had come to her rescue. The one they didn’t much talk about.
She closed her eyes, a tear sliding down her cheek. “Did I ever thank you?” she whispered.
“For what?”
“For saving me.”
“Sammy...”
“I mean, we don’t really talk about that night so much as talk around it. I think he was going to kill me,” she said. “I really do.”
“I can’t think about that,” he said, his voice rough.
“All I did was...” She had never told him this. And he had never asked. Of course, he never would. Of course, in response to her father beating her mercilessly he would never ask what she had done to earn that, because of course he would never believe that she had.
Not Ryder.
But she had done something. She had wanted something.
“He was...doing what he did. Angry and drunken... He started in on me, because he found condoms in my backpack. And he asked why I was such a slut. He backhanded me. He said that he didn’t want any daughter of his going around acting like the town bike. Said that what I was doing was wrong. That I was dirty. And I looked him right in the face and I asked him... I asked why he couldn’t love me. Why he couldn’t love us. I asked him what was wrong with him.”
Tears blurred her vision, her throat so tight she couldn’t speak. She had to let them sit for a moment. Had to let it all settle.
Ryder didn’t say a word. He simply tightened his hold on her. She had thought they couldn’t possibly have any secrets between them. But they did. There was this. This big, looming thing that had created her, transformed her into the person who had moved into Hope Springs Ranch. And what she had been every day since.
“He hit me,” she said. “He said there was nothing wrong with him. It was just all the stupid, stupid women in his life. And we made him do it. I made him do it. Because I made him so angry. And I had to be my mother’s fault. He said he never hit her until me. It was me.” She blinked furiously. “He just said that. Over and over again. And then you came for me. You came for me, Ryder. And you stopped him. And you were the one who sat with me at the hospital. You were the one who got him arrested. You helped me. My own parents hurt me. But you... You rescued me.”
“You never told me any of this,” he said, his voice rough.
“I know. And you never asked because you’re too good to ask. Too good to ask what I had done. I just asked him why he couldn’t love me.”
And she had emerged determined never to feel shame about what she did. About her body. About who she was. She had emerged determined never to be that girl who asked in such a small, frightened voice why her father didn’t love her.
To ask for love and to look up and see only a violent void was a nightmare. The nightmare, perhaps.
The most awful, wrenching thing that she could ever imagine. And she had endured it. She had come out of it. And she had been determined to learn from it. To never feel like that again.
Ever.
And here she was, vulnerable now, but not afraid. Not afraid because of Ryder. Because of everything he was and everything he always would be.
She had landed somewhere safe at least. She could be confident in that. Her child would never have to look at his father and ask that question.
That was a gift. One that she would never, ever undervalue.
“He was broken,” Ryder said. “The reasons you can’t love come from inside you.”
There was something hollow and empty in his voice, and it made her want to ask another question, but she feared the answer far too much. So she didn’t ask. Instead, she kissed his forearm, and rested herself more deeply against him. No good came from asking questions you didn’t want the answers to.
She had done her best to make a life where she didn’t need to ask those kinds of questions. And she didn’t.
She didn’t need to.
She had him. He was committed to her. To taking care of her, to taking care of the baby. There was no reason ever to ask for more. No reason to hope for more. So she wouldn’t. And she would be all the happier for it.
She had his arms. And they would always protect her.
What more could she possibly need?
* * *
THE FAMILY FOURTH of July picnic was interesting this year. West and his half brother, Emmett, made for a fascinating new addition. West was the subject of much interrogation from Colt and Jake, who had come back from the circuit for the event.
But they took a break from interrogating West just long enough to corner Ryder and shove a beer in his hand. “Getting married, huh?” Colt asked.
“To Sammy,” Jake added.
“And having a baby,” Logan added.
“Are you congratulating me or accusing me of something?” Ryder asked.
“Both,” Jake said, looking at Colt, who nodded in agreement. “Definitely both.”
“Seriously?”
“If you hurt her,” Jake said.
“We will tear you apart,” Colt added.
“Limb from limb,” Jake finished, then took a swallow of beer.
“I’m sorry,” Ryder said. “Have I stepped into an alternate dimension? I have been taking care of Sammy for the past seventeen years. I’ll keep doing it now.”
“She doesn’t have a father who will threaten you. She doesn’t have brothers to do it. She has us.”
“I’m your brother, you assholes.”
“Technically our cousin,” Colt said.
“No relation,” Logan said.
“This is the thanks I get?” he asked. “For taking care of you fools for all those years?”
Colt shrugged. “Sammy’s a nice woman.”
“I’m nice,” Ryder said.
Colt shook his head. “You’re a lot of things, but nice isn’t really one of them. Decent. Good. But not nice.”
