“I’m sorry you had to go through that today.”
He shrugged. “It’s part of the job description, I guess. Sometimes I think my life would have been a hell of a lot easier if I’d stuck to raising cattle with Ridge.”
These moments always took her by surprise when she realized anew that Taft was more than just the lighthearted, laughing guy he pretended to be. He felt things deeply. She had always known that, she supposed, but it was sometimes easy to forget when he worked so hard to be a charming flirt.
After weighing the wisdom of being in too close proximity to him against her need to offer comfort, she finally sank onto the sofa beside him.
“I’m sure you did everything you could.”
“That’s what we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night. Yet we always wonder.”
He had been driving back to the ranch after being with her that terrible December night his parents were killed, when a terrified Caidy had called 9-1-1, she remembered now. Taft had heard the report go out on the radio in his truck just as he’d been turning into the gates of the ranch and had rushed inside to find his father shot dead and his mother bleeding out on the floor.
Not that he ever talked about this with her, but one of the responding paramedics had told her about finding a blood-covered Taft desperately trying to do CPR on his mother. He wouldn’t stop, even after the rescue crews arrived.
His failure to revive his mother had eaten away at him, she was quite certain. If he had arrived five minutes earlier, he might have been able to save her.
She suspected, though of course he blocked this part of his life from her, that some part of him had even blamed Caidy for not calling for rescue earlier. Caidy had been home, as well, and had hidden in a closet in terror for several moments after her parents were shot, not sure whether the thieves—who had come to what they thought was an empty ranch to steal the Bowmans’ art collection and been surprised into murder—might still actually be in the house.
After Laura left Pine Gulch, she had wondered if he blocked out his emotions after the murders in an effort to protect himself from that guilt at not being able to do enough to save his parents.
Even though he pretended he was fine, the grief and loss had simmered inside him. If only he had agreed to postpone the wedding, perhaps time would have helped him reach a better place so they could have married without that cloud over them.
None of that mattered now. He was hurting and she was compelled by her very nature to help ease that pain if she could. “What you do is important, Taft, no matter how hard it sometimes must feel. Think of it this way—if not for you and the other rescuers, that boy wouldn’t have any chance at all. He wouldn’t have made it long enough for the medical helicopter. And he’s only one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people you’ve helped. You make a real difference here in Pine Gulch. How many people can say that about their vocation?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time and she couldn’t read the emotion in his gaze. “There you go again. Always looking for the good in a situation.”
“It seems better than focusing on all the misery and despair around me.”
“Yeah, but sometimes life sucks and you can’t gloss over the smoke damage with a coat of paint and a couple new pictures on the wall.”
His words stung more than they should have, piercing unerringly under an old, half-healed scar.
Javier used to call her dulce y inocente. Sweet and innocent. He treated her like a silly girl, keeping away all their financial troubles, his difficulties with the hotel, the other women he slept with, as if she were too fragile to deal with the harsh realities of life.
“I’m not a child, Taft. Believe me, I know just how harsh and ugly the world can be. I don’t think it makes me silly or naive simply because I prefer to focus on the hope that with a little effort, people can make a difference in each other’s lives. We can always make tomorrow a little better than today, can’t we? What’s the point of life if you focus only on the negative, on what’s dark or difficult instead of all the joy waiting to be embraced with each new day?”
She probably sounded like a soppy greeting card, but at that moment she didn’t care.
“I never said you were silly.” He gave her a probing look that made her flush. “Who did?”
She wanted to ignore the question. What business was it of his? But the old inn was quiet around them and there was an odd sort of intimacy in this pretty, comfortable room.
“My husband. He treated me like I was too delicate to cope with the realities of life. It was one of the many points of contention between us. He wanted to put a nice shiny gloss over everything, pretend all was fine.”
He studied her for a long moment, then sighed. “I suppose that’s not so different from what I did to you after my parents died.”
“Yes,” she answered through her surprise that he would actually bring up this subject and admit to his behavior. “If not for our…history, I guess you could say, it might not have bothered me so much when Javier insisted on that shiny gloss. But I had been through it all before. I didn’t want to be that fragile child.”
Before she realized what he intended, he covered her hand with his there on the sofa between them. His hand was large and warm, his fingers rough from years of both working on the ranch and putting his life on the line to help the residents of Pine Gulch, and for one crazy moment, she wanted to turn her hand over, grab tightly to his strength and never let go.
“I’m so sorry I hurt you, Laura. It was selfish and wrong of me. I should have postponed the wedding until I was in a better place.”
“Why didn’t you? A few months—that might have made all the difference, Taft.”
“Then I would have had to admit I was still struggling to cope, six months later, when I thought I should have been fine and over things. I was a tough firefighter, Laura. I faced wildfires. I ran into burning buildings. I did whatever I had to. I guess I didn’t want to show any signs of weakness. It was…tough for me to accept that my parents’ murders threw me for a loop, so I pretended I was fine, too selfish and immature a decade ago to consider that you might have been right, that I needed more time.”
