by Maisey Yates
“We’re in this together,” he said. “Either way. No matter what.”
She nodded. And then they went back to eating. And he couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that one of the deepest, most spiritual moments of his life had occurred at the Mustard Seed Diner, and that it had passed as quietly as it had come on ferociously.
And that it would leave him with an ache in his soul. Because his beautiful sunshine girl was somewhere lost in the dark, and he didn’t know how to reach her.
So he would just love her until he did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EVERY MORNING SAMMY woke up with a panicked feeling rattling around in her chest. And every morning it took her a little while to identify exactly what it was that had her feeling so panicked.
He was in love with her. Ryder was in love with her. And he hadn’t asked her to say it back. In fact, he had told her she didn’t have to.
Which made it worse. Because she knew that he wanted something from her he wouldn’t even ask for. Or demand.
She’d asked for it once.
She blinked. Trying to calm her heart rate.
Ryder was long gone, up and out of bed and working, and she was in the house alone. But it didn’t do anything to help.
She shuffled downstairs, and she found her bowl of fruit sitting on the table. That bowl of fruit that he made for her every morning.
Just one of the many ways that he had shown her that he loved her before ever saying it.
She didn’t know why it was terrible, only that it was. She didn’t know why it frightened her like this, only that it did.
It didn’t have to. It didn’t. She could be with him, and it didn’t have to be love.
She could still protect herself.
She couldn’t eat the fruit, because suddenly her stomach felt off. She went back to her caravan and just sat for a while. Because she thought maybe being there would make her feel... She didn’t know. Safe? Back in the role that she was used to?
When she had been his friend who lived next door, and not his wife, who lived in his house and was pregnant.
Okay. She couldn’t go back. After a couple of hours in the camper, she made that conclusion.
She couldn’t just hide away in here and pretend that nothing was happening. That was impossible, and even she wasn’t delusional enough to think it was possible.
None of it mattered. She decided that about the time she had all of her jewelry-making supplies laid out on the kitchen table. It didn’t matter what anything was called. They didn’t need to get into stuff like that. If he wanted to say that, he could. But in her experience, all those words didn’t need to matter quite so much. And they could just continue on as they had been. Bonded together in a really significant way that didn’t need words and labels and all of that.
Everything really could be fine. He’d said that it could be. So it could be.
And she wanted... Well, she wanted to find a way to take this little hiccup they’d experienced and turn it into something more.
Because she had been reluctant to make love since he’d said that. And he hadn’t pushed it.
He hadn’t pushed her at all. Which wasn’t like him. He was just letting her sit back and stew. Normally, he was a lot more... Well, exactly the way he had been with the midwife. Encouraging her to make meetings, and then sitting there, asking all the questions, forcing the conversation.
But he hadn’t been like that, not since he had told her that he loved her.
Well, she didn’t want that. She wanted him to be him. So she would have to be her.
With great purpose she stood up and began to put her jewelry fixings away. Then she went upstairs and found the sexiest white lace lingerie that she had. And she had quite a bit. She liked white, and Ryder seemed to very much like her in white.
He liked her even better out of it, and she intended to go ahead and tempt him.
She tiptoed out of the house, her sexy secret concealed beneath the gauzy white dress, and began to go on a quest to find her husband.
* * *
HE WAS WORKING outside the barn, sweat pouring off him, when his wife approached.
Things hadn’t been great in the days following his revelation. Not between them.
He had thought that it would be easy to throw the words out there and not ask for anything back. And he could see that no matter what she said about labels and how words didn’t change anything, they had. Because for the past few days his Samantha had been running scared from him, avoiding his touch, avoiding his kiss. And he wasn’t going to push. Not here, not now. There had been a time when he would have. But not on this.
He couldn’t. Because there would’ve been no pushing him into this revelation, either.
He had a lot of theories about why it had happened, at the Mustard Seed Diner, over a hamburger. Why the words had rolled through his soul like the first rumblings of thunder before a catastrophic storm.
Because love was like that, he supposed.
That it could be there, growing inside you and you wouldn’t know. For all that time.
At least, that was how it was for him. But Logan telling him that he was in love with Sammy hadn’t made him understand the words for himself. And the first time they’d made love, when he’d known that joining his body to hers had changed the fabric of what he was forever, hadn’t spoken those words to him, either.
Wedding vows hadn’t done it.
Because there was nothing on the outside that could ever make you see. Not when you didn’t want to.
It caught him in the moment she had bitten into a french fry. The most innocuous and normal thing he could even think of.