“Ungrateful fuckhead,” Ryder grumbled.
“See, my point,” he said.
“I’m taking responsibility,” Ryder said. “Doing what any good man would do.”
“Oh, I hope that you used that in your proposal,” Jake said. “Height of romance.”
“I didn’t say it was romance.” He and Sammy were deeper than that anyway. He didn’t need to put labels on it. Wasn’t Sammy the one who was so averse to labels anyway? It all made sense. It really did. There was no point being a fool about it.
He remembered what she had told him this morning, in the early hours, as he had held her on the bathroom floor. About how she’d asked her father why he didn’t love her.
What he’d said to her then had been true.
People didn’t not love you because of something wrong with you. It was always something with them.
And there was something with him.
That was the thing.
What he felt for Sammy was some kind of sickness. An intensity that made it so he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think clearly. Not like the sweetness shared by his parents. Damn it all, he worried. He worried what it would be like, over the course of years, for anyone to be in a house with them.
He looked at her and it felt like bleeding.
He felt love for his family. Though it wasn’t an easy thing. More like a bonding that couldn’t be undone. Forged in the kind of fire that you would never walk through on purpose. He didn’t have it in him to love, not the way that he watched his parents do it.
Theirs had been something wonderful, had brightened up the whole house. Easy and companionable and the kind of emotion he didn’t think he had the ability to feel.
For him, connections to people would always be double-edged, because the more you care, the more you feared losing them.
And yeah, having this baby was a miracle, but it was a burden, too. Because there was a burd
en to caring. To having something that small and vulnerable be your responsibility. Yeah, it was something.
But he was handling things the way that he knew to do it. Taking control. Taking ownership.
It was what he did.
It was how he made it better. How he made it work.
“We’re happy for you,” Colt said. “But are you happy for yourself? Because Sammy deserves someone who thinks this is happy.”
“She’s got me,” Ryder said. And somehow, he felt like that was a metaphor for everyone’s life that was here.
They had deserved something else. They had gotten him. Maybe he was supposed to have something else, but he’d gotten them.
Not that it was... Not that he resented it. Especially not Sammy.
Because God knew there was nothing else.
No one else but her.
But it was just that... Well, maybe they’d all deserve to feel a whole lot differently. To love a whole lot more differently. To live a whole lot more differently. But they’d gotten the parents they’d gotten; they’d lost them when they had.
And in the end they’d been left with the things they’d been left with. Sammy had come to him because he was next door. Not because she had an endless array of saviors to choose from. But because he was the only savior on hand. It was all well and good, but it wasn’t the same as...people who went through life with the support group you were meant to have. The parents that you were meant to have. Parents who lived. Parents who loved you.
Not parents who would hit you for asking where that love was.
His blood burned.
Now that he knew. Now that he knew what Sammy had done. Dared to ask for what should have been hers by birth.
“We did all right,” Colt said.
“Yeah,” Ryder agreed. “You did okay.”
His relationship with these men had shifted over the years. They were more like brothers now.
But they’d been something more than that to him for a long while. He had known what it was to be an older brother, and that did come with feelings of a certain amount of responsibility. But it was different when it was you the school had to call when grades were down, or they’d gotten into a fight. It was different when you were the final word, when you were the one who had to lay down the law over underage drinking. When you were still underage yourself.
It was all just different.
And he didn’t need them trying to throw down guilt trips about Sammy and what he could be to her and what he couldn’t.
He was aware of his shortcomings.
He was well aware.
But he was offering her something. Not nothing.
And maybe it wasn’t everything, because he didn’t possess the ability to give a whole lot more than what he already offered. But he offered what he had. That was going to have to be enough.
“Come on, let’s stop talking about our feelings,” Ryder said. “Football.”
The guys went out onto the field and a rough game ensued. It was tradition for them to throw the ball around, but Ryder always got overly competitive. Which his almost-brother-in-law seemed to love.
There was only a mild amount of bloodshed.
“Dammit, Ryder,” Colt complained, wiping his palm over a bleeding scuff on his face.
“We don’t do touch football. I’d think a big, bad bull rider could handle that,” Ryder goaded him.
“Bulls have more honor,” Colt muttered, walking to the cooler and getting a beer, which he promptly pressed to the side of his face.
They dispersed after that, making their way over to different food stations. Sammy and Iris had made amazing side dishes. Macaroni and cheese, baked beans, homemade rolls. Pies, cake. Rose—true to her own nature—had provided chips and beer, along with some soda. Ryder had a soft spot for off-brand soda, since that was what they’d had often when he was in charge, and they were living off a shoestring. Nothing wrong with bottom-shelf cereal and grape soda; not in his opinion.