She closed her eyes, wondering how her life might have been different if she had gone ahead with the wedding, despite all her misgivings. If she had been a little more certain he would come through his anger and grief, if she had married him anyway, perhaps they could have worked through it.
On the other hand, even though she had loved him with all her heart, she would have been miserable in a marriage where he refused to share important pieces of himself with her. They probably would have ended up divorced, hating each other, with a couple of
messed-up kids trapped in the middle.
He squeezed her fingers and his gaze met hers. Something glimmered in the depths of those green eyes, emotions she couldn’t identify and wasn’t sure she wanted to see.
“For the record,” he murmured, “nothing was right after you left. It hasn’t been right all this time. I’ve missed you, Laura.”
She stared at him, blood suddenly pulsing through her. She didn’t want to hear this. All her protective instincts were urging her to jump up from this sofa and escape, but she couldn’t seem to make herself move.
“I should have come after you,” he said. “But by the time I straightened out my head enough to do it, you were married and expecting a baby and I figured I had lost my chance.”
“Taft—” Her voice sounded husky and low and she couldn’t seem to collect her thoughts enough to add anything more. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had. He didn’t give her a chance to say a word before he leaned in, his eyes an intense, rich green, and lowered his mouth to hers.
His mouth was warm and tasted of coffee and something else she couldn’t identify. Some part of her knew she should move now, while she still had the will, but she couldn’t seem to make any of her limbs cooperate, too lost in the sheer, familiar joy of being in his arms again.<
br />
He kissed her softly, not demanding anything, only tasting, savoring, as if her mouth were some sort of rare and precious wine. She was helpless to do anything but try to remember to breathe while her insides twisted and curled with longing.
“I missed you, Laura,” he murmured once more, this time against her mouth.
I missed you, too. So much.
The words echoed through her mind but she couldn’t say them. Not now. Not yet.
She could do nothing now but soak in the stunning tenderness of his kiss and let it drift around and through her, resurrecting all those feelings she had shoved so deeply down inside her psyche.
Finally, when she couldn’t think or feel past the thick flow of emotions, he deepened the kiss. Now. Now was the time she should pull away, before things progressed too far. Her mind knew it, but again, the rest of her was weak and she responded instinctively, as she had done to him so many times before, and pressed her mouth to his.
For long moments, nothing else existed but his strength and his heat, his mouth firm and determined on hers, his arms holding her tightly, his muscles surrounding her. She wasn’t sure exactly how he managed it without her realizing, but he shifted and turned her so she was resting back against the armrest of the sofa while he half covered her with his body until she was lost in memories of making love with him, tangled bodies and hearts.
She was still in love with him.
The realization slowly seeped through her consciousness, like water finding a weakness in a seam and dripping through.
She was still in love with Taft and probably had been all this time.
The discovery left her reeling, disoriented. She had loved her husband. Of course she had. She never would have married him if she hadn’t believed they could make a happy life together. Yes, she had discovered she was unexpectedly pregnant after their brief affair, but she hadn’t married him for that, despite the intense pressure he applied to make their relationship legal.
Her love for Javier hadn’t been the deep, rich, consuming love she had known with Taft, but she had cared deeply for the man—at first anyway, until his repeated betrayals and his casual attitude about them had eaten away most of her affection for him.
Even so, she realized now, throughout the seven years of her marriage, some part of her heart had always belonged to Taft.
“We were always so good together. Do you remember?”
The low words thrummed through her and images of exactly how things had been between them flashing through her head. From the very first, they had been perfectly compatible. He had always known just how to kiss, just where to touch.
“Yes, I remember,” she said hoarsely. All the passion, all the heat, all the heartbreak. She remembered all of it. The memories of her despair and abject loneliness after leaving Pine Gulch washed over her like a cold surf, dousing her hunger with cruel effectiveness.
She couldn’t do this. Not again. Not with Taft.
She might still love him, but that was even more reason she shouldn’t be here on this sofa with him with their mouths entwined. She froze, needing distance and space to breathe and think, to remind herself of all the many reasons she couldn’t go through this all over again.
“I remember everything,” she said coldly. “I’m not the one whose memory might have been blurred by the scores of other people I’ve been with in the meantime.”
He jerked his head back as if she had just slapped him. “I told you, reputation isn’t necessarily the truth.”
“But it has some basis in truth. You can’t deny that.”
Even as she snapped the words, she knew this wasn’t the core of the problem. She was afraid. That was the bare truth.
She still loved him as much as she ever had, maybe more now that she was coming to know the man he had become over the past decade, but she had given her heart to him once and he had chosen his grief and anger over all she had wanted to give him.