But every moment, every scent, every sight, was more beautiful because of her. There wasn’t a breath he could take that wasn’t infused by the loving of her. And the simple truth was it was so deeply a part of the entirety of who he was that the words hadn’t formed around it until all those changes had happened. It had taken every last one of them. Sex. Pregnancy. Marriage. Fear. And in those spaces, the words had finally found purchase on his soul.
And now they were imprinted there, he couldn’t unknow it. That he loved her more than he loved anything.
He had known that he would kill for her, but now he knew he’d die for her. He had known that he couldn’t live without her, but now he knew that he would do whatever it took, change whatever he had to, to live with her, which was an infinitely harder, sharper and more brilliant fantasy than the fear of loss could ever be.
The joy and the challenge of bending yourself and your life around someone else. Finding the better in the worse, the rich in the poor.
Yeah. Realizing that he was in love with her changed nothing. And everything, all at once.
And now she was here, and the breath in his lungs caught and held as he braced himself for what might come next. She looked beautiful. That ray of light she’d always been, streaming into his life and warming him with her brilliance. Lighting the path for him.
“Hi,” he said.
Weird now how sometimes it was hard for him to find the words to say to her. They never had that problem before all this. But it was like West had said. The interactions between them suddenly felt heavier. And the potential for pain much larger.
Everything had a higher cost, a higher weight.
“I came to... I thought we might take a walk,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, putting his pitchfork down. Immediately. Because if she wanted his attention, he was going to give it.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked as the two of them set off down the path toward the river that flowed through the property. She didn’t hold his hand. And she wasn’t looking at him.
“I just wanted to... To be with you.”
“All right,” he said, knowing he sounded skeptical and cautious. Feeling a b
it skeptical and cautious.
But he couldn’t deny her. Couldn’t turn away from her.
He would follow Samantha Marshall wherever she went for as long as he lived. She had snared him that day seventeen years ago with a sugar cube in her outstretched hand and hope in her eyes and he’d been a goner ever since.
And he wasn’t even sorry about it. Not at all.
They made it down to the thick, dense package of trees that was near the water, that protected them from the harshest light of the sun. That was when she turned to him, wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed her breasts against his chest and kissed him.
The impact of it hit him like a sledgehammer. She hadn’t touched him like this, not since he’d told her he loved her.
And he was just human enough to be consumed by it. Even though he knew he should find out what was going on. Even though he knew there had to be more to this than she was letting on, he had to surrender to it, because with Sammy, there was no other choice. When her mouth was on his, he couldn’t much think.
They pulled back for a moment, and that was when he looked into her eyes. And saw that they were guarded. That she was trying to hide herself from him, and somehow was pretending she was opening up.
Sammy. Being outrageous yet again, trying to control what happened between them.
“Let go,” he whispered, bringing his mouth to hers. “Let go, Samantha.”
She said nothing. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut tight and kissed him again. She started to pull at his clothes, quickly, frantically, and he grabbed hold of her wrists, pinning them behind her back and deepening the kiss, taking it slow, achingly so. She arched against him. “Come on,” she murmured. “I need you.”
“You need to let someone else be in charge,” he said firmly. “And don’t you give me that I’m always in control. It’s not true, Samantha.”
“Stop it,” she said. “Only you call me Samantha.”
“I know,” he said. “And I’m the only one who ever will. I’m your husband. I’m your best friend. And this is it for me. This is it for me,” he repeated. “I want to take my time.”
“Well,” she said, still sounding petulant and bratty. “If this is it for you, then we have forever.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So what does time matter anyway? We can make forever this moment if we want.” He looked at her, at her beautiful, slight curves, enticing and visible through the thin fabric she was wearing. She had some kind of witchcraft on beneath her top and skirt, and he could barely see what it was, but he was dying to get the view.
He lifted her up off the ground, and she protested for a moment, then gave in, as he carried them both down to the river. He set her down, and she just stood there, looking at him, her face beautiful, glowing, as the sunlight filtered through the trees. Unreadable by design.
“Why are you hiding from me now?”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe I just want to think I know you. Maybe I never will. Not really.”
That idea filled him with despair, almost more than anything else. That he might never get down to the bottom of who she was. That he might never reach her heart.
He wanted to know her.
Every inch.
Inside and out.
He wanted her to know him in ways he didn’t even want to know himself.
Something about his words seemed to penetrate, and she registered fear on that beautiful face.
“Does that scare you? That I might not even know?” he asked. “That I might not be able to tell you?”
“Nothing scares me,” she said. “I’ve been to hell and back. I grew up in a house where looking at someone in the wrong direction would mean physical repercussions. My own father put me in the hospital. Nothing scares me.”
But he did. He scared her. Not in that way, but he could see it, could sense it.
And he had to wonder if even more than him, Sammy was scared of herself.