Logan fired up the grill, putting on steaks and hamburgers for the group, and Colt picked up his guitar and started to strum a halfway decent country tune. He would never be one to perform anywhere but in the backyard, but he had a decent voice and passable skill, and he did fine enough for entertainment at family gatherings.
In the middle of all this familiarity, there was still something that stood out.
Bright and different even though she was the same.
Sammy was laughing, the dogs swirling around her, overly excited blurs of fur. Looking at her made his chest hurt. The sun shone down on her like she was an angel of some kind.
Like the light was finding its own and gathering together, creating something so brilliant he could hardly bear to look at it straight on.
Sammy.
Something shifted in him, something deep, and he couldn’t find a name for it. Except all of a sudden a whole bunch of truths tumbled in on him. That in a couple of years he would be watching his child run around at this very same barbecue. That he would be about his father’s age when he’d died.
It was such a strange milestone to move toward. A part of life that his dad hadn’t even lived.
And he would be a father.
The idea of leaving his son behind, his son or daughter, to face the kinds of things that Ryder and the rest of them had had to face alone...
The kid was barely bigger than a lima bean at this point and he was already making him insane. Making him think about things that just about brought him to his knees.
Dammit, this was tough stuff. And he couldn’t quite find the words to say why.
He never had to find the words for his particular pain; all he had to do was figure out how to shove it down and deal with it. Because he was the oldest. So there was no one for him to talk to. He hoped that they had talked to each other. That Colt and Jake had found ways to give their grief a language. That Iris and Pansy and Rose had bonded with each other. And he had Sammy. Beautiful and bright, and he hadn’t wanted to put any of his pain onto her. He had only wanted to enjoy her particular brand of beauty. Her particular brand of brightness. That had been everything he wanted.
She saw him, and smiled.
“You look better,” he said, moving to close the distance between them.
“I feel better,” she said. “But then, this is a good time for me. And sometime in the early hours my enjoyment of this barbecue will rebound on me. I feel like our child hates me already.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Ryder said, not even sure why he was engaging in this strange line of conversation.
“He?”
“I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just saying. You’re talking like you know its emotions. Me knowing its gender seems weirder?”
She laughed. “Not weirder. But maybe we’re both a little bit weird.” She shook her head. “Is this what it does to you?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I don’t have another frame of reference.”
There was a strange threat of awkwardness between them, and that was never the case for him and Sammy. Because Sammy was never awkward. And he had never taken her for someone who held things back, but he could feel it now. Feel himself doing it, and her doing it in response. Could feel a strange threat of tension between them that just wasn’t them. Not usually. Not them.
But he had a feeling that getting rid of it would take sorting through some of that shifting that had happened inside him, and he didn’t know how the hell to do that. Didn’t think he wanted to, either. And he was pretty damn sure that Sammy wouldn’t want to anyway.
Because all he could do was think about that emotion in her voice when she had told him that story about her father. There had been no small amount of fear there.
He never wanted to be the cause of fear.
The day wore on and faded into evening, and h
e watched Colt and Jake set off fireworks and come damn near close to blowing their fingers off. Laughing like oversize teenage boys.
Ryder was grateful they did laugh like that. That they had come through everything with a sense of adventure. That they had grown into themselves. Gone off and joined the rodeo and all of that.
“What?” He looked over at Sammy, whose face was illuminated by the golden pink of the fireworks that were going off around them.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching the show.”
“And thinking so loud I can practically hear the gears in your head grinding.”
“I’m happy for them,” Ryder said. “I’m happy that they went and found their dream.”
“What about you?”
“I have more than I imagined I would,” he said.
But when Sammy smiled up at him, it seemed forced, and he didn’t like that, either, because Sammy didn’t do forced, not usually.
“You know, you can always find out if there’s a coaching position available at the high school,” she pointed out.
“I don’t need to coach,” he said, a strange, bruised feeling hitting his chest. “I’d be retired from the game by now anyway, even if I had gone on to play for real. And I wouldn’t have.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I mean, I pretty much do.”
“Everything is going to be okay, right?”
She was looking up at him, hopefully, and the problem was, he knew that you couldn’t make guarantees like that. That you couldn’t just say it would be fine, because you didn’t really know. But what he did know was that you could stay standing even when dark stuff went down. He knew that you could withstand a hell of a lot more than you thought you might be able to.
And that you could take broken pieces and turn them into something. Not necessarily something that was just as good as what you had, and not even something that would make it all okay. But if you worked at it, if you tried, you were never left with nothing.
He knew that much.
“It’s going to be,” he said. “That I know. The sun always rises and sets, Sammy, no matter what’s happening in other parts of the world. No matter what’s happening in your life.”