If she only had herself to consider, she might be willing to take the risk. But she had two children to think about. Alex and Maya were already coming to care for Taft. What if he decided he preferred his partying life again and chose that over her and the children? He had done it once before.
Her late husband had done the same thing, chosen his own selfish pursuits over his family, time and again, and she had to remember she wouldn’t be the only one devastated if Taft decided he didn’t want a family. Her children had already been through the
pain of losing their father. At all costs, she had to protect them and the life she was trying to create for
them.
“I don’t want this. I don’t want you,” she said firmly, sliding away from him. Despite her resolve, her hands trembled and she shoved them into the pocket of her sweater and drew a deep breath for strength as she stood.
“Like apparently half the women in town, I’m weak when it comes to you, so I’m appealing to your better nature. Don’t kiss me again. I mean it, Taft. Leave me and my children alone. We can be polite and friendly when we see each other in town, but I can’t go through this again. I won’t. The children and I are finally in a good place, somewhere we can be happy and build a future. I can’t bear it if you bounce in and out again and break our hearts all over again. Please, Taft, don’t make me beg. Go back to the life you had before and leave us alone.”
* * *
Her words seemed to gouge and claw at his heart.
I don’t want this. I don’t want you.
That was clear enough. He couldn’t possibly misunderstand.
The children and I are finally in a good place, somewhere we can be happy and build a future. I can’t bear it if you bounce in and out again and break our hearts all over again.
As she had done mere days before their wedding, she had looked at him and found him somehow wanting. Again.
He sucked in a ragged breath, everything inside him achy and sore. This was too much after the misery of the day he had just been through, and left him feeling as battered as if he’d free-floated down several miles of level-five rapids.
In that moment, as he gazed at her standing slim and lovely in this graceful, comfortable room, he realized the truth. He loved her. Laura and her family were his life, his heart. He wanted forever with them—while she only wanted him gone.
The loss raced over him like a firestorm, like the sudden flashover he had once experienced as a wildlands firefighter in his early twenties. The pain was just like that fire, hot and raw and wild. He couldn’t outrun it; he could only hunker down in his shelter and wait for it to pass over.
He wanted to yell at her—to argue and curse and tell her she was being completely unreasonable. He wasn’t the same man he’d been a decade ago. Couldn’t she see that? He had been twenty-four years old, just a stupid kid, when she left.
Yeah, it might have taken ten years to figure things out, but now he finally knew what he wanted out of life. He was ready to commit everything to her and her children. He wanted what Trace had found with Becca. Once he had held exactly that gift in his hands and he had let it slip away and the loss of it had never hurt as keenly as it did right in this moment.
What did it matter that he might have changed? She didn’t want to risk being hurt again by him and he didn’t know how to argue with that.
She was right, he had turned away from the warmth of her love at a time in his life when he had needed it most. He couldn’t argue with that and he couldn’t change things.
He didn’t know how to demonstrate to her that he had changed, though, that he needed her now to help him become the kind of man he wanted to be. He would be willing to sacrifice anything to take care of her and her children now, and he had no idea how to prove that to her.
“Laura—” he began, but she shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I’m just…I’m not strong enough to go through this all over again.”
The misery in her features broke his heart, especially because he knew he had put it there—now and ten
years ago.
She gave him one last searching look, then rushed out of this bright, cheerily decorated room, leaving him alone.
He stood there for a long time in the middle of the floor, trying to absorb the loss of her all over again in this room that now seemed cold and lifeless.
What now? He couldn’t stay here at the inn anymore. She obviously didn’t want him here and he wasn’t sure he could linger on the edges of her life, having to content himself with polite greetings at the front desk and the occasional wave in the hallway.
He had finished the carpentry work Jan asked of him in this room and the other six in this wing that had needed the most repair. Because his house was ready for occupancy, with only a few minor things left to finish, he had no real excuse for hanging around.
She hadn’t wanted him here in the first place, had only tolerated his presence because her mother had arranged things. He would give her what she wanted. He needed to move out, although the thought of leaving her and Alex and Maya left him feeling grimly empty.
Losing her ten years ago had devastated him. He had a very strong suspicion the pain of their broken engagement would pale compared to the loss of her now.
Chapter Ten
“So how’s the house?”
Taft barely heard his brother’s question, too busy watching a little kid about Alex’s age eating one of The Gulch’s famous hamburgers and chattering away a mile a minute while his parents listened with slightly glazed expressions on their faces.
Tourists, he figured, because he didn’t recognize them and he knew most of the people in his town, at least by sight. It was a little early for the full tourism season to hit—still only mid-May, with springtime in full bloom—but maybe they were visiting family for the Mother’s Day weekend.
Where were they staying? he wondered. Would it be weird if he dropped over at their booth and casually mentioned Cold Creek Inn and the new breakfast service people were raving about? Yeah, probably. Trace, at least, would never let him hear the end of it.
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