He stripped his shirt off, cast it onto the ground, and then he undid his belt buckle, the button on his jeans, kicked his boots off before sliding his pants and underwear down, leaving himself naked there by the river.
“You’re always after me to skinny-dip. Might as well give it a try.”
He picked her up again and carried her out into the water, fully clothed. He watched as the river soaked through her shirt, giving him a tantalizing view of her white lace underwear beneath, and the dark shadow of her nipples.
“I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight than you, Sammy Marshall. And I’ve been looking at you for seventeen years. The greatest gift over the past couple of months has been seeing your beauty in all these different ways. It’s like a miracle. Being so familiar with you and seeing you for the first time. Like a damn miracle.”
He kissed her, out in that water, and the cold didn’t do anything to dampen his arousal. Her hands were slick on his back as they kissed, and she began to shiver, began to shake. Then she slipped from his arms and beneath the surface of the water, swimming away from him, the white fabric she was wearing floating around her, her blond hair a pale cloud. And when she emerged from the water on the other side of the river, she climbed up the rocks and sat on the edge, her knees pulled up to her chest, her blond hair hanging in limp twists around her face. A bedraggled fairy.
He felt like for the first time he might finally be seeing what she was. Without all her enchantment, without all that magic.
And she was still perfect to him.
Even like this. Frightened and sitting on a rock, reduced by that fear.
But he didn’t want her to be afraid.
He swam across the space and climbed up beside her, taking care to avoid the sharp rocks, given that he didn’t have the protection of clothing. She looked up at him, and for a moment he saw all that unmasked fear in her eyes. Confusion.
He felt like he was staring down at her like on that night he found her being beaten by her father. When he had carried her out of that house and looked down at her then.
His heart ached. To think that he had caused her pain that somehow echoed back to that.
He wanted to catch her up and protect her. And when she shivered again, that was exactly what he did. He swept them both up from the rocks, and carried her to a patch of grass that sat in the sun. This part of the ranch was generally unoccupied, as it took crossing the river or driving on the road that encircled the place to get back here. So he had no worries about being caught. There was nothing to do but simply lie in the sun on that soft, sweet patch of grass.
He looked at her body, beautiful and pale, droplets of water sliding over her skin, the sun drying her slowly. He put his hand on her stomach, where their child grew, and then he slid it down to her hip, then between her thighs, stroking her as he lowered his head for a kiss. He kept on doing that until she was sobbing, her breath catching on each small noise.
This woman.
This woman had come into his life and burst through all the grief and pain and darkness.
And he wanted to do it for her. It wasn’t about her loving him back. He wanted that more than anything. Except this.
He wanted to find her. So that she could find herself. He wanted her to be able to shine her own light all the way down inside.
To be healed by him in the way that he felt healed by her.
“I love you,” he whispered. And then he kissed her, positioning himself between her thighs and thrusting home. Her blue eyes widened, and then she closed them tight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SAMMY WONDERED IF this was what dying felt like. Being stripped bare. Reduced to a raw nerve both inside and out. It was too much. Her heart felt scrubbed raw, and so did her skin. The feeling was just now returning to it fully from that dip in the water, and
it was like icy pinpricks were dotting her skin with flashes of heat in between. And then there was Ryder. Over her. In her. His eyes burning into hers with an intensity that made her need to look away.
Because he could see her.
He could see her, and she couldn’t even see herself.
There was nothing but confusion, white noise. Except then he had whispered that he loved her. And he had entered her body. And that noise had quieted, everything centering down to him, to the moment.
And there was something almost more frightening about that quiet, about that calm. Because it had come from him. And it spoke of need.
And something else she didn’t want to uncover.
So she closed her eyes, and she tried to hide. Even as pleasure buffeted her. As desire made her mindless, need made her senseless.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
And she obeyed. She obeyed because she could do nothing else.
When those eyes met hers again she felt him. All of him, searing her right down to her soul.
And he was... He was the steadiest, best man that she had ever known. Or ever could know. And he wanted something from her. And he would never, ever leave her. He was in it for real. Because that was who he was.
Even if it made him miserable. Even if he never...
He had said to her that he had to be romantic because if it wasn’t him it wouldn’t be anyone else, because he was marrying her and they were forever. And it was the same for him. He wouldn’t have anyone else. Because she was his wife. And if she couldn’t give him the words then no one would.
She would make him miserable for the rest of his life. She already had. She had burst in a tangle of complication that a man like Ryder would have never found on his own. Because he was far too good, far too organized, and the universe had dealt its blow to him already. The way that it had treated him taking his parents away...
And that she had just heaped chaos on top of it.
And he was good. He took care of people. It was what he did.